Scientific Discovery Is Increasingly Pointing to God

I have an acquaintance who is a religious skeptic. He goes to church and sings in the choir, but he tells me that his reading of science has made it difficult for him to believe that the God of Judeo-Christian theology actually exists.

The repeated claims by atheistic scientists that modern science has made God superfluous has had an impact not only on my friend's thinking but throughout the culture. Polls show a significant decline in the number of people in the U.S. who consider themselves believers.

Yet, as philosopher of science Stephen Meyer argues in an opinion piece at Newsweek, most of the scientific discoveries of the last three decades actually confirm the theistic hypothesis and are unexpected on the naturalistic view that nature and the laws of physics are all that exist.

Referring to a survey taken by the Discovery Institute of which he is the Director, Meyer writes:

Perhaps surprisingly, our survey discovered that the perceived message of science has played a leading role in the loss of faith. We found that scientific theories about the unguided evolution of life have, in particular, led more people to reject belief in God than worries about suffering, disease, or death.

It also showed that 65 percent of self-described atheists and 43 percent of agnostics believe "the findings of science [generally] make the existence of God less probable.

Here are a few excerpts from the rest of his column:

....Yet....over the last century important scientific discoveries have dramatically challenged science-based atheism, and three in particular tell a decidedly more God-friendly story.

First, scientists have discovered that the physical universe had a beginning. This finding...contradicts the expectations of scientific atheists, who long portrayed the universe as eternal and self-existent and therefore in no need of an external creator.

Evidence for what scientists call the Big Bang has instead confirmed the expectations of traditional theists.

This confirmation is reinforced by discoveries over the past three decades or so which reveal that the fundamental physical laws and parameters of the universe are exquisitely fine-tuned. Had the values they have - such as the strength of the gravitational force - deviated by incomprehensibly minute amounts the universe either wouldn't exist at all or would be unsuitable for life:

Since the 1960s, physicists have determined that the fundamental physical laws and parameters of our universe are finely tuned, against all odds, to make our universe capable of hosting life.

Even slight alterations of many independent factors—such as the strength of gravitational or electromagnetic attraction, or the initial arrangement of matter and energy in the universe—would have rendered life impossible. Scientists have discovered that we live in a kind of "Goldilocks Universe," or what Australian physicist Luke Barnes calls an extremely "Fortunate Universe."

Not surprisingly, many physicists have concluded that this improbable fine-tuning points to a cosmic "fine-tuner." As former Cambridge astrophysicist Sir Fred Hoyle argued, "A common-sense interpretation of the data suggests that a super-intellect has monkeyed with physics" to make life possible.

The third discovery that confirms the claim that the universe and life are the products of an intelligent agent is the astonishing structure of the genetic code and the cells which contain it:

Third, molecular biology has revealed the presence in living cells of an exquisite world of informational nanotechnology. These include digital code in DNA and RNA—tiny, intricately constructed molecular machines which vastly exceed our own digital high technology in their storage and transmission capabilities.

And even Richard Dawkins has acknowledged that "the machine code of the genes is uncannily computer-like" — implying, it would seem, the activity of a master programmer at work in the origin of life.

At the very least, the discoveries of modern biology are not what anyone would have expected from blind, materialistic processes.

Scientific theories are predicated in part on what's called "explanatory power." The theory that can explain our observations most simply and plausibly is considered superior to alternative theories.

On this criterion theism is certainly superior to naturalistic atheism. The problem is that academia and the media are slow to publicize the fact and thus the larger culture is to a great extent unaware of it.

Meyer goes into a lot more detail on the three discoveries in his book The Return of the God Hypothesis: Three Scientific Discoveries That Reveal the Mind Behind the Universe. I also recommend two books by geneticist Michael Denton: The Miracle of the Cell and The Miracle of Man that anyone, especially those with some background in the sciences and who are willing to entertain a very serious challenge to naturalism, should read.