A Case for Science as an Ally of Faith

I had the opportunity to sit down recently with Michel-Yves Bolloré and Olivier Bonnassies, the authors of God, the Science, the Evidence. The book, originally published in France in 2021, has already been a publishing sensation in Europe, where it has sold over 400,000 copies. A new English edition was released on October 14. While I confess that I have, as yet, only perused parts of the book and skimmed others, and that it covers many areas in which I would not have the expertise to judge its accuracy, it is well worth considering the book and its arguments, which have already withstood a lot of critical attention in Europe.

The book’s mission is to act as a primer, debate-starter, and argumentative brief for the proposition that modern science, on balance, supports rather than undermines the case for the existence of God. While the question of God’s existence is timeless, the book is timely. It arrives in an age of skepticism, religious doubt, and declining church attendance, but also of revived curiosity among the younger generation about faith that their fathers took for granted. Perhaps more to the point, it arrives in a society that venerates science but misunderstands it as a rival to religion, with its own substitute white-coated priesthood. Bolloré and Bonnassies emphasize that, due to developments in the scientific evidence, this book could not have been written 30 or 40 years ago, or at least would have been very different in its contents.

While the book comes from a Christian perspective, its chief aim is not to make the case for Christianity — as the authors acknowledge, one needs faith to know who God is — but to tally and weigh the scientific evidence for the proposition that some powerful and intelligent divine Creator is a likelier explanation for physical reality and life than the purely “materialist” position. In the materialist view, both the universe of time, space, and matter and the existence of life are things that either always existed or arose in some sense spontaneously from their absence. There is, of course, the third position: that of the agnostic, who is not convinced either of the deist view or the materialist view. Bolloré and Bonnassies do not attempt to debunk the agnostic position, but in the book’s final third — which shifts to philosophical, historical, scriptural, and theological topics — they do seek to make the case that it matters a great deal whether there is or isn’t a God, and therefore that agnostics should care whether the deists or the materialists have the stronger evidence for their arguments.

God, the Science, the Evidence sets out to do something different from most books on the topic in two ways. One is that it scans across multiple disciplines, from astrophysics to genetic biology to mathematics, with the aim of assembling a broader picture. When you consider how many leaps of faith are required across different disciplines to accept the materialist view, the case for the deist position becomes comparatively stronger. You may be persuaded that the growing evidence for the Big Bang theory and the growing evidence against a universe of cyclical expansion and contraction suggests a first-mover cause who started Creation. You may be persuaded that nobody has ever come up with an explanation for life proceeding from non-life (“spontaneous generation”) that isn’t comically unscientific. You may be persuaded that both organic DNA and the delicate mathematical constants behind stars suggest intelligent design. Or you may be persuaded that “multiverses” are an entirely speculative explanation, without supporting evidence, to explain away as the result of infinite probability the huge number of things that had to be just precisely so in order for life to exist. But what the authors ask most of all is that you consider all of these elements as a unified whole rather than as the disconnected problems of particular scientific disciplines.

The second way in which the book is distinctive is in the rigor that was applied to presenting the scientific evidence, while doing so in as readable a format as possible for lay audiences. Bolloré and Bonnassies wrote this book for the best of all reasons to write a book: They wanted there to be a book on this topic and couldn’t find one. Expecting to spend a year producing it from their beginning in 2017, they spent four years assembling its case and ensuring its accuracy. They have the advantage of being men of scientific training, but also of being practical men of engineering and technology rather than cloistered members of the scientific priesthood. That gave them the perspective of generalists and a willingness to consider scientific questions as practical inquiries into what works and what doesn’t, rather than dogmatic adherence to one or another school of scientific doctrine.

Their backgrounds as successful businessmen also rather clearly meant that they put a lot of resources into the book’s contents as well as its colorful, eye-catching layout. They consulted experts in many fields, including multiple Nobel laureates, to vet their text, some of whom have given the book a public imprimatur. If the book occasionally veers into more appeals to authority than my taste would prefer, that is the coin of the realm in much of modern scientific debate and necessary in order to reach some audiences. As Robert Wilson — winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics for his discovery of cosmic microwave background radiation — writes: “This book is a very good presentation of the development of the Big Bang theory and its impact on our beliefs and our representation of the world . . . as the Big Bang theory suggests, if the Universe had a beginning, then we cannot avoid the question of creation.”

The two Frenchmen also brought distinct faith perspectives of their own, Bolloré as a lifelong believer and Bonnassies as a convert from atheism with a sense of what is persuasive to the unconverted. The book is framed not around a denunciation of materialism so much as a forensic examination of the comparative strength of the evidence for the two contending positions. It discusses everything from DNA to the unique history of the Jewish people and the miraculous apparition at Fatima from the same rationalist perspective, with close attention to defining what it means to cite evidence — to know how we know what we claim to know.

In spite of the presentation of its various arguments as a coherent whole, the 538-page book (plus appendices and a glossary) is written in a modular format that lends itself to picking out individual chapters to read on their own — a common enough way in which many people read books these days. From my perspective as a lover of history, I naturally went first to the chapter on Soviet and Nazi persecutions of adherents to the Big Bang and related theories that the universe had a beginning and was not eternal. Some readers may regard the chapter as a bit of emotional deck-stacking (of the sort frequently deployed by critics of religion) in detailing terrible crimes committed in pursuit of the materialist perspective. But the core point made by Bolloré and Bonnassies in telling these particular stories is to observe that the Soviets and the Nazis recognized, and showed in their actions, the devastating threat that these apparently esoteric scientific ideas presented to the materialist explanation of a godless universe.

God, the Science, the Evidence will not end any debates. Humanity’s search for the divine is endless in this life, and so is the temptation to reject the implications of the question. Science, for its part, is never settled. But the book offers a useful resource for anyone interested in the most profound questions of how we came to exist.