At the beginning of the twentieth century, materialists could feel triumphant. The four preceding centuries had yielded a rich harvest of scientific discoveries that fortified the materialist worldview, drawing most scientists and philosophers to its side. These discoveries profoundly unsettled a Europe that had, until then, been Christian.
The first shock, administered by Copernicus and Galileo, showed the Earth to be no longer the center of the universe, with the sun no longer circling around it. Newton, Descartes, and Laplace revealed that the stars, rather than being pushed through the heavens by angels, were governed by laws of elegant mathematical simplicity. Buffon argued that the age of the earth dated back beyond any biblical account, establishing chronologies that spanned tens of thousands, even millions, of years. And man himself—long regarded as the handiwork of God—appeared in the works of Lamarck and Darwin as the product of an immense evolutionary history, humbled by his descent from an ape, or something very like one.
Taken together, these discoveries seemed to render the notion of a Creator God unnecessary; the universe could be explained without him. Around 1800, the French mathematician Laplace presented the mathematical equations governing our solar system to Emperor Napoleon. Napoleon reportedly asked him, “M. Laplace, they tell me you have written this large book on the system of the universe, and have never even mentioned its Creator?” Laplace is said to have replied, “I have no need for that hypothesis.” Whether true or embellished, the anecdote neatly captures the spirit of the age: If a Creator was no longer required to explain the world, it was for a very simple reason—he just didn’t exist!
Others went further, arguing not only that God did not exist, but that belief in God was harmful. Religion was the opium of the people, as Marx wrote, and the product of humanity’s alienation and neuroses, as Freud would later argue. If these ancient beliefs could be abandoned, humanity would at last achieve prosperity, knowledge, and freedom. Sexual liberation was placed at the forefront of this promise, with visions of radiant tomorrows close behind. Science, it was asserted, belonged to serious and enlightened minds, whereas faith was the province of the elderly, murmured in half-empty churches.
It was almost inevitable that such scientific developments would give rise to new philosophies, which in turn found political expression in a wave of socialist revolutions that declared religion reactionary. These movements swept through Europe before spreading across the world: in Russia with Lenin in 1917, in Italy with Mussolini in 1920, in Germany with Hitler in 1930, in Spain with the Civil War in 1936, and later in China with Mao Zedong in 1948, to name only the most prominent examples.
Scientists and philosophers of the age believed that science would continue indefinitely along this same path. Materialism, they thought, had become the very foundation of science itself. Across Europe, many Christians, humiliated, submitted; many abandoned religion entirely. This is why what has followed in the world of science has been so unforeseen, even scandalous. For science has undergone a profound reversal. In the span of a single century, a cascade of discoveries cracked the very foundations of materialism. The book I coauthored with Olivier Bonnassies, God, the Science, the Evidence, tells the story of those discoveries and the materialists’ response to them. It has once again become difficult, if not impossible, to explain the universe without hypothesizing a Creator. The Clockmaker has returned.
Four upheavals have shaken the very foundations of materialism, though the public remains largely unaware of them. The first arrived in the mid-nineteenth century, with the birth of a new science: thermodynamics. In formulating laws governing energy, heat, and work, physicists believed they were addressing practical problems of engines and efficiency. But they uncovered something far more consequential.
The second law of thermodynamics revealed that closed systems move irreversibly toward disorder. Light a candle, and you begin with a well-organized system: a cylinder of wax and a fresh wick. Within a few hours of burning, that orderly system disintegrates into light, heat, gases, and residue. The process cannot run in reverse without external intervention. Applied to the universe, this principle carries unsettling implications. If entropy is always increasing, the cosmos cannot cycle endlessly through repetition. It must be moving steadily toward an ultimate end—a state physicists came to call the “heat death” of the cosmos. Time acquired a direction.
The implications were profound. A universe governed by entropy cannot be eternal in both directions. Disorder increases into the future; order increases into the past. But order cannot increase without limit. The logic of entropy implies a beginning—a condition of maximal order from which the universe began its irreversible descent. The past, like the future, was no longer open-ended. Even our own sun reflects this principle. Born roughly four billion years ago, it is a finite reservoir of energy. It shines because it is slowly consuming its fuel. In another five billion years, the fuel will be exhausted, and the solar system will cease to exist.
The same fate awaits every star. Over immense spans of time, the lights of the universe will fade one by one, leaving a cosmos that is dark, cold, and almost empty. Matter, as we can see it now, will no longer exist. The density of matter will be diluted to such a degree that there will be only elementary particles here and there, approximately one per cubic meter. This trajectory is not conjectural; it is broadly accepted within contemporary physics. What troubled many materialist thinkers was not simply the solar system’s eventual death, but what that fate implied. If the universe is running down, the question arises whether it was once set in motion. Thermodynamics thus reopened an old metaphysical question, which science had hoped to outgrow: Why is there something rather than nothing?
