Hawking and the origins of the Universe
I don’t usually like to write on subjects concerning science and religion but with Stephen Hawking’s new book coming out and all the press hype around it I thought I’d post something.
It is a complex subject and Stephen is obviously a brilliant man but brilliant men are not immune from coming to bad conclusions. In an article about Stephen Hawking’s previous work Dr Schaefer describes why he doesn’t always agree with Stephen Hawking’s. You can read it here … (Part 2 is here…)
I found it interesting to note that Stephen Hawking’s mother was a Communist – this is only significant in that Communism has a very anti-religion and atheist emphasis – and his boyhood hero was Bertrand Russel (a very aggressive atheist philosopher). Like all of us Stephen Hawkings does not come from a neutral position and this can be clearly seen in his writings.
Let me just quote the description of the many other brilliant scientists who don’t agree with Stephen Hawking’s conclusions about creation and God.
Does everyone agree with Stephen Hawking’s opinion on these matters? The answer is no. Alan Lightman, a MIT professor, said in his book Origins: The Lives and Worlds of Modern Cosmologists (Harvard University Press, 1990), “Contrary to popular myths, scientists appear to have the same range of attitudes about religious matters as does the general public.”
This fact can be established either from anecdote or from statistical data. Sigma Xi, the scientific honorary society, ran a large poll a few years ago which showed that, on any given Sunday, around 46 percent of all Ph.D. scientists are in church; for the general population the figure is 47 percent. So, whatever influences people in their beliefs about God, it doesn’t appear to have much to do with having a Ph.D. in science.
There are many prominent counter-examples to Stephen Hawking. One is a colleague of mine at Berkeley for 18 years, Charlie Townes. Townes won the Nobel Prize for discovering the maser. One statement he made differs greatly from Hawking’s view; he said, “In my view, the question of origin seems to be left unanswered if we explore from a scientific view alone. Thus, I believe there is a need for some religious or metaphysical explanation. I believe in the concept of God and in His existence.”
Arthur Schawlow is another Nobel Prize winner, a professor at Stanford who identifies himself as a Christian. He states, “We are fortunate to have the Bible and especially the New Testament which tells us so much about God in widely accessible human terms.”
The other Cambridge professor of theoretical physics for much of Hawking’s career was John Polkinghorn, a nuclear physicist. He left his chair of theoretical physics at Cambridge in 1979 and went to seminary to become a minister. Upon completing that, he had a parish church for awhile and now has recently come back to be the President of Queen’s College at Cambridge. He states, “I take God very seriously indeed. I am a Christian believer and I believe that God exists and has made Himself known in human terms in Jesus Christ.”
Probably the world’s greatest observational cosmologist is Allan Sandage. Sandage works in Pasadena, California at the Carnegie Observatories. In 1991, he received a prize given by the Swedish academy that is given every six years in physics for cosmology and is worth the same amount of money as the Nobel prize (there is not a Nobel Prize given for cosmology). Sandage has even been called “the grand old man of cosmology” by the New York Times.
At the age of 50, Sandage became a Christian. He states in Lightman’s book, Origins: The Lives and Worlds of Modern Cosmologists, “The nature of God is not to be found within any part of the findings of science. For that, one must turn to the Scriptures.” When asked the famous question regarding whether it’s possible to be a scientist and a Christian, Sandage replies, “Yes. The world is too complicated in all its parts and interconnections to be due to chance alone. I am convinced that the existence of life with all its order in each of its organisms is simply too well put together.”
One of the persons closest to Stephen Hawking, whom you know if you’ve seen the movie about A Brief History of Time, is Donald Page. Page has had an excellent physics career in his own right, but he started to become famous as a post-doctoral fellow with Stephen Hawking. The Hawkings were not financially well-off in the years prior to his book and needed some help to keep going. So the post-doctoral fellows would come to live with the Hawkings. Donald Page did this for three years.
Page described these years in the book (the book about the film about the book!). He said, “I would usually get up around 7:15 or 7:30, take a shower, read in my Bible and pray. Then I would go down and get Stephen up. After breakfast, I would often tell him what I’d been reading in the Bible, hoping that this would eventually have some influence. I remember telling Stephen one story about how Jesus had seen the deranged man and how this man had these demons and the demons had been sent into a herd of swine. The swine then plunged over the edge of the cliff and into the sea. Stephen piped up and said, ‘Well, the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals would not like that story, would they?’”
Page stated, “I am a conservative Christian in the sense of pretty much taking the Bible seriously for what it says. Of course I know that certain parts are not intended to be read literally, so I am not precisely a literalist but I try to believe in the meaning, I think, it is intended to have.”
And then from Stephen Hawking’s equally brilliant wife (herself a devout Christian):
Jane Hawking has commented on this aspect of her husband’s work. “Stephen has the feelings that because everything is reduced to a rational, mathematical formula, that must be the truth,” Jane explained. “He is delving into realms that really do matter to thinking people and, in a way, that can have a very disturbing effect on people-and he’s not competent.”
From what I have read so far (in the press) Hawking’s conclusions are still just personal opinion but because he writes in a very accessible and interesting way people will believe that his conclusions are based on hard evidence. Of course there is always the question – that it seems to me Hawking’s likes to avoid with some clever mind games – of what was before and where did these laws of physics come from?
People have often pondered over the question of their purpose. One of the problems faced by those who do not believe in God is that if you exist by chance, a random set of circumstances, then you have no real purpose, you have no reason to exist, there is no right or wrong.