I think only an idiot can be an atheist. We must admit that there exists an incomprehensible power or force with limitless foresight and knowledge that started the whole universe going in the first place.[1] – Christian Anfinsen (1916-1995). Professor of Chemistry at Harvard University and winner of the 1972 Nobel Prize in Chemistry
For those curious about how God and science can coexist harmoniously rather than stand in opposition, numerous books explore the intersections of theology with cosmology, chemist…
I think only an idiot can be an atheist. We must admit that there exists an incomprehensible power or force with limitless foresight and knowledge that started the whole universe going in the first place.[1] – Christian Anfinsen (1916-1995). Professor of Chemistry at Harvard University and winner of the 1972 Nobel Prize in Chemistry
For those curious about how God and science can coexist harmoniously rather than stand in opposition, numerous books explore the intersections of theology with cosmology, chemistry, molecular biology, mathematics, and physics.[2] Many also provide historical accounts of sixteenth- through nineteenth-century scientists whose faith in the God of the Bible inspired their exploration of the natural world.
This changed during the nineteenth century with the advent of the “four, bearded god-killers,” who made popular such theories as philosophical materialism, nihilism, Marxism, and evolution. [3]
But the “dawn of a revolution,”—perhaps a better term would be renaissance—began somewhere during the twentieth century as cosmologists looked heavenward and molecular biologists peered deeper into the nuclei of cells. One result is that many of these scientists threw in the towel on atheism and philosophical materialism when they realized what the evidence implied. Some went so far as to embrace theism, and others, Christianity and the Creator-God of the Bible.
The latest entry to make this case is God, the Science, the Evidence, by Michel-Yves Bollore and Oliver Bonnassies. The book has just been published in English; the original was written in French and published as Dieu, La science, Les preuves in 2021. It has sold almost half a million copies.
What sets this tome apart from most other works in the field is a generous sprinkling of quotations from scientists in support of the evidence for God from a variety of disciplines, as well as an entire chapter (Chapter 13) devoted to “One Hundred Essential Citations from Leading Scientists.” Apart from that, there is little new information offered for either the science or the evidence for God. This is not a criticism, but a recognition that most scientific discoveries referenced in the book, such as the Anthropic Principle and the Fine Tuning of the Universe, the evidence for the Big Bang and its implications, and the elucidation of the structure of DNA, occurred in the twentieth century.
In Chapter 1, “The Dawn of a Revolution,” the authors explain that recent findings “began in the early twentieth century, [and] brought about a complete reversal of the thinking of previous centuries, when science was considered incompatible with any discussion of the existence of God.”[4]
Chapter 2, “What is Evidence?,” presents the authors’ concept of evidence as “not absolute proof that compels universal agreement on the existence of a creator God, rather … numerous, converging, and independent pieces of evidence that can inspire conviction beyond all reasonable doubt.”[5]
[RELATED: A Case for Integrating a Christian Worldview in the Science Classroom]
Theories for the origin of the universe and the men behind the twentieth-century discoveries that changed so many minds are the subject of Chapters 3 through 8. Among those findings is evidence for the Big Bang, first postulated by Georges Lemaître in 1931 and further refined by George Gamow in 1948. The moniker “Big Bang” was coined by Fred Hoyle in 1949 to disparage the theory.[6] But it was the cosmologists who followed that had the last laugh. Evidence for the universe’s origin being the result of an unfathomably massive explosion in its past was established by the discovery of cosmic microwave background radiation in 1964. In 1992, a series of further confirmations verified what is now known as the “Standard Model of the Big Bang.” The thermal map of the universe, first published in 1992 by George Smoot, won him the Nobel Prize in 2006. “[During] his reception speech, directed at his colleagues in the American Physical Society, he projected photos of the first cosmic light on the screen and used this phrase: ‘It’s like seeing God.’”[7]
Certainly, if you are religious, I can’t think of a better theory of the origin of the universe to match with Genesis. – Robert Woodrow Wilson, Astronomer and winner of the 1978 Nobel Prize for his 1964 discovery of the first light of the universe
The importance of the proof for an origin of the universe begs the question of an originator—Aristotle’s “unmoved mover,” so to speak. We might also ask, did the universe come from nothing? Does a Creator God exist, or are we left with the unsettling notion that nothing exists beyond the material universe? And what to make of the Bible’s claim that God created the universe ex nihilo?[8] The authors provide thoughtful considerations of many of these questions, including an entire chapter (Chapter 8—The Big Bang, A Noir Thriller) that documents the fates of German and Soviet scientists who dared lend their support to this new theory, challenging Nietzsche’s infamous “God is dead” claim, and threatening an end to atheism and dialectic materialism.
In the Soviet Union, among the scientists whose stories are told—men who were imprisoned and then finally shot for their work on the origins of the universe—are Innokenty Balanovsky, Yevgeny Perepyolkin, Maximillian Musselius, Dmitri Eropkin, and Boris Numerov.
