God and Stephen Hawking

I have written this short book in the hope that it will assist my readers to understand some of the most important issues that lie at the heart of the contemporary debate about God and science. For that reason, I have tried to avoid technicality where possible, and concentrate on the logic of the argument. I believe that those of us who have been educated in mathematics and the natural sciences have a responsibility for the public understanding of science. In particular, we have a duty to point out that not all statements by scientists are statements of science, and so do not carry the authority of authentic science even though such authority is often erroneously ascribed to them.

Of course that applies to me, as much as to anyone else, so I would ask the reader to scrutinize the arguments I have used very carefully. I am a mathematician and this book is not about mathematics, so the correctness of any of the mathematical results I may have proved elsewhere is no guarantee of the correctness of what I have said here. I do, however, have confidence in my readers’ ability to follow an argument to its conclusion. I therefore submit what I have written to their judgment.

God is very much on the agenda these days. Scientists have made sure of it by publishing book after book, with titles like Francis Collins’
The Language of God
, Richard Dawkins’
The God Delusion
, Victor Stenger’s
God: The Failed Hypothesis
, Robert Winston’s
The Story of God
, and so on, and on.

Some of these books have been runaway best-sellers. People obviously want to hear what the scientists have to say. That is not surprising, for science has immense cultural and intellectual authority in our sophisticated modern world. This is, in part, because of its phenomenal success in generating technologies from which all of us benefit, and in part because of its capacity to inspire, by giving us increased insight into the wonders of the universe as communicated by beautifully made television documentaries.

For that reason many people, increasingly aware that the material spin-offs from science do not satisfy the deepest needs of their humanity, are turning to the scientists to see if they have anything to say about the big questions of existence: Why are we here? What is the purpose of life? Where are we going? Is this universe all that exists, or is there more?

And these questions inevitably make us think about God. So millions of us want to know what science has to say about God. Some of the above best-sellers are written by atheists. But, and this is the important thing, not all the authors are atheists. This tells us at once that it would be very naïve to write off the debate as the inevitable clash between science and religion. That “conflict” view of the matter has long since been discredited. Take, for example, the first author on our list, Francis Collins, the Director of the National Institute of Health in the USA, and former Head of the Human Genome Project. His predecessor as head of that project was Jim Watson, winner (with Francis Crick) of the Nobel Prize for discovering the double-helix structure of DNA. Collins is a Christian, Watson an atheist. They are both top-level scientists, which shows us that what divides them is not their science but their world-view. There is a real conflict, but it is not science versus religion. It is theism versus atheism, and there are scientists on both sides.

And that is what makes the debate all the more interesting, because we can then focus on the real question at stake: does science point towards God, away from God, or is it neutral on the issue?

One thing is clear straightaway. This remarkable surge of interest in God defies the so-called secularization hypothesis, which rashly assumed, in the wake of the Enlightenment, that religion would eventually decline and die out – in Europe at least. Indeed, it could well be that it is precisely the perceived failure of secularization that is driving the God question ever higher on the agenda.

According to distinguished journalists John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge of
The Economist
, “God is Back”
¹
– and not only for the uneducated. “In much of the world it is exactly the sort of upwardly-mobile, educated middle classes that Marx and Weber presumed would shed such superstitions who are driving the explosion of faith.”
²
This particular development has understandably proved infuriating for the secularists, especially the atheist scientists among them.

The protest is loudest in Europe, perhaps because atheists feel Europe is where they have most to lose. They are probably right; and there are signs that they are losing it. Richard Dawkins, still the pack leader, has been frantically turning up the volume from loud to shrill, as the logic of his argument fractures – at least so it would seem, even to many of his fellow atheists. He is determined to “raise the consciousness” of the public, by recruiting as many disciples as possible to spread his faith that atheism is the only intellectually respectable viewpoint on the market. His campaign has even extended to posters on bendy-buses
³
and atheist summer camps for children; not forgetting, of course, large lapel badges marked with a red “A” for “atheist”, and any number of intelligently designed T-shirts.

Whether this campaign had anything to do with it or not I don’t know, but one very powerful scientific voice has been added to the atheist choir – that of physicist Stephen Hawking. Around the world the headlines were full of it: “Stephen Hawking says universe not created by God”, “Stephen Hawking says physics leaves no room for God”, and so on with many variations. The headlines were referring to the publication of a new book by Hawking and his co-author Leonard Mlodinow,
The Grand Design
. It raced immediately to the top of the best-seller charts. The public confession of atheism by a man of such high intellectual profile as Hawking has had the instant effect of ratcheting up the debate by several notches. It has also sold a lot of books.

What are we to think? Is that it, then? Is there nothing more to discuss? Should all theologians resign their chairs forthwith? Should all church workers hang up their hats and go home? Has the Grand Master of Physics checkmated the Grand Designer of the Universe?

