Last week, we caught up with a news story about the English translation of a new book that has made quite a stir in French: God, the Science, the Evidence by Michel-Yves Bolloré and Olivier Bonnassies The authors insist — with much help from prominent scientists, apparently — that science points to God.
For Europe, this is new, and we did not wait long for reactions. Philosopher Kathleen Stock, a contributing editor at Unherd who also writes for the Sunday Times, has jumped in with “The book that could shake the Pope’s faith.”
The Pope’s faith? If the history of the Catholic Church and the nearly successful assassination attempt on a recent predecessor have not shaken his faith…
Stock Has Concerns
She writes:
Leibniz once asked: “Why is there something rather than nothing?” Bolloré and Bonnassie’s answer is that God originally decreed “let there be something”; and they think that 20th-century developments in physics, biology, and history support this hypothesis. Their basic strategy in the book is to keep asking “What are the chances of that?” in a sceptical tone, concluding that only the truth of Christianity can explain otherwise unlikely natural circumstances.
Not every argument in the book takes this form, but most do. The first section focuses on the Big Bang theory, and its implication that the universe must have had a beginning, and will have an end; in which case, the authors think, the existence of a supernatural first cause is deductively implied. But the next section, focusing on “fine-tuning arguments”, puts us squarely in the territory of induction not deduction, and what philosophers like to call “inference to the best explanation” — treating the physical universe as if it were a murder scene, with you as Hercule Poirot, trying to work out whodunnit from the clues.
Actually, there is massive evidence out there for a First Cause beyond nature, whether we prefer deductive or inductive reasoning. The evidence is avoided or explained away in mainstream science only by the unwholesome practice of asserting comparatively ridiculous alternatives — most famously, perhaps, the idea that there are countless flopped universes out there that we just don’t know about. Thus we are enjoined to believe in what we do not and can’t know while discrediting the evidence of our senses. It is well past time to wake up and evaluate why such an anti-realist message should be coming from science (or is it “the science” now?).
Disappointing from an Academic
Stock deals with the issues raised by God, the Science, the Evidence disappointingly for an academic of her talents, choosing to make sophisticated fun of them:
… God’s intentions in designing the universe still look worryingly vague: what was He calibrating the background physical laws for, exactly? Was it just to bring carbon into the universe; or carbon-based life forms, generally; or humans, specifically; or even just one human in particular — Liz Truss, say, or Craig from Strictly? Why did He adopt so painfully indirect and slow a manner of implementation, and not just magic up the Garden of Eden in a trice instead, like a pop-up at the Chelsea Flower Show? The nature of God also looks pretty vague, defined only as whoever it was that came up with the floorplans: are we talking just one cosmic architect, or a committee?
These are not arguments against fine-tuning but attempts to distract from the significance of the massive evidence for it.
Then Things Become Confused
Stock writes:
Perhaps, then, we are at an impasse: two mutually incompatible explanations of how we got here, each with its own measure of confusion and darkness. We could just stipulate that a creationist God, by definition, gets all the glamorous mystery, while the material world gets rational comprehensibility; He is whatever started things off, but that which we cannot otherwise hope to know. Or perhaps — and this would be my preference — we could give up flat-footed quests to prove the existence of the supernatural by rational means; we could start becoming alert to immanence, rather than simply hypothesising transcendence. That is: we could stop treating the natural world as if it were an Agatha Christie novel, where the only real mystery is how exactly the body got into the library.
God is not, of course, unknowable. The question is, what do we want to know? A butterfly testifies quite adequately to his amazing handiwork. But, from a Christian perspective, if we want to know about things that matter more to us than butterflies, he is known through our human stories and through sacred Scripture. And, like all relationships, it is a journey, not a set of answers written on a card.
Stock’s Anxiety is Understandable
She wants us to go back to assuming that there is no actual evidence for the existence of the supernatural. We will be happier that way. Our faith will never be tested and thus be unshaken.
The trouble is, the human mind is itself evidence for a supernatural reality, available to each and every one of us. Anyone who doubts this should listen to the futile efforts to account for it as merely “what the brain does.” As neurosurgeon Michael Egnor and I point out in The Immortal Mind (2025), eliminative materialism is failing. So are the efforts to hush us up about the significance of fine-tuning of the universe for life.
Perhaps this new book out of France is best seen as further evidence that hardline materialism — the snake that eats its own tail — isn’t working any more in general. Never a better time to stay tuned.
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.