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

by Stephen C. Meyer

In other words, there are vastly more ways of arranging nucleotide bases that will produce nonfunctional amino-acid chains than there are ways of arranging nucleotide bases that will produce folded and functional proteins. Indeed, for every functional gene capable of coding for a protein fold there is an almost unimaginably large number of corresponding nonfunctional sequences through which the evolutionary process would need to search. To return to our lock illustration, the ratio Axe found implies that the difficulty of a mutational search for a new gene or novel protein fold is equivalent to the difficulty of searching for just one combination on a lock with ten digits on each of seventy-seven dials (Fig. 10.10)!

Clearly, 1077 represents a huge number. To put it in context, there are only 1065 atoms in our galaxy. But could random genetic mutations effectively search a space of possibilities that large in the time available to the Cambrian explosion or even the entire history of life on earth? To answer to that question, we still need to know how many opportunities the evolutionary process would have had to search this huge number of possibilities—as Axe himself has emphasized.

Consider that every time an organism reproduces and generates a new organism, an opportunity occurs to mutate and pass on a new gene sequence. And during the 3.85-billion-year history of life, biologists estimate that about 1040 individual organisms—a huge number—have lived on our planet.

means that, at most, about 1040 such opportunities to mutate a gene that might ultimately produce a new protein fold could have occurred. Yet 1040 represents only a tiny fraction of 1077—the number of non-functional sequences corresponding to each protein fold of modest length (Fig. 10.11). Indeed, the fraction 1040 divided by 1077 equals 1 part in 1037, or 1 part in ten trillion times a trillion times a trillion, to be exact.

For example, Sean Carroll, one of the most prominent proponents of naturalism, has acknowledged that naturalism has not explained the origin of the universe, precisely because it can offer no cause capable of producing it. He suggests, however, that the origin of the universe does not necessarily require a causal explanation; it might “just be.” Nevertheless, because the evidence indicates that the universe has not existed infinitely, but instead began to exist, it would seem to require—by the principles of causality and sufficient reason—a cause. Saying otherwise undermines one of the basic presuppositions of scientific investigation and indeed of reason itself, namely, that “whatever begins to exist must have a cause.”

Philosopher William Lane Craig (Fig. 12.4) brought this point home forcefully in an interview I conducted with him several years ago. He pointed out that saying the universe might have popped into existence uncaused for no reason at all is no different from saying that a freight train or a Bengal tiger might have done so. Though, he pointed out, there was no way to disprove such possibilities, reason and the scientific investigation of the world depend upon the opposite assumption—that all such material events do have causes. He said those who deny this principle and who yet also decry the reasonableness of theism “should, therefore, forever be silenced.”18

The evidence supporting the big bang theory, the Hawking-Penrose-Ellis solutions to the field equations of general relativity, and the Borde-Guth-Vilenkin theorem all point to a beginning to the universe.19 It follows that any entity capable of explaining the origin of the universe, to which these indicators attest, must transcend the space and time, matter and energy of the universe.

An uncaused first event violates the principles of causality and sufficient reason with all the destructive consequences for rationality discussed above. If, however, naturalists posit that the necessary and sufficient conditions of the origin of the universe existed from all eternity, then we would expect to observe evidence of an infinitely old universe. But we do not. Indeed, as soon as the necessary and sufficient conditions for the production of a given event occur, that event will occur. If the necessary and sufficient conditions for the production of the universe always existed back into the infinite past, then the universe itself should have come into existence an infinitely long time ago (when those conditions “first” occurred) and we should have evidence of that. But, again, we do not. Instead, we have evidence of a finite, not an infinite, universe.

As J. P. Moreland (Fig. 12.5) and William Lane Craig have shown, positing the action of a personal agent with free will resolves this dilemma. The concept of free will, also called libertarian agency, entails the idea that an agent with such freedom of will can initiate a new chain of cause and effect without being compelled by any prior material conditions. Since minds with free agency can initiate new chains of cause and effect without being compelled, the action of a free agent eliminates the need for an infinite regress of prior material states—and thus an infinite universe at odds with empirical observations.

