Was the universe created, and did God create it? It would be wonderful if we could assemble a team of unbiased scientists to examine the evidence and come to a clear conclusion. And at first that’s what I anticipated as I sat down to read God, the Science, the Evidence: The Dawn of a Revolution—a dispassionate recounting of the latest scientific research.
As stated in the book’s preface by its French co-authors Michel-Yves Bolloré and Olivier Bonnassies, God, the Science, the Evidence aims to examine the results “of nearly four years of research conducted in collaboration with a team of around twenty high-level international specialists and scientists” and come to a conclusion.
Granted, proving a Creator from inside a creation would be a Herculean, if not impossible, task (at least if one is striving for 100% certainty). But the book could at least give readers “all the elements necessary to decide what seems most reasonable for you to believe” and, as the authors promise, “leave the rest to your free judgment.”
If this was the authors’ goal in writing God, the Science, the Evidence (which I’ll hereafter refer to simply as “GSE”), though, I fear they’ve fallen short. Five hundred and fifty pages later, it turns out GSE is just another work of apologetics.
“So Stephen C. Meyer, C.S. Lewis, and Pope John Paul II walk into a bar…” This may sound like the setup to a joke, but it’s also very much how GSE’s authors lay out their arguments. The first 330-odd pages cover scientific arguments aiming to illustrate the defects in a purely materialist philosophy of the universe and bolster the view that the universe was created by an outside creator, and most likely a Creator God.
This was the real meat of the book. Entitled “evidence within the sciences,” this section may not break new ground, but it does a fine job of explaining, in cogent arguments and large font, how “the best data we have [on how time and space began] are exactly what I would have predicted, had I nothing to go on but the five books of Moses, the Psalms, the Bible as a whole.”
“In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth” reads the first sentence of the King James Version. Of course, for this to be true, the universe cannot have always existed (as most scientists assumed up through about the 1920s). At some specific time, it must have begun. And scientists spent the bulk of the 20th century confirming that this was indeed the case.
How? By proving the Second Law of Thermodynamics, for example, and confirming that “entropy is perpetually increasing” such that the universe can only end in a “Heat Death.” Ultimately, all reactions will cease, all energy will be expended, and all matter will be attenuated. The universe itself must conclude in “a state of total darkness, cold, and eventual death.” The logical implication of this theory is that if one were to roll back the cosmic clock, one would eventually reach a starting point at which the “increasing” began!
Likewise, examinations of redshift in distant galaxies have confirmed that not only is the universe expanding but its expansion is accelerating. On the one hand, this makes it impossible for the universe to ever come back together (in a cyclical manner, resulting in a “Big Crunch”). On the other, were the timeline rewound and the expansion viewed in reverse, we’d eventually reach a point where all the expansion began from a singularity.
Or, as Genesis put it, in a “beginning” at which the universe was “created.”
Similar to the cosmological arguments, GSE does yeoman’s work in presenting evidence that something more than materialism and random chance accounts for the origin of life in the universe. Although Stephen Meyer is not mentioned by name or cited as a source, the book’s discussion of the probabilities of “22 types of amino acids” coming together to form even one single, life-essential protein chain through random chance reads much like something out of his Signature in the Cell or Return of the God Hypothesis.
(If you’re curious, the chance of that happening even once is approximately one in 10 to the 1,500th power—1 chance in 10 followed by … 1,500 zeroes.)
Put another way, the authors conclude that “practically speaking, it would take longer than the lifespan of the universe for a single protein to form by accident.”
Furthermore, the chance of enough proteins assembling by accident to create “even the simplest living cell” so as to start the evolutionary process known as Darwinism is estimated at one chance in 10 to the 340,000th power. (And that’s 10 followed by even more zeroes than there are letters in this review!)
Throughout the book, the authors buttress their argument with scores, even hundreds of quotes from subject-matter experts. The bit up above about “the five books of Moses” predicting the structure and origin of the cosmos, for example? That came from 1978 Nobel Prize in Physics winner Arno Penzias, who, along with fellow Nobel laureate Robert Woodrow Wilson, famously confirmed the existence of Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation (CMBR) while working for Bell Labs in 1964, providing invaluable evidence of the Big Bang.
