God and Stephen Hawking (6 page)

It would appear, therefore, that Hawking’s name would be a suitable addition to this list.

Miracles and the laws of nature

According to Hawking, then, the reign of the laws of nature is absolute. They determine everything and permit no exceptions. There can therefore be no miracles. He writes: “These laws should hold everywhere and at all times; otherwise they wouldn’t be laws. There could be no exceptions or miracles. Gods or demons couldn’t intervene in the running of the universe.”
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Once again we are faced with a choice between mutually exclusive alternatives. Either we believe in miracles or we believe in the scientific understanding of the laws of nature, but not both.

Not surprisingly, this argument is also put forward with characteristic force by Richard Dawkins:

However, it cannot be quite as simple as Hawking and Dawkins think. There are highly intelligent, eminent scientists who would differ with them; for instance: Professor William Phillips, Physics Nobel Prizewinner 1998; Professor John Polkinghorne FRS, Quantum Physicist, Cambridge; Sir John Houghton, former Director of the British Meteorological Office and Head of the International Governmental Panel on Climate Change; and the current Director of the National Institute of Health and former Director of the Human Genome Project, Francis Collins. These distinguished scientists are well aware of the arguments against miracles. Nevertheless, publicly and without embarrassment or a sense of absurdity, each affirms his belief in the supernatural and, in particular, in the resurrection of Christ – which they regard, as I do, as the supreme evidence for the truth of the Christian world-view.

One of the scientists just mentioned, Francis Collins, gives a wise caution regarding the matter of miracles:

For that reason I shall concentrate on the resurrection of Christ, in order to give the discussion as sharp a focus as possible. It was the miracle of the resurrection of Christ that started Christianity going, and that same miracle is its central message. Indeed, the basic qualification of a Christian apostle was to be an eyewitness of the resurrection.
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C. S. Lewis writes: “The first fact in the history of Christendom is a number of people who say they have seen the Resurrection. If they had died without making anyone else believe this ‘gospel’, no Gospels would ever have been written.”
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According to the early Christians, then, without the resurrection there simply is no Christian message. The apostle Paul writes: “If Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith.”
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Let us remind ourselves of the perspective of contemporary science, and its thinking about the laws of nature. Since scientific laws embody cause-effect relationships, scientists nowadays do not regard them as merely capable of describing what has happened in the past. Provided we are not working at the quantum level, such laws can successfully predict what will happen in the future with such accuracy that, for example, the orbits of communication satellites can be precisely calculated, and moon and Mars landings are possible. Many scientists are therefore convinced that the universe is a closed system of cause and effect.

In light of this, it is understandable that such scientists resent the idea that some god could arbitrarily intervene and alter, suspend, reverse, or otherwise “violate”, these laws of nature. To them that would seem to contradict the immutability of those laws, and thus overturn the very basis of the scientific understanding of the universe. In consequence many such scientists would advance the following two arguments against miracles.

The first is that belief in miracles in general, and in the New Testament miracles in particular, arose in primitive, pre-scientific cultures, where people were ignorant of the laws of nature and so readily accepted miracle stories.

Any initial plausibility which this explanation may seem to possess disappears rapidly when it is applied to New Testament miracles like the resurrection. A moment’s thought will show us that, in order to recognize some event as a miracle, there must be some perceived regularity to which that event is an apparent exception! You cannot recognize something as abnormal if you do not know what is normal.

This was actually well appreciated long ago, indeed at the time of the writing of the New Testament documents. Interestingly, the historian Luke, who was a doctor trained in the medical science of his day, raises this very matter. In his account of the rise of Christianity, Luke informs us that the first opposition to the Christian message of the resurrection of Jesus Christ came not from atheists, but from the high priests of Judaism. They were highly religious men of the party of the Sadducees. They believed in God. They said their prayers and conducted the services in the Temple. But that did not mean that the first time they heard the claim that Jesus had risen from the dead they believed it. They did not believe it, for they had embraced a world-view which denied the possibility of bodily resurrection of anyone at all, let alone that of Jesus Christ.

