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

by Stephen C. Meyer

He thought human beings had invented the myth of a benevolent God to provide a comforting father figure as a psychological crutch to compensate for difficult relationships with their actual earthly fathers. Thus, his famous dictum reversing the Judeo-Christian creation story: “God did not create man; man created God.”48

With these three great figures—Darwin, Marx, and Freud—science seemed to answer many of the deepest worldview questions that, heretofore, Judeo-Christian religion had answered for people in the West. As I’ve explained somewhat aphoristically in conference talks: “Darwin told us where we came from, Marx told us where we are going, and Freud told us about human nature and what to...

Dating back to classical antiquity, most philosophers thought that the universe had existed forever. Aristotle, as I mentioned, affirmed an eternal universe without a beginning in time.1 He argued that belief in a temporally finite universe entailed a logical contradiction. He thought of time as a series of connected moments, each with a beginning and ending, connecting to the beginning of the next moment and coming from the ending of the previous moment. If the universe began with the first moment in time, it must have come from the ending of an earlier moment.

But to say that implied that a moment in time existed before the beginning of time—clearly an impossibility. What could be more contradictory than to talk about a time before time first started? For Aristotle, any consideration of a beginning of time led logically to just such an absurdity.2

Medieval proponents of the Kalām cosmological argument thought that they could prove this idea by showing the absurdity of what philosophers called “actual infinites.”7 If the past is infinitely old, then getting from the past to the present would be like trying to climb to the surface of the earth from a hole infinitely deep—from a bottomless pit. As one contemporary philosopher has characterized the problem, “one could get no foothold in . . . [an infinite temporal] series to even get started, for to get to any point, one already has to have crossed infinity.”8 Nevertheless, other medieval theologians and philosophers such as Augustine, Aquinas, and Maimonides9 merely affirmed by faith that the universe had a beginning, convinced that reason could not decide the question one way or another.

Olbers’s Paradox. The light from stars in the night sky at all distances appears to fill different parts of our visual field. If the universe were infinitely large, and stars or galaxies were distributed throughout it, every line of sight would terminate with a star or galaxy. In that case, the night sky would appear entirely illuminated and no dark regions would remain. That the night sky does not appear entirely white suggests that the universe is not infinitely large.

Olbers had come to this conclusion because he realized that if space extended without end and if it contained a similarly infinite number of stars, then eventually any line of sight would terminate with a star (Fig. 4.1). Therefore, every possible point in the sky should shine brightly. To get a sense of why this follows, imagine standing in a forest surrounded by trees at various distances. If the forest continued forever in every direction, then however wide the trees were and however wide the gaps between the trees surrounding you were spaced, every line of sight would eventually terminate in a tree. And, consequently, the green of the forest would fill your entire field of view.

Finally, in 1848, a poet, not an astronomer, formulated an explanation—one that anticipated by three-quarters of a century a later scientific discovery that would finally resolve Olbers’s paradox to the satisfaction of scientists. The poet was an American known for his summoning of atmospheres of eeriness and dread: Edgar Allan Poe

In an extended essay entitled Eureka: A Prose Poem, Poe attempted to resolve the paradox by arguing that the immense extent of the universe did not afford enough time for the light to arrive from distant stars.15 As he explained, “The only mode, therefore, in which . . . we could comprehend the voids which our telescopes find in innumerable directions, would be by supposing the distance of the invisible background so immense that no ray from it has yet been able to reach us at all.”

It’s true that astronomers before Poe also proposed that the light from very distant stars couldn’t reach us. But Poe had a different idea about the reason for this. Unlike the earlier thinkers, who thought that the light from distant objects might grow tired or that the ether might block it, Poe proposed that the universe was not old enough to give light sufficient time to get to the earth from the most remote regions of the vast night sky.17 And if it was not old enough, that meant it was not of infinite age.

In Poe’s view, if our present universe had existed for an infinitely long time, then the light would have had plenty of time to reach observers on earth, even if it traveled at a finite velocity across a great distance. But if our universe had only existed for a finite time, then the light from the extremely dis...

Poe postulated other ideas about the origin of the universe that have a strikingly modern feel. For example, he proposed that the universe started from a “primordial particle” and then expanded by “irradiating spherically” in all directions as new atoms were created.18 This theory of the origin of the universe led him to propose what modern astronomers now think of as the correct solution to Olbers’s paradox: the universe has a finite age, so light has only had time to reach us from a limited number of stars.

When I explain the concept of the expanding universe to students or in public talks, I often illustrate the concept by blowing up a balloon with spiral galaxies drawn on the surface with a marking pen. As I inflate the balloon, the hand-drawn galaxies on the surface of the balloon get farther and farther away from each other. The galaxies in the universe do the same as the result of the expansion of space itself. Moreover, the galaxies that are initially farther apart expand away from each other faster than the galaxies that are initially closer together, suggesting that the model of spherical or uniform expansion explains Hubble’s observations well. By deflating the balloon, I can also illustrate how the material in the universe would have been closer and closer together at points farther and farther back in the past, suggesting that the matter making up the galaxies would have all come from the same initial point marking the beginning of the expansion of the universe.

Einstein’s thought experiments showed that our measurements of space and time are fundamentally linked. Our perception of time depends on how fast we are moving through space; our perception of space depends upon how fast we are moving over time. That linkage suggested to him a new entity—spacetime. Spacetime combines the time variable (t) with the three spatial variables (x, y, z) in a four-dimensional continuum (x, y, z, ct) where c represents the speed of light.

But the heavens would soon talk back. In 1931 Einstein visited Hubble at Mt. Wilson and saw the astronomical evidence in support of the expanding universe through the great 100-inch telescope there. In the adjoining photograph of that visit (Fig. 5.6), you can see a famous picture of Einstein looking through the telescope, with Hubble in the background smoking his pipe. Soon after visiting Hubble at Mt. Wilson, Einstein publicly acknowledged that he recognized the necessity of a “beginning.”

This story, as commonly told, often places too much emphasis on Einstein’s visit to Mt. Wilson and his interactions there with Hubble as the decisive event in his change of perspective. In truth, Einstein had probably come to accept the expanding-universe model more than a year earlier. He first learned about the red shift evidence from Lemaître in a taxicab ride during the Solvay Conference in 1927.

1930, Sir Arthur Eddington (Fig. 5.7) also informed Einstein about the new developments in observational cosmology—including Hubble’s 1929 paper establishing Hubble’s Law—while Einstein was visiting ...

Eddington also likely explained to Einstein why his static-universe model was unstable—and why Lemaître’s equations, therefore, better represented the cosmological implications of general relativity than Einstein’s own static-universe concept.

Earlier that year, Eddington had shown that even for the value of the cosmological constant that Einstein chose, the universe would remain in static balance only if the mass and energy in the universe stayed evenly or homogeneously distributed. Even slight imbalances in the distribution of mass-energy would shift the universe toward a dynamic state in which pockets of space (or space as a whole) would either collapse or expand.

Eddington showed that the values for the cosmological constant and the curvature of the universe (as well as the mass-energy density of the universe) needed to be perfectly set and maintained. Even the slightest alteration in any of those values would cause the universe to either expand ...

“New observations by Hubble and Humason [astronomers at Mt. Wilson] concerning the red shift of light in distant nebulae” establish that “the general structure of the universe is not static.”29 He also stated in another New York Times interview on February 12: “The red shift of the distant nebulae have smashed my old construction like a hammer blow.”30 Later Einstein said that his postulation of an arbitrary value for the cosmological constant—his cosmic fudge factor—was “the greatest blunder” of his life. Indeed, by seeking to preserve a static universe, Einstein inadvertently concealed an important cosmological reality implicit in his own theory of gravitation.

Einstein was not the only scientist who reacted reflexively against the idea of a beginning. Eddington himself found the metaphysical implications troubling. “Philosophically, the notion of a beginning of the present order is repugnant to me,” he said. “I should like to find a genuine loophole. I simply do not believe the present order of things started off with a bang. The expanding Universe is preposterous. . . . It leaves me cold.”

Robert Dicke, a leading Princeton University physicist during the 1950s and 1960s, later explained why a finite universe elicited such knee-jerk philosophical opposition among so many scientists. An infinitely old universe “would relieve us,” he said, “of the necessity of understanding the origin of matter at any finite time in the past.”32 A finite universe, by contrast, would force scientists to confront uncomfortable questions about the ultimate beginning of the material universe itself.

For example, in 1948 three Cambridge researchers—Fred Hoyle, his fellow astrophysicist Thomas Gold, and mathematician Hermann Bondi (Fig. 5.8)—proposed the “steady-state” model to explain galactic recession without invoking the objectionable notion of a beginning.33 Hoyle himself acknowledged that he proposed the steady-state model to circumvent what were to him the obvious theistic implications of the big bang theory.

