Live-Blogging Curiosity, Hawking, and God

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. šŸ™‚

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.

265 Comments

265 thoughts on “Live-Blogging Curiosity, Hawking, and God”

  1. I’m not really sure what God is made of or how He created the universe from nothing (assuming the universe WAS created from nothing).

    Why even bother pretending that God is even a viable hypothesis, then? An incoherent thing made of an incoherent nonsubstantive substance that incoherently acts on nothing at all is just incoherence squared, cubed, and raised to ever higher powers of incoherence.

    If you want to learn more about God, in what sense God transcends space and time, and what kind of existence He has, check out the writings of some theologians, Thomas Aquinas.

    I have. Thomas Aquinas commits multiple logical fallacies and uses stupid word games to come to incoherent and illogical conclusions.

    Thomas Aquinas didn’t know anything about the actual universe, let alone about God. He just filled his works with sophistry and bullshit.

    I have no idea how our universe was made (if it was made through natural processes), and regardless of how much sense the notion of a God creating it makes, it also makes no sense to suggest that the universe came into existence from nothing, as I explained above.

    It makes much less sense to suggest a God, as I explained above.

    If there is no multiverse (and we don’t know the answer to that without knowing what the fundamental theory is, which Stephen Hawking doesn’t know), then, no, there was no zero-point energy before the big bang because if there is no multiverse then our universe did not come from a “parent universe”. Therefore, no zero-point energy from which our universe could have been born.

    Or in other words, there was no zero-point energy because you say so. The argument by fiat remains a logical fallacy.

    Where did you come across the notion that “nothing” is unstable?

    It’s quote from Frank Wilczek.

    http://www.csicop.org/sb/show/why_is_there_something_rather_than_nothing

  2. It was from the philosophic challenge to the religion of its day that science arose: philosophers asked the questions, and science began to supply what answers it could to those questions…answers which began to supplant those which religions had supplied (as well as supplanting its own answers with ones that took more observations and experimental evidence into account: since science doesn’t argue from authority, its authorities could be challenged, its paradigms changed, and hence science advances. Aristotle was a great scientist, as was Newton…but we have witnessed advances beyond them via successful challenges to their theories by new ones which fit the data better than theirs did or could).

    Science supplies two kinds of answers: on the one hand, to the question “what existed before the Big Bang,” it doesn’t merely reply “nothing:” the experimental evidence implies that nothing could have existed before the Big Bang (and as any good Daoist could tell you, nothing is not to be sneezed at!)

    The other kind of answer it supplies is to questions like “define the nothing that existed before the Big Bang:” a seemingly straightforward philosophical question, but one that science shows is about as answerable as “what is the sound of one hand clapping?” or “what is at the place where a circular road ends?” It’s like “if everything that exists was caused by something else, and God exists, what created God?” This is analogous to the “shicho,” or endless ladder trap in the game of Go: better to recognise it for what it is, and stop such fruitless pursuit before it begins.

    It’s not that science can answer all philosophical questions, in particular normative ones: it can, however, help to clarify our analyses of such questions…and to help us to clearly distinguish between questions that have a normative (i.e. judgmental) element from those that do not.

    Having shaved with Occam’s Razor this AM, always happy to supply a pinch of parsimony to the recipe!

    Back to you!

  3. I read Stenger’s piece and I’m not sure what he’s talking about because he’s using kind of vague language. Have you looked at his books. They look interesting to read, but do you know if he references physics papers when he talks about “nothing” and about results suggestion that “nothing is unstable”.

    For example, he says, “In some models of the origin of the universe, the vacuum undergoes a spontaneous phase transition to something more complicated, like a universe containing matter.” But the vacuum isn’t nothing. What does he mean by ‘vacuum’. If by ‘vacuum’ he means the traditional physics definition, then he’s not, strictly speaking, talking about the origin of the universe here, but the origin of the matter and energy in the universe. So it’s vague statements like these that want to make me look at the papers he’s drawing his information from to gain a more accurate and precise understanding of his position.

    Another example:

    “Then why is there something rather than nothing? Because something is the more natural state of affairs and is thus more likely than nothing-more than twice as likely according to one calculation. We can infer this from the processes of nature where simple systems tend to be unstable and often spontaneously transform into more complex ones. Theoretical models such as the inflationary model of the early universe bear this out”

    Again, I want to look at the paper containing this calculation. I say this because it’s one thing to say that something is more likely than nothing (whatever that means in your paper), but it’s an entirely different matter to say that there exists a process by which ‘nothing’ can spontaneously transform into ‘something’ because ‘something’ is more likely. Presumably, if there’s ‘nothing’ (no matter, no energy, no space, no time) then what kind of process can transform ‘nothing’ into ‘something’? Just because, in nature, you observe simple systems being unstable and transform into more complex ones, doesn’t mean you can extend that idea to ‘nothing’ transforming into ‘something’ because ‘nothing’ is less likely than ‘something’. It’s an analogy which may not necessarily apply to ‘nothing’ and ‘something’. But I understand that he is using this for the purpose of explaining this stuff to people, which is why I’m wondering if he has referenced the papers he came across somewhere.

