Gunning for God (5 page)

Maddox’s reaction is to be contrasted with that of Richard Dawkins. When I made this point to him in our Alabama debate he was not impressed. His response was that, since either there was a beginning or there was not, the Bible had a 50-50 chance of getting it right. However, quite apart from the gratuitous assumption that the biblical account is simply a matter of guesswork, the probability of a correct guess is not quite the issue. The Big Bang theory met fierce resistance because there was a palpable desire among scientists that the Bible should not get it right. It took massive and convincing scientific evidence to establish the standard model. The irony is that the very same Big Bang model of the universe, which confirms the biblical teaching that there was a beginning, is now being used to banish God by one of the brilliant theoretical physicists involved in developing the theory - Stephen Hawking.

STEPHEN HAWKING AND GOD

In his latest book
The Grand Design
, co-authored with Leonard Mlodinow, Hawking mounts an audacious challenge to the traditional religious belief in the divine creation of the universe. According to him, the laws of physics (not the will of God) provide the real explanation as to how life on earth came into being. He argues that the Big Bang was the inevitable consequence of these laws: “Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing.”
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Hawking is guilty of a number of serious misunderstandings and logical fallacies. Firstly, his view of God is defective. From what he says, he clearly thinks of God as a “God of the Gaps”, to be put forward as an explanation if we don’t yet have a scientific one. Hence his conclusion that physics has no room for God as it has removed the last place where he might be found - the moment of creation.

But this is certainly not what any of the great monotheistic religions believe. For them, God is author of the whole show. God both created the universe and constantly sustains it in existence. Without him, there would be nothing there for physicists to study. In particular, therefore, God is the creator both of the bits of the universe we don’t understand, and the bits we do. And of course, it is the bits we do understand that give the most evidence of God’s existence and activity. Just as I can admire the genius behind a work of engineering or art, the more I understand it; so my worship of the Creator increases, the more I understand what he has done.

Hawking’s inadequate view of God could well be linked with his attitude to philosophy in general. He writes: “Philosophy is dead.”
⁹
But this itself is a philosophical statement. It is manifestly not a statement of science. Therefore, because it says that philosophy is dead, it contradicts itself. It is a classic example of logical incoherence. Not only that: Hawking’s book, insofar as it is interpreting and applying science to ultimate questions like the existence of God, is a book about metaphysics — philosophy par excellence.

Imagining that philosophy is dead is hardly the wisest thing to do, especially when you yourself are about to engage in it. Take, for instance, Hawking’s key assertion quoted above: “Because there is a law such as gravity the universe can and will create itself from nothing.” Clearly, he assumes that gravity (or perhaps only the law of gravity?) exists. That is not nothing. So the universe is not created from nothing. Worse still, the statement “the Universe can and will create itself from nothing” is self-contradictory. If I say “X creates Y”, this presupposes the existence of X in the first place in order to bring Y into existence. If I say “X creates X”, I presuppose the existence of X in order to account for the existence of X. To presuppose the existence of the universe, to account for its existence, is logically incoherent. What this shows is that nonsense remains nonsense even when talked by world-famous scientists. It also shows that a little bit of philosophy might have helped.

Because Hawking has an inadequate concept both of God and of philosophy, he blunders into a further series of errors by asking us to choose between God and the laws of physics. Here he confuses two very different things: physical law and personal agency. The choice he asks us to make is between false alternatives. This is a classic example of category error. His call for us to choose between physics and God is as manifestly absurd as demanding that we choose either the laws of physics or aeronautical engineer Sir Frank Whittle, in order to explain the jet engine.

That mistake was not made by a previous holder of Hawking’s chair at Cambridge, Sir Isaac Newton, when he discovered his law of gravitation. He did not say: “Now that I have the law of gravity I don’t need God.” What he did was to write
Principia Mathematica
, the most famous book in the history of science, expressing the hope that it would “persuade the thinking man” to believe in God.

The point here is that the laws of physics can explain how the jet engine works, but not how it came to exist in the first place. It is self-evident that a jet engine could not have been created by the laws of physics on their own. That task needed the intelligence and creative engineering work of Whittle. Come to think of it, even the laws of physics plus Frank Whittle could not on their own produce a jet engine. There also needs to be some material around the place that is subject to those laws, and that can be worked on by Whittle. Matter may be humble stuff, but laws don’t produce it.

Not only did scientists not put the universe there; neither did science or the laws of mathematical physics. Yet Hawking seems to think they did. In
A Brief History of Time
he hinted at this kind of explanation in suggesting that a theory might bring the universe into existence:

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? Is the unified theory so compelling that it brings about its own existence? Or does it need a creator, and, if so, does he have any other effect on the universe?
¹⁰

However, the idea of a
theory
or
physical laws
bringing the universe into existence does not make sense. Or am I missing something? Scientists expect to develop theories involving mathematical laws that describe natural phenomena, and have done so with spectacular success. However, the laws that we find cannot themselves even cause anything, let alone create it.

