Stephen Hawking. ‘Lord’ of a diminished cosmos

 

by

 

Damien F. Mackey

 

 

 

Part One:

Physics and the ‘God Hypothesis’

 

“Although we are puny and insignificant on the scale of the cosmos,

this makes us in a sense the lords of creation”.

 

The Grand Design

 

Introduction

 

The Grand Design (Bantam Books, 2010), co-written by physicists Stephen Hawking (deceased this month of March, 2018) and Leonard Mlodinow, I found to be surprisingly readable.

 

The intent of the book is well set out in its opening section, “The Mystery of Being”. There, though, we read some rather startling assertions, such as:

 

“Traditionally these are questions for philosophy, but philosophy is dead”.

 

“M-theory predicts that a great many universes were created out of nothing. Their creation does not require the intervention of some supernatural being or god. Rather, these multiple universes arise naturally from physical law”.

 

“… this makes us in a sense the lords of creation”.

 

Philosophy is dead.

God is unnecessary.

We are the creators.

 

A few nights ago I watched on TV quite a heartbreaking movie about Stephen Hawking and his first wife, Jane Wilde, The Theory of Everything.

 

 

Although Jane was of a religious inclination, Stephen was not, he declaring in the movie at one stage that ‘God was a distraction in physics’.

 

No need for the God hypothesis?

 

Not all famous physicists have so totally blotted God out of the picture.

Sir Isaac Newton, writes Joseph Hartropp in his article “Are science and religion in conflict? Isaac Newton didn't think so”:

https://www.christiantoday.com/article/are-science-and-religion-in-conflict-isaac-newton-didnt-think-so/105915.htm

 

Are God and science at war? It's a popular conception in modern culture, but one that would have been strongly denied by the man at the heart of the scientific revolution.

Isaac Newton died on this day in 1727. His discovery of the gravitational force, amongst many other things, transformed the way we see the world. He was also a Christian with a deep interest in theology and the Bible.

 

Newton began his prodigious career at Cambridge University, which is also where he was converted to Christianity. Science, Newton said, 'cannot explain who set the planets in motion. God governs all things.' Newton saw science as a 'garden' that God wanted him to cultivate, and saw his many of his pioneering discoveries as coming from the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. He saw an intelligent designer behind the order of the universe, sustaining creation, and he described atheism as 'senseless'.

 

Newton said: 'This most beautiful system of the sun, planets, and comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being ... This Being governs all things, not as the soul of the world, but as Lord over all; and on account of his dominion he is wont to be called Lord God.' ….

 

Albert Einstein is famous for his saying: “God does not play dice”. But this quote needs to be put into its proper context. For Einstein apparently admitted to not actually believing in God: https://www.businessinsider.com.au/god-does-not-play-dice-quote-meaning-2015-11?r=US&IR=T

 

Einstein himself even cleared up the matter in a letter he wrote in 1954:

 

I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.

 

Byron Jennings has written on this subject, “There is No Need for God as a Hypothesis”: https://www.quantumdiaries.org/2011/09/16/there-is-no-need-for-god-as-a-hypothesis/

 

Pierre-Simon, marquis de Laplace (1749 – 1827) was one of the great French mathematical physicists. In math, his fame is shown by the number of mathematical objects named after him: Laplace’s equation, Laplace transforms, the Laplacian, etc.  In physics, he was the first to show that planetary orbits are stable and he developed a model—the nebular model—to account for how the solar system formed.  In modified form, the nebular model is still accepted. In spite of these important contributions, he was also very much a lackey, being very careful to keep on the right side of all the right people. During the French revolution, that might have been just good survival strategy. After all, he served successive French governments and, unlike Lavoisier, kept his head.

 

Laplace presented his definitive work on the properties of the solar system to Napoleon.  Napoleon, liking to embarrass people, asked Laplace if it was true that there was no mention of the solar system’s Creator (ie God) in his opus magus. Laplace, on this occasion at least, was not obsequious and replied, “I had no need of that hypothesis.”