    But thanks for sending that link to me. I looked up his books on amazon, and they do look interesting even though I’m a theist.

  4. assume what dr. hawking says is true and that there is no time in a black hole. assume likewise that his statements about the big bang originating from something with properties similar to a black hole are true. this makes it seem possible that his statement about no “before” might also be true and therefore the possibility of no god being involved in creation for lack of time to do it might be correct. however, consider the following about black holes – at least the ones we are familiar with: the black holes in our universe were not here at the time of the big bang, but formed sometime after that. therefore, there was a “before” for these black holes, even though time may be stopped in them currently. i wonder if this is not a possibility for the thing which was the origin of our big bang.

  5. i have just watched the curiosity show with steven hawking…one question sticks in my brain and that is what about the collective conscienceness of the entire universe? when man looks at what really is…in the beginning was the “thought” and the thought was with God and the thought was God…I know many will say that i have substitued thought for Word but the real translation is thought. maybe on a quantum level thought is the real motivator…of course there are those that will say that thought is merely a chemical reaction in the brain but maybe the brain is just a type of electro chemical receiver that allows the thought process to manifest itself in this corporeal world. imagine if you will a dimension outside of time and space where our physics have no meaning…i am not talking about the twilight zone but a place where pure thought and eternal mind can create out of nothing, something… for those of you that are deep thinkers…think about this…how does one get the idea for inventing? or what about inpiration? laws are continually being modified by those who have vision…what if the only thing that limits us to do anything is our own mind making the limits…what if all we had to do is believe…now what is meant by believe…believe would be the ability to be sure about what ever you could think or dream you could manifest in this material world…in order for that you must have faith…and faith is the assurance of things hoped for…again this is on a quantum level assuming that the mind could operate on such a level…the only boundaries are those that we create…i wonder if someone walked up to steven hawking and said steven would you beleive in God if this collective conscienceness could come to you and make you whole again…would he beleive then or would he just try to explain it away with science….i know this may seem a cruel scenario to project but what if? of course you have all heard this analogy… could you take all of the parts of a fine swiss watch and put them in a box and shake it long enough that it would come together to be a working watch with out a designer or one to put it together.? then why is it so hard for some in this world to accept a master builder of all we see and experience in this corporeal world which we have just began to experience again this time around?…things have order and order demands one who gives them…just a thought but if we as a species could ever hope to move on to the next level then we are going to have to put more faith in a supreme creator that is in the mind and the mind of all but gracious enough to give each the opportunity to be indivdual…both light and dark, postive and negative both alive and dead both on and off…by the way is there a midpoint between on and off? i think once once you have found that then you will find God since God is all and one at once which is finite and infinite….consider this paradox of mathematics….there are an infinite amount of points between to fixed points on a number line….is that not saying infinity can lay inside a finite lenth? we need to rewright the math just a little dont we or do we?

  6. Though not my favorite science popularizer, I do agree with Michio Kaku’s comment regarding multiverse hypothesis;

    To my understanding the possibility of there being a multiverse is one of the latest cosmological insights and it does away with the notion that everything including time started with the big bang. After having been practically taboo for a long time the question “what happened before the big bang?” is now a scientifically valid question.

    So there may well have been something (including time) before the big bang, so that Hawking’s argument that God could not have created the big bang because there was no time for anything (including God) to exist before the big bang, does no longer hold.

    To me the problem is summarized nicely by Davies:

    “Either you have an unexplained god, or you have unexplained laws.”

    The issue there is that “god did it” does not explain the laws, nor does it explain anything of scientific importance. The laws on the other hand – although themselves unexplained – do in turn explain a whole lot of things (possibly including why it is that people do have religious beliefs).

  7. Pingback: God and Cosmology Conversation | Cosmic Variance | Discover Magazine

  8. No matter how sophisticated the telescope there’s always a limit to how far we can see.
    Beyond that lies infinite deep black space, filled with infinite possibilities. Odds are,
    what we think is wrong and therefore a waste of time.

    As fiction, scripture should give one wisdom (seen through GODs eyes) not knowledge
    (seen through mans eyes).

  9. Scientific views end in awe and mystery, lost at the edge in uncertainty, but they appear to be so deep and so impressive that the theory that it is all arranged as a stage for God to watch man’s struggle for good and evil seems inadequate.

