Noted from last month. What could this mean? Bring it on.
The Atlantic, Elizabeth Bruenig, 26 Mar 2026: The Evidence That God Exists, subtitled “Searching for scientific proof for faith misunderstands faith.”
You can see the writer establishing some wiggle room with her subtitle.
I grew up in a faithful Methodist household in deep-red Texas during the George W. Bush years, when the political sway of evangelicals was at its zenith. At the same time, evangelists of a robust atheism—figures such as the biologist Richard Dawkins, the critic Christopher Hitchens, and the neuroscientist Sam Harris—toured the country offending salt-of-the-earth Americans with their contempt for religious belief.
— It was not contempt. It was sincere bafflement that people don’t understand that foundations of religious belief rest on sand. And they were not criticizing community, or the other benefits from religion serve as comfort, etc. —
It was hard for me to ignore that a number of their assertions were clearly correct: Young-Earth creationism, for instance, instantly struck me as absurd when I first learned about it from a history teacher in my public junior-high school, who confidently told me that the world is only a few thousand years old.
… Meanwhile, the New Atheists were making hay of the fact that such faithful misapprehensions about nature were easily disproved by scientific discovery.
Well, yes, why does the revelation of easily verifiable facts about the age and size of the world and universe upset the faithful? (Easily answered.)
Oh, here we go:
This steady diminishing of [my] faith probably would have continued indefinitely, were it not for one brisk autumn afternoon in 2011 when, standing alone at a bus stop, I happened to witness the presence of God.
So the writer is inclined to believe, based on personal experience of something she can’t explain. So much for easily verifiable facts. She pivots:
The latest evidence suggests that God most likely exists, argues a big recent book by Michel-Yves Bolloré, a computer engineer, and Olivier Bonnassies, a Catholic author. Tracts that aim to prove the reality of God are hardly novel. What makes this endeavor unique, say the French writers behind God, The Science, the Evidence: The Dawn of a Revolution, is the scientific nature of their work. Medieval monks toiling away at poetic meditations on the divine have their place, the authors allow, but their own arguments are meant to surpass mere abstract justifications for belief. Instead they assert that cutting-edge empirical proof observable in the natural world makes a firm case for God. With this, they strive for the ultimate alchemy, transforming faith into fact.
Here’s the Amazon page: God, the Science, the Evidence. There is no website for “Palomar Editions,” the indicated publisher. The book has its own website. I conclude it’s self-published. If the evidence were substantial, it would change the world and the book would be released by a major publisher. Here’s a Publishers Weekly interview with the authors from Sept 2025.
But let’s see what the article says.
Bolloré and Bonnassies’s book is part of a burgeoning genre of apologetics that relies on relatively new scientific developments and theories, like quantum mechanics and cosmology, to make an ancient case. Their book, which has already sold more than 400,000 copies around the world, arrives at a time of both bloody religious conflict and rapidly collapsing religious belief, especially among the young and the highly educated. It joins other recent projects—including two new documentaries, The Story of Everything: The Science That Reveals a Mind Behind the Universe and Universe Designed—that propose the same tantalizing theory: that there is incontrovertible proof that a divine power created the cosmos, and that this evidence is mounting.
This is a seductive idea, which Bolloré and Bonnassies spend a painstaking 500 pages trying to support. Keen to reassure readers that a sophisticated and intelligent person might reasonably justify belief in God, the authors acknowledge how such a thing became unthinkable. They identify a series of scientific breakthroughs that helped undermine religious faith over the centuries, including Galileo’s heliocentrism, Newton’s clockwork universe, Darwin’s theory of evolution, and the revelation that Earth is not thousands but billions of years old. But in drawing upon those exact fields of study to reverse the long-term march toward unbelief, the authors appear to have missed the mechanism by which those prior discoveries eroded faith: namely, that people had staked their belief on evidence that was overturned by subsequent data. There is always a risk that today’s proof will be undone by tomorrow’s evidence. Trusting in the existence of God largely involves deciding not to operate strictly within the confines of reason as we know it, a choice that usually emerges from sentiment rather than argument.
No, this is a misconception. Evidence is not “overturned by subsequent data.” Evidence is evidence. Interpretations can change; theories can change; but the writer’s language is loose. She’s suggesting that faith, trust in the existence of God, is about ignoring evidence and reason. A bit more, giving the article its due:
Bolloré and Bonnassies do not appear concerned. “We have conducted this work as a rigorous investigation,” they write. “We have always used rationality as our only compass.” Enough, they suggest, with emotional and mystical arguments for the presence of a divine power, or fanciful ideas such as young-Earth creationism; theirs is a project explicitly devoted to reason. Their “panoramic view” of the available evidence spans from the Big Bang, which they say implies an act of creation by demonstrating an absolute beginning to the universe, to the unlikely “fine-tuning” of the cosmos to create the conditions for flourishing life on Earth. Their book includes “one hundred essential citations from leading scientists” across multiple disciplines who have either allowed for the existence of God or asserted it outright. This includes Robert Wilson, an astronomer and a Nobel Prize winner in physics, who is quoted observing that the Big Bang theory makes “the question of creation” unavoidable. Luc Jaeger, a professor of chemistry and biochemistry at UC Santa Barbara, likewise states that “science practiced in a sincere quest for the truth brings man closer to God.”
No. All these arguments about absolute beginnings and fine tuning have been endlessly discussed and rationalized (by scientists, who do actually take real-world evidence into account) as having nothing to do with a creator God, which is a wish-fulfillment fantasy of the writers of this book and of all the religious people in the world. That is, there’s no “evidence that God exists” here.
And then the writer returns to her personal experience and how it made her feel, as if this is all about her. And at the end, she is maybe honest about what this is really about. Ending:
In my years of working out exactly what I believe, I have been relieved to learn that faith does not in fact demand the surrender of logic and vigorous intellectual inquiry—a case Bolloré and Bonnassies convincingly bolster with numerous testimonials from award-winning scientists. Still, to trust in the existence of God is to accept both the appearance and the possibility of being naive or delusional. No accumulation of promising developments in our analytical understanding of the world can delay confrontation with that essential fact. Having faith is a vulnerable thing.
Bolloré and Bonnassies’s arguments are more likely to shore up the faith of wavering believers than to win new converts. This itself is no small thing. The authors may even be right about the growing evidence for the existence of God secreted away in the latest science. But their approach has a history of upsets. The only way to inoculate belief against that cycle of disruption is to treat faith as a decision that transcends scientific proof.
OK: even scientists understand they might be “naive or delusional,” and that’s why the scientific method exists to make corrections to any incorrect such claims. Scientists are human too. That’s why the process exists, and has survived for hundreds of years, to winnow the chaff from the wheat, so to speak, to create an ever-improving body of verifiable knowledge. The writer here has no defense of God except to claim that “faith as a decision that transcends scientific proof.” Which is to say, it’s personal, private, and indefensible.
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To note the death of Ciaran Marion Brennan, founder of the Irish group Clannad, which gave birth to Enya, here’s the song that closes The Last of the Mohicans, which otherwise has one of the best movie scores of all time, I think, by Trevor Jones and Randy Edelman.
NY Times obit: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/19/obituaries/moya-brennan-dead.html
This is the Last of the Mohicans score:
Apparently, for reasons I’ve never understood, two different composers were brought in to complete the score, Trevor Jones and Randy Edelman, and that disqualified the score from the Academy Awards consideration. But the opening theme, I still think, is one of the best of all time.