The Oscillating Universe Following the demise of the steady-state model in the mid-1960s, some physicists proposed an oscillating-universe model (Fig. 5.12) as an alternative to the finite universe suggested by the then ascendant big bang. Advocates of this oscillating model envisioned a universe that would expand, gradually decelerate, shrink back under the force of its own gravitation, and then, by some unknown mechanism, reinitiate its expansion, over and over, ad infinitum.

For a time, the oscillating model preserved the notion of an eternal self-existing universe. But for several reasons physicists eventually rejected the model, its implication of an eternal universe, or both.

First, proponents could not devise a plausible mechanism to explain the successive reexpansions of the universe after the gravitational collapses they envisioned. Even on the somewhat implausible assumption that something like the expansion force of the cosmological constant would reinflate the universe after each collapse, the model ran into difficulties with the second law of thermodynamics, as MIT physicist Alan Guth demonstrated in 1984.53 (The second law says that the disorder or entropy of an isolated system of matter and energy will increase over time.)

Guth showed that, according to the second law, the entropy (or disorder) of the matter and energy in the universe would increase over time in each cycle. But such increases in entropy (or the disorderly distribution of mass-energy) would result in less energy available to do work in each cycle. That would cause progressively longer and longer cycles of expansion and contraction, since increasing inhomogeneities in the mass-energy density throughout space would decrease the efficiency of gravitational contraction.

Yet if the duration of each cycle necessarily increases as the universe moves forward in time, then it follows that each cycle in the past would have been progressively shorter. Since the periods of each cycle cannot decrease indefinitely, the univer...

Similarly, if in every cycle mass and energy grow progressively more randomized, eventually—given infinite time—the universe would reach heat death in which no energy will be available to do work, like a rubber ball that bounces to a smaller and smaller height until finally it can bounce no more. Yet, if the universe was oscillating and infinitely old, it should have reached such a state an infinitely long time ago. But since we do not find ourselves in such a cold universe with maximally homogeneous distributions o...

In any case, recent astronomical measurements suggest that the universe has a mass density slightly less than the so-called critical density necessary to stop the expansion of the universe, thus ensuring that the universe will never recollapse.54 Also, the expansion of the universe may actually be accelerating,55 perhaps as the result of what astrophysicists call “dark energy,” a postulated but un...

Of these luminaries, Sandage had perhaps the most profound effect on the audience. He described several of the lines of evidence supporting the big bang theory, including his own discoveries confirming the linear relationship between the distance to far-flung galaxies and their recessional velocities. After serving as a graduate assistant to Edwin Hubble and earning his PhD at Caltech under Walter Baade, Sandage continued the work of Hubble, refining the understanding of the Hubble relationship between recessional velocity and distance as it applied to galaxies in all quadrants of the night sky.

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 event” had contributed to a profound change in his worldview.

recall his looking intently at the audience and gravely stating, “Here is evidence for what can only be described as a supernatural event. There is no way that this could have been predicted within the realm of physics as we know it.” As he spoke, he paused between the words “super” and “natural,” saying them separately for emphasis. He went on to explain that “science, until recently, has concerned itself not with primary causes but, essentially, with secondary causes. What has happened in the last fifty years is a remarkable event within ast...

Sandage described his own internal struggle to reconcile his commitment to a reductionistic and materialistic philosophy of science with his growing convictions that something beyond the strictly material must have played a role in bringing the universe into existence. He explained that although he did not think that scientific evidence could prove God’s existence, he did think that new discoveries...

I now have to go from a stance as a complete materialistic rational scientist and say this super natural event, to me, gives at least some credence to my belief that there is some design put in the universe. I cannot . . . with certainty say that. What now do I do? I am convinced that there is some order in the universe. I think all scientists, at the deepest level, are so startled by what they see in the miraculousness...

Listening to Sandage wrestle so honestly with the question of ultimate origins, with the implications of a theory that did not comport well with his previously long-held worldview, made a big impression on me. Could it be, I wondered, that scientific discoveries about the origin of the universe now challenged the long dominant materialism of the scientific establishment? Sandage seemed to be saying at least that much, and with good reason. If the material universe (of mass, energy, space, and time) itself came into existence a finite time ago, then matter and energy do not seem to be good candidates ...