    Richard P. Feynman

  10. Hawking is an extremely arrogant, desperate man who wants to believe he has solved the secret of the universe before he dies. Notice I used the word believe. Because despite all the formulas, all the science, it still comes down to what you believe. He makes a pathetic argument as he angrily shakes his impotent fist at the sky and in effect sings in the words of the Book of Mormon(the play), “hasa diga eebowai” or f**k you god! As I have taught my son there are two immutable rules of human existence, i.e. Everything is magic and everyone is full of **it. Sky and Telescope magazine has the humility to print a feature in every issue where they show something they published 25, 50 and 75 years ago . Invariably it has proven to be less than correct. While science can bring us to a point that is 99.999999999-% correct (or at least believable), it can never arrive at the absolute. At least.. that’s what I believe.

  11. “Hawking says Einstein might be the greatest scientist ever. He has long favored Einstein over Newton, Iā€™m not sure why. “

    Hhmmm…. Difficult to compare them since the societies they lived in were so different. Newton has gravity, optics, calculus and of course the whole idea of mathematical philosophy; Einstein has the photoelectric effect, SR, GR, old quantum theory, Bose-Einstein statistics, his early work on thermodynamics. How does one compare such accomplishments?

    In some sense, I think that many of Newton’s ideas would have been found at most not much later by others (and in some cases this happened—see the dispute with Leibniz about the calculus). That’s true of some of Einstein’s stuff as well, particularly SR, but if Einstein hadn’t come up with GR, we might have had to wait much longer. Einstein himself said that the only time in his life he was really revolutionary was with his explanation of the photoelectric effect.

    But aside from science? Newton spent a huge amount of time with occult and religious stuff: alchemy, biblical chronology etc. He never married; whether he was celibate or the “greatest whoremonger in London” I don’t know. He spent the latter part of his life as master of the mint. Einstein played the violin quite well, was politically active, appreciated female company and, although it was ultimately futile, never gave up working in science, spending the last 30 or 40 years of his life in search of the unified field theory.

    In whose shoes would you rather be?

  12. You all understand that nobody is taking the time to read these opinions, right?
    Your thoughts are all a bunch of farts in a storm.
    There are no gods. There are gods.

    āˆž YES āˆž NO āˆž

  13. I assume that Discover is well aware of what exactly Stephen Hawking had stated in The Discovery Channel’s The First Episode of Curiosity titled “Did God Create The Universe”.

    Stephen Hawking makes the argument that since time itself didn’t exist therefore God would have no time to create the universe in. He said it’s from science šŸ™‚ But this introduces a subtle paradox that can best be shown using this challenging statement:

    “If God had no time to create then also The Big Bang had no time to Bang, what is good for the goose is often also good for the gander as well. Give Up.”

    Yet we know the universe did not always exist because stars keep time like candles by using up their fuel and dying. It is even more mind boggling to realize that time itself cannot possibly be infinite since time would never be able to tic down to the present time from an infinite past.

    About about in circles we go !!!

    Your mission should you choice to accept it, is to find a solution to this paradox.

    To find out more about my view points please feel free to visit my discusions:

    http://answers.yahoo.com/my-activity

  14. I assume that Discover is well aware of what exactly Stephen Hawking had stated in The Discovery Channel’s The First Episode of Curiosity titled “Did God Create The Universe”.

    Stephen Hawking makes the argument that since time itself didn’t exist therefore God would have no time to create the universe in. He said it’s from science šŸ™‚ But this introduces a subtle paradox that can best be shown using this challenging statement:

    “If God had no time to create then also The Big Bang had no time to Bang, what is good for the goose is often also good for the gander as well. Give Up.”

    Yet we know the universe did not always exist because stars keep time like candles by using up their fuel and dying. It is even more mind boggling to realize that time itself cannot possibly be infinite since time would never be able to tic down to the present time from an infinite past.

    About about in circles we go !!!

    Your mission should you choice to accept it, is to find a solution to this paradox.

    To find out more about my view points please feel free to visit my discusions:

    http://answers.yahoo.com/activity;_ylt=AtRg8ZtS2LRpCQt.DeXfMfnsy6IX;_ylv=3?show=ed16380f11d628bdeac10227c45df672aa&view=public

  15. Scholars!! If logic is virtualized well we end up with horse-shit for brains from the religious to the secular scholars agreeing horse-shit is logic.They can’t decide if it should be lavender or rose scented is all. Whom even pays attention to scholars, Shit for brain wanna be scholars.

    The world is like a spewing gusher of oil out of the mouth’s of milliions of gargoyles dressed up in scholar suits. A superficial film floating in front of the eyes now on a global scale turning minds into shit for brains. Oh we are so doomed…..

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