 

This is essentially the simplicity argument discussed in a previous blog, but stated very crisply and succinctly.

 

Laplace was not just a whistlin’ Dixie. Newton had needed that hypothesis, ie God, to make the solar system work. Newton believed that the planetary orbits were unstable and unless God intervened periodically, the planets would wander off into space. Newton had not done the mathematical analysis sufficiently completely. Laplace rectified the problem. Newton also had no model for the origin of the solar system. Laplace eliminated these two gaps that Newton had God fill.

 

Back to Napoleon—he told Joseph Lagrange (1736 – 1813), another of the great French mathematicians/physicists, Laplace’s comment about no need for the God hypothesis. Lagrange’s reply was, “Ah, it is a fine hypothesis; it explains many things.” Laplace’s apocryphal reply was, “This hypothesis, Sir, explains in fact everything, but does not permit to predict anything. As a scholar, I must provide you with works permitting predictions.” This is the ultimate insult in science: it explains everything but predicts nothing. Explanations are a dime a dozen; if you want explanations, read Kipling’s Just so Stories. Now, there are some fine explanations. I particularly like The Cat That Walked by Himself.

 

[Laplace’s] argument, I had no need of that hypothesis, is still being used today. Hawking and Mlodinow in their book, The Grand Design, created a stir by claiming God did not exist. But their argument was just Laplace’s pushed back from the beginning of the solar system to the beginning of universe:  they had no need of that hypothesis. Whether their physics is correct or not is still an open question. It is not clear that string theory has gotten past the “it explains everything but predicts nothing” stage. ….

 

 

Part Two:

A modern intellectual cowardice

 

 

 

“Pseudo-metaphysics arises from intellectual nihilism; it is a fantastic edifice of pretence, impervious to rational discussion since it obliterates all genuinely rational lines; it marks a retreat into egocentricity and a loss of the power of dialogue; ultimately … it is a craven attempt of the mind to … screen itself from the providence of God, and remove him farther off from the affairs of the world …”.

 

Gavin Ardley

 

Introduction

 

Once upon a time, those who sought wisdom and inspiration regarding man and the universe began by genuflecting to the Almighty God in reverential awe (the meaning of “fear” below). Because, as they saw it:

 

 

“The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge, but fools despise wisdom and instruction”. Proverbs 1:7

 

“The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and knowledge of the Holy One is understanding”. Proverbs 9:10

 

“The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. A good understanding to all that do it …”. Psalm 110:10 (Douay)

 

“… here is the conclusion of the matter: Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the duty of all mankind”. Ecclesiastes 12:13

 

“The fear of the Lord—that is wisdom, and to shun evil is understanding”. Job 28:28

 

“If you fear the Lord, you will do this. Master his Law, and you will find Wisdom”. Sirach 15:1

 

And, now in the New Testament, the Baptist is found to have been of the very same sapiential mentality. He, using the image of the light of the morning star fading with the sun’s rising (Jesus Christ), will declare (John 3:30): ‘He must become greater; I must become less’.

Why? - because:

 

‘The One who comes from above is above all; the one who is from the earth belongs to the earth, and speaks as one from the earth. The One who comes from heaven is above all. He testifies to what he has seen and heard, but no one accepts his testimony. Whoever has accepted it has certified that God is truthful. For the One whom God has sent speaks the words of God, for God gives the Spirit without limit. The Father loves the Son and has placed everything in his hands. Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life, but whoever rejects the Son will not see life, for God’s wrath remains on them’.

 

Only “the One who comes from heaven [who] is above all” can know the real design and structure of things. And He will only reveal such things to the likes of a Solomon, who prayed for wisdom and knowledge both humbly and submissively.

