Recently I’ve been listening to The Universe (audio book) by John Brockman of Edge.org, a collection of essays from some incredibly smart scientists. The book is fascinating in its own right, but I was especially interested by how close cosmology gets to theology. In trying to peer into the origins of the universe, these brilliant scientists can’t help from getting a little philosophical, even theological.

One thing that stood out to me was that atheistic scientists have a very stubborn piece of thestic evidence to deal with. That piece of evidence is called the universe.

The toughest and most perplexing question they have to answer is: why is there something rather than nothing? Their most sophisticated scientific answers to this conundrum (string theory and multiverse, for example) suggest an even more complex order that preexisted or coexists with this one, thus only pushing back the question even further.

Atheistic cosmologists might accuse Christians of taking the easy way out by simply attributing to God the existence of the universe. But these scientists’ theories for how the universe began end up involving something that looks quite like God anyway—an order of reality that preexisted this one, possesses different dimensions, and is therefore unobservable, and that is significantly more complex.

The whole point of a scientific theory is to account for all the facts. When more facts are discovered, the theory must change to account for them. We cannot accept a scientific theory that tries to account for all the facts but denies the fact of facts.