In the religion classes given in school, the Creation was explained according to the Book of Genesis. In the science classes, however, the teacher talked about the Big Bang theory, that cosmic explosion that apparently unleashed the improbable phenomenon of life on our planet.

So strangely incomprehensible, and therefore fascinating, the evolution of matter until it derived in our own existence was permeated by lucubrations about how we became what we are. The eternal philosophical question regarding the meaning of life.

Although in religion class we were told about the six days of Creation and, on the seventh, the well-deserved rest of a higher God who had placed on earth the controversial lineage of Adam and Eve, the scientific hypothesis of an expansion of the universe seemed more plausible.

After all, chaos and chance indicate that we are the consequence of the natural disorder of cataclysms. That explains the futility of the narcissistic gestures of those who believe themselves the navel of the universe, when in reality we are only the residue of an astral blast.

The rest, what has been written and debated when we peered into the abyss of our doubts, is the consequence of the fate of belonging to a species that developed its conscience on the process of natural selection described by Darwin.

In the end, it turns out that the Big Bang theory is our true starting point.

In that upheaval, the first thing that happened was a fraction of a second that produced the Higgs boson (named after the scientist who detected it), also known as the God Particle, a more literary denomination that feeds our daydreams as we contemplate the immensity of firmament and feel the infinite void that envelops the corner of our existence.

Which explains the celebration in Geneva by the researchers of the European Council for Nuclear Research (CERN), when they announced to the world — that’s all of us, sailing in the loneliness of nothingness — that they were able to capture that puff of particles from which our presence on earth developed and was made explicit. The long road traversed by the history of mankind.

It was the presentation of the chart of our beginnings. The primal family tree. A fraction of certitude in an ocean of uncertainty.

The formidable scientists at CERN have aligned the Rubik Cube by finding a subatomic particle never seen until now. It was quite a feat and took a long time. Armed with pencil and paper, Peter Higgs in 1964 elaborated an equation while searching for this particle and ever since chased it indefatigably until he trapped it in that cathedral of knowledge where, with numbers and formulas, physicists write their scientific Bible: the Holy Book of our origins.

Maybe the confirmation that the Higgs boson exists will not dissipate many of our existential anxieties, but it does vindicate the bases for the empirical reasoning of persecuted sages like Hypatia, Galileo, Copernicus, Newton and Darwin — all of them the children of this God Particle.