Clearly there is a moral issue involved with attainment of wisdom and knowledge. And no one has explained this better, I believe, than Gavin Ardley, in Berkeley’s Renovation of Philosophy (Martinus Nijhoff, 1968). Having first discussed moral scruples: “The condition of moral scruples is morbid” (pp. 78-79), Ardley then proceeds to write about “intellectual scruples”:

 

….

[George] Berkeley's estimate of the nature of pseudo-metaphysics and of its therapy runs along lines parallel to the moral case.

Intellectual scruples are a philosophical disease; they spring from a kind of vanity, a wish to be god-like, to know all; which wish being frustrated leads to the opposite extreme, a loss of confidence,  a conviction that we know nothing; which state, in turn, is a condition of receptivity to any irrational doctrine which seeks lodging; which state, in turn, is a condition of receptivity to any irrational doctrine which seeks lodging; which doctrine, in turn, is clung to tenaciously and blindly as a kind of protective cover.

Pseudo-metaphysics arises from intellectual nihilism; it is a fantastic edifice of pretence, impervious to rational discussion since it obliterates all genuinely rational lines; it marks a retreat into egocentricity and a loss of the power of dialogue; ultimately, Berkeley suspects, it is a craven attempt of the mind to “screen itself from the providence of God, and remove him farther off from the affairs of the world” (Pr. 75).

 

Ardley’s use of the adjective “craven” here is not an exaggeration in light of St John Paul II’s

encyclical, Fides et ratio (1998), in which the indispensability of philosophy is upheld in the face of a modern intellectual cowardice - (recall e.g. Stephen Hawking’s: “Traditionally these are questions for philosophy, but philosophy is dead”) - which, the pope wrote, “has wilted under the weight of so much knowledge and little by little has lost the capacity to lift its gaze to the heights, not daring to rise to the truth of being”.

 

Here is the relevant section # 5 from that encyclical letter:

 

On her part, the Church cannot but set great value upon reason's drive to attain goals which render people's lives ever more worthy. She sees in philosophy the way to come to know fundamental truths about human life. At the same time, the Church considers philosophy an indispensable help for a deeper understanding of faith and for communicating the truth of the Gospel to those who do not yet know it.

Therefore, following upon similar initiatives by my Predecessors, I wish to reflect upon this special activity of human reason. I judge it necessary to do so because, at the present time in particular, the search for ultimate truth seems often to be neglected. Modern philosophy clearly has the great merit of focusing attention upon man. From this starting-point, human reason with its many questions has developed further its yearning to know more and to know it ever more deeply. Complex systems of thought have thus been built, yielding results in the different fields of knowledge and fostering the development of culture and history. Anthropology, logic, the natural sciences, history, linguistics and so forth—the whole universe of knowledge has been involved in one way or another. Yet the positive results achieved must not obscure the fact that reason, in its one-sided concern to investigate human subjectivity, seems to have forgotten that men and women are always called to direct their steps towards a truth which transcends them. Sundered from that truth, individuals are at the mercy of caprice, and their state as person ends up being judged by pragmatic criteria based essentially upon experimental data, in the mistaken belief that technology must dominate all. It has happened therefore that reason, rather than voicing the human orientation towards truth, has wilted under the weight of so much knowledge and little by little has lost the capacity to lift its gaze to the heights, not daring to rise to the truth of being. Abandoning the investigation of being, modern philosophical research has concentrated instead upon human knowing. Rather than make use of the human capacity to know the truth, modern philosophy has preferred to accentuate the ways in which this capacity is limited and conditioned.

