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

by Stephen C. Meyer

(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.

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. Such an intelligence coincides with what human beings have called God, and so I call this story of reversal the return of the God hypothesis.

Is this begging the question? Is Meyer "reverse-engineering" our universe to marshal facts presupposing an intelligent designer?

possibility that the evidence from cosmology and physics taken together with that of biology might provide the basis for a persuasive reformulation of a God hypothesis. To say that the God hypothesis has returned implies that scientists must have previously rejected it and that, at some still earlier time, a theistic perspective reigned either as an inspiration for doing science, an explanation for specific scientific discoveries, or both. Yet few science popularizers today present the history of science and its relationship to religious belief this way. Instead, they not only assert that science and theistic belief currently conflict, but they also say that science and religion have nearly always been at war.4 They describe the historical relationship between science and religion as one characterized by conflicting claims about reality and competing ways of knowing.5 This chapter challenges the New Atheist–favored narrative about the historical relationship between science and theistic belief. It does so by showing how Judeo-Christian ideas contributed crucially to the rise of modern science.

Another historian of science, Jeffrey B. Russell, observes that White’s book was “of immense importance, because it . . . explicitly declared that science and religion were at war. It fixed in the educated mind the idea that ‘science’ stood for freedom and progress against the superstition and repression of ‘religion.’”12 In his Pulitzer Prize–winning history of the Scopes trial, Summer for the Gods, Edward Larson notes that in the decades following the publication of the Origin of Species, this “warfare model” of science and religion became “ingrained into the received wisdom of many secular Americans.”13

they thought that the order in nature was the product not of logical necessity, but of rational deliberation and choice, what the Scottish theologian Thomas Torrance calls “contingent rationality.”50 By reaffirming the doctrine of creation and the sovereignty and freedom of God to create as God saw fit, Tempier’s decree in 1277 emphasized this principle. This transposition in thinking led to a different approach to the study of nature in the centuries following Tempier’s decree. Just as there are many ways to paint a picture or design a clock or organize the books in a library, there are many ways to design and organize a universe. Because it had been chosen by a rational mind, the order in nature could have been otherwise. Thus, the natural philosophers could not merely deduce the order of nature from logical first principles; they needed to observe nature carefully and systematically.

the job of the natural philosopher was not to ask what God must have done, but what God actually did.51 Boyle argued that God’s freedom required an empirical and observational approach, not just a deductive one.52 Scientists needed to look, and to find out. As historian of science Ian Barbour explains, “The doctrine of creation implies that the details of nature can be known only by observing them.”53

modern science was specifically inspired by the conviction that the universe is the product of a rational mind who designed the universe to be understood and who also designed the human mind to understand it.

“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

“once Christians began to read the Bible for themselves,” as they did with the availability of printed books from the fifteenth century on, “they too picked out those ideas as salient in how they defined their relationship to God.” This biblical understanding of human nature “extended to how they did science.”62 Such a nuanced view of human nature implied, on the one hand, that human beings could attain insight into the workings of the natural world, but that, on the other, they were vulnerable to self-deception, flights of fancy, and prematurely jumping to conclusions.

“This sensibility carried into the modern secular age, as perhaps best illustrated in our own day by Karl Popper’s . . . method of ‘conjectures and refutations,’ the stronger the better in both cases. We should aspire to understand all of nature by proposing bold hypotheses (something of which we are capable because of the imago dei) but to expect and admit error (something to which we are inclined because of the peccatum originis) whenever we fall short in light of the evidence.”65

the contingency of creation and its dependence on the will of God, its creator.70 Ockham’s razor and his famed dictum—“Never posit pluralities [many explanatory entities] without necessity”71—helped

But how does Ockham's razor become some universally applied principle? Where's his proof of his theory rather than his assertion?

