I’m with Dennis Prager on this one: the “God particle” does not negate the possibility that there is a God

A lot of people have been crowing that the “God particle” proves that there is no God, because it explains the “something from nothing” aspect of the Big Bang.  These people forget one thing:  Where did the so-called God particle originate?

Dennis Prager is more erudite than I am, so he makes a more sophisticated fallacy-spotting argument:

But scientific discovery and meaning are not necessarily related. As one of the leading physicists of our time, Steven Weinberg, has written, “The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.”

And pointlessness is the point. The discovery of the Higgs boson brings us no closer to understanding why there is a universe, not to mention whether life has meaning. In fact, no scientific discovery ever made will ever explain why there is existence. Nor will it render good and evil anything more than subjective opinion, or explain why human beings have consciousness or anything else that truly matters.

The only thing that can explain existence and answer these other questions is God or some other similar metaphysical belief. This angers those scientists and others who are emotionally as well as intellectually committed to atheism. But many honest atheists recognize that a godless world means a meaningless one, and they admit that science can explain only what, not why.

[snip]

Not only is science incapable of discovering why there is existence; scientists also confront the equally frustrating fact that the more they discover about the universe, the more they realize they do not know.

I continue to be agnostic on the subject of God:  Believers haven’t proven to me that God exists but the non-believers certainly haven’t proven to me that God doesn’t exist.  Moreover, the one argument that believers make, and that Prager reiterates here, is that a belief in God gives meaning to life.  That means that whether proven or unproven, God is a very important concept in elevating us above the cow that chews cud in the field or the ant that scurries back and forth.