 

This has given rise to different forms of agnosticism and relativism which have led philosophical research to lose its way in the shifting sands of widespread scepticism. Recent times have seen the rise to prominence of various doctrines which tend to devalue even the truths which had been judged certain. A legitimate plurality of positions has yielded to an undifferentiated pluralism, based upon the assumption that all positions are equally valid, which is one of today's most widespread symptoms of the lack of confidence in truth. Even certain conceptions of life coming from the East betray this lack of confidence, denying truth its exclusive character and assuming that truth reveals itself equally in different doctrines, even if they contradict one another. On this understanding, everything is reduced to opinion; and there is a sense of being adrift. While, on the one hand, philosophical thinking has succeeded in coming closer to the reality of human life and its forms of expression, it has also tended to pursue issues—existential, hermeneutical or linguistic—which ignore the radical question of the truth about personal existence, about being and about God. Hence we see among the men and women of our time, and not just in some philosophers, attitudes of widespread distrust of the human being's great capacity for knowledge. With a false modesty, people rest content with partial and provisional truths, no longer seeking to ask radical questions about the meaning and ultimate foundation of human, personal and social existence. In short, the hope that philosophy might be able to provide definitive answers to these questions has dwindled. ….

Part Three:

Creating new universes

 

“M-theory predicts that a great many universes were created out of nothing. Their creation does not require the intervention of some supernatural being or god. Rather, these multiple universes arise naturally from physical law”.

 

The Grand Design

 

 

Introduction

 

Those great wise men of bygone ages whose maxims we considered in Part Two, the likes of King Solomon (Ecclesiastes), the prophet Job, and Sirach (Ecclesiasticus), were men of common sense who trusted in the reliability of their God-given senses, but who were humble before the God who they believed to have created the heavens and the earth, and who they knew held the key to Nature. Their profound knowledge was metaphysically-based.

 

Then came a complete revolution in the nature of ‘science’.

Man, not God, became ‘the measure of all things’.

Dr. Gavin Ardley tells of it, with Galileo being the cut-off point (Aquinas and Kant, 1950):

 

Post-Galilean physical science is cut off from the rest of the world and is the creation of man himself. Consequently the science, in itself, has no immediate metaphysical foundations, and no metaphysical implications, in spite of popular beliefs to the contrary. These beliefs arise from the failure to realise the science’s ‘otherness’, that it belongs to the categorial order and not to the real order.

 

Only that which belongs to the real order is directly linked with metaphysics. The ancient and medieval science of physics belongs to this real order, and is, in principle, an integral part of philosophy in general. It has metaphysical foundations and metaphysical implications. [Footnote: This is not to say that all the particular Aristotelean doctrines of the Earth, the Skies, the Heavens and so on, are essential to Aristotelean metaphysics. They are integrated with metaphysics only in their general intention, and not in particular formulation. They could be modified without necessitating any change in metaphysical principles since the principles of metaphysics are founded on more general grounds. Many of the particular Aristotelean opinions about phenomena were abandoned in the 17^th century with the increasingly detailed knowledge of Nature. Galileo’s Dialogues on the Two Great Systems of the World is a classic account of this revision of detailed theories of phenomena. Galileo himself, unlike many of his more extravagant followers, generally pursued this revision with considerable moderation. (See Ch. XVII). He is careful to distinguish what is true an abiding in Aristotle from what is erroneous and non-essential.] ….

 

It is not surprising that Immanuel Kant (d. 1804), considered by some to have been the most influential thinker of the Enlightenment era, who was able to identify the artificial nature of the new sciences, whilst however adapting this methodology to his idiosyncratic new ‘philosophy’, is considered to have buried metaphysics once and for all.

 

The new ‘science’ has become so successful as to give almost God-like status to its better known proponents. Thus we find famous scientists now pontificating about matters of Theology and philosophy, despite the fact that they are neither theologians nor philosophers. In Part One, we read that physicists Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow felt themselves sufficiently qualified in matters metaphysical to declare, in The Grand Design, that:

 

“… philosophy is dead”.

 

“… creation does not require the intervention of some supernatural being or god”.

 

“… this makes us in a sense the lords of creation”.

