I thought the silly season for news stories ended when term started. But apparently not. On the other hand I may be unusual in thinking this is a complete non-story: Stephen Hawking apparently thinks scientific theory renders God redundant.
The journalist reporting this seems to take Hawking’s earlier reference to “the mind of God” – possibly the only words in A Brief History of Time that any popular writer has ever quoted – as a statement of theistic belief rather than a poetic metaphor. I was always under the impression that Hawking was at least agnostic verging on atheist, and expected that sooner or later a Theory of Everything would be worked out.
I am incapable of judging the quality of his science in this book, and not only because it isn’t published, but because I’m simply not that bright. However, I can’t see that any statement about how the non-universe was before [ed - after reading a comment I need to point out this is a non-temporal "before" – whatever one of those is!] the initial conditions of the Big Bang is any less speculative than any other. He’s quoted as saying:
Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist. It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going.
At one level, of course, this indicates the way in which God is sometimes treated as the filler for the ultimate gap in a way continuous with older God-of-the-gaps theories. It has never been the best of arguments to use God as an explanation for things we can’t yet explain.
At another level, it would seem to me that Hawking’s view is as much a statement of faith in gravity as some kind of Platonic idea as it is anything truly scientific. Gravity is a necessary property of the universe. It’s not clear that it can be held to be a spontaneous cause of it. I’m tempted to wonder whether string theory isn’t appropriately so named because its answers are always as long as a piece of string.
At a deeper level, of course, the way in which some Christians, myself included, take the nature of the universe to point to a purposeful God rather than a random fluctuation is its intelligibility as the sort of universe it is, not its simple existence. Our human reasoning about reality is not an empty activity of imposing rational patterns on a fundamentally random and pointless cosmos, but a discerning of pattern and meaning which offers a true (but limited) testimony to a pattern-maker and meaning-giver.
But that a famous scientist thinks science renders God redundant as an explanation is a bit of non-story. It’s nor science, it’s not theology and it’s not exactly new.
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