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.
“And, how did we get the “black hole” and the “laws of nature” to begin with? These haven’t been addressed.”
Uhh… read a physics book, there’s actual evidence for what he bases his theories on (as opposed to your idea of “God is everything”).
Bottom line is that science is actively trying to answer questions that don’t yet have answers. And if there isn’t an answer, please have the intellectual integrity to simply say, “I don’t know,” instead of shoving God in as if that answered anything. Religion has not added to the field of human knowledge but has merely provided comfort to those too insecure with gaps in their own understanding. I would have hoped we as a society would have gotten past the God-of-the-gaps but apparently it’s alive [sic] and well.
Since Rob says the answers to my questions exist, i would ask him to kindly explain to us how a primordial soup created the early amino acids and then double helix DNA and WHY we havent used this technology to create more at the bench.
It’s too bad this discussion has become a platform for voicing the same old hackneyed creationist arguments, such as “life must have a divine purpose” and “biological entities are perfect, so God did it.” I’d rather live in Hawking’s world of humanist optimism than in one where life’s purpose is constrained by a belief that every question has only one (metaphysical) answer.
@Dave: “we don’t need documentaries to explain gravity . . . its in every physics textbook.”
No it’s not. Gravity is much more complicated than what your everyday physics textbook says. By your logic, if God was the answer to everything, we wouldn’t have missionaries going around the world converting people or people of different religions.
“Religion, on the other hand, espouses beliefs and conclusions before the facts are in ….”
Unlike Hawking in this case? Where is the proof, when did the “facts come in” that conclusively show that the way that Hawking believes the universe started is actually the way it went? I mean, gee, it’s not like scientists—event brilliant ones—have ever been wrong, eh?
@Sean: “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.”
I agree w/this. But even though cosmology has many good ideas (or hypotheses) about how the universe *might* have come into existence, I think it’s a little premature to assert, “Science/Cosmology has proven that God does not exist.” Statements like these only dilute the impression that the average Joe has about the power of science and the scientific method to arrive at truth.
I am not a religious person, but I have always thought that if God did exist, she would certainly exist outside of space and time as we know it. Whether God intervenes in the world … for that I’ve seen no real evidence, so I’m skeptical. Then again, I’m also skeptical about string theory (even though some of my best friends are string theorists!), so there you go.
@David “WHY we havent used this technology to create more at the bench.”
We have created early amino acids from inorganic matter (in fact, they’ve found it in deep space) and if we had billions of years, I’m sure we’d be making the double helix from a primordial soup.
mxh, but my physics textbook hasnt told me yet how random chance created gravity. I understand your need to indulge in your blind faith in science but it would be best if you didnt pooh pooh the beliefs of others.
@david
does the bible even mention gravity??
“I mean, gee, it’s not like scientists—event brilliant ones—have ever been wrong, eh?”
He’s got evidence, but I”m sure he’d accept being wrong if any convincing contrary evidence is presented. Religious people, on the other hand, have never been wrong, right?
@ mxh, if you are talking about the Miller-Urey experiment then i suggest you do realise that was a joke of an experiment right? Of course under the right (extreme) conditions we are able to generate the most basic of amino acids in the d-form which is practically useless for human existence.
Are you suggesting that somehow by chance, nature figured out everything from amino acids to DNA, installed it just right despite the fact that a tiny change in the cell’s function is enough to doom an entire organism.
wow. Nature must be such a remarkable statistician.
@ mastershake, i in no way suggest the bible explains science.
Shara,
I totally understand about the money, but education does not have to be from a formal classroom setting. This is the internet. All you need is desire to learn, and time.
But that isn’t even really my point. My point was, there is no faith in understanding scientific explanations. If you were to ask “How do you know that?”, a scientist can give you an answer. A theologian will only have clever rhetoric (at best). No faith.
“blind faith” in science? What does that even mean? Just because science hasn’t explained it in complete detail doesn’t mean that I should instead believe in a magical sky being creating gravity.
@David, that’s because your physics textbook is probably a high school or college freshman introductory text. You need to learn all of that. Then, enroll at a local university and take Calculus I, Calculus II, Calculus III, Calculus IV, an introductory modern physics course (probably 300 level) that includes Special Relativity, the Standard Model, and introductory quantum theory. Now you need only to dive head first into quantum theory and General Relativity. That’s going to be at least a couple of classes for each.
Now you’ve finally arrived at a place where you will see how random chance can create gravity. I know it’s not as easy as “God did it,” but some of the best things are the hardest to achieve!
Thanks Fred, i prefer biology to math.
Spent 5 years at the bench, i kept wondering why we couldnt create amino acids ourselves. Very frustrating . . . considering nature is alleged to have done this spontaneously.
