Today we live in a surprising moment in the history of knowledge, which gives us the opportunity to obtain a new vision or understanding of the world, a deeply satisfying experience.
A new understanding of the world
Viktor Frankl[1], a young Austrian psychiatrist who survived the horrendous environment of the concentration camps in Nazi Germany, has conveyed to us his reflection that the search for meaning is the main motivating force of human life. We must find this search for meaning in understanding the world in which we live. To know the world, according to the most current scientific theories, is to understand a universe created by God.
Indeed, today we live in a surprising moment in the history of knowledge, which allows us to obtain a new vision or understanding of the world, a deeply satisfying experience. Furthermore, as highlighted in an article in the magazine Teaching News: “The scientific knowledge acquired in the last fifty years allows for more rigorous forms of inductive or deductive argumentation of the existence of God”[2].
Fundamental discoveries leading to the idea of God
The 20th century has witnessed numerous fundamental scientific discoveries that lead to the idea of the existence of a creator God as the origin of the universe and intelligent life. We know that science in itself cannot prove or refute its existence, since God is outside of nature, but one by one the arguments that have been used in the past to deny his existence have crumbled and new knowledge has emerged that They point to a created universe and an author of that Creation. We are referring to discoveries in all fields of science: physics, cosmology, biology, mathematics…
Both the theory of relativity and quantum physics have profoundly modified our thinking. Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle demystified materialistic determinism, while the Big Bang theory strengthened the idea of Creation. If we must highlight a discovery as the most important of the 20th century, we have to refer to the concept that we live in an expanding universe, which leads inexorably to its beginning 13.8 billion years ago. For the first time in human history it is scientifically reasoned that the universe has a beginning. An idea proposed by Georges Lemaître[3], a Catholic priest and doctor in physics, who deduced it from Einstein’s equations of relativity. This notion was so groundbreaking that Einstein himself only admitted it when evidence appeared as a result of observation. The proposal of a universe generated from an enormously energetic point was formulated by Lemaître in 1931 and was progressively completed by other researchers, although it was not generally accepted until 1968, when microwave background radiation was detected. Science leads us to the idea proclaimed in Genesis: the universe had an origin.
Furthermore, this reality is supported by another area of science. The need for a beginning for the universe is also deduced from thermodynamics. In the second half of the 19th century, Boltzmann mathematically defined entropy, which was the measure of the disorder of a system; and the second principle of thermodynamics says that the amount of entropy in the universe tends to increase over time. This law implies a principle of our universe as deduced by different scientists, including Arthur Eddington, who coined the term “arrow of time”, indicating that it runs from the past to the future. But the consequence that this implies a beginning of the universe was not widely accepted until the idea of the Big Bang was accepted in the late 1960s.
In 2003, a new scientific advance once again corroborates this initial moment of the universe, through the formulation of the Borde-Vilenkin-Guth theorem by these three scientists, which demonstrates that a universe that has a positive expansion rate necessarily has a beginning in time.
The evidence of the origin of the universe, which clearly points to the existence of a Creator, is not the only sign that new scientific knowledge has given us about an Intelligent Creator. Thus, we can summarize the laws of nature in a set of equations that contain a certain number of constants; These allow us to make very precise calculations of the most basic physical phenomena, which are confirmed by experimental evidence. Starting in the second half of the last century, we began to perceive that there is an infinitesimal “fine adjustment” of many of the constants of nature and the initial conditions of the universe in order to produce life. An adjustment that points inexorably to a purpose and a Creator. This important discovery has its starting point in 1953, when Fred Hoyle wondered how carbon, so necessary for the existence of life, could have been produced in the universe. And it is proven that this is possible thanks to the existence in the carbon nucleus of an absolutely precise energy level. Following this discovery, we have learned that all the constants present in the complex set of physical laws that define the cosmos have infinitesimally specific values and that, if the slightest deviation occurs in any of these values, the universe as it exists we know could not exist, much less sustain life. The prestigious agnostic physicist Steven Weinberg, Nobel Prize winner in Physics, has written “…how surprising it is that the laws of nature and the initial conditions of the universe allow the existence of beings that could observe it. Life as we know it would be impossible if any of the various physical quantities had slightly different values”[4].
