Michel-Yves Bolloré is the co-author of “God: The science, the evidence,” a new book that aims to lay out the scientific evidence for the existence of God.
In a text spanning nearly 600 pages, he and his co-author Olivier Bonassies, explain how factors such as the thermal death and expansion of the universe, as well as its fine-tuning, lend weight make the existence of a creator the most rational explanation.
The book’s forward is written by Nobel prize winner and physicist Robert Wilson, and around 30 other scientists, from a variety of fields, contributed to the book, which also delves briefly into the historical, philosophical and moral evidence for the existence of God, as well as taking a detailed look at the miracle of Fatima.
An English translation of the book is in the works now, and is expected to be published by early 2025.
The Pillar spoke with Bolloré during a trip to Lisbon, to promote the book.
The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
The title of your book is “God: The science, the evidence”, and the subtitle is “The dawn of a revolution”.
You argue in the book that, contrary to what was expected around 125 years ago, current science overwhelmingly seems to support the existence of a creator God.
Could you walk us through your argument?
From the Renaissance until 1900, from Copernicus to Freud, all the discoveries seemed to say that it was possible to explain our world and the universe without a creator God.
After Copernicus came Galileo, then Newton, Laplace, and then Buffon – who told us that the Earth is much more than a few thousand years old – and then evolution, with Lamarck and Darwin.
And all these discoveries told us that we don’t need a God to explain how the sun or the moon, or the sea, or the mountains, or electricity works. All this is just the laws of the universe. So, people thought that if God is not necessary to explain the world, then He is not essential, and therefore He probably doesn't exist.
Then you had intellectuals like Karl Marx and Freud, who said that not only does God not exist, but the fact that people continue to think He does, is destroying their lives. If people want to be happy, they must get rid of not only God, but the idea of God and any religion, because religion is the “opium of the people.”
All the intellectuals thought that the more we know, the more science we have, the more it is certain that “God is dead” and does not exist at all.
Surprisingly, though, exactly the opposite happened. After 1900, one discovery after the other has done exactly the opposite, saying that it is no longer possible to explain our universe without a creator God.
And this is a story that we want to tell people, that for four centuries people have told you that the science says that God does not exist, and now it is the opposite, and science is providing evidence that there is a creator God.
We attempt to describe this intellectual revolution, using simple language.
Would you describe your book as a defense of the reasonability of the existence of God, or as an actual defense of the existence of God?
I would prefer the first. But it is more than that.
There are only two possible theories. One is that the universe was created by a creator God. That is a possibility, it is admitted by many people, we understand it and it is simple: God is almighty, he can create a universe if he wants.
And there is another possibility: God does not exist, we are pure space, time and matter.
It is important to weigh both sides of the scales and see what evidence we have.
In one, for the existence of God, we have the thermal death of the universe, which is a proof that the universe is going to “die,” and that it had a beginning. You have the expansion of the universe and you have the fine-tuning of the universe, which is completely independent from its expansion. Then you have the appearance of life.
Finally, outside of the realm of science, you have philosophy, you have morals, you have history and you even have some miracles.
On the other side of the scales what do we have? Nothing. We have to believe in the “multiverse.”
It is interesting that we continue to speak of believers and non-believers, because that is completely wrong. We who believe in the theory of God's existence, know what we believe. But the materialists don't realize that they are placing their belief in things that are completely crazy. They believe that our universe has no beginning, when almost everything demonstrates the opposite; they have to believe in a multiverse, which is science-fiction science; and they have to believe that life appeared from matter, which seems very difficult.
Saying that our book defends the reasonability of the existence of God is not enough. There are two plates on the scales, one has plenty of evidence, and another, for materialism, is completely empty, so the reasonability today is to hold and believe that God exists.
But you wouldn’t go so far as to say that you demonstrate the existence of God…?
There is a confusion between absolute demonstration and evidence. Absolute demonstration is like the theorem of Pythagoras, which was demonstrated 2500 years ago, and is still valid and convincing to everybody.
It is very difficult for people to understand that there is no demonstration in the real world. In the real world, in the scientific world, science moves forward by observing, and looking for an explanation. Why does the apple fall to the ground? Newton builds a theory that the apple and the earth are attracting each other. Then he looks at the implications, the consequences of his theory, and he makes a mathematical model of this, and what happens in the centuries after is that the consequences of Newton's theory are confirmed, such as the prediction of Haley's comet.
However, in 1917, with Einstein, evidence surfaced that Newton's theory was not completely true. So we had evidence that Newton was right, and later we had evidence that he was wrong. It is important to understand that evidence does not equal absolute demonstration.
And sometimes you have evidence in one way and evidence pointing in another, which is also true. The evidence pointing to Newton being right is still true, and the evidence pointing to him being wrong is also still true.
You might be tempted to think that there is nothing one can do, because you will never have certainty. But when you have a set of several pieces of evidence, coming from different fields of knowledge, all in the same direction, then you can say “Yes, I have a certainty.” The same applies in justice, where people are convicted based on evidence that provides certainty “beyond any reasonable doubt.”
This is where we are.
We cannot say we are giving a demonstration of the existence of God, because this is impossible, but we can say that science and reason are bringing much independent and converging evidence that God exists.
And the independence of the evidence is very important. For example, the evidence of the thermal death of the universe is independent from the expansion of the universe, these are two very different things, as is the fact that life appears from matter.
So, if you have evidence coming from different fields, then you feel comfortable, and if you have evidence also coming from philosophy, from morality and from history and enigmas, or miracles, and it all points in the same direction, then... Well, you can always say it is not enough for you, but if you are a reasonable man you have to make a decision.
From what I understood, the main counter-argument to a creator is the idea of a succession of universes, or the multiverse.
Could you briefly explain that idea, and why you don’t think it is acceptable?
We know that our universe had a beginning, 13 billion years ago, and that it will end, that in a few billion years it will be completely dead. This is our universe. The problem for the materialists is that if they admit that our universe has a beginning, this means that God exists, so they cannot admit that it has a beginning. But if we cannot admit that, then what are the possibilities?
When the expansion of the universe was understood, with Einstein and all the other scientists, they all expected that after the “Big Bang”, there would be a “Big Crunch”, concentrating on one point, and then “boom”, again, and so on, forever. So that would solve the problem.
In 1978 it was demonstrated that not only is the expansion still going on, but it is going on faster and faster, so there will be no “Big Crunch.”
So, the materialists had to find another possibility, and they posited that our universe was like an egg, coming from a chicken. We are the egg, but the chicken, which is another universe, created ours. And even if this universe has a lifetime, there is another one before, and so on in an infinite series. The theory of a multiverse is an absolutely necessary theory for atheists, because it solves two problems:
First, it solves the problem of the beginning of the universe, because it says that yes, it had a beginning, but it came from another one, so there’s no problem. And it also solves the problem of the fine-tuning of the universe, because our universe, as we know, is completely fine-tuned, and everybody admits that, but the materialists say that there is an infinite number of universes, and we are the lucky ones who live in the fine-tuned one.
Karl Popper, who was one of the greatest philosophers of science, used to say that to be scientific, a theory has to be refutable. But we will never know anything about the multiverse because by definition it is “somewhere else.” We cannot see it, we cannot find any sign of it, it is pure hypothesis.
At the end of his life, Steven Hawking said that the idea of the multiverse is dead. He said that because he no longer believed in the multiverse, he chose to believe that our Universe came from nothing.
Why do we see so much resistance from scientists against the idea of a creator God?
The important thing to understand is that the existence of God is a passionate issue, so we cannot expect people to be rational about God.
Why? Because for many people God is perceived as a tyrant, because he forbids us from doing a number of things; as a judge; and as an obstacle to knowledge. This is how the Devil convinces Adam and Eve to revolt against God, in the Bible.
In our book we include quotes from top scientists, showing this.
One that I especially like is by George Wald, a twentieth century Nobel prize winner [1967, for medicine]. This is what he wrote:
“When it comes to the origin of life, we have only two possibilities as to how life arose. One is spontaneous generation arising to evolution; the other is a supernatural creative act of God. There is no third possibility...
Spontaneous generation was scientifically disproved one hundred years ago by Louis Pasteur, Spellanzani, Reddy and others. That leads us scientifically to only one possible conclusion – that life arose as a supernatural creative act of God...
I will not accept that philosophically because I do not want to believe in God.
Therefore, I choose to believe in that which I know is scientifically impossible, spontaneous generation arising to evolution.”
Isn't that incredible? We have five or six more like this. What does this show? It shows that George Wald, who is a Nobel laureate, and an honest man, who could admit his own bias, rejected God and said he prefers to believe in something he knows is impossible.
So, the question of God is a passionate question, and we must not expect that all this evidence we are bringing is going to convince George Wald and his friends.
Concluding that it is reasonable that God exists, or that reality is by necessity created, is one thing.
