Scientific Demonstration Of The Existence Of (A) God

Today I am in the mood for something light, a simple, uncomplicated topic that is easy to understand and solve.

I want to talk about the existence of God.

And give a rigorously scientific answer to the question everyone has always asked: does God exist?

Well, actually, not everyone wonders. Religious people, for example, have no doubts. Atheists don’t either. But I think the vast majority stands, as I do, in the middle, perplexed, lacking the faith of the former, and the conviction of the latter.

I find it surprising that the favorite argument of atheists to deny the existence of a creator is scientific evidence. According to this thought, all our knowledge about nature and the laws that regulate its functioning would prove the non-existence of a supernatural being. And it is recalled that the belief in gods was born from the human need to explain phenomena that, at the time, could not be understood: lightning, rain, wind...

The church, for its part, is in the diametrically opposite position: the truth is in the Word, revealed and unexplained, and not in the scientific investigation, apparently aimed and intended only to try to prove that there are no Gods Almighty anywhere.

It comes the suspicion that science and religion, instead of pursuing the search for truth, are concerned primarily to ensure and protect the privileges of their respective castes against the attack of those of others.

If there was collaboration, and more open-mindedness (on both sides), perhaps better results could be achieved.

The theories on the origins of life and the evolution of the species are one of the most heated battlegrounds in the dispute between faith and reason: the first denies their evidence, the second (and I do not know why) considers them irrefutable evidence of the non-existence of any creator.

Instead, it is easy to see that, together with the second principle of thermodynamics, they unequivocally demonstrate the existence of an entity external to man that, in some way, has shaped life on Earth in the forms that currently exist.

We more or less all know, at least from hearsay, what the first, aforementioned theories say.

Life, as we know it today, and of which we feel, modesty aside, the leading elements, has developed over the millennia through a long and complicated succession of reactions that, from simple elements, have produced increasingly complex compounds.

This would be true in a first phase, which according to some theories would have led to the formation of organic molecules from inorganic elements, in environmental conditions no longer existing on Earth (according to others, however, life has always been part of the universe, and in its most basic form would be distributed in space in different ways - meteorites, gas, dust ... spaceships); even more true in the next one, that from extremely simple and “homemade” life forms (bacteria) led to the constitution of more and more evolved and better-organized organisms: algae, mollusks, and so on up to our mighty Schwarzenegger. Be sure to keep this word in mind: “organized”; or “complex”, or “ordered”, in a certain sense equivalent terms.

And this, at the moment, is what is accepted by the scientific community, as opposed to the story of the “fiat lux”, of the seven days, and Adam and Eve. An allegory, clearly, to which someone claims to believe to the letter.

I imagine there will be fewer people who are aware of the three principles of thermodynamics, and particularly the second one.

This principle argues, in the simplest terms possible, that in any closed system any process always evolves spontaneously (second term to remember: “spontaneously”, i.e. without any intervention from outside) in the sense of more disorder in the system itself (third term to keep in mind, “disorder,” which then is the most important keyword of all). To express this, scientists use a difficult word (what can you do, they have fun like that. Maybe to give themselves more tone. Like certain Catholics, who prefer to speak in Latin even when addressing messages to people that these people should be able to understand). The word in question is “entropy”, which would represent a measure of the disorder of the universe, and they declaim the principle saying that “entropy is a function not decreasing in time”. Clear, isn´t it?

Well, I have said this for the sake of completeness, but it is better to refer to the previous, simpler enunciation.

So, I repeat, in a way, I hope, even more understandable: in nature, whatever happens, it happens spontaneously only if the result involves a greater disorder than the starting situation. Otherwise, to make it happen, it is necessary to intervene in some way from the outside.

To clarify with a practical example, this means that, for example, if you want ice, it is useless to put a glass of water on a table and wait for it to solidify (unless you are in some cozy place with sub-zero temperatures, but, in this case, I don’t know what you can do with an ice cube).

Heat always passes spontaneously from the higher temperature body to the lower temperature body, never the other way around.

Never, by itself, on a hot day in August, our glass of water will give the surrounding environment the heat necessary to cool and solidify. If anything, we observe it quietly, it is the surrounding environment that gives it, without any intervention by anyone, part of its heat, transforming its content of fresh water (or orange juice, or coke) in an undrinkable soup.

This, simply, because ice has a more orderly structure than the corresponding amount of water (and, generally, any body or liquid colder than the same body at a higher temperature): in the first case, the molecules are arranged in a certain place and they stay there quiet without moving (well, more or less), while in the liquid are free to move as they want and position themselves where it happens (condition of greater disorder).

