3 Scientific Discoveries That Call for a God Hypothesis
By: John Stonestreet and Shane Morris
God is real. He’s the designer of the the universe. The author of science. We were created in the image of The intelligent designer. The universe did not happen to be by random chance.
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
3 Scientific Discoveries That Call for a God Hypothesis
In the book River Out of Eden, Oxford biologist and atheist superstar Richard Dawkins famously wrote:
“The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.”
Dawkins and other “new atheists” have long insisted that science has excluded the possibility of a creator or has, at least, rendered it unnecessary. Turns out this belief may be scientifically out of date. According to a new book, the biggest discoveries of the last century challenged a materialistic worldview and call science back to its theistic roots.
Cambridge-educated philosopher of science Stephen Meyer wrote two books, Signature in the Cell and Darwin’s Doubt, that both argue against materialist accounts of biology. His latest book, The Return of the God Hypothesis, makes an even more ambitious claim.
Three key twentieth-century discoveries, argues Meyer, challenge materialist assumptions and point, not just to an intelligent designer, but to a transcendent God. He recently joined my colleague Shane Morris on the Upstream podcast to talk about the book.
Not only were most of the founders of modern science devout Christians, the scientific method itself emerged from assumptions found only in a Christian worldview, such as the intelligibility of nature and the need to constantly test our fallen intuitions against the facts. Tracing science from its theistic beginnings, Meyer shows how it gradually lost its way and became tethered to materialism.
Famed scientists like Laplace, Hume, and Darwin came to believe that the “God hypothesis” was no longer necessary to explain the natural world, that the universe required no cause beyond itself. Given the opportunity and enough time, living things could arise and evolve on their own. Since the conditions for life were simple and the universe had existed from eternity, here we are.
These assumptions went largely unchallenged until the twentieth century. However, breakthroughs in astronomy, physics, and biology began to undermine materialism. For example, telescopes began to challenge the proponents (Einstein being one) of a steady-state universe. More and more evidence mounted that the universe was, in fact, not eternal, as many scientists had long assumed. If instead, the universe came into being at some point in time, it must have had a cause outside of itself, To be clear, there must be a cause outside of space, time, matter, and energy.
Another discovery was how finely tuned the universe is. The very laws that govern the cosmos, such as gravity, electromagnetism, nuclear forces, and the cosmological constant, are precisely calibrated in such a way that makes life possible. There’s not a compelling way to explain this “Goldilocks universe,” one “just right” that could have been otherwise, within a naturalistic worldview. As English astronomer and former atheist Fred Hoyle put it, “A common-sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a super-intellect has monkeyed with physics…”
And then, there’s the discovery Meyer has already devoted two other books to exploring: Materialists long thought that Darwin’s theory was a silver bullet against design arguments. Darwin, however, knew nothing about DNA, the inner structure of the cell, or the crucial role information plays in the existence and propagation of life. The more we learn about them, the more outdated this “God is no longer necessary” hypothesis seems to be.
Simply put, Dawkins got it wrong. The universe we live in has properties one would expect if it were, in fact, designed by a God who had us in mind when He made the place.
As Myer’s book shows, this assumption was an original conviction of many who launched and drove the scientific revolution. It’s the conviction of a growing number of scientists today who are willing to challenge the powers that be and admit the design they see in the heavens, the laws of nature, and under the microscope. As Meyer puts it, “The evidence is crying out for a God hypothesis.”
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No, Dawkins is right. Repeating the same lame arguments doesn't validate them.
Wedge Strategy nonsense.
It’s just god of the gaps over and over again.
That is utter nonsense. The scientific method did not emerge from some Christian worldview, it emerged when that worldview was pushed aside and take out of the equation. And the religion of many early scientists had nothing to do with their discoveries, their discoveries were made by ignoring religion and religious teachings and going on the evidence/data. Nothing in Christianity encouraged the development of the scientific method.
But that doesn’t mean god. This the god of the gaps “argument”.
Again, what utter nonsense. The laws of physics are what they are, and they just happen to allow matter as we know/understand it to exist. None of that means life was the ultimate goal, or even inevitable. The universe is also extremely hostile to life as we know it, which this far can only be verified to exist in one place, and most of it only under specific conditions that when altered lead to extinction. All that is happening here is someone is assigning meaning or intent to observations of the natural world. That is like me saying a mountain was fine tuned in such a way that a cave is possible.
What absolute bullshit. Darwin didn’t need to know about cells or DNA to publish his hypothesis, and the discoveries of those things and the more we have learned have merely served to strengthen his hypothesis to the point that it is now one of the most heavily supported and strongest theories in the scientific world (even more heavily supported than gravity). Everything points to Darwin nailing it. None of it requires god or even suggests the need for one.
As Meyer puts it “we are at the limits of our knowledge for the moment, therefore god!” Don’t waste your time reading this crap everyone, the entire thing is one drawn out god of the gaps argument.