The Atlantic: The Evidence That God Exists, by Elizabeth Bruenig (B.A. Brandeis; M.Phil. Christian Theology, Cambridge):

I grew up in a faithful Methodist household in deep-red Texas during the George W. Bush years, when the political sway of evangelicals was at its zenith. At the same time, evangelists of a robust atheism—figures such as the biologist Richard Dawkins, the critic Christopher Hitchens, and the neuroscientist Sam Harris—toured the country offending salt-of-the-earth Americans with their contempt for religious belief. It was hard for me to ignore that a number of their assertions were clearly correct. … The New Atheists were making hay of the fact that … faithful misapprehensions about nature were easily disproved by scientific discovery. Though I continued to attend church as usual, I privately wondered whether the entire enterprise might be rooted in nothing more than a misunderstanding. …

This steady diminishing of faith probably would have continued indefinitely, were it not for one brisk autumn afternoon in 2011 when, standing alone at a bus stop, I happened to witness the presence of God.

The unevenly paved lane where I waited was a quiet one-way street tucked away in a clutch of trees. I gazed down the road, preoccupied with other things—midterm exams, campus-club minutiae—and expecting the bus to trundle around the bend. A sudden icy wind tore around the corner instead, sweeping into gray branches and climbing ivy to send a spray of golden birch leaves spiraling into the sky, taking my breath along with them. And I knew that my soul was bared to something indescribably majestic and bracing—something that overwhelmed me with the unmistakable sensation of eye contact. What I saw, I felt, also saw me. Before I could rationally account for what had happened, a verse of poetry from John Ashbery came to mind:

A look of glass stops you

And you walk on shaken: was I the perceived?

That seemed to explain things perfectly, jarringly so. I was dazed in class as afternoon darkened to evening.

The latest evidence suggests that God most likely exists, argues a big recent book by Michel-Yves Bolloré, a computer engineer, and Olivier Bonnassies, a Catholic author. Tracts that aim to prove the reality of God are hardly novel. What makes this endeavor unique, say the French writers behind God, The Science, the Evidence: The Dawn of a Revolution, is the scientific nature of their work. Medieval monks toiling away at poetic meditations on the divine have their place, the authors allow, but their own arguments are meant to surpass mere abstract justifications for belief. Instead they assert that cutting-edge empirical proof observable in the natural world makes a firm case for God. With this, they strive for the ultimate alchemy, transforming faith into fact.

Bolloré and Bonnassies’s book is part of a burgeoning genre of apologetics that relies on relatively new scientific developments and theories, like quantum mechanics and cosmology, to make an ancient case. …

To imagine that one might find traces of the divine strewn throughout the universe, or that earthly methods of inquiry might uncover some of those signs, isn’t ridiculous. But this latest round of arguments in favor of intelligent design seems aimed mostly at establishing that God could or should exist within the rational frameworks we already employ. This is both weak grounds for belief and a fundamental misunderstanding of faith. The route to durable faith in God often runs not through logical proofs or the sciences, but through awe, wonder, and an attunement to the beauty and poetry of the world, natural and otherwise.

This was not always apparent to me. I came to this understanding through trial, error, and my own brushes with scientific rebuttals to the existence of God. …

After that brisk autumn afternoon, … I spent hours in my college library reading Saint Augustine, a foundational philosopher and theologian. Here I encountered another strange sensation: Every word I read felt like remembering something I had once known but somehow forgotten. This recalled an observation of Plato’s, who argued that the soul contains lost memories of the divine—that we are born knowing the truth of the universe, but forget it all when the mundanities of life get in the way. Maybe he had a point, I thought. And maybe the Christian Neoplatonists, Augustine among them, had some points as well. I contemplated this for a while before I realized that there wasn’t any sense in debating it with myself anymore. I knew what I felt, so I gave up and chose to believe.

I’m still sorting through the ramifications. In my years of working out exactly what I believe, I have been relieved to learn that faith does not in fact demand the surrender of logic and vigorous intellectual inquiry—a case Bolloré and Bonnassies convincingly bolster with numerous testimonials from award-winning scientists. Still, to trust in the existence of God is to accept both the appearance and the possibility of being naive or delusional. No accumulation of promising developments in our analytical understanding of the world can delay confrontation with that essential fact. Having faith is a vulnerable thing.

Bolloré and Bonnassies’s arguments are more likely to shore up the faith of wavering believers than to win new converts. This itself is no small thing. The authors may even be right about the growing evidence for the existence of God secreted away in the latest science. But their approach has a history of upsets. The only way to inoculate belief against that cycle of disruption is to treat faith as a decision that transcends scientific proof.

Michel-Yves Bollore & Olivier Bonnassies, God, The Science, the Evidence: The Dawn of a Revolution (2025):

After four years of research in partnership with over twenty scientists and esteemed experts, this book explores one of the most significant questions we face: the existence or non-existence of a creator God.

For more than four centuries, the scientific discoveries of Copernicus, Galileo, Darwin, and Freud created the impression that we could explain the workings of the Universe without the idea of a creator–God. By the beginning of the twentieth century, materialism had become the dominant theory of the time. And yet, with unexpected and astonishing force, the pendulum of science has swung back in the other direction, owing to a rapid succession of discoveries: the theory of relativity; quantum mechanics; the Big Bang; the theories of expansion, heat death, and fine-tuning of the universe. This newly acquired knowledge has upended the certainties of the twentieth century collective consciousness. Once the only acceptable theory, materialism is increasingly considered an irrational belief.

The authors of this highly readable book retrace the fascinating history of these scientific breakthroughs and offer a rigorous overview of the new proof of the existence of God. God: the Science and the Evidence is an invitation to reflect and debate the place of God in science.

Reviews:

• Catholic Insight
• C.S. Lewis Institute
• The Gospel Coalition
• Kirkus
• Minding the Campus
• National Catholic Register
• Wall Street Journal

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