Stephen Hawking has a new book coming out (The Grand Design, with Leonard Mlodinow). Among other things, he points out that modern physics has progressed to the point where we don’t need to invoke God to explain the existence of the universe. This is not exactly a hot flash — I remember writing an essay making the same point for a philosophy class my sophomore year in college — but it makes news because it’s Hawking who says it. And that’s absolutely fine — Hawking has a track record of making substantial intellectual contributions, there’s every reason to listen to him more than random undergraduates waxing profound.
This issue is, of course, totally up my alley, and I should certainly blog about it. But I can’t, because I’m on hiatus! (Right?) So, as an experiment, I made a video of myself talking rather than simply typing my words into the computer. Radical! Not sure the amount of information conveyed is anywhere near as large in this format, and obviously I didn’t sweat the production values. I fear that some subtleties of the argument may be lost. But if we’re lucky, other people elsewhere on the internet will also talk about these questions, and we’ll get it all sorted out.
Let me know if the Grand Video Experiment is worth repeating and improving, or whether it’s just a waste of time.
Something that I should have said, but didn’t: there doesn’t need to be some sophisticated modern-physics answer to the question “Why is there something rather than nothing?” The universe can simply exist, end of story. But it’s still fun to think carefully about all the possibilities, existence and non-existence both included.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_numbers#Constructions_based_on_set_theory
It shouldn’t take a Stephen Hawking to figure out that the Laws of Physics can never be used to postulate the non-existence of a Creator. Why call it “physics” if it can as well speak for the “spiritual?”
If everything came out of absolutely “nothing,” why–in the first place–the need for “something” like physical laws to keep everything from ending into nothingness again, anytime?
Nothingness is the ultimate & the simplest resulting balance of chaos after its components have naturally canceled each other out. The fact that the Universe has kept itself from being nothing again (Law of Conservation of Mass & Energy) is built-in proof that it is consciously keeping itself to be in existence. That consciousness–is God.
“The Purpose Driven Life” by Rick Warren?????!!????? (Fourth book from the left on the top shelf of the right bookcase) I read it too, as “research”, but promptly threw it in the trash. Shame on you, Sean.
The background of this video contains a vast collection of books,
including one (on the (my) right hand side, at the bottom shelf)
with the title: ‘Does God exist?’ (the author is not distinguishable).
It reminds me a TV-picture from the meeting of R.Reagan and
M.Gorbachev in Reykjavik (press-conference, maybe).
The background there had contained two ‘desk-top’ figurines:
Rodin’s ‘The Thinker’ was on the Reagan’s side and, on the other
side, there was Shadr’s ‘Stone as a weapon of proletariat’.
(I say nothing about Reagan, but ‘Gorby’, imho, is much below
the both sculptures.)
Well, ‘Shadr’ is a pseudonym, taken after sculptor’s native town,
Shadrinsk (not vice versa; the real family was just ‘Ivanov’;
well, why do I know this? it’s easy, I was born in Shadrinsk)
And, by the way, I have published recently a book under the next
title (it seemingly has some influence of the Bible !
and includes many equations):
‘Old and new research on the Absolute Parallelism’.
See amazon.com for the blurb.
And, frankly speaking, I believe that a concrete (or the correct)
theory can give concrete conclusions; while an eclectic set of models
(or theories which, perhaps, will give falsifiable predictions
only ‘ten years form now’) leads only to endless disputes (in any form).
I find it interesting that some of you seem to think that science can say nothing about religion, or that scientists, or those with a rational thought process, need to defer to experts in religion in order to show how foolish religious beliefs are. The scientific process, logic, cause-effect thinking, can show that religion is not logical, is not based on cause and effect relationships, etc. i.e. it can be used to show what religion is not. As far as what else I think is a con job, it is simply anything that we are expected to believe that is supernatural, without evidence, because of irrational, unsupported dogma, and incapable of modification…..that pretty much restricts it to religion, in all its toxic forms.
Yes, it is easy to debunk a strawman caricature of religious belief. Congrats.
Religion asks a wholly different question from science. It’s impossible to read a religious text honestly and read it as an attempt to explain how the physical world works. Religion serves a purpose of creating meaning or context. You can disagree with that meaning and that context, but if you’re going to do so, you at least need to abandon this claim that religious texts are alternate models for how the physical world works, which is a belief only really held by fundamentalist idiots.