Indeed, they shared a widespread conviction. Historian Tom Wright says:

To suppose, then, that Christianity was born in a pre-scientific, credulous, and ignorant world is simply false to the facts. The ancient world knew the law of nature as well as we do, that dead bodies do not get up out of graves. Christianity won its way by dint of the sheer weight of evidence that one man had actually risen from the dead.

The second objection to miracles is that now we know the laws of nature, miracles are impossible. This is Hawking’s position. However, it involves a further fallacy that C. S. Lewis illustrated with the following analogy:

The analogy also reminds us that the scientific use of the word “law” is not the same as the legal use, where we often think of a law as constraining someone’s actions. There is no sense in which the laws of arithmetic constrain or pressurize the thief in our story. Newton’s law of gravitation tells me that if I drop an apple it will fall towards the centre of the earth. But that law does not prevent someone intervening, and catching the apple as it descends. In other words, the law predicts what will happen, provided there is no change in the conditions under which the experiment is conducted.

Thus, from the theistic perspective, the laws of nature predict what is bound to happen if God does not intervene. It is no act of theft, of course, if the Creator intervenes in his own creation. To argue that the laws of nature make it impossible for us to believe in the existence of God and the likelihood of his intervention in the universe is plainly false. It would be like claiming that an understanding of the laws of the jet engine would make it impossible to believe that the designer of such an engine could, or would, intervene and remove the fan. Of course he could intervene. Moreover, his intervention would not destroy those laws. The very same laws that explained why the engine worked with the fan in place would now explain why it does not work with the fan removed.

It is, therefore, inaccurate and misleading to say with David Hume that miracles “violate” the laws of nature. Once more C. S. Lewis is helpful:

In this vein we could say that it is a law of nature that human beings do not rise again from the dead
by some natural mechanism
. But Christians do not claim that Christ rose from the dead by such a mechanism. This point is of vital importance for the whole discussion: they claim that he rose from the dead by supernatural power. By themselves, the laws of nature cannot rule out that possibility. When a miracle takes place, it is the laws of nature that alert us to the fact that it is a miracle. It is important to grasp that Christians do not deny the laws of nature. It is an essential part of the Christian position to believe in the laws of nature as descriptions of those regularities and cause-effect relationships which have been built into the universe by its Creator, and according to which it normally operates. If we did not know them, we should never recognize a miracle if we saw one. The crucial difference between the Christian view and Hawking’s view is that Christians do not believe that this universe is a closed system of cause and effect. They believe that it is open to the causal activity of its Creator God.

In anybody’s book then, miracles, by definition, are exceptions to what normally happens. They are singularities. However, it is one thing to say: “Experience shows that such and such normally happens, but there may be exceptions, although none has been observed; that is, the experience
we have had up to this point has been uniform
.” It is an entirely different thing to say: “This is what we normally experience, and we must always experience it, for there can be and are no exceptions.”

However, Hawking appears committed to the view that nature is absolutely uniform: the laws of nature know no exceptions. We have seen that the laws of nature cannot forbid miracles. So how does Hawking know that they cannot happen? In order to know that experience against miracles is
absolutely
uniform, he would need to have total access to every event in the universe at all times and places, which is self-evidently impossible. Humans have only ever observed a tiny fraction of the sum total of events that have occurred in the universe; and very few of the total of all human observations have been written down. Therefore, Hawking cannot know that miracles have never occurred in the past, or that they might occur in the future. He is simply assuming what he wants to prove. He is expressing a belief based on his atheistic world-view, not on his science.

The problem here is that the uniformity of nature, sometimes called the inductive principle, on which much scientific argument is based, cannot be proved. We noted earlier that David Hume had pointed this out. Alister McGrath argues that “it is an unjustified (indeed, circular) assumption within any non-theistic world-view”.
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McGrath cites no less an authority than the famous atheist philosopher Bertrand Russell: