If someone places their trust in science, then they must also accept at least one miracle. That miracle is the moment when everything began. According to current cosmological understanding, the entire universe—space, time, matter, and energy—originated from a singularity approximately 13.8 billion years ago. There was no physical cause, no preceding event, and no natural mechanism. Everything emerged from what appears to be nothing.
This is not a theological claim. It is the standard model of physics. The moment we call the big bang marks a boundary. The laws of nature, including time, space, matter, and causality, began at that moment. There is no “before,” because time itself did not exist. The question of what caused the big bang is not merely unanswered. It may be fundamentally unanswerable. Any cause would have to operate outside our physical universe, beyond time and space, and possibly under laws and principles entirely different from those we know. As such, the origin of everything may lie beyond not only our instruments but our cognition itself. The limits are not only technological. They are structural. What lies beyond that first instant might remain, by definition, outside the reach of human understanding.
This foundational mystery is often overlooked. The more we learn about the universe, the more it appears not only vast and elegant but also extraordinarily improbable. Scientific progress has not erased wonder. It has deepened it.
The universe operates under a set of physical constants—measurable quantities that determine the strength of forces, the behavior of particles, and the expansion of space. These constants are not determined by theory. They are inputs, discovered through observation, and their precision is staggering.
Consider the cosmological constant. This value determines how fast the universe expands. If it were larger by even one part in ten to the one hundred and twentieth power, the expansion would have been too rapid for galaxies, stars, or planets to form. This level of precision is difficult to express in ordinary terms. A one followed by 120 zeroes exceeds the total number of atoms in the observable universe.
The more we learn about the universe, the more it appears not only vast and elegant but also extraordinarily improbable.
The strong nuclear force, which binds protons and neutrons together inside atomic nuclei, is similarly fine tuned. If this force were just 2 percent stronger, the fusion of hydrogen in stars would be disrupted, producing only heavier elements. Life as we know it would be chemically impossible. If it were weaker by 5 percent, hydrogen would not fuse at all, and stars would never ignite. There would be no light, no heat, and no complex matter.
The ratio between the electromagnetic force and gravity must also fall within an extremely narrow range. If it differed by just one part in ten to the fortieth power, matter would not clump into stable structures. Planets could not form. Chemistry would not proceed in the way we observe. These values are not approximate: They are exact to many decimal places. The probability that all of them would align by accident is vanishingly small.
Roger Penrose, a Nobel Prize–winning physicist, calculated the odds that the early universe would possess the necessary conditions for life as one in ten to the power of ten to the power of 123. This number is so large that it cannot be meaningfully visualized. It is, quite simply, beyond imagination.
We are improbable, but here we are.
To avoid the philosophical implications of this improbability, many physicists propose the existence of a multiverse. According to this view, our universe is just one among countless others, each with different physical laws. In such a framework, it is not surprising that one universe happens to be suitable for life. We are simply in the one that works.
However, the multiverse is not an empirical theory. Other universes, if they exist, are beyond observation. There is no possible experiment to confirm or refute their existence. As a result, the multiverse functions not as a scientific conclusion but as a metaphysical assumption, introduced to preserve the idea that the universe is ultimately random.
While cosmology raises these external questions, neuroscience reveals an internal frontier. The human brain processes around 11 million bits of sensory data per second. However, our conscious awareness can handle only about forty to sixty bits at any given moment. More than 99.999 percent of information is filtered out before it reaches consciousness.
This is not a malfunction. It is a survival mechanism. The brain evolved to process information relevant to safety and reproduction, not to perceive ultimate reality. What we see, hear, and feel is a compressed model of the world, not the world itself. As neuroscientist David Eagleman has written, our experience is a user interface, not a direct window into the structure of the cosmos.
Language, like perception, evolved for survival. Its primary function is coordination, not revelation. Our words for ideas like eternity, consciousness, or the divine are symbolic approximations. They are attempts to describe concepts that likely exceed the capacity of our language to express fully.
“The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will turn you into an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass God is waiting.”
Then there is the unresolved mystery of consciousness itself. No scientific theory currently explains why we have subjective experience. The brain can be studied in great detail, and its activity can be measured. But the emergence of awareness, of selfhood, memory, identity, and intention, remains unaccounted for. This is what philosophers call the hard problem of consciousness. It is not a lack of data; it is a lack of conceptual tools.
Despite major advances in artificial intelligence, neuroscience, and cognitive psychology, we still do not understand why anything feels like anything. We can describe how neurons fire, but we cannot explain why that firing should produce the sensation of beauty, pain, fear, or love. Awareness is the most basic and undeniable part of our lives, and yet we cannot say what it is or where it comes from.
All these frontiers such as cosmological precision, mathematical limits, perceptual compression, and subjective awareness point to the same conclusion. Human knowledge is powerful but incomplete. Reason is essential, but it has boundaries. There are truths that lie beyond deduction. There are realities that resist full observation. There are questions that cannot be answered within the system that asks them.
This does not prove the existence of God. But it does make confidence in a fully self-explaining, purely material universe increasingly difficult to sustain. The silence of God, often cited as an objection to belief, may in fact reflect our own structural limitations. Perhaps silence is not absence. Perhaps it is signal that we are not fully equipped to decode.
Faith, in this light, is not a leap away from reason. It is a recognition of reason’s architecture. It is the willingness to admit that explanation has edges. It is not superstition. It is epistemic humility.
If the universe began in a moment we cannot explain, if its structure depends on constants we cannot derive, if its probability of existing is so low as to be functionally impossible, and if the very tools we use to investigate it are biologically constrained, then we should not dismiss the possibility of a greater order beyond our grasp.
Belief is not always about seeing more. Sometimes, it begins with acknowledging what we cannot see.
In my latest book, The Converted Atheist, I explore these questions more deeply, from cosmology to consciousness, from probability to purpose. The journey is not one of abandoning science but of following it to its limits. As the Nobel Prize–winning physicist Werner Heisenberg is often paraphrased, “The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will turn you into an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass God is waiting.” While the attribution is debated, the insight remains powerful. The more deeply we understand the complexity, order, and mystery of existence, the more we are drawn not from belief but toward it. Not out of fear or tradition but out of intellectual honesty. We are improbable, but here we are. And that may be the first clue.