Stephen Hawking’s been in the news the past few weeks, for speaking on rather dark matters. Last month he said “I believe that the long-term future of the human race must be in space,” and urged that we prepare to abandon the Earth. Now, according to Reuters,
Hawking says a new series of theories made a creator of the universe redundant. . . .“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,” Hawking writes.
Of course he’s entitled to his personal beliefs, but there’s something about this public statement that rings funny to me: It’s the “there is” part: “Because there is a law such as gravity . . . .” Wait, where did that law come from? Oh, who knows; it just is.
Despite his new thoughts on the subject, it’s that thing about what just is that remains unchanged and leaves room for science and faith to coexist. Indeed, he expressed that very thought–that faith and reason don’t have to work against each other–years ago in A Brief History of Time: “If we discover a complete theory, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason–for then we should know the mind of God.”
September 2nd, 2010 | 11:35 am
The Guardian have a poll based on this “news”
Is physicist Stephen Hawking right that physics, not God, created the universe?
The pro-God choice is at a paltry 12.7% at the mo.
Even though it has rightly been pointed out to me that this poll has created an either/or situation which doesn’t exist (we can have God and gravity thanks).…give it a boost folks….
September 2nd, 2010 | 12:02 pm
@Stuart
For the benefit of American readers the Guardian is known as the Godless Guardian in some circles over here. Christians are on safe ground taking the opposite view to any expressed in the Guardian. Even on social issues, the Guardian’s approach is to deny the existence of a Creator, to make Man the measure of all things and to deny the reality of sin. The Guardian is read in the main by teachers, university lecturers, BBC reporters and trendy liberal clerics. It is supported indirectly by the taxpayer in that the Education Department spends a vast amount advertising teaching jobs there. Without that cash it would go broke. “Normal” people do not read it. In 27 years commuting into London I have seen 3 people on the train reading the Guardian. A lot of society’s ills can be laid at the door of the Guardian and people who read it. Its opinions can be ignored with advantage. [Rant over.]
September 2nd, 2010 | 12:02 pm
Remember that old philosophical question, “If a tree falls in a forest and no one hears it, does it make a sound?” If one hears it, did the sound exist?
So how could gravity have existed if there was nothing, a complete, total vacuum with no matter pulling on each other where the universe as we know it exists today?
September 2nd, 2010 | 12:12 pm
STEPHEN HAWKING SAYS GOD DIDN’T CREATE THE UNIVERSE, HE DID
September 2nd, 2010 | 12:15 pm
I believe he also noted a few months back that we were in danger of being attacked by menacing extraterrestrial races. It seems any mention of his recent ventures in religious contemplation ought also to note this fact.
September 2nd, 2010 | 12:53 pm
There is no data about “before the Big Bang” and Hawking knows it. There is no “before the Big Bang”. Claims to the contrary are nonsense. True or not, Prof. Barr?
September 2nd, 2010 | 1:00 pm
After reading about the latest escapades of Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan, it’s good to find some light reading for a change of pace. Thanks, Professor Hawking, for the chuckles.
September 2nd, 2010 | 1:33 pm
“Why is there not nothing?” You’re a theist if the question makes you wonder. You’re probably not if it doesn’t. Being is mysterious. The project of trying to demystify it is ancient but still not successful. Can human reason ever comprehend the mystery of being?
“Lovers and madmen have such seething brains, such shaping fantasies, that apprehend more than cool reason ever comprehends.” I would put stress on the first word of this passage. Love is a faculty like reason — it’s another form of knowing. Nosco, as opposed to cogito.
September 2nd, 2010 | 1:41 pm
Stephen Hawking “urged that we abandon the earth.” I say, you go first, Stephen!
September 2nd, 2010 | 1:45 pm
The Law of Gravity is a new theory?
Furthermore, a new “theory” proves something?
I think not.
September 2nd, 2010 | 1:48 pm
“Thanks, Stephen. I needed a good laugh today.”
~God
September 2nd, 2010 | 2:05 pm
You might as well say that iambic pentameter explains the plays of Shakespeare.
