Return of the God Hypothesis (REVIEW)

Challenging, questioning, and engrossing best describes Stephen C. Meyer’s book Return of the God Hypothesis (HarperCollins). In his tour de force, he explores different theories about the biological and cosmological origins of our universe.

In the opening chapter he explains why Judeo-Christian theology marked the genesis of modern science. According to philosopher Holmes Rolston III, “It was monotheism that launched the coming of physical science.” The early luminaries of physics, Newton, Galileo, Kepler, and Copernicus were devout believers in God, but it was Robert Boyle, the pioneer of modern chemistry who is credited with being the father of intelligent design.

The Biblical proverb, “there is no new thing under the sun” repudiates the notion that Boyle was the father of intelligent design. One need only read the first sentence of Genesis, “In the beginning God created the Heaven and the Earth” to learn it was the Israelites who initiated and spread the intelligent design creation narrative to the rest of the world. That revelation led to the rejection of the pagan belief that an assortment of competing gods created the sun, the moon, the stars and everything else that comprised the known universe of the ancients.

Meyer traces how we morphed from the Israelites’ idea that man is the result of a purposeful and a supernatural process with humankind in mind, to the contention of atheists like George Gaylord Simpson, Douglas Futuyma, and  Stephen Hawking, “that emergence of mankind is the result of a purposeless natural process that did not have him in mind.”

In addition to mind-bending theories, there are some surprises contained within the covers of this book. For example, in 1848 an unlikely source weighed in on the cosmological debate. It was not an astronomer; it was the poet Edgar Allan Poe. Surprisingly, he solved a riddle known as Olbers’s Paradox to the satisfaction of the scientific community, which had been mystified by it for decades. Poe demystified the paradox which posed the question “why is the night sky dark, despite the assumption that an infinite, static universe filled with stars should be uniformly bright.” His explanation, as explained in the text, is mesmerizing.

As expected, in a book dealing with cosmology and physics, Albert Einstein looms large, as well as a collection of other notable science luminaries. They are prominently featured throughout the book along with their theories of space, time, gravitation, quarks, particles, waves, photons, black holes, and dark matter. It is packed with questions which have yet to be definitively answered, such as was creation the result of a Big Bang, as was first proposed by Belgian priest, physicist, and astronomer Georges Lemaître in 1927, or was everything created from nothing “creatio ex nihilo,” a notion entertained by a nucleus of credible scientists. Meyer argues that intelligent design is not out of the question as the cause of all creation. Even Einstein and Darwin entertained the idea of some sort of intelligent design, but neither one attributed it to God.

You need not be a physicist, cosmologist, or philosopher to find this professionally researched and documented opus, Return of the God Hypothesis, riveting and fascinating. It is infused with a generous array of theories, hypotheses and scientific insights, all of which attempt to answer that age-old question, “how did we get here?”