Four Reasons To Believe in God From Science

As a scientist who studies the most fundamental particles and forces in the universe, I tend to only accept something as true if it is supported by abundant objective evidence. You might think that a person like me, who wants testable reasons for everything, could never be a Christian since Christianity is based on faith in God. However, real Christian faith as described in the Bible is always based on evidence and is more accurately defined as “trusting God based on the evidence that he is trustworthy.” Since I am an experimental particle physicist who needs facts to back up my beliefs, I have studied many of the objective reasons to believe and trust in God from history, science, philosophy, sociology, and other academic disciplines. Perhaps some of my findings will give you additional tangible reasons to believe in God.

Here are Four Reasons to Believe in God from Science:

The BGV Theorem Revisited

Did this universe have a transcendent beginning? How strong is the scientific evidence for a beginning? If you read the comments in this blog you know that one reader and I have been discussing the question of the beginning of this universe and if there is a necessary transcendent cause. In parallel to our discussion, I have been reading a book by Robert J. Sptizer called New Proofs for the Existence of God: Contributions of Contemporary Physics and Philosophy. Spitzer is a Jesuit priest and philosopher and was the president of Gonzago University in Spokane, Washington. In Spitzer's book, Bruce L. Gordon, who has a Ph.D. in the history and philosophy of science and physics, has written a nice postscript talking in some depth about the Borde-Guth-Vilenkin (BGV) theorem.¹  One of my firsts blog posts that I wrote discussed the BGV theorem, but given my recent dialogue and my recent reading, I think it is worthwhile going into a little more depth about this theorem and its ramifications.

A Changing Arrow of Time?

This is one post I am not looking forward to writing.  Some of my readers have asked me to comment about alternative theories to the Big Bang which remove the necessity of our universe having a beginning.  I have been thinking for some time about how to write on this subject in a non-technical manner, which is the tone I strive for on this blog.  Because most of these ideas are quite theoretical, requiring complex mathematics and intricate nuances, it is quite a challenge for me to give an accurate and adequate description of most of these proposals, yet still be comprehensible.   Nevertheless, in this post I want to try to discuss the paper by Anthony Aguirre and Steven Gratton (AG) that describes a scenario which they claim requires no beginning.¹   I also want to give some thoughts on how their idea fits into the whole discussion of evidence for or against a deity, particularly the Christian God.  My attempt may be an epic fail.

In the model proposed by Aguirre and Gratton, they claim to avoid a beginning by proposing a thermodynamic arrow of time that points in different directions depending on whether the universe is expanding or collapsing.  To understand what this means I need to first take a diversion to discuss what the thermodynamic arrow of time means.  Actually, no one really knows for sure why we experience time moving forward but we do know that a quantity called entropy must increase in any non-reversible process.  Entropy strictly has to do with the number of microstates available to a system. The concept of a microstate can be illustrated by considering two six-sided dice. There is only one microstate available for the dice to roll 2: both must show a one. However, there are six possible microstates available for the dice to roll a 7. The combinations are 1 and 6, 2 and 5, 3 and 4, 4 and 3, 5 and 2, or 6 and 1. Because there are more available microstates, the dice will more often roll a 7. A macroscopic system with more available microstates has a greater entropy than one with fewer microstates. The second law of thermodynamics states that an isolated system will evolve spontaneously to the state with maximum entropy.   This is a statistical idea.  In general, all processes move toward those that are more statistically probable.  That gives us the arrow of time.   Time moves in the direction where entropy increases.

The Significance of the BGV Theorem

Let's continue to explore the question of whether or not our universe had an actual beginning.  In two previous posts I have said that (1) if our universe had a beginning, then the cause of the universe must be transcendent, a characteristic of the Christian God, and (2) we may never have any observational or theoretical evidence about what happened in the first 10^-35 seconds of the universe.

However, there have still been a lot of ideas from theoretical physicists about what may have happened to bring the universe into being and what we can surmise from the equations and laws that we know describe our universe.  One of the most often discussed papers dealing with our past was published by Arvind Borde, Alan H. Guth, and Alexander Vilenkin in 2003¹ and called the BGV theorem after the three authors.  In this paper, the authors show that any universe which is on average expanding has a timeline that cannot be infinite into the past, it must have had a beginning when it started to expand.  Since our universe is known to be expanding this theorem seems to require that it had a beginning.  (There are some technicalities to this conclusion like, for instance, the difference between "expanding" and "on average expanding" but, in general, what is known about our universe corresponds with the requirements of the BGV theorem.)

The God Particle...and God

On July 4, 2012 two collaborations of over 3000 physicist each independently announced the discovery of a particle colloquially known as "The God Particle."  Where did this elusive particle get its name?  Why did its discovery make international news?  And does it have anything to do with God?

Every scientist I know dislikes the moniker "The God Particle."  Physicists, instead, have named the particle after one of the six people who predicted its existence in 1964, the British theoretical physicist Peter Higgs.  Thus, it is the "Higgs particle" or "Higgs boson."  (For those of you who don't know but care about such things, a boson is a subatomic particle with an intrinsic quantum mechanical property of spin equal to an integer value times the Planck constant, named after Indian physicist Satyendra Nath Bose.)

In 1993, Leon Lederman, a Nobel Prize winning physicist, wrote a book about the search for the Higgs boson and named the book The God Particle at the urging of his publisher in order to maximize sales.  So the nickname "The God Particle" is mostly a marketing gimmick to sell books.  The name doesn't give any insight into the particle's properties or its place in the ensemble of fundamental particles.

The Soul of the Artist

I have a friend who is quite an accomplished artist.  In fact, one of his paintings (shown above) hangs in the main gallery of the Oklahoma Capitol Building.  He has told me that when you look at a piece of art, you see the soul of the artist.  When I look at a piece of art I often just see the superficial subject and colors.  But an art aficionado would truly see the soul of the artist in things like the intricate technique used to paint the picture, or the subtle use of light and shadow, or the way the artist has created a scene that draws your eyes from one place to another.

As a scientist, I have the privilege of looking at God's work of art, his creative work called the universe, and seeing his soul.  Like the art expert, I may be able to see things in the creation that give me insight into the Artist's soul in a way that the casual observer might not notice.