The discovery of the structure of DNA by Watson and Crick in 1953 has led to knowledge of the complexity of the information necessary for the creation of life from the inert. The exhaustive research of recent years has not allowed us to know the mechanisms by which life has been generated, but it leads us to the confirmation of the absolute improbability of it having occurred by chance with the laws that we know. And we sense that fine tuning reappears in this evolutionary stage that leads to our existence. The action of a supernatural intelligence is the most logical explanation we have to justify this infinitesimal adjustment of the initial conditions and constants of the universe in the Big Bang, which gave rise to the universe and life.
The abstract world of mathematics also provides us with clues that lead to the existence of God. Eugene Wigner[5] considered it a miracle that mathematics can explain the physical phenomena of nature. And Kurt Gödel, probably the most influential mathematician of the 20th century, proved the so-called incompleteness theorems, the first of which is stated like this: for any consistent and formal system there are statements that are expressible in that system and that are true, but that They cannot be demonstrated in that system. The consequence is that a superior system is always required to demonstrate the realities of any formal system. The incompleteness theorem is applicable not only to mathematics, but to everything that is subject to the laws of logic: science, language or philosophy. And since the universe is mathematical and logical, incompleteness also applies to it. The consequence is that the universe, made up of matter, energy, space and time, cannot explain itself. He needs an explanation of something external to him that is not matter, energy, space, or time. That is, something immaterial that is outside the universe.
Science, within our reach
All those people who at this moment feel the impulse to follow Viktor Frankl’s advice and seek that understanding of the world in which we live, have a lot of information at their disposal to turn to. In particular, in Spain two books have been published in recent months, with similar titles: God – Science – The Tests[6] and New scientific evidence of the existence of God[7].
Among the publications of recent years on the same topic, works written under a different sensitivity and objective can be selected. The following five titles listed below may be indicative of this variety of approaches.
The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence to Believe
Francis Collins is a genetics scientist, world-renowned for his discoveries of disease-causing genes, who has led the Human Genome Project[8] for nine years. In his book The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence to Believe [9], which he wrote at the end of his time as director of this project, he initially recounts the evolution of his thinking. During his time as a Chemistry and Physics student he went from agnosticism to atheism, following the current that seemed to prevail among men of science. Once he had his doctorate, he decided to enroll in Medicine and the contact in the hospital with certain patients moved him to reflect: the encounter with patients whose faith gave them comfort and peace despite their suffering led him to think about whether beliefs could have a basis rational. He decided to inform himself systematically and it was in reading C. S. Lewis’s book Mere Christianity [10] where he found the best argument in favor of the integration of faith and logic. In this book, Collins argues his faith in the existence of God, delving into the origin of the universe and placing special emphasis on biological evolution.
God exists
Antony Flew[11] has been a prestigious atheist philosopher. His 1949 lecture given at Oxford became one of the most published philosophical essays and, from then on, for more than fifty years he has been at the forefront as an active defender of his atheistic ideas, which he has set out in 26 published books. , achieving great impact. But the development of Big Bang cosmology and the progressive knowledge of the fine tuning of physical constants led him to modify his thinking. In 2007 he published the book God Exists [12], in which he reflects on all the evidence that current scientific knowledge shows us. He endorses the words of the Nobel Prize winner in Medicine George Wald, who in 1984 abandoned his atheistic thinking, affirming that the Mind, a creative intelligence, is the fundamental reality of the world: “How is it possible that, with so many other apparent options, we are in a universe that possesses that peculiar set of properties that engenders life? Lately it has occurred to me, I must confess that at first with a certain shock to my scientific sensibility, that both questions can be treated in a way that is to a certain extent congruent. That is, by assuming that intelligence, rather than emerging as a late consequence in the evolution of life, has actually always existed as the matrix, the source and condition of physical reality, which the matter of which physical reality is made up of is the stuff of the mind. It is Mind that has composed a physical universe that engenders life, capable of evolutionarily producing creatures that know and create.”
God – Science – The Proof / New scientific evidence of the existence of God
There is a broad parallel between these two books that have appeared in Spain almost at the same time. Its authors are, in both cases, professionals dedicated to the business world, who have verified this “fracture between the immense growth of scientific knowledge and technical achievements on the one hand, and the understanding of them by citizens”[13] which is alluded to in the cited article from Teaching Activity, and in particular about the existence of God. And they have felt the need to disseminate that knowledge.
