Gluons don't exist since no one has seen them, so it must be God who holds the nucleus together
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Claim
Gluons don't exist since no one has seen them, so it must be God who holds the nucleus together.
Source
Responses
- Gluons have been observed in scattering experiments since the 1970s, and their existance is as certain as the existence of other microscopic components like atoms, electrons or photons.
- Disbelieving what one cannot see is a really extreme form of skepticism. This is inconsistent with belief in God.
- Even if there really were no known explanation, this would not necessitate God.
- The strong nuclear force is exploited on a daily basis in the generation of nuclear power. Were this a divine phenomenon, it would mean in effect that man has harnessed God to do his bidding.
- Just because we can't see something doesn't mean it doesn't exist; for example, atoms were around long before anyone even considered the possibility of their existence, much less actually detected them.
- The contrapositive of this statement could be used to disprove the existence of God (God doesn't exist since no one has seen him/her/it, so it must be gluons that hold the nucleus together.), thereby revealing the fallacy within the original argument.
- While it is true that gluons have never been unambiguously observed, quantum chromodynamics is still a work-in-progress, and so far remains a non-renormalized effective field theory. The reason that gluons cannot be observed is due in one part to particle accelerators not yet being able to reach that energy level, and in another part to the asymptotic freedom of gluons themselves. If QCD is correct, single gluons cannot be directly observed. Only color-singlet states can be directly observed, and no single gluon, nor any pair of gluons, is a color-singlet. Particular groups of three or more gluons might be available to observation, and some of these might have already been detected, but the identity of so-called glueballs is not yet so well-accepted that it is without credible dispute.
- The fact that gluons have not been unambiguously observed does not reflect on the validity of the rest of the Standard Model, nor the rest of particle physics, nor the rest of science.
Fallacies contained in this claim
- Slothful Induction (strong force is well established)
- Inconsistency (for gluons to exist, someone must have seen them; for God, this is not necessary)
- Argument from Ignorance (if I can't explain it, God must be responsible)
- God of the gaps (God lives at 1 TeV because our colliders can't get there yet)
Related claims
- 2nd law of thermodynamics prohibits evolution
- Complexity doesn't come from simplicity
- How could information, such as in DNA, assemble itself?
- 2nd law of thermodynamics applies to information theory
- Cybernetic simulations show Darwinian processes don't produce order
- Evolutionary algorithms smuggle in design in the fitness function
- Were you there?
