Dear readers, faithful companions of the lantern and the basketball,

There are evenings when the astronomer in me no longer contents himself with measuring, calculating, demonstrating. There are evenings when the silent contemplation of the starry vault gives rise to a question that surpasses all equations, all telescopes, all particle accelerators. A question that humanity has asked ever since it became aware of its own existence. Why?

Why is there something rather than nothing? Why does the universe exist? Why is it governed by laws so precise, so elegant, so fertile that they have allowed the emergence of life, of consciousness, of love? Tonight, I want to set my lantern at the edge of the greatest of mysteries, and speak to you in my own name, with my heart of a scientist and my soul of a believer.

1. What Science Says: The “How” and the Planck Wall

Science is my profession, my passion, my lantern. It has taught me to observe, to measure, to model. It has taught me that the universe has a history, and that this history began 13.8 billion years ago with an event we call the Big Bang. We can describe what happened a fraction of a second after that moment: cosmic inflation, primordial nucleosynthesis, the formation of the first atoms, the appearance of stars and galaxies. We have evidence, measurements, equations that work.

But science has its limits. As we trace back time, we hit a wall: the Planck wall. At 10⁻⁴³ second after the Big Bang, our equations cease to function. General relativity and quantum mechanics, our two pillars, refuse to agree. The initial singularity, that infinitely dense and infinitely hot point, is an essential singularity, as demonstrated by the Hawking-Penrose theorem. It cannot be circumvented by any mathematical trick. Physics, by its very nature, cannot describe what happened “before,” nor even whether the word “before” has any meaning.

The official position of science is therefore methodological agnosticism. Science describes the “how,” not the “why.” It can neither affirm nor deny the existence of a Creator. Some scientists, like Stephen Hawking, have proposed that the universe could have been born spontaneously from a quantum fluctuation of the vacuum, without divine intervention. Others, like the physicist and cosmologist Georges Lemaître, who was also a Catholic priest, saw in the Big Bang the imprint of a Creator God. The debate is not closed, and it may never be.

2. What the Great Religions Say

If science stops at the threshold of the mystery, religions have always proposed narratives. Narratives that do not claim to explain the mechanisms, but that give meaning. All the great spiritual traditions of humanity have meditated on the origin of the world, and it is fascinating to note that, despite their differences, they often converge on the essential.

Judaism. From the very first verse of the Torah, Judaism asserts with incredible force: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” This God, Yahweh, is not an impersonal force. He is a being who speaks, who wills, who acts. Creation is not an accident, but a deliberate act. And above all, it is declared “good,” “very good.” The universe is not a cold mechanism: it is the fruit of a loving intention. For centuries, rabbis have meditated on this mystery, often refusing to take Genesis literally, seeing in it profound allegories rather than a cosmology textbook.

Christianity. Heir to Judaism, Christianity takes up the Genesis narrative and enriches it. The Gospel of John opens with these sublime words: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. All things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made.” Christ is identified with the Logos, the divine reason that orders the cosmos. The Church Fathers, and then medieval theologians like Saint Augustine or Saint Thomas Aquinas, sought to reconcile faith and reason. For them, to study nature was to study God’s work. The Big Bang itself was welcomed with enthusiasm by many Christians, who saw in it confirmation of the idea of an absolute beginning.

Islam. The Quran, too, constantly calls believers to contemplate creation as a sign of God. “In the creation of the heavens and the earth, in the alternation of night and day, there are signs for those of understanding.” Islam has never opposed faith and reason. On the contrary, it was in the great libraries of Baghdad, Cairo or Cordoba that Muslim scholars preserved and developed the Greek scientific heritage during Europe’s dark centuries. Al-Khwarizmi, Al-Battani, Al-Tusi: these names that we still carry in our astronomical vocabulary, algebra, zenith, nadir, are those of fervent believers who saw in the order of the cosmos proof of the existence of God.

Eastern traditions. Hinduism, with its cosmic cycles of creation and dissolution, the kalpas and yugas, offers a vision of a universe that is born, dies and is reborn in an eternal breath. Buddhism, for its part, refuses to pronounce on the origin of the world, considering that the question itself is a trap for the mind. “Is the universe eternal? The Buddha did not answer.” This silence is a form of wisdom.”

3. My Personal Conviction: The Universe Cannot Be an Accident

I am an astronomer. I spend my nights contemplating nebulae, galaxies, clusters of stars. And the more I contemplate, the more I measure the incredible complexity, the dizzying beauty, the mathematical precision of this universe.

