The Signs Are There

The God Hypothesis Versus Atheist Science Denial

My friend and colleague Stephen Meyer has a superb essay at The Federalist about the major scientific discoveries in the past century that clearly point to God. Dr. Meyer points out that a large percentage of young atheists today cite science as a reason for their disbelief in God, and that is because many atheist scientists have publicly misused modern scientific findings to discredit belief in God. The public square is replete with books and articles written by atheist scientists claiming that cosmology or genetics or evolution properly understood disproves the existence of God. These atheist scientists profoundly misunderstand the implications of their science; they couldn’t be more wrong. As in his new book, Return of the God Hypothesis, Dr. Meyer points to three particularly clear advances in modern science.

The Big Bang

The first is the discovery of the Big Bang, which was predicted by Einstein’s equations of gravitation and subsequently confirmed by the Belgian priest and physicist Georges Lemaître and Mount Wilson Observatory astronomer Edwin Hubble and many physicists and astronomers who worked with them. The existence of a moment of beginning of our universe in an almost incomprehensibly massive burst of light and energy is astonishingly consistent with beliefs about the creation of the universe from the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic traditions. As physicist and Nobel laureate Arno Penzias, who provided what many believe is the conclusive evidence for the Big Bang, observed 

the best data we have [concerning a beginning] are exactly what I would’ve predicted, had I nothing to go on but the first five books of Moses, the Psalms, the Bible as a whole.

They consilience between the biblical description of creation and Big Bang theory is astonishing. As physicist Robert Jastrow noted:

At this moment it seems as though science will never be able to raise the curtain on the mystery of creation. For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.

Only a hardened refusal to objectively consider the evidence would lead scientists to deny that the evidence provided by Big Bang cosmology strongly supports the existence of God as traditionally understood by the major monotheistic faiths.

Cosmic Fine-Tuning

Dr. Meyer also discusses the remarkable fine-tuning of the physical constants in the universe that is necessary for the existence of life. If any of these physical values were even slightly different, mankind would not have appeared. It is as if Someone were expecting us and rigged the physics of the universe to make sure we were created.

In response to this overwhelming evidence for God’s existence, atheists have retreated to the theory of the multiverse. I have written here about the complete inadequacy of multiverse theory to account for anthropic fine tuning. In addition, Meyer notes that even if the multiverse were a coherent concept and actually existed, it would still presuppose an intelligence that made its existence possible. There is no getting away from what Thomas Aquinas recognized as a Prime Mover, a First Cause, a Necessary Existence and an Intelligent Designer. You don’t get a universe — or a multiverse — from nothing.

Biological Information

The third scientific discovery of the past century that unequivocally points to God is the discovery of the enormous information encoded in DNA. The genetic code is quite analogous to a computer code and even to a language — it has punctuation, for example. It is a blueprint for life, and every blueprint presupposes a designer. 

To understand the stranglehold that blind recalcitrant atheism has on many modern scientists, consider that with the discovery of the genetic code in DNA scientists didn’t immediately acknowledge the evidence for intelligent design. In any other scientific discovery — in the discovery of artifacts in space or meaningful linguistic signals or codes from other galaxies — the inference to design would be immediately acknowledged and universally accepted. It is ironic that intelligent design denier Carl Sagan wrote a novel named Contact in which scientists inferred the existence of an extraterrestrial intelligent civilization based on the discovery of a blueprint in a signal received by a radio telescope. Sagan didn’t understand that this amazing discovery had already happened in real life — the blueprint wasn’t discovered in space but rather it was discovered in 1953 in the DNA inside living cells. The DNA blueprint is exactly the kind of evidence for intelligent design that Sagan affirmed in his novel. His atheism blinded him to this reality.

Science is replete with evidence for God, and scientific discovery in the 20th century in particular was a milestone in the long history of the accumulation of evidence for a creator. It is a scandal that atheism has such an emotional and intellectual hold on so many scientists that it corrupts their science and leads them to deny what is obvious to any objective scientist.

(This article originally appeared in Evolution News on April 5th, 2021, and was used with permission.)