The God Hypothesis? – 2/1/2023
The naturalistic worldview denies anything beyond what we can observe in nature itself, namely matter and energy within space and time. Particles, quantum fields, and the “laws” of physics . . . that’s all there is, ever was, or ever will be, to paraphrase Carl Sagan.
Prior to Big Bang cosmology, the reigning “scientific” view was of an eternal and infinite universe. Albert Einstein fudged his equations with a “cosmological constant” to support this idea and Fred Hoyle, with strictly ideological motivations, proposed a steady-state infinite universe. Sir Arthur Eddington confessed that he found the Big Bang idea “repugnant.”
And so the Big Bang idea was resisted for some time because it allowed for a cause. There shouldn’t be anything or, God forbid, anyone outside the universe that could bring it into existence. As Stephen Meyer points out in his 2021 book, Return of the GOD Hypothesis: Three Scientific Discoveries that Reveal the Mind Behind the Universe, since naturalism posits nothing outside the physical universe, therefore naturalism “does not qualify as a causally adequate explanation for . . . the beginning of the universe.”
Meyer would tell his students, “If you extrapolate back all the way to a singularity, you eventually reach a point where there is no matter left to do the causing.”
In this essay I’ll extract nuggets and comment (as usual). I do highly recommend the book, but only if you’re already thoroughly grounded in young-earth creationism. You can use my essays and book on creation vs. evolution on this site to help, and take advantage of the wealth of materials on creation.com and answersingenesis.org. Meyer is firmly entrenched in the Intelligent Design camp and, accordingly, compromises on age of the earth and other historical issues within the first eleven chapters of Genesis. But his book Return of the GOD Hypothesis is a wonderful exposition of the history and sorry speculations of the naturalistic foundations of atheism.
In particular, Meyer examines three major scientific discoveries that wreck any supposed rational faith in naturalism: (1) the material universe had a beginning; (2) the universe is finely tuned for life; and (3) the biosphere has experienced huge and discontinuous increases in functionally specified information.
Let’s do a bit of history first. Meyer quotes Oxford physicist / historian Peter E. Hodgson who wrote on “the material requirements for the growth of science.” Specifically, there must be “a fairly well-developed society, so that some of its members can spend most of their time just thinking about the world,” without just scrabbling for the next meal. Simple technology must be available to conduct simple experiments. Mathematics are necessary for the systemization of experimental studies and a written language is required to communicate with other scientists to grow the collective knowledge base.
Several historians note that science developed in Western civilization alone, because of the intellectual presuppositions of Judeo-Christian theology. In contrast, for example, Greek philosophers believed that order in nature derived from the logos, a self-existent logical principle, rather than from a divine mind. This led to an ‘armchair’ philosophizer approach, neglectful of careful observations.
Robert Boyle, a founder of modern chemistry, insisted that the job of the natural philosopher (scientist) was not to ask what God must have done, but what God actually did. Boyle advocated an empirical, observational approach, not merely a deductive one. Newton, Galileo, Kepler, and Copernicus, Meyer notes, believed themselves to be called to find evidences of God in the world.
Kepler wrote that God made it possible for us to discover God’s natural laws “by creating us after his own image so that we could share in his own thoughts.”
Scientists with a biblical worldview embraced human capability based on our image-of-God nature, and exercised caution about our fallibility due to the Fall and our tendencies to sin. Thus, our experimental methods must be systematic and reviewed, even repeated by others.
Nobel laureate (chemist) Melvin Calvin argued that the monotheistic worldview of the ancient Hebrews suggested a single coherent order in creation with a single, universal set of laws. Meyer notes in contrast that since animists, polytheists, and pantheists claim many spirits or gods interacting with nature in different ways, chaos and randomness would be more likely than uniformity and order. Accordingly, Melvin Calvin identified the biblical concept of God as “the historical foundation for modern science.”
