Physicist Stephen Hawking Thinks to Replace God with an M-Theory

The Hawking and Dawkins assault on our belief in the existence of God.





Following on from the determined efforts by one of the most famous atheistic scientist of our times, Richard Dawkins, to discredit religion once and for all in his book God Delusion, theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking has declared that his latest work shows that there was no creator of the universe.



Stephen Hawking solemnly declared, prior to the publication of his brand new book The Grand Design (September 2010), that God did not create the universe. The point is, he says, that our universe followed inevitably from the laws of nature.


Does Hawking’s ‘scientific encyclical’ finally pronounce doom upon all theology, just as Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason was said to have done in the case of metaphysics, thereby bringing it completely to an end?


And just what are these alleged ‘laws of nature’? From whence did they emanate?


The German scientist-philosopher Immanuel Kant (d. 1804), though he probably retained his belief in God, was forced to conclude - due to the logic of his quirky epistemology (or how knowledge is acquired) - that all intellectual proofs for the existence of God were invalid and that all metaphysical contentions were groundless. Richard Dawkins, by contrast, is a virulent atheist who is on a hell-bent mission to destroy all belief in God.


Stephen Hawking for his part, who has met with the most recent two popes, is perhaps more ambiguous than Dawkins. Hawking has, in his search for the ‘theory of everything’ - a preoccupation of scientists today - referred to ‘God’ in such fashion that one might have been led to conclude that he does actually think that God exists.


Thus prize-winning author, Graham Farmelo, has commented:

It is perhaps a bit rich for Hawking to make God redundant after granting him/her/it a celebrity cameo at the end of his multi-million selling A Brief History of Time. In his famous conclusion to the book, Hawking wrote that if scientists could find the most fundamental laws of nature "then we should know the mind of God".
But then Farmelo adds: “To be fair, he was writing metaphorically – we all know what he meant”.
Hawking, according to Dr. H. ‘Fritz’ Schaefer of the University of Colorado,

… is probably the most famous living scientist. His book, A Brief History of Time, is available in paperback …. It has sold in excess of 10 million copies, and I think he sold about five million before the paperback version. For a book to sell so many copies is almost unheard of in the history of science writing.


There has been a film made about the book. The film is also good. There has even been a book made about the film. Hawking has a wonderful sense of humor. He writes in the introduction of the second book, "This is the book of the film of the book. I don't know if they are planning a film of the book of the film of the book." [Schaefer’s 1994 lecture, University of Colorado, “Stephen Hawking, The Big Bang, and God”]



A Brief History of Time is considered to be the most popular book about cosmology ever written.


Stephen Hawking has claimed in his writings that "the actual point of creation lies outside the scope of presently known laws of physics," and a less well-known cosmologist, Professor Alan Guth from MIT, says the "instant of creation remains unexplained." Indeed, the kind of science done by Stephen Hawking and others has an almost religious ring to it. He and his colleagues are trying to find the patterns in the basic fabric of reality – the mathematical laws that they believe govern the workings of nature at its finest level.



But can physics, which admittedly has delivered such great technological benefits to our modern world, serve also to determine for us whether or not God exists?


And are the new physical scientists legitimately able to take the place of the theologians and the metaphysicians?


Should we now consider that the traditional view of a rational knowledge above (supra) physics and serving as a handmaid to theology has been rendered obsolete, just as scientists tell us has been the fate also of the traditional cosmology?


Certainly Richard Dawkins would say so.


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Dr. "Fritz" Schaefer is the Graham Perdue Professor of Chemistry and the director of the Center for Computational Quantum Chemistry at the University of Georgia. He has been nominated for the Nobel Prize and was recently cited as the third most quoted chemist in the world. "The significance and joy in my science comes in the occasional moments of discovering something new and saying to myself, 'So that's how God did it!' My goal is to understand a little corner of God's plan." --U.S. News & World Report, Dec. 23, 1991.




But Dawkins’s virulence is now starting to annoy even his fellow atheists. Thus David Penberthy, writing for Sydney’s Daily Telegraph (16th September, pp. 66-67), and entitling his article, “Atheist zealots a heavy cross to bear”, contrasts the approach of Dawkins with the milder form of American physicist Bobby Anderson, who has mischievously suggested that Earth has been created by a flying spaghetti monster, and who has requested for his ‘religion’, which he calls Pastafarianism, to be included in the Kansas curriculum:

For Anderson, what started as the highly specific ridicule of teaching theological nonsense as science has now ballooned into a more generalised form of juvenile abuse towards anyone who believes in God. ….
Yet Anderson is a paragon of non-believer civility compared to the brilliant English scientist and celebrity atheist Richard Dawkins, author of The Selfish Gene and other books on human evolution and natural selection.
A few years ago Dawkins fired off a particularly narky text – The God Delusion – which became a best-seller ….


