Not long ago, CERN announced that the Large Hadron Collider produced evidence of the Higgs Boson, a fundamental particle Peter Higgs predicted in 1964, and was a major missing piece from the Standard Model. In order to explain mass, and thus why certain particles differ in mass, which in turn influences things like why the Weak Force (carried by particles that have mass) and electromagnetism (carried by photons, which don’t) are different forces with different properties. A big deal for physicists, but somehow it generated a lot more attention in the general media than such things usually do.

The reason for this is that Leon M. Lederman wanted to sell books. (Or maybe it was his co-author Dick Teresi. Either way, he jokes that the publisher vetoed his original title “The Goddamn Particle”) Lederman named his popularization of the relevant science, “The God Particle: If the Universe is the Answer, What Was the Question?” And so, people mistakenly thought the discovery implied something significant the Big Bang vs. Literal Genesis debate. It does provide one big piece of the Big Bang puzzle, it explains how a high energy “soup” too energetic to be thought of in terms of different particles divided the way it did.

But the discovery says nothing about Creation, despite rhetoric otherwise. The scientists who write such things (but I think most scientists are still theists or at least deists) are battling paganism. They think that we believe in Thor to get a handle on thunder and Poseidon justifies the moods of the sea. A “God of the Gaps” who is there to explain all the bugaboos of a world we don’t understand. And therefore they think that the more they explain scientifically, the less space is left for G-d.

Many Creationists defend their position by distinguishing between “science”, the stuff they can’t deny and depend upon for medicine and engineering, and “scientism”, the stuff they disagree with. Without a rigorous definition of “scientism”, that’s really all it can boil down to. So here’s my proposed definition:

Science is a methodology for reaching and testing theories about the empirical world, and the current collection of resulting theories. It has a limited domain of study — it is only the empirical and it only deals in the repeatable. Scientism is the belief that there are no truths outside of science’s domain of inquiry. In other words, it’s correct to say that belief in a Creator is unscientific, because G-d is neither empirical, nor is He constrained to follow natural law that we could repeat experiments in a laboratory to get predicted results. It is incorrect and becomes scientism when the person saying he thinks that saying “the notion of G-d is unscientific” has anything to do with the fact that there actually is One.

Thus, paganism’s “god of the gaps” is based on the same error as scientism; both are founded on the notion that religion and science are competing explanation systems. One overreaches religion, the other overreaaches science.

Science itself stands on the culture built by monotheism — the notion of One G-d, One Designer, One Maker, who had One Plan. There is no reason to assume a Grand Unified Theory or a Theory of Everything if it weren’t that even the atheists among them come from a culture that saw the Hand of G-d in creation. The main role of such religion is to explain “why” and what ought to be, though belief in One Creator is what led us to expect an elegant answer to “how” and what is.

And so, when science reveals more wisdom within nature, more design, gets one step closer to unity, it is actually reaffirming faith, not providing an alternative.

The Higgs Boson is like a beautiful sunset. An opportunity to gape open-jawed at the incredible Wisdom of the Designer. “מָה-רַבּוּ מַעֲשֶׂיךָ ה, כֻּלָּם בְּחָכְמָה עָשִׂיתָ; מָלְאָה הָאָרֶץ קִנְיָנֶךָ — How wondrous are Your works, Hashem!”(Tehillim 104:24)