Counting to God

A Journey Back to Faith Through Science

When I was a child, I sensed that there was a purpose behind the universe, and that comforted me. My parents took me to church and Sunday school, but I don’t remember learning anything about Jesus or the Gospel. Nothing sunk in, and that was probably because I was a very distracted kid.

High-School Science vs. Faith

I left the faith in high school. I was (and still am) quite the nerd, and as I learned more about science, science seemed to contradict the Bible. What really shook me was something called the Miller-Urey experiment. It was in my high-school textbook, and although it has long been discredited, it still appears in many science textbooks.

In 1953, two scientists mixed the chemicals they thought were representative of the early-Earth atmosphere. By running electricity through the solution, they were able to produce a few amino acids, the elementary building blocks of life. From this they inferred that life could have formed by natural processes—that it could have, as Charles Darwin had speculated, started as an accidental byproduct of some chemical reaction in a “warm little pond” on the primeval Earth. It was a weak inference for many reasons: for one, they used ultra-pure chemicals, and for another, the conditions of the controlled experiment were nowhere near what the natural conditions might have been. Moreover, even if they had produced all the necessary building blocks, there would still be the matter of getting them to link up in the right way, a feat that does not “just happen” by accident.

Unfortunately, after reading that life could have started by chance, I turned away from God. I considered myself an atheist when I entered MIT, and this continued for many years as I went through graduate school in theoretical mathematics and then law school.

Church

Later, when I was in my early thirties, my son was born. My wife wanted him to be baptized, and I agreed mostly to avoid conflict. But I sensed something at that church. I felt a sense of holiness there, and I met people who had peace in their lives. They had something that I desperately needed and wanted, and I knew that no amount of money nor professional success was going to provide it for me. I started going to church regularly.

But I still had doubts. I told myself that I couldn’t believe in God unless there was scientific evidence for his existence. So I decided I owed it to myself to look for evidence.

Amazing Evidence

I purchased the standard college treatise on molecular biology (more than 1,400 pages of fine print) and started to read. What I found amazed me! The evidence from biology is overwhelming; there is far too much complexity and information stored in our 3.2 billion “letters” of DNA to be the result of anything but design. I read details about how life runs because of those biological parts we call proteins and the complicated machines (a lot of them) that are built by putting them together in just the right way. Proteins are highly specialized molecules. At one point, the math nerd in me could not help but calculate—literally on the back of an envelope on an airplane—the fantastic improbability that a single functional protein could have ever come together by accident in the entire history of the universe. It was an “Aha” moment for me. The question of God’s existence was a no-brainer; modern science points to belief in God.

I also read books on physics and cosmology, where I found more compelling evidence. There are dozens of constants that seem to be set perfectly for life to exist: the speed of light, the strength of gravity, the ratio of the masses of the proton and the electron, and so on. The extreme improbability of our universe’s having all the constants set so precisely has been likened to a control room in which every dial has been finely tuned to the exact right setting. The conjecture of a multiverse as an answer to the problem of this fine-tuning fails for numerous scientific reasons. And scientific posturing notwithstanding, without God, science has no clue why there is something rather than nothing. Why does anything exist?

At one point during this journey, I was talking with a friend who was then head of the physics department at MIT. I mentioned that modern science points directly to God. “Someone should write a book about it,” I said—to which he responded, “Perhaps that could be you.”

I didn’t like that answer; I was a busy attorney with three kids. Surely, there must be someone better suited to the task. But I did eventually put my findings in a book. Counting To God: A Personal Journey Through Science to Belief (2014) took me ten years to write, and I launched it by giving a lecture at MIT. It “counts” through seven areas of science that point to God: the creation of the universe, the fine-tuning of the universe, the origin of life, the technology of life, the puzzles of macroevolution, our uniquely special Earth, and quantum mechanics and its implications for human thought and free will. One simple fact that nearly anyone can understand is that when it comes to the proposed neo-Darwinian mechanism of natural selection operating on random mutations, evolution works downward, not up. In other words, when you take working DNA code and corrupt it with errors and unguided mutations, the organism deteriorates. This now seems obvious to me, and it should be obvious to anyone who’s ever worked with software code.

The Wonderful Gift of Faith

For those who have eyes to see, the evidence is everywhere! My search for evidence for God has been ongoing for more than 40 years. To this day, I feel like I was intellectually bullied, pressured to turn away from God in high school and college by falsified science. I abhor bullies of all types and most especially intellectual bullies—people, often professors at top colleges, who think their views are more important than anyone else’s and who try to overwhelm others with questionable science. The truth is inconvenient to secular intellectuals, but honest science points to God. To quote Lord Kelvin, “If you study science deep enough and long enough, it will force you to believe in God.”

My faith journey has been a wonderful gift. It’s as though, while following road signs to logic, I came to a place of indescribable wonder. I now live in awe of the majestic design of the universe and the magnificent technology in all life. I wake up every morning giving thanks to God.

Read the sidebar to this article: Zombie Science by Bob Perry