God and Stephen Hawking (5 page)

Finally, if we cannot directly perceive that Hawking and Mlodinow are objectively real people who have written a book called
The Grand Design
, which makes certain truth claims about the universe, then one would wonder why they bothered to write it in the first place. And that is just the interesting thing about those who espouse various kinds of relativism: they all seem to end up by saying, essentially, that truth, perception, etc. are relative, except of course the truth they are passionately trying to get us to perceive. That is, they fail to apply their own relativism to themselves.

The subjective element in science

It is, of course, important to recognize that there is a subjective element in science. The idea of a completely independent observer, free of all preconceived theories, doing investigations and coming to unbiased conclusions that constitute absolute truth, is simply a myth. For, in common with everyone else, scientists have preconceived ideas, indeed world-views, that they bring to bear on every situation. Furthermore, they are well aware that it is almost impossible for them to make any kind of observation without resting on some prior theory; for example, they cannot even take a temperature without having an underlying theory of heat. Also, their scientific theories tend to be underdetermined by the data; that is, more than one theory could account for the same set of data. If, for example, we plot our observational data on a graph as a finite set of points, elementary mathematics will tell us that there is no limit to the number of curves that we can draw through that particular set of points. That is, the data represented by the points on the paper do not determine the curve that we should draw through them, although in any particular case, there may well be physical principles that significantly restrict our choice.

Most scientists will freely admit, therefore, that science, by its very nature, possesses an inevitable degree of tentativeness. It needs to be made clear, however, that the degree of this tentativeness is extremely small in the vast majority of cases. The fact is that science-based technology has been spectacularly successful in fundamentally changing the face of the world: from radio and television to computers, aircraft, space probes, X-rays and artificial hearts. It is sheer nonsense, therefore, to assert, as postmodernists often do, that these elements of tentativeness and subjectivity in science mean that science is a purely social construct. As physicist Paul Davies says:

It is self-evident, surely, that if we believed that the science that led to the construction of jet aircraft was merely a subjective social construct, none of us would ever get on a plane. Or, to put it another way, one sure method of finding out whether the law of gravity is a social or cultural construct or not would be to step off the top of a skyscraper!

4 Whose design is it anyway?

In the final chapter of their book, Hawking and Mlodinow discuss the “Grand Design”. They open the chapter by saying that although the laws of nature tell us
how
the universe behaves, they do not answer the
why
questions they posed at the start of the book: Why is there something rather than nothing? Why do we exist? Why this particular set of laws and not another?
⁶⁴
So far, so good. The laws of nature do not answer the why questions. However, as we saw in Chapter 2, the conclusion of the book contradicts this by affirming that the laws of nature, and in particular the law of gravity, do provide the answer to these questions.

To make sure we have got this right, let us remind ourselves of that conclusion: “Because there is a law like 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.”
⁶⁵
There it is in black and white. The law of gravity is the answer to the very questions that Hawking says it cannot answer.

Furthermore, what does Hawking mean by “spontaneous creation”? It sounds very much like an uncaused cause, an expression often cited as a paradoxical way of describing God. And, even if there were such a thing as spontaneous creation it would scarcely be a
reason
, would it? A reason would be something that replaced the dots in the statement “There is something rather than nothing
because
…”. Hawking’s statement seems to be saying: “There is something rather than nothing
because
there is something – and that something comes about spontaneously without any cause or reason except, maybe, that it is possible and just happens.”

It is hard to be impressed by this kind of argument – especially when it is compounded by the multiple self-contradictions mentioned earlier.

If, on the other hand, we turn to God as the answer to the why questions, as I unashamedly do, then Hawking will counter: “It is reasonable to ask who or what created the universe, but if the answer is God, then the question has merely been deflected to that of who created God.”
⁶⁶

Well, what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. If the answer is “the law of gravity” (which, as we have already seen in Chapter 2, it cannot be), by Hawking’s own argument the question has merely been deflected to: who created the law of gravity? And this is a question that he does not answer.

