This article by Terry Scambray originally appeared, in a brief version, in New Oxford Review.

The renowned physicist Freeman Dyson once said,  “The more I examine the universe and study the details of its architecture, the more evidence I find that the universe in some sense must have known we were coming.” Or as Yogi Berra put it, “That’s too coincidental to be a coincidence.” 

And is it a coincidence that in our age of “scientific materialism” that the evidence for a metaphysical world, for the existence of  another realm that leads to God and specifically to Jehovah — and Jesus — is so abundant?

 Michel-Yves Bollore, a computer engineer with a master’s in science and a doctorate in business, is an entrepreneur and investor.  Olivier Bonnassies, educated in Paris in science and theology has also started various businesses.  In God: the Science, the Evidence : The Dawn of a Revolution (2025), they make a case for a metaphysical world. They do so with clarity .and overwhelming evidence from the hard sciences as well as evidence from the Bible, and from logical and philosophical arguments and also from extraordinary events like the Virgin Mary’s appearances at Fatima.  That this evidence threatened atheist regimes in Russia, Germany, and Portugal also makes a persuasive case for its revolutionary power. 

What these co-authors refer to as “The Great Reversal”, is pictured on the thick, fold-out inside cover of the book as a large half circle or perhaps, more positively, the extended mouth of a “smiley face” on which tiny photographs of scientists are shown who have had the greatest impact on the world view of their respective time. 

At the beginning of the half circle on the top left is a small photo of  Copernicus whose heliocentrism reduced our great big, beautiful Earth to the status of a mere satellite circling the Sun, a finding which supposedly eviscerated the self-esteem of us Earth bound huddled masses.

Descending further is another cameo of “the Enlightenment” polymath, Pierre Laplace.  He famously – infamously? – said that once all the variables that make up the material universe could be accounted for, science would be able to explain everything!  Thus, any need for a supposed Creator-God would be redundant.  Put another way, Laplace envisioned a determinist universe without beginning and without end.  Ahh-men! 

In this way, Laplace offered an example of unabashed “scientism”, the arrogant, not to mention, unscientific view that only material explanations suffice for explaining nature, its origin, its forms, its complexity, its destiny. And though Laplace’s hubris may sound modern, he was an avatar for ancients like Democritus and Lucretius, the former speculating that the tiniest elements in the universe are atoms which whirl ‘round & ‘round and then congeal to form the material world; and the latter, Lucretius, who thought that the weeding out process of natural selection, given enough time, had made the cosmos just right for life . 

Neither Democritus nor Lucretius, though their speculations are impressive for their time, had a microscope or a telescope and, therefore, had no empirical knowledge of the staggering complexity of the atomic, sub-atomic and celestial world revealed to scientists in the last 400 years.

Way down at the bottom of our co-author’s half circle – imagine the lowest level of Dante’s Inferno – are the three mandarins of modern materialism, Darwin, Marx, and Freud who provided the now collapsing foundation for scientific atheism. But then The Great Reversal, The Revolution, begins as the line curves upward,  accompanied by cameos of these harbingers of  “scientific theism” who, while showing that nature is necessary, also show that it is not sufficient to explain the  origin and the complexity of the world.

 The most prominent of these scientists is the Belgian, Catholic priest George Lemaitre who in 1927 found that the cosmos began, not with a whimper, but a Big Bang, and from that fecund moment in time, everything else came forth. 

Since as far as we know from science as well as common sense, everything that begins to exist has a cause, and since nature did not exist prior to the Big Bang, something outside of nature must have triggered it. For as our co-authors ask, “Is not an immaterial creator God located outside space and time the most natural explanation for the Big Bang?” 

Then findings confirming Lemaitre’s thesis began to pile up.  First was Edwin Hubble’s discovery in 1929 that galaxies are moving apart at a high rate of speed from what would appear to be some central point.  So surprising was Hubble’s discovery that Einstein, originally a Big Bang skeptic, journeyed to Mt. Wilson in California to confirm the finding by looking through what was then the world’s largest telescope. 