It certainly is a grandiose claim to have banished God. After all, the majority of great scientists in the past have believed in him. Many still do. Were Galileo, Kepler, Newton and Maxwell, to name a few, really all wrong on the God question?

With such a lot at stake we surely need to ask Hawking to produce evidence to establish his claim. Do his arguments really stand up to close scrutiny? I think we have a right to know.

But we shall never know unless we look and see.

So, let us do just that…

1 The big questions

Stephen Hawking is, without doubt, the world’s most famous living scientist. He has recently retired from the Lucasian Professorship in Cambridge, a chair once held by Sir Isaac Newton. Hawking has occupied this position with great distinction. He has been made a Companion of Honour by Her Majesty the Queen, and his academic career has been marked by an accolade of honorary degrees from all over the world.

He has also been an outstanding symbol of fortitude, having suffered the ravages of motor neurone disease for over forty years. During many of these he has been confined to a wheelchair, with his only means of verbal communication being a specially designed electronic voice synthesizer. Its instantly recognizable “voice” is known all over the world.

With many distinguished colleagues and students, Hawking has explored the frontiers of mathematical physics – most famously, perhaps, the counter-intuitive mysteries of black holes. His work has led to the prediction of “Hawking Radiation”, which, if verified experimentally, would surely qualify him for a Nobel Prize.

In his runaway best-seller,
A Brief History of Time
⁴
, Hawking brought the recondite world of fundamental physics to the coffee table (although many people have confessed to finding the contents rather beyond them). This book was followed by several others in the same vein, which attempted quite successfully to excite a wider readership with the buzz of great science.

Since his books deal with the origin of the universe, it was inevitable that he should consider the matter of the existence of a Divine Creator. However,
A Brief History of Time
left this matter tantalizingly open, by ending with the much-quoted statement that if physicists were to find a “Theory of Everything” (that is, a theory that unified the four fundamental forces of nature: the strong and weak nuclear forces, electromagnetism and gravity), we would “know the Mind of God”.

In his latest book,
The Grand Design
⁵
, co-authored with Leonard Mlodinow
⁶
, Hawking’s reticence has disappeared, and he challenges belief in the divine creation of the universe. According to him it is the laws of physics, not the will of God, that provide the real explanation as to how the universe came into being. The Big Bang, he argues, was the inevitable consequence of these laws: “because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing”.

The title,
The Grand Design
, will suggest for many people the existence of a Grand Designer – but that is actually what the book is designed to deny. Hawking’s grand conclusion is: “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.”
⁷

In this book I wish to engage in the main not with Hawking’s science but with what he deduces from it regarding the existence, or rather the non-existence, of God. Although Hawking’s argument, that science shows God is unnecessary, has been hailed as ground-breaking, it is hardly new. For years other scientists have made similar claims, maintaining that the awesome, sophisticated complexity of the world around us can be interpreted solely by reference to the basic stuff of the universe (mass/energy), or to the physical laws that describe the behaviour of the universe, such as the law of gravity. Indeed, it is difficult at first glance to see quite how this new book adds much to what Hawking wrote in
A Brief History of Time.

The Grand Design
opens with a list of the big questions that people have always asked: “How can we understand the world in which we find ourselves? How does the universe behave? What is the nature of reality? Where did all this come from? Did the universe need a Creator?”
⁸
These questions, emanating from such a famous person, excite the imagination with the anticipation of hearing a world-class scientist give his insights on some of the profoundest questions of metaphysics. It is, after all, fascinating to listen in on a great mind exploring the philosophical questions that we all ask from time to time.

An inadequate view of philosophy

If that is what we expect we are in for a shock; for, in his very next words, Hawking dismisses philosophy. Referring to his list of questions, he writes: “Traditionally these are questions for philosophy, but philosophy is dead. It has not kept up with modern developments in science, particularly in physics. As a result scientists have become the bearers of the torch of discovery in our quest for knowledge.”
⁹

Apart from the unwarranted hubris of this dismissal of philosophy (a discipline well represented and respected at his own university of Cambridge), it constitutes rather disturbing evidence that at least one scientist, Hawking himself, has not even kept up with philosophy sufficiently to realize that he himself is engaging in it throughout his book.

The very first thing I notice is that Hawking’s statement about philosophy is itself a philosophical statement. It is manifestly not a statement of science: it is a metaphysical statement about science. Therefore, his statement that philosophy is dead contradicts itself. It is a classic example of logical incoherence.

Hawking’s attitude to philosophy contrasts markedly with that of Albert Einstein in a letter supporting the teaching of history and philosophy of science to physicists:

Furthermore, Hawking’s statement that “scientists have become the bearers of the torch of discovery” smacks of scientism – the view that science is the only way to truth. It is a conviction characteristic of that movement in secular thought known as the “New Atheism”, although its ideas are mostly only new in the aggressive way they are presented, rather than in their intellectual content.

