Mind of God

Stephen Hawking's bestseller, A Brief History of Time, concludes with the passage that made the book famous. If a complete theory of subatomic physics were ever reached, he wrote, people would then be able "to take part in the discussion of the question of why it is that we and the universe exist. If we find the answer to that, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason - for then we should know the mind of God". Professor Hawking later said he nearly deleted that last sentence when reading the proofs, but had he done so sales of the book might have been halved. This public fascination with ultimate questions explains the excitement surrounding the Large Hadron Collider, run by the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, better known by its French acronym, Cern. This £5-billion physics experiment became operational on Wednesday, when the first particles were accelerated towards the speed of light in order to study what happens when two such beams collide.

The aim is to produce conditions equivalent to those just after the creation of the universe, popularly known as the Big Bang, in order to search for an elusive particle called a Higgs boson. This is named after the Edinburgh scientist Professor Peter Higgs, who predicted its existence on theoretical grounds. Whether confirmation of the Higgs boson would complete the theory that Professor Hawking was referring to is a matter for debate, although the possibility has caused it to be dubbed "the God particle". In fundamental science the solution to one question usually raises more, and there is no finality to be expected. Even less can there be an equation between the existence of the Higgs boson and the existence of God.

Even so, these issues do lie squarely at the interface of cosmology and theology, summed up in the question, "Why is there anything rather than nothing?" The Big Bang itself turns out to be a curious event indeed, the moment when the laws of physics as we know them kicked in to set in train a process, at the other end of which intelligent life emerges to ask these very questions. The odds against this happening by accident appear to be almost infinite, so what other explanation is there? The theory that nature contains every possible combination of scientific laws, each governing the conduct of a different universe and together making up what has been termed a multiverse, has a slight air of desperation about it, not least because there is no scientific evidence to support it (unless one includes, as a scientific fact, the proposition that God does not exist).

If atheists are uncomfortable with questions about meaning and purpose, theists must be careful not to press their case too far. Asking "Why is there anything rather than nothing?" is an invitation to non-believers and believers alike to contemplate the mystery of the universe with awe and humility, and could lead modern minds to a modern version of "Be still and know that I am God". Too often, science and theology are considered the antithesis of each other. But as Fr Georges Lemaître, the Belgian priest and physicist who proposed the Big Bang theory, put it, they are two ways of arriving at the truth. Those filled with wonder by contemplating the physical laws of the universe, and indeed, the results of the Cern experiment may well come to agree with Lemaître that there is no difficulty in following along the paths of both cosmology and faith.