Hawking, Stephen. Science: A. Philosophy: D.

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 18/09/2010 (5529 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

In his latest book, "The Grand Design," Prof. Stephen Hawking says that the 1992 discovery of a planet orbiting a star other than the sun demolished the "Goldilocks" view of Isaac Newton, which was that the unique position of the earth — not too hot, not too cold, but just right for allowing life — could not have arisen out of chaos but must have been purposefully created, by God.

"That makes the coincidences of our planetary conditions — the single Sun, the lucky combination of Earth-Sun distance and solar mass, far less remarkable, and far less compelling evidence that the Earth was carefully designed just to please us human beings … It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going," he writes.

What he has missed out on is the astonishing way in which cosmological beliefs today about the origin of the universe are resonating with traditional theological beliefs about God.

Genesis I does not imply that God sat on his hands for eons, then one day decided to create a universe and lit a blue touchpaper. The doctrine of creation, as found in St. Augustine and almost all other heavyweight theologians, is that the whole of space-time is dependent upon a non-space-time reality.

If God brings time into being, God does not do so in time. There are many whose life work is concerned with the first 300th of a second after the Big Bang. If the Large Hadron Collider does its stuff, they’ll be able to study the first millionth of a second of the universe. But to ask what happened five seconds before that is meaningless, for time did not exist until the timeless reality of God timelessly generated the whole of time and space. God can generate many different space-times, and Augustine mentioned this possibility 1,600 years ago in "The City of God."

So God should not be conceived as a person who thinks, wonders, decides and interferes. There is a proper place for such shorthand, and that is the pulpit, where faith speaks to faith, but only if it is plain that one is using metaphor. "God" is a timeless existent and, strictly speaking, we should not talk about God in the same way as we would about a human. It would help if preachers and writers gave a hint of this occasionally: "God (in a manner of speaking) doesn’t want your excuses … God (so to speak) ‘challenges’ us … we must ‘listen’ (to coin a phrase) to what God is (as it were) ‘saying’ to us." Of course, any sermon like that would collapse under its own weight of subordinate clauses. Nevertheless, relentless human-speak in talking about God, without any letup, without any pointing to an edgier reality, has dumbed a lot of people out of the churches — where they meet those who never entered, for that very reason.

Imagine a parents’ evening, where the teacher is trying to point out a boy’s foibles to his mother: "He has difficulty in articulating sentences." "But he looks so nice in blue, don’t you think?" "He’s handing in every assignment late." "Look at these pictures of him we took on holiday." A mother like that, who is incapable of switching to another, more mature way of talking about her son, is showing that she does not fully understand him. Nor do preachers who cannot refer to God other than in human-speak shorthand: "He likes this, doesn’t like that, is very cross if we …"

All talk about "God" and what "He" does is metaphor.

This need not mean long words: "Enough already about Judge Lori Douglas. Unceasing, prurient intrusion into the private life of a woman who has done nothing other than suffer a gross betrayal of trust is amounting to constructive rape. Media — cease and desist." That’s how God is, imho: clear, simple and always, always contemporary.

Stephen Hawking and I do have one thing in common: we each — with extreme reluctance — took the Statistics module of the Cambridge Natural Sciences Tripos. The difference between us, roughly speaking, was that whereas I struggled with Poisson regression analysis, he mailed the textbook back to the author, marking all the errors in his reasoning. And that’s not name-dropping, for we were several years apart; it’s to point out that up to that century the title of the exam had been The Natural Philosophy Tripos. To this day, study of mind/brain duality is neither pure philosophy nor experimental science, but somewhere in-between. It needs saying, for philosophy has a bad name now for being just pointless hot air.

Hawking’s book homes in on this low opinion, criticising philosophy for playing trivial word games and "not keeping up with science." To him, Cosmology is energetic, biology is evolutionary, maths is precise and science has simply outstripped lazy, woolly philosophy.

But philosophy has continuously defined mathematics — from Zeno (fifth-century BC) to 20th-century Tarski.

Philosophy is the mother of science. Many ideas have migrated from the philosophy room to the science lab, via proof. It was the philosopher Leucippus, in 430BC, who first conceived what we call atomic theory; his disciple Democritus called the building blocks of matter ‘atomoV’ (atomos), meaning "indivisible" — uniform, solid, hard, incompressible and indestructible particles that moved through empty space until stopped.

Other topics remain firmly in the philosophy room. For example, science cannot handle ethics. Evaluating certain actions or values as good or bad is not down to the guys in white coats.

Philosophy, on the other hand, can critique the scientists. It can examine the way the science is practised, both theoretically (by analysing the scientific method) and practically (by thinking through the morality of, say, testing on animals, or using devices to elicit confessions, or medical procedures for keeping people alive).

It can also critique religion. One of its most underused abilities is the cleaning up of religious language. If I asked you "how heavy is Tuesday?" you would rightly say that is a nonsense question and could probably say why, giving an ‘apples and oranges’ answer, to the effect that you cannot assign a physical attribute (weight) to something abstract (Tuesday). We have already dealt with another favourite: "what happened before the Big Bang?" There are many others, one of which is: "if God made the universe, who made God?"

This is Hawking’s question. It’s not maker-of-god that he is really getting at, nor Spinoza’s idea of universe=deity, deity=universe (which Einstein used), but the very notion of a personal creator, who therefore could not have come from nowhere: "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," he writes.

He has blindsided us, of course, because at heart we’re all lazy determinists. If something happens, we assume there’s a cause. If scientists talk about a "random event," we mentally think that means they haven’t yet developed a computer powerful enough to trace its cause. But random really does mean random. Hurricane Earl just happened; there was no purposeful first swirl.

Furthermore, gravity is a form of negative energy, and quantum theory has it that matter must be able to spring into existence spontaneously and randomly.

The first point is fairly straightforward: if you lift a pail of water off the floor and balance it on the door just before teacher comes in, it gains potential energy (and much potential amusement). If you lift it beyond the Milky Way, its gravitational pull towards the classroom floor is reduced to zero — teacher’s head and the pail of water now have zero gravitational energy. So the gravitational negative energy of matter exactly balances the positive energy it contains, according to the equation E=mc2.

As for the second point, California Institute of Technology physicist Sean Carroll said in "USA Today": "Universes are free. It costs precisely zero energy (and zero anything else) to make an entire universe. From that perspective, perhaps it’s not surprising that the universe did come into existence."

This whole universe is a zero-sum game. It all came from nothing and adds up to nothing, but it’s one in which you are perfectly balanced out by your doppelganger of energy waves out there. What you do affects them instantly. You matter.

Or, to put it another way: "God said, ‘I will be with you’" (Ex 3:12); "I will never leave you, nor forsake you" (Heb 13:5); "the very hairs of your head are all numbered" (Lk 12:7) — so to speak.

 

(To be continued)

 

 

» Rev. Michael Skliros is a retired Anglican priest in Brandon.

 

» Comments or criticisms on all aspects of contemporary religious faith and practice are welcome and should be emailed to: life@brandonsun.com.

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