For any scientist, let alone a science superstar, to disparage philosophy on the one hand, and then at once to adopt a self-contradictory philosophical stance on the other, is not the wisest thing to do – especially at the beginning of a book that is designed to be convincing.

Nobel Laureate Sir Peter Medawar pointed out this danger long ago in his excellent book
Advice to a Young Scientist
, which ought to be compulsory reading for all scientists.

Medawar goes on to say: “The existence of a limit to science is, however, made clear by its inability to answer childlike elementary questions having to do with first and last things – questions such as: ‘How did everything begin?’ ‘What are we all here for?’ ‘What is the point of living?’”
¹¹
He adds that we must turn to imaginative literature and religion for the answers to such questions.

Francis Collins is equally clear on the limitations of science: “Science is powerless to answer questions such as ‘Why did the universe come into being?’ ‘What is the meaning of human existence?’ ‘What happens after we die?’”
¹²

Obviously Medawar and Collins are passionate scientists. So there is clearly no inconsistency involved in being a committed scientist at the highest level, while simultaneously recognizing that science cannot answer every kind of question, including some of the deepest questions that human beings can ask.

For instance, there is widespread acknowledgment that it is very difficult to get a base for morality in science. Albert Einstein saw this clearly. In a discussion on science and religion in Berlin in 1930, he said that our human sense of beauty and our religious instinct are “tributary forms in helping the reasoning faculty towards its highest achievements. You are right in speaking of the moral foundations of science, but you cannot turn round and speak of the scientific foundations of morality.” Einstein proceeded to point out that science cannot form a base for morality: “every attempt to reduce ethics to scientific formulae must fail”.
¹³

Richard Feynman, also a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, shared Einstein’s view: “Even the greatest forces and abilities don’t seem to carry any clear instructions on how to use them. As an example, the great accumulation of understanding as to how the physical world behaves only convinces one that this behaviour has a kind of meaninglessness about it. The sciences do not directly teach good or bad.”
¹⁴
Elsewhere he states that “ethical values lie outside the scientific realm”.
¹⁵

Yet Hawking seems to deny this, by assigning to science a role beyond its capacity. Not only that but, after disparaging philosophy, he then proceeds to engage in it. For, insofar as he is interpreting and applying science to ultimate questions like the existence of God, Hawking is doing metaphysics. Now, let us be clear, I do not fault him for doing that; I shall be engaging in metaphysics all through this book. My concern is that he does not seem to recognize this.

Let’s look a little more closely at Hawking’s two lists of questions. Here is the first list:

• How can we understand the world in which we find ourselves?
  

• How does the universe behave?
  

• What is the nature of reality?
  

• Where did all this come from?
  

• Did the universe need a Creator?
  ¹⁶
  

The second of these questions is scientific: a typical “how” question that does not raise the matter of ultimate purpose. The first and the last three questions are fundamental questions of philosophy.

Hawking’s second list is to be found at the end of his first chapter:

• Why is there something rather than nothing?
  

• Why do we exist?
  

• Why this particular set of laws and not some other?
  ¹⁷
  

These are also well-known great questions of philosophy.

Now science, of course, is one of the voices that will have an input into attempting to answer these questions; but it is by no means the only, nor indeed necessarily the most important, voice.

Philosophy may be dead according to Hawking, but he seems to believe in giving it an immediate resurrection! Calling his three questions “The Ultimate Questions of Life, the Universe and Everything”, Hawking says: “We shall attempt to answer them in this book.”

An inadequate view of God

The consequence of sailing through one red light is that you are likely to sail through a good many more, and that is exactly what happens. Hawking’s inadequate view of philosophy soon shows itself in an inadequate view of God. He writes: “Ignorance of nature’s ways led people in ancient times to invent gods to lord it over every aspect of human life.” He then says that this began to change with ancient Greek thinkers like Thales of Miletus about 2,600 years ago: “The idea arose that nature follows consistent principles that could be deciphered. And so began the long process of replacing the notion of the reign of the gods with the concept of the notion of a universe that is governed by laws of nature, and created according to a blueprint we could someday learn to read.”
¹⁸

The impression given by this is that the concept of God, or the gods, is a placeholder for human ignorance – a “God of the Gaps”, who will increasingly be displaced as the gaps in our knowledge are filled by scientific explanations, so that he will eventually disappear completely, like the smile on the face of the proverbial Cheshire cat. In the past there have been many gaps in the scientific picture that have been occupied by God; but Hawking now claims that physics has no longer any room for God, as it has removed the last place where he might be found – the moment of creation. The last piece of the scientific jigsaw has been snapped into place and it leaves us with a closed universe.

He is but a step away from regarding atheism as a necessary prerequisite for doing science.