Theism vs. Atheism: What does Science say?

Was the universe brought into being by a divine creator?

Concerning this question, the fronts seem to be clear: The scientists on the one hand state that there are no indications for a divine origin at all. The religious on the other hand keep putting their cherished mythological idea of a divine creator above the scientific facts.

This view is challenged by the French authors Michel-Yves Bolloré and Olivier Bonnassies in their recent book „Dieu – La science – Les Preuves“ („God – The Science – The Evidence“, October 2021). 20 scientists have been involved; the preface is written by a legend of physics: Robert W. Wilson, Nobel laureate and discoverer of the cosmic background radiation. 

Natural sciences undermining religious belief

Bolloré and Bonnassies admit that the natural sciences have indeed undermined religious belief. Scientific findings became the building blocks of an atheistic worldview. The astronomical discoveries of Copernicus (1543) and Galileo (1610) banished man from the center of the universe. Newton (1687) deified nature and subjected it to the laws of mechanics. Darwin (1859) degraded man to a random product of mutation and selection. The social sciences followed suit: Marx (1870) called on the oppressed working class to free themselves from the old order of church and state (1870). Freud (1896) declared religion to be pathological and motivated by unconscious impulses.

Wheels of knowledge grind slowly: It took centuries for the atheistic worldview to penetrate so far that it seemed to be widely accepted, at least in the natural sciences.

Natural sciences undermining atheistic belief

Even today, those wheels grind slowly. But, surprisingly enough, they meanwhile grind on the opposite realization: God is back. It's not generally accepted yet, but atheism can no longer appeal to the natural sciences.

It started with Einstein: His theory of relativity (1905–1915) showed that time, space and matter are not eternal, but rather came into existence together. Mustn't the universe then have a cause outside itself?

Big Bang: The universe has a starting point 

The Big Bang Theory (starting in the 1920s), which was only later called so, pointed into the same direction. It came up at a time, when it was considered taboo in physics to doubt the eternity of the universe. The objection to the big bang theory was: If the universe had a beginning, then someone must have started it—which would bring us to the religious notion of a Creator God. And that must not be.

A bizarre situation had thus arisen in the natural sciences: now it was no longer the pious, but the materialism-oriented scientists who refused to accept reality for ideological reasons. And the proponents of the Big Bang theory felt their resistance painfully: although the big bang theory was already evident decades earlier, it was only recognized in 1964 under the pressure of irrefutable empirical evidence.

And the attempts to assert the eternity of the universe despite the Big Bang continued. According to the big crunch theory, after the current phase of expansion, the universe would eventually contract again, making a cyclical process conceivable. This theory, according to Bolloré and Bonnassies, has been disproved since 1998: Today we know that one day there will be nothing in the universe but evenly distributed photons in a cooled, gigantic space.

Quantum mechanics: Determinism is wrong

Quantum mechanics (1900-1930) also seems difficult to reconcile with a materialistic-deterministic worldview. According to it, the iron law of cause and effect is invalid at the micro level, elementary particles can be in two places at the same time and systems can interact independently of space and time.

Fine-tuned universe: Supposing a plan behind the universe is reasonable

The thesis that the universe originated from unintentionally random processes is even more questionable in view of the fine-tuning of the natural constants (1960–2020): the four basic forces of physics – gravitation, electromagnetism, weak and strong interactions – are extremely precisely coordinated. If only one of these forces were adjusted slightly differently, instead of our universe there would be either nothing or absolute chaos, but definitely no life.

Take, for example, the relation between electromagnetism and gravitation. It's extremely precisely adjusted. The mathematician John Lennox illustrated how improbable it would be to randomly find the measure required for life here: Pave an area the size of Russia with small coins, on each of these coins build a pillar with more coins, the height of which corresponds to the distance between the earth and the moon, multiply the whole thing by a billion and then blindly pick out precisely that single coin from this huge mass of coins that is the only one colored red. Isn't a planning intelligence the more probable cause?

Origin of life: still unexplained

And it gets even tighter for the supporters of chance, when it comes to biology. – Biology? Shouldn't this be a domain of atheism on the basis of the theory of evolution? Well, the variety of species may be explained on the evolutionary terms exhaustively. But what about the origin of life?

According to Bolloré and Bonnassies, we are much further away from an explanation for the origin of life than materialistic biologists would have us believe. Their claim that the primordial soup experiments would have brought us much closer to the mystery is illusory. If you compare the degree of complexity of the most complex structure that emerged from these experiments with the degree of complexity of the simplest single-celled organism, you will find that the difference is as big as that between a screw and a car.

The astronomer and mathematician Fred Hoyle illustrated how improbable it is that life could have developed by chance from inanimate matter: We could just as easily believe that a storm could whirl the parts of a spare parts warehouse together in such a way that a Boeing 747 is being assembled.

But who knows: maybe a Boeing 747 could actually be made from a spare parts store if only there was enough time for countless tiny intermediate steps?

Multiverse: wishful thinking? 

Materialists seem to think so. They have also come up with a theory to ward off the impositions of the big bang and fine-tuning: the multiverse theory. According to it, there is not just one universe, but infinitely many, whose parameters are all randomly adjusted in some way, without any plan behind it. The sheer mass of the universes then explains why our universe is randomly adjusted to be life-friendly. Just as it can be statistically explained that someone will succeed in hitting the jackpot in the lottery if only enough players take part.

So, is our universe the one who accidentally drew the red-colored coin of life-friendliness because an infinite number of other universes didn't?

That cannot be disproved. But is that still physics? The multiverse theory is based on mere speculation, it cannot be falsified by any experiments. Therefore, isn't it the kind of theory that philosophers of science call "so bad they're not even wrong"? Isn't it a desperate attempt to explain away the likelihood of an intelligent plan behind our existence, against all odds?

Who is sticking to the facts, who is practicing wishful thinking? I'd at least leave the question open.

 This post is based on an article I wrote for the newsletter of "Netzwerk Nahtoderfahrung", the German branch of IANDS.