In revealing the inexorable arrow of time, thermodynamics quietly disproved the vision of the cosmos that had long sustained materialism: the belief in endless existence, matter continuing forever. For centuries, the universe had been imagined as infinite, self-sustaining, and eternal. Entropy replaced that picture with one of finitude, direction, and decay. It is striking that this discovery remains largely absent from popular consciousness, eclipsed by later cosmological theories such as the Big Bang.
The second upheaval arrived in the early twentieth century, with the discovery that the universe is expanding. Space itself grows everywhere, and as a result the distances among galaxies are constantly increasing. Think of a child blowing up a balloon: If you mark a few points on the balloon’s surface with a pen, those marks will move farther apart as the balloon expands. What was long assumed to be static revealed itself as dynamic, evolving, and—most importantly—finite in age. The equations of general relativity, developed by Einstein and extended by Friedmann and Lemaître, pointed to a striking conclusion: The universe had not always existed. Space and time themselves appeared to have emerged from a single originating event, now known as the Big Bang.
This idea was resisted fiercely. Why did the prospect of an absolute beginning of the universe provoke such opposition? Because an eternal universe had long been one of materialism’s first principles. Nearly the entire world accepts the principle attributed to Parmenides: ex nihilo nihil fit, “from nothing, nothing comes.” If the universe truly began to exist, then either it arose from nothing, which violates this principle, or it was brought into being by something not bound by the universe’s temporal limits. Either the universe itself is eternal, or something eternal exists beyond it. If matter and energy had always existed, the question of their origin could be set aside. An absolute beginning reopened the debate, restoring a metaphysical problem that modern science had hoped to leave behind.
In the twentieth century, various political movements—from Marxist regimes to militant secular nationalisms—sought to marginalize religion and construct societies on the basis of explicitly materialist assumptions. Brilliant scientists such as Perepyolkin, Bronstein, Musselius, Eropkin, and Numerov were killed. Einstein, Born, Stern, Gamow, and Tamarkin escaped just in time.
In the West, opposition took subtler forms. Georges Lemaître’s theory of the “primeval atom,” introduced in 1931, was ridiculed, in part because it seemed to lend support to theological claims about creation. Building on Einstein’s equations, Lemaître demonstrated that a static universe was impossible and that space itself was undergoing permanent expansion. If the universe is expanding today, he reasoned, then in the distant past it must have been far smaller, denser, and hotter. Tracing this expansion backward led to a remarkable conclusion: The entire universe must once have been concentrated in an extremely small state— “a universe contained in a pinhead,” as he described it—which he called the primeval atom. From this initial state, space and time began to unfold.
For decades, this idea remained controversial, tolerated as at best a mathematical curiosity. Over time, however, evidence accumulated. The turning point came in 1964, when the accidental discovery of cosmic microwave background radiation by Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson confirmed that the universe had indeed once been hot, dense, and radically unlike its present state. Wilson and Penzias were working on a different problem when their large antenna kept detecting a persistent background noise coming from every direction in the sky. After painstaking checks eliminated other possibilities, it became clear that the signal was real: a faint, uniform radiation filling the universe. This was the echo of the Big Bang—exactly the phenomenon predicted by Lemaître’s theory.
This discovery transformed cosmology. The Big Bang ceased to be a speculative model and became the dominant cosmological account. Even then, however, resistance did not disappear. Scientists worked hard to formulate alternative theories that might preserve an eternal universe in some form. Oscillating and cyclic cosmologies—most notably the so-called Big Crunch Theory—proposed that cosmic expansion might reverse and allow the universe to collapse and be reborn, again and again in endless sequence.
This possibility was ultimately ruled out by observation. Measurements of distant galaxies showed that the expansion of the universe was not slowing, as the Big Crunch scenario required, but accelerating. Astronomers detected the acceleration by observing the Doppler effect produced by the increasing rate at which galaxies were moving away from one another. This discovery eliminated the prospect of a future cosmic collapse and further strengthened the Big Bang model as the leading account of the universe’s history.
The third upheaval was subtler but perhaps even more astonishing: the discovery that the universe is finely tuned for the emergence of structure and life. As physicists refined their understanding of the fundamental constants of nature—the strengths of the forces that govern matter, the masses of elementary particles, the speed of light, and the rate of cosmic expansion—they encountered an extraordinary and unexpected fact. The universe is governed by about thirty constants, such as gravity, the weak and strong nuclear forces among particles, and the speed of light. These numbers determine how the laws of physics operate: how strongly particles attract or repel one another, how matter forms atoms and molecules, how stars ignite and burn, how galaxies take shape.
