Three months after its appearance, the book has sold more than 100 thousand copies.
Michel-Yves Bolloré is a practicing Catholic and the brother of Vincent Bolloré, one of the most powerful French industrialists.
The co-author assured AFP that he worked for three years on “a book that did not exist until now.”
The work aims to explain “in an accessible way” how the astronomical discoveries of the 20th century have again provided evidence of the existence of a supreme intelligence, which orchestrated everything.
For nearly four centuries, with the emergence of Galileo, and then Newton and Darwin, “science demonstrated that a Creator was not necessary to explain the Universe. To the point that materialism triumphed at the beginning of the 20th century.”
But now society is experiencing a great “pendulum” movement, with the discovery of the Big Bang, the expansion of the Universe, its thermal death… Theories that, according to Michel-Yves Bolloré, question the thesis of an immutable Universe, since that “has a beginning and an end.”
The authors therefore conclude the existence of a “Supreme Creator” who gave the first impulse.
“It is the notion of evidence that causes controversy,” admits Thierry Magnin, a physicist and priest. “We have the right to think that there is a ‘great watchmaker’ but we do not have the right to say that this is in itself a ‘proof’,” he told AFP. “Articulating science and religion is not the same as confusing them.”
“To claim that the existence of God can be scientifically proven is to be naive.” adds the philosopher of science Etienne Klein, in the weekly L’Express.
In the opinion of the theologian and physicist François Euvé, the book works because it responds to “a need for points of reference, in a period of uncertainty about the future of the world.” In his opinion, “it is not incumbent” on science to respond to this need for certainty.
The second part of the book is dedicated to the traditional proofs of monotheistic religions: the Bible, the notion of the chosen people of the Jews, miracles such as that of Fatima.
The American Nobel Prize in Physics Robert Wilson signs the preface of the book, something that according to the weekly L’Express, he would not have done if he had read that second part.
“I have no written evidence to show that (Wilson) is sorry.Bollore replies.