At the dawn of the 20th century, materialists could rightly claim victory in the debate about God. The four preceding centuries had yielded scientific discoveries that fortified the materialist worldview. These discoveries profoundly unsettled the mind of a Europe that had, until then, been Christian, and seemed to render the notion of a Creator God unnecessary to explain the universe.
The Earth was no longer the centre of the universe, and the sun no longer circled around it (Copernicus, 1540 to Galileo, 1610). Physical laws governed the stars’ motion (Newton, Descartes, Laplace, 1650-1800). The Earth had not come into being required to explain the world, it was because He didn’t exist!
Soon after, others went further, claiming not only that God did not exist, but that even belief in His existence was poisonous. Faith, they said, was the opium of the people (Marx, 1870) and the source of humanity’s alienation and neuroses (Freud, 1890). It was almost inevitable that such scientific discoveries would inspire new philosophies which, in turn, found political expression in totalitarianism. Both scientists and philosophers believed that materialism had become the very language of science itself.
What followed was as dramatic as it was unforeseen. Science underwent a profound reversal. Within a century, a cascade of six thousand years ago as Scripture seemed to suggest, but was ancient beyond imagining (Buffon, 1780). And man himself had appeared only after an immense evolution (Lamarck, 1810 to Darwin, 1870), burdened moreover with the humbling revelation that he descended from an ape, or something very like one.
God was no longer needed to explain the universe, and Man was no longer the centre of the world. Freud would later speak of the three great humiliations endured by modern humanity: the Earth was not the centre of the cosmos, Man was not the centre of creation, and Man discovered he was not even master of his own mind. Philosophers concluded that if a Creator was no longer discoveries shattered the foundations of materialism.
The book God, the Science, the Evidence, which I co-authored with Olivier Bonnassies, tells the story of that extraordinary scientific upheaval and of the materialists’ response. After the startling discoveries of the 20th century, it had once again become difficult, if not impossible, to explain the universe without invoking the hypothesis of a Creator. Within less than a century, four new upheavals shook the very foundations of materialism, though the public remains largely unaware of them. Those who wish to explore them in depth will find fuller treatment in our book.
The first came in the mid-19th century with the birth of thermodynamics. Its second law revealed that all things decay, and that the universe itself was moving inexorably toward its end, the “heat death” of the cosmos. Yet everything that comes to an end must also have had a beginning, and everything that begins must have a cause. Svante Arrhenius, the celebrated chemist, Nobel laureate and avowed atheist, refused to believe it, so troubling were the implications. Even Einstein hesitated for years before admitting it was among the greatest discoveries in science.
Then came the discovery of the expanding universe, which carried within it the necessity of a beginning, which we now call the Big Bang. It offered fresh, independent confirmation that the cosmos had a definite origin. Many of the scientists who advanced this theory in Russia or Germany were persecuted. Stalin and Hitler understood that such ideas were capable of destroying their materialist ideologies. This episode remains almost entirely unknown to the public, perhaps because even today it is too disturbing.
In the West, the theory of the “primeval atom”, proposed by Lemaître in 1930 and implying an absolute beginning to the universe, was ridiculed and buried until, by sheer chance, irrefutable evidence emerged to confirm it beyond dispute (Penzias and Wilson, 1963). Soon after, in the mid fine-tuning, a third shock so remarkable that the materialist astrophysicist Fred Hoyle publicly reversed his position and acknowledged the necessity of a Creator.
The fourth shock was the discovery of DNA and the staggering complexity of life itself (Watson and Crick, 1953). This revelation led to the abandonment of Darwin’s notion that the first living cell might have arisen by chance in a warm little pond at the foot of a volcano. The intricacy was beyond imagination: the informational density of DNA is billions of times greater than that of a modern mobile phone, a device no one imagines appearing by accident in a pool of warm water.
In the West, materialist scientists proposed a series of new theories to escape the implications of these discoveries, yet most were eventually proven false. The Big Crunch hypothesis was dismissed in 1998, and the notion of infinitely recurring cyclic universes was overturned in 2003 by the American physicists Guth, Borde and Vilenkin. Others, such as the theory of multiple universes, remain fashionable because they appear to resolve many difficulties, yet they are entirely beyond proof.
Toward the end of his life, Stephen Hawking remarked that the multiverse theories were dead, and that he preferred instead to believe the universe had arisen from nothing, a notion absurd in itself, though to him less absurd than the existence of countless unseen worlds. Lacking stronger arguments, some materialists replied that even if the discoveries of the 20th century were true, they proved nothing. The idea of God, they said, was only a convenient stop-gap devised by Christians to fill the gaps in human knowledge, gaps that future science would inevitably close with rational and satisfactory explanations.
The materialist paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould sought to erect an intellectual boundary, arguing that God should no longer be spoken of in connection with science. In 1997 he formalised this idea under the acronym NOMA, short for “non-overlapping magisteria”, which held that the realms of science and faith had nothing in common, and that any dialogue between them was futile.
Yet the weakness of this claim is immediately apparent, for even the question of the universe’s origin is at once scientific and metaphysical, and it is far from the only one. Thus, in less than a century, materialism, which was never more than one belief among others, has become an irrational creed. Yet few are likely to renounce it, for materialism remains the creed best suited to those who, like George Wald, wish to acknowledge no limits to their freedom, least of all the freedom to decide for themselves what is good and what is evil.
History, however, has its own irony. The very science that once sought to dethrone the Creator has now traced the outline of His hand. Materialism, born of reason’s triumph, ends in unreason; faith, dismissed as superstition, reappears as the condition of wonder. The circle has closed, and the question with which modernity began returns with renewed force: not whether God exists, but how long man can live as though He did not.