What surprised physicists was not simply that these constants exist, but how delicately balanced they are. Even very, very small changes in any of these numbers would have produced a universe that is radically different from our own—and almost certainly incapable of supporting life. If gravity were marginally stronger, the universe might have collapsed shortly after its birth. If it were weaker by even a micro-amount, matter might never have gathered into stars and galaxies.
The same sensitivity appears in the rate of cosmic expansion set in motion at the beginning of the universe—a value known to us with extraordinary precision. If the fifteenth digit after the decimal point were increased by one, matter would have dispersed too quickly for stars or planets to form. If it were reduced by one, gravity would have halted the expansion, and the universe would have collapsed before large-scale structures could emerge.
With modern mathematical models and powerful computers, physicists can explore such possibilities directly. By adjusting these constants, even by extraordinarily small amounts, they repeatedly obtain sterile universes without stable matter, long-lived stars, or complex chemistry. The cosmos balances on a knife’s edge.
Once again, materialist explanations followed these discoveries, including the hypothesis of a multitude of parallel universes, each with different physical parameters. The so-called multiverse theory suggests that we happen to inhabit the universe that, by chance, possessed the correct parameters for the emergence of life. These theories remain controversial, however, because they have no observable implications and therefore hold no level of validation.
In 2023, Thomas Hertog, the last scientist to work closely with Stephen Hawking, laid out Hawking’s final theory on the “origin of time.” Hertog explains that the question that obsessed Hawking was “the mysterious biophilia of the Universe,” the astonishing fact of the fine-tuning of the laws of the universe. According to Hawking, as quoted by Hertog, “it’s obvious that the Multiverse doesn’t explain anything.” Hertog even asserts that for Hawking, “scientific explanations like the idea of the Multiverse or a theory of everything” are “dead.”
The fine-tuning problem did not compel belief in God. But it made the alternative—that order emerged from nothing but chance—harder to accept without qualification. The materialist astrophysicist Fred Hoyle was a fierce atheist who had coined the term “Big Bang” to mock Georges Lemaître. This evidence was compelling enough to force him to reconsider his position and to acknowledge publicly the necessity of a creator God.
The fourth upheaval emerged from biology, with the discovery of DNA and the extraordinary informational complexity of living systems. When James Watson and Francis Crick identified the structure of DNA in 1953, they revealed that life is not merely chemically intricate, but coded. At the heart of every cell lies a system for storing, transmitting, and executing instructions—an arrangement unlike anything previously encountered in the natural world.
This discovery quietly altered the terms of an older debate. Darwin had speculated that the first living cell might have arisen by chance, in what he famously described as a “warm little pond” at the foot of a volcano. The molecular biology that followed made clear just how implausible such a simple explanation was. The informational density of DNA is billions of times greater than that of a modern mobile phone, a device no one would ever imagine appeared “by accident” in a pool of warm water.
DNA did not overturn evolutionary theory, of course. Natural selection explains how organisms diversify and adapt, once self-replicating systems exist. What it does not explain is how such systems arise in the first place. The question of life’s origin—how matter crosses the threshold into coded, self-replicating order—remains distinct from the question of how life evolves thereafter.
Materialism did not collapse in the face of this evidence. Once again, it adapted. Hypotheses proliferated. But the earlier confidence that life could be explained as a by-product of chemistry began to erode. The difficulty was acknowledged by some of materialism’s most committed defenders.
George Wald, a Nobel Prize–winning biologist and outspoken atheist, conceded that spontaneous generation was an untenable theory, though he refused to accept the possibility of creation:
The reasonable view was to believe in spontaneous generation; the only alternative, to believe in a single, primary act of supernatural creation. There is no third position. For this reason many scientists a century ago chose to regard the belief in spontaneous generation as a “philosophical necessity.” It is a symptom of the philosophical poverty of our time that this necessity is no longer appreciated. Most modern biologists, having reviewed with satisfaction the downfall of the spontaneous generation hypothesis, yet unwilling to accept the alternative belief in special creation, are left with nothing. I think a scientist has no choice but to approach the origin of life through a hypothesis of spontaneous generation.
Wald’s candor captured the unease provoked by the new biology. The origin of life now appeared unsolved, but certainly resistant to explanation in materialist terms.
These discoveries reopen a question modernity believed it had settled. The universe appears contingent, intelligible, ordered in time, and miraculously hospitable to life. These are empirical facts. Their significance lies not in what they compel us to believe, but in what they make difficult to dismiss. In less than a century, materialism increasingly resembles a creed that persists less by argument than by blindness to facts. Few are eager to abandon it, for materialism remains uniquely suited to a vision of human freedom unbounded by purpose, judgment, or design.
History, however, has its own irony. The very science that once sought to dethrone the Creator has now traced the outline of his hand. Materialism, born of reason’s apparent triumph, ends in unreason. The circle has closed.
