Much ado about nothing

Warwick McFadyen

September 11, 2010

Stephen Hawking has taken God out of the universe.

God created the universe versus the universe came from nothing – must science and religion be forever rivals?

THIS is the only joke I can remember.

Q: Have you heard about the dyslexic agnostic insomniac?

A: He stayed awake all night wondering if there was a dog.

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I wonder if Stephen Hawking knows it. There’s no such doubt within his mercurial mind about the origins of the universe.

”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.”

Thus spoke Stephen Hawking.

It’s the ultimate spontaneous combustion: no fuel, no spark, no thing.

Given this view, then it follows for Hawking that ”philosophy is dead”. One can see why he said it, but that doesn’t make it any less daft. Once more God dies. But this time all the philosophers’ works down the centuries have been thrown onto the funeral pyre.

”The use of reason and argument in seeking truth and knowledge of reality”, as the Oxford defines it, means nothing. One would assume this would include the works of Friedrich Nietzsche, who pronounced in the 1880s that God was dead.

Imagine a man standing alone in a field. He vanishes. The field was his mind. Now, imagine if the one standing in the field was God. He vanishes.

From this first vanishing silence we search for echoes. But if we are curious looking for the answers to the who, when, where, why and how, we are also contented when the answers are based on faith. There are two roads, religion and science, and travellers upon each believe that who gets to the end of the road, that is, the origin of existence, will therefore find the meaning of life. It ain’t necessarily so.

Hawking in his latest book, The Grand Design, co-written with US physicist Leonard Mlodinow, lit a brief bonfire of the vanities when an extract was published overseas last week. Headlines such as ”Hawking: God did not create universe” circled the globe. For here was one of humankind’s greatest scientific brains saying not merely that God was dead, but that he (and I use the male gender simply because of common usage) never existed in the first place.

”In Western culture,” the book contends, ”the Old Testament contains the idea of providential design, but the traditional Christian viewpoint was also greatly influenced by Aristotle, who believed ‘in an intelligent natural world that functions according to some deliberate design’. That is not the answer of modern science. As recent advances in cosmology suggest, the laws of gravity and quantum theory allow universes to appear spontaneously from nothing.”

It’s a little statement with a very large bang: Universes. Appearing. Spontaneously. From. Nothing.

But then, in the alternative, if the laws were laws unto themselves, how did these laws arise? Spontaneously. From. Nothing?

Nothing emerging from nothing? Who could create such a chrysalis?

Indeed, it’s a question that Father Robert Spitzer, an American Jesuit priest and author puts in reply to Hawking’s position. Spitzer is the president of the Magis Centre of Reason and Faith, whose aim is ”to explain the consistency between science and faith in contemporary astrophysics”. Spitzer’s new book, released in July, was New Proofs for the Existence of God – Contributions of Contemporary Physics and Philosophy.

A week ago, under the heading ”The Curious Metaphysics of Dr Stephen Hawking”, Spitzer in an article on the Magis website took issue with Hawking’s definition of nothing. He cited philosophers Parmenides and Plato as having a better grasp, so to speak, of nothingness.

”These thinkers use the term ‘nothing’ to mean ‘nothing’ (i.e. ‘that which there is no such thing as’). Nothing should not be thought to be a vacuum or a void . . . and it is certainly not a physical law.

”If the universe was nothing prior to its beginning, then the reality which causes it to exist must be completely beyond it (‘independent of it’). This transcendent reality which causes the universe as a whole to exist is frequently termed ‘creator’ or God. In my view, Dr Hawking has not yet shown the non-necessity of this reality. Indeed, he implies it by assuming the existence of a beginning in his assertion about the universe coming from nothing.”

Theologians joined in attacking Hawking’s theory. Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams reacted thus: ”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.”

This is arm-wrestling in the cosmic cafe. (Who’s that sitting in the corner? Why it’s William Blake. He’s speaking softly to himself.)

To see a world in a grain of sand

And a heaven in a wild flower

Hold infinity in the palm of your hand

And eternity in an hour.

(Auguries of Innocence)

It’s a contest for the truth of existence that carries with it a rather strange prize. An empty cup. For each side will forever believe that what the other holds is hollow. But what takes this through the looking glass is that in fact, ontologically, the two rivals are part of the one body of humanity.

Throughout history, the name of God has been used and abused to justify the worst in humans: torture, murder, conquest, expulsion. It has been the lever to turn the rack of misery. Its followers were not on the path to transcendence, for blood spilt is not blood redeemed.

