French authors present exhaustive study of modern proofs for existence of God

The thesis of God: The Science, the Proofs: The Dawn of a Revolution (not yet available in English translation) is summarized, simply and directly, on pages 507-508 by the Australian-British physicist Paul Davies:

The temptation to believe that the universe is the product of a sort of design, a manifestation of a subtle mathematical-aesthetic arbitration, is overwhelming. I suspect a majority of physicians of thinking as I do that there is ‘something behind all this.’

Immediately following, Mssrs Bolloré and Bonnassies outline their argument:

1.) If the world has not been conceived by an intelligence, the applicability of the mathematics [involved] is a coincidence. 2.) Now, it is very improbable that the applicability of these mathematics is a coincidence. 3.) Therefore, it is very probable that the world was conceived by an intelligence.

They continue: “The first proposition is demonstrated by the explicative impasse that we have described: neither empiricism, nor realism, nor conventionalism work. The second proposition is simply a matter of common sense. The conclusion follows logically.”

Scientific discoveries and advances made in the course of the 18^th and 19^th centuries appeared to suggest and even confirm a materialistic view of the universe—that of an eternal world with no beginning and no end and the non-existence, not only of the biblical God but of any god at all. But scientific research and advanced mathematical calculation, beginning with the theorizing of a young physicist in Vienna named Albert Einstein and his fellow Viennese and colleague Kurt Gödel in the first decade of the 20^th century, and continuing through the 1960s and 70s down to the present time, have effectively proved the exact opposite. The universe did indeed have a beginning, it must eventually have an end, and its origin not a matter of random chance. Rather, it is the the work of an intelligent creator whose nature agrees with what theologians for thousands of years have described as “divine.”

In his Preface to this book, Robert Woodrow Wilson—awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1978 for his discovery fourteen years earlier of the radioactive “echo” of the “Big Bang” in which the universe was created—writes unequivocally:

In accordance with the actual scientific findings, this book explores the idea of a spirit or of a Creator God, an idea found in numerous religions. It is certain that if you are religious in the sense established by the Judeo-Christian tradition, I do not see a better scientific theory than that of the Big Bang and the origin of the universe corresponding on this point with the descriptions in Genesis.

The authors’ claim that there have never been as many spectacular scientific discoveries to have appeared in so short a period of time as those that were made in the 20th century and early in the 21st is incontestable. And they are discoveries, moreover, that have revolutionized our previous understanding of the cosmos and forced a reconsideration of the answer to the questions of God’s existence, His role in the history of the universe, and consequently that of the human race. These discoveries were adumbrated by the formulation of the theory of thermodynamics in 1824 and its confirmation in 1998 by the further one regarding the accelerated expansion of the universe through a process of “thermal death,” which implies that the cosmos had a beginning–hence a Creator—and will necessarily have an end.

They continue with the development of the theory of relativity, formulated by Einstein between 1905 and 1915 and demonstrating that time, space, and matter are linked and that none of the three can exist without the other two. And the confirmation of the cosmological fact of the “Big Bang” (the contemptuous term coined by the English physicist Fred Hoyle, at the time an agnostic who considered the notion to be puerile nonsense—but ended by accepting it as scientific truth) in the 1960s. And the discovery of “réglagement;” the incomprehensibly exquisite mathematical tuning and continuous readjustment of the universe that makes its existence possible and sustains its continuation. The fifth discovery was the mechanism behind the passage of inert matter into living substance permitted by the profoundly mysterious overleap of the immense gulf separating the two.

Beyond all this, modern science provides proof positive that God the Creator is, as one researcher put it, a master mathematician whose design for the universe is so subtle that, were a single atom to be possessed of properties differing in the minutest degree in size or weight from those it actually has, the universe could not exist at all. And if the order of creation, as described in Genesis, were other than what is recounted there, the materials requisite for any one step of the creative sequence to occur would have been insufficient to allow the following ones to proceed. As for the possibility that the universe could have been created by chance:

The cosmological constant, with a very weak value, corresponds with a very small ‘energy of the void’ and acts as a repulsive force counterbalancing gravity and producing the acceleration of the expansion of the universe observed today. If it had been scarcely less strong, the universe would have dilated too quickly for the stars and galaxies to have had time to form. No form of life would have had the least chance to be born. On the other hand, had it been very slightly less, the cosmos would have collapsed on itself a long time ago.

