Don't Believe In God? Would You Rather Believe This?

Merry Christmas! You’ll not hear “Happy Holidays” around a Costello household. We remember the reason for the season.

At the same time, I understand that quite a few people out there take a certain smug pride in their disbelief of such things. Faith to them is nothing but superstition. I would agree that religious attempts to lay earthquakes and hurricanes at God’s feet cross into superstition, but I would also argue that the universe we see around us is impossible without intelligent design.

I was at a gathering of scholars once when I was asked how I reconciled my faith in God with my profession as a biological scientist. Inwardly I smiled because the question was overheard by several scientists who share my faith, including two biological scientists and two physicists. I answered simply that I did not treat the Bible as a biology text anymore than Copernicus treated it as an astronomy text.
I did not pursue the question further because the venue was inappropriate for debate. But in truth, an intellectual disbelief in God requires at least as much faith as belief in God.

Here’s an example: The universe as we observe it is impossible. According to the physics that we understand, those pretty spiral galaxies that you see in photographs should all fly apart because there is simply not nearly enough observable mass supplying the gravity required to hold them together.
In fact, the observable matter of the universe can only account for about 2% of the necessary mass.

So how do physicists solve this dilemma? With “dark matter” of course. Dark matter is by definition invisible and directly unobservable. We can only detect its presence by inference. If it weren’t there, then the universe couldn’t exist. Therefore, it must be there.

If this sounds a bit like religious faith, it should. Most of the planet’s pagan religions evolved to explain what humans could not understand.

Here’s another scientific conundrum that physicists rely upon faith to explain.

The universe that you see around you is highly unlikely. According to physical theory, at the moment of the Big Bang, a single unified force was shattered randomly into the four forces we now observe, the strong nuclear force, the weak nuclear force, electromagnetism and gravity. These four forces are balanced on a knife edge. Only very slight deviances in the strengths any one of these forces from what we observe would make the state of matter you see today impossible. There would either be no atomic nuclei, and therefore no atoms, or all the matter in the universe would fuse into a single nuclei. All the matter in the universe would either fly apart, never coalescing into stars and planets, or it would collapse into a single black hole.

And there is no known law of physics dictating that the four forces should have fractured as they did, yielding the perfect balance that we see today.

If you thought that dark matter was a strange journey into faith, wait until you learn how physicists explain this one.

In the world of secular physics, the forces that gave us that gave us the Big Bang also give rise to a great many alternative universes. Depending upon your chosen multiverse theory (and they are many), the number ranges from uncountable to infinite. With so many possibilities, they argue, it’s inevitable that at least one would have turned out the way that ours did.

According to one multiverse theory, every elementary particle at any given time exists in a vast range of quantum states of differing probabilities. Every possible quantum state creates a new universe of its own. So, to estimate the number of simultaneously existing parallel universes out there, you multiply the number of possible quantum states for each particle (infinite) times the number of possible intervals that time may divided into (infinite) times the number of elementary particles in the observable universe (might as well be infinite).  With so many possibilities, a universe such as ours is more than simply inevitable. This theory predicts that there are actually an infinite number of identical copies of our universe.

Where are these alternative universes? They’re invisible. They’re undetectable. How do physicists know that they’re there? Faith my friend.

And once we get into the elegance of biology, the influence of intelligent design becomes even more apparent. Science does not replace God, but clarifies His presence.