Equally, followers of a belief system can attain a state of bliss that transcends their outside reality. They thus attain the unknowable. No amount of science can pull that apart.

Karen Armstrong, the author of many books on theology, believes that the view of religions that God is the answer to all questions, particularly the beginning of creation, is wrong. In her book, A Case for God, she writes: ”We have got used to thinking that religion should provide us with information. Is there a god? How did the world come into being? But this is a modern aberration. Religion was never supposed to provide answers to questions that lay within the reach of human reason.

”Religion’s task, closely allied to that of art, was to help us to live creatively, peacefully and even joyously with realities for which there were no easy explanations and problems that we could not solve: mortality, pain, grief, despair, and outrage at the injustice and cruelty of life.

”Over the centuries, people in all cultures discovered that by pushing their reasoning powers to the limit, stretching language to the end of its tether, and living as selflessly and compassionately as possible, they experienced a transcendence that enabled them to affirm their suffering with serenity and courage.”

They found God, for want of a better word. It had not a whit to do with analysing the chicken or the egg.

To Armstrong, religion was a ”practical discipline” through which practitioners ”discovered a transcendental dimension of life that was not simply an external reality ‘out there’ but was identical with the deepest level of their being. This reality, which they have called God, Dao, Brahmin or Nirvana, has been a fact of human life  ¢â‚¬ ¦ Our scientifically oriented knowledge seeks to master reality, explain it, and bring it under the control of reason, but a delight in unknowing has also been part of the human experience.”

It is a delight that is anathema to scientists. A scientist’s reason for being is to know. A physicist would never say: ”God works in mysterious ways.”

It doesn’t stop scientists, however, invoking his name for metaphorical flourish. Indeed, Hawking in A Brief History of Time, his bestseller published 20 years ago, said: ”If we discover a complete theory, it would be the ultimate triumph of reason, for then we should know the mind of God.”

The mind of God, the face of God, the hand of God. The imagery has such a powerful pull and such a deep enigmatic resonance you would have to be superhuman not to use it. Even Albert Einstein used it several times, most famously when he had doubts about quantum mechanics: ”I cannot believe that God plays dice with the cosmos.”

He also said: ”I am not interested in this phenomenon or that phenomenon. I want to know God’s thoughts – the rest are mere details.” It’s a good line, but unhelpful.

Roger Highfield, editor of New Scientist, recently cited several instances of Einstein and Hawking using God phraseology. Indeed, in one instance Hawking said: ”Einstein was wrong when he said, God does not play dice. Consideration of black holes suggests, not only that God does play dice, but that he sometimes confuses us by throwing them where they can’t be seen.”

THERE are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy. Thus spoke Hamlet. Indeed, and surely one of the most intriguing positions, if you follow Hawking, is that there are many universes.

Surely one universe is big enough to hold everything. This multiverse is a concept too large to digest. Its largeness takes it into the realm of abstraction. Science fiction has played with the idea of parallel worlds, and a few years ago it was part of the plot for Dr Who when Rose, the doctor’s assistant, was stuck forever in a parallel universe. Such scenarios are entertaining, but no less comprehensible. Multiple universes are the aces up science’s sleeve. Just when all the cards have been dealt in the poker game of the origin of existence, science throws in this. Wait, there’s more than one universe, and they all began at the same time. Where does that leave God? Where does that leave certainty of belief?

Armstrong has written that ”during the early-modern period, (about 500 years ago) Western people fell in love with an ideal of absolute certainty that, it seems, may be unattainable. But because some are reluctant to relinquish it, they have tended to overcompensate, claiming certitude for beliefs and doctrines that can only be provisional.”

Even more so now. A recent survey found that the number of Christian followers globally was on the rise, except in Europe. Therein lies the paradox. All the theory in the world can count for nothing and everything. The human looks inwards and outwards. No other creature does this. It’s the tension at the heart of the mortal coil.

Physics has taken humankind into the machinery of matter. We keep drilling down and down. The search is now on at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland for the ”God particle”, for want of a better term. In an article in National Geographic in 2008, spokesman Peter Jenni, who works at the collider, said: ”Humankind differs from a collection of ants. We have intellectual curiosity; we need to understand the mechanisms of life and the universe.”

That is, of course, so. But then there’s this tale from Armstrong about Buddha. A Brahmin priest encountered Buddha. He was amazed ”by his serenity, stillness and self-discipline” and he gave ”impressions of immense strength channelled creatively into an extraordinary peace”.