Look at the fundamental constants of physics. The speed of light, the Planck constant, the charge of the electron, the gravitational constant. If any one of them had been different, even by an infinitesimal fraction, the universe could never have produced stars, planets, life. The tuning is so fine, so improbable, that many physicists speak of the “anthropic principle”: the universe seems to have been calibrated for our existence.

Some see in this the fruit of chance. A blind chance, a quantum fluctuation in an infinite multiverse where all possibilities are realised. It is a respectable hypothesis, but it does not convince me. It does not convince me because it is unverifiable, certainly, but above all because it seems to me almost as mysterious as the hypothesis of a Creator. To say that the universe was born of a quantum chance is to push the mystery back a notch, not to solve it. For where do the quantum laws come from? Where does the primordial void come from? Where does the very possibility of chance come from?

For me, the answer lies elsewhere. I believe that this universe, in its splendour and complexity, is the work of a higher intelligence, of a Being I call God. A God who does not play dice, to use Einstein’s phrase. A God who willed matter, time, space, and who breathed into this great Whole a direction, a meaning, a purpose. A God who is not a capricious magician, but the supreme lawgiver, the one who wrote the equations we spend our lives deciphering.

This conviction is not a demonstration. It is a faith. I impose it on no one. But it is mine, and it gives my work as an astronomer a depth that the scientific method alone could not offer. It makes of every nebula a prayer, of every star a psalm, of every galaxy a canticle.

4. The False Prophets: Bigots, Fanatics, and Hypocrites

But I must, in honesty, draw a clear line between my faith and that of those who disfigure it.

There are the bigots, those who use God to hate. Those who brandish the Bible to condemn homosexuals, Muslims, migrants, but who forget the central message of the Gospel: “Love one another.” Those who reduce faith to a list of prohibitions, to a penal code, to a tribal identity. Those who have never read a verse of Genesis in Hebrew, but who are certain the world was created in six twenty-four-hour days, and who call astronomers liars.

There are the religious fanatics, those who kill in the name of God. The God’s madmen, as they are called. Whether they be fundamentalist Christians, radical Islamists, Jewish extremists, they have in common a monstrous certainty: they know what God wants. They know who should live and who should die. They turn faith into hatred, prayer into howling, the temple into a bunker. These people are not seeking God. They are seeking power. And they use God as a shield behind which they hide their thirst for domination.

And then there are the modern hypocrites, the false believers who pretend to pray in order to better rule. I speak of the supporters of Donald Trump, those evangelicals who elected him, supported him, adored him, when he is the exact opposite of everything Christianity teaches. Trump is a liar, an adulterer, a thief, a violent man, a man who built his fortune on exploitation and fraud, who mocks the poor, who insults the weak, who never asks for forgiveness because he never believes himself guilty. And yet he is the hero of those who claim to defend “Christian values.”

This alliance between Trumpism and religious fundamentalism is an insult to faith. It tramples on science, it tramples on reason, it tramples on the Gospel. It is an imposture, a perversion, a blasphemy. Trump is not an envoy of God. He is a pagan idol, a golden calf, raised up by a crowd that has forgotten the Beatitudes to retain only hatred of the other.

5. The Watchman’s Lesson

Dear readers, I do not ask you to believe what I believe. I ask you to reflect. To look at the sky, to contemplate the stars, to probe the immensity, and to listen to what your heart tells you. Science will give you the “how.” Faith will perhaps give you the “why.” The two are not enemies. They are two lanterns lighting the same night, two wings carrying us toward the mystery.

I set down my lantern. It flickers gently, like a small flame in the infinite temple of the cosmos. The basketball is in its place, and I think of that God I love, that God who created quasars and dragonflies, black holes and poppies, the laws of thermodynamics and the music of Bach. A God great enough to invent the universe, and humble enough to let Himself be sought by creatures as fragile as we.

The night is vast. But it is not empty. It is full of signs, of wonders, of questions. And perhaps, at the end of the path, of an answer.

6. An Invitation to Dialogue

And you, dear readers, what do you think? This text is not a monologue; it is an invitation. I am an astronomer, a lover of the stars, a believer who seeks. But I do not hold the truth. You who read me may have another vision of the cosmos. Perhaps you are an atheist, an agnostic, a believer of another tradition. Perhaps you think the universe is pure chance, or on the contrary that it is the work of an intelligence you name differently. Perhaps you are angry with religions, or perhaps you find your peace in them.

Whatever your conviction, I invite you to share it. In the comments of this blog, express yourself. Tell us what you believe, what you doubt, what you hope for. Respect and kindness will be our only rules. I am not here to convert, nor to judge. I am here to listen, to learn, to dialogue. The lantern shines brighter when it is surrounded by other lanterns. Come, draw near. Let us speak together of this mystery that surpasses us all.

François