The God Delusion starts off promising a reasoned and scientific examination of why there is no God and can be no God, but soon descends into schoolyard teasing of the flying spaghetti monster variety.
Anyone who saw Dawkins’ bullying effort on the ABC’s Q & A last year would recall the manner in which he continually interrupted and shouted down other panellists who disputed his view.


The irony here is that the thing which has always fired up atheists, such as me, is a dislike of the righteousness which many religious people display.


There is an impertinence at the centre of religion, namely the conviction that your God is the one and only and that everyone else is deluded in following a rival God or no God at all.


But this spiritual impertinence can be found in equal measure among many atheists, with the latest entrant to their number being none other than Australia’s own Koran-smoking Bible-inhaler [Brisbane legal academic Alex] Stewart.
… If [all] this is the best atheists can do it’s no wonder some of us are thinking about taking our non-faith and quietly returning to the closet.

Stephen Hawking apparently has no intention of doing this. Whilst being less bullying than Dawkins and less blatantly offensive than Alex Stewart, Hawking has now emphatically joined their chorus, if he wasn’t there already before. According to Farmelo’s assessment, God and all that pertains to Him has been rejected by Hawking, and has been replaced with Hawking’s view of a scientific explanation:

[Hawking] now suggests that the search for this particular Holy Grail is over, now that scientists have come up with a type of theory, known as M-theory, that may describe the behaviour of all the fundamental particles and force, and even account for the very birth of the universe. If this theory is backed up by experiment, it might perhaps replace all religious accounts of creation – in Hawking's capacious mind, it already has.

But: “One problem with the theory”, Farmelo believes, “is that it looks as though it will be extremely difficult to test, unless physicists can build a particle accelerator the size of a galaxy”. Yes that is quite a problem.
And Farmelo adds: “Even if the experimenters find a way round this and M-theory passes all their tests, the reasons for the mathematical order at the heart of the universe's order would remain an unsolvable mystery”.
But Farmelo, despite his caution, can still say:

There is plenty of evidence that these [scientific] laws hold good all the way back to the beginning of time, which is how scientists have put together an extremely detailed and well-tested theory of the Big Bang, the first few minutes of the universe. The Large Hadron Collider will soon be reproducing, at will, the conditions in the universe within a billionth of a second of the beginning of time.

And hence, he believes, the tendency for scientists to theologise:

This has led writers to invest these experiments with a theological significance. The distinguished experimenter Leon Lederman labelled the Higgs particle, being sought at the Collider, as the God Particle, with no good reason except as a hook to promote his book, which he named after it.

“Yet these experiments will tell us nothing about God”, Farmelo concludes. “They will simply steer us towards an improved theoretical understanding of our material universe, ultimately in terms of principles set out in mathematics”.
Such are the firm opinions of scientists and even apparently of those who consider that God does exist. And even certain scientists who like to regard themselves philosophically as Thomists, or vice versa, can be found amongst those who think that the laws of theoretical physics are actually uncovering the secrets of nature.
But are they?
Though scientists with a firm belief in God would place Him above all this, so Farmelo believes:

Even religious scientists – and there are still a few – never use the God concept in their scientific work. Perhaps it is time for a moratorium on the use of the concept in popularisations, too? This would avoid mixing up scientific and non-scientific statements and put an end to the consequent confusions. I think it wise for scientists and religious believers to keep out of each other's territory – no good has come out of their engagement and I suspect it never will.