Isaac Newton viewed the order in creation as evidence of divine action. For example, he argued that the uncanny match between the optical properties of light and the structure of the mammalian eye suggested design. Newton also noted that the stability of the planetary orbits depended not only on the regularity of gravitational forces, but also upon the precise initial positioning of planets and comets with respect to the sun.
Extrapolating, consider the observed universe of stars, roughly 100 billion stars in each of a trillion galaxies . . . at least. For galaxies to be stable and beautifully ordered, each star must have a suitable initial position and velocity. Note that aerospace engineers don’t just fling artificial satellites up and hope for the best. Those communications and GPS satellites must be carefully launched and positioned with precise velocity vectors, or else they will either fall back to Earth or escape completely.
Now, Meyer buys into Big Bang mythology completely, but hopes that people will believe that ‘God did that.’ He cites the famous conclusion to the book, God and the Astronomers, by astrophysicist Robert Jastrow of NASA’s Goddard Space Center, who wrote, “For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about the conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.”
I’ve written much else on this site regarding the Big Bang, so I’ll be concise here. See also my two astronomy tracts at ThinkTracts.com for a brief summary of key issues. The Big Bang idea derives from ‘winding the clock back’ from the currently observed expansion of the universe . . . which the Bible (perhaps) refers to at least 17 times as God ‘stretching out’ the heavens. There simply must have been a beginning, which greatly tormented many atheistic scientists of the 20th century who despised any fact that necessitated a Creator. But the Big Bang is not biblical! (See Genesis chapter 1.) And ‘scientifically’ the Big Bang and naturalistic cosmology explain nothing, not the formation of galaxies and stars and planets, not dark energy nor dark matter, and not those beautiful orbits that we see in our telescopes everywhere.
As I draft this in August 2022, the preliminary results from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have shocked the cosmological establishment. The JWST is designed to see deeper into the infrared than other telescopes in order to find those ‘proto-galaxies’ that supposedly were forming just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. But what they’re finding is what creationists (including me) have predicted they would find . . . fully formed galaxies at the greatest distances. Big Bang doctrine is dogmatic against fully formed galaxies at the greatest observed distances! Furthermore, the spectra displays elements (other than hydrogen and helium) that shouldn’t have been in the first generation of stars. And yet the ID camp remains in lockstep with the atheists in embrace of the Big Bang.
Let’s move on. Meyer reviews the history and variations of thought within the Big Bang community, and that’s all interesting. The next key area to review, however, is fine tuning, “the discovery that many properties of the universe fall within extremely narrow and improbable ranges that turn out to be absolutely necessary for complex forms of life . . . to exist.” The term “anthropic fine tuning” is also used to emphasize that we wouldn’t be here to marvel at these ‘coincidences’ if they hadn’t worked out just right. Atheistic scientists sometimes call it “the fine-tuning problem.”
In our “Goldilocks universe” the forces of physics have just the right strengths, the particles have just the right mass, and the initial distribution of matter and energy was organized just right. Stellar and planetary orbits, for example, although Big Bangers like Meyer believe that the initial sub-microscopic ball of mass and energy that expanded into our universe had to be arranged ‘just right.’
One very particular example of fine-tuning is found in the wonderful properties and abundance of carbon, without which life as we know it would be impossible. Complex organic chemistry with its infinite variety of long, chain-like molecules enables storing and processing genetic information and the execution of all other cellular processes. No other element comes close as a potential substitute for carbon. Carbon’s properties depend critically on its mass, the stability of its nucleus, the strength of the forces of physics at the atomic level, and its abundance in the earth’s crust.
Physicist Paul Davies on fine-tuning: “The impression of design is overwhelming.” Astrophysicist Luke Barnes: “Fine tuning suggests that, at the deepest level that physics has reached, the Universe is well put-together . . . The whole system seems well thought out, something that someone planned and created.”
