Jesus Course

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?

Thoughts creation, god, hawkings

I spend a fair bit of time listening to what atheists have to say. I think it’s important for Christians to understand what others say and to really listen to the opinions of others.

There is something I find very interesting about why people declare themselves atheists. Some seem to have reasoned things out for themselves and taken that step of saying that they don’t believe there is a god, but the vast majority don’t take that reasoned approach. Of course they do try to make reasoned arguments but ultimately their declaration that there is no god stems from two assumptions. I’m not saying any of this to attack anyone – by the way – I’m not interested in name calling but I am interested in finding the truth.

The first of these, it seems to me, is that a great number of atheists assume that atheism is somehow the natural result of being intelligent. “How can anyone who is clever believe in all that superstition?”, they might well want to claim. They assume that religious belief is something that poor uneducated peasants believe in. The kind of thing that a Granny might believe because she didn’t get a proper education and likes to think the world is all lovely and fluffy. Or the kind of thing a country yokel, who also believes that drinking cider and dancing around a tree drives away the evil spirits to ensure a good harvest, might believe. But that belief in god is not for the more sophisticated and educated city dweller.

The thing is that this is all assumption and just plain rubbish. There are plenty of very intelligent people who believe in god. I’ve got a bit of paper somewhere from an I.Q. test I once had to endure (took 6 hours I seem to remember) that declares that I’m a pretty intelligent person myself (modesty prevents me from saying how high) and yet I’m convinced that there is a God. I can also appeal to many very intelligent people who are convinced that god exists, whoever that god might be (I’m not arguing for a Christian view of god here but just a view that there is a god).

There does seem to be a certain anti-god snobbishness in certain academic circles but this is often based on prejudice more than any evidence or argument.

This comes out in the claim by some atheists that theists (those who do believe in god) have to prove their belief where a-theists don’t. However an atheist can’t assume the non-existence of god and then say that theists have to prove it – both sides need to have good reason to say what they do. A-theism is a truth ‘claim’ just as much as theism.

I’d better get back to subject because this could get to be a very involved discussion for a blog.

The other assumption that is often made is based on bad experience with an organised religion. Something like ‘I don’t believe in god because I hate organised religion – after all look at all the wars it has caused’, etc. Or it might stem from a bad religious school experience, or perhaps a bad vicar/priest/minister, or even an over zealous evangelist, or even worse a corrupt evangelist. It doesn’t take a clever person (or perhaps it does) to see that anger at organised religion doesn’t prove that there is no god. The best you should be able to come up from this is that you hate god because his followers make you angry.

The first thing to point out is that it isn’t the fault of organised religion that some people in a religion (and sometimes even the leaders) turn out to be nasty, despicable people. If we took this line then we would have to also hate organised sport, organised politics, organised education, organised news reporting (e.g. newspapers), organised businesses, organised holidays, organised families, organised anything. It isn’t because something is organised that makes it bad but sometimes people abuse that organisation for their own ends.

Everyone in an organised religion hates the fact that some people have abused their position in that organisation for their own ends. In that sense we don’t like organised religion any more than anyone else does- but you see sometimes being organised can help.

Schools, for example, come out of organised religion and if their was no organisation their would be no schools (same goes for Universities).  What about hospitals? What about helping the homeless? What about charitable works? All these and many more stem from organised religion.

Of course I can’t claim that no one would ever have come up with the idea without organised religion but there is plenty of history to show that organised religion played a key role in pioneering many good things which we often take for granted.

Bad things do not stem from organised religion but we who are a part of it (that is organised religion) need to work hard to make sure that corrupt people don’t get the chance to abuse the organisation for their own agendas.

Anyway if you are someone who claims not to believe in god: a) because you think intelligent people don’t – please think again because this is simply not true, or b) because an encounter with a crackpot organised religious group has made you angry – please think again because the majority of those in organised religions are really quite good people.

If you are going to claim to be atheist then you need better reasons that these.

Thoughts atheism, god, organised religion, organized religion, religion, theism

There is an advertising campaign run by atheists claiming that there is “probably no god” in the U.K. at the moment. I haven’t seen them myself but I believe that they exist.

Perhaps that is the nub of my problem. I can believe things without having to see them. Like I believe Australia and the Antarctic and India and Mount Everest all exist even though I have never seen them.

It seems to me that we have got so hung up on philosophy (and I like reading philosophy by the way) and the meaning of words and what truth is that we have missed out on some basic parts of life and how we actually know that something is true.

For instance it is possible to make an argument about colour and that we can’t really know that what one person sees as a colour is actually what another person sees. My blue may be red to you. We see the same thing, the same wavelengths etc but how do we know that we see the same colour?

It’s thinking like this that leads some to conclude that there is no god. If we can’t be certain about anything then we have to doubt everything and if we doubt everythng then we have to doubt that god exists, etc.

All very boring I know.

And yet I can turn to my youngest son and point out the beauty of a rainbow or the stars in the night sky and together we enjoy the experience. In some way we just know that we are sharing something together and finding pleasure in it. I can have a conversation with my wife and we end up concluding the same thing. I can watch Harry Hill on the T.V. and enjoy his humour.

There is a part of us that longs for certainty about everything but sometimes that search for certainty gets in the way of knowing and of truth.

Some scientists have tried to claim that they know the only and whole truth and yet ultimately what they claim is based on probabilities only. Science only works if the universe works to a pattern or rules but perhaps we have just made those rules up and in fact the universe is completely random. It is possible for people to see patterns where none exist.

In the end everything we know can only be known by faith.

So then we come back to the existence of god. “Probably”, injects an element of doubt but that doubt works both ways. To say there is probably no god is to say that there might be. If there is even a small chance that god exists then we need to be living as if god does exist. We should also be looking out for the evidence.

Of course I believe that the evidence for the existence of God is overwhelming and so it only takes a little faith on my part to believe in God. After concluding that God does exist I felt a great release and sense of peace about things. Since that time I have even met God, felt his presence. I could now no more deny the existence of God than I could deny the existence of my wife.

Philosophically I can only say God probably exists but in my heart I know He does. Philosophy is great fun but it’s rubbish for working life out.

Thoughts christian, faith, god, Jesus, religion