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.
Things go bump in the night–or at least, maybe they do–therefore there must be a god. Ipso facto, Hawking is wrong.
There! I’ve conclusively proved the existence of the God of the people of the Book, using my vast & powerful intellect, which is better than yours. That doesn’t mean my opinions are necessarily better than yours, but we both know they really are, don’t we?
As for the video presentation: I didn’t watch it, because I couldn’t have heard it, or even read the lips. But it’s just simply wrong to use video on a blog (see previous paragraph for authority).
MT-LA Well, unicorns weren’t supposed to be supernatural, they were supposed to be actual animals in the physical world that could be trapped and hunted. So they’re an especially bad example of pop-materialist argument by derision and mockery, appealing to people who don’t understand the issue.
At least that’s been my line of argument that none of them seems to have refuted.
I have to say that until I’d read the line of argument Hawking takes in his book, going to the mutiverse theory and putting that together with his pronouncements about religion being all about authority and science about evidence and so science would win I hadn’t realized how big the disconnect is. Having followed some of the discussions of the multiverse controversy including Sean Carroll, especially the Bloggingheads discussion here:
http://bloggingheads.tv/diavlogs/9433
in which Carroll says that it’s OK to not accept the idea, twice, I was pretty stunned that he endorsed what Hawking said about that extension of it.
Yes, MT-LA, Anthony is a bat, but not a logic bat–rather a fruit bat. It is not logic that he is using.
Also, he complains that scientists haven’t read the religious literature. Well, is it worth reading?
Christopher Hitchens, Dawkins, and Sam Harris all certainly have read a good chunk of it—why not
read their books to find out? I do admire their patience and their intestinal fortitude in doing so, considering the, e.g. misogyny, brutality, pettiness, of the Christian god, and the incredible viciousness of Christ in introducing the concept of Hell into Christianity (not there in the Old Testament). Most religions are derivative anyway. At least Scientology is not derivative lunacy.
Of course, it is incredibly silly, and most religious folks would also say so, but if you look at its belief system, is it really more far out than the 3 bigtime religions?
BTW, I notice that those on the blog defending religion seem also to be promoting psi and other flaky frauds.
Unicorns are supposed to be real animals, and they turn out not to be, so somehow this affects an argument against their existence ?? Am I reading you correctly? This smacks of “everything that I can think of exists.”
BTW, I have read several of Karen Armstrong’s books on various religions and they are excellent—
a former nun who renounced Catholicism and now is at most, a deist, perhaps an atheist.
The religious apologists here must be from the USA, perhaps the most religiously polluted developed country in the world.
And if you needed more examples Gordon has provided them.
Okay a couple of things which appear to have confused folk on my posts.
When I asked whether Hawking (or Sean) were theologians and whether they knew how God works it was with a view to establish a few things about them:
1) If they were theologians they would know that it is impossible to know how God works. My second question was a trick question.
2) Since Hawking (and Sean) are not theologians it is also clear that what hawking has done is to establish his own theology and then successfully overturn it.
3) Even the use of the word theology is misleading – again something that wasn’t picked up on. There are many different types of theology, and perhaps Hawking’s ‘theology’ is most closely aligned to Deism, which is not what the Catholic Church teaches. And yes, I’m Catholic so can only really speak for the Catholic Church
What is also clear is that Hawking (and Sean) do not know their philosophy of science, they do not its limits.
Unlike philosophy or metaphysics, science cannot deductively prove a creation or a God. This is because natural science deals with the physical universe and with the regularities which we call ‘laws of nature’ that are obeyed by the phenomena within that universe. But God is not an object or phenomena or regularity within the physical universe; so science cannot say anything about God.
Moreover, science is an empirical and inductive discipline. As such science cannot be certain that it has considered all possible data that would be relevant to a complete explanation of particular physical phenomena or the universe itself. It is always open to new data and discoveries which could alter its explanation of particular phenomena and the universe.
But science can provide pointers – cosmological, teleological, and so on. Science and theology, properly understood, both seek the truth and therefore cannot be in opposition.
