Evidence for God could throw the world’s religions into disarray (Image: Lee Frost/Millennium Images, UK)
THE equations are checked and rechecked. Finally, physicists throw up their hands and declare that the big bang must have had a cause – a prime mover that created the universe. Or perhaps God simply shows up on Earth in full supernatural glory. As shocks to the system go, it couldn’t get much bigger.
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There’s no denying we have a God-shaped void in our heads. What if it were filled? Would our increasingly secular world see a mass conversion? Perhaps, but it is far from clear what people would convert to. In fact, organised religions would probably be thrown into disarray. If God could come in any number of guises, whatever this entity turned out to be would be unlikely to fit our narrow range of existing ideas.
We might also think that proof of God would be egg on the face of atheists. Perhaps – but for many, the idea of God is not only unbelievable, but also distasteful. The writer Christopher Hitchens, who called himself an “anti-theist”, detested the idea of a cosmic chaperone watching our every move. If this being did present itself to us, we could see atheists start a revolution against God.
Ultimately, our reaction would depend on the nature of the evidence, says , an anthropologist of religion at the University of Cambridge. Big changes would only come from a dramatic confirmation, he says. “It would take something like Jesus or aliens turning up on Earth and saying, ‘Hi, I’m your creator’.”
Although religion might take a hit, we could expect a boom in theological debate. At the top of the agenda would be morality, suffering and death – subjects often sidelined to academic backwaters, says at St Mary’s University in London. For example, if suffering exists despite there being an all-powerful God, does that mean suffering is somehow necessary in the universe? Or does it instead say something about the nature of this God?
There may also be a swing towards fatalism. There is evidence that religious people often simultaneously invoke natural and supernatural explanations for events such as sickness and death. People will take medicine even when they believe God is controlling the course of their illness, for example. Proof of God’s existence might tip the balance away from medical explanations of sickness and encourage people to feel that when you get ill, that’s it – your time has come.
Knowing that a physical entity set off the big bang would help cosmologists, says Alexei Nesteruk, a cosmologist and theologist at the University of Portsmouth, UK. It would prove once and for all that the universe is not eternal.
There are two broad theories that suggest the universe isn’t eternal. Inflationary cosmology says that universes pop up like bubbles within a high-energy vacuum with repulsive gravity. And conformal cyclic cosmology says that parallel universes continually collide, move apart and collide again, each collision seeming like a big bang. A God might shed light on which of the competing models of our universe – or multiverse – is correct.
Ultimately, though, Nesteruk thinks proof of God is impossible, if we take this to mean evidence of an uncreated being. Faced with such an entity, we would always ask, “Well, who created you?”
Read more: “10 discoveries that would change everything”
This article appeared in print under the headline “What if … We find God?”
