Professor Gerd Ganteför believes in the supernatural: I don’t want to live in a world where Darwinism prevails
17-10-2025
Christian Life
Jörn Schumacher, PRO
Physics professor Gerd Ganteför. Photo Gerd Ganteför
Christian Life
Through his research into astrophysics and the quantum world, physics professor Gerd Ganteför discovered that the world cannot be explained by matter alone. The universe is based on information. But who came up with all this?
Gerd Ganteför was a physics professor at the University of Konstanz. Since he retired two and a half years ago, he has been explaining the world of physics in numerous videos on YouTube. Thousands of people click on his videos because he has a pleasant voice and a friendly manner, and because he can simply explain complicated things.
His channel, Grenzen des Wissens (Limits of Knowledge), has more than 100,000 subscribers. In six years, Ganteför has published 460 videos with a total of 20 million clicks. The 68-year-old serves as an “explainer” for astro-, nano-, and quantum physics, as well as energy and climate. But there is a supernatural element to it all: Ganteför used to be an atheist, but physics brought him to God.
“Physics is never about fear.”
Knowledge
Even before the coronavirus pandemic, the University of Konstanz employed Ganteför as an ‘explainer’ for videos on interesting physical phenomena. During the pandemic, lectures for students had to be recorded as online videos. Suddenly, these clips were being watched by many more people than would normally attend the lectures. Ganteför’s video’ Relativity Theory for Laypeople’, for example, received over eight million views. This led him to create his own channel. “I just enjoy sharing my knowledge with people”, says the physicist in an interview with PRO.
Ganteför has a high output, publishing two videos per week: one on astrophysics, one on energy and climate. “The former is viewed by around 20,000 people, the latter by around 40,000.”
His aim is to show what physics can say about climate. And nothing more. Physics is always about objectivity, he emphasises. “Never about fear.” But what he often observes in the public debate on climate change is fear, panic and doom and gloom.
Religious moment
When UN Secretary-General António Guterres said that humanity was on a “highway to hell” due to climate change, it greatly annoyed Ganteför, he says. “That’s a religious moment”, he says. Here, physics is being misused to support an ideology, and anyone who doesn’t conform to it is treated with hostility and cancelled. Ganteför repeatedly insists: “We are not doomed. Humanity will not die out because of climate change.”
In this regard, the physicist largely agrees with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. “There is the greenhouse effect caused by CO2 and the burning of coal, gas and oil”, he emphasises, “and there is man-made global warming, no question about it. But the media and climate activists are turning it into hysteria.”
Admittedly, the proportion of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere should not be allowed to become too high. But Ganteför is sure that there is a way out. And it looks something like this: half of the approximately 40 billion tonnes of CO2 that enter the atmosphere each year are absorbed by the oceans and trees. His conclusion: “We no longer need to achieve zero emissions, but rather half that amount.”
In a video, the physicist pointed out that wind is not an infinite resource. “When you extract energy from air currents using wind turbines, you change the wind currents.” Studies suggest that the wind behind large wind farms in the North Sea is weaker. This has consequences for nature. Ganteför says climate scientists have attacked him for his theories. He also reports harassment against a friend because of him and speaks of “Mafia methods”.
Ideology
Ganteför was defamed as a climate denier and even as an AfD supporter. Yet he is a member of the FDP in his canton of Thurgau. Around ten years ago, he spoke twice at AfD events on energy and climate issues at the invitation of the party – at a time when the AfD was significantly less radical than it is today.
In a video entitled “Klima: Ein sehr persönlicher Erfahrungsbericht” (Climate: A Very Personal Experience Report), Ganteför talks about this difficult time. His university did not support him or question the accusations. Ganteför’s research proposals were suddenly rejected. He compares it to the witch hunts of the Middle Ages. “Only the prosecution has a say. And the prosecution is the climate movement.” So-called climate science no longer seemed like science to him, but rather an ideology with religious-fanatical traits.
Today, Ganteför finds himself caught between two camps: when he explains in his videos in precise scientific terms why the greenhouse effect exists and why it is right to emit less and less CO2, he is attacked by climate change deniers. However, when he points out that huge wind farms can weaken the wind on their leeward side, he himself is accused of being a climate change denier.
Many of his videos deal with astrophysics and the “limits of knowledge”. He readily admits when things get speculative. “What does “supernatural” actually mean?” he asks in one video. “Is it everything that is not familiar from everyday life and cannot be seen at any time? Basically, even an electromagnetic wave is supernatural.” After taking a deep look into quantum research, one can only conclude: “Yes, there is such a thing as the supernatural!” This has nothing to do with esotericism, Ganteför says. For him, it means above all “immaterial”.