Gordon, can science say anything about the right to a speedy trial or due process? Most of human experience and life includes a huge number of things that science can’t deal with because science can’t handle anything but the things that can fit into its methods and be processed by its tools. It can only refute claims made about those parts of the physical universe about which its methods and tools can produce reliable evidence. Even within the physical universe, if science can’t produce the evidence or even make sufficient observations science isn’t able to do that.
Your bringing up cause and effect relationships is interesting to me because I recently had an argument in which I made exactly that point. Science can only know things that lie within a causal network, it only catches those things which it can in that net, as Eddington pointed out more than eighty years ago. It might be able to tell you about what it catches in its net, it can’t tell you anything about what it doesn’t catch but that might still be just as real. I’m surprised that anyone who works in physics would have to have that pointed out to them but we’re all only human, after all.
It’s a con job for a scientist to pretend that their work can contain things it can’t and that it can do what it can’t. Scientists who come to believe their science can do that are deluded in a way that some people delude themselves about their belief in what’s important to them. That kind of myopia is common all through our kind, even very clever people aren’t immune, when they get too full of themselves they are especially susceptible.
And, I’m decidedly not sorry to tell you, people have every right to consult their experience and their reasoning and their conscience and come to conclusions about things. That’s especially true for things which science or history or any other fact based field of human activity can’t tell them. Whether or not God is real is one of those.
As to evidence, Hawking or anyone else on the nature of alien life is no less speculative than theology. Thinking about it for something I wrote this past week, he doesn’t seem to really appreciate how very complex the question gets when its based entirely on theoretical possibilities instead of evidence, for which we have absolutely none. That is especially true when you consider the possibilities of life that is very unlike ours. I got the feeling reading about what he said that his was a very simple physicists view of it, one I’d be surprised to find in an evolutionary biologist, say.
For someone who knows something about mathematics, stating what you believe about the possibility of “other life” and framing it in terms of probability when we have a grand total of zero examples of “other life” to base a range of possibility on, was interesting. Hawking was doing what we also seem to fall in the trap of doing, applying language inappropriately. We know of one line of life that has arisen and developed in the universe so we know that the chance of that is one in something, there is absolutely no way of knowing if that something is one (possible venue for life to arise and develop) or some incalculably huge number. Even if we were able in some seemingly improbable future to get that first number up to two, I think I’m fairly safe in saying that the size of the second number will always be unknown to either science or mathematics.
Maybe it would have been better if I had said that we know the possibility of life arising is 1x in something, x being at least 1.
@34 – I did not say theologians know how God works so it is not fair to ask “Do theologians know how God works?” The point is that nor Carroll or Hawking are theologians, and if you know anything about theology you would know that it is impossible to know how God works.
Read this to understand what I mean.
http://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/hawkings-new-book-does-not-dismiss-the-real-god-from-creation-jesuit-scholars-say/?utm_source=www.findpdf.us&utm_medium=findpdf.us
But perhaps the greatest irony to all of this is that Sean Carroll is quoted by Fr Robert Spitzer SJ in his latest book “New Proofs for the Existence of God: Contributions of Contemporary Physics and Philosophy”
Nice explanation of Hawking’s book, i think (haven’t read it yet), but I have two questions for Sean Carroll,
and i apologize for not having read all the comments here, and if this question is already posted:
If the laws of quantum mechanics state that someting (space, time, mass) indeed can come from nothing, then:
1. Isn’t spontaneous quantum fluctuation about particles appearing within this universe, requiring a background?
2. So space has come to be, from no space? Because of the quantum laws? But where did those laws apply when there weren’t any space? There wasn’t even a ‘where’?
Ian, I’m also interested in the idea that the laws of physics have some known existence in the universe apart from the humans who have formulated those laws. I thought that was especially strange in someone who has speculated, as Hawking has, that “other life” could be very, very different from us. I’d expect that life that might be expected to have a very different frame of reference and point of view might come up with other ways to explain the universe to themselves.
There seems to be a conceit in the line of atheist thought that he holds that the nature of even the objects they study is comprehensively known to them. If Sean Carroll was participating in this discussion I’d like to ask him if he is asserting that there is a single object studied by physics about which, literally, everything is known to science. And I really do mean a comprehensive and exhaustive knowledge. If, as I expect, the answer to that would be “no”, it’s a pretty big leap to thinking they have enough understanding of God who is believed to be above the physical universe and the objects in it.
You could go on to look at what proof actually consists of and when it’s really possible to have a comprehensive proof and the role that consensus plays in the status of “proved” being given to an idea.