Dawkins claimed, as I noted earlier, that the universe “has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose,” only “blind, pitiless indifference.”77 Second, since, in his view, neither life nor the universe revealed any evidence of actual (as opposed to apparent) design, atheism or materialism provided a more “parsimonious” explanation of the world. If there was no evidence of actual design in the universe and thus no evidence of design by God, why continue to believe in such a being?

scientists writing during the scientific revolution and the philosophers and theologians writing in the centuries leading up to it likened nature to a book, a clock, or a law-governed realm (Fig. 2.1).

whereas the Greeks conceived of these principles as logically necessary axioms inherent in (or internal to) nature itself, the scientists during the seventeenth century began to conceive of the laws of nature as contingent forms of order that were impressed upon nature from the outside by a creator.51

Hume advanced a theory of knowledge known as radical empiricism. Empiricism asserts that the observation of the natural world through the five senses offers the only sure path to knowledge. As such, it provides the only reliable source of ideas in our minds.4 Hume’s rejection of the possibility of miracles reflected this view, because it asserted that uniform human experience derived through the senses had established the laws of nature—and human beings had never observed any exceptions to them. As he noted: “Nothing is esteemed a miracle, if it ever happened in the common course of nature.”5 Thus, Hume not only argued that miracles violate the laws of nature, he also argued that our experience has established that what we call natural laws admit no exceptions. In short, miracles violate the laws of nature, and the laws of nature cannot be violated; therefore, miracles are impossible.

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). Finally, proponents of the Kalām argument equated that first transcendent and personal cause with God.

If the origin of biological organisms could be explained naturalistically, as Darwin argued, then explanations invoking a creative intelligence were unnecessary and even vacuous.29

in Darwin’s view, explanations pointing to an immaterial mind, idea, or plan did not—in principle—qualify as proper scientific explanations.

“Darwin told us where we came from, Marx told us where we are going, and Freud told us about human nature and what to do about our guilt.”

Many conflict advocates cite the ascendancy of Darwinian thinking—with its denial of actual as opposed to merely apparent design in living systems—as the principle and irreconcilable locus of this conflict. If theism asserts that creative intelligence played a key role in the origin of living forms, and if evolutionary biology can account for the origin of living organisms by reference to wholly undirected material processes, then one of these two views must be incorrect.

Of course, it does not follow from the truth of neo-Darwinism or some other materialistic evolutionary theory that a deity could not possibly exist. Even popular proponents of scientific atheism, including Dawkins and Nye, admit that science cannot categorically exclude that possibility.57 They do not deny the possibility of a designer whose creative activity is so masked in apparently natural processes that it escapes scientific detection. Yet for most evolutionary biologists such an undetectable entity hardly seems worthy of consideration. As Dawkins has argued, if the appearance of design can now be fully explained by natural causes, then surely it is simpler to attribute the appearance of design directly to such causes rather than invoking an additional factor, an undetectable designer.58 Although the existence of such a designer has remained a logical possibility, the vast majority of evolutionary biologists, and certainly New Atheists, have rejected the idea as an unnecessary and unparsimonious explanation. At the very least, neo-Darwinism makes “theological explanations” of life “superfluous,”59 as evolutionary biologist Douglas Futuyma writes.

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.

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.

“Space tells matter how to move, and matter tells space how to curve.”5

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,

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 unidentified form of energy that putatively permeates all of space and exerts an outward pressure on it.56

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.64

In the subatomic realm (10−12 cm or smaller), strange phenomena can occur, such as light or electrons acting like both waves and particles at the same time. Nondeterministic fluctuations in energy can occur at that scale as well.

the theorem applies to nearly all plausible and realistic cosmological models. It states that any universe that is on average expanding is “past incomplete.” In other words, if one follows any spacetime trajectory back in time, any expanding universe, including one expanding as a consequence of an “inflaton field,” must have had a starting point to its expansion, indicating a beginning.

masses of these quarks must have simultaneously met nine different conditions for the right nuclear reactions to have occurred in the early universe16 (Fig. 7.4). The “right” reactions are ones that would produce the right elements (such as carbon and oxygen) in the right abundances necessary for life.

the value of the “up quark” must have a precise mass of between zero and just one billion trillionth of the Planck mass, corresponding to a fine tuning of roughly 1 part in 1021.17 The mass of the “down quark” must have a similarly precise fine tuning.18

since G could reasonably range from 0 to 1040 times its current value, the range of G consistent with stable stars still represents a small fraction of this range, 1 part in one hundred billion trillion trillion (1 in 1035).25

He also asked the audience to imagine that each of those dials was fixed to a specific setting out of a vast number of other possible settings. FIGURE 7.8 A hypothetical universe-generating machine illustrating the fine tuning of the laws and constants of physics and the initial conditions of the universe.