Free agency also eliminates the need to posit an uncaused material first cause, which would violate the principles of causality and sufficient reason. It does so because having free will—familiar to us all because of our own introspective awareness of the powers of our own minds21—means that our decisions or acts of mind can alter material states of affairs without being wholly determined by a prior set of necessary and sufficient material conditions.

Moreover, it is at least reasonable to consider positing the action of a free agent as the explanation for the beginning of the universe. Most people already accept the reality of their own free will and think that their choices can cause new material states of affairs to occur. Those who don’t accept this possibility typically deny the existence of their free will only because philosophical arguments have convinced them that their perception of free will is an illusion. But that implies that people at least have an intuitive understanding of the concept of free will. Thus, the concept of a freely chosen decision does not represent an exotic, ad hoc, or arbitrary explanatory postulation, but rather one that we routinely employ to explain other changes of state or sta...

After all, free agents cause things to exist that did not exist before. At the same time, positing a prior material state to explain the beginning of the material universe generates an explanatory conundrum for naturalism. Therefore, positing the choice of a free agent—a mind—provi...

As the British biologist and philosopher J. B. S. Haldane once said, “If mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain, I [would] have no reason to suppose my beliefs are true . . . and hence no reason for supposing my brain to be made of atoms.”23 Thus, theism posits the one kind of entity—a free personal agent—that can initiate new sequences of cause and effect without itself being caused to do so and without, at the same time, undermining confidence in either human rationality or the intelligibility of the physical world. In so doing, it resolves the explanatory puzzle that confronts naturalism as the result of the evidence that supports the universe having a beginning in time.24

Though a pantheistic worldview affirms the existence of a god, it fails to explain the origin of the universe for much the same reason that naturalism does. The god of pantheism exists within, and is coextensive with, the physical universe. Thus, god as conceived by pantheists cannot act to bring the physical universe into being from nothing physical, since such a god does not exist independently of the physical universe.

at some finite point in the past the physical universe did not exist, then a pantheistic god would not have existed either. If the pantheistic god did not exist before the universe began, it could not cause the universe to begin to exist. Thus, pantheism does not meet the test of causal adequacy.

Yet the cosmological fine-tuning evidence does not just support a generic intelligent design hypothesis. It also provides support for either a theistic or deistic design hypothesis—in other words, a God hypothesis. Here’s why. Recall from Chapters 7 and 8 that physicists think that the fine tuning of the laws and constants of physics, and (obviously) the initial conditions of the universe, would have been set from the beginning of the universe. Since both theism and deism conceive of God as existing outside of our time and as having acted to create and design the universe at the beginning of time in this universe, both theism and deism would expect to find evidence of design present from the beginning.

Since the cosmological fine tuning provides such evidence, it provides abductive confirmation for a God hypothesis and not just for a generic intelligent designer. The following argument shows why: Major Premise: If God acted to design the universe, we would expect evidence of fine tuning from the beginning of the universe. Minor Premise: We have evidence of fine tuning from the beginning of the universe. Conclusion: We have reason to think that an intelligent agent that transcends the universe—also known as God—acted to design the universe in a way that makes it conducive to life.

As Dawkins explained: It could be that at some earlier time somewhere in the universe a civilization evolved by probably some type of Darwinian means to a very, very high level of technology and designed a form of life that they seeded onto, perhaps, this planet. Now that is a possibility, and an intriguing possibility, and I suppose it’s possible that you might find evidence for that; if you looked at the details of biochemistry and molecular biology you might find a signature of some sort of a designer.

Simply asserting that life arose somewhere else out in the cosmos does not explain how the information necessary to build the first life, let alone the first intelligent life, could have arisen. It merely pushes the explanatory challenge farther back in time and out into space. Indeed, positing another form of preexisting life only presupposes the existence of the very thing that all theories of the origin of life must explain and have yet to explain—the origin of functional biological information.

Beyond that, panspermia certainly does not explain the origin of the cosmological fine tuning. Since the fine tuning of the laws and constants of physics and the initial conditions of the universe date from the very origin of the universe itself, if intelligent design best explains the fine tuning, then the designing intelligence responsible for the fine tuning must have had the capability of setting the fine-tuning parameters and initial conditions from the moment of creation.