And in response to some who believe Catholic theology has been in opposition to science: Bruno was condemned for his theology not his science which was based on the works of Cardinal Nicolas of Cusa (you will not be burnt at the stake for repeating the words of a Cardinal). Bruno eventually frustrated his Inquisitors with his constant confessions and retractions. Galileo could not prove that the Earth spun or that it did indeed revolve around the Sun – Foucalt’s pendulum and Stellar aberration (and later parallax) proved that. Galileo was condemned more for his derision of the Pope (his sponsor) and his desire to re-interpret Scripture.
Where theology and science do clash, is in their application – namely morals. But even then I am very loathed to say that they do clash since it more likely what boils down to is an individuals desire to ‘do whatever I want’. For example, my faith teaches me that human life is sacred, and science teaches us that human life begins at conception, and as such hESRC and abortion are morally wrong and yet some scientists wish to promote them.
And finally on Fr Spitzer’s book: Those who claim that science has nothing to say about the existence of a God, then I suggest you read the book and then pass comment.
I am reading, off and on, a wonderful book by Prof. Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer, formerly a clinical professor of psychology at UC Berkeley (Oppenheimer’s place!) called Extraordinary Knowing, with a foreward by Prof. Freeman Dyson (who showed Feynman and Schwinger’s QED stuff were equivalent). Originally a strong skeptic on the paranormal, she concluded after her own research and personal experiences that the phenomena were quite real.
This seeems to bring in a powerful subjective element into reality and one which has a strong personal aspect. In my brief comments above on the reincarnation work of Prof. Ian Stevenson there seems to be a pattern here, some punchy afterlife data that needs explaining.
Can the multiverse idea explain all this, this highly personal aspect of ourselves which maybe carries on after we die? Is this then tied into the God-idea and are God-like universes (with this personal continuation property) created in the multiverse by anthropic selection? The mind boggles!
I must say seriously that there is a convergence here more towards God-like than God-less. Maybe that’s just how the multiverse does it’s stuff, populating it’s nifty Landscape with nice little God-type universes which have within them, from time to time, a bit of “intervention” from higher beings.
I’m OK with this.
Gordon, I think Karen Armstrong would be surprised to find out that she’s a deist, at least from the last things I heard or read of her. I know she was calling herself a “freelance monotheist” for quite a while. I think you might be relying too much on the literature of popular atheism for your sources. Which is, of course, the problem with relying on Hitchens, Harris or Dawkins on the topic of theology. While I’m sure they boned up a bit to write their polemical hit jobs, it was exactly for that purpose, to have stuff to shoot at not to seriously inform themselves about the full scope of thinking on the subject. Their address of the history of religion isn’t much more credible. And, as many of the reviewers of The God Delusion pointed out, Dawkins address of serious theological thinking is absurdly slight for a book claiming to dispose of God. I seem to recall one of them pointed out that he made reference to Douglas Adams more than he did any well regarded theologian. Given what I’ve read about Hawking’s book, maybe it’s a rule of thumb that a book of that sort which leans on Adams fails. Relying on them for information about the enormous range of serious writing on religion would be the exact equivalent to relying on three writers from the Intelligent Design industry to learn about biology, and I don’t mean the ones conversant with real science. I don’t think Sean Carroll would like anyone unfamiliar with his topic to depend only on critics of his POV, even the internal critics of it. You’re recommending that people rely on an anti-religious, middle brow equivalent of Jack Chick for their understanding of religious thinking.
And, Gordon, as they were supposedly animals in the physical world that don’t exist, unicorns are as suited to debunking science, which deals only with the physical universe, as they are God who is certainly defined as being not of the physical universe. Maybe you should learn the lesson that people can be mistaken about what they believe about the physical universe from unicorns. They might be a much more suitable analogue for those mulitverses, which are supposed to be part of the physical universe. And what they could tell you about people being mistaken about animals they can’t see could be more applicable to Dawkins’ unseen behaviors in undocumented societies, though the idea just came to me and I haven’t really thought it out.
Considering how much play they get among you new atheists, I’m wondering where are all these deists you keep talking about? I’ve never seen one or heard one. I think they’re a figment of your imagination.
