[pdonis]

> If the higgs field did not exist, particles would not have enough mass to attract each other, and the universe as we know it would not exist.

This is not correct. Rest mass is not required for gravity. The source of gravity in GR is the stress-energy tensor, which was nonzero in the early universe even though all of the Standard Model fields were massless. Indeed, a vacuum electromagnetic field today has a nonzero stress-energy tensor even though, at the QFT level, it is a massless field (the photon).