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. 🙂

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 found it quite interesting that Mr. Hawking in the last few minutes of his presentation acknowledged the grand design of the universe and denied the existence of a designer. He was also grateful for the opportunity and privilege to study this design which requires someone to be thankful toward. I am thankful to my parents for my existence and thankful to Jesus for my destiny. Perhaps he is not so settled in his convictions.

    Popular religious thought today places the Creator outside of His creation which includes time. Therefore it is bogus to suggest God did not have time to create the universe. He is not constrained by time. He is eternally in the now, yesterday, today and forever (all time references for our finite perspectives)

    Altogether, the presentation brought forth very interesting facts; it’s the conclusions that baffle me.

  2. Yes, Dr. Hawking’s sometimes tacit admission of design…well, the good Dr. has spoken on that. I believe he says that all of matter may well be determinate, but the question of whether we are determinate is irrelevant since we can never know the Determiner. I cannot now prove Dr. Hawking will meet the Determiner, but believe he will.

    I maintain, who can refute the obvious logical fallacies in the statement, “Because there is a law such as gravity, the Universe can and will create itself from nothing”–Stephen Hawking. Who or What decreed the law of gravity? From where did the Information come? The problem of the creation and destruction of information is something that has tripped up Hawking before, IIRC.

    Science is a process. Religion in its purest form is a type of science, an attempt to explain the state of things through information, observation, hypothesis, testing, and evaluation. Neither is religion all theistic. Some of the most religious people I know are atheists. Sometimes religion does bad science, in a manner of speaking. Sometimes scientists do bad science and worse religion. Sometimes either hypothesizes from insufficient or incorrect information or fails to surrender disproven hypotheses.

    Good religion does not negate good science. But good science will expose bad religion, and of that I have no fear. Bad science, well, that will usually expose itself. Those of you who merely proclaim, “You people are just too stupid to comprehend this wonderful science that can’t be exposited in a mere hour” need to find a shorter horse, so to speak. Dude, you can make almost any point effectively in an hour, including most quantum effects, for almost any reasonably intelligent person. Many well-qualified scientists take strong issue with Dr. Hawking’s conclusions.

    I expect that, should mankind still exist in this dispensation 1,000 years from now, when some of today’s “best” theories are bandied about, people will exclaim, “Did they really believe THAT? Wow.”

  3. I think its annoying that John Haught evaded your question about whether the world would be different if there were no God, by essentially saying that he couldn’t even imagine that possibility. He basically thinks that nobody should talk about God until they have learned to slyly evade questions.

  4. Sean,

    You were fantastic! I’m a student organizer and public debater and it was almost creepy how much what you said was almost identical to what I’ve written on the subject. I’ve certainly got to look more into what you’ve written.

    I had two take-aways from the discussion. First, David Greggory seemed to think that Hawking has just come up with atheism. He seemed to have no idea how long and how in depth this kind of discussion has already been going on and how little impact Hawking’s statements will have.

    Second, no one pushed the theologian on Christian doctrine. Haught seemed to be touting Tillich’s version of god, which is fine, but the elephant in the room is how he draws a line from God as existence itself to believing that the human son of God was born of a virgin, suffered under Pontius Pilate, crucified, died, and was buried, and rose again after 3 days to purge all who believe in him of sin. This certainly falls under the category of a historical, scientific claim for which there is no reliable evidence. So much for NOMA.

  5. @ 179, Ben Zalisko,

    ” This certainly falls under the category of a historical, scientific claim for which there is no reliable evidence.”

    Actually, check out this lecture by Dr. Peter Williams entitled “New Evidences the Gospels were Based on Eyewitness Accounts” using some nifty arguments and some statistics.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5Ylt1pBMm8

    It’s very interesting! Of course, I’m not sure if this constitutes reliable evidence (probably not). 🙂

    But if you really want to learn how the God you mentioned can be compatible with the ideas in the Gospels, check out some highly regarded theologians, such as Thomas Aquinas, and others. That is, if you care to learn about this in more detail (rather than be satisfied with your incomplete view of the relations between God and Christianity).

