Read God and Stephen Hawking Online
Authors: John Lennox
God and Stephen Hawking (3 page)
Millennia ago Aristotle thought a great deal about these issues. He spoke about four different “causes” that we can, perhaps, reasonably translate informally as “levels of explanation”. Thinking of the jet engine, first there is the material cause – the raw material out of which the engine is crafted; then there is the formal cause – the concept, plan, theory, and blueprint that Sir Frank Whittle conceived and to which he worked. Next there is the efficient cause – Sir Frank Whittle himself, who did the work. Fourthly, and last in the list, there is the final cause – the ultimate purpose for which the jet engine was conceived and built: to power a particular aircraft to fly faster than ever before.
The example of the jet engine can help us to clear up another confusion. Science, according to many scientists, concentrates essentially on material causation. It asks the “how” questions: how does the jet engine work? It also asks the “why” question regarding function: why is this pipe here? But it does not ask the “why” question of purpose: why was the jet engine built? What is important here is that Sir Frank Whittle does not appear in the scientific account. To quote Laplace, the scientific account has “no need of that hypothesis”.
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Clearly, however, it would be ridiculous to deduce from this that Whittle did not exist. He is the answer to the question: why does the jet engine exist in the first place?
Yet this is essentially what many scientists (and others) do with God. They define the range of questions that science is permitted to ask in such a way that God is excluded from the start; and then they claim that God is unnecessary, or doesn’t exist. They fail to see that their science does not answer the question as to why something exists rather than nothing, for the simple reason that their science cannot answer that question. They also fail to see that by assumption it is their atheist world-view, not science as such, that excludes God.
The scientists did not put the universe there. But neither did their theories, nor the laws of mathematical physics. Yet Hawking seems to think they did. In
A Brief History of Time
he hinted at this kind of explanation, suggesting that a theory might bring the universe into existence:
The usual approach of science of constructing a mathematical model cannot answer the questions of why there should be a universe for the model to describe. Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing? Is the unified theory so compelling that it brings about its own existence? Or does it need a creator, and, if so, does he have any other effect on the universe?
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Much as I find it hard to believe, Hawking seems to wish to reduce all explanation to formal causes only. He claims that all that is necessary to create the universe is the law of gravity. When asked
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where gravity came from, he answered: “M-theory.” However, to say that a theory or physical laws could bring the universe (or anything at all, for that matter) into existence is to misunderstand what theory and laws are. Scientists expect to develop theories involving mathematical laws to describe natural phenomena, which enable them to make predictions; and they have done so with spectacular success. However, on their own, the theories and laws cannot even
cause
anything, let alone
create
it.
Long ago none other than the Christian philosopher William Paley said as much. Speaking of the person who had just stumbled on a watch on the heath and picked it up, he says that such a person would not be
less surprised to be informed that the watch in his hand was nothing more than the result of the laws of
metallic
nature. It is a perversion of language to assign any law as the efficient, operative cause of any thing. A law presupposes an agent; for it is only the mode, according to which an agent proceeds: it implies a power; for it is the order, according to which that power acts. Without this agent, without this power, which are both distinct from itself, the
law
does nothing; is nothing.
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Quite so. Physical laws cannot create anything. They are a description of what normally happens under certain given conditions. This is surely obvious from the very first example that Hawking gives of physical law. The sun rises in the east every day, but this law does not create the sun; nor the planet earth, with east and west. The law is descriptive and predictive, but it is not creative. Similarly Newton’s law of gravitation does not create gravity or the matter on which gravity acts. In fact, Newton’s law does not even
explain
gravity, as Newton himself realized.
The laws of physics are not only incapable of creating anything; they cannot even
cause
anything to happen. For instance, Newton’s celebrated laws of motion never caused a pool ball to race across the green baize table. That can only be done by people using a pool cue and the actions of their own muscles. The laws enable us to analyse the motion, and to map the trajectory of the ball’s movement in the future (provided nothing external interferes); but they are powerless to move the ball, let alone bring it into existence.