September 2nd, 2010 | 2:14 pm
“Spontaneous creation”. Isn’t that one of the nine billion names of God?
September 2nd, 2010 | 4:01 pm
John Cummins has it right. There is no data possible from the Big Bang because it began in a singularity, a dimensionless point. Stephen Hawking has squandered his borrowed lifetime trying without success to prove his hypothesis that the singularity was really in infinitesimally small circle.
( Perhaps it is more accurate to say it began in The Singularity.)
September 2nd, 2010 | 4:36 pm
Boze – Hawking didn’t say that we were definitely in danger from spacefaring extraterrestrials. He just said that if they exist, they’d be dangerous. (Looking at Earth history where a more technically advanced culture met a less technological one, it’s hard to dispute that.)
Beth – Robert Heinlein once said, “The meek can have the Earth. The rest of us are going to the stars!” I don’t think Hawking’d take your challenge the way I think you intended…
September 2nd, 2010 | 4:37 pm
[...] Counterpoint to Stephen Hawking’s recent revelation of spontaneous creation. [...]
September 2nd, 2010 | 7:04 pm
Starting Genesis 1:1… All I have to say. That guy is out of his mind
September 2nd, 2010 | 8:23 pm
Robert Heinlein once said, “The meek can have the Earth. The rest of us are going to the stars!”
Going to the stars to do what? According to Walker Percy in _Lost in the Cosmos_, the elite space travelers will descend into egotism, sensuality, malice, and cruelty just as readily in space as they have done on earth.
As a solution to the human condition, space travel is on a par with crossing the street.
September 2nd, 2010 | 9:11 pm
Hawking: “If we discover a complete theory, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason — for then we should know the mind of God.”
“And the serpent said to the woman: No, you shall not die the death. For God doth know that in what day soever you shall eat thereof, your eyes shall be opened: and you shall be as Gods, knowing good and evil.” (Gen. 3:4-5).
“(umteen billioneth) verse, same as the first” (Herman’s Hermits, Henry the Eighth)
September 2nd, 2010 | 10:03 pm
@John cummins
You said-
“There is no data about “before the Big Bang” and Hawking knows it. There is no “before the Big Bang”
I assume you believe the Bible to be the truth, yet in the Bible it stated that the Earth was created thousands of years ago, yet from your statement I am assuming you believe the Big Bang, which occurred billions of year ago, to be a fact as well. So does this mean the Bible is false about the date of creation, if so, why can’t it be false about other things as well? Just wondering, had to rant sorry…
September 3rd, 2010 | 3:31 am
Certainly, Hawking is avery smart guy. he seems to have gone this way before, though. He stated, I think, that the universe may have started with a “quantum fluctuation”, and therefore there was no need for a God. As, of course is the case with gravity, what caused the quantum fluctuation, or who, (or what) made the quantum materr/energy?
Some might argue that this exemplifies that we’re in over our heads, when attempting to decipher, something so grand as the beginning of the universe, with something so relatively puny, as our finite, human minds.
Kant stated that, the “antinomies”, examples of which, are, does space have boudries, and does time have a beginning, transcend our abilities to know. He argued, that our minds, are simply not equipped to definitively answer such questions. When we say, that “time” arose, at a particular point, we always are tempted to ask: what happened before this! Or, space originated, here, with this “point”, but what’s outside, this point!
Despite Hawkin’s overwhelmingly impressive intelligence, and credentials, we should not be overly impressed with his latest assertion. He’s implying, that God, is an object, like any other, that “causes” effects, on/in other objects, and since he cannot detect, this God object”, it doesn’t exist.
But God is outside of space and time, indeed the creator of space and time, and therefore, could not be detected empirically. He is what allows empirical objects, and their causes and effects, to exist in the first place.
September 3rd, 2010 | 3:35 am
Evan G.: Sorry, but the bible never “stated” that the earth was created “thousands of years ago”. That’s your, interpretation, that I must submit, respectfully, is erroneous.
September 3rd, 2010 | 3:52 am
Bret Lythgoe – Aristotle was right, when he said time is a measure of change, not of duration.