Bolloré and Bonnassies make clever use of these quotations, most dramatically at the end of the “evidence within the sciences” section, where they lay out 30 straight pages of quotations from leading scientists and philosophers, all supportive of the theory that God exists and that He created the universe. Like an irresistible army of Christian soldiers marching onward as to war (against disbelief), these 100 quotes pile up one upon the other, amounting to a mountain of scientific affirmation of the idea.
Granted, one still wishes GSE’s authors had played their personal beliefs a bit closer to the vest before reaching their conclusion. Still, the point gets made, and I suppose that’s what counts.
Can 100 scientists, all singing the Creator’s praises, be a statistical anomaly? Perhaps. But the authors argue instead that, contrary to common misperceptions, belief in God is far from uncommon in scientific circles. While it’s true that a 2009 poll from Pew Research found that a sizeable number of scientists (41%) are atheist, some 90% of the best scientists—Nobel laureates—“identified with some religion,” and two-thirds of them were specifically Christians.
Its scientific bona fides established, GSE segues to “evidence from outside the sciences.” These include facts about the universe that were revealed (or at least alluded to) in the Bible at a time when most non-Hebraic civilizations believed otherwise: the non-divinity of sun and moon and stars; the fact that the universe began at a single point in time; that time proceeds in a straight line and is not cyclical. Such knowledge, the authors observe, was granted to Israel hundreds, even thousands of years before modern scientific experiments could prove it correct.
GSE argues that the survival of the Jewish nation from antiquity to today, its return to Israel, the revival of Hebrew as a living language, and Israel’s military successes in the 20th century are all statistical improbabilities suggestive of a God who “intervenes in history” (and who must therefore exist).
Taking notes from Mere Christianity, GSE then spends a whole chapter discussing C.S. Lewis’s classic trilemma (Jesus Christ was either a liar, a madman, or the Son of God), and quoting everyone from Josephus to Tacitus to Suetonius to re-prove the fact that Jesus existed, necessary perhaps given the increasing popularity in some atheist circles of “Jesus mythicism.”
Other matters addressed in this section seem less appropriate in a book purportedly focused on scientific support for “the existence or non-existence of a creator God.” Notably, GSE includes a chapter on “alleged errors of the Bible, which are not errors.” (If the reader was uncertain as to whether GSE was less a science book, and more a work of apologetics—by this point it becomes crystal clear.)
Perhaps most perplexing of all, though, is the authors’ decision to devote 40 pages—about 7% of GSE’s total length—to discussing a single alleged miracle that happened in Fátima, Portugal, nearly 110 years ago.
For non-Catholic readers (such as your humble reviewer), this seemed a digression, but also a bit of a revelation. While not substantially bolstering the authors’ primary argument, the Fátima chapter does contribute to the overall direction of the book.
How? Consider that, if one picks up GSE in search of cold, hard facts presented for analysis and dispassionate evaluation by a reader lacking prior convictions in either a theist or nontheist direction, then exposing him or her to data surrounding an unfamiliar “miracle” that supposedly took place in a faraway land more than a century ago provides an excellent test case! Can the authors play the facts straight and trust a reader’s “free judgment” to decide on the merits?
Not quite, but in this chapter the authors at least come closest to that goal.
As they describe it, on May 13, 1917, three young shepherds in rural Portugal reported being visited by a “lady in white,” who told them to return to speak with her every month for five months, culminating in a sign that was prophesied to occur at the celestial noon-hour on October 13. By the time the fateful day arrived, some 30,000 to 70,000 witnesses had joined the shepherds to witness the sun transforming into, first, “a silver disc,” then “a wheel of fire, shooting sprays of light in all directions, changing color, and … falling” toward the crowd, before returning to normal.
A strange occurrence? Certainly. But the authors proceed to buttress their case not by explaining what they think happened (at least, not at the outset). Rather, they provide excerpts from more than two dozen contemporaneous newspaper articles, all from liberal and anti-clerical publications, all reciting the facts as their reporters saw them, with interviews of witnesses both at the site and miles from it. The authors provide six potential interpretations of the Fátima event, based on facts as recounted in this hostile reporting.
Only then do the authors ultimately conclude that Fátima has “convincing power” and was indeed a miracle that “took place so that people might believe.” Had the rest of GSE taken a similar approach, of sticking to plain facts before coming to its conclusions, rather than vice versa, I suspect it would have succeeded better in coming off less like an exercise in apologetics and more like the science-based argument for the existence of God. So let the reader beware, as well as any writer who wishes to broach this subject in the future.
