God, the Science, the Evidence, Michel-Yves Bolloré and Olivier Bonnassies, Palomar, 2025, £16.25.
In January, I found myself back in Bradford on the A650 Bingley Bypass, a dual-carriageway better known by its cartographical nom de plume ‘Sir Fred Hoyle Way’. I took note because Hoyle, born in the West Riding, but who spent most of his life as an astronomer at Cambridge, emerges as one of the villains of a book I was then reading, which, at the very least, is highly deserving of its recent translation into English.
But does God, the Science, the Evidence deserve, as its cheerleaders suggest, the reputation it is quietly acquiring for changing minds about the most profound existential questions entertained by our species? As a God botherer myself, I have little trouble answering in the affirmative. But what is this strange book with its trashy self-help manual cover, its brash boast to be an international best-seller, and its pithy website slogan ‘Not a sermon. Not a slogan. Just evidence.’
Really, it is two books, the first superior to the second. The first is pure science, using scientific method to take Richard Dawkins at his word when he wrote in The God Delusion that ‘The God hypothesis is a scientific hypothesis about the universe, which should be analysed as sceptically as any other.’ The authors, both Frenchmen, take us through recent breakthroughs in cosmology, mathematics and evolutionary biology to make a persuasive case that God is a more likely creator of the Universe than materialists have, hitherto, been willing to concede.
The evidence is strong, precise and keeps on coming. Not just the testimonies of some very clever scientists themselves, who find the improbabilities that made life possible just too far-fetched. But also, the step-by-step unwinding of some of the assumptions we, as laymen, were taught to make as schoolboys. So, we see the fine-tuning required to maintain a stable and growing Universe after the Big Bang as so improbable as to be essentially impossible. The authors give multiple examples of these improbabilities, and do their best to make abstract calculations and mind-boggling numbers comprehensible.
One of the best similes is offered by John Lennox, Professor of Mathematics at Oxford, who is quoted thus:
The fundamental constants that govern what the Universe is like have come to be within very, very finely defined limits in order to have a Universe like we have, in which carbon-based life is possible. For example, the ratio of the electromagnetic force to gravity in the early Universe has to be accurate to about 1/10 to the power of 40 in order that we can have the chemistry of the Universe as we now see it. Now 1/10 to the power of 40: to get some idea of that, let’s imagine that we covered, say, the whole of Russia with small coins, and we built the piles over the whole of Russia to the height of the Moon, and then we took a billion systems like that, and we painted one of the coins red and we asked you to blindfold a friend and go and find it. They’d have got a chance of about 1/10 to the power of 40 of finding it, so it’s a very small probability.
Which brings us to Yorkshire’s Fred Hoyle. He it was who coined the phrase ‘Big Bang’, using the phrase pejoratively in a 1949 BBC interview. It was part of an (unsuccessful) attempt to debunk and demean the Primeval Atom Theory which, from the 1920s, posited that all life began from one infinitesimally small speck. Its proponent was the Catholic priest and scientist Father Georges Lemaître. According to Wikipedia, when Belgium’s state broadcaster organised a poll of famous Belgians, Lemaître only came in at number 61. Which seems a little rum for a man who counted Einstein among his admirers and whose discovery re-shaped our understanding of life’s origins.
Lemaître’s insights are, according to the authors, a punctation mark in the story of science: an arc tending towards atheism from the year 1500, courtesy of a cascade of breakthroughs from Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, and Darwin – but with the possibility of the supernatural reintroduced after 1900 by Lemaître. The idea of science doing God’s work may surprise some of its practitioners. But, as presented here, it’s hard not to read, for instance, the discovery of DNA by Watson and Crick as anything other than a huge shot in the arm for those who believe in the divine spark.
And if that’s just too much hocus-pocus for unbelievers, then the chapter on how atheistic regimes, most starkly Stalinism and Hitlerism, sought to suppress Lemaître’s Big Bang Theory (as it came to be known) is a historical revelation. Research on the Big Bang in the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany was suppressed and scientists eliminated. Why? Because the idea of all life having a beginning and an end might be seen to endorse the idea of the creator God found in Genesis.
The second half of the book inclines towards exegesis. The sections on the ‘miracles’ at Fatima and the durability of the State of Israel as evidence of an interventionist (and Judeo-Christian) God represents an unexpected, if not unwelcome, editorial change of tone. But overall this is a book which provides theological and scientific ammunition for people of faith who frequently feel outgunned in the theological culture wars.
At times, the bald projections of cosmology are so profound as to be elegiac. Take this one:
The best available data agrees that unless the laws of nature change over time, the Universe will end in thermal death. All stars will eventually be extinguished, every source of energy will be consumed, and the universe will grow colder and colder until it tends towards a temperature of absolute zero and a state of maximum entropy, in which no further thermodynamic reactions are possible. It is estimated that this ‘Dark Era’ will occur around 10 to the power of 100 years from now.
What a bleakly haunting image. The ultimate Last Thing. The very final photon; the product of a universe that is born in the Big Bang, but which eventually (a word doing a lot of semantic heavy-lifting) comes to a distant end. I’m not sure, however, what it says about the nature of God and His plans for us. If the Big Bang does end with a slow deflation and, ultimately, nothingness, how should the faithful respond? With fearful awe, loving gratitude or, as the Bible suggests, a peace that surpasses all understanding?
