William Carroll, one of the most subtle Thomists currently thinking about science, metaphysics, and faith, has put up a characteristically clear and lucid analysis of Stephen Hawking’s claim that modern physics has shown that we don’t need God to get the universe going.
As Carroll observes, “Many cosmologists who now routinely speak of what happened “before the Big Bang” think that to reject some original Big Bang is to eliminate the need for a Creator.”
But what does it mean to create? Carroll continues: “They deny the need for a Creator because they think that “to be created” means to have a temporal beginning. In such a scenario, accepting or rejecting a Creator is tied to accepting or to explaining away an original Big Bang.”
Hawking makes exactly this assumption. “You might remember,” writes Carroll, “Hawking’s famous rhetorical question: ‘So long as the universe had a beginning, we could suppose it had a creator. But if the universe is really completely self-contained, having no boundary or edge, it would have neither beginning nor end: it would simply be. What place, then, for a creator?’” The problem, Carroll notes, is a conceptual mistake. “Creation, as a metaphysical notion,” Carroll points out, “affirms that all that is, in whatever way or ways it is, depends upon God as cause.” This differs from the usual meaning we give to creation, which involves shaping or altering or initating something.
The natural sciences seek to explain these kinds of alterations or creations. They as their subject, Caroll continues, “the world of changing things: from subatomic particles to acorns to galaxies. Whenever there is a change there must be something that changes. Whether these changes are biological or cosmological, without beginning or end, or temporally finite, they remain processes.”
As do all scientists, Hawking thinks in terms of processes governed by the laws of physics. He points out, for example, that the laws of physics make it possible for the universe to initiate itself, and for it to have no boundary or edge.
But at a conceptual level this way of thinking is quite different from the usual way that theologians and philosophers approach the question. Creation, in the metaphysical sense of the word, Carrol observes, “is the radical causing of the whole existence of whatever exists. Creation is not a change. To cause completely something to exist is not to produce a change in something, is not to work on or with some existing material. When God’s creative act is said to be “out of nothing,” what is meant is that God does not use anything in creating all that is: it does not mean that there is a change from “nothing” to ‘something.’”
If we keep this distinction in mind—the distinction between a change of state, even a change from what physicists call “nothing” to the something of our present universe, and to be the source of existence as such—then we can see the error that Hawking makes. As Carroll points out, we “find Hawking telling us that it is not necessary ‘to invoke God . . . to set the Universe going.’ But creation does not mean ‘to set the Universe going’-as though some change occurred at a putative beginning. To deny such a change, as Hawking does, is not to deny creation.” The explanation of the difference between the two senses of “create” that Carroll gives ought to be clear to anyone. Indeed, I must admit that I when I read Hawkings’ précis of his book, The Grand Design, in the Weekend edition of the Wall Street Journal, I was flabbergast.
Hawking has a reputation for being very smart, but he seems to be invincibly ignorant when it comes to metaphysics.
And not just ignorant, but also intellectually irresponsible. Consider the opening lines: “According to Viking mythology, eclipses occur when two wolves, Skoll and Hati, catch the sun or moon. At the onset of an eclipse people would make lots of noise, hoping to scare the wolves away. After some time, people must have noticed that the eclipses ended regardless of whether they ran around banging on pots.”
Christian and Jewish theologies do not think that God “caused” the world by grabbing primeval matter and spinning it like a pot. On the contrary, the doctrine of creation out of nothing was formulated precisely to rule out mythological views of God’s power over finite reality. God is not bigger and better than everything else. God is entirely transcendent over and other than everything else.
Apparently, Stephen Hawking thinks it is unnecessary to inform himself about what Christians and Jews (and Muslims, for that matter, as well as various philosophical schools) actually think about God and creation. Robert Sokolowsi’s book, The God of Faith and Reason, is not obscure, inaccessible, or out of print, and within its pages an intelligent college freshman can come to grasp the logic of the classical doctrine of creation.
In the end, Hawking on theology reminds me of ill-informed fundamentalists and their efforts at creation “science.” There’s no actual interest in the a broad engagement with the challenges of understanding, just a mulish push to make what one already understands into the key for understanding everything else.
September 8th, 2010 | 1:34 pm
I agree that the hammer syndrome is part of the problem. If I have a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail. Hawking does have mighty big hammer. But there is something more there, maybe a failure of imagination. If he states that the universe is sufficient in its laws to create itself, why doesn’t he wonder where the laws come from?
September 8th, 2010 | 2:15 pm
Actually physicists do wonder where the laws of physics come from. The modernist magazine, The Economist, had an article last week about the theory that the laws of physics vary through space.
http://www.economist.com/node/16941123
September 8th, 2010 | 4:03 pm
“Invicibly ignorant” indeed. I recall hearing of Hawkins report after a conference at which the Pope (JPII, I think) told the assembled scientists that they would not be successful in discovering the ultimate origin of the cosmos through their science as that origin, God, is not a scientifically verifiable entity. My paraphrase of Hawkins’ smug remarks: “The Pope forbade us from going too far back in researcing the origin of the universe.”
