The Cosmos as Sacred Text

Materialism cannot account  
for mind without borrowing
the very idealism it rejects

The Cosmos as Sacred Text: Modern Science Confesses More Than It Intends

By John Wise, PhD

The Universe as Sacred Text

Ethan Siegel begins his new piece in BigThink, “The 9 biggest gaps in our understanding of cosmic history,” December 1, 2025, with a remarkable sentence:

The answers to nature’s greatest riddles are written upon the Universe itself.

Readers may glide past this first sentence, but they should stop and reflect. That line is a confession, a creed, a secular rewrite of cosmogony, the modern creation myth. It tells us (implicitly, of course, as such sentiment would never be explicitly tolerated) that the universe is not simply matter, energy, heat, and light. It is a revelation. It holds answers. It carries meaning. It speaks.

It is a text.

This is not science. It is metaphysics.

The Christian begins with “In the beginning God …”. Modern cosmology begins with “In the beginning the Universe…”.

The two openings could not be more different, yet both reveal the starting point that governs everything that follows.

The Nine Gaps – and the Story They Hide

What makes Siegel’s article so valuable is that he immediately lists nine major events in cosmic history for which no one knows the cause, the mechanism, or even whether the process happened the way our textbooks say it did. The beginning of the universe. Inflation. Reheating. The creation of matter. The origin of the first stars. The early black holes that should not exist. The mysterious reionization of the cosmos. The structure we see today that relies on particles no one has ever observed.

At each point he tells us two things: 1) we know that these transitions occurred, but 2) we do not know how these transitions occurred. Yet despite the admission of ignorance, the cosmic story is treated as complete.

The Compulsion to Closure

This is what we have called the Compulsion to Closure (C to C) at work. Claim curiosity, but retreat into certainty. Describe the gaps as if you were a skeptic, then prescribe the conclusion as if materialism were beyond question. Name the ignorance in order to tame it, yet leave the narrative untouched. Science claims the mantle of skepticism even as it wears the mitre of a pope. It is the postmodern gesture of having your cake and eating it too, and it saturates the discourse of our age.

The evidence is not the problem. The structure of the story is.

Materialism Smuggles Idealism

In the trilogy we just completed on consciousness, we noted that materialism cannot account for mind without borrowing the very idealism it rejects. Information, differentiation, meaning, and order – these are the marks of an intellect, not of unguided matter. The more honestly we describe the world and the more complete our empirical evidence of it becomes, the more clearly we see that the universe behaves like something intelligible. What is the most logical conclusion?

It was intelligently designed.

What Siegel’s nine-point essay gives us, perhaps without intending to, is an empirical demonstration of a philosophical truth. Whatever science says about itself, it treats the universe as a sacred text and cosmologists as its authorized exegetes. In practice, the cosmos becomes sacred revelation.

This is idealism smuggled into materialism.

It is unavoidably such, for matter is dead and explains nothing. Only mind explains. Modern cosmology has adopted all the functions of mind while denying the Mind that gives meaning to the world.

Humility as the Foundation of Knowledge

The secular scientist sees our confidence in Scripture as irrational. They accuse us of treating a collection of ancient writings from “pre-scientific cultures” as divine revelation. Yet the materialist treats a 13.8 billion year old physical record, written (as they say) by nothing conscious, as an infallible revelation of ultimate origins. Their worldview asks us to trust that unguided matter can write truth, that blind forces can reveal meaning, that explosions can encode information, and that accidental brains can read it reliably.

We do not accuse atheists or secular scientists of irrationality, because we do not doubt their rational nature. They reason because they bear the image of the One who is Reason. That spark of intelligibility persists even when their worldview cannot justify it. If they follow their own logic to its end rather than short-circuiting it at the pressure points, they will reach the contradiction that materialism must continually bury.

Idealism returns not because culture is sentimental, but because mind is inescapable.

Materialism denies the conditions that make reason possible, and so it is forced to smuggle those conditions back in under altered terminology. This has been the defining cycle of Western metaphysics since Kant, and it now resurfaces in today’s cosmology. Socrates said that wisdom begins with the admission of ignorance. Scripture says that wisdom begins with the fear of the Lord. Both locate knowledge not in self-certainty, but in true openness and humility.

What Creation Offers Science

When you believe the universe writes its own answers, you remove the very ground that makes truth possible. A story with no Author beyond itself cannot be tested for accuracy. When you assume the story is already complete, your posture becomes closed even as you speak proudly of “openness.”

This posture pervades our world.

Materialism must maintain this closure to survive, and so the gaps are covered with confident declarations. A creationist framework begins with limits, but those limits do not certify our conclusions. They guard our posture. They keep us from pretending the narrative is ours to complete. In this sense, creation does not give us mastery over the world but restores the openness that genuine science demands.

For the past year I have been developing what I call a “Young Earth Creationist Philosophy of Science.” Its aim is not to shield us from evidence, but to restore the humility that real science demands. We take the world seriously as created, which means that the world is intelligible. We take ourselves seriously as creatures, which means that our knowledge is limited. And we take the Lord Jesus seriously as Creator, which means that understanding begins with humility, not with self-authorship.

The Game Is Not Over

In the end, the materialist must treat the universe the way the Christian treats Scripture: as an authoritative text bearing intention, structure, revelation, and meaning. Materialism must collapse into the idealism it denies, for it addresses only part of a much greater, even if unacknowledged, Whole.

Siegel’s article is valuable precisely because it exposes the contradiction.

When physics begins speaking like philosophy, we briefly glimpse the machinery beneath the narrative. But the game is not over. It continues for as long as we can invent another one to play that shields us from the Truth we hope to avoid. It is at this moment that “secular science” drops its value-neutral pretense, choosing to defend the “secular” rather than the “science.”

The world God made still speaks of Him, even when we insist that it speak only of itself.

 

 

---

John Wise received his PhD in philosophy from the University of CA, Irvine in 2004. His dissertation was titled Sartre’s Phenomenological Ontology and the German Idealist Tradition. His area of specialization is 19th to early 20th century continental philosophy.

He tells the story of his 25-year odyssey from atheism to Christianity in the book, Through the Looking Glass: The Imploding of an Atheist Professor’s Worldview (available on Amazon). Since his return to Christ, his research interests include developing a Christian (YEC) philosophy of science and the integration of all human knowledge with God’s word.

He has taught philosophy for the University of CA, Irvine, East Stroudsburg University of PA, Grand Canyon University, American Intercontinental University, and Ashford University. He currently teaches online for the University of Arizona, Global Campus, and is a member of the Heterodox Academy. He and his wife Jenny are known online as The Christian Atheist with a podcast of that name, in addition to a YouTube channel: John and Jenny Wise.