In Germany, under the Nazis, Hitler had declared war on God. “While persecution was less widespread, the fate reserved for supporters of the Big Bang … was hardly more enviable.”[9] German scientists, many of them close associates of Einstein, were eliminated methodically during Hitler’s reign of terror. Most fled the country. Those who chose to stay were humiliated. Otto Stern lost a prestigious position at the Physics Institute. Max Born was arrested by the German SA and given two hours to leave the university where he taught. He fled to the UK, where he became a professor at the University of Cambridge and then Edinburgh, ultimately receiving the Nobel Prize in 1954.
*If alpha [the fine structure constant] were bigger than it really is, we should not be able to distinguish matter from ether [the vacuum, nothingness], and our task to disentangle the natural laws would be hopelessly difficult, the fact however that alpha has just its value of 1/137 is certainly no chance but itself a law of nature. It is clear that the explanation of this number must be the central problem of natural philosophy.[10] **– *Max Born (1882-1970), German-British theoretical physicist and shared winner of the 1954 Nobel Prize.
Chapters 9 -11 review the theory of the “Anthropic Principle” and the “Fine Tuning of the Universe,” and the objections raised to the myriads—approximately 200 to date—of physical constants that, like dials set on an electronic instrument, demand belief in a designer. The authors contend that if the settings on only one dial were slightly altered, the universe as we know it would cease to exist.[11] That these dials were “set” in such a precise fashion by chance is ruled out by the combined probabilities of small numbers and demands belief in a mind that established their initial settings so that carbon-based life could emerge on planet Earth.
All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particles of an atom to vibration and holds the most minute solar system of the atom together … We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind. – Max Planck (1858-1947) Theoretical Physicist and winner of the 1918 Nobel Prize in Physics.
Chapter 12, “Biology: The Incredible Leap from Inert to Living Matter,” reviews the repeated failures over the last seventy years—since the elucidation of the structure of DNA by Watson and Crick in 1953—to demonstrate life from nonlife in the laboratory. Beginning in the 1950s, with experiments with “prebiotic soups” that “mimicked the supposed conditions of the emergence of life on the Earth,” the authors systematically dismantle the theory of abiogenesis due to the enormous hurdles that must be overcome to build even the simplest protein.
The first hurdle is that of the twenty or so amino acids that are the building blocks for proteins; all but one are chiral. Chirality is a stereochemical property that can be thought of as “handedness.” Chiral molecules exist in two forms, a “left hand” and a “right hand” molecule. (This can be pictured as a molecule and its non-superimposable mirror image). Life runs on only “left-handed” or L-amino acids. If amino acids were formed randomly in a so-called primordial soup, they would not be stereochemically pure; half of them would be useless as building blocks for proteins. The second hurdle is that, for a protein to be built, a blueprint for its synthesis must exist. These blueprints, called genes, are found in DNA. The third hurdle is that there must be a number of molecular machines to copy this information from the gene onto an mRNA (messenger RNA) strand. Finally, this mRNA copy of the gene must be fed into yet another molecular machine, the ribosome, where the code is read and used to assemble the individual amino acids into the correct sequence for the protein.
Astronomy leads us to a unique event, a universe which was created out of nothing, one with a very delicate balance needed to provide exactly the conditions required to permit life, and one which has an underlying (one might say ‘supernatural’) plan. – Arno Penmzias, (1933-2024) Winner of the 1978 Nobel Prize in Physics.
Here is the conundrum: since proteins are required to produce all the molecular machines involved in protein synthesis, it’s not even a chicken-or-the-egg issue. Both the chicken and the egg had to be present simultaneously for the entire process to run. The authors write: “In the last fifty years, we have discovered that the complexity of life surpasses anything we could have imagined. Today’s leading figures in science have been humbled by this fact.”[12]
[RELATED: Christian Ethics Are the Antidote for Research Misconduct]
Sir Francis Crick, described by the authors as a “militant atheist,” won the 1962 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery of DNA.[13] He said, “An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have to have been satisfied to get it going.”
All of us who study the origin of life find that the more we look into it, the more we feel it is too complex to have evolved anywhere. We all believe, as an article of faith, that life evolved from dead matter on this planet. It is just that its complexity is so great, it is hard for us to imagine that it did. – Harold Urey, 1934 Nobel Prize winner in chemistry (and atheist).
The authors draw two conclusions from this chapter: “The numbers don’t lie, and they all point one way: pure chance is not a reasonable hypothesis for explaining the transitions from inert matter to the first living being.” Their second conclusion follows naturally from the first: “The fact that we can quantify the incredible [and impossible] leap from the inert to the living is strong evidence for the existence of a creator God.”[14]
Chapters 13 through 16 offer numerous, pithy quotations from scientists across various disciplines, including an entire chapter (Chapter 15) devoted to Albert Einstein, and (Chapter 16) Kurt Gödel, whose mathematical theorem dealing with true yet unprovable propositions turned out to have deeper implications beyond mathematics that even he did not fully realize at the time.