Hawking is here giving an argument that serves only to reveal the inadequacy of his concept of God. To ask the question who
created
God logically presupposes that God is a created entity. That is certainly not the Christian – nor, indeed, the Jewish or Muslim – concept of God. God is eternal; he is the ultimate reality, the ultimate fact. To ask who created him is to show that one does not understand the nature of his being.
⁶⁷

Austin Farrer comments aptly on what is at stake here: “The issue between the atheist and the believer is not whether it makes sense to question ultimate fact, it is rather the question: what fact is ultimate? The atheist’s ultimate fact is the universe; the theist’s ultimate fact is God.”
⁶⁸
Maybe we should modify this to say that for some atheists the ultimate fact is the multiverse, or the law of gravity, but this makes no difference to the point at issue.

The bulk of Hawking’s final chapter is devoted to an example of a mathematical model that, according to him, creates a reality of its own: John Conway’s “Game of Life”. Conway envisioned a “world” consisting of an array of squares like a chess board, but extending indefinitely in all directions. Each square can be in one of two states, “alive” or “dead”, represented by the squares being coloured green or black respectively. Each square has eight neighbours (up, down, left, right and four on the diagonals). Time moves in discrete steps. You start with any chosen arrangement of alive and dead squares; there are three rules or laws that determine what happens next, all proceeding deterministically from the initial chosen state. Some simple patterns remain the same, others change for several generations and then die out; yet others return to their original form after several generations and then repeat the process indefinitely. There are “gliders”, consisting of five alive squares, which morph through five intermediate shapes and then return to their original shape, albeit displacing one square along the diagonal. And there are many more sophisticated forms of behaviour exhibited by more complex initial configurations.

Part of Conway’s world (remember that it is assumed infinite in all directions) can be modelled on a computer, so that one can watch what happens as generation succeeds generation. For instance, “gliders” can be observed crawling diagonally across the screen.
⁶⁹

This world with its simple laws holds great attraction for mathematicians, and has been instrumental in the development of the important theory of cellular automata. Conway and his students, as Hawking points out, showed that there are complex initial configurations that self-replicate under the laws. Some of them are so-called Universal Turing Machines that can, in principle, carry out any calculation that could be carried out on a computer. Configurations of alive and dead squares in Conway’s world that are able to do this have been calculated as being of enormous size – consisting of trillions of squares.
⁷⁰

As a mathematician, I find Conway’s work fascinating. Listening to him make mathematics come alive was one of the high points of my experience of Cambridge lectures. However, what interests me here is Hawking’s purpose in using this analogy:

Hawking continues: “In a physical universe, the counterparts of objects such as gliders in the Game of Life are isolated bodies of matter.”
⁷¹

At this point Hawking diverts from the Game of Life, and leaves the reader uncertain as to exactly how he is applying it. Nevertheless, one can surely say that the impression has been communicated to the reader that, just as in Conway’s world a simple set of laws can produce lifelike complexity, in our world a simple set of laws could produce life itself.

However, the analogy shows nothing of the sort, but rather the exact opposite. First of all, in Conway’s world the laws do not produce the complex self-replicating objects. Laws, as we have constantly emphasized, create nothing in any world: they can only act on something that is already there. In Conway’s world the immensely complex objects that can self-replicate under the laws have to be initially configured in the system by highly intelligent mathematical minds. They are created neither from nothing nor by chance, but by intelligence. The same applies to the laws.

Secondly, Conway’s world has to be implemented, and this is done using sophisticated computer hardware with all its attendant software and high-speed algorithms. The alive and dead cells are represented by pixellated squares on a screen, and the laws governing their behaviour are programmed into the system. It should go without saying – but it clearly needs to be said – that all of this involves massive intellectual activity and input of information.

In this way, even though he is allergic to the notion of intelligent design,
⁷²
Hawking has just given an excellent argument in its support. Ironically, he actually admits this by saying that, in Conway’s world, we are the creators.

And in our universe the Creator is God.

5 Science and rationality

Much of the rationale behind Hawking’s argument lies in the idea that there is a deep-seated conflict between science and religion. This is not a discord that I recognize. For me, as a Christian believer, the beauty of the scientific laws reinforces my faith in an intelligent, divine Creator. The more I understand science the more I believe in God, because of my wonder at the breadth, sophistication, and integrity of his creation.

Indeed, the very reason that science flourished so vigorously in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, under men like Galileo, Kepler and Newton, had a great deal to do with their conviction that the laws of nature reflected the influence of a divine law-giver. One of the fundamental themes of Christianity is that the universe was built according to a rational, intelligent design. Far from belief in God hindering science, it is the motor that drove it.

