Alright, let's pick apart Krauss's statements of faith. Just for debate sake, we'll assume inflation and the Higg's field did it, just as he suggests.
How the Higgs Boson Posits a New Story of our Creation - Newsweek and The Daily Beast
This idea is at the heart of one of the boldest predictions of cosmology, called inflation. This posits that a similar type of background field was established in the earliest moments of the big bang, causing a microscopic region to expand by more than 85 orders of magnitude in a fraction of a second, after which the energy contained in otherwise empty space was converted into all the matter and radiation we see today! Alan Guth, the originator of the theory, called it “the ultimate free lunch.”
What 'free lunch'? According to Guth and Krauss, not only did the Higgs field already exist, and provide energy to the "near singularity", the inflation field "did it" in terms of expansion. Whatever "energy" exists in the universe today existed as either Higgs field energy (God particle energy) or as inflation energy. There was no "free lunch", and no violation of first law of thermodynamics even if everything unfolded as they claim. All energy existed prior to the bang, and it all predated the "bang". No new energy was created or destroyed in a bang event, energy simply transformed itself from Higg's fields and inflation fields into atoms. Krauss's very first claim about a "free lunch" is a bunch of bogus nonsense!
If these bold, some would say arrogant, notions
More like "ignorant notions" if you ask me. It seems rather ignorant to ignore the preexisting energy in the God particle field and the inflation field. No 'free lunch' can occur in physics. What a dumb thing to claim.
derive support from the remarkable results at the Large Hadron Collider, they may reinforce two potentially uncomfortable possibilities: first, that many features of our universe, including our existence, may be accidental consequences of conditions associated with the universe’s birth;
What "accident"? Again, he simply 'assumed' that it was "accidental", whereas no theistic astronomer makes such a claim. He's just spewing his own strong atheistic rhetoric again.
and second, that creating “stuff” from “no stuff” seems to be no problem at all—
Pfft. If it was "no problem at all", why hasn't Krauss duplicated that process in lab yet? The concept of 'no problem' is nothing but a "statement of faith' on his part. We can't even really 'create' whole atoms from other forms of energy yet, and he's running around claiming it's "no problem" to create them from nothing but a preexisting Higg's field. Again, pure nonsense.
We "found' the Higgs (supposedly) by slamming preexisting forms of matter together. That's like slamming two cars together and finding engine components in the wreckage and then claiming: "Aha! It's no problem to build cars from 'nothing'.
His whole argument is based upon a non sequitur fallacy.
everything we see could have emerged as a purposeless quantum burp in space or perhaps a quantum burp of space itself.
Again, this is no more than a 'statement of faith'. God 'could have' simply chosen to use inflation and a preexisting Higg's field to create a universe too. His idea about it being an 'accident' is bogus. He can't know that even *if* the process involves only two forms of preexisting energy.
Humans, with their remarkable tools and their remarkable brains, may have just taken a giant step toward replacing metaphysical speculation with empirically verifiable knowledge. The Higgs particle is now arguably more relevant than God.
Except it's a "God particle field" to start with.
Wow. I've seen really lame arguments used in debate before, but Krauss takes the cake. Not only is his free lunch anything but free, his claims about it being a cosmic accident are nothing more than thinly disguised "statement of faith" from an obviously "strong" atheist. His scientific (free lunch) and belief in cosmic accidents (religion) are certainly questionable. I really fail to see why any of you hold him up as some sort of scientific "hero". What free lunch? What accident?