Part 1: Proof of God
It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.
Henry David Thoreau
Chapter 1: The Beauty of the Universe
Nature’s beauty has always captivated us. Yet today’s scientific breakthroughs have unveiled astonishing, previously inconceivable features of our universe—far surpassing anything we had ever imagined.
We are fortunate to live in an era of unprecedented discovery. Questions once thought beyond human reach are now being answered, revealing a cosmos so precisely fine-tuned for life that its design defies belief. These revelations inspire awe and invite us to marvel at the intentional elegance woven into the fabric of existence.
Every scientific breakthrough reveals a new layer of handiwork, each time a little more about the big picture, about a universe crafted with such intelligence that it prompted Arthur Schawlow, Nobel laureate in physics and Stanford University professor, to say: “It seems to me that when confronted with the marvels of life and the universe, one must ask why and not just how. The only possible answers are religious… I find a need for God in the universe and in my own life.” [1]
What can be more central to the human mind, after all, than to see knock-down proof that our universe was designed, that it has a purpose, and to learn something about how it was done? The meaning of life hangs in the balance, and it seems to me that’s where our search for what is true, using human means, should begin.
Through the lens of science, we witness the intricate patterns and laws that govern nature. We behold the extraordinary harmony and elegance of quantum mechanics that regulate everything from the tiniest building blocks of nature to the vast expanse of the universe, all of which echo the perfection and beauty of an attentive, caring creator, God, in ways our ancestors could never have imagined. As we delve deeper into the components of life, from the intricate design of a single cell to genetic codes, and to ecosystems that sustain all living things, we see the fingerprints of a creator who values order and beauty. All of it inspires reverence in the human heart for a designer so intimately involved in our lives.
Science is a search for truth, for what is real. And since all truth is God’s truth for reasons we’ll see shortly, then all scientific research is, in the end, an effort to understand the language of God as creator. The impulse to understand that language, to rejoice in the search for truth, by whatever name it’s called, whether it’s the elusive “theory of everything” that would fully explain and link together all aspects of the universe, or any other term, beckons many great scientists to be more than just spectators on the sideline of creation. They enrol heart and soul in the noble cause of serving their fellow humans by adding to our understanding of how nature works and how it came about. They set their sights on something appealing, much bigger than themselves, because doing so is always uplifting. Einstein summed up this fact much better than I ever could, when he said:
The most beautiful and most profound emotion we can experience is the sensation of the mystical. It is the sower of all true science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead. To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms – this knowledge, this feeling, is at the center of true religiousness.
Since the days of Einstein, the very latest discoveries in cosmology[2] and neuroscience[3] bear strong witness to God and, as we’ll see, to the human soul. The world-renowned genetics scientist Dr. Francis Collins describes, in his book The Language of God, how his discovery of some of the wonders of God’s creation was for him, when he was leading an international team of prominent scientists to decode the human genome, an important inspiration for his Christian conversion and faith. His book’s title says it all.
Many leading scientists, including Nobel laureates, have come to believe in God, as we will see, because of that divine “language of God” that they saw written throughout creation. Every new layer of nature discovered introduces us to previously unsuspected wonders in a fine-tuned universe. To many of them, the discoveries were very moving experiences… it was like touching the face of God.
There can’t be two separate sets of truths, two different sets of realities: a religious one and scientific one reality. There can only be one reality, one truth, which is why there can be no conflict between science and God. All truth is God’s truth. The more scientific discoveries that are being made, including those invisible to the naked eye, ranging from the tiniest particles to the grand scale of astronomy, the more inspiring it is for the mind and the heart to praise God for them. This was the case for another celebrated scientist, Dr. Francisco Ayala, a world authority on evolutionary biology and past chairman of the board of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, when he said: “For me, as an evolutionary biologist, the complexity of life, the beauty of life is very inspiring [...] It should inspire people to think more about God; to love God.”
Since all good science is God’s science, there’s great appeal even within the scientific method itself. A logical, flowing mathematical formula is really part of nature. Some of them have a flow that unfolds toward a grand conclusion like an uplifting, soaring movement in a musical symphony. There’s a kind of beauty in that. If other civilizations exist across the vast cosmos, we could communicate and understand each other through that language of mathematics, as we’re trying to do now, because math and geometry speak the universal language of logos, or logic. The fact that it’s part of God’s exquisite vocabulary is what makes it universal.
