American astrophysicist, Robert Jastrow, is back as this month’s notable quote, taken from a 1982 interview in Christianity Today:

“Astronomers now find they have painted themselves into a corner because they have proven, by their own methods, that the world began abruptly in an act of creation to which you can trace the seeds of every star, every planet, every living thing in this cosmos and on the earth. And they have found that all this happened as a product of forces they cannot hope to discover. That there are what I or anyone would call supernatural forces at work is now, I think, a scientifically proven fact.”

Jastrow was not a believer, but he recognized the logical implication of the big bang and accepted it.

There are generally two atheist responses to this. One is to try to find a loophole in cosmology that gets them out of a beginning, and thus out of the supernatural. The other is to accept the existence of the supernatural and to posit an alternative — like the multiverse — to God as the supernatural creative force.

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