Comments on: Believers tout Higgs boson discovery as evidence of God

By: Mark Ross

Mark Ross — Sun, 15 Jul 2012 16:10:49 +0000

I like the approach of this article. Twitter may not be scientific, but it is certainly enlightening to see the actual real time reactions of people. I really liked how the twitter posts were linked with the observation: “Even more interesting is the process by which people respond by incorporating their new, though very superficial knowledge about the Higgs boson into their existing religious frameworks. Unlike what people like Richard Dawkins might expect, scientific discoveries like these do not necessarily challenge faith because, as examples like this remind us, humans are skilled at re-interpreting knowledge through their own existing frameworks.” Well said.

By: Grace Yukich

Grace Yukich — Wed, 11 Jul 2012 00:34:21 +0000

To clarify, this post makes no claim to be a scholarly study. Its purpose is simply to draw attention to one subset of religious responses to the discovery (whether informed or uninformed) and to raise related questions about the relationship between religion and science.

By: Micah Dennis

Micah Dennis — Tue, 10 Jul 2012 19:35:47 +0000

“Perhaps this ignorance of scientific methods and findings is unsurprising, but it is still troubling.”

Twitter hardly seems the appropriate context for a scholarly study of religious responses to the Higgs boson discovery. Twitter encourages quick and poorly thought through responses; it’s hardly where we’d hope to find informed responses of the religious to the discovery. Furthermore, the twitter feed was started by someone anticipating “crazy” responses: clearly there is a selection bias involved here. That there are uninformed religious people on Twitter is hardly news.