All of these discoveries were achieved, and confirmed, in the face of a determined professional skepticism that yielded to fact only when the most confirmed skeptics were compelled to realize that a refusal to accept recent scientific findings is itself unscientific: to concede, in other words, that, as Bolloré and Bonnassies put it, materialism is an irrational belief.

Einstein himself, raised as a secular Jew with no religious training or interest, was almost violent in his initial rejection of the implications of his own theory: namely, that a Creator must exist. Even so, he persisted steadfastly in rejecting the idea of a personal God. “I am,” he wrote in a fomous letter to Eric Gutkind:

a non-believer profoundly religious. It is a religion of a type rather new. I have never imputed to Nature an objective or an end, or anything that could pass as anthropomorphic. What I see in Nature is a superb structure that can only be understood imperfectly and that must inspire in a reflective person a profound feeling of humility. It is a feeling authentically religious which has nothing to do with mysticism. To me, the idea of a personal God is totally strange, and seems to me even naïve.

Of the 577 pages in this book, the first 279 are devoted to the science itself; the second part considers proofs of God’s existence that are discoverable in the nonscientific fields of knowledge. “In science,” the authors observe, “as in history or in philosophy, it is always fruitful to pay attention to anomalies or contradictions, that is to say to facts which do not have rational explanations that are also reasonable if nothing but the material universe exists.”

In this context they consider such questions and objections as: What is the source or origin of the inexplicable truths found in the Bible? Who might Jesus Christ have been? Can the history and destiny of the Jewish people be explained in natural terms—that is, leaving out supernatural purpose, direction, and guidance? What actually happened at Fatima on October 16, 1917? Are good and evil limitlessly decidable by man?

From here, Mssrs Bolloré and Bonnassies go on to rebut the most common objections made throughout history–and still today–to a supernatural understanding of the universe in general and of Judeo-Christianity specifically. If proof of God’s existence actually existed, we would already know it; God is not necessary to explain the universe; the Bible is a tissue of ignorance, errors, and silly legends; religions cause wars; if God really exists, how does one account for evil–and so on and so forth.

Of particular interest, to my mind at least, is the authors’ handling of the maltreatment and dismissal, honest and well-intentioned or otherwise, of the Bible by atheists, agnostics, and other enemies of Holy Scripture. The Good Book, they patiently explain, was inspired by the Holy Spirit who (of course) was aware that it must speak and appeal to all people–wise, educated, foolish, and ignorant alike—representing all cultures and speaking every language across every age and in every epoch of human history down to the end of time, and that therefore its content must be presented in terms of reference, terms, and language that a readership incomprehensibly more varied than Babel could find comprehensible and compelling.

Thus, the Bible’s divinely inspired authors labored under linguistic constraints that were insurmountable in the absence of supernatural cooperation. To take what is perhaps the most obvious example–one moreover that is directly germane to Dieu–the sceptics and scoffers have for several thousand years made great sport of the first and second Books of Genesis, wherein the world is represented as having been created in six days: an account that, as the authors note, is one of the best known, and most often cited, tissues of “error” committed in the Bible. “Mais quel absurdité ! Quel ignorance!” “Everyone knows the world was created over billions of years; modern science—The Science—has proved it!” Only….the real “error” here is that of the critics, who, ignorant of the realities of cultural history and thoughtless of the constraints of language, have always been complacently unaware that neither the word “billion” nor, indeed, the concept of any such number existed over the many centuries required for the Bible’s composition: “billion” being a numerical concept that was invented three thousand years later in the 15^th century A.D. by French mathematicians.

Two of a many lasting impressions remain after finishing this book, which is a work as admirable as it is unswerable. The first is the fact that it is not, and never has been, the case that, throughout history, only ignorant reactionaries have resisted confirmed scientific discoveries unwelcome to themselves and threatening to their established systems of belief (Bolloré and Bonnassies include a long chapter on the inhumanly brutal history of Marxist science in the 20^th century).

The second is the truth that the more materialistic Western societies become, the further Western science goes in proving that the materialist view of the universe is demonstrably a false one in scientific terms.

Dieu: La science, les preuves: L’aube d’une révolution (God, science, evidence: The dawn of a revolution)

Guy Trédaniel éditeur, 2021
Paperback, 577 pages