Hubble and Humason's redshift observations provided empirical evidence that galaxies are moving outward, suggesting an expanding universe, which confirmed the Big Bang model against Einstein's steady-state preference.

The Hawking-Penrose singularity theorem in the 1960s provides rigorous proof that any universe satisfying certain physical conditions must have had a beginning, commanding broad consensus in modern cosmology.

Newton's Principia was titled to reveal the mathematical principles of the universe as expressions of the mind of God; Newton was explicitly trying to explore the divine order embedded in nature through mathematical analysis.

Newton's law of universal gravitation includes an action-at-a-distance term (inverse-square law) that Leibniz criticized as bringing the occult back into science because force is transmitted through empty space without material mediation, creating the philosophical problem of how gravity actually works.

Early modern scientists (Galileo, Kepler, Boyle, Pascal, Newton) believed that the human mind was made in the image of a rational creator and that nature was endowed with rationality and order by the same creator, giving them confidence that nature was intelligible and could be systematically studied.

Materialism has become the water we're swimming in as a default way of thinking among many natural scientists, social scientists, and in humanities ideologies derivative of those sciences, despite not holding up well to rigorous inquiry

The discarded image problem emerged when reality became naturalized, revealing that some aspects of reality could not be reduced to natural sciences, leading magic to become a way of attempting to restore a unified understanding of reality

Medieval and scholastic philosophers explained causation through formal causes—attributing causal powers to the names of effects (like saying opium causes sleep because it has a 'dormitive virtue')—which late 17th-century mechanical philosophers correctly rejected as circular reasoning

The separation of science from theology began gradually but particularly in the late 19th century with geologists and Darwin, who explained features of Earth and life through slow, gradual, purely naturalistic processes without invoking a guiding intelligence.

A universe with a Big Bang beginning requires explanation; Einstein originally resisted this conclusion because materialism makes a beginning of matter inconceivable, since the late 19th century consensus held that matter was eternal.

Einstein introduced the cosmological constant arbitrarily to maintain a static universe, fine-tuning it to balance gravitational pull inward with an outward antigravity force, but subsequent physics showed even small perturbations would break this balance.

After 1958, molecular biology revealed that the fundamental nature of reality includes information as a third category alongside matter and energy, making it very hard to be an intellectually fulfilled materialist.

The shift from a theocentric to anthropocentric conception of the universe, emerging with Renaissance humanism, positioned the human mind as the great organizer and constructor of reality, representing a Faustian-Promethean impulse

Newton's mathematical formulation provided something the scholastics lacked—a powerful, predictive mathematical description—which is why Newton's circular definition of gravity advanced science despite committing the same logical form of error as scholasticism

Newton's tutor Isaac Barrow examined Newton on mathematics at the beginning of the 1684-1686 period and found him deficient, revealing that Newton's extraordinary mastery of mathematics during those two years represented not innate genius but extraordinary work ethic and intellectual power applied through sustained effort.

Information, in the uniform and repeated experience that forms the basis of scientific reasoning, is not a product of material substrate alone; information is a non-material phenomenon that requires explanation.

The Kalam cosmological argument from the Abbasid Caliphate in the 8th-9th century states: the universe began to exist, therefore the universe has a cause, and that cause cannot be material since matter itself is what is being explained.

Contemporary science offers a case for theism based on scientific discoveries (Big Bang, fine-tuning, information in DNA) rather than on gaps in understanding—a fundamentally different and stronger form of theistic argument

For a short protein of 150 amino acids, the experimental ratio of functional proteins to non-functional gibberish sequences is approximately 1 in 10 to the 77th power, meaning functional proteins are extraordinarily rare in the sequence space.

Intelligent design proponents have made successful predictions about the non-coding regions of the genome, predicting that 'junk DNA' previously identified as non-functional by neo-Darwinians would in fact be importantly functional, and this demonstrates that the design approach is scientifically productive.