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

by Stephen C. Meyer

Like other worldviews, scientific materialism attempts to answer some basic questions about ultimate reality—questions about human nature, morality and ethics, the basis of human knowledge, and even what happens to human beings at death. Most fundamentally, scientific materialism offers an answer to the question, “What is the entity or the process from which everything else came?” Scientific materialists have traditionally answered that question by affirming that matter, energy, and/or the laws of physics are the entities from which everything else came and that those entities have existed from eternity past as the uncreated foundation of all that exists. Matter, energy, and physical laws are, therefore, viewed by materialists as self-existent.

Because materialists think that matter and energy are the foundational realities from which all else comes,2 they deny the existence of immaterial entities such as God, free will, the human soul, and even the human mind conceived as an entity in some way distinct from the physiological processes at work in the brain.

Stephen Hawking, formerly of the University of Cambridge and until his death in 2018 the world’s best-known scientist, made a similar argument. In his book The Grand Design, coauthored with Leonard Mlodinow, he argues that “because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist.” Thus, for Hawking, “it is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the Universe going.”9 The late Victor Stenger made similar arguments in his poignantly titled book God: The Failed Hypothesis.

I have argued that certain features of living systems—in particular, the digitally encoded information present in DNA and the complex circuitry and information-processing systems at work in living cells—are best explained by the activity of an actual designing intelligence. Just as the inscriptions on the Rosetta Stone point to the activity of an ancient scribe and the software in a computer program points to a programmer, I’ve argued that the digital code discovered within the DNA molecule suggests the activity of a designing mind in the origin of life.

Nevertheless, in making my case for intelligent design, I have been careful not to claim more than the biological evidence alone can justify. In my previous books, I did not attempt to identify the designing intelligence responsible for the origin of the information present in living organisms or to prove the existence of God.

After all, though I don’t hold this view, it is at least logically possible that a preexisting intelligent agent somewhere else within the cosmos (i.e., not God) might have designed life and “seeded” it here on earth, as scienti...

what I call “the return of the God hypothesis”: (1) evidence from cosmology suggesting that the material universe had a beginning; (2) evidence from physics showing that from the beginning the universe has been “finely tuned” to allow for the possibility of life; and (3) evidence from biology establishing that since the beginning large amounts of new functional genetic information have arisen in our biosphere to make new forms of life possible—implying, as I had argued before, the activity of a designing intelligence.

As I prepared for the night in the two weeks leading up to it, I studied Krauss’s proposed explanation for the origin of the universe. I also pored over a key technical paper and book written by a Russian physicist, Alexander Vilenkin, whose ideas Krauss had popularized in his book A Universe from Nothing. I was stunned by what I found. Krauss used the work of Vilenkin in effect to refute what is called the cosmological, or “first-cause,” argument for the existence of God—an argument that posits God as the cause of the beginning of the material universe.

As I reflected on what Vilenkin wrote, however, I concluded that Krauss completely missed the real import of Vilenkin’s work, which arguably implied the need for a preexisting mind (see Chapters 17–19 for more detail).

For example, attempts to explain the origin of what’s called the fine tuning of the universe by invoking a “multiverse” inevitably required invoking prior unexplained fine tuning. Attempts to explain the origin of the information necessary to produce new forms of life invariably either required prior unexplained information or involved simulations that required the intelligent guidance of a programmer, biochemist, or engineer as a condition of their success.

This book will show that reports of God’s decease have “been grossly exaggerated,” to appropriate a quote from Mark Twain.3 Instead, the truth is just the opposite of what Dawkins, Barash, and numerous other popular spokespersons for science have insisted. The properties of the universe and of life—specifically as they pertain to understanding their origins—are just “what we should expect” if a transcendent and purposive intelligence has acted in the history of life and the cosmos.

On the first panel, not only Professor Gingerich, but also the famed astronomer Allan Sandage, of Caltech, explained how advances in astronomy and cosmology established that the material universe had a definite beginning in time and space, suggesting a cause beyond the physical or material universe. Gingerich and Sandage also discussed discoveries in physics showing how the universe had been finely tuned from the beginning of time—in its physical parameters and initial arrangements of matter—to allow for the existence of complex life. This suggested to them some prior intelligence responsible for the “fine tuning.”

Professor Sandage (Fig. 1.2) caused a stir at the conference just by sitting down on the theistic side of the panel. It turns out that he had been a lifelong agnostic and scientific materialist and had only recently embraced faith in God. And he had done so in part because of scientific evidence, not in spite of it.