Indeed, the matter is far too vast to be explained by a popular writer such as Farmelo. And so he is forced to a pacifist kind of conclusion that the best tactic is for scientists and people of faith just to stay right out of each other’s way and thereby avoid an almighty clash.
A philosopher of scientist, on the other hand, will need to face the key issues squarely and try to provide answers to the kinds of questions being posed in this article; for example, whether scientists really are entitled to go as far as they are now going in terms of theologising? This question takes us to the very heart of modern science.
The world in which the typical physicist moves is a world of great order and beauty. And it has its own distinctive mathematically based language. But is it also the real world, as the physicists are now claiming - given their pontifications - and is the language that they talk, and use to communicate amongst themselves, really a grammar of nature? Are scientists really discovering laws about nature, or are they in actual fact writing their own laws into nature? This has become a fundamental question of our age, the answer to which is imperative if we are to defend - or are still to see the need to bother to defend - all of the bygone traditions. And Dawkins and Hawking, who have brought the science-religion debate right back into the limelight, and who seem to be carrying the day, have made all the more urgent the answer to such questions, touching on the very nature of modern physics.
Since these are philosophical questions, it would be normal to expect that only those well schooled in philosophy would be in a position to tackle them. Physics is a highly rigorous and demanding world of its own, and one must wonder if someone as fully absorbed in it as a Stephen Hawking could have the time and the inclination also to master philosophy. Can such people be objective enough about their own science to be able to philosophise about what it really is? We know that creative people, such as artists and writers, can sometimes be the worst people to commentate about their own output - so immersed are they in what they are doing. It is often necessary for informed critics instead to provide that objective assessment of their creative work. And the very same applies to physics. Those who do physics are not necessarily those who know what physics is. To explain it, to classify it properly in the order of being, is the task of genuine philosophers of science. About two centuries ago, Immanuel Kant, a professional philosopher (though by no means a Thomist) with a deep knowledge also of science and mathematics, was able to make such an assessment and to say what the new physicists were actually doing. These, he said were actively imposing their a priori laws of nature upon the world (as opposed to the traditional scientists who had looked to study the world as it is). Thus the new physicists were, contrary to what they themselves imagined, engaging with nature only at the end rather than at the very beginning (if at all).
So the answer to our questions concerning whether or not physicists such as Stephen Hawking and his colleagues, in their trying to find the patterns in the basic fabric of reality, are actually revealing true laws of nature, and whether the new physics can justifiably be said to render obsolete God and theology, is an emphatic No. These people, as physicists, live in their own little theoretical worlds and communicate the one to the other with their fantastic mathematics and complex equations. It is to a great extent a world of science fiction. Perhaps it is fitting, therefore, that that other scientist (non physicist though) whom we have had cause to mention, Richard Dawkins, is married to an actress, Sarah “Lalla” Ward who became known from her appearances as Time Lady Romana in the British science fiction favourite, DR WHO.
Rather fittingly, then, John Cornwell tells that “the encomiums on the dust-jacket [of The God Delusion] feature a line-up of writers in the realm of fantasy fiction” (Darwin’s Angel, p. 10). The mathematical laws devised by physicists like Hawking are not laws of reality, but laws by which nature can be quantified and harnessed for utilitarian and scientific purposes. This was well understood by another philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein (d. 1951), when he wrote in his Tractatus Logico-philosophicus (6.341), in relation to the science of Sir Isaac Newton, that the Newtonian mechanics tell us nothing about the world: but what does tell us something about the world is the precise way in which it is able to be described by these means.
The real existence of many of the elements and particles so fundamental to modern science has never been proven. The same applies to Dark Matter. Recent newspaper articles carried headings such as “Dark matter discovery hopes raised at US mine”, but nothing has been proven. These elements belong to the world of artifacts, partly included in the ancient notion of entia rationis, or objects of thought incapable of existing outside the mind. It is a very low platform level of being indeed from which to presume to mount a Tower of Babel-like challenge against God the Supreme Being.
In time one great system of physics, such as Newton’s - in its day considered to be set in stone - will be rendered obsolete and will be replaced by another, more practically useful (for prediction purposes) model.
That is proof enough that modern physics is not fixed.
Farmelo (op. cit.) says somewhat similarly:

Science and religion are about fundamentally different things. No religion has ever been rendered obsolete by facts or observations, but this happens to most scientific theories, at least in the long run. Science advances over the wreckage of its theories by continually putting theoretical ideas to experimental test; no matter how beautiful a theoretical idea might be, it must be discarded if it is at odds with experiment. Like any other human activity, science has flaws and does not always flow smoothly, but no one can seriously doubt the progress it has made in helping us understand the world and in helping to underpin technology. A useful characteristic of a scientific theory is that it must be possible, at least in principle, for experimenters to prove it wrong. Newton and Darwin, two of the greatest theoreticians, both set out ideas in this way, putting their heads on Nature's chopping block. In Newton's case, at least, his ideas have been superseded after proving inadequate in some circumstances. Unlike many religions, science has no final authority; the Royal Society, the UK academy of sciences, expresses this neatly in its motto "Take nobody's word for it". No religion has ever been set out in terms of scientific statements.
….
The most famous atheist scientist of our times is the fearless Richard Dawkins, whose God Delusion set out to discredit religion once and for all. For him, it was Darwin's theory of evolution that dealt the fatal blow to religious belief. Powerful and eloquent though it was, religion continues to flourish, and scientists (albeit a minority) continue to go to church, just as Galileo, Newton, Faraday and others have done in the past. I suspect that none of them would have abandoned their respective faiths after reading Dawkins (admittedly, not a scientific statement). Religions will survive so long as they steer clear of making statements that can be shown to be factually wrong.
Yet this is where religion can sneak back into the picture. Einstein, to the frustration of many of his colleagues, was fond of referring to God when he was talking about the laws expressing the fundamental harmonies of the universe. As Dawkins rightly stresses, it is quite clear that Einstein did not think of God as a white-bearded benefactor capable of interfering with the functioning of the universe. Rather, Einstein followed closely the views of the philosopher Spinoza, for whom the concept of God is an expression of the underlying unity of the universe, something so wondrous that it can command a spiritual awe.
Einstein's views were largely shared by his acquaintance Paul Dirac, the greatest English theoretician since Newton. Dirac, like Newton and Hawking, held the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics at Cambridge University. For Dirac, the greatest mystery of the universe was that its most fundamental laws can be expressed in terms of beautiful mathematical equations [sic]. Towards the end of his life, in the 1970s and early 1980s, Dirac often said that mathematical beauty "is almost a religion to me".
As a young man, he was an outspoken atheist, drawing his colleague Wolfgang Pauli to comment, "There is no God and Dirac is his prophet." Decades later, in 1963, Dirac was happy to use theological imagery: "God is a mathematician of a very high order." He was speaking metaphorically, but we know what he meant.
Yet I think it is misleading, especially when talking about science to non-specialists, to play fast and loose with the idea of God.

Scientists can tend to re-cast ‘God’ according to their own mathematico-scientific proclivities.
A very good account of the limitations of modern science, and how it can lead us away from reality, can be found in the Internet article beginning on p. 23 below, “The ‘Rotating’ Earth”. For, as will be argued there:

Heliocentricity not only remains unproven, but the Newtonian physics which [was] its main support [is] being openly questioned, if not discredited, ever since Maurice Allais and others have shown experimentally that Newton’s theory of gravity can no longer account for proven facts. ....
Whether the earth rotates once a day from West to East as Copernicus taught, or the heavens revolve once a day from East to West, as his predecessors believed, the observable phenomena will be exactly the same. That shows a defect in Newtonian dynamics, since an empirical science ought not to contain a metaphysical assumption which can never be proved or disproved by observation.

Stephen Hawking is complex. He had married a Christian, Jane, who made the statement in 1986, "Without my faith in God, I wouldn't have been able to live in this situation;" namely, the deteriorating health of her husband. "I would not have been able to marry Stephen in the first place because I wouldn't have had the optimism to carry me through and I wouldn't have been able to carry on with it." After she and Hawking divorced in the early 1990s she revealed that one of the reasons was his scorn for religion.
Hawking has met with two popes. Here is his account of a meeting with John Paul II:

Stephen Hawking says pope told him not to study
beginning of universe

HONG KONG (AP) – World-renowned astrophysicist Stephen Hawking said Thursday that the late Pope John Paul II once told scientists that they should not study the beginning of the universe because it was the work of God.
Hawking, author of the best-seller, A Brief History of Time, said that that John Paul made the comment at a cosmology conference at the Vatican. ....
Hawking quoted the pope as saying, “It’s OK to study the universe and where it began. But we should not inquire into the beginning itself because that was the moment of creation and the work of God”.
The scientist then joked that he was glad John Paul did not realize that he had presented a paper at the conference suggesting how the universe began.
“I didn’t fancy the thought of being handed over to the Inquisition like Galileo”.

http://www.usatoday.com/life/people/2006-06-15-hawking_x.htm

John Paul II was quite right. Hawking and his colleagues will never replicate the beginning, nor understand it through their physics. Our world is the poorer for, not science with its fascinations and triumphs, but for today’s complete obsession with the very lowest levels of being to the detriment of our studying the far more fascinating realm of higher being, of all that pertains to God and things spiritual.