Next, Arno Penzias, Nobel Laureate, and Robert Wilson discovered microwave radiation remnants which further confirmed the Big Bang and validated the predictions of renowned physicists like George Gamow. 

Further confirmation of a beginning of the universe is provided by the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics which explains why the expansion caused by the Big Bang will eventually slow down until finally the universe contracts and ends in a fiery heat death. 

A notch higher on the ascending side of the half circle is Kurt Godel, the celebrated mathematician and “the greatest logician since Aristotle”, who said that certain statements made within any system of logic are not provable within that system.  While not easy to understand, Godel’s point was that something outside of a system is necessary to sustain a system’s consistency. 

Godel, like other mathematicians, including most notably those in attendance at the 1966 Wistar Conference in Philadelphia, did not think that time and chance alone can account for the appearance of life.  As Messieurs  Bollore & Bonnassies write, “Godel deconstructed the positivistic and reductionistic thesis the shaped what he called the ‘spirit of the time.’ “

Next in the ascent toward scientific theism are James Watson & Francis Crick.  In 1953, they found that DNA is the biochemical information system within each cell which gives form and structure to all life.  This discovery led to the investigation of cellular life that continues as new layers of complexity continue to be discovered. 

Just above Watson & Crick at the top of the half circle are cosmologists, Robert Dicke, Brandon Carter and Robert Feynman, pioneers in supporting the claim of “the fine tuning of the universe” which means that the billions of variables that make life possible are, as Goldilocks put it, “Ah, just right.”

For example, the universe depends on twenty parameters or constants which are fixed, such as the electromagnetic force, the strong & weak force, the velocity of the expansion of the universe, the cosmological constant and so on, all of which behave according to various mathematical formulae which themselves raise another question:  Why is mathematics so astonishingly effective at describing the universe?

Three distinguished physicists offer their views on this question.  One is Richard Feynman who said,” We use these numbers in all our theories,  but we don’t understand them – what they are or where they come from.”  And as physicist Paul Davies wrote: “The universe is put together with an ingenuity which is so astonishing that I cannot accept it merely as a brute fact.” 

Even atheist Steven Weinberg, famous for his work on the unifying force between elementary particles, wrote, “Life as we know it would be impossible if any one of several physical quantities had slightly different values.” Interestingly, when I heard Weinberg give a talk, he said that individuals who think the world is designed are motivated to think this way because of their fear that life is meaningless. Clearly though, it would have been better had he stuck to his day job as a physicist reporting on verifiable entities than to moonlight as a psychologist, sounding off about people’s motives which he had no access to.  Furthermore, Weinberg commits the genetic fallacy by discrediting an argument because of its alleged source.

Supporting Bollore & Bonnassies’ claim is the biochemist and medical doctor, Michael Denton,  who calculates the probability of making an organic cell to be comparable to 100 proteins appearing simultaneously in one place, an occurrence by chance that he calculates to be 1 in 10²⁰⁰⁰, which equates to 1 with 2,000 zeroes behind it.  To illustrate by comparison, the total number of indivisible or, as they are called, “elementary” particles in the visible universe is 10⁸⁶.  As Denton concludes, the claim that time and chance produced life “is one of the most daring claims in all of science.  But it is also one of the least substantiated.  No one has ever produced any proof that the designs in nature are within the reach of chance.”  

And not only does life exist on a razor’s edge, but we, earthlings, are in the right place at the right time to know that this is the case.  This is the thesis of The Privileged Planet: How Our Place in the Cosmos is Designed for Discovery by  Guillermo Gonzalez, an astronomer, and Jay Richards, a philosopher.  Though not mentioned by our co-authors, this book provides additional compelling evidence for a Goldilocks’ universe.

However, after the publication of this book, Professor Gonzalez was dismissed from his position at the University of Iowa.  Other rationales were offered for his dismissal, to be sure; but it seems clear that his dismissal was due to his findings which threaten the materialist narrative dominate in the universities.