And, for the record, I don’t have any opinion as to whether or not multiverses exist I just don’t see how something that only fits into a theoretical model and is supposed to be accepted because you can come up with an explanation for things if you assume they are there, fits into science. I don’t think it’s that far removed from people who come to a better understanding of their experience by referring to God. I’d always thought that it was the actual observation, detection, measurement, analysis and the successful defense of that analysis that defined the scientific definition of the natural universe and anything that couldn’t measure up to those standards isn’t included in science. Given that boast Hawking and just about any popular atheist I’ve ever heard on the topic of “evidence” make, multiverses don’t seem to measure up to that standard. Though I have nothing against people believing in it if they find it helpful, though I don’t really see any practical use for the idea.
Jim V. Do you have any actual, testable, physical evidence to back up that explanatory myth you spun @175?
Hawking says nothing new. He simply reiterates the ancient theological conundrum of creation out of nothing; ex nihilo. The only difference between that and his take is that he substitutes God with ‘laws of physics’. the word ‘law’ is derived from Latin ‘lex’; ‘legis’, which in turn is derived from the Greek ‘logos’. Interesting is that St. John’s Gospel says: “in the beginning there was the Word (logos), and the Word (logos) was with God, and the Word (logos) was God.
But of course not all theologians agreed that something would come from nothing. It was the Jewish scribes that started that embarrassment in Genesi I. In Babylon and Sumeria God only created new order from the pre-existing chaos.
And Heraclitus said: “the the Universe, which is the same for all, has not been created by any god or man, but always has been, is and will be an ever-living fire, kindling itself by regular measures and going out by regular measures.”
And all mystics will agree with him.
Hawking says nothing new. He simply reiterates the ancient theological conundrum of creation out of nothing; ex nihilo. The only difference between that and his take is that he substitutes God with ‘laws of physics’. the word ‘law’ is derived from Latin ‘lex’; ‘legis’, which in turn is derived from the Greek ‘logos’. Interesting is that St. John’s Gospel says: “in the beginning there was the Word (logos), and the Word (logos) was with God, and the Word (logos) was God.
But of course not all theologians agreed that something would come from nothing. It was the Jewish scribes that started that embarrassment in Genesi I. In Babylon and Sumeria God only created new order from the pre-existing chaos.
And Heraclitus said: “the the Universe, which is the same for all, has not been created by any god or man, but always has been, is and will be an ever-living fire, kindling itself by regular measures and going out by regular measures.”
And all mystics will agree with him.
JimV@175 writes:
“Science now tells us that creation of new universes by quantum fluctuations in empty space is also a natural process, not one that requires the personal manipulation of any god or gods.”
Not quite. The difference between rain falling, fire burning, and the spontaneous creation of new universes is that two are observable and one is theoretically possible based on our current understanding of the mathematics. Two are scientifically based. One is based in faith in mathematical models. How exactly do any of them disprove the existence of God?
As usual scientists are no good at philosophy. Of course philosophers are no good at science either. It’s a good thing we still have both…
As long as we’re putting science and philosophy on the same page, God is not an object. God could never be something one finds at the beginning of a chain of physical cause and effect. Whether, or not, God exists, physical law, if consistent, must be self-contained. So developing a more self-contained model of cosmology says nothing whatsoever about the existence of God.
To come at this from a different angle, human beings decide and act. As far as science is concerned, this is all covered by physical law. Notoriously, however, understanding physical law is no help at all when it comes to deciding whether or not to do something important. You have to decide for reasons of your own. Again, it is no help at all to think that it’s all “covered” no matter what you decide. You still have to decide, and you still have to have your own reasons. (This argument has countless antecedents.)
In the sense of “reasons” that I am using here — things that motivate rational decisions by human beings in a sense that is more or less at right angles to physical law — God is the reason why there is anything, and the ultimate reason why we should do anything.
We can get further inside the structure I am trying to illuminate. Assume that all reasoning and acting is covered by physical law. Formulate a complete, predictive model of my reasoning and acting. Communicate that model to me. It is no longer complete and predictive, because it cannot account for the effects upon me of its communication to me. There is an infinite regress of self-representation… conscious reasoning diagonalizes physical models of conscious reasoning. This is true whether, or not, consciousness has a physical basis. (This is a condensed form of Mackay’s “logical indeterminacy of free choice”).