To achieve our goal, we will have to intervene from the outside, and that is to put that water in a freezer. Freezer that will do some work on our water to remove the necessary heat, but that will throw it into the environment added to the heat produced by itself to function, so, in the end, the overall “heat” of the system (environment plus freezer plus glass of water), and therefore its disorder, will be increased. Don’t believe the Tom and Jerry cartoons where they open the refrigerator door to freeze the room and skate on it, it doesn’t work that way.

Try it to believe it.

Another consequence of this principle is that we unconsciously apply it when we play the Superenalotto.

Who here has tried to play the “1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6” sequence?

I bet no one.

I imagine that anyone, of you, will say: such a sequence will never come out.

This is incorrect because there is no reason why it should not come out. Rather, it is more exact to think that such an ordered sequence of numbers has a lower probability of coming out than a more disordered sequence, and this is correct, and reflects exactly what the thermodynamic principle we are talking about means.

It is for this reason that, when choosing numbers, we typically tend to distribute them in the full range of values between one and ninety (committing, however, the same error, if the distribution is too “uniform”), and that, if we take a pre-filled coupon, we frown if there are two or even three numbers too close together, or simply in the same ten, although experience teaches that such an event happens quite frequently (again, we try to put an order in the disorder we are looking for).

The concept is always the same: greater clutter, greater likelihood of occurrence.

But if “1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6” were to come out, would the principle of entropy have failed?

No, because the statement speaks of a “non-decreasing” function in time, i.e. that, over time, the total disorder of the universe can not decrease (only increase, or, in special circumstances and quite improbable - though not impossible - remain unchanged). The exit of this sequence would mean the occurrence of an ordered situation as one already possible in the beginning (since this, and other equally ordered combinations are already existing in the set of possible combinations), so the resulting disorder would not decrease (it can not!), but would remain equal to the pre-existing one.

If by absurdity a more orderly combination than those foreseeable at the beginning would be obtained, then we would have a result with more order, and therefore a decrease of disorder in the universe, but such a combination does not exist. For example, a sequence that is more ordered than those possible on six numbers would be “1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7”, because seven ordered numbers are more ordered than six ordered numbers.

But, in the Superenalotto, such a sequence will never come out, simply because the numbers drawn are six! And our entropy is saved.

But get back to the evolution of the species.

According to those theories, I said, the life we know is the result of a series of transformations that, from simple, single-celled organisms, has led to a highly specialized arrangement of different cells to form different organs, organs assembled in turn to build organisms according to an organization (forgive these repetitions, in science, is not always easy to be stylistically correct) more and more complex: that is, we have gone from a situation of relative disorder to an astounding engineering of the various components for the generation of a highly sophisticated structure.

In practice, from an original situation of disorder to a gradually more orderly organization.

And this, by the second principle of thermodynamics, cannot have happened spontaneously, because there would have been, with the passage of time, a decrease of entropy, of general disorder.

And this, again, means that, to have taken place, the evolution of life needed an intervention outside the Earth system.

Conclusion: either scientists abandon the theory of evolution ( with great displeasure of the church), or the second principle of thermodynamics, or they must add two and two and arrive at the result above. That is the existence of a god.

Or, at least, of something conceptually very similar to what man has always called god.

Of course, the above shows that a god exists, but nothing says, nor could it, about who it is. It could be called Jehovah, Allah, Buddha, Odin... God. It could have been extraterrestrial creatures who had nothing better to do (but then the problem would shift to “their” origins).

This yes is a matter of faith.

Let the various religions spar with each other, but not science and faith.

Despite the above considerations, however, I still belong to that center of doubters, squeezed between believers and atheists, who can’t decide yet. Because to have demonstrated that something exists, but not to have any certain information about it, is more or less equivalent to not having demonstrated anything.

The event of my birth in a traditionally (not institutionally, I want to clarify, I do not want to create some hornet’s nest) catholic country, the education received at an age when the critical sense is lacking, and you tend to swallow whatever they offer you, and historical studies on a character named Jesus Christ, would make me lean towards this type of faith.

But if I look at the world, what happens in it, and not only because of man (a true masterpiece, Lord, congratulations!), if I think about what are called laws of nature and establish that the survival of a being depends on the overpowering of another (couple lion-gazelle, or big fish-small fish, or even capitalist-worker, criminal-common man, elected-voter), I find it tremendously difficult to accept that all this has been created by a good and merciful God.

It seems more plausible to see it all as the work of an evil devil in the mood for fun.

(This writing develops an episode, however marginal, of a science fiction novel, “Perfect Killer”, to which I’m still working. Necessary clarification to avoid that, in the auspicious - at least on my part - case of completion and publication, a possible reading of it, added to a vague memory of this article, could lead to thinking of plagiarism).