God and Stephen Hawking Page 2

  Yet Hawking seems to deny this, by assigning to science a role beyond its capacity. Not only that but, after disparaging philosophy, he then proceeds to engage in it. For, insofar as he is interpreting and applying science to ultimate questions like the existence of God, Hawking is doing metaphysics. Now, let us be clear, I do not fault him for doing that; I shall be engaging in metaphysics all through this book. My concern is that he does not seem to recognize this.

  Let’s look a little more closely at Hawking’s two lists of questions. Here is the first list:

  How can we understand the world in which we find ourselves?

  How does the universe behave?

  What is the nature of reality?

  Where did all this come from?

  Did the universe need a Creator?16

  The second of these questions is scientific: a typical “how” question that does not raise the matter of ultimate purpose. The first and the last three questions are fundamental questions of philosophy.

  Hawking’s second list is to be found at the end of his first chapter:

  Why is there something rather than nothing?

  Why do we exist?

  Why this particular set of laws and not some other?17

  These are also well-known great questions of philosophy.

  Now science, of course, is one of the voices that will have an input into attempting to answer these questions; but it is by no means the only, nor indeed necessarily the most important, voice.

  Philosophy may be dead according to Hawking, but he seems to believe in giving it an immediate resurrection! Calling his three questions “The Ultimate Questions of Life, the Universe and Everything”, Hawking says: “We shall attempt to answer them in this book.”

  An inadequate view of God

  The consequence of sailing through one red light is that you are likely to sail through a good many more, and that is exactly what happens. Hawking’s inadequate view of philosophy soon shows itself in an inadequate view of God. He writes: “Ignorance of nature’s ways led people in ancient times to invent gods to lord it over every aspect of human life.” He then says that this began to change with ancient Greek thinkers like Thales of Miletus about 2,600 years ago: “The idea arose that nature follows consistent principles that could be deciphered. And so began the long process of replacing the notion of the reign of the gods with the concept of the notion of a universe that is governed by laws of nature, and created according to a blueprint we could someday learn to read.”18

  The impression given by this is that the concept of God, or the gods, is a placeholder for human ignorance – a “God of the Gaps”, who will increasingly be displaced as the gaps in our knowledge are filled by scientific explanations, so that he will eventually disappear completely, like the smile on the face of the proverbial Cheshire cat. In the past there have been many gaps in the scientific picture that have been occupied by God; but Hawking now claims that physics has no longer any room for God, as it has removed the last place where he might be found – the moment of creation. The last piece of the scientific jigsaw has been snapped into place and it leaves us with a closed universe.

  He is but a step away from regarding atheism as a necessary prerequisite for doing science.

  First of all, let us look at the element of truth in what Hawking says. When it thunders, if we suppose that it is a god roaring – as some of the ancients did – we would scarcely be in a mood to investigate the mechanism behind the noise. Only by assuming that there are no gods of this kind can we be free to investigate the mechanisms of nature in a scientific manner.

  So we certainly need to remove deification of the forces of nature in order to be free to study nature. This was a revolutionary step in thinking, taken, as Hawking points out, by early Greek natural philosophers like Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes of Milesia over 2,500 years ago.

  They were not content with mythological explanations, such as those written down by Homer and Hesiod around 700 BC. They sought explanations in terms of natural processes and chalked up some notable scientific successes. Thales is accredited with calculating the length of the year as 365 days, accurately predicting a solar eclipse in 585 BC, and using geometric methods to calculate the height of pyramids from their shadows, and even to estimate the size of the earth and moon. Anaximander invented a sundial and a weatherproof clock, and made the first world and star maps. The Milesians were therefore among the earliest “scientists”, although the word “scientist” was first introduced (by William Whewell) in the nineteenth century.

  Of great interest in the present context is Xenophanes (c. 570–478 BC) of Colophon (near Izmir in present-day Turkey), who, though he was known for his attempts to understand the significance of the fossils of sea creatures found in Malta, is even more famous for his trenchant denunciation of the mythological world-view. He pointed out that certain behaviour was attributed to the gods which would be regarded as utterly shameful among humans: the gods were rogues, thieves, and adulterers. Not unreasonably, Xenophanes held that these gods had been made in the images of the peoples that believed in them: Ethiopians have gods that are dark and flat-nosed, Thracians made them blue-eyed and red-haired. He added derisively: “If cows and horses or lions had hands and could draw, then horses would draw the forms of gods like horses, cows like cows, making their bodies similar in shape to their own.” Thus, for Xenophanes, these gods were but childish fiction drawn from the fertile imaginations of those who believed in them.

  Furthermore, the influential Greek atomist philosopher, Epicurus (born in 341 BC just after the death of Plato), who gave his name to Epicurean philosophy, wished to remove the myths from explanation in order to improve understanding: “Thunderbolts can be produced in several different ways – just be sure the myths are kept out of it! And they will be kept out of it if one follows rightly the appearances and takes them as signs of what is unobservable.”

