"When you begin your defense with, "...or a Higgs Boson like particle,"
you have made my point. The Higgs Boson particle has NOT been
discovered"

It likely has, but we simply need longer for the statistics to give us more confidence. We know we have a) Detected a particle, and b) Know the particle behaves similar to how we expect a Higgs to behave.

Now, you're right, it could turn out not to be the Higgs, but so far, it looks like it is.

Newton's model or theoretical underpinnings (or lack thereoff) might have been wrong, but his PREDICTIONS were, by and large, accurate. Sure they couldn't predict things like the precession of Mercury's orbit, or would never even begin to predict gravitational lensing... but that's not the majority of predictions about mechanics that our species makes. Newton's laws are generally 'right enough'.

It's when physics finds those areas of "wrong", like Newton's failure to explain the precession of Mercury's orbit, or when Michelson and Morley failed to discover a deviation in the speed of light (consistent with Maxwell's equations but not the Aether) which mandated physics grow, adapt, and change far more than with models we find to be correct.

I'm a big fan of us finding the Higgs, but I fully realize that when we're wrong, it's always more interesting.

When you begin your defense with, "...or a Higgs Boson like particle," you have made my point. The Higgs Boson particle has NOT been discovered. So, either the search goes on, is abandoned, or the definition of what the Higgs Boson is must be revised. As for Newton, he was mostly wrong. Gravity is not a property of matter. Matter warps space-time and that is what accounts for planetary motion. It might seem like a minor point, but lack of precision causes problems; like saying that the Higgs Boson particle has been discovered when one should have said that a Higgs Boson like particle has been discovered.

Pardon? Yes, we have found the Higgs. (Or "higgs-like particle") and we hope it is the standard model higgs.

That's because the Higgs boson is the last particle yet to be discovered under the "standard model of particle physics". We expect to find it. We would be shocked if we're wrong... (or as Nima Ankari-Hamed put it, he would commit suicide if the Higgs turns out to be a techni dilaton.)

When we are shocked we have to create new and more accurate physics. Being right is cool, but ultimately, always more boring.

We expected to find the Higgs just like we expected to find the top quark back when the Tevatron discovered it in 1996.

If we had been wrong, it would have required quite a lot of reworking of physics. We weren't wrong, and so physics continued with its nice standard model.

Now that we have the Higgs, physics desperately is in need for some anomalous data. The LHC however does give us access to much higher energy scales than the Tevatron, so it's certainly possible for us to get some in the near future.

(I say "much higher" energy scales, but really, it's only 7TeV per beam, as opposed to 1 with the Tevatron. So *almost* an order of magnitude.)

http://home.web.cern.ch/about/updates/2013/03/new-results-indicate-new-particle-higgs-boson

Except I'd argue that if we hadn't found the Higgs, it'd have been equivalent to hitting the physics lottery.

Not finding the Higgs would arguably be far more an interesting development to the world of physics than any confirmation ever will. Why? Because physics grows most when predictions we make fail to be confirmed. Failed predictions mean "we were wrong", and force us to examine things more deeply. "We were wrong" is a lot, LOT more interesting to examine than "we were right, again".

Consider Newton's Law of Universal Gravitation. Now, it's "mostly right", in that it makes excellent predictions for most of our planets. But it fails to account for the precession of the perihelion of mercury's orbit. A minor detail, but a consistently wrong prediction none the less.

Consider the Luminiferous Eather. Michelson and Morley's experiment *should* have been able to see a different in the speed of light. If physics worked as we had predicted, we expected to see difference depending upon the relative position of the earth.

We didn't. Instead we struggled for a few years to rework our mathematics under a new framework, Relativity. It's important to note that while the Luminiferous Eather may have been wrong, stunningly so, mathematics developed along with the theory is fully correct. We don't call it the "minkowski metric" or "lorentz transforms" for no reason. They published before Einstein ever published Special Relativity.

Being wrong, having strong, robust predictions come back in our face as being stunningly wrong mandates we develop entirely new sets of underlying principles and premises.

Confirming the Higgs tells us we're right, and sadly, little else. Proving the Higgs wrong would have told us we're wrong, and begin a quest for entirely new physics to explain the data we have.

* yes, with a 'B'

Finding the Higgs is already a definite success for the LHC, although we hope there will be others.

"What does this have to do with a Catholic/atheist dialogue?"

Perhaps the cultural-buzz about a so-called "God particle" which potentially offers new insights into the origins of the universe.