One can understand what is meant by saying that the behaviour of the universe is governed by the laws of nature. But what can Hawking possibly mean by saying that the universe arises naturally from physical law, or that gravity arises from M-theory?
Another example of this basic misunderstanding of the nature of law is given by well-known physicist Paul Davies: “There’s no need to invoke anything supernatural in the origins of the universe or of life. I have never liked the idea of divine tinkering: for me it is much more inspiring to believe that a set of mathematical laws can be so clever as to bring all these things into being.”
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However, in the world in which most of us live, the simple law of arithmetic by itself, 1+1=2, never brought anything into being. It certainly has never put any money into my bank account. If I put £1,000 into the bank, and later another £1,000, the laws of arithmetic will rationally explain how it is that I now have £2,000 in the bank. But if I never put any money into the bank myself, and simply leave it to the laws of arithmetic to bring money into being in my bank account, I shall remain permanently bankrupt.
C. S. Lewis grasped this issue, with characteristic clarity. Of the laws of nature he writes:
They produce no events: they state the pattern to which every event – if only it can be induced to happen – must conform, just as the rules of arithmetic state the pattern to which all transactions with money must conform – if only you can get hold of any money. Thus in one sense the laws of Nature cover the whole field of space and time; in another, what they leave out is precisely the whole real universe – the incessant torrent of actual events which makes up true history. That must come from somewhere else. To think the laws can produce it is like thinking that you can create real money by simply doing sums. For every law, in the last resort, says: “If you have A, then you will get B.” But first catch your A: the laws won’t do it for you.
Laws give us only a universe of “Ifs and Ands”: not this universe which actually exists. What we know through laws and general principles is a series of connections. But, in order for there to be a real universe, the connections must be given something to connect; a torrent of opaque actualities must be fed into the pattern. If God created the world then He is precisely the source of this torrent, and it alone gives our truest principles anything to be true
about
. But if God is the ultimate source of all concrete, individual things and events, then God Himself must be concrete, and individual in the highest degree. Unless the origin of all other things were itself concrete and individual, nothing else could be so; for there is no conceivable means whereby what is abstract or general could itself produce concrete reality. Book-keeping, continued to all eternity, could never produce one farthing.
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The world of strict naturalism, in which clever mathematical laws all by themselves bring the universe and life into existence, is pure (science) fiction. Theories and laws do not bring matter/energy into existence. The view that nevertheless they somehow have that capacity seems a rather desperate refuge from the alternative possibility implied by Hawking’s question cited above: “Or does it need a Creator?”
If Hawking were not as dismissive of philosophy he might have come across the Wittgenstein statement that the “deception of modernism” is the idea that the laws of nature
explain
the world to us, when all they do is
describe
structural regularities. Richard Feynman, a Nobel Laureate in physics, takes the matter further:
The fact that there are rules at all to be checked is a kind of miracle; that it is possible to find a rule, like the inverse square law of gravitation, is some sort of miracle. It is not understood at all, but it leads to the possibility of prediction – that means it tells you what you would expect to happen in an experiment you have not yet done.
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The very fact that those laws can be mathematically formulated was for Einstein a constant source of amazement that pointed beyond the physical universe. He wrote: “Every one who is seriously engaged in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that the laws of nature manifest the existence of a spirit vastly superior to that of men, and one in the face of which we with our modest powers must feel humble.”
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Hawking has signally failed to answer the central question: why is there something rather than nothing? He says that the existence of gravity means the creation of the universe was inevitable. But how did gravity come to exist in the first place? What was the creative force behind its birth? Who put it there, with all its properties and potential for mathematical description in terms of law? Similarly, when Hawking argues in support of his theory of spontaneous creation, that it was only necessary for “the blue touch paper” to be lit to “set the universe going”, I am tempted to ask: where did this blue touch paper come from? It is clearly not part of the universe, if it set the universe going. So who lit it, in the sense of ultimate causation, if not God?
