Tonight’s the premiere of Curiosity on the Discovery Channel, featuring Stephen Hawking talking about cosmology and God, followed by the “Curiosity Conversation” panel that I’m on along with David Gregory, Paul Davies, and John Haught. Hawking’s hour-long show is scheduled for 8pm Eastern/5pm Pacific, and will then repeat 3 hours later (11E/8P). Our half-hour panel discussion follows immediately afterward — you do the arithmetic.
There’s a lot to say about these shows, and in particular there’s a huge amount that we didn’t have time to say during the panel. So as I sit in front of the TV, I’ll be live-blogging along by adding updates to this post. This will be the early show, so the fun will happen 8pm-9:30pm Eastern. Hey, Nathan Fillion live-tweets during Castle, so why not me? There is also a chat going on at the Discovery site.
The main attraction of Hawking’s program is not that he has disproven the existence of God. Certainly I don’t think he’s going to be changing the minds of many religious believers. His argument is essentially that the universe is self-contained, and doesn’t really have “room” for God (nor any need to invoke a creator). It’s very easy to wriggle free of that conclusion, if you are inclined not to accept it.
But “changing people’s minds” isn’t the only reason to talk about something, even about controversial issues. Religion, like sex and death, is one of those topics where it’s very difficult to simply have a dispassionate discussion without making people uncomfortable. It can happen within a group of similarly-minded people, of course, but once a wider range of views gets involved, it’s hard to maintain comity. (Comedy, on the other hand, is pretty easy.) I don’t mean everyone has to agree — just the opposite. We should be able to talk about things we completely disagree on, while still maintaining level heads.
That’s why I think this episode of Curiosity is potentially important. It’s a forthright statement of a view that doesn’t often get aired in American media. Even if nobody’s mind is changed, simply talking rationally about this issues would be a step forward.
Pre-show update: I should note ahead of time that I was not wearing a tie. Haught, Davies, and Gregory were all wearing ties. But Hawking wasn’t. Maybe atheists don’t wear ties? (Although I’m pretty sure Jesus never wore a tie, either.)
Start: We begin with a disclaimer! These are Stephen Hawking’s opinions, not those of Discovery. 🙂
4 minutes: I hope the analogy here is clear. “People who believe God made the universe are kind of like the Vikings shouting at the Sun to stop a solar eclipse.”
8 minutes: Snark aside, the message here is a fundamental one. Nature obeys laws! Something that’s certainly not a priori obvious or necessary, but a really profound truth.
14 minutes: I wasn’t able to find an independent confirmation of this story about Pope John XXI condemning the idea of “laws of nature.” (It’s true that he did die when the roof collapsed.) Presumably this refers to the Condemnations of 1277.
20 minutes: The universe is a big, messy, complicated, and occasionally quite intricate place. On the face of it, the idea that it’s all the working-out of some impersonal patterns of matter and energy, rather than being constructed by some kind of conscious intelligence, is pretty remarkable. (But true nonetheless.)
27 minutes: Hey, a tiny ad for Discovery Retreats!
28 minutes: Hawking says Einstein might be the greatest scientist ever. He has long favored Einstein over Newton, I’m not sure why. Hawking appeared on an episode of Star Trek: TNG, where he was a hologram playing poker with Einstein, Newton, and Data. He actually wrote the script, and Newton doesn’t come off well.
36 minutes: Ah, negative energy. Depends on what you mean by “energy,” but this isn’t the venue to get overly technical, obviously. Roughly, matter has positive energy and gravity has negative energy. That’s hopefully enough to help people swallow the crucial point: you can make a universe for nothing. There isn’t some fixed resource, out of which we can make a universe or two, before we hit Peak Universe. There can be an infinite number of universes.
41 minutes: People on Twitter are asking why Hawking doesn’t have a British accent. He easily could, of course; voice-synthesis technology has come quite a way since he first got the system. But he’s said that he now identifies with that voice he got years ago, and doesn’t want to change it; it’s identified with him.
47 minutes: Okay, here’s the payoff. He’s saying that generally we’re used to effects being caused by pre-existing events. (The first step toward a cosmological argument for God’s existence.) You might think that a chain of causation takes you back to the Big Bang, which then requires God as a cause. But no! The Big Bang can just … be.
50 minutes: The point of the black hole discussion is to get to the idea of a singularity, a conjectural point of infinite curvature and density. The Big Bang, in classical general relativity, is also a singular moment. But classical GR isn’t right. We need quantum gravity. Hawking believes that quantum gravity smooths the singularity and explains how there was no pre-existing time. (At least in the TV show, unlike A Brief History, he doesn’t start talking about “imaginary time.”)
