Does the universe need a Creator?
Three years ago the book Dieu : la science, les preuves : l’aube d’une révolution (2021) (God, science, the evidence: the dawn of a revolution) by Michel Yves Bolloré and Olivier Bonnassies was published in France. It is presented as the “dawn of a revolution” both scientific and theological. The authors –both are engineers and businessmen, and the latter has a degree in theology- set out to defend the truth of the Christian faith and its traditional dogmas with irrefutable scientific (and historical) arguments. I will refer exclusively to their alleged “evidence” of God’s creation of the world out of nothing. The world, they say, is finite: it moves towards its end and, therefore, it should have a beginning; and because it could not start by itself, it had to have an external creator: God.
This proof is worth as much as the dilemma on which the entire book is based: “either the universe was created by God” or “the universe is exclusively material”. Reason in general and scientific reason in particular –the authors affirm- must, thus, choose: either a world created by God with a purpose, a horizon, a spirit that guides it, or a blind, material world, with no horizon, orientation or hope. Faith in a provident creator God would be the only reasonable, scientific alternative.
I think that this dilemma and the proof on which it is based lack the necessary scientific and theological rigor, insofar as the entire argument rests, or rather it staggers, on a radical misunderstanding of the two central concepts of the book: God and matter. In this 21st century, the scientific and theological approach of the authors assumes a radical dualism (Platonic, Aristotelic, scholastic): they understand “God” to mean a supreme metaphysical entity, an immaterial and eternal pure spirit, anterior and external to the world, Someone who created the universe out of nothing and who can intervene in it with miracles; and they understand “matter” to mean a “purely physical” reality, finite and temporary, blind and inanimate, as opposed to spirit. It is, therefore, a “theistic” concept of God and a “physicist” concept of matter, both ideas increasingly distant from the profound, spiritual experience and from the current scientific knowledge –increasingly holistic or integral- of reality.
I have read with special interest the foreword, written by Robert W. Wilson who received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1978, and I will discuss it. He admits being agnostic, but he shows great respect for the extremely traditional, apologetic (which in Greek means “defensive”) and dogmatic theological approach of the authors. He acknowledges that the image of a finite and temporary world created by an eternal divinity could be “comfortable” for many believers. But, with the modesty and honesty of a wise scientist, he does not fail to formulate the two main objections he has to the work as a whole. I will collect and comment on both scientific objections before concluding with some theological notes.
The first problem, the Nobel Prize winner points out in his brief preface of three pages, is that “actually, we only know about the 4% of the matter and the energy of the universe”; we know nothing about the rest, except that it exists; if we would get to know it, “a new Physics could emerge which would change completely our current understanding of the genesis and evolution of our universe since the Big Bang” (p. 12 of the French edition). I suppose that on the day when we observe and know –and it seems we may not be very far from it- what that invisible matter and energy constituting more than the 95% of the universe are and how they act, we will be able to better explain its origin. And I suppose that then the postulate of the intervention of a divine metaphysical agent will become more improbable and superfluous, that God will withdraw and will be unnecessary. But there is more.
The second problem, warns Robert W. Wilson, “is perhaps more serious”. He refers to the hypothesis that this universe is but a part of a multiverse “that has existed forever, so that an infinite number of Big Bangs would have occurred, each with its random physical constants” (p. 13). I gather that in this case our universe would be one of the infinite sparks or beats of an eternal multiverse that transcends all our space and time parameters. And I gather that the belief in an external divine creator would shatter, or at least the proof of its existence as a necessary first cause would. This apologetics would crumble. Actually, it crumbled long time ago: the leap to the metaphysical cause, said Kant in the 18th century, is impracticable for reason (scientific as well as philosophical and theological).
It is true that the prestigious Physics Nobel Prize winner is sceptical about that unverified hypothesis of the multiverse. And he even concedes that “for a religious person” the intervention “of a spirit or of a creator God”, maintained by the authors of the book, could not contradict the scientific vision of the world in which we live. The US physicist gets that far, but he in no way endorses – contrary to what the authors of the book defend – that scientific ignorance can be taken as proof of the existence of a metaphysical creator entity. Rather, with his good common sense, he simply adds that recurring to a creator divinity “in a way, it only postpones the question, once more, of its ultimate origin. How did that spirit or God come into existence, and which are his properties?” (p. 14). Crystal clear. The human recourse to a God-being without origin to explain the origin of the universe of which we do not even know that it has an origin bears the stamp of a flight from reality and its mystery, from one’s own fears in the end.
This foreword by the wise 88-year-old researcher, honest and humble, is in reality a torpedo on the very waterline of the apologetic argument of the two authors (who follow 13th century Thomas Aquinas who, in turn, follows 6th century BC Aristotle). A torpedo that ruins their claim to rationally and scientifically demonstrate the existence of a supreme omnipotent metaphysical God-entity who created the world out of nothing and intervenes in it when it wants, a constructed “theistic” God to whom we turn as an explanation of everything we do not know and a remedy for what we cannot get. A kindly launched torpedo, but a torpedo after all for a belief condemned to retreat constantly, for a theology always on the defensive.
It is urgent, if not too late, for theology –word about the depth of vital experience and of universal reality- to transcend the millenary image of God as a supreme metaphysical entity and provident creator. Every image of God is a mental construct, but the construct we call “theistic” has ceased to be coherent and comprehensible, inspiring and creator, for the large majority of those who share the scientific worldview, a worldview that sooner than later will predominate in all continents.
In this situation, is it still worth using the term God, so misleading and tarnished? Would it not be better to abandon it definitely and put an end to the misunderstanding once and for all? Perhaps. But I do not believe that by doing so the deepest misunderstandings of our worldview and our word about the bottom of the eternal reality would banish. I personally, today and depending on where and before whom I find myself, and first of all for myself, I do not renounce to call it also “God”, as a metaphor for the deep breath that is in everything, the unspeakable breath by which all beings are created and of which we are creators.
I watch the infinitely small and the infinitely large, the world that expands without end and the closest reality, the light that inhabits it and the pain it suffers. All forms or beings that emerge in the universe/multiverse do so from a universal infinite network of causalities, but I cannot think that the universe/multiverse was the work of an external, creative cause, as if it were a Great Watchmaker. It is easier and more admirable to think that the universe/multiverse is eternal and self-creating, and that the matter-energy which constitutes it is an original material-spiritual matrix, eternally animated and dynamic, creative and self-creating. In no way it is that which many understand as “pure matter”, but pure potentiality and “divine” creativity.
In a universe with dimensions beyond all our calculations, in an Earth inhabited by the miracle of life, when we watch in astonishment an ant-hill, the flight of a bird, the eyes of a child, or the starry sky, we cannot but ask ourselves with Leibniz: why does something exist instead of nothing? Why does all that exists exist? Why did life come into being? Why did conscience appear? We ask ourselves time and again with the same astonishment, but without looking for a final answer.
What I call “God” is no answer, but the always open question, the confidence that is reborn in spite of everything, the creative responsibility beyond all images, syllogisms and postulates. It is not a necessary resource, or an enigma to be solved, or a metaphysical reality the existence of which needs to be investigated and demonstrated. It is neither Something nor Someone who is prior or outside or inside the universe. It is the Soul that animates it, the Breath that drives it, the Relationship that unifies it. It is enough to open your eyes and look deeply, to see the Invisible, to listen to the Silence, to recognize the Infinity, to perceive its Presence, to feel its wounds, to answer its call in everything.
Aizarna, February 28th, 2024
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Translated by Mertxe de Renobales Scheifler