 

Blissfully ignorant of the science of metaphysics, however, such as these have no apparent grasp whatsoever of the limited nature of their own discipline, that, to recall Gavin Ardley: “… has no immediate metaphysical foundations, and no metaphysical implications, in spite of popular beliefs to the contrary. These beliefs arise from the failure to realise the science’s ‘otherness’, that it belongs to the categorial order and not to the real order”.

And so, as Ardley rightly continues: “The general run of physicists and philosophers have gone on writing learned works on the metaphysical foundations, and more particularly the metaphysical implications, of modern physics, oblivious to this change of character”.  

 

 

A whole load of science fiction

 

Two of the most visible darlings of today’s science are (until recently) Stephen Hawking (RIP) and Richard Dawkins. They both are (were) heavily influenced by science fiction.

Dawkins is an evolutionary biologist, a discipline which - if it weren’t tied to evolution, as in Dawkins’ case - would be of its very nature far less artificial than is, say, theoretical physics.  Dawkins is a great fan of sci-fi writer, Isaac Asimov, whom he quotes in The God Delusion: “Isaac Asimov's remark about the infantilism of pseudoscience is just as applicable to religion: ‘Inspect every piece of pseudoscience and you will find a security blanket, a thumb to suck, a skirt to hold.' It is astonishing, moreover, how many people are unable to understand that 'X is comforting' does not imply 'X is true'.’”

 

That “pseudoscience” can be a comfort we shall see.

 

Richard Dawkins married Lalla Ward, an actress in Doctor Who.

She had previously been married to her co-star in Doctor Who, Tom Baker.

 

Stephen Hawking, too, was a fan of Doctor Who, he having once been interviewed as part of Doctor Who Live: The Next Doctor.

He also loved Star Trek, to which his co-writer of The Grand Design, Leonard Mlodinow, contributed an episode: http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Stephen_Hawking_(actor)

 

Stephen Hawking (8 January 1942 – 14 March 2018; age 76) was a noted scientist who formerly held the Lucasian Chair at Cambridge University in England. Diagnosed at age 22 with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (Lou Gehrig's Disease), he used a wheelchair for the majority of his life, and communicated by means of an electronic vocal synthesizer. He was famous for formulating several theories regarding the nature of black holes, often working with colleague Kip Thorne, and for his best-selling science books including A Brief History of Time.

Hawking is the only person, to date, to have played himself on Star Trek (excluding historical people who have appeared via stock footage), appearing as his own holographic counterpart in the Star Trek: The Next Generation sixth season episode "Descent" in 1993. While filming the episode, Hawking was taken on a tour of the engineering set; indicating the warp core, he said, "I'm working on that." (Star Trek Encyclopedia (3rd ed., p. 185)) On a subsequent visit to the set, he passed by actor Brent Spiner and asked where his money was from winning the hand of poker. Spiner replied that the check was in the mail. Hawking was interviewed on 8 April 1993 when he filmed his Trek appearance. This interview was part of the TNG Season 6 DVD special feature "Mission Overview Year Six" – "Descent – Part 1 Featuring Stephen Hawking".

Hawking visited the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine set during the filming of "The House of Quark". In the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Companion, Armin Shimerman describes meeting Dr. Hawking as one of the high points of his life.

Hawking also played himself on Futurama, The Simpsons, and The Big Bang Theory, and appeared in documentaries about Red Dwarf and Doctor Who. In 2010 he co-authored The Grand Design with former Star Trek: The Next Generation story editor and writer of the episode "The Dauphin", Leonard Mlodinow.

 

In the movie referred to in Part One, The Theory of Everything, Stephen Hawking comes across as one totally obsessed with his physics to the exclusion of just about everything else: a bore, definitely, a nerd?, perhaps a single-minded genius. This situation was only exacerbated by his fall on the grounds of Cambridge, followed by the terrible death-sentence diagnosis - delivered bluntly in the movie - of motor neurone disease, with only two years to live and with terrible debilitations.

The physicist was only 22 at the time (but he lived to be 76).