That such anti-materialist findings appear threatening in our presumably Judaic Christian civilization, consider how threatening they are to totalitarian regimes who are propped up by lies which are backed up by force – And not by an appeal to self-evident truths.

In Marxist Russia the lies propagated with the imprimatur of science have a history.  The best known example is of agronomist Trofim Lysenko, who fabricated the notion that characteristics acquired during an organism’s life are heritable, thus, giving credence to the myth of  “the New Soviet Man” to replace the fallen Adam of the Bible. A lesser-known example is Ilya Ivanov, a veterinarian, who artificially inseminated female chimpanzees with human sperm in what was a failed attempt to make chimps cousins to humans, thus knocking humans off their pedestal. 

But these perversions of science are the tip of the iceberg in the politically and geographically frigid atmosphere of Stalin’s Russia.  For the brutal extremes that the twin totalitarians, Marxism & fascism will go to deny the Truth are shown in a revealing chapter titled, “The Big Bang, A Noir Thriller”.  

So, as expected, the discovery of a beginning to the universe with all its attributes of fine tuning was immediately seen as a threat to a regime built on the idea that, “The cosmos is all that is or ever was and ever will be,” as the American astronomer, atheist and activist, Carl Sagan, put it.  Thus, any scientist who suggested otherwise was jailed , exiled, tortured or shot.  Or all three.

Nonetheless, in packed lecture halls, the distinguished Russian mathematician, Alexander Friedman, was greeted with thunderous applause each time he uttered in a hushed voice: “Gentlemen, we have demonstrated the Universe has not existed forever.  It had a beginning.”  Word of his statements spread, leading to clashes between police and Friedman’s students.  And by 1931, Russian scientists “were resolved to open a conversation on these ideas, but the Soviet empire’s new masters – Stalin, Molotov, Bukharin, Beria – were now hostile to Western science,” as our co-authors write.  And, indeed, the book grimly recounts the names of the many physicists who were persecuted for defying their new masters.

The nihilist Nazi regime was also terrified of the implications of the Big Bang which combined with their antisemitism led to the same brutality directed toward enlightened scientists.  For example, in 1933, the physicist, Max Planck, met with Hitler, hoping to stop his destructive anti-science policies.  But “Hitler shouted,  ‘Jewish science is perverted thinking about the Universe and is trying to convince us that it has not existed forever!’  Planck was forced to beat a hasty retreat. ”

The second half of the book is devoted to presenting evidence for “The Great Reversal From Outside The Sciences” which begins by showing how the Bible, an ancient book, presents a vision in harmony with modern cosmology. 

For, while modern science pines for A Theory of Everything, ancient Jewish monotheism offered one. That is, the God of the Jews demythologized nature, making it an object of study, in contrast to polytheists who anthropomorphized nature, seeing it as populated by an assortment of spirits.  And though demythologizing nature permitted science to sometimes abuse nature, the Israelites were preservationists in that they “rested” their fields every seven years, resulting in more productivity as we see in the Joseph story in Genesis.

Speaking of Genesis, it shows that the universe had a beginning which modern science has now gotten around to confirming.  Additionally, that mankind descended from a single pair of ancestors is now the prevailing scientific view which conforms with the Adam & Eve narrative.

Is it, once again, a coincidence that a specific ancient tribe, the Jews, came up with truths that modern science is just now discovering?  For as Arno Penzias wrote, “The best data we have are exactly what I would have predicted, had I had nothing to go on but the five books of Moses and the rest of the Bible.” 

Bollore & Bonnassies have presented a monumental case for how modern science has validated God. As true as that is, it also reinforces the historical fact that science began in the medieval, European university with its reliance on the metaphysical foundation that a rational God had made the world. 

In effect, therefore, this book is a call for a return to the medieval vision of a rational God who created rational creatures equipped to discover the verities of nature. In other words, to do science.  Thus, science and God are not merely compatible, they are inseparable.  For without the Christian vision of God, science would not exist.

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.