We can get outside this structure as well. A physical model is mechanistic, it is an abstract machine. As such it has a definite Kolmogorov complexity. A physical model of scientific creativity would have to have a Kolmogorov complexity greater than that of all physical models generated by that creativity. So either we have a fixed Kolmogorov complexity and so will never be complex enough to model how we generate models, or we do not have a fixed Kolmogorov complexity and it is impossible in principle to model how we generate models. (This is an updated form of Godel’s dilemma.)
The structure I am trying to illuminate has a name. Transcendence. God is what, or who, transcends physical law. This is not the same, I hope it is clear, as a miracle.
Still, whether, or not, this transcendence is simply an artifact of our finitude and logical incompleteness, or it is real and active, is not a question that science can answer.
Michael Gogins, in case anyone might have made a mistake, I’d better come clean and say I’m not a philosopher, I’m a music teacher, though a mediocre one who has time on his hands.
“Where are these deists you are talking about”—-try Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin, John Adams etc for a start. Your founding fathers would be appalled to see what the US has mutated into.
Michael—that was drivel with buzzwords.
Alan—now its psyhics? What next? This is a science blog, not an asylum.
Anthony–Douglas Adams was more intelligent than theologians. Man, if you want a dreck-induced headache try reading any Teilhard de Chardin. Also, where are the deists?–well, they are all over the place. No one with a functioning neo-cortex believes in a personal god any longer.
Since a few people were kind enough to notice my previous comment, I’ll make the dangerous mistake of expanding upon it – although really, any misconceptions can best and perhaps only be cleared up by re-reading it carefully.
Evidence for its various theses:
That people make up myths to give explanations (which don’t actually explain anything) for things they don’t understand about the universe: see history and anthropology, Norse mythology, Egyptian mythology, Greek Mythology, etc..
That natural processes exist which are not influenced by sacrifice or prayer: anecdotal evidence abounds (unless you are willing to claim that no victims of a car or airplane crash ever had a prayer for safe travel – “traveling mercies” is the phrase I have heard – offered on their behalf); and there have been controlled experiments on prayer showing it it be ineffective against illness.
That science says quantum fluctuations can produce new universes: I haven’t polled scientists, but that seems to be the consensus of those I have read. That quantum fluctuations do produce virtual particles: Hawking radiation from black holes.
That theists will continue pushing their god hypotheses further and further upstream as science makes it necessary, without regard to the increasingly strange sequence of events this entails: see this thread.
As for disproving the existence of god, neither I, nor Sean Carroll, nor Hawking, nor Richard Dawkins, would dream of it. Neither can we disprove the existence of pink unicorns, which could be magical creatures which are very good at hiding, similar to gods. We simply say, we have found no evidence or need for that hypothesis (and it fails to meet the Judge Judy criterion).
BTW, here is Peter Medawar’s devastating review of de Chardin’s Phenomenon of Man. It could apply to nearly any theistic book.
http://markmaking.typepad.com/markmaking/2006/05/medawar_on_teil.html
-Sorry for the typo psychic, not psyhic, but those who believe in them likely wouldn’t notice.
re :173 “…not sure what Deepak Chopra will add”—–I am. He will add a farrago of New Age drivel
and obfuscation plus misuse of scientific terms.
JimV:”As for disproving the existence of god, neither I, nor Sean Carroll, nor Hawking, nor Richard Dawkins, would dream of it…We simply say, we have found no evidence or need for that hypothesis.”
Strange, since the title of this blog post seems to contradict your statement. You, personally, might not be trying to disprove the existence of God. That’s fine…you can believe (or disbelieve) what you want. But when hubris of science begins to cloud its actual capability, then you start running into problems.
If I can paraphrase Anthony McCarthy (and I apologize if I misstate your position): Science is of the physical world. Science can only know of the physical world because of the constraints of the scientific method. The scientific method cannot be applied to God because it is not of the physical world. The scientific method, similarly, cannot be applied to the pre-universe because there are no physical laws that are independent of a physical universe.
