God and Stephen Hawking Read online

  In this way, even though he is allergic to the notion of intelligent design,72 Hawking has just given an excellent argument in its support. Ironically, he actually admits this by saying that, in Conway’s world, we are the creators.

  And in our universe the Creator is God.

  5 Science and rationality

  Much of the rationale behind Hawking’s argument lies in the idea that there is a deep-seated conflict between science and religion. This is not a discord that I recognize. For me, as a Christian believer, the beauty of the scientific laws reinforces my faith in an intelligent, divine Creator. The more I understand science the more I believe in God, because of my wonder at the breadth, sophistication, and integrity of his creation.

  Indeed, the very reason that science flourished so vigorously in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, under men like Galileo, Kepler and Newton, had a great deal to do with their conviction that the laws of nature reflected the influence of a divine law-giver. One of the fundamental themes of Christianity is that the universe was built according to a rational, intelligent design. Far from belief in God hindering science, it is the motor that drove it.

  The fact that science is (mainly) a rational activity helps us to identify another flaw in Hawking’s thinking. Like Francis Crick, he wants us to believe that we human beings are nothing but “mere collections of fundamental particles of nature”. Crick writes: “You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.”73

  What shall we think, then, of human love and fear, joy and sorrow? Are they meaningless neural behaviour patterns? Or, what shall we make of the concepts of beauty and truth? Is a Rembrandt painting nothing but molecules of paint scattered on canvas? Hawking and Crick would seem to think so. One wonders, then, by what means we should recognize it. After all, if the concept of truth itself results from “no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells”, how in the name of logic would we know that our brain was composed of nerve cells?

  These arguments recall what has come to be known as Darwin’s Doubt: “With me, the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy.”

  By far and away the most devastating criticism of such extreme reductionism is that, like scientism, it is self-destructive. Physicist John Polkinghorne describes its programme as:

  ultimately suicidal. If Crick’s thesis is true we could never know it. For, not only does it relegate our experiences of beauty, moral obligation, and religious encounter to the epiphenomenal scrap-heap, it also destroys rationality. Thought is replaced by electro-chemical neural events. Two such events cannot confront each other in rational discourse. They are neither right nor wrong. They simply happen… The very assertions of the reductionist himself are nothing but blips in the neural network of his brain. The world of rational discourse dissolves into the absurd chatter of firing synapses. Quite frankly, that cannot be right and none of us believes it to be so.74

  Precisely. There is a patent self-contradiction running through all attempts, however sophisticated they may appear, to derive rationality from irrationality. When stripped down to their bare bones, they all seem uncannily like the futile attempts to lift oneself by one’s bootstraps that we mentioned in the first chapter. After all, it is the use of the human mind that has led Hawking and Crick to adopt a view of human beings that carries with it the corollary that there is no reason to trust our minds when they tell us anything at all; let alone, in particular, that such reductionism is true.

  The very existence of the capacity for rational thought is surely a pointer: not downwards to chance and necessity, but upwards to an intelligent source of that capacity. We live in an information age, and we are well aware that language-type information is intimately connected with intelligence. For instance, we have only to see a few letters of the alphabet spelling our name in the sand to recognize at once the work of an intelligent agent. How much more likely, then, is the existence of an intelligent Creator behind human DNA, the colossal biological database that contains no fewer than 3.5 billion “letters” – the longest “word” yet discovered?

  However, we are now moving away from physics in the direction of biology – a subject in which similar issues arise. I have devoted a great deal of attention to it in my book God’s Undertaker, so I shall not re-tell that story here.

  Rational support for the existence of God from outside science

  Rational support for the existence of God is not only to be found in the realm of science, for science is not co-extensive with rationality, as many people imagine. For instance, we find ourselves to be moral beings, capable of understanding the difference between right and wrong. There is no scientific route to such ethics, as has been admitted by all but the most die-hard converts to scientism. Physics cannot inspire our concern for others, nor was science responsible for the spirit of altruism that has existed in human societies since the dawn of time. But that does not mean that ethics is non-rational.

  Furthermore, just as the fine-tuning of the constants of nature and the rational intelligibility of nature point to a transcendent intelligence that is independent of this world, so the existence of a common pool of moral values points to the existence of a transcendent moral being.

  History is also a very important rational discipline. Indeed, it is easy to overlook the fact that the methods of the historian have a very important role to play within science itself. We have been discussing the way in which the universe is describable in terms of physical law, and most of us are aware that physical laws are often established by an inductive process. That is, observations can be repeatedly made, experiments repeatedly done, and, if they give the same results each time under the same conditions, we feel comfortable in asserting that we have a genuine law, by what we call “inductive inference”. For instance, we can repeatedly observe the motion of the planets in their orbits round the sun, and thus confirm Kepler’s laws of planetary motion.