Allan Sandage, widely regarded as the father of modern astronomy, discoverer of quasars, and winner of the Crafoord Prize (astronomy’s equivalent of the Nobel Prize), is in no doubt about his answer: “I find it quite improbable that such order came out of chaos. There has to be some organizing principle. God to me is a mystery but is the explanation for the miracle of existence – why there is something rather than nothing.”
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It is fascinating that Hawking, in attacking religion, feels compelled to put so much emphasis on the Big Bang theory, because, even if the non-believers don’t like it, the Big Bang resonates powerfully with the biblical narrative of creation. That is why, before the Big Bang gained currency, so many leading scientists were keen to dismiss it, since it seemed to support the Bible story. Some clung to Aristotle’s view of the “eternal universe” without beginning or end; but this theory, and later variants of it, are now discredited.
Hawking, however, contents himself with saying:
According to the Old Testament, God created Adam and Eve only six days into creation. Bishop Ussher, primate of all Ireland from 1625 to 1656, placed the origin of the world even more precisely, at nine in the morning on October 27, 4004
BC
. We take a different view: that humans are a recent creation but that the universe itself began much earlier, about 13.7 billion years ago.
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It is clear that Hawking, though he has thought in depth about the interpretation of the data of science, has not thought very seriously about the interpretation of the biblical data. Some might think that resting content with Ussher’s interpretation of the Bible is like resting content with Ptolemy’s interpretation of the universe with its fixed earth and all the heavenly bodies rotating around it – something which Hawking would not dream of doing.
If Hawking had engaged a little more with biblical scholarship, rather than simply putting the biblical creation account into the same pigeonhole as Norse, Mayan, Africana and Chinese myths, he might have discovered that the Bible itself leaves the time of creation open. In the structure of the text of Genesis, the statement “in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” does not form part of the creation “week” but clearly precedes it; and so, however one interprets the days of creation, neither the age of the earth nor that of the universe is specified; and so there is no necessary conflict between what Genesis says and the 13.7 billion years yielded by scientific calculation.
As Hawking points out, the first actual scientific evidence that the universe had a beginning did not appear until the early 1900s. The Bible, however, has been quietly asserting that fact for millennia. It would be good if credit were given where it is due.
3 God or the multiverse?
In trying to avoid the evidence that is visible to all for the existence of a divine intelligence behind nature, atheist scientists are forced to ascribe creative powers to less and less credible candidates, like mass/energy, the laws of nature, or even to their theories about those laws. In fact, Hawking has not only not got rid of God, he has not even got rid of the God of the Gaps in which no sensible person believes. For the very theories he advances to banish the God of the Gaps are themselves highly speculative and untestable.
Like every other physicist, Hawking is confronted with powerful evidence of design:
Our universe and its laws appear to have a design that both is tailor-made to support us and, if we are to exist, leaves little room for alteration. That is not easily explained and raises the natural question of why it is that way…The discovery relatively recently of the extreme fine-tuning of so many of the laws of nature could lead at least some of us back to the old idea that this grand design is the work of some grand designer…That is not the answer of modern science…our universe seems to be one of many, each with different laws.
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It is therefore quite clear that Hawking recognizes a “Grand Design”. He devotes almost an entire chapter to giving extensive details of the spectacular fine-tuning of both the laws of nature and the constants associated with fundamental physics. The evidence he gives is impressive, and certainly fits in with what he calls the “old idea that this grand design is the work of some grand designer”. Of course it does: it fits like a glove – because there is a Grand Designer.
The idea of a Grand Designer is certainly
old
, but the important question to ask is whether or not it is
true
. Simply to say it is old can give the erroneous impression that what is old is necessarily false and has been superseded. Secondly, it can give the further incorrect impression that no one holds it today. However, as we have seen, some of the finest minds in science do hold it. The conviction that there is a Grand Designer, God, the Creator, is held by millions, if not billions of people – vastly more, incidentally, than those who hold the atheist alternative.
The multiverse
Hawking, therefore, goes too far in claiming that the existence of a Grand Designer is not the answer of modern science. What, then, is Hawking’s preferred answer to what he admits is the “apparent miracle” (of fine-tuning)?
