Can science prove the existence of God? This is a tricky question, because today many people are convinced that science cannot prove the existence of God in principle. But this principle is not scientific in itself; it is a naturalistic philosophy or worldview. And few have refuted this worldview in recent years more than Dr. Stephen Meyer, philosopher of science and best-selling author.
Meyer has recently brought the intelligent design argument into the mainstream. Last year, he appeared on “The Joe Rogan Experience” where he argued that science can and does show the existence of a designer, and last month he appeared on “Piers Morgan Uncensored” where he made the case for intelligent design, arguing that three of the greatest discoveries of the 20th century convincingly show the existence of God, to surprisingly good reviews.
First, the fact that the universe had a beginning requires a non-natural cause for everything. Mayer explained that in the early 20th century, materialist scientists believed that the universe was eternal and therefore uncaused. But as astronomers and physicists peered into the heavens with increasingly advanced tools, they came to the inescapable conclusion that the universe had a beginning. This had big implications.
Meyer states: “Prior to the origin of matter, there is no causal substance. We must invoke something external to the universe and not limited by time and space.” An immaterial cause outside of time and space is very similar to the classical Christian idea of God.
Meyer also pointed out to Morgan the incredible “fine-tuning” scientists have observed in the universe, without which life would be impossible: Whether it’s the nuclear forces that bind atoms together, the strength of gravity, the speed of light, or the initial distribution of mass and energy at the beginning of the universe, each variable is precisely tuned to make life and even basic chemical reactions possible.
If any of these values were even slightly off, we wouldn’t be here. But it turns out there is no naturalistic reason for such tweaks. As the atheist astronomer Fred Hoyle once admitted, it’s more like “a superintelligence has tampered with physics.”
Finally, Meyer argued that Darwin’s theory of evolution fails to solve two of the greatest mysteries in biology: the origin of the first living cells, which must have come fully formed into existence rather than evolving gradually, and the origin of the information in DNA that explains “the great innovations in the history of life,” which Meyer called “signatures within cells.”
Both, he argues, are best explained as the work of intelligent agents, since they are the only sources of information we know that are capable of producing functional information and irreducibly complex structures.
Taken together, these three discoveries call for what Meyer calls the “God hypothesis.” It turns out this is something the founders of modern science didn’t hesitate to invoke. But today’s scientists and critics of science are hesitant to do so. And that’s the real battle.
You see, ever since “intelligent design” became a recognizable concept, critics have made the same charge against it: that it’s merely a “God in the gaps” argument, unscientific because you can’t infer supernatural causes to explain natural phenomena.
This criticism was at the heart of the famous Dover case in 2005, where a federal judge ruled that a Pennsylvania school district violated the First Amendment by introducing intelligent design into its classes alongside Darwin’s theory of evolution. Teaching intelligent design is unconstitutional, the judge said, because it introduces God and is therefore “not a scientific theory.”
But as Mayer argues in his media appearances and in his book, The God Hypothesis Resurrected, this belief that the only explanation for material effects is a material cause is not scientific. It is a worldview belief held by many modern people to exclude God and his evidence for it. As C.S. Lewis put it in his book Miracles, it is the belief that matter and energy are “everything” and that if God exists, God’s world tells us nothing about God.
The Bible tells an entirely different story: one in which “the heavens declare the glory of God” and God’s invisible attributes “have been clearly perceived ever since the creation of the world in the things that have been made.”
Science studies the material world, but if those who advocate intelligent design are correct (and I believe they are), the material world clearly indicates the existence of an immaterial, timeless, spaceless, intelligent Creator beyond the material world. Observing and acknowledging this fact should no longer be considered unscientific. That is why I am pleased to see voices like Dr. Steven Meyer making this argument so persuasively, and gaining a mainstream audience. It is time for science to reject the philosophy of naturalism and welcome the return of the “God hypothesis.”
From Breakpoint, June 7, 2024; Reprinted with permission from the Colson Center, breakpoint.org.
