Is believing in truth more important than believing in God?

Professor Sean Carroll is a theoretical physicist at CalTech, and like most of us believes in truth.

“Most people don’t want to be lied to,” he says.

So he wrote a book called “The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself.”  And in it, he has a message for people who believe in God.

“Well, I think that their belief in God, in particular, is not the best way to account for the universe we see,” Professor Carroll says.

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Because there is now a huge body of research showing that the universe – and life – can be explained objectively as the movement of molecules. It’s called Naturalism.

“Naturalism is the idea that the physical world, the world that we see, the natural world, is all that there is,” he says.

But if there’s no God to watch and judge people – wouldn’t we all just revert to savagery?

“I don’t think that most people want to be good people only because God tells them to do that,” he says. “I think most people actually just want to be good.”

And you might say, what about the movie “It’s a Wonderful Life,” where Jimmy Stewart plays George Bailey, the failed banker who decides to jump off a bridge but is saved by his guardian angel?

Well, Dr. Carroll says, actually, it’s George Bailey who saves himself.

“The thing that saves him is the realization that he had a positive impact on all the other real people there in Bedford Falls,” Carroll says. “If you believe my way of looking at the world, that is what is real, and that is what mattered.”

So feel free to believe in God, but Dr. Carroll just wants you to know that’s it’s not supported by the laws of physics.  So don’t go trying to pray rockets into orbit.

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