The fact that science is (mainly) a rational activity helps us to identify another flaw in Hawking’s thinking. Like Francis Crick, he wants us to believe that we human beings are nothing but “mere collections of fundamental particles of nature”. Crick writes: “You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.”
⁷³

What shall we think, then, of human love and fear, joy and sorrow? Are they meaningless neural behaviour patterns? Or, what shall we make of the concepts of beauty and truth? Is a Rembrandt painting nothing but molecules of paint scattered on canvas? Hawking and Crick would seem to think so. One wonders, then, by what means we should recognize it. After all, if the concept of truth itself results from “no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells”, how in the name of logic would we know that our brain was composed of nerve cells?

These arguments recall what has come to be known as Darwin’s Doubt: “With me, the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy.”

By far and away the most devastating criticism of such extreme reductionism is that, like scientism, it is self-destructive. Physicist John Polkinghorne describes its programme as:

Precisely. There is a patent self-contradiction running through all attempts, however sophisticated they may appear, to derive rationality from irrationality. When stripped down to their bare bones, they all seem uncannily like the futile attempts to lift oneself by one’s bootstraps that we mentioned in the first chapter. After all, it is the use of the human mind that has led Hawking and Crick to adopt a view of human beings that carries with it the corollary that there is no reason to trust our minds when they tell us anything at all; let alone, in particular, that such reductionism is true.

The very existence of the capacity for rational thought is surely a pointer: not downwards to chance and necessity, but upwards to an intelligent source of that capacity. We live in an information age, and we are well aware that language-type information is intimately connected with intelligence. For instance, we have only to see a few letters of the alphabet spelling our name in the sand to recognize at once the work of an intelligent agent. How much more likely, then, is the existence of an intelligent Creator behind human DNA, the colossal biological database that contains no fewer than 3.5 billion “letters” – the longest “word” yet discovered?

However, we are now moving away from physics in the direction of biology – a subject in which similar issues arise. I have devoted a great deal of attention to it in my book
God’s Undertaker
, so I shall not re-tell that story here.

Rational support for the existence of God from outside science

Rational support for the existence of God is not only to be found in the realm of science, for science is not co-extensive with rationality, as many people imagine. For instance, we find ourselves to be moral beings, capable of understanding the difference between right and wrong. There is no scientific route to such ethics, as has been admitted by all but the most die-hard converts to scientism. Physics cannot inspire our concern for others, nor was science responsible for the spirit of altruism that has existed in human societies since the dawn of time. But that does not mean that ethics is non-rational.

Furthermore, just as the fine-tuning of the constants of nature and the rational intelligibility of nature point to a transcendent intelligence that is independent of this world, so the existence of a common pool of moral values points to the existence of a transcendent moral being.

History is also a very important rational discipline. Indeed, it is easy to overlook the fact that the methods of the historian have a very important role to play within science itself. We have been discussing the way in which the universe is describable in terms of physical law, and most of us are aware that physical laws are often established by an inductive process. That is, observations can be repeatedly made, experiments repeatedly done, and, if they give the same results each time under the same conditions, we feel comfortable in asserting that we have a genuine law, by what we call “inductive inference”. For instance, we can repeatedly observe the motion of the planets in their orbits round the sun, and thus confirm Kepler’s laws of planetary motion.

In areas of science such as cosmology, however, there are things which we cannot repeat. The most obvious example is the history of the universe from its beginning. We cannot re-run the Big Bang and say that it has been established by repeated experimentation.

What we can and do employ are the methods of the historian. We use a procedure called “inference to the best explanation” (or “abductive inference”).
⁷⁵
We are all familiar with this procedure, since it is the key to every good detective novel. A is murdered. B is found to have a motive – she stood to profit if A died. So B did it? Maybe. But then C is found to have had a violent row with A on the night he was murdered. So C did it? Maybe. But then… and Hercule Poirot keeps us guessing until the final denouement. Let us call the circumstance where there are several possible hypotheses consistent with an observed outcome the Poirot Principle.

The point about a Poirot story is that you cannot re-run the murder to see who did it. We cannot, therefore, expect the same level of certainty here which we get with repeated experimentation. It is that very feature, of course, that makes Poirot stories so enjoyable.

