Stephen Hawking's new book, The Grand Design, is upsetting people even before it has been published. The extracts published in The Times have prompted all sorts of headlines from critics and religious apologetics, desperately seeking to justify their world views in the face of Hawking's prose. So what has he said to upset them?
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. It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going.
From The Grand Design, quoted on BBC News website
The important bit is the last sentence, which basically says that the creation of the universe can be explained without God (note that it doesn't say that there isn't a God, only that God is not necessary - that's an important difference). Nothing unexpected there - only the religious ever expected anything else - but Hawking won't have said it without a damn good reason and that means that he's got the maths to backup his claims.
The problem I have with critics like Dr Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, is that they stray far from their area of expertise (which is, arguably, the selling of ludicrous post-death paradises to gullible idiots and the removal from said idiots of as much of their worldly wealth as possible) into areas about which they are simply not qualified to comment. Let's see what Dr Williams said (and I apologise for quoting from The Daily Mail - it was the only source I could find):
Belief in God is not about plugging a gap in explaining how one thing relates to another within the universe. It is the belief that there is an intelligent, living agent on whose activity everything ultimately depends for its existence. Physics on its own will not settle the question of why there is something rather than nothing.
From The Daily Mail
Dr Williams is clearly wrong; physics can say much to settle the question of why there is something rather than nothing, as Hawking has done. The real question is can Dr Williams, by reading Hawking's book, absorb new knowledge and use it to improve his personal model of the universe? Probably not, given that he's already rejected Hawking's ability to comment on the subject.
Christianity isn't the only religion whose leaders are unable to absorb the conclusions of modern science. Ibrahim Mogra, an imam and committee chairman at the Muslim Council of Britain, said:
If we look at the universe and all that has been created, it indicates that somebody has been here to bring it into existence. That somebody is the almighty conqueror.
The major problem with this (apart from the fact that it is simply incorrect) is that not only does it not provide a convincing answer to the question of how the universe came to be (we could ask "who created the creator?" but then things get really silly as they argue that god is infinite, or love, or has always existed) but that it also attempts to deny further investigation of the problem by simply declaring "God did it". Trying to close lines of scientific investigation because "God did it" is a pretty pathetic response.
Ultimately all the religious leaders have demonstrated by their criticism is that they haven't understood the science. They aren't able to question the evidence directly (which, to be honest, isn't surprising - there aren't many people, I suspect, who understand the maths) so they just blast away with ridiculous statements like "a question which science cannot answer" by which they try to suggest that there are some aspects of our physical world about which science can say nothing; they are wrong.
Finally, just to show that Christians and Muslims aren't the only ones making ignorant, ill-formed and illogical comments, here is Chief Rabbi Lord Sacks saying something stupid:
There is a difference between science and religion. Science is about explanation. Religion is about interpretation. Science takes things apart to see how they work. Religion puts things together to see what they mean. They are different intellectual enterprises.
From the BBC News Website
Er, really? If religion is all about interpretation then it makes sense only to interpret from the latest scientific model of the universe but that isn't the way the religious want to work. If the science disagrees with their dogma then they just rule that the science is wrong without even bothering to investigate. That's pretty stupid, especially when the science comes from Stephen Hawking.
I look forward to reading the book, out next week.
Posted via email from James's posterous