The point in the article you linked to about the rather stunning underestimate of the size and scope of what believers mean when they talk about God is also a part of this. I’ve yet to talk to even the most rational, dogmatic atheist who doesn’t fail to understand what religion means when it talks about God. They want to dispose of the idea by reduction, maybe that’s a habit they get from the necessary practices of science. I’ve seldom encountered an agnostic who doesn’t understand the scope of the idea.
The whole science on the basis of which Hawking has written the upcoming atheistic book has been proved wrong & baseless. Finally the theory of everything has been put forward wherein Big Bang Theory, Special Theory of Relativity, General Theory of Relativity, space-time concept have been proved absolutely baseless. The theory has been sent to Nature, Physical Review D, Astrophyical Journal and other journals
besides to all possible media to get the theory checked by physicists all over the world. Whosoever wants the theory, I would love to send the theory to him if he makes the request on my e-mail shafiqifs@gmail.com besides part of the unedited theory is available on my website http://www.islamic-thought.com. The theory is being shortly published by a leading science journal. After the theories are published the books about Relativity shall have to be simply burnt. Let every reader of this blog
have no doubt about it because the proofs against theories of relativity are so strong.
Anthony. I finally get your point. Science has little to nothing to say about religion. Except, using its
tools and methods, it can say that religion is very likely wrong, or else entirely speculative. Like
trials, laws, etc that you mention, it is a social construct, usually a dogmatic one based on tenets that would have been politically useful a millenium ago. One does not need science to see that most religious beliefs do not correspond to reality—just a rational mind. Religious beliefs tend to be delusional in the true sense of the word, except that when millions have them, it is called religion.
Sam Harris says that when many have such a belief, it is religion. If one person had the belief system, he would be called insane. People use the word “God” in many ways to mean so many different things.
For example, I can accept the God of Spinoza or Einstein—but their use of it seems to mean just the Universe of what is. When Hawking finished his “Brief History of Time” with “and then we would know the mind of God”, he was doing the same thing, but also being purposely mischievous.
Gordon, you can speculate all you want but the methods of science don’t touch any proposal of religion except those about the physical universe for which science can produce evidence. Even religious ideas about that which science can’t produce a refutation of with valid evidence are beyond the reach of science. No matter how preposterous those ideas seem to you or me or anyone else, if you can’t produce the evidence that is relevant to them your rejection has to be based on something other than science. You might find more honest challenges to some of then in history but that’s hardly the same thing.
That is unless you want to junk that old idea that science was all about evidence, which a surprising number of the more fashionable atheists seem to want to do.
I’ve got nothing against people deciding they believe there isn’t a God, I’ve got a real problem with rude, arrogant and dishonest statements on the subject either way.
Sanity should be determined by the ability to function in the world. I think most of the proposals about extraterrestrials are pretty nuts but I don’t think Hawking is insane.
Sean. Wouldn’t it be better to say you’re no longer on hiatus than to keep apologizing for writing while you’re on hiatus?
No, my rejection of religion is based on LACK of evidence for it. I am under no obligation to look for evidence for it or any other delusional supernatural system.
Gordon, I didn’t request that you look for evidence for them did I? I just pointed out that Hawking and Carroll were being rather coy about the inability of physics to find evidence in the matter of the existence of God.
I wonder if you’ve ever lectured Daniel Dennett, Susan Blackmore or Richard Dawkins about the lack of evidence for memes or specific behaviors in the Paleolithic period.
As to your accusation of delusion in the large majority of the human population, clearly you’re very emotional about this issue. Far more than the mere absence of evidence would warrant because very, very little in life has that level of evidentiary foundation
Hmmm with religion the clear winner in that category. You ARE asking that I (Sean, Hawking) find evidence for religion clearly by saying about the “inability of physics to find evidence in the matter of the existence of God” and I say that you have to provide evidence for God. I don’t have to and physics doesnt have to find evidence for a non-existent being. That is impossible. Certainly there is abundant evidence for memes, but not in the Paleolithic period for good rational reasons—talk about straw men.
Arguing with you is like arguing with a brick.
