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By Lee Strobel 

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     Allan Rex Sandage (1926-2010), the greatest observational cosmologist in the world (see Wikipedia for list of accomplishments!)—who deciphered the secrets of the stars, plumbed the mysteries of quasars, revealed the age of globular clusters, pinpointed the distances of remote galaxies, and quantified the universe’s expansion through his work at the Mount Wilson and Palomar observatories—prepared to step onto the conference platform.

     Few scientists were as widely respected as this one-time protégé of legendary astronomer Edwin Hubble.  Sandage had been showered with prestigious honors from the American Astronomical Society, the Swiss Physical Society, the Royal Astronomical Society, and the Swedish Academy of Sciences, receiving astronomy’s equivalent of the Nobel Prize.  The New York Times dubbed him the “grand old man of cosmology.”

     As he approached the stage at this conference on science and religion, there was little doubt where he would sit.  The discussion would be about the origin of the universe, and the panel would be divided among those scientists who believed in God and those who didn’t, with each faction sitting on its own side of the stage.

     Many of the attenders probably knew the ethnically Jewish Sandage had been a virtual atheist even as a child.  Others undoubtedly believed that a scientist of his stature must surely be skeptical about God. As Newsweek put it, “The more deeply scientists see into the secrets of the universe, you’d expect, the more God would fade away from their hearts and minds.”  So Sandage’s seat among the doubters seemed a given.

     Then the unexpected happened. Sandage set the room abuzz by turning and taking a chair among the theists.  Even more dazzling, in the context of a talk about the big bang and its philosophical implications, he disclosed publicly that he had become a Christian at age fifty.

     The big bang, he told the rapt audience, was a supernatural event that cannot be explained within the realm of physics as we know it.  Science has taken us to the first event, but it can’t take us back to the first cause.  The sudden emergence of matter, space, time, and energy pointed to the need for some kind of transcendence.

     “It is my science that drove me to the conclusion that the world is much more complicated than can be explained by science,” he later told a reporter.  “It was only through the supernatural that I can understand the mystery of existence.”

     For me, the road to atheism was paved by science, but, ironically, so was my later journey to God.  Good information, I am convinced, points us to a good God.

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Quotes by Rex Allan Sandage:

The world is too complicated in all parts and interconnections to be due to chance alone.  I am convinced that the existence of life with all its order in each of its organisms is simply too well put together.  Each part of a living thing depends on all its other parts to function.  How does each part know?  How is each part specified at conception?  The more one learns of biochemistry the more unbelievable it becomes unless there is some type of organizing principle- an architect.

I find it quite improbable that such order came out of chaos.  There has to be some organizing principle.  God to me is a mystery but is the explanation for the miracle of existence, why there is something instead of nothing.

Science… is a process that progresses only by showing itself to be wrong.

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Luke 1:1-4  —  Since many have undertaken to set down an orderly account of the events that have been fulfilled among us, just as they were handed on to us by those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and servants of the word, I too decided, after investigating everything carefully from the very first, to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, so that you may know the truth concerning the things about which you have been instructed.

Romans 1:19-21  (a favorite passage of Sandage)  —  For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them.  Ever since the creation of the world his eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things he has made.  So they are without excuse; for though they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their senseless minds were darkened.

Genesis 1:1  —  In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.

Psalm 19:1  —  The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament shows forth His handiwork.

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From Psalm 8: