[I wrote this for publication at American Thinker but it was rejected so I published it myself.]
The probability that a supernatural God exists is extremely high. We can be confident because this conclusion is based on the best scientific evidence currently available.
Our universe hasn’t always existed. We can believe this is true because scientists have observed redshift (the phenomena where objects in the universe are moving apart at an accelerating speed) and discovered cosmic microwave background radiation, establishing the facts that our universe is expanding from an origin where no planets, galaxies, or even atoms existed. This singularity is popularly known as The Big Bang Theory.
Physicist Fred Hoyle coined that phrase on March 28, 1949, to mock the concept of a universe with an origin while it was still only a hypothesis. He believed in an eternal or “steady state” universe because Hoyle was a brilliant scientist but also an atheist, and he recognized the problems caused by a universe that hadn’t always existed. A universe that had been literally created from nothing.
Hoyle might have been our most brilliant scientist of the previous century. He formulated the theory of stellar nucleosynthesis and co-authored the famous B2FH paper, which asserted that complex chemical elements were produced by nuclear fusion reactions that took place inside of stars. He studied the carbon-12 atom and predicted if the anthropic principle (a concept stating the universe’s observable properties must be such that they allow for the existence of intelligent life) were true, then the excited state of the carbon-12 molecule (which is 98.9 percent of the material found on Earth) should be found at 7.65 MeV and have the same energy as the combination of beryllium-8 plus helium-4.
In 1983, William Fowler and Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar won the Nobel Prize in Physics for performing the experiment that confirmed Hoyle’s theory about what is now known as the Hoyle State. Hoyle himself did not share in the Nobel Prize awarded to others for his work because he tended to rub many of his colleagues the wrong way with his prickly, abrasive demeanor. In many respects, Fred Hoyle was Sheldon Cooper, in real-life. Hoyle wasn’t content with not believing in the Big Bang; he had to publicly ridicule the idea.
Hoyle was stubborn about many things, and his atheistic worldview was one of them. In 1951 he was quoted in Harper’s Magazine as saying, “Religion is but a desperate attempt to find an escape from the truly dreadful situation in which we find ourselves.”
However, perhaps Hoyle’s most famous quote is a grudging concession to a worldview compatible with theism: “A commonsense interpretation of the facts suggests that a super-intellect has monkeyed with the physics, as well as chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature.”
Science tells us the universe had an origin we call the Big Bang, thanks to Fred Hoyle. Since we can be reasonably confident our universe had a beginning thanks to scientific evidence, we can also stipulate there are only two basic options for this beginning: our universe was either planned or unplanned.
A planned universe is a purposeful universe. In a planned universe, things must exist for a reason, even if we may not always be able to correctly guess what this reason might be using our limited human understanding. Conversely, an unplanned universe must come to exist without rhyme or reason and would be dominated by chaos.
Those are our two basic alternatives. What does the scientific evidence suggest?
In his book Just Six Numbers, Martin Rees identified six cosmological factors that have been exquisitely fine-tuned to produce our “Goldilocks” universe, which is a universe “just right” for life. According to Rees, the slightest variation in any of the six values would result in our universe failing…not failing to produce intelligent life but failing to exist, period.
Roger Penrose performed the mathematical calculations and estimated the probability that our universe somehow stumbled on the magic, perfect combination of cosmic variables to produce a result where sapient creatures could ponder existential questions about the mysteries of our fine-tuned universe as being the staggeringly low value of 1 in 10 in 10124th power. (I’ve also seen the number represented as 1 in 10300 which is also extremely low. Think of the number as a decimal point followed by three hundred zeros and finally a one.) It is a number so low it makes the odds of one-in-a-million seem like a safe bet by comparison. The event is so unlikely that it is called a singularity, meaning an event so exceedingly rare it might possibly only happen once (if at all.)
That is the “out” for the atheist who uses science as their excuse to reject God—no matter how improbable the Big Bang might be, it only had to happen once. We have billions of years for life to emerge from non-life without any help. This is why I like to say Time is the god of atheism because with enough Time, anything and everything becomes (theoretically) possible, even though it is grotesquely improbable.
The odds against an unplanned Big Bang are a miniscule fraction of a single percent, making the odds of a planned Big Bang the inverse percentage. Immediately following the Big Bang is an event called cosmic inflation, which has been estimated to have odds against success of one in a million-million. Then we must accept the odds against the origin of life from inanimate matter, a hypothesis known as abiogenesis, which are so low they are effectively zero if you believe two-time Nobel Prize winner Ilya Prigogine. The odds of an unplanned universe are the odds against the Big Bang combined with the odds against cosmic inflation and abiogenesis. They start off really bad and only get worse.
Joe Rogan has joked that “science wants you to believe it’s all about measurement and reason if you allow them (scientists) one miracle.”
But is only one miracle enough? We require at least four miracles to exist: the origin of the universe, the immediate and immaculately timed expansion of the universe, the origin of life, and the origin of consciousness. Not only do these four miracles need to occur, but they must also occur in sequence.
In August 1954 famed biologist George Wald sort of gave the game away in an interview with Scientific American when he said, “There are only two possible explanations as to how life arose: spontaneous generation arising to evolution or a supernatural creative act of God. There is no other possibility. Spontaneous generation was scientifically disproved 120 years ago by Louis Pasteur and others, but that just leaves us with one other possibility…that life came as a supernatural act of creation by God, but I can’t accept that philosophy because I do not want to believe in God. (emphasis added) Therefore, I choose to believe in that which I know is scientifically impossible, spontaneous generation leading to evolution.”
Wald’s explanation for his extraordinary leap of faith? Time. In that same interview he said, “Given so much time (billions of years), the “impossible” becomes possible, the possible probable, and the probable virtually certain. One only has to wait: time itself performs the miracles.”
It seems to me that Time isn’t the only crucial ingredient in this alchemist’s elixir that magically produced life: we also need an extraordinary amount of good luck to overcome the odds against success that science has provided us.
Because these odds against an unplanned universe producing intelligent life are so remarkably low, scientists who stubbornly stick to naturalism have proposed multiverse hypotheses and string theories attempting to solve the mysteries of the universe without involving God as the Intelligent Designer, but multiverses only attack the improbability problem by throwing sheer numbers at it.
An infinite number of failed universes might improve the odds of our fine-tuned universe coming into existence, but it doesn’t answer the question of how or why the Big Bang occurred. And even if a multiverse hypothesis could solve the problem of how the universe was created, it fails to speculate about the reason why it was created. If our created universe was the effect the unanswered question remains, what was the cause?
The first chapter of Genesis gives us the best, most logical answer to the question about the First Cause. It was when God spoke and said, “Let there be light.”
And there was light.
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