The panel on the origin of the first life featured another similarly dramatic revelation. One of the leading origin-of-life researchers in attendance, biophysicist Dean Kenyon (Fig. 1.3), announced that he had repudiated his own cutting-edge evolutionary theory of life’s origin. Kenyon’s theory—developed in a bestselling advanced textbook titled Biochemical Predestination—articulated what was then arguably the most plausible evolutionary account of how a living cell might have “self-organized” from simpler chemicals in a “prebiotic soup.”

But as Kenyon explained at the conference, he had come to doubt his own theory. Origin-of-life simulation experiments increasingly suggested that simple chemicals do not arrange themselves into complex information-bearing molecules, nor do they move in life-relevant directions—unless, that is, biochemists actively and intelligently guide the process.

But if undirected chemical processes cannot account for the encoded information found in even the simplest cells, might a directing intelligence have played a role in the origin of life? Kenyon announced that he now held that view.

Consider, for example, the revised, thirteen-part Cosmos series that aired in 2014. In the series, Neil deGrasse Tyson, a scientific materialist who dislikes the label “atheist,” attributes a loss of belief in God during the seventeenth century to the triumph of Newtonian physics. In the third episode, Tyson gives a detailed account of the collaboration between astronomer Edmond Halley and Isaac Newton.6 He recounts how this collaboration led to the publication of Newton’s masterpiece the Principia, in which Newton developed his mathematically precise theory of gravity. Tyson claims that the applicability of Newton’s theory of gravity to the motions of the planetary bodies undermined the “need for a master clockmaker to explain the precision and beauty of the solar system.”7

Though Tyson acknowledged that Isaac Newton personally believed in God, calling him a “God-loving man,” he assured his viewers that Newton’s religious beliefs did nothing to advance his scientific endeavors. Instead, he insisted that Newton’s religious study “never led anywhere” and that Newton’s appeal to God represented “the closing of a door. It didn’t lead to other questions.”8 Thus, according to Tyson, Newton’s science liberated people from belief in God, even as his belief in God impeded his own scientific progress. Tyson’s message was clear: to do good science, scientists must throw off the shackles of religion, and the advance of science has allowed people in Western culture to do just that.

In truth, a chorus of twentieth- and twenty-first-century historians, philosophers, and sociologists of science tell a significantly different story. These scholars include Herbert Butterfield,16 A. C. Crombie,17 Michael B. Foster,18 Loren Eiseley,19 David Lindberg,20 Owen Gingerich,21 Reijer Hooykaas,22 Robert Merton,23 Pierre Duhem,24 Colin Russell,25 Alfred North Whitehead,26 Peter Hodgson,27 Ian Barbour,28 Christopher Kaiser,29 Holmes Rolston III,30 Steve Fuller,31 Peter Harrison32 and Rodney Stark,33 to name a handful.

Although some scientific theories during the nineteenth century, particularly those concerning biological origins and geological history, did seem to challenge some traditional theistic ideas, these historians note that belief in a God—and Christianity specifically—played a decisive role in the rise of modern science during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Certainly, when Draper and White were writing, many scientists perceived a conflict between science and religious belief, but this was not always the case. Instead, almost all historians of science today offer a more nuanced view: they maintain that although some scientists or scientific theories challenged belief in God in some period...

In addition, many historians of science have shown that belief in God served both as an inspiration for doing science and as a framework for explaining scientific observations during the crucial period known as the scientific revolution (roughly between 1500 and 17...

The founders of modern science assumed that if they studied nature carefully, it would reveal its secrets. Their confidence in this assumption was grounded in both the Greek and the Judeo-Christian idea that the universe is an orderly system—a cosmos, not a chaos. As the British philosopher Alfred North Whitehead argued, “There can be no living science unless there is a widespread instinctive conviction in the existence of an Order of Things. And, in particular, of an Order of Nature.”55 Whitehead particularly attributed this conviction among the founders of modern science to the “medieval insistence upon the rationality of God.”56

Philosopher Holmes Rolston III puts the point this way: “It was monotheism that launched the coming of physical science, for it premised an intelligible world, sacred but disenchanted, a world with a blueprint, which was therefore open to the searches of the scientists.

The great pioneers in physics—Newton, Galileo, Kepler, Copernicus—devoutly believed themselves called to find evidences of God in the physical world.”58 The astronomer Johannes Kepler (1571–1630) (Fig. 1.6), for example, exclaimed that “God wanted us to recognize” natural laws and that God made this possible “by creating us after his own image so that we could share in his own thoughts.”59

Thus, the assumption that a rational mind with a will had created the universe gave rise to two ideas—contingency and intelligibility—which, in turn, provided a powerful impetus to study nature with confidence that such study would yield understanding.

