. Let’s get God out of the way to start. The Higgs Boson particle/field is not the God particle. (I keep telling everyone – the neutral B-meson is the God particle.) In part because of that name, and, certainly, the momentous confirmation at the largest site of physics experimentation in the world of a near […]
The Higgs-Boson Particle: That Which We Call a Rose
. So physicists it seems, both at Tevatron and CERN‘s Large Hadron Collider, may be closing in on the Higgs-Boson, or “God,” particle. Except, it seems, that many scientists are unhappy about that nickname. “I hate that “God particle’ term,” one member of the CERN team in Europe said last December. “The Higgs is not […]
Slaying the Tyrant
. Qaddafi is dead. Now there is the period of questioning and examination, of the circumstances and of ourselves, and self-examination is always a good thing. There are areas of our social and political life – whole political parties – in which smug certitude reigns and the death of even the hapless is cheered. In […]
Darkness at Noon, Today
The challenges to Enlightenment Humanism come from all sides. In the U.S., on the Right, a fundamentalist rejection of modernity has led to an increasing, unreasoned disbelief in the scientific method and the process of rational inference from its results. It rejects any conception of the human without GOD, even as it rationalizes varied forms […]
Humanism and Morality
Image via Wikipedia There has been a wonderful and long discussion going on over at Augean Stables “On Atheist Morality,” proprietor Richard Landes’s post building upon a column by Jeff Jacoby of The Boston Globe entitled “Created by God to Be Good.” I am mostly going to address Jacoby’s argument, though I will comment on […]