In 1966, Time Magazine ran a cover story asking,

is God dead?

The cover reflected the fact that many people had accepted the cultural narrative

that God is obsolete, that as science progresses, there's less need for a God to explain the universe.

It turns out, though, that the rumors of God's death were premature.

In fact, perhaps the best arguments for his existence come from of all places science itself.

Here's the story.

The same year, Time featured its now famous headline,

the astronomer Carl Sagan announced that there were two necessary criteria for a planet to support life,

the right kind of star, and a planet the right distance from that star.

Given the roughly octillion planets in the universe that's one followed by 24 zeros,

there should have been about septillion planets that's one followed by 21 zeros,

capable of supporting life.

With such spectacular odds, scientists were optimistic that the search for extraterrestrial intelligence

known by its initials SETI, an ambitious project launched in the 1960s,

was sure to turn up something soon.

With a vast radio-telloscopic network, scientists listened for signals that resembled coded intelligence.

But as the years passed, the silence from the universe was deafening.

As of 2014, researchers have discovered precisely,

Bobkiss, Nada Zilch, which is to say zero, followed by an infinite number of zeros.

What happened?

As our knowledge of the universe increased,

...