Fred and his universe.

To believe in God inevitably raises difficulties.

“It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God,” mused the American philosopher Thomas Nagel, “and naturally hope that I’m right in that belief. It’s that I hope there is no God! I don’t want there to be a God. I don’t want the universe to be like that.”

Yet whatever Nagel may wish, the universe is as it is. We cannot construct our own version of reality, except in our imagination — and that doesn’t really count. The world is what it is. And if Jesus truly did rise from the dead, then the world is very different from the one we thought we knew.

And that, as we know, raises all sorts of questions. The risen Jesus calls us to stoop down and take up our own cross if we are to follow him. That is rarely comfortable. To follow Jesus means facing hard truths about ourselves. It often involves some profound U-turns, as we begin to realise that he — not I — is Lord.

This week I’ve been reading about the astronomer Fred Hoyle. He was a major figure at Cambridge during my time there. I remember reading his novel The Black Cloud, a curious story about a vast interstellar cloud approaching our planet. Yet this is no ordinary cloud. It is sentient — immensely intelligent and capable of communication.

In the story the cloud, rather like Hoyle himself, finds human religion intriguing but rather puzzling. Through its observations Hoyle explores a tension that runs throughout the book: the contrast between scientific reasoning and human cultural habits.

What many people do not realise is that Hoyle coined the phrase the Big Bang during a radio broadcast in 1949 — and he did so rather dismissively. He regarded the theory with considerable scepticism, even contempt. One reason was that it appeared to leave room for the idea of a Creator who brought the universe into being ex nihilo, out of nothing.

Hoyle himself championed the Steady State theory, which proposed that the universe had always existed. It had no beginning and no end, and therefore no need of a creator. The universe, in his view, looks essentially the same at all times and in all places.

Yet in the 1960s new observational evidence began to challenge that theory. Astronomers detected the faint heat signature left over from the early expansion of the universe. Gradually the Big Bang theory — so often ridiculed by Hoyle — became the scientific consensus, as it largely remains today.

What is striking is that Hoyle himself never accepted this shift. Even in the face of mounting evidence he held firmly to the Steady State model until his death in 2001 — illustrating the remark often attributed to Max Planck that “science progresses one funeral at a time.”

Hoyle remained an atheist, though he was deeply impressed by what physicists call the fine-tuning of the universe for life — particularly the delicate nuclear processes that allow carbon to exist. Late in life he famously remarked that it looked as though “a super-intellect has monkeyed with physics.”

One sometimes senses that Hoyle would have done almost anything to avoid believing in God — let alone in a God who loves us at such cost, as we see in the cross of Jesus.

Of all human pursuits we might expect science to be the most objective. Yet it remains a deeply human enterprise. And because we are human — like Adam, like Fred, like the rest of us — we instinctively resist the idea that God might stand at the centre of this extraordinary universe rather than ourselves.

Often conversion to Christ is a struggle. We resist his claim on our lives. One of Hoyle’s contemporaries at Cambridge, C. S. Lewis, once described feeling almost hunted by God as the arguments for belief slowly closed around him.

Lewis famously described his conversion in 1929, when he finally accepted the existence of God: “You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen, night after night… the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet.”

And then the famous line: “I gave in, and admitted that God was God… perhaps that night the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.”

And perhaps that is the heart of the matter. The difficulty of believing in God is not primarily intellectual, though we often imagine that it is. At a deeper level the struggle is moral and spiritual. If God truly exists, and if Jesus truly rose from the dead, then the universe is not arranged around our preferences, ambitions, or comforts. It is arranged around him.

That is precisely what unsettles us. Like Adam in the garden, we would prefer a world in which we ourselves stand at the centre. We want the freedom to define reality on our own terms — to decide what is true, what is good, and what ultimately matters.

Yet the Christian claim is that reality does not bend to our wishes. The universe belongs to its Creator. And the risen Christ quietly but persistently calls each of us to recognise that fact.

Strangely enough, that recognition is not the loss of freedom but the beginning of it. For when we stop trying to be the centre of the universe, we discover that we were never meant to carry that burden. The God who stands at the centre is not distant or indifferent, but the God revealed in Jesus Christ — the one who loved us enough to bear a cross.

Because once God stands at the centre, everything else in our lives must move. And that, in the end, is good news.