  Such denunciation of the gods, together with a determination to investigate the natural processes hitherto almost exclusively understood to be the activity of those gods, inevitably led to the decline of mythological interpretations of the universe and paved the way for scientific advance.

  Xenophanes was, however, not the only ancient thinker to criticize the polytheistic world-view. More importantly, he wasn’t the first to do so. Unknown to him presumably (there does not seem to be much information on the matter), and centuries beforehand, the Hebrew leader Moses had warned against worshipping “other gods, bowing down to them or to the sun or the moon or the stars of the sky”. Later, the prophet Jeremiah, writing in about 600 BC, similarly denounced the absurdity of deifying nature and worshipping the sun, moon and stars.

  We now reach a crucial error that seems to have escaped Hawking’s attention. It is to imagine that getting rid of gods either necessitates, or is the same as, getting rid of God. Far from it. For Moses and the Hebrew prophets it was absurd to bow down to various bits of the universe, like the sun, moon and stars, as gods. But they regarded it equally as absurd not to believe in, and bow down to, the Creator God who had made both the universe and them.

  Nor were they introducing a radically novel idea. They did not have to have their universe de-deified as the Greeks did, for the simple reason that they had never believed in such gods. What had saved them from that superstition was their belief in the One True God, Creator of heaven and earth. What Moses and the prophets were protesting about was the introduction of the gods into a previously monotheistic culture.

  That is, the idolatrous and polytheistic universe described by Homer and Hesiod was not the original world-picture of humankind. Nevertheless, this is an impression often gained from books on science and philosophy (including The Grand Design) that start with the ancient Greeks and rightly emphasize the importance of the de-deification of the universe, yet singularly fail to point out that the Hebrews had vigorously protested against idolatrous interpretations of the universe long before the time of the Greeks. This obscures th
e fact that polytheism arguably constitutes a perversion of an original belief in the One Creator God. It was this perversion that needed to be corrected, by recovering belief in the Creator and not by jettisoning it. The same is true today.

  In order to avoid confusion, we should explore the depth of the gulf between the Greek and Hebrew views of the universe a little further, just to see how vast and unbridgeable it is. Commenting on Hesiod’s poem “Theogony” (“The genesis of the gods”), Werner Jaeger writes:

  If we compare this Greek hypostasis of the world-creative Eros with that of the Logos in the Hebrew account of creation, we may observe a deep-lying difference in the outlook of the two peoples. The Logos is a substantialization of an intellectual property or power of God the creator, who is stationed outside the world and brings that world into existence by his own personal fiat. The Greek gods are stationed inside the world; they are descended from Heaven and Earth…they are generated by the mighty power of Eros who likewise belongs within the world as an all-engendering primitive force. Thus they are already subject to what we should call natural law…When Hesiod’s thought at last gives way to truly philosophical thinking, the Divine is sought inside the world – not outside it, as in the Jewish Christian theology that develops out of the book of Genesis.19

  It is therefore a very striking fact that Xenophanes, despite being steeped in a polytheistic culture, did not make the mistake of confusing God with the gods and thus reject the former with the latter. He believed in one God who ruled the universe. He wrote: “There is one God…similar to mortals neither in shape nor in thought…remote and effortless he governs all there is.”

  Hawking is surely not expecting us to fall for the common trick of rubbishing religion by rubbishing primitive concepts of God or the gods. Yet, whether deliberately or not, he confuses God with the gods. And that inevitably leads him to a completely inadequate view of God, as a God of the Gaps who can be displaced by scientific advance. It is, however, a view of God that is not to be found in any major monotheistic religion, where God is not a God of the Gaps but the author of the whole show. Nor, incidentally, is he the God of the deists, who lit the blue touch paper to start the universe going and then retired to a vast uninvolved distance. God both created the universe and constantly sustains it in existence. Without him, nothing would be there for physicists like Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow to study.

  In particular, therefore, God is the creator both of the bits of the universe we don’t understand and of the bits that we do. And it is, of course, the bits that we do understand that give the most evidence of God’s existence and activity. Just as my admiration of the genius behind a work of engineering or art increases the more I understand it, so my worship of the Creator increases the more I understand the universe he has created.

  2 God or the laws of nature?

  A matter of logic: a self-creating universe?

  One of the main conclusions of The Grand Design is: “Because there is a law of gravity, the universe can and will create itself out of nothing.”20 First, a general comment on this key expression of Hawking’s belief.

  According to him, as we have seen, philosophy is dead. However, one of the main tasks of philosophy is to train people in the art of definition, logical analysis, and argument. Is Hawking really telling us that this also is dead? Surely not. However, it would seem that some of his arguments could have profited from a little more attention to the matter of clarity of definition and logical analysis. We shall start with the statement just quoted.