September 3rd, 2010 | 4:50 am
Docta Hawkin’, he know’ a lot of t’ing’, but Docta Hawkin’, he don’ know Parmenides.
Or Shakespeare. Ex nihilo nihil fit: it’s not just a good idea, it’s the truth.
September 3rd, 2010 | 6:39 am
[...] Hawkings is being picked apart by the religious community. More power to them. As much as I respect the man, it’s hard to take Hawking seriously when [...]
September 3rd, 2010 | 8:14 am
Just to point out I am a different Paul Shonk from the one above!
Hawking is right – there is no god. All religions treatise that their god is all forgiving and peace loving, yet all those (with very few exceptions) go around the world in the name of their god killing and utilising violence to prove they are right.
A wise man on UK TV recently said: “there are good men that do good things, bad men that do bad things. Only one thing makes good men do bad things – religion.”
September 3rd, 2010 | 8:17 am
Anyone who thinks he knows why there is something rather than nothing, or how the universe came to be, is mistaken. The “mystery of existence . . . . “
September 3rd, 2010 | 10:11 am
First Paul Shonk: What if a “cure for the human condition” isn’t the goal? Colonizing the Americas from Europe wasn’t a “cure for the human condition” either – far from it – but it’s had some pretty good results. In space, we also wouldn’t be displacing indigenous populations…
September 3rd, 2010 | 10:34 am
To save confusion, I am the second Paul Shonk and have added my middle initial!
Ray, I am assuming that you are condoning the movement of the Europeans to the colonies? If so, how can you justify the slaughter of thousands of indigenous inhabitants for gain.
This strikes me as morally wrong (nothing to do with religion, but more of a humanistic approach). I assume that you then think the situation in the middle east, with the Israelies stealing land from the Palestinians is justified too, in fact, this approach sounds like a justification for war of any sort, as long as the aggressor can say that the end justifies the means – which, from here sounds very much like a typical American approach!
September 3rd, 2010 | 10:55 am
Is Stephen Hawking the new Ptolemy?
September 3rd, 2010 | 11:45 am
[...] Several people have commented on Stephen Hawking’s declaration that there is no god. I found this commentary by David [...]
September 3rd, 2010 | 1:46 pm
@EvanG
“You said-
‘There is no data about “before the Big Bang” and Hawking knows it. There is no “before the Big Bang’
Yes; it was written, not said. You assume either that the statements, by themselves, or made at firstthings.com in a spiritual/religious context, or both, imply a belief that the Bible is “the truth”.
Do you understand why and acknowledge that the statements, “There is no data about ‘before the Big Bang’ and Hawking knows it. There is no ‘before the Big Bang’ ” by themselves provide no ground for such an assumption?
If so, then we can discuss: what might be implied by the statement that a book can be “the truth”; what the truth is and so forth. But before you continue deriving assumptions from conflations of scientific and spiritual topics, (such as the comments here, by both believers and non-believers), please straighten out for yourself that with “M-theory”, Hawking is offering up so much scientific, logical and semantic crap.
September 3rd, 2010 | 6:42 pm
I don’t justify it, hence my comment that the colonization was “far from” a “cure for the human condition”. The worst of it was unintentional – bringing many terrible diseases to the Americas (see the book 1491 by Charles Mann to appreciate how many, and how much, was lost). But there was brutality aplenty. (That’s also why I explicitly pointed out that at least our neighborhood of space doesn’t have populations to displace – such moral considerations won’t apply to space exploration anytime soon, if ever.)
It wasn’t all brutality and broken promises, either. And it did wind up producing the U.S.A. To paraphrase Churchill, “The worst nation in the world… except for all the others.” Some good has come from it. My key point was that exploring new territory doesn’t have to have ‘perfecting humanity’ as a goal.
September 3rd, 2010 | 8:15 pm
The Law of Beginning–
Hawking has shown himself the one who does not rely on “observation and reason” as he claims to. If he were, he (and others who hold to his views on this topic) would have observed that all things in our physical universe have a beginning. We have a beginning when conceived. Planets have beginnings. Stars have beginnings, and our universe had a beginning.
