Presented as a simple bottom line statement: If one postulates and accepts the idea of some kind of independent, omnipotent, omniscient, and eternal being and then accepts that all the scientific knowledge gained by mankind is essentially valid (although not yet absolute or final, but still evolving or modifying), then the modern notion of God is simply that which (who) conceived and used what is now called Science to formulate the rules by which the Universe operates and changes with time. Setting all this into motion is what we imply in the idea of the "creation act". (It is interesting to note that my above "model" for the Universe's inception and development, which I arrived at on my own through years of thought, is very similar in its essence to the metaphysical explanation for the physical world described by Sir Isaac Newton, who remained a believer all his life.)

Paraphrasing the preceding: Let us assume or accept as fact that there is some kind of God and that what we have learned scientifically about the Universe (within and beyond humanity) is also true/valid/correct, then the task that has always challenged thinking Man is just to reconcile the two ideas because they are indeed two ways of approaching the essence of Existence. These thoughts need further elaboration:

Lets start with a simple premise: the scientific method works when applied to ideas that properly belong to the venue of science.

This method, of course, follows these steps: formulation of the "problem" or the topic(s) to be studied; accumulation of known facts; observations seeking new data; experimentation where appropriate; development of hypotheses; prediction and testing; refinement to narrow to a specific hypothesis with strong supporting results; publication after peer review; and continued survival, improvement, and probation of the hypothesis until it is accepted as a valid theory or even a law of nature. This is the core of how science operates and yields hard facts.

It is near impossible to deny that the modern world has most of its foundation built on the ideas and achievements developed by scientists from Copernicus and Newton through Einstein and his fellow titans in thought (as well as the hundreds of thousands of less famed scientists who’ve contributed over the past 500 years). In countless instances, the tenets of the various sciences - physics, chemistry, biology, math, others - have been proven repeatedly to work, that is, they have survived the tests and have led to useful applications: the production of energy; convenient means of transportation; diverse varieties of communication; the power of computers; the many pharmaceutical and instrumental products available to doctors; the management of the environment, to name a few. So, science is a reality of great significance to those who practice science and those who reap its benefits.

Does it not make sense that, if there is a Creator, then Science is one of his/her (I prefer "its") essential creations? As science unravels the mysteries of the Universe, one result should be the awareness that all creation follows a scientific pattern, namely every manifestation of matter and energy is describable by laws subjected to rigorous scientific scrutiny.

Looking at the Genesis stories, what God has made was once described in allegories, myths, and parables, together with historical facts, as in the Bible, the Koran, the Hindu teachings. At the time they were written, they had to be of that simplistic style since the people of those times had no understanding of the scientific principles since developed and now widely accepted. The need for such records to be presented in the context of what was then so imperfectly known does not discredit the wisdom and validity of their content, irrespective of the later advances in knowledge now that Man has matured sufficiently to examine alternatively te world from the perspective of the sciences.

So, what do I mean by the phrase "God is a Scientist"? First, let me note that the God of biblical times, of early Christian times, of the Islamics, Hindus, Buddhists, and other, often primitive, faiths might better be referred to as "God is a Magician". Working through miracles, revelations, and rituals, God in those times proclaimed insights and truths about its (his) nature and about what is expected of Man to live in a godly manner in ways that clearly are not the purview of modern science.

Yet, after the thousands of years during which the traditional beliefs about creation were initiated and changed, there has emerged in parallel the knowledge acquired by science that the fundamental workings of the Universe can also be described in purely natural terms.

Still, the crux is this: the fact that we now know reasonably well so many things about the world of our planet and the Universe beyond in those terms can nevertheless be taken as an independent truth that the creator set up the Universe to run according to the scientific laws simultaneously designed and applied when it all started.

It is ridiculous to promote the arrogant idea that just because we have uncovered and verified those laws, it is no longer necessary to assume that they must have had some external source (verily, an eternal source at that). That source, the originator of the Universe, set into motion the "modus operandi" by which all of existence has functioned over time according to rules and laws once thought to be "magical" but now identified as "scientific".

In the Middle Ages, theologians and philosophers, such as St. Thomas Aquinas, devised various proofs (many built upon ancient Greek philosophy) of the existence of a Creator using metaphysical logic, drawing upon procedures as ancient as the ideas put forth by Plato, Aristotle, and others, that depended heavily on causality, tempered by revelation.

I contend, as have others of our Age, that modern science, in particular Cosmology, has uncovered still another proof that is elegant in its scientific basis. I refer to the prevailing doctrine that the Universe had a finite origin in the Big Bang, a cataclysmic "explosion" some 12 to 15 billion years ago from a point (a singularity that has no discrete location) of incredible energy, density, and temperature. Limitations of space in this letter preclude me from elaborating on the mechanisms and outcomes of this extraordinary event, whose general characteristics, while still imperfectly known, are now embraced by nearly all specialists in astrophysics and cosmology.

Granting its efficacy, I want to extract a single axiom that in itself goes a long way to support the advocacy of the "Grand Designer" (also known as the "Intelligent Designer") model, that is, the postulate of an independent Creator who conceived the notion of the Universe, established its laws of operation, and (indirectly?) triggered the Big Bang.

