An executive of important multinationals, married and with seven children, José Carlos González-Hurtado (Madrid, 1964), has been able to find time in recent years (most of them living outside Spain), to present a book in which he assures to have "enjoyed enormously", and "I hope the readers do too".
The subject is "the latest scientific findings that leave no room for doubt about the need for that Something/Someone, that which we call God," says González-Hurtado. The title of the prologue, written by Alberto Dols, Professor of Condensed Matter Physics at the Complutense University of Madrid, summarizes the content of the book: 'A valuable contribution to the reflection on the relationship between science and religion'.
The book, published by Voz de Papel, "is very well documented, and to write it I have read hundreds and hundreds of documents and books in Spanish, French, English and German; it has more than 700 footnotes, but it is written so that everyone can understand it," says the author.
"In fact, I mention some anecdote with my eleven-year-old son Diego, to whom I read it as I wrote it in order to make sure it could be understood by scientists and laymen."
Interesting topics such as the second law of thermodynamics and the end of the universe were left out of the interview, but there you have the book, which is being presented these days in Madrid. The profits from its sale will go entirely to the EWTN Spain Foundation. We begin the conversation.
You consider your book necessary, and myth-busting. For example, in the face of the myth that the more science, the less God, you affirm that the more science, the more God. Tell us about theistic scientists.
- I think it is a necessary book for non-believers, but also very much for believers, and not only to increase faith and realize how much God the Creator thought of us when creating the universe, but also as an instrument of consultation and apologetics.
It is also a book to give to the skeptical brother-in-law and the agnostic neighbor. Given the evidence accumulating in Physics and Cosmology (from the Big BangThe majority of scientists are theists or religious, either in Mathematics (with Gödel's incompleteness theorems, Hilbert's negation of actual infinities, etc.), or in Biology, with the discoveries about the human genome and the birth of life, the majority of scientists are theists or religious.
In this sense, I believe this book is unique, since it gathers such evidence from all these fields of science. Arthur Compton, Nobel laureate in physics, corroborated this: "Rare are the scientists today who defend an atheistic attitude". Robert Millikan, another Nobel laureate in physics, went a step further by stating that "it is unthinkable to me that a real atheist could be a scientist; I have never met an intelligent man who did not believe in God". And finally Christian Anfinsen, Nobel laureate in Chemistry, put it even less charitably; "Only an idiot can be an atheist".
And statistically?
- The data corroborate these claims. There is a study mentioned in the book, conducted by an Israeli geneticist, Baruch Aba Shalev, which studies the beliefs of all Nobel laureates of the last 100 years, and concludes that only 10 % of the laureates in scientific subjects were atheists, while more than 30 % of the Nobel laureates in literature considered themselves unbelievers.
Other data provided in the book is that the "more scientific" or closer to the fundamental study of science, the more theistic and religious one is. And another interesting fact, young scientists are considerably more religious than scientists over the age of 65. This is not surprising, since in the last 50 years the evidence for a Creator God has accumulated -which is what the book proposes-. It is as if Providence thinks that in our time we need more scientific evidence than in other times.
In its pages he also refers to authors of the "new atheism".
- In fact, at the beginning what I do is simply to expose the opinions of these authors, blatantly dishonest, pretentious and shameless, which are anything but scientific, and in fact put many other atheist colleagues to shame.
These authors are the heirs of the rampant atheism in the 1930s that informed the most criminal ideologies in the history of mankind. I also mention that, contrary to pretence, the vast majority of these authors are not scientists, nor are they new, since most of them were born in the 40s of the last century. I am referring to Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, Steven Pinker, etc. Yes, Richard Dawkins studied zoology, but he is not known to have made any relevant contribution to science, although we do not lose hope.
On the other hand, the greatest living contemporary biologist, Francis Collins, director of the human genome project, was a convert and a Christian; possibly the greatest mathematician in history, Kurt Gödel, was a Christian; the father of quantum physics, Max Planck, was also a theist and a Christian, as was Werner Heisenberg. Einstein was a theist; the father of genetics, Mendel, was a Catholic priest, as was the discoverer of the Big Bang Lemaitre, Father Lemaitre.
New scientific evidence for the existence of God
What is the most current alternative to avoid the idea of a Creator?
- John Barrow was a professor of applied mathematics and theoretical physics at Cambridge University. He was a Christian who died in 2020, and he recognized that "a multitude of cosmological studies are motivated by the desire to avoid the initial singularity," i.e., to attempt to discredit the Big Bang. But the truth is that the Big Bang is part of the "standard cosmological model", as is the theory of relativity, and is beyond doubt.
The one-time NASA director of the Apollo project, who turned from atheist to theist by dint of scientific arguments - Robert Jastrow - said that "astronomers now find that they have put themselves in a dead end, because they have proved by their own methods that the world began abruptly in an act of creation of which traces can be found in every star and every planet, and every living thing in the cosmos and on earth."
The more you know about the Big Bang (Big Bang), the more you believe in God, you assure us.
- The Big Bang was the moment of creation of the universe, which occurred, with all certainty, 13.7 billion years ago. Before knowing this, the most accepted theory was the so-called Steady State theory. This theory proclaimed that the universe was infinite and timeless both "backward", i.e., without beginning, and "forward", i.e., without end. The Steady State is a theory that does not compromise atheism...; the eternal universe might seem that it does not need God but... It is already known that this is not true.
The universe will have an end, as predicted by the 2nd law of Thermodynamics, which was aggressively opposed by the atheistic scientists of the time. I even quote a letter from Frederick Engels to Karl Marx in which he admits that if this law were true, the existence of God would have to be admitted.
But the universe also had a beginning - the Big Bang- and that puts atheistic scientists and non-scientists in a bind. For if there is a beginning there will also be a Beginner. If there was creation, a Creator is also necessary. We have to think that not only all the matter in the universe was created at that moment but also that time began at the Big Bang, i.e. there was no "before" the Big Bang. This leads us to a timeless -omnipotent-, non-material and intelligent being like the creator of the Big Bang. That is what we call God.
Several topics are left out. But finally tell us about Kurt Gödel (1906-1978).
- Kurt Gödel was arguably the most important mathematician in history and one of the most brilliant logicians, perhaps the most brilliant since Aristotle. He was a great friend of Einstein with whom he lived on the Princeton University campus. They talked about politics and God. Gödel was a Christian and in the book I also refer to some of his letters, to his mother, where he comforts her and confirms that - according to him and according to science - there must be a life after this life.
Gödel was also categorical with materialism. "Materialism is false," he warned. It is one of the consequences of his mathematical theoretical developments.
He is the author of the incompleteness theorems. They are very complex theorems but they can be summarized in that Gödel shows that in any formal system -in arithmetic for example-, there are propositions that cannot be proved or disproved. That is to say that there are truths that we cannot prove except by appealing to a higher system..., and in that higher system likewise, and so on and so forth. That is to say that in the end, in order to have consistency in mathematics or in science, we must appeal to God.
I also mention in the book that Gödel formalized in mathematical language the ontological argument of St. Anselm that proves the existence of God.
