From Atheist to Believer: The Journey of Physicist Allan Sandage to Discovering the Divine

Astronomer Allan Sandage is 95 years old. With many years of research exploring the mysteries of the universe behind him, he describes himself as someone who was raised in the arms of atheism from a young age. He built his professional career uncovering the secrets of the stars, peering through telescopes from Chile to California, hoping to discover nothing less than the origin and fate of the universe. His observations of distant stars showed how quickly the universe is expanding and its age.

But on the path to solving the universe's deepest mysteries, Sandage was plagued by questions whose answers were not hidden in bright supernovas. Among them: Why is there something in the universe, instead of nothing at all?

Sandage despaired of answering such questions solely through logic. At the age of 50, he forced himself to accept belief in a Creator.

"The science I've been engaged in led me to the conclusion that the world is far more complex than what can be explained by science," he says. "Hashem is my natural explanation to understand the mystery of existence."

As recounted in a famous scientific publication, Newsweek, something surprising is occurring these days between science and religion. Allan Sandage states, "Today the scientific community scorns religious belief to the extent of being unwilling to expose oneself as a believer. The treatment of believers is so intense." Yet now "theology and science are entering a new relationship," says physicist-turned-theologian Robert John Russell, who founded the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley in 1981.

"Instead of undermining faith and spiritual feeling, new scientific discoveries, at least to believing scientists, actually strengthen them. The Big Bang, once thought to leave no room for a Creator, now suggests to some scientists that there is design and purpose behind the universe. Evolution, say some scientist-theologians, provides hints of God's nature. Chaos theory, describing processes like weather systems and dripping faucets, is seen as opening a door for God to act in the world.

"From Georgetown to Berkeley, theologians engaging with science and scientists who cannot bear the spiritual emptiness of empiricism are establishing integration institutes for the two. Books such as 'Science and Theology: The New Harmony' or 'Belief in God in an Age of Science' are streaming off the presses. In June, a symposium on 'Science and Spiritual Quest' organized by Russell's CTNS drew over 320 paying participants and 33 speakers. A PBS documentary on science and faith will air this coming fall.

"Physicists encounter signs that the universe was created fine-tuned for life and consciousness. It turns out that if nature's constants—unchanging numbers like the force of gravity, electron charge, and proton mass—were altered even slightly, atoms wouldn't cluster, stars wouldn’t burn, and life would never appear."

"When you realize that the laws of nature must be finely tuned to produce the universe we see," says John Polkinghorne, who had a distinguished career as a physicist at Cambridge University before becoming an Anglican priest in 1982, "you understand that the universe didn't just happen, but that there must be a purpose behind it."

Charles Townes, who won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1964 for discovering the principles of the laser, goes even further: "Many have a sense that somehow intelligence must be involved in the laws of the universe."

The very rational nature of science makes it appear as a spiritual adversary, but even here, a new reading can sustain, rather than eliminate, faith. Since Isaac Newton, science has dictated a clear message: the world operates following rules, fundamentally mathematical rules, that humans can understand. Humans invented abstract mathematics as a creation of their imagination, but miraculously this math truly describes the world...

This suggests, says Polkinghorne, "a very deep fact about the nature of the universe," that is, our minds, which invent mathematics, are attuned to the cosmos's reality. We are somehow aligned with its truths.

Since the discovery that pure thought can penetrate the universe’s mysteries, "it seems something about human consciousness is harmonious with God's thinking," says Carl Feit, a cancer biology researcher from New Jersey.

An even newer branch of science, chaos theory, describes phenomena like weather patterns and certain types of chemical reactions whose precise results can't be predicted. It could be, says Polkinghorne, that God chooses the potential that becomes reality. This divine action doesn't violate physical laws.

Most scientists still park their faith, if "they have it," at the lab's door. But just as faith can find inspiration in science, so too can scientists find inspiration in faith...

According to a published study, 40 percent of scientists believe in a personal God—not just an ineffable force and presence in the world, but a deity to whom they can pray. To Joel Primack, an astrophysicist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, "pursuing science brings spiritual inspiration." It turns out, Primack explains, that one can conceive of the greatest size, the entire universe, being 10 with 29 zeros following it. The smallest size describes the world of particles, and it is 10 with 24 zeros (and decimals) in front of it. Humans are truly in the middle. Does this return us to a place of honor at the world’s center? Primack doesn't know, but he calls it "a cosmology that satisfies the soul."

Mark Richardson of the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences says, "Science cannot serve as evidence for God's existence, but it can serve as a character witness."