A beautiful equation is one that matches perfectly the observed realities of nature. Take geometry for instance. Wherever we look, geometrical patterns emerge that are modeled mathematically. These include tree branches, symmetrical stripes on a tiger’s face, the patterns we see on sunflower heads, bird feathers, spider webs, antlers, waves, snowflakes, mollusk shells, and galaxies. These geometrical patterns can be captured in mathematical equations, and they raise the compelling question: can such mathematical models capture some of the beauty of the language of God? Roger Penrose of Oxford, one of the world’s most distinguished mathematicians, once reflected that mathematics reveal a beauty that has always been present.
The Father of modern science, Isaac Newton, who is said to have written more religious books than scientific ones, discovered some of the laws of nature because he believed in God as its creator. He relentlessly searched for such laws of coherence and harmony because he had expected that the lawgiver of the universe would have created them in this way, with that harmony. And the more laws of nature that are discovered, the more we realize that, beyond any surface complexity, the rules of the universe, from physics to chemistry to biology, come together beautifully synchronized like a well-tuned orchestra. Once understood, those universal laws become so obvious that Einstein once reflected: “The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is the fact that it’s comprehensible.” He was so moved by all the harmony that, referring to any and all scientific theories, he told other scientists: “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough. […] An alleged scientific discovery has no merit unless it can be explained to your bartender.”
I think most scientists are attracted to study nature because of its great appeal. Understanding photosynthesis, for instance, doesn’t make plant life less appealing, only more so. Knowing how the tiniest subatomic components of the universe work together to ultimately govern large-scale phenomena like galaxies, is spiritually lifting, it reveals God’s genius that much more. There’s great charm in that. In fact, the words cosmology and cosmetics are related because both are derived from the Greek “kosmos”, referring to the great beauty and order in the universe. There’s actually such order and delicate fine tuning in it that some scientists now believe that life was eventually inevitable, somewhere in it, from the get-go. Such a perfect universe without life in it wouldn’t make sense.
What I’m saying is that God speaks to us not just through the beauty of nature that jumps out at us, but also very much through the exquisite language of creation that science is just starting to learn how to read. And that language points beyond any reasonable doubt, as we will see, to a universe that was designed, and therefore intended, and thus with a purpose, a purpose that we’ll explore in the latter parts of the book.
Until a few years ago, it would have been unrealistic, even presumptuous, to suggest that God can be proven beyond a reasonable doubt through sheer reasoning. Saint Thomas Aquinas went a long way to do so in the 13th century, using what knowledge was then available, and many others have followed suit since then. But the breaking new scientific knowledge, ranging from the tiniest building blocks of nature to the nature of life itself, has now caught up with theology and allows us, in my view, to put that question to rest. It’s what prompted Robert Jastrow, planetary physicist and Director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, to say: “As the scientist is about to conquer the highest peak and pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.” [4]
Science believes the universe started 13.8 billion years ago as a single point that exploded in what’s dubbed the Big Bang, and then expanded like a balloon to grow as large as it is right now. And it’s still expanding. The universe is much bigger than anyone had realized until recently. It has so many stars in it that if those stars, instead of being a million times the size of Earth, were only as big as a grain of sand, there’d be enough of them to cover the whole surface of our planet a mind-boggling 12 meters deep, or about 41 feet, including all the areas covering the ocean floors.
But just as mind-bending as the size of the universe is the fact that it’s so finely tuned. Why, for instance, did atoms form, and then organize into molecules that evolved into ever more complex ones that eventually formed the great celestial structures, the stars and the planets, and the elements which are the building blocks of life? Why, for that matter, does anything exists at all? Cosmic patterns emerged after the birth of the universe that should not have logically emerged, and those patterns produced life, eventually you and me!
As we’ll see in a moment, there is no other sane explanation for the perfection of the universe than it had been intended that way, and thus intentionally designed.
I find it very inspiring to think that the creator of it all has actually come to talk to us two thousand years ago, as we’ll discuss later, to tell us firsthand about the meaning of life.
Chapter 2: The Final Frontier
Today’s scientific discoveries are pushing the boundaries of what’s even knowable well past what we thought was possible even a few short years ago. But every question it answers raises ten more questions. It’s why no matter how many answers science provides, there will always be another “why” question it has to answer…
If we ask enough successive “why-related” questions about anything, anything at all, we will at some point hit a wall, and will have to open our minds to the fact that the universe must have a grand purpose. And where there’s a purpose, there has to be a purpose giver.
To explain what I mean, let’s take the most mundane example:
Why Did the Chicken Cross the Road?
Why did the chicken cross the road?
To get to the other side.
Why so?