Exactly the same thing happens in cosmology. We set up a hypothesis. Suppose there was a Big Bang, and let’s call this hypothesis A. We then say: if A happened, what would we expect to find today? Someone says: we would expect to find B. So, scientists look and find B. What does this prove? Well, it is consistent with A, but it does not prove that A happened with the same kind of certainty that is associated with inductive argument, for the very obvious reason that there could be another hypothesis, A
¹
– very different from A, but nevertheless consistent with observing B. Indeed, there could be many other hypotheses different from Abut consistent with observing B. The Poirot Principle operates in cosmology.

It is for this reason that inference to the best explanation (abduction) does not carry the same weight as inductive inference. M-theory is speculative. Kepler’s laws are not. The danger is that, because science involves both induction and abduction, the latter is often invested with the authority accorded to the former.

Nevertheless, inference to the best explanation plays a very important role in those branches of science that deal with unrepeatable events in the past; like the origin of the universe and of life.

It is perfectly appropriate, therefore, to turn to history to ask if it supplies us with any evidence that there is a God. After all, if there is a God who is ultimately responsible for this universe and human life, it would surely not be surprising if he were to reveal himself. One of the main reasons I believe in God is because of the evidence that God has revealed himself to human beings within recorded history. The evidence centres mainly on the life and work of Jesus Christ, and focuses above all on his resurrection from the dead, which is presented to us as a fact of history.

These events are well attested in the biblical record, whose authenticity has been repeatedly established. There are also important extra-biblical sources and a wealth of archaeological findings that confirm the reliability of the biblical narrative. My faith in God, therefore, rests not only on the testimony of science but also on the testimony of history, particularly to the fact that Jesus Christ rose from the dead.

Here we are once again in the realm of the singular and unrepeatable; and, in light of Hume’s dictum cited above, we shall clearly require strong evidence, if belief in the resurrection is to be credible. However, Hawking will stop us at this point, and object that my claim that the resurrection occurred violates one of the fundamental principles of science: the laws of nature are universal – they admit no exceptions. As we have seen, Hawking is quite prepared to make inferences to the best explanation about unrepeatable past events. In his view, however, the resurrection is impossible in principle.

Hawking discusses this in the context of his convictions about what he calls “scientific determinism” – a view traceable to Laplace. “Given the state of the universe at one time, a complete set of laws fully determines both the future and the past. That would exclude the possibility of miracles or an active role for God.”
⁷⁶

On the basis of his determinism, Hawking reduces biology to physics and chemistry and concludes: “It is hard to see how free will can operate if our behaviour is determined by physical law, so it seems we are no more than biological machines and that free will is just an illusion.”
⁷⁷
He concedes, however, that human behaviour is so complex that predicting it would be impossible, so in practice we use “the effective theory that people have free will”.
⁷⁸

Hawking says: “This book is rooted in the concept of scientific determinism which implies that…there are no miracles, or exceptions to the laws of nature.”
⁷⁹
Could it be his scientific determinism that is the illusion? He is explicit in defining the implications of his determinism. In connection with the difficulty of predicting human behaviour in practice, he says, in a statement again reminiscent of Laplace: “For that one would need a knowledge of each of the initial states of each of the thousand trillion trillion molecules in the human body and to solve something like that number of equations.”
⁸⁰
At first sight this seems like strange language to come from a contemporary expert on quantum theory, which has as one of its fundamental tenets the Heisenberg Principle of Indeterminacy – that it is not possible simultaneously to measure accurately the position and the momentum of an electron, say. This principle would appear to vitiate any possibility of realizing Laplace’s deterministic dream, even in theory.

However, Hawking has not forgotten the Uncertainty Principle. In a later chapter he informs us that the Uncertainty Principle “tells us that there are limits to our ability to simultaneously measure certain data, such as the position and velocity of a particle”.
⁸¹
This leads him at once to modify his original “scientific determinism”.

His absolute determinism seems to have been seriously diluted – by Hawking himself. How, or even whether, he thinks this modified “determinism” (if that’s what it is) negates free will and the possibility of miracles, he does not say.

Let us, therefore, cite a comment on the implications of determinism by another physicist, John Polkinghorne.