The book that could shake the Pope’s faith Science can’t prove the ineffable

The eternal truths of religion are having a moment. Church pews are filling up with newcomers. Gen Z is earnestly discussing demons and sedevacantism on social media. This might, therefore, seem like a good time to publish a book which purports to lay out a positive empirical case for the existence of a supreme being.

God, the Science, the Evidence by Michel-Yves Bolloré and Olivier Bonnassies, out this week in English, is already a best-seller in Europe. It comes with endorsements from various luminaries, including a Nobel Prize winner in physics. Reading it hasn’t affected my religious tendencies either way, but it has definitely undermined my faith in science.

Leibniz once asked: “Why is there something rather than nothing?” Bolloré and Bonnassie’s answer is that God originally decreed “let there be something”; and they think that 20th-century developments in physics, biology, and history support this hypothesis. Their basic strategy in the book is to keep asking “What are the chances of that?” in a skeptical tone, concluding that only the truth of Christianity can explain otherwise unlikely natural circumstances.

Not every argument in the book takes this form, but most do. The first section focuses on the Big Bang theory, and its implication that the universe must have had a beginning, and will have an end; in which case, the authors think, the existence of a supernatural first cause is deductively implied. But the next section, focusing on “fine-tuning arguments”, puts us squarely in the territory of induction not deduction, and what philosophers like to call “inference to the best explanation” — treating the physical universe as if it were a murder scene, with you as Hercule Poirot, trying to work out whodunnit from the clues.

Fine-tuning arguments are already familiar to many — not least from earlier popular science books like Paul Davies’ The Goldilocks Enigma — and Bolloré and Bonnassies make a reasonable job of introducing them to those not in the know. Put simply, the claim is that the universe is sensitively calibrated for life in a way that cannot be coincidental. It’s intelligent design. Physical laws and constants are balanced excruciatingly delicately. “For some of these numbers, a very slight deviation by even a distant decimal point would have yielded an unrecognizable Universe, and we would not be here to talk about it.”

Had the mass of a proton been slightly bigger than that of a neutron, there would be nothing in the universe but neutronium. Had the beryllium 8 in stars not formed chemical bonds at a very precise resonance, there wouldn’t have been enough carbon in the universe for the beginning of life. Had the electromagnetic force binding electrons to nuclei been only a few percentage points different, you wouldn’t be reading this now. Counterfactual after counterfactual underlines just how lucky we are to be alive — so lucky, in fact, that perhaps luck has nothing to do with it.

And it is not just in the realm of physics that Bolloré and Bonnassies find natural phenomena too improbable to be accidental. In biology, the complexity of a single cell organism and the stunning efficiency of the double helix are among the structures they think only an intelligent being could account for. But it’s when our co-authors get to the last third of their book, and take on the supposed improbability of historical events involving Jesus, the Jewish race, and miracles such as the one at Fatima, that the true extent of their detective skills comes to the fore: less Hercule Poirot and more Inspector Clouseau. This part of the book is so clumsily argued, it would cause the Pope himself to have doubts.

Consider their story about why the existence of the Old Testament counts as good historical evidence for God’s invisible hand. They argue that it offers readers proto-scientific truths, such as “mankind comes from matter”, and “the world was not created all at once but developed in stages”, that absolutely could not have been revealed to the Ancient Hebrews at the time without divine instruction. (Never mind that much earlier pre-Socratic Greeks like Anaximenes and Anaximander made statements like this too.) At this, you might reasonably protest that the Bible also gets quite a lot wrong, perhaps suggesting that occasional empirical accuracy is more due to luck than judgment. For instance, the Book of Genesis says that heaven and earth were created in six days, not 13.8 billion years. But a bit like loyal press officers working to cover the ramblings of an unreliable leader, Bolloré and Bonnassies retort that nobody back then had the concept of a billion (though couldn’t God have given it to them?); and anyway, the “precise” age of the Earth “is of no interest at all, from either a metaphysical or physical point of view”.

Or take the authors’ argument that the historical Jesus must have been the Messiah, by attempting to rule out more prosaic rival explanations. Jesus can’t have been just another wise sage wandering round the Levant, they suggest, because he sometimes said crazy things. Equally, though, he can’t have been a crazy man, because he sometimes said wise things. The possibility that both sages and madmen sometimes have days off seems not to have occurred. The next chapter is of similar argumentative quality: could the Jewish race have lasted so long, been so intensely persecuted, yet achieved so much — including producing “the most sold book in history” and achieving “many unexpected and spectacular military victories” — had God not been intervening on their behalf all along?

By the time you get to the book’s treatment of the Fatima “sun miracle” — not to mention the authors’ insinuation that God instigated it in order to precipitate the Soviet Union — images of Richard Dawkins leaping around with glee and punching the air become irresistible. As chance would have it, only this week Scott Alexander published his own, much more rigorous, exploration of the Fatima sun miracle than the one offered by Bolloré and Bonnassies in their chapter. I recommend that they take this as a sign from God, and give up the explanation game forthwith.

Fine-tuning arguments remain interesting, though. Ultimately, they don’t work to rationally justify Christianity, or indeed any other kind of concrete theology, because of the large gaps they leave. One big problem is about how to calculate the probabilities of physical laws being as they are; for on many secular views of the laws of nature, their being different from the way they are is, precisely, physically impossible. But even leaving aside that technical issue, God’s intentions in designing the universe still look worryingly vague: what was He calibrating the background physical laws for, exactly? Was it just to bring carbon into the universe; or carbon-based life forms, generally; or humans, specifically; or even just one human in particular — Liz Truss, say, or Craig from Strictly? Why did He adopt so painfully indirect and slow a manner of implementation, and not just magic up the Garden of Eden in a trice instead, like a pop-up at the Chelsea Flower Show? The nature of God also looks pretty vague, defined only as whoever it was that came up with the floorplans: are we talking just one cosmic architect, or a committee?

Effectively, then, though fine-tuning arguments empty nature of mystery, treating it like a piece of machinery we might one day fully understand, they return all the obscurity to God. This is explicit in God, the Science, the Evidence: at one point the authors write that “the human body is just an intelligent machine”. Only the soul, if it exists, is of a different nature.” Inside nature, we might one day understand everything; on the outside, there is no time, no space, no real hooks for our subjective minds to catch on. Every earthbound image we come up with is inadequate.

But materialist accounts don’t do much better in banishing cosmological mystery; for arguably, saying we came from absolutely nothing is the most mysterious stance of all. So puzzling is this proposal, attempts to explain the origins of the universe in terms of prior nothingness often inadvertently smuggle something in. A portion of space pulsating with energy is still something; a quantum field is still something. We can still always ask: yes, but what caused the existence of it? And there’s also the metaphysically irritating fact that, if you don’t want to countenance a birth and a death for the universe, you have to posit the existence of an actual infinity; no less bizarre for the average mind, acquainted only with finitude, than its religious alternative.

Perhaps, then, we are at an impasse: two mutually incompatible explanations of how we got here, each with its own measure of confusion and darkness. We could just stipulate that a creationist God, by definition, gets all the glamorous mystery, while the material world gets rational comprehensibility; He is whatever started things off, but that which we cannot otherwise hope to know. Or perhaps — and this would be my preference — we could give up flat-footed quests to prove the existence of the supernatural by rational means; we could start becoming alert to immanence, rather than simply hypothesizing transcendence. That is: we could stop treating the natural world as if it were an Agatha Christie novel, where the only real mystery is how exactly the body got into the library.

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