56 minutes: Ultimately Hawking’s argument against God is pretty simplistic. He assumes that if God created the Big Bang, God must have existed before the Big Bang, but there was no “before the Big Bang,” QED. It’s easy enough to simply assert that God doesn’t exist “within time” (if that means anything). It would have been better (IMHO) to emphasize that modern cosmology has many good ideas about how the universe could have come to be, so there’s no need to rely on a divine creator.
58 minutes: Final thought from SWH: no life after death! Enjoy it while you’re around, folks. An important message.
Panel discussion starts: Forgot to mention that Paul Davies has shaved off his moustache. Disconcerting.
4 minutes: Also disconcerting: watching myself on TV. Hate it. But I persevere for the greater good.
5 minutes: Here’s Michio Kaku, not saying very much.
7 minutes: Jennifer Wiseman and I were actually grad students together! She’s good people, even if we disagree about the whole God thing.
9 minutes: I come out in favor of basing purpose and meaning on reality. But I’m pretty sure a longer remark was cut off there. Arrrrgh! Nothing nefarious, we intentionally recorded a bit more than they had time to show. But enormously frustrating that there was so little time.
13 minutes: Not sure why we kept talking about the multiverse. Hawking didn’t bring it up, did he?
17 minutes: I thought a lot of what Haught said was not even really trying to argue in favor of God’s existence, but simply expressing a desire that he exist. “God is the grounding of hope” isn’t evidence for God’s existence.
22 minutes: Haven’t said anything completely silly yet, so that’s good. But so little time…
27 minutes: Always time for more Michio!
30 minutes: Arrrrgh again, this time for real: in the live conversation, I had the last word and it was a pretty good one. In the televised program, not so much. Had to end wishy-washy.
Thanks for tuning in. Wouldn’t it have been wonderful to have the time for a real conversation? But big ups to Discovery for hosting the panel at all — it’s a rare event on TV.
There was an interesting Discovery episode here about an eminent neurosurgeon’s NDE experience:
http://science.discovery.com/videos/through-the-wormhole-2-near-death-experience.html
and here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFvzHEepPQE&feature=related
where he runs through his condition in detail saying his “entire neocortex, that part of the brain that makes us human, was completely shut down”.
He also says that his experience during the coma could not have arisen from “laid down memories” in his brain.
He’s writing a book on his experiences. I am honestly curious about trying to meld this kind of seemingly “evidential” experience with current physics – or is there any other possible physics that may be acceptable in some sense where this could work?
If the universe can do this stuff where does this leave the God idea?
Vikings analogy!? Come on. The question isn’t whether religious people sometimes (incorrectly) assign supernatural causes to natural events. The question is whether there are any supernatural events, by which I mean those not attributable to natural cause. Straw man.
” The universe is a big, messy, complicated, and occasionally quite intricate place. On the face of it, the idea that it’s all the working-out of some impersonal patterns of matter and energy, rather than being constructed by some kind of conscious intelligence, is pretty remarkable. (But true nonetheless.)”
I’m curious as to how you can conclusively state that the universe is created from impersonal patterns of matter and energy rather than divine intelligence without proof? Is the demand for proof not the reason ID is constantly pooh poohed in our schools?
Science doesn’t prove or disprove anything. ID is pooh-poohed because it’s a crappy attempt at making religion look like science.
Science so far is great at explaining a lot except the origin of man and the universe. This is looking like a crappy attempt at disparaging religion
David you’re right, the bible never says that the earth is the center of the universe. I think using the wrongful cunclusions of some historical religious leaders is self serving.
Sean, I missed the first 20 minutes of the show, don’t worry, I have it stored on my DVR. 🙂 Thanks for the live updates.
Science is actually pretty damn good at explaining the origin of man, evolution is one of the most solid theories in science backed up with mounds of evidence that if people actually thought with logic and reason they would easily see how it makes sense, much more than any type of supernatural explanations.
I adore this show, and just about most of the stuff that has been put out by the science community really challenging everyday thought… (Now, if you’d kindly get the politicians thinking more, we’d be quite grateful…)
As I watch this, among the other shows I’ve watched, I have to say, isn’t science a kind of faith in itself?
