“Many scientists are now driven to faith by their very work.”

Excerpt from: Lee Strobel: The Case For A Creator

Allan Rex Sandage, the greatest observational cosmologist in the world-who has deciphered the secrets of the stars, plumbed the mysteries of quasars, revealed the age of globular clusters, pinpointed the distances of remote galaxies, and quantified the universe’s expansion through his work at the Mount Wilson and Palomar observatories prepared to step onto the platform at a conference in Dallas.

Few scientists are as widely respected as this one-time protege to legendary astronomer Edwin Hubble. Sandage has been showered with prestigious honors from the American Astronomical Society, the Swiss Physical Society, the Royal Astronomical Society, and the Swedish Academy of Sciences, receiving astronomy’s equivalent of the Nobel Prize. The New York Times dubbed him the “Grand Old Man of Cosmology.”

As he approached the stage at this 1985 conference on science and religion, there seemed to be little doubt where he would sit. The discussion would be about the origin of the universe, and the panel would be divided among those scientists who believed in God and those who didn’t, with each viewpoint having its own side of the stage.

Many of the attendees probably knew that the ethnically Jewish Sandage had been a virtual atheist even as a child. Many others undoubtedly believed that a scientist of his stature must surely be skeptical about God. As Newsweek put it, “The more deeply scientists Sandage had been a virtual atheist even as a child. Many others undoubtedly believed that a scientist of his stature must surely be skeptical about God. As Newsweek put it, “The more deeply scientists see into the secrets of the universe, you’d expect, the more God would fade away from their hearts and minds.” So Sandage’s seat among the doubters was a given.

Then the unexpected happened. Sandage set the room abuzz by turning and taking a chair among the theists. Even more dazzling, in the context of a talk about the Big Bang and its philosophical implications, he disclosed publicly that he had decided to become a Christian at age fifty. The Big Bang, he told the rapt audience, was a supernatural event that cannot be explained within the realm of physics as we know it. Science had taken us to the First Event, but it can’t take us further to the First Cause. The sudden emergence of matter, space, time, and energy pointed to the need for some kind of transcendence. “It was my science that drove me to the conclusion that the world is much more complicated than can be explained by science,” he would later tell a reporter. “It was only through the supernatural that I can understand the mystery of existence.”

Sitting among the Dallas crowd that day, astounded by what he was hearing from Sandage, was a young geophysicist who had dropped by the conference almost by accident. Stephen Meyer had become a Christian through a philosophical quest for the meaning of life, but he hadn’t really explored the issue of whether science could provide evidential support for his faith. Now here was not only Sandage but also prominent Harvard astrophysicist Owen Gingerich concluding that the Big Bang seemed to fit best into a theistic worldview.

Later came a session on the origin of life, featuring Dean Kenyon, a biophysicist from San Francisco State University, who had co-authored an influential book asserting that the emergence of life might have been “biochemically predestined,” because of an inherent attraction between amino acids.’ This seemed to be the most promising explanation for the conundrum of how the first living cell could somehow self-assemble from nonliving matter. To Meyer’s surprise, Kenyon stepped to the podium and actually repudiated the conclusions of his own book, declaring that he had come to the point where he was critical of all naturalistic theories of origins. Due to the immense molecular complexity of the cell and the information-bearing properties of DNA, Kenyon now believed that the best evidence pointed toward a designer of life.

Instead of science and religion being at odds, Meyer heard specialists at the highest levels of achievement who said they were theists not in spite of the scientific evidence but because of it. As Sandage would say, “Many scientists are now driven to faith by their very work.”

Meyer was intrigued. It seemed to him that the theists had the intellectual initiative in each of the three issues discussed at the conference-the origin of the universe, the origin of life, and the nature of human consciousness. Even skeptics on the panels conceded the shortcomings of naturalistic explanations. Their main response was only to challenge the theists to provide “scientific answers” instead of merely invoking the idea of intelligent design. That objection didn’t make much sense to Meyer. “Maybe the world looks designed,” he mused, “because it really is designed!” As he walked away from the conference, Meyer was brimming with excitement over what he had experienced. Despite his background in science, he simply had been unaware of the powerful scientific findings that were supporting belief in God.