Since then I’ve wondered if Hawkins simply hates God for the confinment he has suffered since college and, on occasion, uses the podium his brilliance affords him to lash out in self-imposed “invicible ignorance”.
September 8th, 2010 | 4:30 pm
How is it established that “existence as such” needs a “source”?
September 8th, 2010 | 6:22 pm
Another possible explanation for Hawking’s failure of imagination is ego. If he can’t fit God into an equation or understand how God could have been the Creator of everything (and nothingness) then God can’t exist. Talk about a classic example of thinking yourself greater than God. Even satan believes in God.
September 8th, 2010 | 10:55 pm
If he states that the universe is sufficient in its laws to create itself, why doesn’t he wonder where the laws come from?
Why not wonder where God comes from while you are at it? And simply defining God as the uncaused cause is begging the question.
In any case, this seems a bit misplaced to me. Is this really what modern believers want to reduce their God to: someone who writes the laws of physics and then otherwise stands back and lets the universe run its course? As Pascal said, this is the God of philosophers rather than the God of Abraham.
Is F = G*m1*m2 / r^2 really adequate proof of the existence of God, let alone a Christian God?
September 8th, 2010 | 10:59 pm
Hawking suffers physically, and it takes a toll on him mentally, emotionally and spiritually. He needs our prayers.
He is hardly an expert on the biblical understanding of creation, so why expect him to be?
Most Christians don’t grasp what the Bible teaches about the creation having a fixed but flexible order that is identifiable by universally observed binary opposites such as Sun-Moon, night-day, male-female, etc. To speak of creation without recognizing these distinctions is to speak of creation in a non-biblical way.
September 8th, 2010 | 11:51 pm
“Why not wonder where God comes from while you are at it? And simply defining God as the uncaused cause is begging the question.”
Au contraire. Philosophically speaking, the statement of the existence of God is primarily a statement about the ontological contingency of the universe. Just walk outside and you should notice that there are only beings, not being. Otherwise, there is really not much we can say about God (in fact, almost nothing apart from historical revelation)
Darn, it is embarassing that people in the XII grasped these things, while even very intelligent people today seem to be clueless about them.
September 9th, 2010 | 12:45 am
Au contraire. Philosophically speaking, the statement of the existence of God is primarily a statement about the ontological contingency of the universe.
I was addressing the implication that one needs to explain where the laws of physics come from. Indeed, such an explanation would be satisfying but it strikes me as no more necessary than a theist explaining where God comes from. The laws of physics have the advantage that we can confirm through evidence that they exist.
The invocation of God’s existence doesn’t actually solve anything or give you any explanatory power, which is the point that Hawking was making. To the extent that theologians are not interested in explaining the observable world, there isn’t any real conflict.
September 9th, 2010 | 2:45 am
It sounds to me, that Hawking needs a good corrective dose of Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae. Aquinas, inhis attempt to reconcile, what seemed to be irreconcilible passages from Aristotle, that the universe had no beginning, with the christian teaching, that the universe did have a beginning, and was created by God, came up with a subtle conclusion: The universe may have existed always, as Aristotle asserted, but God STILL created it.
Aquinas’s contemporaries, such as St. Bonaventure, a franciscian, who was more inclined toward Augustine and neoplatonism, than to Aristotle, believed that Aristotle’s notion, of the world always existing, was incoherent. And, St. Albert The Great, a dominican, like Aquinas, and very sympathetic to Aristotle, felt similarly to Bonaventure.
But, as Aquinas showed, the universe could have always existed, not having a temporal beginning, and yet, be entirely contingent on God, for its creation. God is not bound by space or time, in fact, he created them, and can work outside of space and time.
Mark: Who’s to say that the God ascertained through philosophy, is mutually exclusive, with the God known through christian revelation? What we really understand about our universe, is exceedingly small, we may have revolutions, comparable to quantum mechanics, in the future.
September 9th, 2010 | 10:30 am
We seem to have two commenters determined to turn poor Hawking on his head. Hawking claims there is no God based on his theory. I believe he is required to provide proof from the materialistic viewpoint to that end. I don’t see any.
@Ingles: Let Hawking make his case rather then suggesting others have to disprove him. I find it convincing that Hawking is merely attempting to sell books. That certainly is materialistic of him.
@Mark: All good scientists should be wondering where the laws of nature come from. Then they’ll be able to predict when those laws might not apply. You don’t need to be a theist to ask that question.
September 9th, 2010 | 11:44 am
[...] Hawking and Creation Wednesday, September 8, 2010, 11:18 AM R.R. Reno William Carroll, one of the most subtle Thomists currently thinking about science, metaphysics, and faith, has put up a characteristically clear and lucid analysis of Stephen Hawking’s claim that modern physics has shown that we don’t need God to get the universe going. [...]