There’s a good deal of things we, as the public, have explained to us and told ‘no, really, it happened. Believe me!’ Some explanations in Quantum Physics, black holes, x rays, dark matter, etc have an almost supernatural flavour to them. (especially to those of us without high powered telescopes or major fusion reactors) I’m an oddity, I suppose, in believing faith and science are not things wholly mutually exclusive. Discovery, exploration, expanding how we perceive our world…well..we’ve progressed beyond the use of ‘awareness enhancers’ to do that. (A form of evolution, maybe? ~^_^~)
There are so many things in this world, and universe, even Hawking can’t fully explain beyond theories.. Stuff we may never answer. (but damn well keep trying!) The us/them mentality between science and religion I find ridiculous, non-productive and hindering to everyone…Especially when both demand a certain degree of ‘faith’ on the part of man. For me, I’ll keep my contented marriage of both, neither based in church or scientist, but my own discovery and reason.
Unfortunately, the disclaimer probably scared away those who most needed to watch it.
I feel sorry for Stephen, because without god, he has no hope. and he’s happy about it.
Finally I don’t feel alone in my view, Ther is no God! Bravest man I know, Hawking is the only hero I know.
#8, Shara: Science is a set of self-correcting methods and institutions that works to create understanding about the world. A theory is an explanatory framework. The accuracy of a theory is determined by taking the predictions it makes and testing them against the reality observed by observers. This war between the “dreamers” (it does take some degree of creativity, as well as a strong grounding in what is known already) and the “reality checkers” in the scientific community who go in and see if things actually match up. Richard Feynman once said “What I do is imagine things…but I am in a straightjacket. I am constrained by the physical laws which are already established unless I can replace them with something better.”
The truth of science depends on rigid self-criticism (in the scientist, in the communities, and in the methodology). Not many other system of ideas really requires that kind of checking (mathematics? some branches of philosophy?).
I feel sorry for Kenny, because he thinks life isn’t worthwhile without false hope, and he’s baffled by the millions of people who are happy without it.
It’s the good ole faith vs empiricism panel discussion. Or at least that’s how these discussions usually boil down.
Haha @ comments on Michio.
Shara, it’s not an us vs them mentality it’s a this vs that mentality. Science provides evidence for its claims, religion doesn’t. Scientists, or anyone thinking scientifically, form their opinions based on individual facts, discoveries and data which often aren’t very exciting on their own. Science forms conclusions reluctantly and with caveats. Religion, on the other hand, espouses beliefs and conclusions before the facts are in, and often directly in the face of them once they are revealed. There is a very real conflict between the religious and scientific worldviews, and the claims each makes. If it were a matter of faith scientists would never change their minds web confronted with new facts, or try so hard to confirm what they think is probably true. Religion just assumes it got it right the first time. That’s faith.
on the ‘hill and hole’ analogy, does this imply the existance of a negitive universe? if so can we visit it? i belive it exists but we cannot go from hill to hole.
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How come SH went through the whole Kalam argument without actually naming it?
If you think God has no influence on the workings of the universe, then “Go nuts,” says Sean. FANTASTIC.
god should be removed from scientific thought, god prohibits people from asking questions it lets people think they have all the answers which no one dose science asks questions and comes up with theory’s that could possibly answer these questions but there is never a definite answer because we can not prove it. I am an atheist but i have no problem with religious people i just simply believe they should not take part in science and if they do to simply put god aside while working in science.
I have such a conflict on this question. To say that the universe was created from ‘nothing’ just doesn’t work for me. But let’s look at it the other way. The universe as we know it today is big, really big, ok, it’s universal. What’s beyond it? That’s the conumdrum, and ‘nothing’ doesn’t work, because ‘nothing’ in this example is ‘something’… So what’s beyond the ‘nothing’? Same question about the theory about the creation of the universe from ‘nothing’. Ok, so there was nothing around the big bang, but was was beyond, or outside the nothing?
I here a lot of “if”statements. My question to Hawking is if you are going to displace God as thee ultimatebcreator based on your”ScientificTheory” then how do you explain the biology make up of the human body. We are created in the image of our divine maker “God”. The human body is the most incredible make up of any intellectual invention. There is Nothing in the world today that is created or invented that does not mock some part of the human body functions. Are you saying that the design of the human body was created out of Nothing? It has a very large purpose… Your machine that helps you speak through your mind was created based on the very human body that you sit in, which was created by God. I agree with some of the other statements on this blog. I feel heartache for Hawkings, that he can not get past himself to have any hope or purpose in life. If he fully believes that there is not a divine creator then why does he care to share his theories, after all he has no purpose, right. I will be praying for him.
It is difficult for people to understand the physics background without understanding 4000 years of physics and mathematics. Physicists have a view and working model of the universe which does not need the assumption of a god.