I wish to make only one statement in connection with the physics “vs.” god issue. I’ll make it right away and then ramble some to describe its motivations. My contention is that the ultimate theory of reality, the logical structure that after a struggle of centuries or perhaps longer renders theoretical physics a completed system, will be seen in retrospect to have the following property: that the theory could in principle have been deduced through thought alone and without the need for experiment or measurents of any kind. In other words, as I have encountered elsewhere, ‘Reality is a crutch,’ but a more intelligent statement might be that the universe has unique properties and arises from a logical necessity. I want something more compelling than what is offered here, namely to say that QM and GR allow the universe to arise out of nothingness; QM and GR are circumstantial, based on observation, and do not arise out of logical necessity.
A final theory would answer our questions without, for once, raising new questions at the same time, and there would no longer be a need then after so much hard work to throw up our arms in frustration and invoke a deity or QM or GR or any other first cause behind it all. In his tricentennial address ( in James R. Newman’s collected essays on the history of mathematics) on Newton, Keynes, after reviewing the trunks of Newton’s unpublished papers, which included on the order of a million words on religion, claimed that Newton believed, if he could only have the time uninterrupted and silent to concentrate long enough, that he could unravel all the questions that could be put to the universe, in Keynes words, “including the Godhead.” Although the inventor of physics was indeed a theist, one can claim at the same time. as Sean and Hawking, that the very concept of God is inconsistent with the spirit and ends of physics. But as a radical I throw QM and GR into the same “first cause” donjon in which I confine deities.
I wrote the above remarks before hearing Sean’s video presentation, which was slowly downloading on my dialup connection. It’s a marvelous and concise talk that I much admire. I accept Sean’s dryly amusing statement that “it’s ok to believe in God as long as he doesn’t do anything” as equivalent to my claim that God is inconsistent with the spirit of physics. ( I had no problem with the technical aspects of the video, but agree with some others, particularly the deaf and those who like to take out quotes, that text is preferable. But having never met Sean, it was very nice to see him in action; he’s a laconic and very expressive speaker.)
I will read Hawking’s book when I can get, and I hope that it will answer the question of how the universe springs from nothingness, a question that plagues not only me but Cecelia (“So space has come to be, from no space? Because of the quantum laws? But where did those laws apply when there weren’t any space? There wasn’t even a ‘where’?”) and Job Pabsibigan (“If everything came out of absolutely “nothing,” why–in the first place–the need for “something” like physical laws to keep everything from ending into nothingness again, anytime? “) and others too.
Sean is evidently more sanguine about existence, and he gives his answer to these questions I think twice. In the video, he says roughly ” the universe can just come into existence out of nothing…add to that quantum mechanics, that if something can happen then it will happen…if you wait long enough.” Well, there are some obvious problems here ( such as what is meant by “waiting” prior to the existence of space and time) but I won’t belabor them because I think Sean makes his point well enough. A second and very clear expression of this practical attitude is in Sean’s written introduction to the video wherein he says,”“Why is there something rather than nothing?” The universe can simply exist, end of story. ” I anticipate that the ideas in Hawking’s book are very similar.
But I don’t feel this way. As a trouble maker by nature, I want more answers. I want to know Why the universe exists, and I feel that physics will remain unfinished until it answers this question. Even in an infinite steady-state universe, I would be unsatisfied with Sean’s pragmatic acceptance of existence, but in the Big Bang world with its dated beginning and dismal end I really must demand an answer.
All the established theories of course lack the requisite property that I and some others would demand, although there have been attempts. As an undergraduate I bcame fascinated by Eddington’s book Fundamental Theory. I could not of course understand it no matter how far I carried it with me each day, and when I sought help my professor told me, “Agh! He was crazy when he wrote that.” Nevertheless, the idea that Eddington could calculate the number – exactly – of protons in the universe and compute the mass of the electron as well, all from some principle without the need for data, seemed to enshrine an ideal that was truly worth striving for. ( I saw not long ago at Amazon that there is now a book purporting to elucidate Fundamantal Theory, and I intend to get ahold of this and see if my understanding of Eddington’s intent is accurate.)
Actually, Eddington required one number, the Hubble constant, to arrive at his values, and perhaps a final theory should be allowed a parameter of scale, a single curtsey to gross reality. Does string theory have these properties? Tell me, as I don’t know enough about it to say.
