God, the Science, the Evidence: The Dawn of a Revolution, Michel-Yves Bolloré, Michel-Yves, Olivier Bonnassies, translated by Rebecca M. West, Christine Elizabeth Jones, Palamar, 2025, pp. 562, $28 softcover.
This book argues that a paradigm shift in science has taken place, but only a few realize it. The foundations of nineteenth century philosophical materialism have been so weakened by an accumulation of twentieth century discoveries that it is more credible now to assume the probability of God than not. Materialism has been routed. Atheism now has little scientific backing. Accumulating evidence in physics, mathematics, astronomy, and cosmology has discredited the idea that matter is an infinite reality and that the universe exists without beginning or end. Furthermore, few physical scientists now believe that chance alone plays a significant role in the development of the cosmos. Instead, it is generally accepted that the universe had a beginning and will eventually have an end, and that it appears to have been precisely ordered in a way favorable to human life. Implied by these discoveries, according to the authors, is the existence of a transcendent creator they openly identify as God. Although many scientists, including Albert Einstein, resisted connecting discoveries suggesting intelligent design with religious belief, the authors note that other scientists concede that Biblical assumptions about the universe’s development, while lacking scientific detail, are fundamentally consistent with modern scientific understanding. The authors explain that the purpose of the book is “to gather into one volume the most up-to-date rational arguments for the possible existence of a creator God.”
The scientific discoveries forming the essential building blocks of this new outlook are these:
- 1905-1917: Einstein’s theories of Special and General Relativity (demonstrating the interrelatedness of space, time, matter, and energy).
- 1920-1930: Third Law of Thermodynamics (confirmed that near absolute zero temperatures result in complete entropy, or “heat death”).
- 1920s, 1963: the Big Bang theory and its confirmation (the idea of a sudden, explosive beginning of the universe).
- 1973: formulation of the anthropic principle (that the universe is “finely tuned” to make life possible) with many subsequent confirmations.
- 1998: confirmation of the thermal death of the universe (the universe’s likely end).
These proofs were established over the last hundred years or so by dozens of scientists and mathematicians, some of whom were slandered and harassed. It is common to deplore the narrow-mindedness of the Catholic Church in resisting the discoveries of Copernicus and Galileo, but less frequent are condemnations of the role of the atheistic governments of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany in stifling scientists whose work explored the validity of the Big Bang Theory. The Soviet Union declared that scientific research assuming the universe had a beginning (thus implying a creator) was tantamount to plotting against the state. Such a pursuit threatened its ideological foundation: dialectical materialism. Some twenty of the brightest young men of Russia, who were astronomers, physicists, mathematicians, and cosmologists mostly in their late twenties or early thirties, were stalked by secret police, kidnapped, sent to the gulag, tortured, and/or murdered for their thought crimes. The most formidable of them, Alexander Friedmann, who died under suspicious circumstances, had the courage to challenge Einstein’s assumption in the Theory of General Relativity that the universe must be static. Testing that theory, he saw that the universe must be expanding. Friedmann’s proofs eventually persuaded Einstein to admit his error of assuming a constant in the universe that simply did not exist. Friedmann’s follower, George Gamow, escaped the Soviets and became influential as he furthered his research in the United States. As late as the 1940s and 1950s, the Soviet Union denounced Gamow as an “Americanized apostate” who promoted the Big Bang theory, a “cancerous tumour that corrodes modern astronomical theory and is the main ideological enemy of materialist science.”
As for the Nazis, not only did the new theories of an expanding universe, with both beginning and end, offend the ideology of materialism, but they also called into question the eternity of the Germanic gods and Aryan race. Consequently, nationalistic Germany turned its ire on Einstein, who had won the Nobel Prize in 1921. When he reportedly said to a student, “I want to know how God created the world. . . . I want to know His thoughts: the rest are details,” rumor framed the remarks as Einstein’s trying to insert Judaism into the sciences. He was mocked at the university and received anonymous death threats. Physics professors actively opposed him, calling his work “Jewish physics” and their own, “pure Aryan physics.” The Nazi Party, early in its existence, began monitoring him and other physicists whose work threatened a racialist view of the universe. As Einstein modified his Theory of General Relativity in response to Friedmann’s critique and began leaning toward the idea of a universe with a beginning and an end, criticism increased against him. In 1931, he was stunned to learn of a volume filled with vitriol entitled One Hundred Authors against Einstein. A year later, brown shirts threw a paver through the window of a café where Einstein was sitting with a friend. Attached was a threatening, anti-Semitic warning. In1933, when he learned that Hitler had become a legal dictator, that a bounty had been placed on his head, and that his summer villa had been pillaged by the Nazis, Einstein renounced his German citizenship and never returned.
Later in the twentieth century, evidence began mounting that the universe is “fine-tuned,” a cosmos that could support life. As the authors write, “The origin, evolution, and continued functioning of the Universe depend on around twenty parameters or constants. The values of these numbers were fixed at the moment the Universe came into being and are invariable in time and space.” Among these constants are the forces of gravity and electromagnetism, the masses of the proton, neutron, and electron, the velocity of the universe’s expansion, and its density and mass. Even the slightest alteration of any of these parameters would create what the authors term “an unrecognizable universe.” Their ultimate origin is unknown. As Richard Feynman, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965, remarks, “We use the numbers in all our theories, but we don’t understand them—what they are, or where they came from.” That these parameters must have been in place even during the universe’s explosive beginning suggests to George Smoot, Nobel Prize winner in Physics in 2006, that “the big bang, the most cataclysmic event we can imagine, on closer inspection appears finely orchestrated.” The evolution of the universe, he declares, “was written in its beginnings, in its cosmic DNA.”
In addition to the excellent survey of significant scientific discoveries, the authors select four examples from the humanistic disciplines to build a case for God’s existence. Chapters on the historical accounts of the Bible, the remarkable history of the Jewish people, the numerous records of the life and miracles of Jesus, and even the strange phenomenon observed in the sky above Fàtima, Italy in 1917 are offered as proof that it is rational to assume God exists. Humanistic studies have always considered the question of God, but the authors contend that science and God are once again compatible subjects as well. Thus, the unified approach of early scientists who lived before materialism and atheism became ideologically bound is possible again. Whether humanistic, mathematical, and physical sciences can be reconciled in fruitful ways remains to be seen. But the authors are sanguine in their conclusion that there is no longer a barrier to consideration of first causes across the disciplines.
This book does a remarkable job of gathering major scientific advances, explaining them clearly, and exploring their implications for the question of God’s existence. It is a particularly valuable resource for non-scientists who may be unfamiliar with the discoveries that have prompted a reassessment of cosmic origins and development. Whereas much of the scientific evidence emphasized during the nineteenth century—especially in biology—appeared to support a more atheistic or materialist outlook, a perspective that heavily influenced public discourse during much of the twentieth century, developments in the physical sciences increasingly pointed in a different direction. The book argues that these newer discoveries should encourage a reconsideration of prevailing assumptions about the universe and ultimately support the proposition that God created the universe and designed it in a way favorable to human life.
William L. Howard is Professor of English (ret.), Chicago State University. His most recent article in Academic Questions was “A Persistent and Dissenting Voice: The Literature of the South” for our Summer 2024 issue.
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