Life cannot have had a random beginning…The trouble is that there are about 2,000 enzymes, and the chance of obtaining them all in a random trial is only one part in 1040,000 an outrageously small probability that could not be faced even if the whole universe consisted of organic soup. –Fred Hoyle, (1915-2001) English astronomer and originator of the theory of stellar nucleosynthesis.
The remainder of the book branches off from pure science, offering eight additional chapters in a section titled “Evidence from Outside the Sciences.” Among the chapters I found to be interesting was Chapter 18—”The Alleged Errors of the Bible,” Chapter 19— “Jesus: Who Could He Be?” Chapter 20—”The Jewish People: A Destiny Beyond the Improbable,” and two chapters that present philosophical and materialist arguments against the authors’ thesis.
While this well-researched book breaks no new ground, God, the Science, the Evidence organizes many important scientific discoveries of the twentieth century into one comprehensive, easy-to-read volume. It presents them as evidence in support of a non-materialist, biblical apologetic for the creation of the universe and the authority of Scripture. The book also highlights the profound influence many of these discoveries had on the discoverers, something for all readers to reflect upon, especially the doubters, who may come away changed or, at the very minimum, with lots to think about.
Find more book reviews here.
[1] Michel-Yves Bollore and Oliver Bonnassies, God, the Science, the Evidence—the Dawn of a Revolution, (USA E.1, Palomar editions, 2025), 264. Cited in Anfinsen, Cosmos, Bios, Theos, ed. Henry Margenau and Roy A. Varghese (Chicago: Open Court, 1997), 139.
[2] Examples from my library include: William Dembski, Casey Luskin et al, The Comprehensive Guide to Science and Faith, (Eugene, Oregon, Harvest House, 2021); Dinesh D’Souza, What’s So Great About Christianity?, (Washington, D.C., Regnery, 2007); Michael Guillen, Believing Is Seeing, (Carol Stream, IL, Tyndale House Publishers, 2021); Stephen C. Meyer, The Return of the God Hypothesis, (New York, NY, Harper Colins, 2021); Stephen C. Meyer, Signature in the Cell, (New York, NY, Harper Collins, 2009); Eric Metaxas, Is Atheism Dead?, (Washington, D.C. Salem Books-Regnery, 2021); Rodney Stark, For the Glory of God, (Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 2003).
[3] Martin E. Marty, “Freud and Other ‘God-Killers’ Are Here to Stay,” University of Chicago Divinity School, October 2, 2017. “Darwin-Marx-Nietzsche-Freud—sometimes dubbed, “’the four bearded god-killers’” who framed now-classic, career-long attacks on God and gods and religion and religions, enjoy and suffer successions of varying critical fates.
[4]Michel-Yves Bollore and Oliver Bonnassies, *God, the Science, the Evidence, *23.
[5] *God, the Science, the Evidence, *49.
[6] At that time, the current theory was the “Steady State Theory,” i.e. the universe had always existed and was just assumed to have had no beginning (and hence, no God).
[7]*God, the Science, the Evidence, *97.
[8]Ex nihilo is Latin for “from nothing.” The term creation ex nihilo refers to God creating everything from nothing. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth (Genesis 1:1). Prior to that moment, there was nothing. God didn’t make the universe from preexisting building blocks. He started from scratch. The Bible never expressly states that God made everything from nothing, but it is implied. In Hebrews 11:3 we read, “By faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that the things which are seen were not made of things which are visible.” Scholars take this to mean that the universe came into existence by divine command and was not assembled from preexisting matter or energy. Things that are visible do not owe their existence to anything visible.” https://www.gotquestions.org/creation-ex-nihilo.html
[9] *God, the Science, the Evidence, *153.
[10] Arthur I. Miller, *Deciphering the Cosmic Number: The Strange Friendship of Wolfgang Pauli and Carl Jung *(New York: W. W. Norton, 2009) 253. Quoted in God the Science, the Evidence, 170-171.
[11] Jay W. Richards, “List of Fine-Tuning Parameters,” Intelligent Design, Research and Analysis, January 14, 2015. https://www.discovery.org/a/fine-tuning-parameters/
[12] God, the Science, the Evidence*, *251.
[13] Ibid.
[14] *God, the Science, the Evidence, *259-260.
Cover by Jared Gould using an image by PRASERT on Adobe; Asset ID#: 193232578, and an image of the book cover by Gregory J. Rummo
Gregory J. Rummo, D.Min., M.S., M.B.A., B.S., is a Lecturer of Chemistry in the School of Arts and Sciences at Palm Beach Atlantic University and an Adjunct Scholar at the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation. He is the author of The View from the Grass Roots, The View from the Grass Roots - Another Look, and several other volumes in the series. His 2024 doctoral dissertation, Reaching Gen Z with the Gospel in the College Classroom was published in January 2025 by Wipf & Stock.