Does God exist?

Editor's Notes

• #4: In reply to a question in 1996 about his religious beliefs, Sagan answered, "I'm agnostic.” Sagan's views on religion have been interpreted as a form of pantheism comparable to Einstein's belief in Spinoza's God. Sagan maintained that the idea of a creator of the universe was difficult to prove or disprove and that the only conceivable scientific discovery that could challenge it would be an infinitely old universe
• #23: Maybe we can understand the reasons God chose to create the universe. Why couldn’t God be personal?Assumptions
• #24: Krauss explains, only in a flat geometry universe (like ours appears to be) does the total “Newtonian gravitational energy” of each cosmic object equal zero. This happens because the negative energy of gravitational attraction cancels out the positive energy of motion. Therefore, the net energy of the universe is zero and if that’s the case, then the universe is essentially nothing. Krauss implies that if the universe really adds up to nothing, why then must we feel compelled to invoke “Someone” (like the biblical God) to explain its cause?According to relativistic quantum field theories, particles are to be understood, rather, as specific arrangements of the fields. Certain ­arrangements of the fields, for instance, correspond to there being 14 particles in the universe, and certain other arrangements correspond to there being 276 particles, and certain other arrangements correspond to there being an infinite number of particles, and certain other arrangements correspond to there being no particles at all. And those last arrangements are referred to, in the jargon of quantum field theories, for obvious reasons, as “vacuum” states. Krauss seems to be thinking that these vacuum states amount to the relativistic-­quantum-field-theoretical version of there not being any physical stuff at all. And he has an argument — or thinks he does — that the laws of relativistic quantum field theories entail that vacuum states are unstable. And that, in a nutshell, is the account he proposes of why there should be something rather than nothing.
• #25: The true relativistic-quantum-field-­theoretical equivalent to there not being any physical stuff at all isn’t this or that particular arrangement of the fields — what it is (obviously, and ineluctably, and on the contrary) is the simple absence of the fields! The fact that some arrangements of fields happen to correspond to the existence of particles and some don’t is not a whit more mysterious than the fact that some of the possible arrangements of my fingers happen to correspond to the existence of a fist and some don’t. And the fact that particles can pop in and out of existence, over time, as those fields rearrange themselves, is not a whit more mysterious than the fact that fists can pop in and out of existence, over time, as my fingers rearrange themselves. And none of these poppings — if you look at them aright — amount to anything even remotely in the neighborhood of a creation from nothing.
• #30: The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world's largest and highest-energy particle accelerator. It was built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) over a ten year period from 1998 to 2008, with the aim of allowing physicists to test the predictions of different theories of particle physics and high-energy physics, and particularly for the existence of the hypothesized Higgs boson and of the large family of new particles predicted by supersymmetry
• #31: The LHC lies in a tunnel 27 kilometres (17 mi) in circumference, as deep as 175 metres (574 ft) beneath the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva, Switzerland.