This touches upon the argument of "fine tuning", related to but distinct from the Anthropic Principle (the Universe is meaningful and knowable because Man exists as a conscious being capable of deciphering this meaning). At the time of the Big Bang and thereafter, certain constants and parameters (those fundamental to Physics) involved in the process, and the mathematical equations that delineate the initiating process and all that follows in the natural order, had to have very specific (precise) values. Otherwise, if these numbers deviated notably from their actual values, and sometimes by just a little, the organization and evolution of the Universe we observe would not have been possible, or, if it could exist, would be so different that it might never have fostered the conditions that led to organic life, here on Earth and probably elsewhere in the Cosmos.

My fellow debaters have alluded to these parameters and factors without spelling them out. I now offer a partial list of those whose importance in the Big Bang and its consequences are not in dispute: the rate of expansion; the homogeneity and isotropy of the Universe at broad levels; the value of the Gravitational Constant (and just recently the recognition that a variant of Einstein’s once discredited Cosmological Constant must actually exist); particle/antiparticle interactions; neutron/proton ratios; the hydrogen/helium and hydrogen/deuterium ratios; the temperature and density variations in the first minute; the balance between nuclear and electron forces; the decay history of certain particles in the first moments; primordial black hole distributions; the total number and density of neutrinos; mechanisms of star and galaxy formtion; element synthesis. The list goes on. (See bottom of this page for a list prepared by Hugh Ross, taken off the Internet, and not included in this letter.)

But the point remains – these are sensitive and finely tuned parameters in that if their values and functions were different by much from what they actually are, the Universe would either never have gotten started, or would have collapsed before life could evolved, or would be expanding too slowly to have reached a stage that can foster life. This in essence is the Intelligent Designer concept.

It is the (aforementioned) Goldilocks dictum: not too hot, not too cold, just right. If chance alone were the governing determinant, the odds are enormously against all the above parameters/factors, and others, being just right. Some intelligence, be it God or any other analogous name or concept, had to play the pivotal role in establishing and structuring a scientifically developed Universe.

Those who promote quantum mechanics (or in its larger domain, quantum cosmology) as both a necessary and sufficient means to explain how a material Universe could originate ex nihilo miss a key point. In their model, quantum fluctuations occur in a total material vacuum during which "virtual" particles develop fleetingly and are nearly always annihilated by virtual antiparticles. But, occasionally one particle would survive and under certain conditions become a singularity that then undergoes a Big Bang. Quantum cosmology admits to the possibility of many Universes being thusly created but most are destroyed and fail; still, one or perhaps many might just "make it".

Even multiple Universes – not in contact with each other and thus unknowable (to us) by any current scientific detection methodology – are potential occurrences. The flaw in the argument, from a metaphysical standpoint, is that virtual particles that are the necessary seeds are something, not nothing. A conceptualizing "operator" had to produce them. We are back to some kind of Creator, who presumably invented quantum cosmology which inherently contains the mechanisms that permit a process culminating in the Big Bang and subsequent expansion of the Universe. The ideas in this paragraph make up the quintessential point to comprehend and remember from this letter.

A word about Evolution. The term connotes "change" – change in something in response to changing conditions, with the thing evolved becoming better adapted to new conditions or circumstances. The astronomical evidence is revealing a systematically evolving Universe.

It is just common sense then to expect that one variant of evolution applies, at a much smaller scale, to the organisms that appeared and changed in an orderly manner on Earth. There is no logical reason why Man - the thinking organsim - should be the exception, by being created "magically"instead of participating in the "scientific"scheme. The only ineluctable question becomes: does Man have a soul (and what are the properties of "soul" aside from intrinsic consciousness and [apparently] immateriality)? If we indeed have souls, and if they are immortal, then at some stage in human evolution, at some point between simian ancestry and the time when the genus Homo can be said to have "crossed over", then a special spiritual act of God to infuse that soul into all subsequent individuals must be assumed. This would seem an exceptiont to the scientific rule but certainly within a Creator’s power. The probability that there are many inhabited planets in the Universe means simply that when certain life form(s) on each such planet reach a certain stage or degree of development, they qualify for "souls" as gifts from God. Why and how, who knows? Suffice, in our present ignorance, to believe in and ascribe this to a benevolent Creator who retains personal interest in the things and beings created.

(As an aside: Amazingly, our bodies participate in the gross evolution of the Universe. Most of the hydrogen within us was created in the first minute of the Big Bang and has passed on unchanged through countless generations of galactic events. Our oxygen, nitrogen, carbon and other elements were later generated inside stars that exploded and disperse these elements essential to life. In one sense we are already eternal!)

OF COURSE, THERE REMAINS ONE ULTIMATE QUESTION - WHAT I CALL THE "GOD CONUNDRUM". THAT IS, WHAT CAUSED GOD? THE ANSWER, SO FAR, REMAINS TOTALLY UNKNOWN, AND LIKELY WILL STAY UNKNOWABLE, REGARDLESS OF HOW FAR SCIENCE PROGRESSES IN THE FUTURE. IT MAY, IN FACT, LIE BEYOND THE CAPABILITIES AND REALM OF THE INTELLIGENT PRODUCTS OF CREATION TO EVER ANSWER WITH CERTAINTY OR EVEN UNDERSTAND ADEQUATELY. THIS IS WHERE FAITH, AIDED BY AND BUILT ON, REVELATION MAY FOREVER PROVIDE THE ONLY BELIEVABLE ANSWER: GOD EXISTS BECAUSE CREATION EXISTS - AND, IN SPITE OF THE COMPELLING LOGIC OF CAUSALITY, IN SOME UTTERLY ARCANE WAY, WE MUST POSTULATE AND ACCEPT THE EXTRAORDINARY NOTION OF (AN UNCAUSED) FIRST CAUSE.