For example, in an essay on “Final Causes” he argued: “The Wise Author of Nature has so excellently Contriv’d the Universe, that the more Clearly and Particularly we Discern, how Congruous the Means are to the Ends to be obtain’d by them, the more Plainly we Discern the Admirable Wisdom of the Omniscient Author of Things; of whom it is Truly said by a Prophet [Isaiah], that He is Wonderful in Counsel, and Excellent in Working.”24 Consequently, he rejected “so Blind a Cause as Chance” as the explanation for both the orderly concourse of nature and the exquisite structures manifest in living things.

Both Boyle’s advocacy of the design argument and his insistence upon finding mechanistic explanations for those processes reflected the influence of the clockwork metaphor.

As the Oxford University historian of science John Hedley Brooke has explained: “For Newton, as for Boyle and Descartes, there were laws of nature only because there had been a [Divine] Legislator.”31

As the Nobel laureate and University of California–Berkeley chemist Melvin Calvin argued, the notion of an “Order of Nature” was “discovered 2,000 or 3,000 years ago, and enunciated first in the Western world by the ancient Hebrews.”32 Calvin notes that the monotheistic worldview of the ancient Hebrews suggested a reason to expect a single coherent order in nature and thus a single, universally applicable set of laws governing the natural world.

By contrast, because animists, polytheists, and pantheists affirmed the existence of many spirits or gods, each possibly interacting with nature in different ways, they had no reason to think that natural phenomena would manifest uniformity and order. The ancient Hebrews, on the other hand, thought that, as Calvin put it, “the universe is governed by a single God, and is not the product of the whims of many gods, each governing his own province according to his own laws.”

Yet the law of gravity as proposed by Newton had no such mechanistic basis. Instead, it involved mysterious “action at a distance,” in which the mass of one material body somehow transmitted a force through empty space attracting the mass of another material body without any physical contact between the two. Thus, Newton attributed—as we do today—the tidal action in the earth’s oceans to the movement of the moon as it orbited around the earth, even though the moon and the earth do not have any direct physical contact.

According to Newton, all material objects exert a precise force on other material objects in direct relation to their mass and in inverse relation to the square of the distance between them (Fig. 2.5). But the second part of that formulation—the square of the distance between them—was the sticking part. It implied that the physical force of gravity was transmitted through empty space across a distance without material or mechanistic interaction—that is, without a material cause.

While teaching, I used to demonstrate what bothered Leibniz to my students by dropping my wallet. I would ask them what caused the wallet to fall. They would answer “gravity” or “gravitational force” without thinking too much about their answer. I would then ask them, “But what is gravity?” They would typically think about the question for a bit and eventually (sometimes with some prompting) come up with answers such as “the force that causes things to fall” or “the tendency for unsupported objects to fall.”

“So,” I would say, parroting their answers back to them, “things fall because of gravity, but gravity is just the tendency for things to fall. Isn’t that circular and vacuous? What produces that tendency to fall? If we don’t know, have we really identified the cause of gravity? Or have we just treated the name of the effect in question as its own cause?” The puzzled looks on the faces of my students confirmed that they had begun to understand exactly why gravitational action at a distance bothered Leibniz. Newton only exacerbated Leibniz’s concern by acknowledging explicitly that he “feigned” no knowledge of the cause of gravitational attraction—hypotheses non fingo, as he famously put it in Latin.

Newton affirmed Bentley’s interpretation and replied, “The last clause of your second position I like very well. ’Tis unconceivable that inanimate brute matter should (without the mediation of something else which is not material) operate upon & affect other matter without mutual contact; as it must if gravitation . . . be essential and inherent in it.”74

Johannes Kepler perceived intelligent design in the mathematical precision of planetary motion and in the three laws he discovered that describe that motion.81 Robert Boyle insisted that the intricate clocklike regularity of physical laws and chemical mechanisms as well as the anatomical structures in living organisms suggested the activity of “a most intelligent and designing agent.”82 Carl Linnaeus later argued for design based upon the ease with which plants and animals fell into an orderly groups-within-groups system of classification.

Newton not only viewed gravitational action at a distance as a manifestation of God’s power, but he also made many powerful design arguments based upon other biological and astronomical discoveries.

