By Claudia Cockerell

Copyright standard

Believing in God is no longer simply a matter of faith. A slew of recent books argue that God, in fact, is a science-backed phenomenon. American philosopher of science Stephen C. Meyer’s 2021 book Return of the God Hypothesis promised “groundbreaking scientific evidence of the existence of God”. Since its release, he has done the rounds on the airwaves, appearing on The Joe Rogan Experience and Piers Morgan Uncensored.

God is big business in the publishing world. Last month Ebury launched the first-ever Christian imprint at Penguin Random House in response to “a clear market need” while Matthew McConaughey’s book Poems & Prayers went straight to the top of the New York Times bestseller list in September. One publisher told me that the only way to make the big bucks these days is to sell the Bible.

A book that has been a bestseller across Europe is about to be published in English — and the authors are betting on it being a hit here. God: The Science, The Evidence is written by a pair of French engineers, Michel-Yves Bolloré and Olivier Bonnassies. It has already been published in several languages and sold an astonishing 400,000 copies, according to the pair’s literary agent.

Bolloré comes from a well-known family in France. His brother Vincent is a billionaire Right-wing media mogul nicknamed “the French Rupert Murdoch”. According to newspaper La Presse, the book’s success in France was “aided by a vast promotional campaign”. The authors have retained the copyright for the book and underwritten the publishing in the UK and the US, launching with a vast first print run of 110,000.

Bolloré tells me that he and Bonnassies felt there was a gap in the market for a book that encompassed “science, philosophy, history and enigmas” to argue for the existence of God.

The titular “evidence” they put forth includes the idea that the Big Bang theory supports the concept of a creator god. The theory was first proposed in 1927 by Georges Lemaître, who the authors describe as a “priest, cosmologist and visionary”. At the time, scientists believed that the universe had been around for time immemorial and there was no beginning.

This, the book argues, is the view of Materialists (who believe that nothing exists outside of physical matter) such as Stalin, who brutally cracked down on Russian cosmologists proposing alternatives to an eternal universe. Lemaître believed that the universe originated from a tiny point, the “primeval atom”. Out of this exploded space, time, and matter. This then begs the question of what existed before the Big Bang, and who or what was responsible for it? If time and matter did not exist, “Is not the existence of an immaterial creator god located outside space and time the most natural explanation?” the book asks.

The Big Bang is widely accepted as the most plausible explanation for the universe’s origin, but the cause of it — if there even was one — is scientifically unknown. The authors seem to feel that scientists have been rather churlish in spending so much time looking for aliens, “rather than dedicating even a fraction of effort to exploring the hypothesis of a creator god”.

Other theories that serve as evidence for God date back centuries, too. In an update on the 19th century watchmaker analogy, the book argues that DNA structures are so complex that they must have been designed by an intelligent creator.

Bolloré has been a Catholic all his life, while Bonnassies found God in his twenties, after growing up atheist. Bonnassies created the Catholic news website Aleteia, which Bolloré helped to finance. Despite their faith, they insist the book is a “neutral investigation”, partly because they paid a range of respected scientists to help them. For example, they sent their chapter on the Big Bang to 89-year-old Nobel Prize-winning physicist Robert W. Wilson for corrections. The book begins with rousing endorsements from 15 people, including physicists, philosophers and priests.

“God created this universe because he wants to have friends; children. We are the children of God,” says Bolloré. Yet humans didn’t come along until 13.8 billion years after the Big Bang. That seems like an awfully long time to wait around before having children. “It’s not so long,” breezes Bolloré. “Time does not exist for God.” Perhaps, he muses, it was also an aesthetic choice: “If you want to have beautiful stars at night, it takes time”.

The authors argue that more scientific evidence for God is found in the “fine-tuning” argument. The hypothesis goes that if any of the physical constants of the universe — such as the strength of gravity or the speed of light — were even slightly different, then galaxies would not have formed and life as we know it would not exist. And the chances of this precision, of all these dials being randomly tuned to the exact right level, are so infinitesimally tiny that perhaps it wasn’t a random act at all. Perhaps there was some almighty power on the decks.

Many scientists have rejected the fine-tuning argument. Italian physicist Carlo Rovelli described the idea that nothing would exist without fine-tuning as “intellectual arrogance and stupidity” and says it’s impossible to predict how different life would be because there is no model for comparison.

Bolloré often returns to the Greek philosopher Parmenides, who said that “nothing comes from nothing”. Despite the so-called evidence, the conclusion that God is the rational explanation for our existence still requires a leap of logic. Critics may wonder at the plausibility of complicated physics and molecular biology standing in for millennia-old beliefs. But according to the book, “science appears to have become God’s ally” — depending on who you ask.