  In areas of science such as cosmology, however, there are things which we cannot repeat. The most obvious example is the history of the universe from its beginning. We cannot re-run the Big Bang and say that it has been established by repeated experimentation.

  What we can and do employ are the methods of the historian. We use a procedure called “inference to the best explanation” (or “abductive inference”).75 We are all familiar with this procedure, since it is the key to every good detective novel. A is murdered. B is found to have a motive – she stood to profit if A died. So B did it? Maybe. But then C is found to have had a violent row with A on the night he was murdered. So C did it? Maybe. But then… and Hercule Poirot keeps us guessing until the final denouement. Let us call the circumstance where there are several possible hypotheses consistent with an observed outcome the Poirot Principle.

  The point about a Poirot story is that you cannot re-run the murder to see who did it. We cannot, therefore, expect the same level of certainty here which we get with repeated experimentation. It is that very feature, of course, that makes Poirot stories so enjoyable.

  Exactly the same thing happens in cosmology. We set up a hypothesis. Suppose there was a Big Bang, and let’s call this hypothesis A. We then say: if A happened, what would we expect to find today? Someone says: we would expect to find B. So, scientists look and find B. What does this prove? Well, it is consistent with A, but it does not prove that A happened with the same kind of certainty that is associated with inductive argument, for the very obvious reason that there could be another hypothesis, A1 – very different from A, but nevertheless consistent with observing B. Indeed, there could be many other hypotheses different from Abut consistent with observing B. The Poirot Principle operates in cosmology.

  It is for this reason that inference to the best explanation (abducti
on) does not carry the same weight as inductive inference. M-theory is speculative. Kepler’s laws are not. The danger is that, because science involves both induction and abduction, the latter is often invested with the authority accorded to the former.

  Nevertheless, inference to the best explanation plays a very important role in those branches of science that deal with unrepeatable events in the past; like the origin of the universe and of life.

  It is perfectly appropriate, therefore, to turn to history to ask if it supplies us with any evidence that there is a God. After all, if there is a God who is ultimately responsible for this universe and human life, it would surely not be surprising if he were to reveal himself. One of the main reasons I believe in God is because of the evidence that God has revealed himself to human beings within recorded history. The evidence centres mainly on the life and work of Jesus Christ, and focuses above all on his resurrection from the dead, which is presented to us as a fact of history.

  These events are well attested in the biblical record, whose authenticity has been repeatedly established. There are also important extra-biblical sources and a wealth of archaeological findings that confirm the reliability of the biblical narrative. My faith in God, therefore, rests not only on the testimony of science but also on the testimony of history, particularly to the fact that Jesus Christ rose from the dead.

  Here we are once again in the realm of the singular and unrepeatable; and, in light of Hume’s dictum cited above, we shall clearly require strong evidence, if belief in the resurrection is to be credible. However, Hawking will stop us at this point, and object that my claim that the resurrection occurred violates one of the fundamental principles of science: the laws of nature are universal – they admit no exceptions. As we have seen, Hawking is quite prepared to make inferences to the best explanation about unrepeatable past events. In his view, however, the resurrection is impossible in principle.

  Hawking discusses this in the context of his convictions about what he calls “scientific determinism” – a view traceable to Laplace. “Given the state of the universe at one time, a complete set of laws fully determines both the future and the past. That would exclude the possibility of miracles or an active role for God.”76

  On the basis of his determinism, Hawking reduces biology to physics and chemistry and concludes: “It is hard to see how free will can operate if our behaviour is determined by physical law, so it seems we are no more than biological machines and that free will is just an illusion.”77 He concedes, however, that human behaviour is so complex that predicting it would be impossible, so in practice we use “the effective theory that people have free will”.78

  Hawking says: “This book is rooted in the concept of scientific determinism which implies that…there are no miracles, or exceptions to the laws of nature.”79 Could it be his scientific determinism that is the illusion? He is explicit in defining the implications of his determinism. In connection with the difficulty of predicting human behaviour in practice, he says, in a statement again reminiscent of Laplace: “For that one would need a knowledge of each of the initial states of each of the thousand trillion trillion molecules in the human body and to solve something like that number of equations.”80 At first sight this seems like strange language to come from a contemporary expert on quantum theory, which has as one of its fundamental tenets the Heisenberg Principle of Indeterminacy – that it is not possible simultaneously to measure accurately the position and the momentum of an electron, say. This principle would appear to vitiate any possibility of realizing Laplace’s deterministic dream, even in theory.

  However, Hawking has not forgotten the Uncertainty Principle. In a later chapter he informs us that the Uncertainty Principle “tells us that there are limits to our ability to simultaneously measure certain data, such as the position and velocity of a particle”.81 This leads him at once to modify his original “scientific determinism”.