Attempts to explain the evidence by invoking chance alone or multiple other universes (more on that in Chapter 16) seemed to him to betray a kind of metaphysical special pleading, even desperation. As Longley explained, the anthropic design argument “is of such an order of certainty that in any other sphere of science, it would be regarded as settled.” He continued: “To insist otherwise is like insisting that Shakespeare was not written by Shakespeare because it might have been written by a billion monkeys sitting at a billion keyboards typing for a billion years. So it might. But the sight of scientific atheists clutching at such desperate straws has put new spring in the step of theists.”47

When creating a tunnel, the precise angle and force of dynamite charges will determine the outcome. In the same way, the initial configuration of matter and energy at the beginning of the universe will determine whether or not a life-permitting universe will result.

a tidy room represents a low-entropy, highly ordered state, whereas a messy room obviously represents a disordered, high-entropy state.

the number that Penrose calculated—1 in 1010123—provides a quantitative measure of the unimaginably precise fine tuning of the initial conditions of the universe.11

1010123 represents what mathematicians call a hyper-exponential number—10 raised to the 10th power (or 10 billion) raised again to the 123rd power. To put that number in perspective, it might help to note that physicists have estimated that the whole universe contains “only” 1080 elementary particles (a huge number—1 followed by 80 zeroes). But that number nevertheless represents a minuscule fraction of 1010123.13 In fact, if we tried to write out this number with a 1 followed by all the zeros that would be needed to represent it accurately without the use of exponents, there would be more zeros in the resulting number than there are elementary particles in the entire universe.

And the density of the universe one nanosecond (a billionth of a second) after the beginning had to have the precise value of 1024 kilograms per cubic meter. If the density were larger or smaller by only 1 kilogram per cubic meter, galaxies would never have developed.18 This corresponds to a fine tuning of 1 part in 1024. The cosmological constant requires an even greater degree of fine tuning.

energy density of space that contributes to the outward expansion of space in opposition to gravitational attraction.) The most conservative estimate for that fine tuning is 1 part in 1053, but the number 1 part in 10120 is more frequently cited.19 Physicists now commonly agree that the degree of fine tuning for the cosmological constant is no less than 1 part in 1090.20 To get a sense of what this number means, imagine searching the vastness of the visible universe for one specially marked subatomic particle. Then consider that the visible universe contains about 200 billion galaxies each with about 100 billion stars21 along with a panoply of asteroids, planets, moons, comets, and interstellar dust associated with each of those stars. Now assume that you have the special power to move instantaneously anywhere in the universe to select—blindfolded and at random—any subatomic particle you wish. The probability of your finding a specially marked subatomic particle—1 chance in 1080—is still 10 billion times better than the probability—1 part in 1090—that the universe would have happened upon a life-permitting strength for the cosmological constant.

As philosopher John Leslie has argued,27 contrary to what WAP advocates claim, the origin of the fine tuning does require explanation. He points out that though we humans should not be surprised to find ourselves living in a universe suited for life (since we are alive), we ought to be surprised to learn that the conditions necessary for life are so extremely improbable. To illustrate the fallacy behind the WAP, Leslie likened our situation in our finely tuned universe to that of a blindfolded man who has discovered that, against all odds, he has survived a firing squad of one hundred expert marksmen. Though his finding himself still alive is certainly consistent with the fact that all the marksmen missed, it does not explain why the marksmen actually did miss. Instead, Leslie argues the prisoner should be surprised that he is still alive, because the marksmen are known to be excellent shots and the probability of all of them missing (if they had intended to kill him) is extremely small. Clearly, the WAP makes a logical error. It treats stating a necessary condition of the occurrence of an event (in this case, our existence) as if it eliminated the need for a causal explanation of the conditions that make the event possible.

