Faith & Science
Physics, Earth & Space
Georges Lemaȋtre’s Hidden God

In a previous Evolution News post, “Here’s the Other Common Objection to Intelligent Design,” I pointed out the striking similarities between the evolution of life and the evolution of human technology, and concluded:
Yet for Darwin and other evolutionists, this is precisely the strongest argument against design. Why? Because even though evolution looks much like the way humans, the only other known intelligent beings in the universe, design things, this is not the way we think God should have designed things. It is so obvious to them that God would not have done things this way that they prefer to attribute it all to an unintelligent process that has never been observed to produce anything new and complex, only very minor adaptations.
Well, why would God create like humans do, through careful planning, testing, and improvements? Now we are getting into theology, of course, where we can never be sure of our answers, but the objection itself is also theological. The most obvious answer is: for the same reasons we do. It seems to me that no matter how intelligent a designer might be, design necessarily requires getting involved in the details, not just waving a magic wand.
One reader wrote to me that not only Darwinists, but many theists, will not be satisfied with this answer because it seems to imply that God, like humans, learns from his mistakes.
The Simplest Solution?
I admitted in the earlier article that I was not entirely satisfied with this answer either and invited readers to do their own theological speculation. But remember what you have to believe to reject intelligent design before you decide that the simplest solution to the paradox is to give up and conclude that nothing but natural causes were at work in the whole process.
One reason I am not satisfied by “the most obvious” answer is that even a designer who has to create step by step like we do, for the same reasons, could surely have still made doubt impossible. I have often wondered if God has not deliberately created us in such a way that doubt, while not reasonable, is still possible. In the last chapter of my 2016 book, Christianity for Doubters, I speculated as to why God chooses to “remain backstage, hidden from view, working behind the scenes while we act out our parts in the human drama,” by imagining how different life would be if God were to “walk out onto the stage and take on a more direct and visible role” in human and natural history.
I realize how silly the idea of a God who chooses to remain “hidden from view” will sound to many, and I said in the previous post that this answer may seem reasonable only after you read the entire chapter. And by itself this answer does not help to explain why bad things happen to good people — like my wife, Melissa — which is the main problem addressed in that chapter, “Is God Really Good?”
“Essentially Hidden”
But it was very interesting to me to see a comment from Georges Lemaȋtre, pictured above with Albert Einstein, a Catholic priest and one of the two key scientists in the history of the Big Bang theory, about our “hidden” God. Jean-Pierre Luminet’s 2024 Discovery Institute Press book, The Big Bang Revolutionaries, reproduces on page 120 Lemaȋtre’s original typed manuscript of his now-famous 1931 letter to Nature, which includes at the end the following sentence:
I think that everyone who believes in a supreme being supporting every being and every acting [sic], believes also that God is essentially hidden and may be glad to see how present physics provides a veil hiding the creation.
Lemaȋtre seems to have felt that the Big Bang (as it would later be called) was a way for God to create the universe while remaining hidden from view. Was Lemaȋtre, who certainly believed in God, suggesting that God deliberately hides himself from us, or just acknowledging the paradox?
Lemaȋtre removed this sentence before submitting the letter to Nature, apparently feeling it was too theological for a science journal. That it may have been, but it may also be a hint about how to resolve one of the most important paradoxes in theology, and perhaps also in science.