Many atheists, including eminent scientist Richard Dawkins, believe religion is antithetical to science.
But a blockbuster study reporting evidence of ancient traces of hemoglobin, a key protein in blood, encrusted into the famed ‘Shroud of Turin’ contradicts this ‘black and white’ vision of science and spirituality.
Believed by many to be the burial cloth used to entomb Jesus Christ, the shroud has long been regarded a hoax perpetrated by medieval painters — despite a growing body of X-ray and chemical analysis suggesting the artifact may be genuine.
DailyMail.com has heard from scientists in other fields whose life-long pursuit of empirical truth in the lab has led them to ‘believe in God as the author of creation.’
The ‘Shroud of Turin’ (pictured) has captivated the imagination of historians, church chiefs, skeptics and Catholics since it was first made public in the 1350s. A growing body of X-ray and chemical analysis suggests the artifact may be a genuinely unique, 2000-year-old burial cloth
Experts found another type of blood that was shed while Jesus was still alive. It also contained signs of radiation, which Christians believe was released when Jesus rose from the dead
British filmmaker and self-described former atheist David Rolfe has been documenting the Shroud of Turin since 1978 – decades of scientific research which have slowly come to convince him the cloth is authentic
Their comments provide modern echoes of Albert Einstein’s famous declaration that ‘God does not play dice with the universe’ and Charles Darwin’s own belief in God.
Dr Denis Alexander, a biomedical researcher and past chair of molecular immunology at the UK-based Babraham Institute in Cambridge, told DailyMail.com his decades in immunology has only increased his belief in an omnipotent creator.
‘I see the sheer complexity of the immune system as truly staggering,’ Dr Alexander explained.
‘For sure, as an evolutionary biologist, I see that complexity as the outcome of millions of years of evolution,’ the scientist clarified. ‘But at the same time the finely-tuned immune system reflects the intelligibility of the universe we inhabit.’
‘The fact that we have a system that can, in principle, defend ourselves against pretty much any invader that we might encounter during life on this planet,’ he said, ‘is remarkable.’
‘It looks like a rational universe with a rational Mind behind it.’
Dr Alexander co-edited a book of essays written by scientists who ultimately came to find Dawkins’ critiques of religion lacking, after their own bouts of atheism: Coming to Faith Through Dawkins: 12 Essays on the Pathway from New Atheism to Christianity.
He found examples, across disciplines, of fellow researchers whose rational exploration of the laws undergirding our universe brought them closer to God.
But two emerging scientific discoveries stood out to him as the most compelling.
The Universe’s Physical Constants
Beginning in the late 1970s, cosmologists Bernard Carr and Martin Rees became increasingly aware of a disquieting fact.
The statistical chances that the universe’s so-called ‘physical constants’ would be exactly what they are is astonishingly low.
In other words, our universe is uncannily well-suited to creating and fostering life.
Physicists were left with two options to resolve this mathematical case for a created universe, as Carr put it: ‘If you don’t want God, you’d better have a multiverse.’
In other words, it would require an infinitude of other random universes, with their own random ‘physical constants,’ for our own to be attributable to happenstance.
Above, the intricate network of gas and dust in spiral galaxy NGC 7496 as imaged by NASA. Cosmologists Bernard Carr and Martin Rees were among the first to argue that even slight changes to the universe’s physical constants would prevent planets and stars from forming
Physicists were left with two options to resolve the growing mathematical case for a created universe. As Carr put it: ‘If you don’t want God, you’d better have a multiverse.’ Above, a timeline from ‘big bang’ to present, in which the universe’s ‘fine tuning’ gave rise to the cosmos
Astrobiologist Dr Caleb Scharf at NASA Ames, and many others who study space, call this conundrum over all these unlikely ‘cosmic coincidences,’ the phenomenon of ‘fine tuning’ or the ‘anthropic principle.’
But given that, as Dr Scharf admits in his book The Copernicus Complex, we have no ‘direct evidence for there being a multiverse,’ Dr Alexander said he’s happier to argue in favor of the former option.