September 9th, 2010 | 1:12 pm
Mike Melendez – We know that something exists. At least ‘cogito ergo sum’, and most go on to reject solipsism. We accept “existence as such”.
Now, many people go on to make a claim – a positive claim – that “existence as such” requires a “source”. As the people making the positive claim, it would seem to me that the burden should be on them to provide evidence for it.
I’m not saying that evidence for that couldn’t exist, but I’m not familiar with it…
September 9th, 2010 | 1:34 pm
To clarify, Hawking appears to be echoing Laplace: “I had no need of that hypothesis.” He believes he’s accounted for the existence of the universe without recourse to God, the same way Laplace accounted for the motions of the planets without recourse to God.
People can certainly attempt to point out holes in his argument, or advance positive arguments for God’s necessity. But I think you’ve got the burden displaced. Occam’s Razor and all…
September 9th, 2010 | 5:37 pm
In “The Grand Design” Stephen Hawking postulates that the M-theory may be the Holy Grail of physics…the Grand Unified Theory which Einstein had tried to formulate and later abandoned. It expands on quantum mechanics and string theories.
In my e-book on comparative mysticism is a quote by Albert Einstein: “…most beautiful and profound emotion we can experience is the sensation of the mystical. It is the sower of all true science. To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and most radiant beauty – which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their primitive form – this knowledge, this feeling, is at the center of all religion.”
Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity is probably the best known scientific equation. I revised it to help better understand the relationship between divine Essence (Spirit), matter (mass/energy: visible/dark) and consciousness (fx raised to its greatest power). Unlike the speed of light, which is a constant, there are no exact measurements for consciousness. In this hypothetical formula, basic consciousness may be of insects, to the second power of animals and to the third power the rational mind of humans. The fourth power is suprarational consciousness of mystics, when they intuit the divine essence in perceived matter. This was a convenient analogy, but there cannot be a divine formula.
September 9th, 2010 | 8:06 pm
“I was addressing the implication that one needs to explain where the laws of physics come from. ”
In fact, what one needs to explain whence any being derives its being.
I am sure you know that Aquinas taught that, aside from revelation, the idea of creation is philosophically perfectly consistent with an eternal universe with no beginning.
September 10th, 2010 | 7:10 am
Carlo –
Why?
September 10th, 2010 | 9:03 am
Ray Ingles:
because our reason perceives it as contingent. Or if you prefer the classical formulation, because its essence does not include its existence. I can assure you that as I am typing these words I am not causing my own existence. And neither does any of the objects in my house or the things outside the window. Of course, you have to understand carefully what I mean by “causality.”
September 10th, 2010 | 11:50 am
Carlo – I just don’t share that insight – that “existence as such” needs to be “caused” – nor has anyone been able to explain it to me.
When contemplating such things, I reflect that practically everything we’ve learned about the universe has been counterintuitive. A spherical Earth, heliocentrism, atomic theory, plate tectonics, evolution, Relativity, Quantum Mechanics – none were what anyone had expected, reasoning from what was known at the time. When dealing with something so far removed from human experience as the origins of universes, I doubt human intuition’s competence.
September 10th, 2010 | 8:27 pm
Ray Ingles:
OK, that’s fair: if you don’t see it, you don’t see it.
However, I don’t understand the second part of your reply, where you mention the origin of the universe. Why did you?
As I mentioned to another poster, the whole discussion of creation should not be mixed up with the problem of the origins of the universe. In the great western philosophical and theological tradition, it was clearly understood that the two issues are separate, and that creation takes place in the present. The most famous example was St. Thomas, who stated very clearly that as far as philosophy understands the universe may well be eternal (without beginning), but it is nevertheless created at every instant by the “esse ipsum subsistens”.
September 10th, 2010 | 9:31 pm
Carlo –
I think the key problem is “trying to use intuition without adequate experience to guide and test it”. Feel free to substitute “maintenance of universes” for “origins of universes” in my comment. I think the point still applies.
September 12th, 2010 | 8:49 pm
Saint Thomas Aquinas said, “All that I have written seems to me like straw compared with what has now been revealed to me.”
Note: After experiencing mystical union, he abandoned writing Summa Theologiae.
September 12th, 2010 | 10:14 pm
“I think the key problem is “trying to use intuition without adequate experience to guide and test it”.
I think it depends on what you mean by “experience.” If experience coincides with quantitative measurement, the scope of rationality is narrow indeed.
But my point was precisely that when I get up in the morning I experience very clearly that the universe is contingent. To me that’s a much more concrete and realistic experience than some physical experiment I will never be able to perform personally.
September 15th, 2010 | 11:53 am
Carlo – Experience doesn’t have to correspond to “quantitative measurement” (though that obviously helps). For example, you don’t have to quantify the exact rate that a ship disappears over the horizon, or how far the horizon is, to note that it disappears from the bottom up.
And I’d say you intuit afresh each morning that the “universe is contingent”. But who knows, maybe you actually do have a mode of sensory perception I lack. :)
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