  6. I just watched about the last 20 minutes of the show, so maybe I missed something, but I have a question. If there was no time in the universe’s initial state, then how could anything ever change? It seems to me that for anything to change at all there must be some kind of time.

  7. But if you really want to learn how the God you mentioned can be compatible with the ideas in the Gospels, check out some highly regarded theologians, such as Thomas Aquinas, and others.

    No theololgian, no matter how highly regarded, provides either logic or evidence that the God that they “prove” to exist with logical fallacies and word games is the same God that is in the Bible.

    And “compatibility” can be a pretty broad concept. A “God” that is compatible with being both a person, and not being a person, simply demonstrates that anything is “compatible” with a logical contradiction, or with making stuff up.

  8. I remember Hawking and other scientists saying that the laws of physics break down in the extremes of black holes and certainly in singularities like the Big Bang. If so, then there isn’t much physical basis to go on in ruling in or out a Creator for the universe (or multiverse). In particular, very little basis for the claim in the program that at the Big Bang time ‘stops’ or had no ‘before’, a result which is derived from theoretical equations (not saying that time does not slow down in a gravitational field, treated classically). For indeed, even in relativity you can have two different times: proper time and improper times as measured by other reference frame. (And what of the time within the larger multiverse?)

    Also, it is possible that time too has its own “quantum fluctuations” since we really can’t say that Delta-t is exactly zero, according to the uncertainty principle — esp. in small enough scales where quantum effects ought to be allowed (so far as we know). And finally (sorry to bore you!), I’m most unpersuaded by arguments about creation or existing out of “nothing” – which to me point to a semantic problem than an actual empirical one.

    Anyway, thanks Sean for your insights and the fair way by which you treated the issue.

  9. @vel, I didn’t mean it that way. I am a long time supporter of Sean and fight against religious fanaticism and belief in the super natural.

  10. @andyo: I’m not interested in talking to someone who thinks he knows better than I what I am saying. I’ve made my position very clear in my comments; it’s a lot more nuanced than this atheists vs. believers world view that you are trying to force on everything.

  11. Farhad, why do you find it necessary to “fight against” religious beliefs? I am not a believer but I find no desire to fight anyone or anything when it comes to religious beliefs….everyone is entitled their opinion.

  12. I would like to know what Sean said at the end that he says was cut out of the program.

  13. “”John Says:
    August 7th, 2011 at 6:34 pm “”

    Dear John,

    That is the best reply I’ve heard on this forum! That is so true! Virtual particles are nothing more than a theory. Where is the proof of them? How can atheists demand proof of God when they haven’t even supplied proof that He can’t exist.

    I’m sorry to stay Stephen Hawking is about as stuck up a physicist as one can get. He always HAD to mention that he shared the same Cambridge Math Chair as Isaac Newton. What a stuck up arsewipe, no wonder he’s an atheist; he believes he’s above everybody, even God.

    LOL!

  14. In chapter 3 of Hawking’s famous book A Brief History of Time, he said:

    “In fact, all our theories of science are formulated on the assumption that space­time is smooth and nearly fiat, so they break down at the big bang singularity, where the curvature of space­time is infinite.”

    As such he would seem to have very little physical basis to make the conclusions he made regarding time at the singularity. So no one knows — we are still far behind in possession solid knowledge on this frontier (though we have many theories).

  15. Samuel Prime says:

    Also, it is possible that time too has its own “quantum fluctuations” since we really can’t say that Delta-t is exactly zero, according to the uncertainty principle — esp. in small enough scales where quantum effects ought to be allowed (so far as we know).

    Indeed, I am not sure modern theories of physics forbid more than a single dimension of time, either. Going with the modern flow, if the math permits it, it must exist! :-^

    But more seriously, I think any God figure would probably exist not just in at least one additional dimension of space, but also an extra dimension of time (at least one) most likely perpendicular to the one in which we live.

  16. Virtual particles are nothing more than a theory. Where is the proof of them?

    You could look it up. Virtual particles.

