[Dion]

Does God exist? Can science really disprove that?

Aczel says he wrote the book to defend the integrity of science. “I've talked to so many scientists, interviewing them for all my books,” he says. “I've studied science in such depth. To me, to say there's no God and the proof [of that] is science is just not right. That's not what science is about, either.”

Science can’t disprove the existence of God, Aczel says, nor should it try. Likewise theology can’t prove the existence of God. You can believe in science and you can believe in God at the same time, he says, “unless there will come a time when somebody will give us proof that there is no God. Then I would be the first to accept it.”

In fact, argues Aczel, the more science teaches us about the world, the more we see that there is structure in the universe that is very unlikely to occur on its own. “It seems so intricate, so complex, so well structured,” he says. “Just because we learn about it doesn’t mean that there is no God.”

Supporting that argument, Aczel points out that if any one of a multitude of parameters was even slightly different, the universe could not exist as we know it. For example, if dark energy had a different value, the universe would have exploded faster than galaxies could have formed, or it would have collapsed on itself before galaxies had a chance to form.

Aczel cites physicist Roger Penrose, who calculated that the emergence of our universe had a probability so close to zero as to be unimaginable. All of the these parameters had to be within an unbelievably small range for the universe to have taken shape as it has. “We are just on the knife-edge of existence,” says physicist Leonard Susskind of Stanford University. So how do we explain this?

“There are are two ways,” Aczel says. “One is to say, ‘Well, [the physical properties of the universe] were made that way by God or whatever you want to call it — some power of nature created them that way. The other is to say, ‘Look, there's an infinite multiverse. We can't live in one of the many universes where the parameters are wrong. So, we live here, because the parameters for us are right.' That's why we ‘choose’ to live in this universe, so to speak.”

“Now this gets to a matter of faith,” he adds. “The multiverse is a matter of faith, because we don't know about other universes except our own. So when scientists talk about things like Boltzmann Brains out in the universe, to me it’s like angels!”

http://www.pri.org/stories/2014-04-2...eally-disprove