I guess i’m left with God did it. Fine.
@ David “Are you suggesting that somehow by chance, nature figured out everything from amino acids to DNA, installed it just right despite the fact that a tiny change in the cell’s function is enough to doom an entire organism.
wow. Nature must be such a remarkable statistician.”
Nope, just billions of tries at something that has a really, really low probability. There are billions of planets where it didn’t happen. We just happen to live on one where it did happen. There are also lots of things wrong with cell function and the human body. It’s not “just right”.
Even if you believe time stops in a black hole (where’s the evidence?), how does that prove there was no time before the Big Bang? How does the “evidence” presented in the program preclude a “Big Crunch” type event that happened prior to the Big Bang?
Stephen Hawking talks about time not existing prior to the big bang and on this and a few things him and i disagree dont get me wrong hes a brilliant guy but i personally believe that time in the sense of the universe’s life cycle did not start at the big bang, i do not believe in a beggining of time time by nature is linear. Even if at one point all matter contained within the universe was a single black hole (in which time would be stopped or slowed incomprehensively) time in a linear sense is not eliminated just halted. Causality says that if this was not the beggining of time something caused the universe to exist in this state, some would say this is god and in a way i would be inclined to agree because i believe the universe created itself. To explain this i look to everthing else i can see within the universe as it exists now and the laws of nature science has come to love. I think the answer lies in what i believe is a law of nature, the cycle of “Life” and “Death” creation and destruction that govern the laws of physics. The energy of the big bang perpetually pushes all matter outward from the universe but gravity in its ultimate form combined with massive amounts of matter will eventually pull the universe back together. Near its end the universe would be filled with massive black holes pulling eachother back together until at some point there is too much matter (perhaps a point that still hasnt swallowed all the matter in the universe) the black hole reaches a point of critical mass or swallows absolutely all matter in the universe and takes eons do die in spectacular fashion. This phenomena is the big bang, the most powerful explosion capable within the laws of physics. I believe time is linear and the universe exists in cycles, if there is a god, a being who is all and created the universe he is by very definition the universe itself. Im not asking you to agree with me im just on half a rant decide for yourselves if you have any serious questions drop me a line at
boleriataashar@hotmail.com
David says: “my physics textbook hasnt told me yet how random chance created gravity.”
Who says it has to be random?.Gravity is one of the 4 fundamental forces of our universe. It’s parameters were determined at the Big bang. Not necessarily randomly. But if you were really interested in knowing this, you would.
@David: Biology is tolerable, if you like the bulk of your work to be the cold, scary kind of work that’s devoid of comforting mathematics. At least, if you have learned biology, we can agree that evolution by natural selection beautifully accounts for the amazing variety of life on our planet, right?
Rob ->*chuckle* Even the internet is littered with large question marks on the basis in fact…Though you can usually tell.
There is still some degree of faith in science, it’s been wrong before. Sometimes, as well, some scientific explanations either boggle the brain, (see the mathematical ‘explanations’ that take up whole chalk boards.. Just thinking about them causes me brief moments of ‘boggling’..) or are ‘theories’. (Nobody, for example was personally around to witness the Big Bang or spontaneous formulation of life. It doesn’t exclude it from happening, but it certainly blurs both details and subtleties that may seem meaningless but may have tons to do with our universe today.) All in all, it comes out sounding like ‘colourful rhetoric’…
My position is even now we don’t have all the answers, why eliminate any possibilities when all possibilities are possible? (With the exclusion of my spontaneously winning the lotto tonight…There’s neither a draw nor do I have a ticket ~^_^~)
@65: It’s hard to provide the evidence you ask for in a one-hour TV show. There is evidence for it. Things like GPS wouldn’t work if engineers didn’t take the same idea into account.
@Boleria “Near its end the universe would be filled with massive black holes pulling eachother back together until at some point there is too much matter”
Nope, Steven Hawkins has shown that black holes actually lose energy and dissipate over time (look up Hawkins radiation).
@mxh: “Religious people, on the other hand, have never been wrong, right?” Of course they have – when did I ever claim the opposite?! mxh, are you trying desperately to shove me into the science vs. religion box?
As for Hawking’s “evidence,” what, exactly, are you referring to? I am a physicist, so no need to hold back on the technicalities! 🙂
Really, my larger point is simply this: the way that Hawking’s argument for the non-existence of God came across on this show (time did not exist before the Big Bang, so God could not have existed) was so simplistic that I think it did more harm than good, in the sense of bringing in people who are not firmly in one camp or another. As a scientist and astrophysicist, I’m embarrassed that this is they way my profession was portrayed. Really, I can’t wait for next week’s show on our readiness for alien attacks.