Thus, even if we concede as a logical possibility that an immanent intelligence might explain the origin of life on earth (since such an entity could possibly precede it), the panspermia hypothesis does not explain either the ultimate origin of life in the universe or the fine tuning of the universe—to say nothing of the origin of the universe itself.

Instead, if intelligent design best explains the fine tuning of the universe, then the kind of intelligence necessary to explain the fine tuning of the universe must in some way preexist or exist independently of the material universe. Indeed, any designing intelligence responsible for the cosmological fine tuning must have had the capability of setting the parameters and initial conditions from the beginning.

Since both theism and deism conceive of God as having an existence independent of the material universe—either in a timeless eternal realm or in another realm of time independent of the time in our universe—both can account for (a) the origin of the universe in time (i.e., at a beg...

other words, since both theism and deism posit the prior (either ontological or temporal) existence of a transcendent intelligent agent, the creative and causal act of such an agent in choosing to design the universe with a specific suite of life-permitting parameters would explain the origin of the fine tuning from the beginning of the universe. Thus, theism or deism can provide a causally adequate explanation for the origin of the fine tuning, whereas an immanent intelligence within the cosmos cannot. In othe...

Unfortunately for proponents of naturalism, the laws of physics do not, and cannot, explain either the fine tuning of the constants of proportionality within the laws of physics or the fine tuning of the initial conditions of the universe.

fundamental laws of physics cannot, in principle, explain why the constants of proportionality have the values that they do. As I explained in Chapters 7 and 8, (1) the structure of the laws allows them to have other values and (2) the specific values of the constants represent features of the laws themselves, not aspects of nature that the laws could conceivably explain. Similarly, the laws of physics do not explain why the universe had the precise set of initial conditions it did. The laws apply to those material conditions, and the laws must presuppose them to describe the universe accurately or to make definite predictions about what would have happened after the beginning of the universe. But the laws do not explain their origin.

Considerations of causal adequacy reinforce the above arguments. In our experience, we have often observed intelligent agents producing finely tuned systems, whether in a digital computer, an internal combustion engine, an arrangement of flowers conveying a message, or a recipe for an exquisite French dish. The very idea of fine tuning implies that some conditions or parameters were precisely and improbably set to achieve a purpose—one that points, based upon our uniform and repeated experience, to the action of a purposive or intelligent agent.

On the other hand, we lack experience of undirected material processes producing obviously finely tuned systems—ones exhibiting both extreme improbability and functional specificity. Computers, engines, meaningful sequences of letters, and recipes arise from purposeful “fine-tuners,” not undirected processes. For this reason, scientific naturalists have typically attempted to explain the fine tuning not by positing a known law or process, but instead by positing alternate explanations that attempt to reduce the surprise associated with the discovery of the fine tuning. Both the weak anthropic principle and the strong anthropic principle provide good examples of this strategy. Nevertheless, as we saw in Chapter 8, both of these explanations failed to meet the test of causal adequacy and for compelling reasons of basic logic.

Of course, in an attempt to explain the extreme improbability of the fine tuning, some contemporary physicists have postulated the existence of other universes—that is, the “multiverse.”18 This hypothesis provides an example of what I call “exotic naturalism,” by which I mean naturalistic hypotheses that posit other unknown realms of nature beyond this observable universe to explain natu...

A naturalistic worldview should, given the discovery of the extreme fine tuning necessary for life, actually lead us to expect a sterile universe incapable of hosting life anywhere. Here’s why. The fundamental laws of physics are consistent with a vast array of other possible universes: universes that evolved from different initial conditions and universes with different physical constants in their laws, or both. Since the laws of nature do not determine the values of the physical constants or the initial conditions of the universe, they do not render any one of these possible universes—including our own—any more or less probable than another.

