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

by Stephen C. Meyer

all materialistic theories of the origin of the material universe face a fundamental problem given the evidence we have of a cosmic beginning. Before matter and energy exist, they cannot cause, or be invoked to explain, the origin of the material universe. Instead, positing a materialistic process to explain the origin of matter and energy assumes the existence of the very entities—matter and energy—the origin of which materialists need to explain. No truly materialistic explanation can close this particular causal discontinuity or gap—the gap between either nothing or a preexisting immaterial or mathematical reality, on the one hand, and a material universe, on the other. Nor do appeals to the laws of nature solve this problem. Stephen Hawking’s claim that the “laws of science” or “the law of gravity” can explain “why there is something rather than nothing” betrayed a deep philosophical confusion about what the laws of physics can do. Laws of nature describe how nature operates and how different parts of nature interact with one another; they don’t cause the natural world to come into existence in the first place. This suggests the futility of waiting for the discovery of some new law of nature or a “theory of everything.” No law of nature can close the causal discontinuity between nothing and the origin of nature itself.