  Quantum physics might seem to undermine the idea that nature is governed by laws, but that is not the case. Instead, it leads us to accept a new sort of determinism: given the state of a system at some time, the laws of nature determine the probabilities of various futures and pasts rather than determining the future and past with certainty.82

  His absolute determinism seems to have been seriously diluted – by Hawking himself. How, or even whether, he thinks this modified “determinism” (if that’s what it is) negates free will and the possibility of miracles, he does not say.

  Let us, therefore, cite a comment on the implications of determinism by another physicist, John Polkinghorne.

  In the opinion of many thinkers, human freedom is closely connected with human rationality. If we were deterministic beings, what would validate the claim that our utterance constituted rational discourse? Would not the sounds issuing from mouths, or the marks we made on paper, be simply the actions of automata? All proponents of deterministic theories, whether social and economic (Marx), or sexual (Freud), or genetic (Dawkins and E. O. Wilson), need a covert disclaimer on their own behalf, excepting their own contribution from reductive dismissal.83

  It would appear, therefore, that Hawking’s name would be a suitable addition to this list.

  Miracles and the laws of nature

  According to Hawking, then, the reign of the laws of nature is absolute. They determine everything and permit no exceptions. There can therefore be no miracles. He writes: “These laws should hold everywhere and at all times; otherwise they wouldn’t be laws. There could be no exceptions or miracles. Gods or demons couldn’t intervene in the running of the universe.” 84

  Once again we are faced with a choice between mutually exclusive alternatives. Either we believe in miracles or we believe in the scientific understanding of the laws of nature, but not both.

  Not surprisingly, this argument is also put forward with characteristic force by Richard Dawkins:

  The nineteenth century is the last time when it was possible for an educated person to admit to believing in miracles like the virgin birth without embarrassment. When pressed, many educated Christians are too loyal to deny the virgin birth and the resurrection. But it embarrasses them because their rational minds know that it is absurd, so they would much rather not be asked.85

  However, it cannot be quite as simple as Hawking and Dawkins think. There are highly intelligent, eminent scientists who would differ with them; for instance: Professor William Phillips, Physics Nobel Prizewinner 1998; Professor John Polkinghorne FRS, Quantum Physicist, Cambridge; Sir John Houghton, former Director of the British Meteorological Office and Head of the International Governmental Panel on Climate Change; and the current Director of the National Institute of Health and former Director of the Human Genome Project, Francis Collins. These distinguished scientists are well aware of the arguments against miracles. Nevertheless, publicly and without embarrassment or a sense of absurdity, each affirms his belief in the supernatural and, in particular, in the resurrection of Christ – which they regard, as I do, as the supreme evidence for the truth of the Christian world-view.

  One of the scientists just mentioned, Francis Collins, gives a wise caution regarding the matter of miracles:

  It is crucial that a healthy scepticism be applied when interpreting potentially miraculous events, lest the integrity and rationality of the religious perspective be brought into question. The only thing that will kill the possibility of miracles more quickly than a committed materialism is the claiming of miracle status for everyday events for which natural explanations are readily at hand.86

  For that reason I shall concentrate on the resurrection of Christ, in order to give the discussion as sharp a focus as possible. It was the miracle of the resurrection of Christ that started Christianity going, and that same miracle is its central message. Indeed, the basic qualification of a Christian apostle was to be an eyewitness of the resurrection.87 C. S. Lewis writes: “The first fact in the history of Christendom is a number of people who say they have seen the Resurrect
ion. If they had died without making anyone else believe this ‘gospel’, no Gospels would ever have been written.”88 According to the early Christians, then, without the resurrection there simply is no Christian message. The apostle Paul writes: “If Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith.”89

  Let us remind ourselves of the perspective of contemporary science, and its thinking about the laws of nature. Since scientific laws embody cause-effect relationships, scientists nowadays do not regard them as merely capable of describing what has happened in the past. Provided we are not working at the quantum level, such laws can successfully predict what will happen in the future with such accuracy that, for example, the orbits of communication satellites can be precisely calculated, and moon and Mars landings are possible. Many scientists are therefore convinced that the universe is a closed system of cause and effect.

  In light of this, it is understandable that such scientists resent the idea that some god could arbitrarily intervene and alter, suspend, reverse, or otherwise “violate”, these laws of nature. To them that would seem to contradict the immutability of those laws, and thus overturn the very basis of the scientific understanding of the universe. In consequence many such scientists would advance the following two arguments against miracles.

  The first is that belief in miracles in general, and in the New Testament miracles in particular, arose in primitive, pre-scientific cultures, where people were ignorant of the laws of nature and so readily accepted miracle stories.

  Any initial plausibility which this explanation may seem to possess disappears rapidly when it is applied to New Testament miracles like the resurrection. A moment’s thought will show us that, in order to recognize some event as a miracle, there must be some perceived regularity to which that event is an apparent exception! You cannot recognize something as abnormal if you do not know what is normal.