    How can atheists demand proof of God when they haven’t even supplied proof that He can’t exist.

    You can’t supply proof that Santa Claus “can’t” exist, or the Easter Bunny, or any nonsense ever dreamed up by humans.

    If you believe in Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny, or all of the nonsense ever dreamed up by humans, simply on the basis that no “proof” that they can’t exist has been supplied, then you’re a moron.

    If you believe in God on the basis that no “proof” that God can’t exist has been supplied, but not in any of the other nonsense, you’re a moron and a hypocrite.

  17. But more seriously, I think any God figure would probably exist not just in at least one additional dimension of space, but also an extra dimension of time (at least one) most likely perpendicular to the one in which we live.

    Lovely. So in order to conjecture an invisible person with magical superpowers, you still need to conjecture some sort of time and space and meta-laws existing anyway.

    Why not conjecture the time and space and meta-laws, and cut God out?

  18. “You can’t supply proof that Santa Claus “can’t” exist, or the Easter Bunny, or any nonsense ever dreamed up by humans.”

    If you believe in Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny, or all of the nonsense ever dreamed up by humans, simply on the basis that no “proof” that they can’t exist has been supplied, then you’re a moron.

    If you believe in God on the basis that no “proof” that God can’t exist has been supplied, but not in any of the other nonsense, you’re a moron and a hypocrite.

    A thousand years of philosophy says that I’m not a moron. Sure, go ahead rely on the atheist’s crutch, the Dawkins Easter Bunny/Zeus quote, but I’ll stick with pure reason and say that nothing physicists have revealed about the natural world contradicts the Grand Designer. In fact, that’s my point exactly. Science has nothing to say about religion, except that a few bad men have ruined atheists’ views of religion during the Enlightenment era. I won’t stop until Stephen Hawking himself admits that the reason he’s an atheist is because of a personal vendetta with the Watchmaker.

  19. A thousand years of philosophy says that I’m not a moron.

    A thousand years of philosophy is not proof that you’re not a moron.

    Sure, go ahead rely on the atheist’s crutch, the Dawkins Easter Bunny/Zeus quote

    It has nothing to do with Dawkins, for pity’s sake. It’s called argument by analogy. If you don’t know what an analogy is, you have no business claiming that you’re not a moron. If you think that Dawkins was the first to come up with analogies, or with analogies like that, you’re definitely a moron.

    Good grief.

    I’ll stick with pure reason

    Hah!

    and say that nothing physicists have revealed about the natural world contradicts the Grand Designer.

    That’s not “pure” reason. That’s rejecting reason.

    You want to believe in a “Grand Designer”, despite having no evidence for this alleged “Grand Designer”, so you believe in spite of the evidence, and in spite of reason.

    Science has nothing to say about religion

    Whenever religion makes empirical claims, science can say something about those claims.

    I won’t stop until Stephen Hawking himself admits that the reason he’s an atheist is because of a personal vendetta with the Watchmaker.

    Hahaha!

    OK, you’re not just a moron, you’re completely nuts.

    You want a cosmologist to admit that he’s got a “vendetta” against some imaginary being that only exists inside your own head?

  20. @ #182, Owlmirror:

    “No theololgian, no matter how highly regarded, provides either logic or evidence that the God that they “prove” to exist with logical fallacies and word games is the same God that is in the Bible. ”

    And how do you know this? Have you read any of there works? Is the only valid logic mathematical and scientific logic? Obviously, these theologians are basing their arguments and logic on premises. I wasn’t saying that these theologians can prove that God exists, only that it is possible that IF such a God exists, it can be the Christian God as described in the Gospels.

    “And “compatibility” can be a pretty broad concept. A “God” that is compatible with being both a person, and not being a person, simply demonstrates that anything is “compatible” with a logical contradiction, or with making stuff up.”