The Buddha said he had revealed a new potential in human nature. It was possible to live in this world of conflict and pain at peace and in harmony with one’s fellow creatures. ”There was no point in merely believing it; you would only discover its truth if you practised his method, systemically cutting off egotism at the root. You would then live at the peak of your capacity, activate parts of the psyche that normally lie dormant and become fully enlightened human beings. ‘Remember me,’ the Buddha told the curious priest, ‘as one who is awake.’ ”

Then again, there is another path. It doesn’t involve knowing the origins of the universe, nor is it based on faith. It’s this:

Beauty is truth; truth, beauty, that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

(Ode on a Grecian Urn, John Keats)

http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/entertainment/books/much-ado-about-nothing-20100910-1557g.html

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*Sightings* 9/23/2010

*Stephen Hawking and the Religion vs. Science Debate*

— Colin Bossen

Despite the long-standing decline in church attendance and an increasing
number of people who identify as “spiritual but not religious,” stirring up
controversy about, or defending, the existence of God remains an excellent
way to sell books. *The Grand Design*, Stephen Hawking’s new book, written
with Leonard Mlodinow, is no exception. The book’s passages about God, and
the authors ¢â‚¬â„¢ dispensation of the necessity of God the creator, have
generated significant media attention.

Hawking is the former Lucian Chair of Mathematics at Cambridge University–a
chair previously held by Isaac Newton–and a best-selling popular science
author. When he speaks people tend to pay attention. His assertion,
therefore, of the non-necessity of God has set off another round of the
debate between atheists and believers over the existence of the deity. Most
of the noise has been on the part of Hawking’s critics who have responded to
his assertion with witty articles–like Clay Farris Naff’s piece “Stephen
Hawking to God: Your Services Are No Longer Needed; God to Hawking: You So
Don’t Get Who I Am”–and those of a more serious tone.

Neither side brings much new to the debate. Members of the scientific
community have been declaring the non-necessity of God for hundreds of
years. Hawking provides one example in his mention of the scientific
determinist Pierre-Simon, marquis de Laplace. Laplace believed that, in
Hawking ¢â‚¬â„¢s words, “a complete set of laws fully determines both the future
and the past.” This led him to argue that there was no place for miracles or
an active role for God in the universe. During a famous exchange with
Napoleon, Laplace was asked about the role of God in his scientific model.
He replied, “I have no need for that hypothesis.”

Theologians, particularly those of the liberal tradition, have often
answered such declarations with tracts suggesting that while people like
Laplace may know something about science and mathematics, they know little
about the nature of the divine. To offer one example, portions of the German
theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher’s late eighteenth-century book *On
Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers* could have been written in
response to *The Grand Design*. In his work, Schleiermacher cedes the realms
of “metaphysics and morals” to others and instead argues that the basis of
religion is “feeling and intuition.”

Schleiermacher’s argument is essentially that religion is not about what we
know or even what we do. It is about what we feel. He believed the religious
feeling was one of experiencing “everything individual as a part of the
whole and everything limited as a representation of the infinite.” In
Schleiermacher’s view, all people have such experiences. How an individual
understands and interprets such feelings is more a reflection of cultural
location and personal temperament than absolute truth. Christians understand
the religious feeling as the presence of Christ. Muslims understand it as a
connection to Allah. And scientific rationalists “gazing at the immense
heavens above,” understand it, in Hawking’s words, as “wonder.” Each
understand the feeling differently, but all have it.

Schleiermacher’s observation that religion is rooted in feeling may provide
an insight into why books on religion and God continue to be best-sellers in
the increasingly secular landscapes of America and Europe. Even though
ever-growing numbers of people no longer participate in religious
institutions, the feeling of connection that generates religion remains
inherent within them. Seeking to make sense of that feeling, they continue
to gravitate towards texts, other forms of media and public thinkers that
explain it. Even if religious institutions continue to decline, the
religion-science debate is bound to remain with us for sometime to come.

*References*

Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow, *The Grand Design* (New York: Bantam
Books, 2010).

Friedrich Schleiermacher, *On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers*,
translated and edited by Richard Crouter (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1988)

Clay Farris Naff, “Stephen Hawking to God: Your Services Are No Longer
Needed; God to Hawking: You So Don’t Get Who I
Am,”
*The Huffington Post*, September 4, 2010.

Rev. Colin Bossen is the minister of the Unitarian Universalist Society of
Cleveland. He keeps a blog at http://infidelity.blogsome.com.

*Sightings* comes from the Martin Marty
Centerat the University of
Chicago Divinity School.

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