It is the multiverse. The idea is, roughly speaking, that there are several many-world scenarios, and so many universes (some suggest infinitely many, whatever that means) that anything that can happen will happen in some universe. It is not surprising then, so the argument goes, that there is at least one universe like ours.
We note in passing that Hawking has once again fallen into the trap of offering false alternatives. This time it is: God or the multiverse. From a theoretical point of view, as philosophers have pointed out, God could create as many universes as he pleases. The multiverse concept
of itself
does not and cannot rule God out.
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Hawking does not seem to have provided us with any argument to counter this observation.
In addition, leaving aside other universes, the physical constants in this universe are fine-tuned. They could have been otherwise, so the theory of the multiverse does not, in any case, annul the evidence of God’s “Grand Design” that is to be perceived in this universe.
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What of the multiverse itself? Is it fine-tuned? If it is, then Hawking is back where he started.
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Where is Hawking’s argument to prove that it is not?
With his multiverse Hawking moves out beyond science into the very realm of philosophy, whose death he announced rather prematurely. As Paul Davies points out: “All cosmological models are constructed by augmenting the results of observations by some sort of philosophical principle.”
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Furthermore, there are weighty voices within science that are not as enthusiastic about the multiverse. Prominent among them is that of Sir Roger Penrose, Hawking’s former collaborator, who shared with him the prestigious Wolf Prize. Of Hawking’s use of the multiverse in
The Grand Design
Penrose said: “It’s overused, and this is a place where it is overused. It’s an excuse for not having a good theory.”
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Penrose does not, in fact, like the term “multiverse”, because he thinks it is inaccurate: “For although this viewpoint is currently expressed as a belief in the parallel co-existence of different alternative worlds, this is misleading. The alternative worlds do not really ‘exist’ separately, in this view; only the
vast particular superposition
…is taken as real.”
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John Polkinghorne, another eminent theoretical physicist, rejects the multiverse concept:
Let us recognize these speculations for what they are. They are not physics, but in the strictest sense, metaphysics. There is no purely scientific reason to believe in an ensemble of universes. By construction these other worlds are unknowable by us. A possible explanation of equal intellectual respectability – and to my mind greater economy and elegance – would be that this one world is the way it is, because it is the creation of the will of a Creator who purposes that it should be so.
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I am tempted to add that belief in God seems to be a much more rational option, if the alternative is to believe that every other universe that can possibly exist does exist; including one in which Richard Dawkins is the Archbishop of Canterbury, Christopher Hitchens the Pope, and Billy Graham has just been voted atheist of the year!
M-theory
To be serious once more (but perhaps I was being serious), Hawking’s ultimate theory to explain why the laws of physics are as they are is called M-theory: a theory of supersymmetric gravity that involves very sophisticated concepts, such as vibrating strings in eleven dimensions. Hawking confidently calls it the “unified theory that Einstein was expecting to find”. If it is, it will be a triumph of mathematical physics; but, for the reasons given above, far from administering the death-blow to God, it will give us even more insight into his creatorial wisdom. Don Page, a theoretical physicist from the University of Alberta, who is a former student of Hawking and has co-authored eight papers with him, says: “I certainly would agree that even if M-theory were a fully formulated theory (which it isn’t yet) and were correct (which of course we don’t know), that would not imply that God did not create the universe.”
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Once again it needs to be stressed that M-theory is an abstract theory, and not a creator. It describes a scenario (or, more accurately, a series of scenarios, as it is a family of theories) that has solutions which allow for 10
500
different universes
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– assuming of course that M-theory is true, which is by no means certain, as we shall see. However, even if it is true,
M-theory itself doesn’t create a single one of those universes
. What Hawking says is: “The laws of M-theory allow for different universes with different apparent laws.” “Allow for” is one thing, “create” is something completely different. A theory that allows for many universes is not the same as an agent who designed them, or a mechanism that produces them.