Evidently, Hawking and Sean both are satisfied that GR and QM possibly along with ST are enough to explain the question of existence. Yet physicists are far from content with GR and QM and regard these merely as things akin to a few Taylor terms of a deeper and more profund theory. I like to think that this final theory, which unlike all previous theories, will be discovered via almost purely logical considerations rather than striving to explain experiments. This theory then may well have some very compelling logical principles within it that indeed explain that the universe is not a choice or a circumstance but a logical necessity. This is the kind of theory that I want, and as long as physicists remain dissatisfied with GR and QM for different and more valid reasons, I will hold out hope that the question of existence will be answered in a way that satisfies me as well as some others here. I think that Eddington was on the track of such a theory long before its time. When physicists have in fact united GR and QM and arrived at a final theory that, despite nonsense musings about Godel, has completed the work of theoretical physics, then it may be that, like the alchemists of old who vanished when they succeeded in transforming dross to gold, physicists will be able to create universes by thought alone and will have become the gods they despise. Many of us with such crazy thoughts should be glad we did not live in the 16th century along with Giordano Bruno. The person I would most like to hear from now is Weinberg.
PS I have spent more time on this comment than I really have and have used far more space than I merit and am leaving it with many imperfections but am sorry that I did not get to discuss Godel’s work and its purported and usually groundless application to physics and other things. There was a “box article” in Scientific American within the last year describing the efforts of an American physicist to develop a proof analogous to some of Godel’s but purley with physics in mind. I am sorry that I cannot find this reference and that the Sci Am search engine is not detailed enough to retrieve it. If you have it handy please let us know.
Gordon, I don’t care if you, Sean or any of the various atheists here or abroad believes in God, you can disbelieve to your hearts content and your mutual admiration and self-esteem. I don’t care if you assert there’s no such thing. But if you claim that you can use science to dispose of God then you are required to back up your claim with science. I would say the same thing to anyone asserting that they can use science to verify the existence of God or any aspect of religious belief. I endorse the Dover decision and the wall of separation as concerns science or any other public school classrooms.
You are flying off the handle and assuming I am trying to convert you to some religious belief when all I’m doing is holding you to produce the evidence to back up your claims. Which you can’t do. That you apparently are upset with being held to your own stated standard is not my fault.
Diocletian, have you read Eddington’s The Philosophy of Physical Science? You might want to read what he has to say about “existence” in that book as well as what he had to say about the nature of the laws of physics.
I’ve never looked at his Fundamental Theory but I thought what he said about the epistemology of science was pretty interesting.
Recent observations shows that the fine structure constant of electromagnetic interactions changes across the universe, and our part of universe could be the only place where life is possible. Shouldn’t Stephen Hawking changes his mind now about non necessity of God’s existence?!
“Now, results from a new study show that alpha seems to have varied a tiny bit in different directions of the universe billions of years ago, being slightly smaller in the northern hemisphere and slightly larger in the southern hemisphere. One intriguing possible implication is that the fine-structure constant is continuously varying in space, and seems fine-tuned for life in our neighborhood of the universe.”
http://www.reddit.com/tb/da55x
“I remember writing an essay making the same point for a philosophy class my sophomore year in college”
I’ve been saying for a while now that your arguments regarding the non-existence of God were sophomoric. Now I have proof.
Hate the video blog format. If I wanted video, I would watch television or go to YouTube. I prefer to read text on blogs. Period.
Stephen Hawking and others are still missing what is the spiritual component of human existence. I have spoken about this before here.
There is for instance scientific work being done on this in regard to near-death experiences by Dr. Sam Parnia, Dr. Peter Fenwick and the huge team of doctors connected with a collaboration of hospitals in Europe and the United States – see mindbodysymposium.com where a substantive conference at the United Nations took place. The research is the AWARE Project.
Some results are out I believe in 2011. Until then I think we can put Stephen Hawking and others on hold. Or perhaps the multiverse, with our universe postulated to be one of many, actually incorporates this too. If the evidence comes in on this then we must include this spiritual part of our existence as part of something rather larger than biology suggests. There may indeed then be life after death – an interesting result from multiverse physics!
Also the work of the late Prof. Ian Stevenson of the University of Virginia is interesting – decades of studies of reincarnation with many peer reviewed publications. His conclusion was that the evidence was “suggestive of reincarnation”, an interesting choice of words from a cautious scientist. Of course, the multiverse must incorporate this too.
It almost seems as if the universe with its properties is “looking after us”. Now can anyone challenge this, albeit I say this in a poetic way?
Can physics bring these observations into its present fold? This is an important question yet to be answered. After all it may also mean that the love we have for our families has a powerful reality, the alternative being the blind illusion of just chemical reactions.
“decades of studies of reincarnation with many peer reviewed publications”
AHAHAHAHAHAAHHAHAHAAAAHHHHHAAHAHAHHHHHAAHH!!!