Nicknaming the Higgs boson "the God particle" was a brilliant move, because it made it almost unforgettable without adding anything at all to our understanding. And journalists love it – what is journalism for, if not to spread a film of smug misunderstanding across almost everything it touches?
Quite possibly, without the name, the scientists might never have raised the funds to find the particle, as they seem to have done. And that in itself is a good thing. I'm all for knowledge, and the more apparently useless the more interesting it becomes.
I don't pretend to understand how the God particle influences the standard scientific understandings of physics, even if I can parrot the verbal formulae well enough: it adds mass to particles which otherwise ought not to have any in our present theories, even though measurements show quite clearly that they do. But though I can say that, I have no idea of how to think about it, or how to relate any particular measurement to the scheme.
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