The alien, Hollus, has come to Earth to gain access to the museum's large collection of fossils, and to study accumulated human knowledge in order to gather evidence of the existence of God.

However, the alien ship's advanced telescope in orbit then sees a large black entity emerge from space itself and cover the exploding star.

Barry F. Seidman from Skeptical Inquirer accused Sawyer of having a religious anti-science agenda and promoting it with Calculating God and The Terminal Experiment.

[3][4][5] Crucially, Seidman's review left out that the only two villains in the novel are terrorists who bomb Thomas's museum compelled by their radical creationist beliefs.

[4] In fact, Seidman cited sentences from theist characters as if they reflected the novel's general stance on God, and in turn the author's.

For example, to give weight to the designer argument for fine-tuning, the novel portrays the multiverse hypothesis as implausible according to the aliens' research, while in reality Sawyer did not believe it to be so.