The biblical creationist loves the fine-tuning arguments, but not exactly the same package. God created the universe fully-functioning, according to His brief outline in Genesis chapter 1. He did not create it via a fantastical fine-tuning of the mass/energy in a Big Bang singularity. Roger Penrose calculated the odds against our well-balanced universe of solar systems and galaxies, whereas the by-far-most-likely result from a Big Bang would have been just one giant ball of mass which would collapse into one giant black hole, or at best a number of big black holes. The odds he calculated are 1 in 10 raised to the 10123 power. Yes, the exponent is 10 raised to the power of 123. The number is inconceivable. There are “only” about 1080 particles in the entire universe.
The secularists call this a fine-tuning problem. No, I call it ridiculous . . . the Big Bang is a ridiculously bad theory. No, God created the planets, stars, and galaxies in a functioning initial state.
Meyer devotes a large section of his book to intelligent design issues in biology. He’s solid on all this, but I’ve written much on this site, including essays on his two previous books, Signature in the Cell and Darwin’s Doubt. For a brief look at the issues, see my tracts on DNA, Genetic Entropy, and the Fossil Record.
Meyer appropriately comments that late 19th century scientists assumed that the universe’s fundamental entitities are matter and energy. What has been discovered since then is that information is foundational to life, particularly the genetic code and all the brilliantly designed nanomachines that enable you and me and the hundred billion cells in our bodies to operate successfully 24-7-365.
Of course, information comes only from a mind, with purpose and intent.
As an ID but anti-creationist, Meyer tells a story of “information explosions” throughout history that produced today’s panoply of life. But of course those “information explosions” all occurred within the week described in Genesis 1. So we’ll move on again.
Regarding the question of what caused the Big Bang, naturalists / atheists have suggested such ideas as eternal, chaotic inflation, supposing that our universe arose out of an already eternally existing multiverse or, somehow, an eternally preexistent set of conditions that allowed for a Big Bang beginning to ours. There are no evidences, of course, for a multiverse and there are foundational philosophical reasons to deny an infinitely eternal past, as elucidated by Christian philosophers J. P. Moreland and William Lane Craig.
The eternal past impossibility is defeated by biblical doctrine – God as described in the Bible is beyond space and time, since He created all that, and as a free agent with free will could “initiate a new chain of cause and effect without being compelled by any prior material conditions.” Therefore, there is no “infinite regress of prior material states.”
A God with free will makes sense to most people, who live as if by their own free will. If you deny you have free will, as any serious materialist must, then to whom am I talking? Is it just brain chemistry making noise? Is there a you in there? Reason and rationality require free will. Meyer also notes that in pantheism, god is part of the universe and so cannot have caused it.
Meyer critiques some assertions of naturalists, for example that everything we see simply derives, necessarily, from the laws of physics. But that cannot be true. The values of the physical constants (speed of light, gravitational constant, charge of the electron, Planck’s constant) could have different values under the same set of laws (Maxwellian or quantum electrodynamics, Einsteinian gravity). Additionally, the initial conditions (number of stars and their orbits) are completely independent of the physical laws, as any freshman physics student comes to understand.
Meyer also critiques theistic evolution, espoused by those who believe that evolution is true, but somehow in an undetectable way, God used evolution to generate life and guide it to the present day. This position is trivially refuted by a Bible-believing Christian, and is scientifically refuted by checking that mutations and natural selection are woefully inadequate for the generation of even miniscule amounts of the information content of life. (See my DNA tract and several of my essays in this area.)
Some suggest a “front-loaded” version of theistic evolution which posits that the Big Bang’s initial conditions were so finely tuned that not only do we get all the stars and their orbits just right, but also the apparently random molecular conditions that resulted in the first cell and all of life after that. Wow! What faith might that entail! No, the 2nd law of thermodynamics and all of its implications (plus quantum indeterminacy) have been with us from the beginning and are evident in both laboratories and in life’s experiences. To suggest a secret thread of molecular lottery winnings that are undetectable – in principle! – begs the question of why don’t you just believe that God did it the way He said He did?