Gordon, “my” founding fathers? First you are mistaken, I don’t worship at the altar of the founders, holding them in any more regard than I do people who came along after them or who are alive now. I wonder, did any of them declare themselves to be deists? They’d have certainly known the term. I know that deism was as big a fad among the educated upper class back then as atheism is today but I’d like to know if any of them affirmed that was what they believed. You will have those quotes handy, won’t you?
Do you happen to be British?
— Douglas Adams was more intelligent than theologians. Gordon
I’m aware there are people who would think that was a witty remark, I wonder what Jefferson would have thought about it. He was rather taken with Priestly on theological topics.
— Man, if you want a dreck-induced headache try reading any Teilhard de Chardin. Gordon
Difficult reading can have that effect on some people. Who else have you read? Assuming you actually read de Chardin and not just the same invective against him that I’ve seen. I will point out I didn’t endorse any particular theologians though I’d have thought that an Oxford chair who undertook to write a book touching on the subject might have made a bit more of an effort to find out what they are talking about.
I did look and noticed that among the people I saw who were impressed with the book was Bernard Towers, who I’d not have taken for a slouch.
— No one with a functioning neo-cortex believes in a personal god any longer. Gordon
Oh, dear. What evidence do you have to back up that assertion. Apparently evidence is as much a sometimes thing as integrity with you folks. Or am I supposed to take this assertion on authority?
Jim V. I still want to know where your explanatory myth came from. What physical evidence do you have to back it up? Or does it just come out of convenience as all of the similar explanatory myths of the Dawkins school of science come from?
I think it’s high time that someone called the new atheists on their claims to only believe things based in evidence because it’s clear they are among the premier advocates of dispensing with evidence in science. You will notice who it has been in this discussion who has been defending that as a standard of scientific reliability and who hasn’t.
You don’t get it, do you? What I (and perhaps Sean) am claiming is simply that there is no evidence for the existence of a God. Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence.
BTW, I did waste my time once reading “The Phenomenon..”. It was not “difficult”. It was obscurantist garbage, and, as a precursor of New Age drivel, was full of feel-good pap.
There is no evidence for multiverses, there is no evidence of memes, there is no evidence of a specific favorably adaptive behavior in our Paleolithic ancestors which was widely practiced, conferring a reproductive advantage, which is the expression of a specific genetic complex producing, for example “religion proteins” which result in what is so popularly talked about among new atheists as “religion”. I would love to further expound what is involved in that idea, let’s just say it’s a remarkably unstable and varied “genetic expression” among us today if that’s true, since there is no definable “thing” that is meant by “religion”. You know, if it was so adaptively favorable in the past, getting rid of its expression just might lead to our extinction. Having gone there several times since I entered this discussion just over a hundred comments ago, I’m not going to review other worthwhile ideas that also have no evidentiary foundation of that kind, but I’m sure even Sean would not like to be without some of them, tenure, for example.
Good grief. I’m supposed to take you guys seriously as the keepers of the little candle in the dark that used to be science, even as you turn it into an evidence free game?
Funny how theists have to presuppose a nonphysical world to justify their belief in the existence of their imaginary friend. It’s a bit like believing ‘oh, there’s this giant platypus colored a bright shade of purple. It exists entirely outside the physical world!’.
Equally probable, equally stupid.
It’s essentially crud you’ve made up inside your head.
I think it’s high time that someone called the new atheists on their claims to only believe things based in evidence because it’s clear they are among the premier advocates of dispensing with evidence in science. You will notice who it has been in this discussion who has been defending that as a standard of scientific reliability and who hasn’t.
We call this a tu quoque. It’s an informal logical fallacy.
The idea of a ‘meme’, I understand, is more of one of those weird social science cultural things. Talk to them about it.
I’m what you might call a ‘new atheist’; I’d say at least on my part that the jury’s out for me on the subject of string theory and multiverses. I am more inclined to believe they exist than a deity exists, because they appear to make use of solely physical mechanisms rather than going off on some bizarre anthrocentric fairy-world tangent. At the same time, they are a little short on the evidence.
And I think the whole genetics-religion thing is kind of silly. That’s more under the purview of social science people, I think, because cognitive biases are ultimately going to be expressed in a context.