If our universe is the result of gravity collapsing the previous universe that existed, then that previous universe also had a beginning, and so on and so on until, as the reasoned Law of Beginning says, there was the [first] beginning of the physical universe.
Of course, the beginning of the physical universe (where gravity is not a factor) could not come about on its own because it didn’t exist. Only something with cognition and outside the physical realm could create the physical realm that we now reside in.
Dean Michael Jackson
Washington, DC
September 3rd, 2010 | 11:17 pm
Talk about blind faith in the face of obvious counterevidence. The 20th century saw many an atheist massacring people — sometimes to stop their religion based on arguments such as that. Do you have reason to believe they were all bad?
September 3rd, 2010 | 11:59 pm
Hawking is a genius, but sort of childish in a loving way. Professor of mathematics, holding the once beloved Isaac Newton’s seat as professor of lucasian mathematicsi–how can you not believe it all? But yet, It’s all unknown. I mean, we do not know who actually put the spec there to make the big bang happen? Another thing…stephen said the aliens will look like anything but Marilyn Monroe. I do not believe in Aliens at all. I think they would have been here by now. I love his imagination, and his intelligence, but he’s a bit childish..and it is wildly close-minded to assume there is no God. We will not know until we know. And until then, I choose to beileve in my creator, and supreme being, God.
September 4th, 2010 | 1:05 am
MEANWHILE Hawking ‘overlooks’ the FACT that
the very world he intellectually inhabits was
the direct creation of the golden age of
CALVINIST Christianity.
Asserting the be all and end all finality of
mechanical and chemical processes seems
frankly sophomoric.
Maybe Hawking should channel Isaac Newton
for more on this subject.
BTW —compare the rich cultural and scientific
legacy of Cambridge with the circumscribed
and sort of second hand legacy of Arminian
heresy undermined, China opium money funded
and tainted Harvard, Yale and Princeton.
The scales will fall from your eyes!
September 4th, 2010 | 1:20 am
“A wise man on UK TV recently said: ‘There are good men that do good things, bad men that do bad things. Only one thing makes good men do bad things – religion.’”
If people spouting simplistic, bumper-sticker inanities count as “wise” in the UK, then I give your country about 50 more years before it collapses upon itself.
September 4th, 2010 | 2:13 pm
Let’s not be duped in thinking that this is a debate between religion and science. This is a debate within science!
this is explained nicely in this post here.
http://adamdeen.blogspot.com/2010/09/professor-stephen-hawking-says-no-god.html
September 6th, 2010 | 4:15 am
According to the Psalmist, even a (former) Lucasian professor of mathematics can get it wrong.
Psalm 14:1-3 The fool says in his heart, “There is no God.”
September 6th, 2010 | 10:02 pm
With no universe existing and nothingness, where did the natural laws come from? Where were they prior to the Spontaneous Creation of space/time? Space itself did not exist.Sounds supernatural to me.
RK
September 6th, 2010 | 11:13 pm
Change the by-line to “John Smith”, and everyone would say the article is embarrassingly bad. It’s nothing but an argument from authority.
September 22nd, 2010 | 4:55 am
Now I give Radhasoami Faith view of Creation Theory. In Sar Bachan (Poetry) composed by His Holiness Soamiji Maharaj the August Founder of Radhasoami Faith the details of creation and dissolution has been described very scientifically. It is written in this Holy Book: Only He Himself (Supreme Father)and none else was there. There issued forth a great current of spirituality, love and grace (In scientific terminology we may call this current as gravitational wave). This is called His Mauj (Divine Ordainment). This was the first manifestation of Supreme Being. This Divine Ordainment brought into being three regions, viz., Agam, Alakh, and Satnam of eternal bliss. Then a current emerged with a powerful sound. It brought forth the creation of seven Surats or currents of various shades and colours (in scientific terminology we may call it electromagnetic waves). Here the true Jaman or coagulant was given (in scientific terminology this coagulant may be called as weak nuclear force and strong nuclear force). Surats, among themselves, brought the creation into being.
These currents descended down further and brought the whole universe/multi verse into being i.e. black holes, galaxies etc. were born.
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