In both cases they have tried to systematically show all the ideas and reasoning of science that lead to the existence of a Creator God: both in relation to the origin of the universe, and the fine adjustment of the constants of nature, which have to do with inanimate matter or the passage from the inert to the animate; as well as arguments that derive from new mathematical knowledge or from physics. Also, in both works, the theories and arguments that try to explain the opposite thesis, the unnecessaryness of a Creator, are analyzed.
In the case of God – Science – Proof, the authors, Michel-Ives Bolloré and Olivier Bonnassies, are two French engineers who have worked for three years on the development of this work and have received advice from around twenty scientists and specialists. . It so happens that one of them, Olivier Bonnassies, has been a non-believer during a period of his life.
The author of New Scientific Evidence of the Existence of God, José Carlos González Hurtado, is a professional who has dedicated his life to business activity, directing top-level international firms that have led him to live in up to fifteen different countries. In 2020 he promoted the launch of the Spanish version of EWTN, the most important Catholic religious television channel in the world. The work addresses the debate regarding the different questions raised.
Science at God’s doorstep
Robert Spitzer is a truly multifaceted Jesuit priest, with a background in Business Administration, Philosophy and Theology. He has developed his activity
as a philosophy professor while he has written numerous books and articles. He is president of the Magis Institute dedicated to training and disseminating the complementarity of science, philosophy and faith, in particular physics, cosmology, philosophy of science and metaphysics.
Spitzer has been analyzing and debating these issues for many years and we should not be surprised that the book of which he is the author, Science at the doorstep to God[14], constitutes a sequence of precise and well-organized information and rigorous reasoning in which no waste not a word. He shows in an academic way that through reason, we can come to see not only the great intelligence of the Creator, but also signs of the love, goodness and glory of him.
Understand the world
There is a famous anecdote about the theory of relativity that featured the astronomer and physicist Sir Arthur Eddington, a few years after it was enunciated by Albert Einstein. A journalist told him: “I heard that you are one of the three people in the world who understands the theory of general relativity.” Hearing this, Eddington looked surprised. When the interviewer asked him the reason for his strangeness, the English physicist responded: “I’m trying to think who the third person could be.”
The anecdote seems to be true and shows us that science in the past was a matter of a few. Thanks to a series of circumstances, among which the work of the disseminators should be highlighted, we can affirm that this is no longer the case.
We must be grateful that there is this effort to transmit the knowledge generated by scientific research and the debate about the consequences that this knowledge reveals. Because it facilitates the search for meaning in life that, as Frankl proposes, we can find in understanding the world in which we live. Any of the five proposed books, each with its differential characteristics, allows us to understand that God is behind this universe and our own life.
Manuel Ribes – Life Sciences Institute – Bioethics Observatory – Catholic University of Valencia
Science tells us over and over again that
GOD EXISTS
Discovering God through Science:
Strong Scientific Evidence
Voices – Manuel Ribes
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[1] Viktor E. Frankl Man’s Search for Meaning | Herder ISBN-13 9788425432026
[2] M. Ribes Dólera: Citizens of the Universe? | Teaching News 02/10/2020
[3] M. Ribes García Lemaître, religion, science: “There were two ways to reach the truth. I decided to follow both” UCV BIOETHICS OBSERVATORY April 16, 2021
[4] The BioLogos Foundation What do “fine-tuning” and the “multiverse” say about God? Updated on 11/20/2023
[5] M. Ribes García The mystery of mathematics | UCV Bioethics Observatory 09/29/2020
[6] Oliver Bonnassies, Michel Yves Bollore God – Science – Proof | Funambulista Publishing House ISBN-13 9788412658798
[7] José Carlos González Hurtado New scientific evidence of the existence of God | Voice of Paper ISBN-13 9788412748611
[8] The Human Genome Project was a large international collaborative initiative that mapped and sequenced the human genome for the first time. The project, which ran from 1990 to 2003, was historic in scope and scale.
[9] Francis S. Collins The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence to Believe Today’s Issues 2007 ISBN-10 9703706134
[10] C. S. Lewis Mero Christianity | Rialp ISBN-10 8432147575
[11] M. Ribes García Modern cosmology destroys the pillars of materialism | UCV Bioethics Observatory 11/8/2021
[12] Antony Flew God exists | Editorial Trotta, S.A ISBN-13 9788498793680
[13] M. Ribes Dólera: Citizens of the Universe? | Teaching News 02/10/2020
[14] Br. Robert Spitzer SJ Science at the doorstep to God | Ignatius Press ISBN-10 162164636X