‘Whether or not we understand some aspect of that existence at the scientific level is really irrelevant to our belief in God,’ he told DailyMail.com.
‘But when we do understand it scientifically, this just increases our awe at the amazing way that everything is put together in this intelligible universe,’ Dr Alexander opined, ‘in which God is the Author.’
‘Convergence’ in Evolution
‘Just as there is a fine-tuning of the physical constants that render the existence of this anthropic universe possible,’ according to Dr Alexander, ‘so in the past few decades it has become apparent that there is also a biological fine-tuning.’
Biologists and other academics, including Cambridge paleontologist Dr Simon Conway Morris, have called this ‘evolutionary convergence’ — or the phenomena of different species, worlds apart, evolving along parallel trajectories.
‘Eyes have evolved more than twenty times independently,’ Dr Alexander noted.
Camera eyes, for example, evolved in both humans and octopus species despite an evolutionary path that split more than 550 million years ago, from a share ancestor whose only vision was a simple ‘pigment spot ocelli.’
Similarly, compound eyes, like those of many insects, evolved independently at least four times.
Above, an young ‘larval’ North Pacific Giant Octopus – in a prize-winning photo from the 2021 International Photography Awards. Octopus species, like humans, other vertebrates and some spiders, are understood to have evolved their ‘camera-type’ eyes independently of one another
Above, a close-up of a human’s ‘camera-type’ eye – which is similar to those from many octopus species. Like other land animals who share this kind of eye, human eyes are more flat and have also evolved with eyelids to help move moisture around the eye to aid with land-based vision
‘Evolution is not a chance process, it is channeled along certain paths,’ he said. ‘The same bit of anatomy or the same biochemical pathway keep evolving in independent evolutionary lineages.’
‘All this is highly consistent with God as the Author who has intentions and purposes for the whole drama of life,’ Dr Alexander noted, emphasizing that the phrase ‘consistent with’ is not that same as saying ‘proof of.’
Dr Morris similarly draws a clear line between ‘intelligent design’ theories and what is meant by ‘evolutionary congruence.’
‘Far from evolution being random and inherently directionless, perhaps it speaks to a deeply ordered world,’ he said.
‘How is it,’ he asked, ‘that our world is so ordered that we can understand it?’
Faith and Reason
For the 13th century Italian monk St. Thomas Aquinas, ‘To one who has faith, no explanation is necessary. To one without faith, no explanation is possible.’
The theologian gained renown to the present day for his impassioned case that religious beliefs and materialist, evidence-based rational inquiry were not themselves irreconcilable.
In more recent times, the late sociologist Rodney Stark has argued that it was this very perspective articulated by European Christians like Aquinas that made the conditions for the Enlightenment and the scientific revolution possible.
Christianity’s belief in an orderly and rational universe created by one God, and its belief that humanity was made in God’s image, he argued, made the quest to rationally understand that world appear feasible and worth undertaking.
The 13th century Italian monk St. Thomas Aquinas (above), argued there was no contradiction between faith and rationality
‘Theological assumptions unique to Christianity explain why science was born only in Christian Europe,’ according to Stark.
‘Contrary to the received wisdom, religion and science not only were compatible,’ he wrote in his 2003 book For the Glory of God, ‘they were inseparable.’
The view is, of course, world’s apart from Dawkins disdain for faith as a replacement for science, as in his common refrain: ‘I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world.’
That sort of belief in God is one that Dr Alexander disagrees with as well.
‘I believe in God as the Author of creation,’ the immunologist told DailyMail.com.
‘This concept of God as Author which I’m outlining is diametrically opposite to the idea of a ‘god-of-the-gaps’ — a ‘god’ that lazy people use to try and plug their present scientific ignorance,’ he said.
This version of belief, in his opinion, like Aquinas before him, shows no gap conflict between the human states of faith and reason.
‘The job of scientists,’ as Dr Alexander put it, ‘is to explore this created order and therefore understand how God does things with more and more complete explanations at the scientific level.’