Stephen retreats to his room, to the comfort of his solitude – and his pseudoscience?

Simon and Garfunkel’s “I Am A Rock” lyrics come to mind (here modified):

 

I’ve built walls
A fortress, steep and mighty
That none may penetrate
I have no need of friendship
Friendship causes pain
It’s laughter and it’s loving I disdain

[Refrain]
I am a rock
I am an island

Don’t talk of love
Well, I’ve heard the words before
It’s sleeping in my memory
And I won’t disturb the slumber
Of feelings that have died
If I never loved, I never would have cried

 

I have my books
And my poetry [mathematical equations] to protect me
I am shielded in my armor
Hiding in my room
Safe within my womb
I touch no one and no one touches me

I am a rock
I am an island

 

Not all physicists are so single-minded.

Others can happily live between two worlds, the one inside the laboratory, and then, leaving behind their white coats, they go outside joyfully to embrace the real world.

Thankfully for Stephen Hawking, he had a girl who loved him and who ordered him out of his room, into that real world, “to play”. By now he was terribly crippled and it was agonising to see the poor young man trying to stay upright to play a game of croquet.

 

But even whilst out in the real world, at the beach, or in the country, an obsessive theoretical scientist will see shapes that remind him (or her) of suns, or stars, or universes, or black holes.

There is no time to be wasted. With God gone, and philosophers also irrelevant, scientists are the torch bearers of civilisation: “Scientists have become the bearers of the torch of discovery in our quest for knowledge”. That is what Hawking and Mlodinow wrote in their book:

 

WE EACH EXIST FOR BUT A SHORT TIME, and in that time explore but a small part of the whole universe. But humans are a curious species. We wonder, we seek answers. Living in this vast world that is by turns kind and cruel, and gazing at the immense heavens above, people have always asked a multitude of questions: How can we understand the world in which we find ourselves? How does the universe behave? What is the nature of reality? Where did all this come from? Did the universe need a creator? Most of us do not spend most of our time worrying about these questions, but almost all of us worry about them some of the time.

 

Traditionally these are questions for philosophy, but philosophy is dead. Philosophy has not kept up with modern developments in science, particularly physics. Scientists have become the bearers of the torch of discovery in our quest for knowledge. ….

 

In the 1920’s it was found, as they go on to explain, that the “classical picture” of an ordered universe “could not account for the seemingly bizarre behavior observed on the atomic and subatomic scales of existence”.

A collision of reality and science fiction? “… quantum and classical physics are based on very different conceptions of physical reality”. Exactly what we have been saying.

 

Instead it was necessary to adopt a different framework, called quantum physics. Quantum theories have turned out to be remarkably accurate at predicting events on those scales, while also reproducing the predictions of the old classical theories when applied to the macroscopic world of daily life. But quantum and classical physics are based on very different conceptions of physical reality. ….

 

And who was the most intuitive expounder of quantum theories, according to Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow?

Surely he must be a genuine scientist and not some science fiction writer, or Doctor Spock?

No, he was a bongo drummer in a strip club:

 

Quantum theories can be formulated in many different ways, but what is probably the most intuitive description was given by Richard (Dick) Feynman, a colorful character who worked at the California Institute of Technology and played the bongo drums at a strip joint down the road. According to Feynman, a system has not just one history but every possible history. As we seek our answers, we will explain Feynman’s approach in detail, and employ it to explore the idea that the universe itself has no single history, nor even an independent existence. That seems like a radical idea, even to many physicists. Indeed, like many notions in today’s science, it appears to violate common sense. ….

 

Hmmmm.

 

Part Four:

Lords of their own creations

 

 

 

Man is the measure of all things.

 - Protagoras

 

God ought to be to us the measure of all things, and not man, as men commonly say: the words are far more true of Him.