Specifically, Meyer explains: “The second law of thermodynamics implies that any biologically relevant information-rich configurations of mass and energy present at the beginning of the universe would dissipate over time.” He also mentions that Claude Shannon’s tenth theorem indicates that only an external source of information or control could prevent that tendency . . . so God would have to be involved all along, once again.
Meyer points out the obvious truth that there is no materialistic explanation to close the causal gap between a preexisting nothing and the existence of the universe. Physicists Stephen Hawking and Lawrence Krauss have suggested that the laws of physics can explain how everything came to be, but this is false on its face. The laws of physics are descriptive of what is observed in an already existing universe. These descriptors have no power to create or cause existence.
Hawking: “The universe was spontaneously created out of nothing, according to the laws of science.” Go ahead, Stephen, explain that . . . or are you just blustering for a popular readership? Hawking’s dereliction in reasoning was motivated by his depressing atheism: “I think belief in an afterlife is just wishful thinking . . . When we die, we return to dust.”
Additionally, the laws of physics are woefully incomplete, requiring enormous extrinsic information about initial and boundary conditions, amounts and kinds of matter, etc. Furthermore, the initial or current conditions (orbits) are finely tuned with respect to the laws of physics. The whole system is finely tuned without any part of the system ‘causing’ any other part of the system.
Atheists threaten us that a belief in God stops the advance of science. Historian Stephen Snobelen reports that Newton’s belief in God and God’s interaction with His creation informed rather than hindered Newton’s work. Newton saw God as (1) the source and sustainer of the universe’s mathematical order, and (2) the intelligent designer of the solar system. These ideas inspired Newton’s science. Newton’s treatise, Principia, was intended to bring glory to God and His genius. Sir Isaac Newton was arguably the greatest scientist in man’s history.
When Meyer began his teaching career he created a course called “Reasons for Faith,” in response to challenges from a frustrated agnostic student who couldn’t get satisfactory answers from his Christian classmates. The student was shocked to hear that Meyer thought that such evidences exist. Meyer cites a poll that two-thirds of atheists believe “the findings of science make the existence of God less probable.” The evolution scam is the core underlying reason for such unbelief. That’s why I have created so many Gospel tracts that target the evolution scam.
As a junior in college Meyer ran into a thought from French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre: “No finite point has any meaning unless it has an infinite reference point.” Without God there is no meaning in human life – our mortality means that anything we achieve will be forgotten. But with God as He reveals Himself in the Bible, there is an eternal and self-existent Creator, the “I AM,” who is both holy and loving and provides THE way for an eternal relationship with Him. Everything we do then matters.
Lawrence Krauss seems to have an idea that we can fake meaning . . . “We make our own purpose. We make our own joy. We are here by a cosmic accident, as I’ve tried to show, but it’s a remarkable accident that’s allowed you and I to be here to talk, to think and appreciate the beauty and splendor of the universe.”
Sartre would have considered this inauthentic. He faced up to the consequences of the alleged “cosmic accident” and professed that without a transcendent God people are left in a state of “anguish, forlornness, and despair.”
However . . . when we authentically recognize that we are made in God’s image, but our sins have condemned us, condemned us even in our own God-given conscience, and we see that we need forgiveness, it is supremely rational to repent, trust Christ for salvation, and live a life in touch with reality, mindful of eternity.
Meyer concludes his book, encouragingly, “But since meaning can only be recognized and conferred by persons, and is arguably found best in relationship between persons, the return of the God hypothesis also revives a hopeful possibility – that our search for ultimate meaning need not end in vain.”
Where Meyer falls disastrously short, though, is his neglect of an affirmation and exhortation that meaning is found only through salvation in the Lord Jesus Christ. It’s not enough to be a theist – even Satan is a theist. You must be born again, via repentance and faith. How tragic for Meyer and any of his readers if they stop short of salvation, and spend an eternity of regret in the Lake of Fire. How tragic to suffer, possibly, ridicule from demons likewise condemned, who knew of God, but never knew God, never willing to humble themselves and enjoy the richness of both this creation and the renewed creation of the ages to come.
- drdave@truthreallymatters.com