Indeed, if we just consider the fine tuning of the initial entropy, we can calculate that, given the fundamental laws of physics—that is, given naturalism—we should expect vastly fewer life-conducive universes than sterile universes by a factor of 1 to 101098. (See n. 11 in Chapter 8.) Barnes argues philosophical naturalists should also strongly expect a universe in which the constants of the physical laws would render life impossible—for, indeed, the overwhelming majority of those values would also produce a lifeless universe. Thus, again, our present observation of a life-friendly universe with its improbable fine tuning contradicts what we should—in all probability—expect if the hypothesis of naturalism were true.

This chapter has evaluated which of the competing metaphysical hypotheses (theism, deism, pantheism, materialism, or panspermia) best explain the fine tuning of the universe. It has argued that theism and deism provide causally adequate explanations for this evidence whereas neither pantheism, materialism, or panspermia do. Similarly, neither pantheism, materialism, nor panspermia explain the evidence for the beginning of the universe as well as theism or deism do. Thus, given these two classes of evidence (i.e., the big bang and fine tuning), theism and deism remain as possibly the best explanations.

I’ve already critiqued the scientific basis of this particular version of theistic evolution. I did so—in effect—in Chapters 9 and 10, and more fully in my previous books, by showing that neither mutation and natural selection nor other evolutionary mechanisms possess the creative power to generate the specified or functional information needed to produce the first life or subsequent major morphological innovations in the history of life. In contrast, our uniform and repeated experience has shown that intelligent agents can and do produce such information, including information in a digital form. Thus, I argued that intelligent design provides a better, more causally adequate explanation for the origin of the information necessary for the origin and development of life than either biological or chemical evolutionary processes.

Are Laws Creative? Like other theistic evolutionists, Lamoureux sometimes speaks as though he thinks the physical laws of nature might be generating the information necessary to produce new forms of life. He refers to evolution as “a planned and purpose-driven natural process” and affirms “that humans evolved from pre-human ancestors, and over a period of time the Image of God and human sin were gradually and mysteriously manifested.”11 Since Lamoureux disavows specific acts of divine creation as illicit appeals to a “God of the gaps,” and since he affirms that humans, at least, acquire new characteristics during the evolutionary process, it might be that he thinks that the laws of nature are generating the new information necessary to produce novel living systems.

There is a deeper reason that laws can transmit, but not generate, information. Scientific laws describe highly regular phenomena or structures, possessing what information theorists refer to as redundant order.

On the other hand, the arrangements of symbols (or chemical subunits functioning in the same way) in information-rich text, including in DNA, possess a high degree of specified complexity, not redundant order. To illustrate the difference, compare the sequences: ababababababababababababababababababababababababab That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.

The first sequence is repetitive and ordered, but not complex or informative. The second sequence is not ordered, in the sense of being repetitious, but it is complex and also informative. The second sequence is complex, because its characters do not follow a rigidly repeating, law-bound pattern, and thus it is not what information theorists call “compressible.” That means it cannot be generated by a few instructions or simple rules such as “repeat ab 25 times.” It is also informative because, unlike a merely complex se...

Indeed, to say that the processes that natural laws describe can generate functionally specified informational sequences betrays a confusion of categories. Laws are the wrong kind of entity to generate the informational features of life. To look to the laws of nature to generate information is to search for the improbable and specific where it is least likely to be found: in the domain of the recurring and the general. And yet some scientists say we must await the discovery of new natural laws to explain the origin of biological information. German chemist Manfred Eigen has argued that “our task is to find an algorithm, a natural law, that leads to the origin of information.”

Yet clearly this statement betrays a category error. Physical laws do not generate or describe complex sequences, whether functionally specified or otherwise; they describe highly regular, repetitive, and periodic patterns of events. This is not to malign the laws of physics and chemistry. It’s simply to accurately state what they do.

But there is another reason that we will not discover such a law. According to classical information theory, the amount of information present in a sequence is inversely proportional to the probability of the sequence occurring. Yet the regularities we refer to as laws describe highly deterministic or predictable relationships between antecedent conditions and subsequent events. Indeed, laws describe patterns in which the probability of e...

