Fr. Patrick Gorevan (St. Patrick’s Maynooth) offers some thoughts on God and science at Australia’s MercatorNet. He is discussing a recent book, Science at the Doorstep to God (Ignatius 2023) by Fr. Robert Spitzer:

How about the extraordinary and unlikely fine-tuning which was needed for life to emerge? Sir Fred Hoyle, an adamant atheist, after discovering the need for exceedingly precise fine-tuning in the resonance levels of oxygen, carbon, helium, and beryllium needed for carbon bonding and carbon abundance, concluded that “some supercalculating intellect must have designed the properties of the carbon atom”.

Spitzer’s most challenging chapter rehearses the background and subsequent development of this point. Spitzer looks long and hard at all of the other options, and comes to the conclusions that it is “virtually impossible” for life to have emerged: the creator (or whatever) would have had to aim at a tiny (1/1010/123 ) volume of the available space. This figure is so unimaginably small (the denominator has so many figures if it were written out the solar system could not contain it) that most physicists agree that it is impossible to hit it. Low entropy, the cosmological constant, the ratio of mass to energy straight after the Big Bang also point to an “impossible” achievement. But it has been achieved; so how did it happen?

Many hypotheses have been tried; string theory, cyclic or bouncing cosmologies, the multiverse… All of them cause the problems that they were trying to solve: they require a beginning, they are unobservable, and actually make it impossible in principle to observe what we actually are observing and to be what we actually are: carbon-based intelligent life forms. We really do need an “unrestricted transphysical/transmaterial conscious intelligence” to ground our universe. “God comes knocking at the door of science,”

November 11, 2024

Actually, if it were not for the sheer number of atheists clustered in science, the atheist approach to the origin of the universe would have been judged as impossible on probability grounds a long time ago.

Some of us would say: Believe what you feel you can defend but don’t expect the rest of us to believe it on the evidence. The science evidence for atheism has never been very good.

You may also wish to read: What becomes of science when the evidence does not matter?