But there are many different religions in the world.
Is it possible to apply scientific reasoning to determine which of these religions appears to be more reasonable?
My personal answer is yes, but that’s not in this book.
Imagine a very elegant 12-storey department store in New York. On the underground floor you have children's toys, then health and care, and on the ninth floor you have jewelry, and so on.
If I can make an analogy with our book, the bottom, underground floor is hard atheist, the first underground floor is agnostic, and the ground floor, where you start to have some light, is deism. At the top is Christianity.
The aim of this book is to bring people from the first or second underground floor to the ground floor, to the light of deism.
After that you have to change elevator and then go up to find out who God is, and so on. But for that there are other books.
You dedicate a chapter to the apparitions in Fatima. There have been many reports of supernatural apparitions in the world.
Why did you choose Fatima for analysis?
There are several reasons. First, an important implication of the theory that God does not exist is that there are no miracles. According to that logic, if there is one miracle it proves that the theory that God does not exist is false, and since this is a binary, that means that the theory that God exists is true. So, if we can get one miracle, it is one more piece of evidence, on top of all the rest, that God exists.
Fátima has several characteristics that make it unique. The first is that the place, the day and the hour were foretold in advance. We have copies of the newspapers, including atheist newspapers, enemies of the Church, which say that these stupid children, driven by fraudulent priests, are announcing that on the 13 of October at noon there will be a miracle.
The second thing that makes Fatima unique is that it serves no practical purpose. All of Jesus' miracles – a blind man recovering his sight, a paralytic recovering the use of his legs – all these things are good, and they happen because He loves people, but there was always a practical outcome. The only practical reason for Fatima is to give proof of the existence of God.
Mary said to the children: “I will perform a miracle, so that everybody believes,” that means everybody, not only the people there, but you and I today.
Now, if you take the miracle of Fatima itself, there are only five reasonable explanations, without God: one, nothing happened; two, a meteorological event; three, a cosmological event; four, a collective hallucination; or five, fraud.
There is nothing else.
If you can discount all of these possibilities, then there is only a supernatural explanation. If we are being reasonable, why should we refuse that?
In the book we show that option one, that nothing happened, is not possible. Sixty-thousand witnesses is too many. A weather event can be discounted because there were a lot of observatories already. Cosmological? No, because again there were observatories everywhere.
Collective hallucination? First of all, those don't exist, and second, many people from far away were able to witness the miracle, including Portuguese poet Afonso Lopes Vieira, an atheist, who was 35 km away at the time.
Fraud? How can you perform fraud in the sky? It is impossible, we could not reproduce it today, let alone then, in a poor village.
So, if you say that none of these options explain it, then you have to admit that you have one more piece of evidence that there is something supernatural. People get upset, they don't like miracles, but what else can we say?
How has your book been received by the scientific world?
In general, very well. Lots of scientists were very happy, and all the people we are working with say they are very happy.
Of course, you always have a portion of people who criticize. What do they say? Usually, the people who are unhappy say that everything we say here in the book has already been known for a long time, but it doesn't prove anything.
This is very important, because it is true. We demonstrate nothing, but we have a set of evidence which can lead a reasonable man to a conclusion.
I have never received any criticism that something is factually wrong in the book, and the reason is that it was written with us by 30 scientists, including Robert Wilson [1978 Nobel Prize for Physics], who was one of the people who worked with us.
We also get some criticism from ecclesiastics. We have approval and endorsement from some clergy, such as Cardinal Robert Sarah and Archbishop André-Joseph Léonard, former primate of Belgium.
However, I must admit that many ecclesiastics have been very unhappy with the book. Usually, they say that God does not require proof, and if there were proof of the existence of God it would reduce the merit of faith. And this seems silly to me, because the existence of God has nothing to do with faith. These are two separate things.
The existence of God is a question, like the existence of the Loch Ness Monster. He either exists or not. It is not a question of faith.
For example, I am French, my President is Mr. Macron. I have never met him, but I still believe that he exists because of television, radio and testimony. It could all be fake, but I believe it. However, I have no faith in him.
There is another well-known example. The Devil believes in the existence of God, but he never had faith in Him.
Also, some say that God does not need proof, but this is false, because the Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that all men can reach the conclusion that God exists with certainty, using only reason.
And finally, I know somebody very important who has a different opinion: the Blessed Virgin Mary, because in Fatima she said that she was going to give proof of the existence of God, so if she says that she is going to give proof, it is because it is good, it is not going to decrease the merit of faith.