 - Plato

 

 

 

Introduction

 

In my article:

 

The Futile Aspiration to Make ‘Man the Measure of All Things’

 

https://www.academia.edu/8494268/The_Futile_Aspiration_to_Make_Man_the_Measure_of_All_Things_

 

I argued against the famous dictum of Protagoras. 

However, Plato is not entirely correct here either in his reply to Protagoras.

For man is indeed the measure of some things. And this is as it meant to be, for did not God tell first man and woman to “subdue” the earth? (Genesis 1:28): ‘Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it …’.

 

The Categorial World

 

Autonomous modern science is thus a perfectly legitimate human enterprise - though its nature is not properly understood - as Gavin Ardley well explains, attributing to Immanuel Kant the correct interpretation of it (Aquinas and Kant):

 

Kant’s Achievement

 

Kant’s great contribution was to point out the revolution in natural science effected by Galileo and Bacon and their successors. This stands in principle even though all the rest of his philosophy wither away. Prior to Galileo people had been concerned with reading laws in Nature. After Galileo they read laws into Nature. His clear recognition of this fact makes Kant the fundamental philosopher of the modern world. It is the greatest contribution to the philosophia perennis since St. Thomas. But this has to be dug patiently out of Kant. Kant himself so overlaid and obscured his discovery that is has ever since gone well nigh unrecognised.

 

We may, in fact we must, refrain from following Kant in his doctrine of metaphysics. The modelling of metaphysics on physics was his great experiment. The experiment is manifestly a failure, in pursuit of what he mistakenly believed to be the best interests of metaphysics.

 

But, putting the metaphysical experiment aside, the principle on which it was founded abides, the principle of our categorial activity. ….

 

There are many scientists who operate in this world whilst still believing in God – whether or not they have also grasped that their world is not of the real order of things, nor are their laws (read into Nature) those of the natural order. They are laws whose end is for purposes of prediction - a mathematicising of the world for utilitarian purposes.

But in this world of non-reality, per se, there is no need of a deity, no need of a philosophy. The scientist is fully in charge using mind and imagination to create his/her own fantastic, mathematicised world(s) of expanding universes, sucking black holes and big bangs that are invariably reflected in works of science fiction, Doctor Who, Star Trek, etc.

Just after Stephen Hawking’s death, he was immediately associated again with Star Trek: http://www.news.com.au/technology/science/space/stephen-hawkings-final-paper-predicted-the-end-of-the-world-and-revealed-a-parallel-universe/news-

 

PROFESSOR Stephen Hawking submitted a research paper just two weeks before he died hinting how scientists could find another universe and predicting the end of the world.

 

The iconic physicist completed the groundbreaking research from his deathbed, said co-author professor Thomas Hertog.

It sets out the maths needed for a Star Trek-style space probe to find experimental evidence for the existence of a “multiverse” — the idea our cosmos is only one of many universes.

 

If such evidence had been found while he was alive, it might have put Hawking in line for the Nobel prize he had so desired, reports The Sunday Times.

“This was Stephen: to boldly go where Star Trek fears to tread,” said Hertog, professor of theoretical physics at KU Leuven University in Belgium.

 

The creator of these fantastic worlds, these parallel universes, is totally in charge, like a deity, his laws standing firm and are unassailable because he makes them to be so. (He may have cause all of a sudden, upon a whim, to tweak a law, or an equation - just as a master painter might decide to erase a part of his work or re-colour some aspect of a painting).

 

Unfortunately, some of our modern-day scientists - unlike the sages of the past - do not realise their own puniness within the vast cosmos that God has created, and they fondly imagine that they themselves, having grasped ‘the theory of everything’, are the real lords of creation.

And so they tell us that they can encapsulate everything in a mathematical equation:

 

Apparently ‘Everything’ looks something like this.

Sadly, people nod their heads in awe.

 

I, for my part, much prefer to mathematical equations the vibrant universe that Almighty God created ex nihilo, “from nothing” - or, as some prefer, “not out of anything” - with all of its qualities, and colours, and charm, and mystery.