First, the biologically relevant chemical subunits of DNA themselves do not contain the information necessary for producing the specified information DNA contains. And if they do not contain such information, then the simpler and less biologically relevant arrangements of elementary particles (or distributions of mass-energy) present at the beginning of the universe almost certainly did not contain such information either.

Our examination of the DNA molecule in Chapter 9 revealed that lawlike forces of chemical attraction do not account for the information in DNA. Instead, DNA’s ability to carry information depends on the absence of lawlike forces of chemical attraction dictating the sequence of nucleotide bases along the double helix. You may remember (see Fig. 9.7) that DNA depends upon several chemical bonds: (1) the bonds between the sugar and phosphate molecules forming the two twisting backbones of the DNA molecule, (2) the bonds attaching individual nucleotide bases to the sugar-phosphate backbones, and (3) hydrogen bonds stretching horizontally across the molecule between nucleotide bases that hold the two complementary copies of the DNA message text together, making replication of the genetic instructions possible.

Nevertheless, recall that there are no chemical bonds between the information-carrying bases along the axis of the DNA molecule where the genetic instructions are encoded. Consequently, forces of chemical attraction do not determine the arrangement of the bases any more than laws of physics determine the arrangement of letters in a line of Shakespearean verse.15 When I was a professor, I used to illustrate this fact with a simple analogy. I would place magnetic letters on a metallic surface and then show how the letters could be arranged and rearranged in many possible ways. I did this to show how the forces of magnetic attraction between the metal surface and the magnetic letters did not determine any specific arra...

Instead, the cell, like individual genes or proteins, faces an extreme combinatorial problem. Tompa and Rose calculate, building on the work of protein scientist Cyrus Levinthal, that there are a whopping 1079,000,000,000 different ways of combining just the proteins in a relatively simple unicellular yeast.

That number only grows exponentially larger when biologists attempt to calculate the number of possible ways of combining all the proteins and all the other large molecular components necessary for that one-celled organism, including the DNA and RNA molecules, ribosomes, lipids and glycolipid molecules, and others. The number of possible combinations of these cellular components (called the “interactome”) vastly exceeds the number of elementary particles in the universe (1080) and even the number of events since the big bang (10139).

Nevertheless, he asked, “Isn’t it still possible that God could have set up the universe with enough information at the beginning to ensure that life would arise in accord with strictly deterministic laws of nature?” I replied that I wasn’t trying to prove there was no possible way that God could have provided enough information at the beginning to make life arising later inevitable. My claim was rather that the evidence we have about this universe and about DNA suggests that the information necessary to produce the first cell did not reside in the elementary particles or energy fields at the beginning of the universe. Consequently, additional information must have arisen after the big bang.

Even so, my case for theism over deism as a better explanation of the origin of biological information does not require proving that all versions of front-loading are logically impossible, but instead only that a fully deistic view of front-loading is scientifically implausible. And, in fact, it is. The universe that Lamoureux and my philosopher friend at the conference were envisioning is a universe that would, like balls on a billiards table, unfold in a perfectly predictable and deterministic way.27 That depiction matches the early nineteenth-century understanding of physics championed by Pierre Laplace, who thought that if scientists knew the initial conditions of the universe and the laws of physics, they could calculate every subsequent state with precision.

Thus, of these two worldview hypotheses, theism provides a better overall explanation than deism of the three key facts about biological and cosmological origins under examination: (1) the material universe had a beginning; (2) the material universe has been finely tuned for life from the beginning; and (3) large discontinuous increases in functionally specified information have entered the biosphere since the beginning. Deism can explain the first two of those facts; theism can explain all three.

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.

Yet theists might well expect evidence of such discontinuity and design. Theism does, in any case, offer causally adequate explanations for the origin and fine tuning of the universe and the origin of biological information. Consequently, many scientists and philosophers have begun to question a default commitment to scientific materialism and to consider what physicist and theologian John Polkinghorne has called “a new natural theology.” As the historian of science Frederic Burnham observed, the God hypothesis “is now a more respectable hypothesis than at any time in the last one hundred years.”29 Or as astronomer Allan Sandage commented in 1985, “If God did not exist, science would have to . . . invent the concept to explain what it is discovering.”30