Return of the God Hypothesis: Breakthroughs in Physics, Cosmology, and Biology Seeking Evidence for the Existence of God

by Stephen C. Meyer

the New Atheists and others have assured millions that scientific evidence, especially as it concerns the origin of life and the universe, supports a materialistic or atheistic outlook. They have claimed or assumed, as Sean Carroll and Michael Shermer have done, that the fundamental laws of nature alone will prove sufficient to explain the most salient features of life and the universe. They have argued, as Richard Dawkins has done, that “the universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose . . . nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.” But the evidence examined so far suggests the need to reassess such claims. That the universe had a beginning, that it was finely tuned from the beginning, and that our planet has experienced dramatic discontinuous increases in biological form and information since the beginning are not at all what proponents of a naturalistic worldview would most “naturally” expect.