By 1985, Sandage was widely respected as one of the great observational astronomers of the twentieth century. As I’ve noted already, he was also well known as an agnostic with a materialist philosophy of science and little interest in questions about the existence and nature of God—or so many of the other panelists assumed that February morning. During his talk, however, he not only described the astronomical evidence for the beginning of the universe; he shocked many of his colleagues by announcing a recent religious conversion and then explaining how the scientific evidence of a “creation
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