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| Brother Consolmagno (CNS/Paul Haring) |
Catholic News Service went to the Vatican’s top scientist for his comments after the recent discovery of a new sub-atomic particle nicknamed “the God particle.” Brother Guy Consolmagno told CNS that the new discovery could lead to further discoveries to explain how the universe works:
When people go about their everyday business working or relaxing, they don’t think about the tiniest building blocks of physical matter, but “without these underlying little things, we wouldn’t be here,” Brother Consolmagno said.
Physicists working with the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research laboratory in Geneva, announced July 4 that they were 99.999 per cent certain they had found evidence of a new particle that might be key to the structure of the universe and to understanding nature.
The Higgs-boson particle was nicknamed “the God particle” as “a joke” in an attempt to depict the particle as “almost like a gift from God to help explain how reality works in the sub-atomic world,” he said. Because the particle is believed to be what gives mass to matter, it was assigned the godlike status of being able to create something out of nothing.
But such “God of the gaps” conjectures are not only bad reasons to believe in God, they are also bad science, Brother Consolmagno said.
“You’ll look foolish, in, say, 2050, when they discover the real reason” for a phenomenon that was explained away earlier by the hand of God, he said.
Read the full story at the CNS website.