This reasoning has an obviously problematic aspect. The observers allegedly causing the fine tuning of the universe make their observation of the fine tuning billions of years after, not before, the event that they allegedly cause. Yet clearly the very concept of “cause” implies an event that produces a subsequent effect. Even in the case of alleged observer-caused quantum phenomena, the effect—the collapse of the wave function—occurs after the cause—that is, the detection of the wave of light. The patent illogic of this formulation led the famous hard-nosed Scientific American writer Martin Gardner to express exasperation. He called the SAP and similar attempts to explain away the origin of the fine tuning “CRAP, the Completely Ridiculous Anthropic Principle.”31 Almost all physicists and philosophers now agree with this well-deserved, if intemperate, dismissal.

Dembski suggests that the improbability of the structure by itself does not trigger our awareness of prior intelligent design. Instead, intelligent agents recognize intelligent activity whenever they observe a highly improbable object or event that also matches an independently recognizable or meaningful pattern.

The pile of stones at the bottom of the cliff does not form such a pattern, but the faces on the mountain do.

Polkinghorne’s hypothetical machine illustrated how our universe exhibits (a) an extremely improbable ensemble of values and conditions that also (b) exemplify a set of functional requirements—those that we can concisely describe as “a set of parameters necessary for producing a life-sustaining universe.”

I show that the probability of producing even a single functional protein of modest length (150 amino acids) by chance alone in a prebiotic environment stands at no better than a “vanishingly small” 1 chance in 10164, an inconceivably small probability. To put this number in perspective, recall that physicists estimate that there are only 1080 elementary particles in the entire universe. In Signature, I also show that the probability of generating a single functional protein is extremely small in relation to all the opportunities for that event to occur since the beginning of time (what are called the “probabilistic resources” of the universe). Even if every event in the entire history of the universe (where an event is defined minimally as an interaction between elementary particles) were devoted to producing combinations of amino acids of a given length (an extravagantly generous assumption), the number of combinations thus produced would still represent only a tiny portion—less than one out of a trillion trillion—of the total number of possible amino-acid combinations corresponding to a functional protein—any functional protein—of that given length. In short, it is extremely implausible to think that even a single protein would have arisen by chance on the early earth even taking into account the “probabilistic resources” of the entire universe over its 13.8-billion-year history. And a single protein, keep in mind, does not a living cell, with its many hundreds of speci...

crystals cannot convey novel information. Bonding affinities, to the extent they exist, cannot be used to explain the origin of information. Self-organizing chemical affinities generate highly repetitive “order,” but not information; they create mantras, not messages (Fig. 9.8). What needs explaining is not the origin of order—whether in crystals, swirling tornadoes, or the “eyes” of hurricanes—but the origin of information.26 FIGURE 9.8 The concepts of order, complexity, and specified complexity are illustrated above. This figure shows three qualitatively different types of sequences as defined by the information sciences. Note that DNA contains sequences that exhibit specified complexity, not simple redundant order.

Drawing on the work of the physical chemist Michael Polanyi and others, they argued that chemistry and physics alone could not produce information any more than ink and paper could produce the information in a book. Instead, our uniform experience suggests that information always arises as the product of mind or what they called an “intelligent cause.”38

Could the intuitive connection between information and the prior activity of designing intelligence justify a rigorous scientific argument for intelligent design based upon the presence of the functionally specified digital information in DNA?

The creative action of a conscious and intelligent agent clearly represents a known and adequate cause (one “now in operation”) for the origin of specified information. Uniform and repeated experience affirms that intelligent agents can produce large amounts of functional or specified information, whether in software programs, ancient inscriptions, or Shakespearean sonnets. The specified information in the cell also points to intelligent design not just as an adequate explanation, but as the best explanation (Fig. 9.12). Why? Experience shows that large amounts of specified information invariably originate from an intelligent source. This is particularly apparent when the information is expressed in a digital or alphabetic form. A computer user who traces the information on a screen back to its source invariably comes to a mind, that of a software engineer. Similarly, the information in a book or newspaper article ultimately derives from a writer—from a mental, rather than a strictly material, cause. FIGURE 9.12 In Signature in the Cell and in this chapter, I infer intelligent agency or design as the best, most causally adequate explanation for the origin of the functional information or specified complexity necessary to produce the first living cell.