A book arguing that modern science provides empirical proof for the existence of God has become a bestseller across Europe and arrives this week in English translation. God, the Science, the Evidence by Michel-Yves Bolloré and Olivier Bonnassies carries endorsements from a Nobel laureate in physics and has sparked debate in a moment when religious discussion is resurgent among younger Europeans. A close reading suggests the work may undermine confidence in scientific reasoning more than it bolsters the case for faith.
The central thesis
The authors revive Leibniz's question: "Why is there something rather than nothing?" Their answer: God decreed "let there be something." They contend that 20th‑century developments in physics, biology and history support this hypothesis. The method is repetitive: ask "What are the chances of that?" in a sceptical tone, then conclude that only Christianity can explain otherwise unlikely circumstances.
Cosmology and the Big Bang
The first section leans on the Big Bang theory, arguing that a universe with a beginning and an end deductively implies a supernatural first cause. The next section shifts to "fine‑tuning" arguments, familiar from Paul Davies' The Goldilocks Enigma, treating the physical universe as a murder scene where the detective must infer a designer from the clues.
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.
The authors list familiar examples: had the proton been heavier than the neutron, the universe would contain only neutronium; had the resonance of beryllium‑8 in stars differed, carbon would be scarce; had the electromagnetic force been a few percentage points different, atoms would not hold together. Each counterfactual is presented as evidence that luck cannot account for our existence.
Biology and history
In biology, the complexity of a single cell and the efficiency of the double helix are cited as structures only an intelligent being could produce. The final third of the book turns to history, arguing that the Old Testament contains proto‑scientific truths, "mankind comes from matter" and "the world was not created all at once but developed in stages", that could not have been known without divine revelation. Pre‑Socratic Greeks such as Anaximenes and Anaximander made similar statements, a fact the authors do not address.
On Jesus, they rule out the possibilities that he was merely a wise sage or merely a madman, because he sometimes said wise things and sometimes said crazy things. The possibility that sages and madmen both have off days is not considered. The longevity and achievements of the Jewish people, including producing "the most sold book in history" and "many unexpected and spectacular military victories", are presented as evidence of continuous divine intervention.
The Fatima episode
The treatment of the 1917 Fatima "sun miracle" descends into what the reviewer calls Inspector Clouseau territory. The authors insinuate that God staged the miracle to precipitate the collapse of the Soviet Union. This week Scott Alexander published a far more rigorous examination of the same event, a piece the authors might take as a sign to abandon the explanation game altogether.
Where the arguments fracture
Fine‑tuning arguments leave large gaps. Calculating the probability of physical constants is problematic: on many secular views, the laws of nature could not have been different, making the probability space undefined. Even granting the premise, the designer's intentions remain vague. Was the universe calibrated for carbon, for carbon‑based life, for humans specifically, or for one particular human, Liz Truss, say, or a contestant from Strictly? Why choose a 13.8‑billion‑year process rather than a pop‑up Garden of Eden at the Chelsea Flower Show? The nature of the designer, single architect or committee, is left undefined.
The human body is just an intelligent machine. Only the soul, if it exists, is of a different nature.
The authors explicitly return all obscurity to God: inside nature we may one day understand everything; outside there is no time, no space, no hooks for our minds. Materialist accounts fare no better in banishing mystery. Positing that the universe arose from "absolutely nothing" is itself deeply mysterious. A quantum field or a pulsating region of space is still something, and one can always ask what caused it. Avoiding a cosmic birth and death requires positing an actual infinity, no less bizarre to finite minds than a creator.
An impasse and a way forward
We may be at an impasse: two mutually incompatible explanations, each with its own measure of confusion. One could stipulate that a creator gets the glamorous mystery while the material world gets rational comprehensibility. The reviewer prefers a different path: give up flat‑footed quests to prove the supernatural by rational means, and instead become alert to immanence rather than simply hypothesising transcendence. Stop treating the natural world as an Agatha Christie novel where the only mystery is how the body got into the library.