What is very interesting in all of this is the impression being given to readers of
The Grand Design
that God is somehow rendered unnecessary, or non-existent, by science. Yet when one examines the arguments one can see that the intellectual cost of doing so is impossibly high, since it involves an attempt to get rid of the Creator by conferring creatorial powers on something that is not in itself capable of doing any creating – an abstract theory.
Tim Radford captures this very cleverly in his review of
The Grand Design
:
In this very brief history of modern cosmological physics, the laws of quantum and relativistic physics represent things to be wondered at but widely accepted: just like biblical miracles. M-theory invokes something different: a prime mover, a begetter, a creative force that is everywhere and nowhere. This force cannot be identified by instruments or examined by comprehensible mathematical prediction, and yet it contains all possibilities. It incorporates omnipresence, omniscience and omnipotence, and it’s a big mystery. Remind you of Anybody?
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A similar point had already been made by physicist Paul Davies: “The general multiverse explanation is simply naïve deism dressed up in scientific language. Both appear to be an infinite unknown, invisible and unknowable system. Both require an infinite amount of information to be discarded just to explain the (finite) universe we observe.”
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The validity of M-theory
Although it does not affect my argument, it should be noted that not all physicists are as convinced as Hawking about the validity of M-theory, and they have been quick off the mark to say so. For instance, theoretical physicist Jim Al-Khalili says:
The connection between this multiverse idea and M-theory is, however, tentative. Advocates of M-theory such as Witten and Hawking would have us believe that it is done and dusted. But its critics have been sharpening their knives for a few years now, arguing that M-theory is not even a proper scientific theory if it is untestable experimentally. At the moment it is just a compelling and beautiful mathematical construct, and in fact only one of a number of candidate TOEs [Theories of Everything].
Paul Davies says of M-theory: “It is not testable, not even in any foreseeable future.”
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Oxford physicist Frank Close goes further: “M-theory is not even defined …we are even told ‘No one seems to know what the M stands for.’ Perhaps it is ‘myth’.” Close concludes: “I don’t see that M-theory adds one iota to the God debate, either pro or con.”
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Jon Butterworth, who works at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, states: “M-theory is highly speculative and certainly not in the zone of science that we have got any evidence for.”
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Before the appearance of Hawking’s book Roger Penrose wrote some cautionary words:
It has been a not uncommon view among confident theoreticians that we may be “almost there”, and that a “theory of everything” may lie not far beyond the subsequent developments of the late twentieth century. Often such comments had tended to be made with an eye on whatever had been the status of the “string theory” that had been current at the time. It is harder to maintain such a viewpoint now that string theory has transmogrified to something (M- or F-theory) whose nature is admitted to being fundamentally unknown at present.
Penrose continues:
From my own perspective, we are much farther from a “final theory” even than this…Various remarkable
mathematical
developments have indeed come out of string-theoretic (and related) ideas. However, I remain profoundly unconvinced that they are very much other than just striking pieces of mathematics albeit with input from some deep physical ideas. For theories whose space-time dimensionality exceeds what we directly observe (namely 1+3), I see no reason to believe that, in themselves, they carry us much further in the direction of
physical
understanding.
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In a radio discussion with Alister McGrath after the appearance of Hawking’s book, Penrose was even more forthright.
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Asked whether science shows that the universe could “create itself from nothing” Penrose responded with a strong condemnation of the string theory that Hawking espouses: “It’s certainly not doing it yet. I think the book suffers rather more strongly than many. It’s not an uncommon thing in popular descriptions of science to latch onto an idea, particularly things to do with string theory, which have absolutely no support from observation. They are just nice ideas.” He stated that M-theory was “very far from any testability…It’s a collection of ideas, hopes, aspirations.” Referring directly to
The Grand Design
, he then said: “The book is a bit misleading. It gives you this impression of a theory that is going to explain everything; it’s nothing of the sort. It’s not even a theory.” Indeed, in Penrose’s estimation, M-theory was “hardly science”.
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It should be noted that Penrose’s criticisms are scientific and do not arise from any religious convictions. He is, in fact, a member of the British Humanist Association.