Because it wanted to see what was over there.
Why?
Because curiosity is part of its nature. It is instinctive.
Why is it?
Because such animal instincts as curiosity can lead to exploration and perhaps to the discovery of practical things like new food supplies for the chicken, or it can help it become aware of certain dangers in its environment.
But why is that?
Because throughout evolution, the cautiously curious animals were the ones best able to survive long enough to transmit their traits in their particular genes to their offsprings down through the successive generations. It’s called natural selection.
Why?
Because evolution is part of nature. We see it everywhere, even in the way matter organized in the early universe into stars and increasingly more complex elements that formed the planets.
But why is there such evolution everywhere?
Because the precise mechanics of it all were contained in the very nature of the Big Bang that gave birth to the universe.
Why? Why did the Big Bang set the stage, in the first place, for the mechanics of the
cosmic and biological evolutions that ultimately account for the eventual curiosity that motivated the chicken to cross the street?
We don’t know because it’s not something that science addresses.
Why not?
Because for us to know the cause of the Big Bang before time and space began 13.8 billion years ago, we’d have to know what’s outside the time-space dimension, and we can’t. So, this is as far as we can go to scientifically answer the question. But there can only be two possibilities:
Either the universe was an accident,
Or it was not.
For the many reasons we’ll see in the next pages, only a purposeful beginning by a creator God, who awaits us at the top of the ladder of successive explanations (or who constitutes the very ground upon which the ladder is resting), can account for the origin of nature. There is, of course, much more to proving the need for a creator, for God, than this test of logic, but my point is that even if we start with the most mundane, superficial question, and follow it up with enough “why” questions, as any unrelenting four-year-old might well do, the successive questioning will inevitably force us to reflect about what lies beyond the boundaries of the universe, in other words nature, and therefore beyond the edge of what is knowable through science and human understanding.
Science will always be dogged by that final “why?”. The Big Bang theory that describes the beginning of the universe as an explosion of unimaginable energy describes only the aftermath of the explosion, the events that followed, starting at the earliest nanosecond, but it does not describe the actual explosion, the spark, the start of the explosion, and even less the “why” part. The late Stephen Hawking, the modern-day “Einstein” and among the world’s most respected and renowned theoretical physicists and cosmologists, said that questions such as who set up the conditions for the Big Bang are not questions that science addresses.[5]
At these outer layers of our knowledge, our thoughts expand to the grandest scale, urging us to at least consider the possibility of an overall scheme of things, a grand purpose to the universe. Scientific research alone will inevitably hit a wall, assuming it even gets to the wall.
If there’s no purpose to the universe, then nature was caused by an accident. But an accident of what? The notion of an “accidental universe”, incidentally, assassinates with a single stroke any notion of “god-as-the-universe” or “god-as-pure-energy”, unless of course one is prepared to entertain the caricature of an “accidental god.” The universe cannot be both an accident and a god. Besides, neither scenario would answer the final “why” question. God has to be more than his creation for the same reason that Henry Ford was more than his car.
Chapter 3: The Holy Grail of Science
The human search for knowledge cannot be satisfied until it answers the ultimate question, that final “why”. For science, knowing that final answer would be the “holy grail of knowledge”, the elusive “theory of everything”, the universe’s “constitution” that generates all the richness of physics, the hub at the centre of all the moving parts of nature, and from which all other laws of the universe depend.
But that final answer will always be elusive to science because, as Steven Weinberg, Nobel laureate in Physics, said, “It is not possible to imagine a theory that does not need a deeper explanation.” There will always be another “why” question to answer, all the way to infinity and eternity… all the way to God.
The more we know, the more we realize how little we know. David Gross, American particle physicist, string theorist, and Nobel laureate in Physics, has remarked that “we have to know quite a bit in order to realize how ignorant we are. It’s hard to be aware, he said, of the ignorance that lies too far beyond our present knowledge […] Perhaps human knowledge can only expand into a sea of ignorance.” There is indeed an ocean of truths inaccessible to the scientific method of inquiry….. (manuscript continues….)
[1] H. Margenau and R.A. Varghese, (eds.) “Cosmos, Bios, and Theos,” p. 105.
[2] The study of the origin, structure, history, and future of the entire universe. It is closely related to astronomy.
[3] The study of the brain and nervous system.
[4] R. Jastrow, God and the Astronomers (New York: W.W. Norton, 1978), p. 116.
[5] S. Hawking and L. Mlodinow, A Briefer History of Time (New York: Bantam Dell, 2005), pp. 68, 69.
