Stephen Hawking, the Big Bang, and God
Henry F. Schaefer III
Dr. "Fritz" Schaefer is the Graham Perdue Professor of Chemistry and the director of the Center for Computational Quantum Chemistry at the University of Georgia. He has been nominated for the Nobel Prize and was recently cited as the third most quoted chemist in the world. "The significance and joy in my science comes in the occasional moments of discovering something new and saying to myself, 'So that's how God did it!' My goal is to understand a little corner of God's plan." --U.S. News & World Report, Dec. 23, 1991.
This is the second part of a two-part lecture given by Dr. Schaefer. Part 1 of this lecture appeared in The Real Issue, November/December, 1994.
We shall begin with the philosophical aspects of A Brief History of Time, which really explains why it has sold so many copies. Stephen Hawking has stated, "It is difficult to discuss the beginning of the universe without mentioning the concept of God. My work on the origin of the universe is on the borderline between science and religion, but I try to stay on the scientific side of the border. It is quite possible that God acts in ways that cannot be described by scientific laws, but in that case, one would just have to go by personal belief."
When asked whether he believed that science and Christianity were competing world views, Hawking replied, "...then Newton would not have discovered the law of gravity." He knew that Newton had strong religious convictions.
A Brief History of Time makes wonderfully ambiguous statements such as, "Even if there is only one possible unified theory [here he's talking about the unification of quantum mechanics with an understanding of gravity], 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?"(p. 174). I love that statement.
Hawking pokes fun at Albert Einstein for not believing in quantum mechanics. When asked why he didn't believe in quantum mechanics, Einstein would say things like, "Well, God doesn't play dice with human beings"(p. 56). Hawking's response is that God not only plays with dice, He sometimes throws them where they can't be seen.
The first time I read A Brief History of Time, for the first 122 pages I thought, "This is a great book; Hawking is building a splendid case for creation by an intelligent being." But then everything changes and this magnificent cosmological epic becomes adulterated by poor philosophy and theology.
For example, he writes, "These laws may have originally been decreed by God, but it appears that he has since left the universe to evolve according to them and does not now intervene in it" (p. 122). The grounds on which Hawking claims "it appears" are unstated and what happens is that a straw God is set up that is certainly not the God of Biblical history. What follows is a curious mixture of deism and the ubiquitous God of the gaps.
Now, lest anyone be confused, let me state that Hawking strenuously denies charges that he is an atheist. When he is accused of that he really gets angry and says that such assertions are not true at all. He is an agnostic or deist or something more along those lines. He's certainly not an atheist and not even very sympathetic to atheism.
One of the most famous and quoted statements in the book is, "So long as the universe had a beginning, we could suppose it had a creator [the cosmological argument]. 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?"(pp. 140- 1).
At the end of the book he states, "However, if we do discover a complete theory. . . then we would know the mind of God"(p. 175).
http://www.leaderu.com/real/ri9501/bigbang2.html