Physical laws on their own cannot
create
anything; they are merely a (mathematical) description of what normally happens under certain given conditions. Newton’s law of gravitation does not create gravity; it does not even explain gravity, as Newton himself realized. In fact, the laws of physics are not only incapable of creating anything; they cannot even cause anything to happen. For instance, Newton’s celebrated laws of motion never caused a snooker ball to race across the green baize table: that can only be done by people using a snooker cue and the actions of their own muscles. The laws enable us to analyse the motion and to map the trajectory of the ball’s movement in the future (provided nothing external interferes
¹¹
), but they are powerless to move the ball, let alone bring it into existence.

Yet well-known physicist Paul Davies appears to agree with Hawking: “There’s no need to invoke anything supernatural in the origins of the universe or of life. I have never liked the idea of divine tinkering: for me it is much more inspiring to believe that a set of mathematical laws can be so clever as to bring all these things into being.”
¹²

However, in the ordinary world in which most of us live, the simple law of arithmetic 1+1 = 2 never by itself brought anything into being. It certainly has never put any money into my bank account. If I put £1,000 into the bank and then later another £1,000, the laws of arithmetic will rationally explain how it is that I now have £2,000 in the bank. But if I never myself put any money into the bank, and simply leave it to the laws of arithmetic to bring money into being in my bank account, I shall remain permanently bankrupt.

C. S. Lewis saw this long ago. Of the laws of nature he says:

They produce no events: they state the pattern to which every event — if only it can be induced to happen — must conform, just as the rules of arithmetic state the pattern to which all transactions with money must conform — if only you can get hold of any money. Thus, in one sense, the laws of Nature cover the whole field of space and time; in another, what they leave out is precisely the whole real universe — the incessant torrent of actual events which makes up true history. That must come from somewhere else. To think the laws can produce it is like thinking that you can create real money by simply doing sums. For every law says in the last resort: “If you have A, then you will get B. But first catch your A: the laws won’t do it for you.”
¹³

The world of strict naturalism, in which clever mathematical laws all by themselves bring the universe and life into existence, is pure (science) fiction. Theories and laws do not bring matter/energy into existence. The view that nevertheless they somehow have that capacity seems a rather desperate refuge (and it is hard to see what else it could be but a refuge), from the alternative possibility implied in Hawking’s question cited above: “or does it need a creator?”

If Hawking were not so dismissive of philosophy, then he might have come across Wittgenstein’s statement that the “deception of modernism” is the idea that the laws of nature
explain
the world to us when all they do is to
describe
structural regularities. Richard Feynman, a Nobel Laureate in physics, takes the matter further: “The fact that there are rules at all to be checked is a kind of miracle; that it is possible to find a rule, like the inverse square law of gravitation, is some sort of miracle. It is not understood at all, but it leads to the possibility of prediction — that means it tells you what you would expect to happen in an experiment you have not yet done.”
¹⁴
The very fact that those laws can be mathematically formulated was for Einstein a constant source of amazement that pointed beyond the physical universe to that “spirit vastly superior to that of man”.

Hawking has signally failed to answer the central question: why is there something rather than nothing? He says that the existence of gravity means the creation of the universe was inevitable. But how did gravity come to exist in the first place? What was the creative force behind its birth? Who put it there, with all its properties and potential for mathematical description? Similarly, when, in support of his theory of spontaneous creation, Hawking argues that it was only necessary for “the blue touch paper” to be lit to “set the universe going”, I am tempted to ask: where did this blue touch paper come from? It is clearly not part of the universe, if it set the universe going. So who lit it, if not God?

Allan Sandage, widely regarded as the father of modern astronomy (discoverer of quasars and winner of the Crafoord Prize, astronomy’s equivalent of the Nobel), is in no doubt about his answer: “I find it quite improbable that such order came out of chaos. There has to be some organizing principle. God to me is a mystery but is the explanation for the miracle of existence — why there is something rather than nothing.”
¹⁵

In trying to avoid the clear evidence for the existence of a divine intelligence behind nature, atheist-scientists are forced to ascribe creative powers to less and less credible candidates, such as mass/energy and the laws of nature. In fact, Hawking has not only not got rid of God; he has not even got rid of the God of the Gaps in which no sensible person believes. For the very theories he advances to banish the God of the Gaps are themselves highly speculative and untestable.

Like every other physicist Hawking is confronted with powerful evidence of design, as he explains in his book:

Our universe and its laws appear to have a design that both is tailor-made to support us and, if we are to exist, leaves little room for alteration. That is not easily explained and raises the natural question of why it is that way… The discovery relatively recently of the extreme fine-tuning of so many of the laws of nature could lead at least some of us back to the old idea that this grand design is the work of some grand designer… That is not the answer of modern science… our universe seems to be one of many, each with different laws.
¹⁶

Thus we arrive at the multiverse. Roughly speaking, the idea here is that there are so many universes (some suggest infinitely many) that anything that can happen will happen in some universe. It is not surprising then, so the argument goes, that there is at least one universe like ours.
¹⁷

We note in passing that Hawking has once again fallen into the trap of offering false alternatives: God, or the multiverse. From a theoretical point of view, as philosophers (that despised race) have pointed out, God could create as many universes as he pleases. Of itself, the multiverse concept does not rule God out.

But back to Hawking’s multiverse. Here he moves out beyond science into the very realm of philosophy whose death he has announced at the beginning of his book. Furthermore, Hawking claims to be the voice of modern science. This gives a false impression where the multiverse is concerned, since there are weighty voices within science that do not support Hawking’s view.