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 ...

It may not decide who is to become the next President of the United States, but abortion is once again a hot issue as the 2008 election campaign is launched at the conclusion of the two party conventions. As during the campaign between John Kerry and George W. Bush four years ago, so attention has again focused on the Catholic vote - approximately a quarter of the whole - and how it will be affected by the strongly ...

It is refreshing to have a bishop who unburdens his mind as candidly and comprehensively as Bishop Patrick O'Donoghue has done in his latest contribution to a series of papers he has been publishing on the state of his diocese, Lancaster. Most of the bishops play their cards so close to their chests that it is hard to know what they think. Indeed, this is one of his points. He says individual bishops should feel ...

From Chris Hoy to Bradley Wiggins, from Rebecca Adlington to Christine Ohuruogu, British athletes have adorned the winners' rostra at the Olympic Games in Beijing, accumulating an almost unimaginable tally of gold medals. By the time The Tablet went to press, the Olympic medal table showed that Great Britain had won more medals than its chief sporting rival, Australia. It is the largest haul of medals for Great ...

The current armed conflict in the Caucasus has a long history. The province of South Ossetia is sovereign Georgian territory, but it is also a Russian ethnic enclave where many Russian citizens live under the tacit protection of their mother country next door. When Georgia moved to reassert its sovereignty by what was in effect a military invasion, Russia's reply was in kind, and devastating. So Western dismay ...