Brian Boughton, of South Ford Road, Dartmouth, writes: In these columns last week Brian Parker (a retired physicist?) wrote scathingly about atheists and the contribution being made by the Large Hadron Collider's contribution towards a grand unified theory of physics. This has recently confirmed the existence of the Higgs boson, which gives mass to all subnuclear particles and ­renders them responsive to the force of gravity. And this ­summer it resumes its work at much higher energy levels, when it is likely to reveal yet more particles that will help to complete our understanding of how matter is constituted and how it came into existence. Mr Parker's God does not come into this explanation, which we now know in some detail back to the first billionths of a billionth of a second after the Big Bang. This, of course, annoys many believers in God, but atheists are happy for them to continue with their own belief in the Book of Genesis, just as long as they don't sneer at the real truth. Professor Brian Cox has given a particularly good account of this for laymen in An Atheists Guide to Christmas, edited by Arian Sherine and published by the Friday Project in 2009.