God, the Science, the Evidence: The Dawn of a Revolution, by Michel-Yves Bolloré and Olivier Bonnassies, will be released this month in English. It is a translation of a book first published in France titled Dieu, la science, les preuves: L’aube d’une révolution, which has sold over 400,000 copies. In describing how advances in modern physics point to a designer behind our world, it covers much of the same ground as Stephen Meyer’s Return of the God Hypothesis. It also covers new ground in addressing how mathematics further undermines a purely materialist understanding of our mind and in integrating the scientific arguments with philosophy, ethics, and theology.
Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem
The first section of the book complements Return of the God Hypothesis in addressing the history behind the discoveries in cosmology that demonstrate that the universe had a beginning and appears to be designed for life. It also describes the thermodynamic and informational barriers to life having originated as an unintended accident. Instead, the order in life must have originated in the mind of a creator. The authors then extend the design argument into the realm of mathematics. One of my favorite chapters focuses on the preeminent mathematician Kurt Gödel.
Gödel (pictured at the top) is not as widely known in popular culture as Einstein, but mathematicians consider his work just as revolutionary and foundational. He demonstrated through his “incompleteness theorem” that (1) any mathematical system must contain statements that are true but unprovable and (2) the consistency of a mathematical system cannot be proven within the system itself. The authors describe the impact of Gödel’s work as follows:
When Gödel published his proof the following year, a veritable tsunami swept over the mathematical elite. Leading mathematician Hermann Weyl called it a “debacle,” a “catastrophe.” As [Brandeis University philosopher] Palle Yourgrau describes it: “The two-thousand-year-old axiomatization inaugurated by Euclid — the paradigm of captured rationality — had been shattered, and the blow had been struck, annoyingly, just when . . . Hilbert had succeeded in perfecting the very idea of a formal system of axioms. Not only the results but the very methods employed in Gödel’s theorem were so unexpected that it was years before mathematicians and logicians began to grasp their full significance.”
The Immaterial Mind
Gödel’s work led him to believe that mathematics exists in a realm beyond our physical world. Since our minds can access that world, they must possess capacities that surpass those of computers. In effect, he embraced an immaterial mind and, in so doing, rejected materialism. This led him to reject the evolutionary explanation for human origins. As the authors explain:
Gödel extended his non-materialist conception of mind to his view of the nature of life and of evolution: “I don’t think the brain came in the Darwinian manner. In fact, it is disprovable. Simple mechanism can’t yield the brain.” He believed that Darwinism, which he called “simple mechanism,” would one day be refuted rationally: “More generally, I believe that mechanism in biology is a prejudice of our time which will be disproved. In this case, one disproof, in my opinion, will consist in a mathematical theorem to the effect that the formation within geological times of a human body by the laws of physics (or any other laws of a similar nature), starting from a random distribution of the elementary particles and the field, is as unlikely as the separation by chance of the atmosphere into its components.”
Gödel anticipated the work of ID theorists who demonstrated the implausibility of the evolutionary narrative for the origin of humans through arguments related to evolutionary search algorithms, waiting times, protein rarity, and irreducible complexity.
Evidence for God Beyond the Natural Sciences
The second section of the book moves beyond physics and biology into history, philosophy, morality, and other fields. The authors argue that while modern science points toward a generic creator, evidence from Scripture, history, miracles, and morality points to a personal God. The book offers a cumulative case that is innovative, thoughtful, and persuasive. They gently guide readers through complex intellectual terrain, helping us grapple with the questions of where we come from and what our purpose is.
Editor’s note: This article is sponsored by Palomar Editions, publisher of God, the Science, the Evidence. However, Discovery Institute staff were responsible for the editorial content of this posting.