  The first question to ask is: what does Hawking mean when he uses the word “nothing” in the statement “the universe can and will create itself out of nothing”? Note the assumption in the first part of that statement: “Because there is a law of gravity…” Hawking assumes, therefore, that a law of gravity exists. One presumes also that he believes that gravity itself exists, for the simple reason that an abstract mathematical law on its own would be vacuous with nothing to describe – a point to which we shall return. The main issue for now, however, is that gravity or a law of gravity is not “nothing”, if he is using that word in its usual philosophically correct sense of “non-being”. If he is not, he should have told us.

  On the face of it, Hawking appears, therefore, to be simultaneously asserting that the universe is created from nothing and from something – not a very promising start. Indeed, one might add for good measure the fact that when physicists talk about “nothing”, they often appear to mean a quantum vacuum, which is manifestly not nothing. In fact, Hawking is surely alluding to this when he writes: “We are a product of quantum fluctuations in the very early universe.”21

  Later on in the book he sets the total energy of empty space to zero by subtracting the actual value and then seems to proceed on the assumption that the energy actually is zero when he asks the question: “If the total energy of the universe must always remain zero, and it costs energy to create a body, how can a whole universe be created from nothing?”22 This seems, at least to me, a rather dubious move.

  Could all of this be just a little too “much ado about nothing”?

  The situation does not improve when we move on to the logic of the second part of Hawking’s statement: “the universe can and will create itself from nothing”. This assertion is self-contradictory. If we say “X creates Y”, we presuppose the existence of X in the first place in order to bring Y into existence. That is a simple matter of understanding what the words “X creates Y” mean. If, therefore, we say “X creates X”, we imply that we are presupposing the existence of X in order to account for the existence of X. This is obviously self-contradictory and thus logically incoherent – even if we put X equal to the universe! To presuppose the existence of the universe to account for its own existence sounds like something out of Alice in Wonderland, not science.

  It is seldom that one finds in a single statement two distinct levels of contradiction, but Hawking appears to have constructed such a statement. He says the universe comes from a nothing that turns out to be a something (self-contradiction number one), and then he says the universe creates itself (self-contradiction number two). But that is not all. His notion that a law of nature (gravity) explains the existence of the universe is also self-contradictory, since a law of nature, by definition, surely depends for its own existence on the prior existence of the nature it purports to describe. More on what laws are later.

  Thus, the main conclusion of the book turns out not simply to be a self-contradiction, which would be disaster enough, but to be a triple self-contradiction. Philosophers just might be tempted to comment: so that is what comes of saying philosophy is dead!

  In the above, Hawking is echoing the language of Oxford chemist Peter Atkins (also a well-known atheist), who believes that “space-time generates its own dust in the process of its own self-assembly”.23 Atkins dubs this the “Cosmic Bootstrap” principle, referring to the self-contradictory idea of a person lifting himself by pulling on his own bootlaces. His Oxford colleague, philosopher of religion Keith Ward, is surely right to say that Atkins’ view of the universe is as blatantly self-contradictory as the name he gives to it, pointing out that it is “logically impossible for a cause to bring about some effect without already being in existence”. Ward concludes: “Between the hypothesis of God and the hypothesis of a cosmic bootstrap, there is no competition. We were always right to think that persons, or universes, who seek to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps are forever doomed to failure.”24

  What this all goes to show is that nonsense remains nonsense, even when talked by world-famous scientists. What serves to obscure the illogicality of such statements is the fact that they are made by scientists; and the general public, not surprisingly, assumes that they are statements of science and takes them on authority. That is why it is important to point out that they are not statements of science, and any statement, whether made by a scientist or not, should be open to logical analysis. Immense prestige and authority do
es not compensate for faulty logic.

  The worrying thing is that this illogical notion of the universe creating itself is not some peripheral point in The Grand Design. It appears to be a key argument. And if the key argument is invalid, in one sense there is little left to say.

  However, since the laws of nature (gravity in particular) play a major role in Hawking’s argument, it will be important to comment on what look very much like serious misunderstandings regarding the nature and capacity of such laws.

  The nature of the laws of nature

  Hawking points out that there was originally no clear distinction in Greek thought between human laws and the laws of nature; and he gives the classic example of Heraclitus (c.535–c.475 BC), who thought that the sun’s movement in the sky was occasioned by its fear of being hunted down by a vengeful goddess of justice. The idea that inanimate objects possessed minds and intentionality was espoused by Aristotle, and dominated Western thinking for around 2,000 years.

  Hawking reminds us that it was Descartes (1596–1650) who first formulated the concept of the laws of nature in our contemporary sense. Here is Hawking’s definition of a law of nature: “Today most scientists would say that a law of nature is a rule that is based upon an observed regularity and provides predictions that go beyond the immediate situations upon which it is based.”25 A familiar example of such a law is “the sun rises in the east”. It is based on an observed regularity, and predicts that the sun will rise in the east tomorrow. On the other hand, “swans are white” is not a law of nature. Not all swans are white; the next one we see may well be black.