When British physicist Stephen Hawking came into the auditorium at Caltech in Pasadena, Calif., the crowd went wild. The Los Angeles Times reported that one fan, 13-year-old Evan Hetland, even dubbed him "the nerd pope."
Hawking was somewhat the darling of some religious people for his occasional references to God, such as one time when he said that if a complete theory of physics were discovered, then "we would know the mind of God."
But Hawking's latest book, "The Grand Design," written with physicist Leonard Mlodinow, leaves little room for God — or philosophy for that matter. A Wall Street Journal article they wrote based on their book is titled "Why God Did Not Create the Universe: There is a sound scientific explanation for the making of our world — no gods required."
Ouch.
The article starts with a story from Viking mythology that explained eclipses were caused by two sky wolves. "Ignorance of nature's ways led people in ancient times to postulate many myths in an effort to make sense of their world," Hawking and Mlodinow wrote.
Those myths (read "religions") gave way to philosophy and now — tadah! — philosophy has given way to modern science. In the introduction, Hawking says that "Philosophy is dead" because it hasn't kept up with modern developments in science.
James E. Faulconer, a professor of philosophy, and Richard L. Evans, Professor of Religious Understanding at BYU, disagree.
"It was a throwaway line," Faulconer said. "Very little of philosophy is about deciphering the universe."
But Hawking is famous for deciphering the universe. In his new book, he explains how M-theory and other physics make the need for a creator god obsolete.
"As recent advances in cosmology suggest, the laws of gravity and quantum theory allow universes to appear spontaneously from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist. It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going," Hawking and Mlodinow wrote.
Blue touch paper is a fuse for fireworks.
So gravity lit the fuse.
Hawking also uses the idea of a multiverse — that there are many different universes — to explain why such a precise universe exists that can create life.
Just how precisely tuned is our universe?
"By examining the model universes, we generate when the theories of physics are altered in certain ways, one can study the effect of changes to physical law in a methodical manner. Such calculations show that a change of as little as 0.5 percent in the strength of the strong nuclear force, or 4 percent in the electric force, would destroy either nearly all carbon or all oxygen in every star, and hence the possibility of life as we know it. Also, most of the fundamental constants appearing in our theories appear fine-tuned in the sense that if they were altered by only modest amounts, the universe would be qualitatively different and, in many cases, unsuitable for the development of life. For example, if protons were 0.2 percent heavier, they would decay into neutrons, destabilizing atoms," Hawking and Mlodinow wrote.
They acknowledge that some may ascribe this fine-tuning to God, but if there are many universes — which physics predicts in string theory and more particularly M-theory — then out of the billions of possible universes, it is likely a universe like ours would be created as well. Created by quantum fluctuations, that is.
So it is like a lottery.
Of all the possibilities, it is likely that our one universe with all its laws would be one of those possibilities. "(O)ur cosmic habitat — now the entire observable universe — is just one of many," Hawking and Mlodinow wrote.
Stephen Barr is a professor in the department of physics and astronomy at the University of Delaware and published "Modern Physics and Ancient Faith" with the University of Notre Dame Press in 2003. Barr thinks the best answer to Hawking's new book is Hawking himself. In Hawking's 1988 bestseller "A Brief History of Time," he wrote about what is at the base of physics: "Even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe? The usual approach of science of constructing a mathematical model cannot answer the questions of why there should be a universe for the model to describe. Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing?"
Barr said, "Physicists can create a mathematical theory of a universe coming into being, but what makes it real? That is a question that a creator, as traditionally understood by Judaism and Christianity, answers. It gives reality to the universe. It's what explains why there is a real universe that those equations are describing."
Barr happens to think that M-theory is correct but recognizes that it is not yet a conclusion. "No description of anything, whether math as provided by physics or verbal descriptions, can confer reality on anything."
Hawking, in fact, hasn't proposed anything new in his book, Barr said. And so Hawking's conclusions may be misleading or at least premature. "When he says physics answered the question, he knows that is nonsense," Barr said.
Steven Faux thinks Hawking is reaching beyond his expertise when he makes pronouncements about philosophy and theology. "Generally, theologians make poor scientists," said Faux, who is in the department of psychology at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, and specializes in cognitive neuroscience and evolutionary psychology. "By and large, scientists make poor theologians."
Faux, who is a Mormon, said that the job of science is to teach how things work in nature. "Religion teaches about a higher meaning in life, something science can't get at."
BYU philosopher Faulconer said, "Scientists have a circular explanation of the world. There is no reference to anything beyond the empirical. So they find nothing beyond the empirical." He said God is not an empirical concept and that religious people need to look beyond the empirical — beyond the things that can be observed and measured — to know there is a God. "We shouldn't be surprised when science can't find God," Faulconer said, then added in mock valley girl speak: "Well, yeah."
Hawking sees a mechanical scientific creation that leaves nothing for God to do. Faux thinks Hawking is missing the main point. "He makes a presumption that we know how God works. But we don't know how God created the earth or the universe."
Faulconer sees the other side of the equation as well. "I can't make an argument for God's existence based on what science accepts. Science gives a perfectly adequate explanation of the world for certain purposes."
Science teaches how things work in nature. Religion, according to Faux, teaches about higher meaning and purpose.
Barr sees Hawking's explanations, not as a scientific conclusion, but as a story like those told in ancient times. But even if his particular story is true, it doesn't exclude God. "It doesn't take away the fact that the universe being life-bearing is a remarkable thing," Barr said.
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