Is God real? What science and philosophy can actually tell us

Suppose we discovered tomorrow that the universe had a creator. What else would we know?

Would that creator be conscious? Still exist? Know that you exist? Care whether you suffer?

The discovery, by itself, would not answer those questions. Yet each one changes what the claim means, and what might count as evidence for it.

That is the first difficulty with asking whether God is real. An ultimate explanation for existence and a loving being who hears prayers involve different claims. Someone might believe they describe the same reality, but connecting them takes additional reasoning.

The scientific and philosophical sources examined for this article do not supply a conclusive yes or no. They supply arguments with disputed premises, physical findings with limits, and experiences whose interpretation is contested. That is an assessment of what these sources establish, not a declaration that nobody could have knowledge of God. The disagreement is visible in the scholarly literature on cosmological arguments and religious experience.

Here, the focus is on a creator and a personal God. That leaves out much of the variety within religious traditions, but it makes the question specific enough to investigate.

Start with the existence of the universe. Why is there anything at all?

It is tempting to answer with the Big Bang. But describing the universe's early development does not automatically explain why reality exists. NASA's account of the early universe acknowledges that scientists do not know what preceded or powered the proposed period of cosmic inflation. A physical account can reach an unresolved question without identifying a divine cause. NASA: Early Universe.

Philosophical arguments about existence go further than filling a missing chapter in cosmology. In the thirteenth century, Thomas Aquinas argued from features such as change and causal dependence toward a first source. His project concerned what makes things exist and change, not merely what happened at the earliest moment. Aquinas, Summa Theologiae.

The familiar retort, who created God?, does not automatically defeat that project. Arguments from contingency distinguish dependent things from a proposed necessary reality: something that does not depend on anything else. The dispute is whether that distinction establishes such a reality, and whether it must possess divine attributes. Critics question the demand for an ultimate explanation and the move from that explanation to God. Cosmological Argument.

Even granting an ultimate explanation would leave further work before arriving at someone you could pray to.

A different route begins with the universe's capacity to support life. Change physical parameters in theoretical models and you can change whether familiar structures are possible. This is the territory of cosmic fine-tuning.

Physicist Luke Barnes's review argues that life-permitting possibilities occupy a very restricted part of the possibilities he considers. Physicist Fred Adams's review identifies substantial ranges that can support astrophysical structures, including possibilities unlike our universe. Their work makes sweeping claims about the tiniest change destroying every possibility of life difficult to defend. Barnes's review, Adams's review.

There is another complication. Finding a narrow habitable range does not, on its own, tell us how likely that range is. For that, we would need an account of which values could occur and how probable they are. Adams explicitly identifies uncertainty about those underlying distributions. Hypothetical universes are not lottery tickets whose odds we have measured. Adams, discussion of probability.

Supporters of design argue that a life-permitting universe makes more sense if an intelligence intended life. Other proposals invoke deeper physical laws or many universes with different conditions. Evaluating those explanations requires further assumptions, including what a designer would want. The technical term fine-tuning does not itself establish a fine-tuner. Fine-Tuning.

Science becomes useful wherever a claim supplies consequences we can investigate. The National Academies describes scientific hypotheses as testable and capable of being rejected. A claim compatible with every possible observation cannot be distinguished from its alternatives by observation alone. National Academies: Evolution Resources.

That does not make every religious claim immune to evidence. A claim about a physical event can be examined through records, observations and alternative explanations. But an unexplained event does not identify its own cause. Failure to explain something is the beginning of an investigation, not a divine signature.

The question becomes more personal when God is described as knowing, powerful and good.

Suffering then becomes evidence to consider. The philosophical problem of evil asks whether the suffering we encounter fits that description of God. Defenders appeal to freedom, moral development or reasons beyond human understanding. Critics ask why those goods require suffering of such severity, and why human freedom would explain suffering caused by natural processes. A possible justification is different from evidence that the justification actually applies. These arguments particularly challenge a good, powerful God; they do not address every conceivable creator in the same way. The Problem of Evil.

An especially unsettling argument begins with someone who would welcome God but cannot honestly believe.

Philosopher J. L. Schellenberg argues that a perfectly loving God would make a relationship available to anyone capable of it who was not resisting. If such a person cannot believe God exists, Schellenberg reasons, the necessary availability is missing. On his premises, nonresistant nonbelief counts against the existence of a perfectly loving God. Schellenberg's Précis.

Replies question whether perfect love requires that availability at every stage of a person's life. Perhaps uncertainty permits a kind of freedom or development that immediate belief would prevent. The dispute concerns whether those proposed reasons can justify the absence of a relationship. It cannot be settled simply by assuming that every unbeliever refuses to believe. Hiddenness of God.

For someone who believes they have encountered God, however, the evidence can feel immediate. Some philosophers defend religious experience as a legitimate basis for belief unless there is a good reason to distrust it. Critics point to conflicting interpretations and alternative explanations. The intensity of an experience does not independently settle its source; neither does identifying a psychological mechanism automatically establish that its apparent object is unreal. Religious Experience.

Where does that leave the original question?

It leaves room for belief, disbelief and suspended judgment, but it does not make them equally well supported by definition. Failing to prove a claim does not make it false. Failing to disprove it does not give us a reason to accept it. People can reasonably examine evidence without demanding absolute certainty, and without assigning an invented percentage to what remains unknown.

The useful next step is to make the claim precise. What kind of God is being proposed? What supports that claim? What would count against it?

A universe with an ultimate explanation would be an extraordinary thing to understand. Establishing that the explanation knows your name would require something more.