Information
In his latest book, Das rätselhafte Gewebe unserer Wirklichkeit und die Grenzen der Physik (The Enigmatic Fabric of Our Reality and the Limits of Physics), Ganteför describes the reasons why he no longer believes in a materialistic universe. In other words, a worldview in which the universe resembles a gigantic machine whose gears, in the form of natural laws, control the course of certain processes.
“Physics cannot answer the question of why.”
‘In the universe, everything evolves towards more probable states.’ This law of entropy demands that order naturally decreases more and more, and energy is distributed throughout the universe until everything dies a great cold death. And yet, something mysterious counteracts the law of entropy. That can only be information. It is an indication of life. Wherever there is life, entropy is counteracted.
“In the universe, everything evolves towards more probable states.” This law of entropy demands that order naturally decreases more and more, and energy is distributed throughout the universe until everything dies a great cold death. And yet, something mysterious counteracts the law of entropy. That can only be information. It is an indication of life. Wherever there is life, entropy is counteracted.
“Physics can describe nature very well”, Ganteför tells PRO. “But it cannot answer the question of why.” Why does light travel at 300,000 kilometres per second and not at five? Why are the constants of nature exactly as they are? In quantum physics in particular, some phenomena can be described mathematically, “but which our current world view cannot cope with”, says the physicist. “They seem like miracles to us.” Science has not yet understood the nature of many things.
This includes, for example, the fact that a quantum system behaves differently when it can be observed. “If I cannot observe it, a particle behaves like a wave. But if I can observe it, it behaves like a particle”, says the physicist, explaining one of the craziest experiments in the history of science, the double-slit experiment. This demonstrates that light and other quantum objects exhibit properties of both particles and waves simultaneously.
“Information obviously plays a role here. But information does not simply exist in inanimate nature.” Ganteför attempts a comparison: “If you found a book with letters in it on an alien planet, you would assume that an intelligent being had written the book.” Similarly, DNA in living beings is full of information. “Without information, there is no life.”
Darwinism
Ganteför drew the following conclusion: “The deeper level of our existence contains a metaphysical, spiritual level. It is not purely material.” Ganteför is convinced that the materialistic worldview is shaped by a zeitgeist, namely an atheistic one. In his book and also in a detailed video, he, therefore, attacks Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion. Ganteför is annoyed that Dawkins does not argue as a scientist, but purely ideologically. He abuses science for his ideology, which is directed against God and religion.
Another astonishing discovery gave the physicist pause for thought. “The universe seems to be tailor-made for life”, says Ganteför. “If the constants and laws of nature were just a little different, our universe would look completely different, and then we wouldn’t exist. If we were talking about one or two parameters, we could dismiss it as a coincidence. But there are 50 to 100! That really makes you think.” He adds: “Perhaps we will eventually realise that information is the actual basis of reality. “It from Bit.”” This short sentence was coined by the American physicist John Wheeler, who died in 2008. All existence (“It”) comes from information (‘Bit’).
Science cannot prove the existence of God, Ganteför notes. “But neither can it prove His non-existence.” He has become somewhat sceptical about Darwinism. “It is cold, murderous and merciless”, he says in one of his videos, adding: “Mercy is a Christian concept. Christianity is the overcoming of Darwinism.” Ganteför refers to the Sermon on the Mount and states: “I don’t want to live in a world where Darwinism prevails.”
For another video, he invited Ralf B. Bergmann, professor of physics at the University of Bremen. The topic: Science and Christianity. They agree that belief in God is reasonable and explains the existence and characteristics of the world better than atheism. In a “Christmas special edition video”, Ganteför went beyond his usual science-oriented approach to conveying information and ventured a confession: he is “a Christian at heart.” His interpretation, he emphasises, is Christian theology. “The basis or substance of the world is spiritual: “In the beginning was the Word.”” This cannot be proven with physics. But in the end, it’s all about probabilities.
About Gerd Ganteför
Gerd Ganteför, born in 1956, grew up in the German city of Dortmund; his father was a chemist. He studied physics at the University of Münster from 1977 to 1984 and obtained his doctorate in nanotechnology at the University of Bielefeld. He then did postdoctoral research in the United States and habilitated at the Jülich Research Centre. In 1997, he was appointed to the University of Konstanz, where he researched and taught until the end of his term of office in 2022. He has been living in Thurgau, in northern Switzerland, on the shores of Lake Constance, for around 20 years. On his YouTube channel Grenzen des Wissens (Limits of Knowledge), he explains scientific concepts related to climate, as well as other physical and metaphysical questions.
This article was translated by CNE.news and published by the German magazine PRO on August 16, 2025
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