As it happens, Sandage was not the only astronomer at this time who perceived a convergence between the evidence for a beginning and a theistic perspective. Owen Gingerich, whose lecture the night before at Southern Methodist University had tipped me off about the conference, also made clear t...

In a memorable conclusion to his book, Jastrow observed that the discovery of a definite cosmic beginning: is an exceedingly strange development, unexpected by all but the theologians. They have always accepted the word of the Bible: In the beginning God created heaven and earth. . . . The development is unexpected because science has had such extraordinary success in tracing the chain of cause and effect backward in time. 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.

The life of Stephen Hawking (Fig. 6.1) is a story of extraordinary scientific achievement in the face of acute physical challenge. From 1979 until 2009 Hawking held the prestigious Lucasian Chair of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge, a chair once held by Isaac Newton himself.

A young Stephen Hawking, whose 1966 PhD thesis developed the first initial proof of a cosmological singularity theorem. During his PhD research Hawking encountered the work of British physicist Roger Penrose. Penrose was working on the physics of black holes, locations in space where matter is so densely concentrated that even light cannot escape the gravitational pull of the mass.

Hawking realized that Penrose’s work on black holes had implications for understanding the origin of the universe. He began to think about how the density and volume of the expanding universe would have changed over time. He realized that at every point in the past the mass of the universe would have been more densely concentrated. That meant that space would have been more tightly curved at every successive point farther and farther back in time.

In his mind’s eye, as he extrapolated backward in time, he saw that at some point the curvature of the universe would reach a limit—that is, it would attain an infinitely tight spatial curvature corresponding to zero spatial volume. This is called a “singularity,” where the known laws of physics would break down and from which the universe would have begun its expansion.

Indeed, the theory of general relativity implies, as Hawking and Ellis wrote, “that there is a singularity in the past that constitutes, in some sense, a beginning of the universe.”

Oddly, however, an infinitely tightly curved space corresponds to a radius of curvature of zero units in length and thus to zero spatial volume. In 1978, the British physicist Paul Davies described the implications of the singularity theorems with great clarity: If we extrapolate this prediction to its extreme, we reach a point when all distances in the universe have shrunk to zero. An initial cosmological singularity therefore forms a past temporal extremity to the universe. We cannot continue physical reasoning, or even the concept of spacetime, through such an extremity. For this reason most cosmologists think of the initial singularity as the beginning of the universe. On this view the big bang represents the creation event; the creation not only of all the matter and energy in the universe, but also of space-time itself.

To get my students to recognize the profundity of this result, I used to ask them, “How much stuff can you put in no space?” They would quickly realize that the answer to this question is: “None” or “No stuff.” If, at some point in the past, space ceased to exist, then there would not at that point have been any place to put anything, whether matter or energy.

Taken at face value, the philosophical implications of a cosmological singularity are staggering. At the very least, a universe that begins in a spacetime singularity poses an acute challenge to any materialistic theory of the origin of the universe. Indeed, a singularity implies that not only space and time but also matter and energy first arose at the beginning of the universe, before which no such entities would have existed that could have caused the universe (of matter and energy) to originate.

Moreover, insofar as the spacetime singularity marks the point of origin of the universe from nothing physical, cosmological models based on solutions to the field equations of general relativity seem strangely reminiscent of what theologians long described in doctrinal terms as creatio ex nihilo—“creation out of nothing” (nothing physical, that is).

Hawking and Ellis themselves addressed the issue of the creation of the universe in the conclusion of their 1973 book. As they reflected: “The creation of the Universe out of nothing has been argued, indecisively, from early times; see for example Kant’s first Antinomy of Pure Reason. . . . The results we have obtained support the idea that the universe began a finite time ago. Howev...

But should we interpret the Hawking-Penrose-Ellis cosmological singularity as a realistic depiction of the spatial geometry of the universe all the way back to a temporal beginning? Hawking and Ellis themselves addressed this question in their 1973 work. They recognized that proofs of the spacetime singularity apply to our universe only if certain conditions are met. First, all singularity theorems presuppose general relativity as our best theory of gravity. And, indeed, numerous experimental confirmations of the predictions of general relativity have given physicists a high degree of confidence in the theory as it applies to the large-scale structure of the universe. These include increasingly accurate tests conducted with a hydrogen maser detector on a NASA rocket in 1980 and 1994.