Newton viewed the order described by the laws of nature as a mode of divine action, but he also thought that many specific arrangements of matter (each subject to those laws) gave evidence of the design of an “intelligent and powerful being.” For example, in the Opticks, his major treatise on light, Newton argued that the uncanny match between the optical properties of light and the structure of the mammalian eye suggested foresight and design. As he explained: “How came the Bodies of Animals to be contrived with so much Art, and for what ends were their several Parts? Was the Eye contrived without Skill in Opticks, and the Ear without Knowledge of Sounds? . . . And these things being rightly dispatch’d, does it not appear from Phænomena that there is a Being incorporeal, living, intelligent, omnipresent?”84

Writing in the General Scholium, the epilogue to the Principia, Newton suggested that the stability of the planetary system depended not only upon the regular action of universal gravitation, but also upon the precise initial positioning of the planets and comets in relation to the sun. As he explained: “though these bodies may indeed persevere in their orbits by the mere laws of gravity, yet they could by no means have at first deriv’d the regular position of the orbits themselves from those laws.” Thus, “this most beautiful System of the Sun, Planets, and Comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful being.”

Many histories of science—the kind you encounter in physics textbooks or in New Atheist books and videos—claim that Newton depicted a “mechanistic universe,” an autonomous self-organizing and self-maintaining “world machine”—one that left no place for the activity of a divine creator, sustainer, or legislator of nature. This view misrepresents Newton in three ways. First, he rejected the idea that gravity—with its mysterious action at a distance—could be explained by any mechanistic cause. Second, Newton thought that laws of nature express God’s way of ordering “brute matter” through the constant action of his will and spirit. Third, Newton saw evidence of initial acts of intelligent design in the complex configurations of matter in both the solar system and biological systems.

As one of my supervisors put it to me, “If you miss Newton’s theism, you’ve missed everything.” Newton not only had a profoundly theistic philosophy of nature, but he also developed several compelling (at least, at the time) arguments for natural theology—that is, arguments for the existence of God based upon observations of complex systems in the natural world.

Medieval Muslim scholars developed one of the most famous versions of the cosmological argument, known as the Kalām argument. It asserted that the universe had a temporal beginning—a proposition that philosophers typically sought to justify by showing the logical or mathematical absurdity of an infinite regress of cause and effect. The argument concluded that the beginning of the physical universe must have resulted from an uncaused first cause that exists independently of the universe.9 The argument was typically expressed in a syllogism: Whatever begins to exist must have a cause. The universe began to exist. The universe must have had a cause for its existence.

By further steps of reasoning, proponents of the Kalām argument deduced that the necessary first cause of the universe must transcend the physical universe (since a cause is necessarily separate from its effects)10 and must be personal (since only a personal agent can act discretely to initiate a new line of causation without its action being caused by a prior set of necessary and sufficient material conditions).

Yet Hume’s categorical rejection of the design argument did not prove entirely decisive with either theistic or secular philosophers. Thinkers as diverse as Kant,22 the Scottish Presbyterian Thomas Reid,23 the Enlightenment deist Thomas Paine,24 and the English philosopher William Whewell continued to affirm various versions of the design argument. Indeed, science-based design arguments continued at least into the early nineteenth century, in works such as William Paley’s Natural Theology (1802).25

Paley (Fig. 3.3) catalogued a host of biological systems that suggested the work of a superintending intelligence. Paley argued that the astonishing complexity and superb adaptation of means to ends in such systems could not originate strictly through the blind forces of nature. Paley also responded directly to Hume’s claim that the design inference rested upon a faulty analogy. A watch that could reproduce itself, he argued, would constitute an even more marvelous effect than one that could not.26 Thus, for Paley, the differences between artifacts and organisms only seemed to strengthen the conclusion of design.

Historians are uncertain about whether Laplace actually said these words, in part because the first reported quotations of them don’t appear until 1825.

Darwin, Marx, and Freud: A Comprehensive Materialism In addition to Darwin, two other late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century figures contributed to this increasingly entrenched worldview. Both did so by developing influential social scientific theories. In economics and social philosophy, Karl Marx’s (Fig. 3.6) dialectical materialism, and his utopian vision of the future based upon it, expressed a profoundly deterministic as well as materialistic understanding of human nature.44 In psychology, Sigmund Freud (Fig. 3.7) formulated a complex characterization of the human psyche describing the different elements and the animating motivations or objectives of each part of the mind, in the process painting a strikingly deterministic vision of human nature.

Whereas Marx depicted human beings as determined by material needs and impersonal economic forces, Freud portrayed behavior as dictated by largely unconscious sexual desires.

Both Marx and Freud were atheists who expressed disdain for the God hypothesis.46 Marx regarded religion as an opiate propagated by the bourgeois elite to anesthetize the working classes to their exploitation.47 Freud also thought that belief in God served a utilitarian end.