    Excellent point. This point, and the teaching of the Trinity, is dealt with in great detail in Thomas Aquinas’ works, such as the Summa Theologia. I suggest you pick up a copy and read through the parts that deal with the Trinity if you want to know more about how the two concept CAN coexist. But be warned, reading through that stuff is not for the faint of heart, so give yourself some time and an open mind. 🙂

    Cheers!

  21. And how do you know this? Have you read any of there works?

    Their works. Yes, I have read some of Augustine, Aquinas, Anselm, Ockham, Plantinga, Craig, Swinburne, Gödel…

    Is the only valid logic mathematical and scientific logic?

    Well, logic does need to be sound in addition to be valid.

    Obviously, these theologians are basing their arguments and logic on premises.

    On utterly ludicrous premises.

    Hey, I can base an argument and logic on the premise that wishes are horses, and logically conclude that beggers can ride.

    But that doesn’t mean that the premise is true, or even sane.

    I wasn’t saying that these theologians can prove that God exists, only that it is possible that IF such a God exists, it can be the Christian God as described in the Gospels.

    Right. They wave their tiny hands and make believe that that’s enough of an “argument” to reach the conclusion that they want to reach.

    Hey, it’s also possible that IF such a God exists, it can be Santa Claus as described in The Night Before Christmas. Or it can be Zeus as described in Hesiod’s Theogony. Or they can be the Elder Gods as described in Lovecraft’s Mythos stories. Or it can be a one-eyed one-horned flying purple people eater, described in The Purple People Eater.

    Because anything is “possible” if you don’t actually care about grounding your premises on empirical fact.

    This point, and the teaching of the Trinity, is dealt with in great detail in Thomas Aquinas’ works, such as the Summa Theologia.

    Why is Aquinas waving his tiny hands better than anyone else waving their tiny hands? Oh, right, because you like the Christian myth, and you want to believe in it. That makes so much sense.

    Pfft.

    I suggest you pick up a copy and read through the parts that deal with the Trinity if you want to know more about how the two concept CAN coexist. But be warned, reading through that stuff is not for the faint of heart, so give yourself some time and an open mind.

    Please. Aquinas cannot make his nonsense plausible unless you presuppose it being true — just like any other believer in any other mythology.

  22. I suggest you pick up a copy and read through the parts that deal with the Trinity if you want to know more about how the two concept CAN coexist. But be warned, reading through that stuff is not for the faint of heart, so give yourself some time and an open mind.

    ..and wouldn’t you know it, I was right. Here’s Aquinas on the Trinity. All he does is throw away out all of the garbage logic that he used to conclude that God is this incredibly abstract and practically meaningless entity, and start using the garbage logic of quote-mining scripture and pre-existing theololgical presuppositions.

    He’s waving his tiny hands, and making exactly as much sense as a classical Greek using the same sort of argumentation to say that well, you wouldn’t think that Zeus would turn himself into a swan in order to have sex with someone, but the myths say that Zeus turned himself into a swan to have sex with Leda, so it must be that Zeus can indeed turn himself into a swan to have sex with someone.

    It’s utterly ludicrous nonsense, and it’s ludicrous that anyone takes that nonsense seriously.

  23. @andyo,

    You know, reading over your comments again, it’s clear to me that you really don’t have a good understanding of how science or the scientific method works. I wonder, are you a scientist? I have been one for 20+ years, so let me give you the skinny: Science does not place any restrictions on what constitutes a valid hypothesis. This is a good thing and again, one of the reasons that science has been so successful. Your hypothesis could be that God exists, that little green men live on Mars … whatever the hell you wish to investigate. The one thing that your hypothesis must be, however, is testable; you must be able to make predictions, collect evidence to confirm these, and provide enough information so that others can reproduce your results. If you cannot do this, then your hypothesis has no hope of being accepted as science, even if your name is Stephen Hawking.

    You, for whatever reason, do not appear to believe in God. Maybe you don’t believe because you’ve seen no evidence to support the claim that God exists, maybe you have other reasons. Whatever your reasons, that is your choice. You seem to feel that Hawking’s hypothesis is a better explanation of the origin of the universe than God. Do you feel this way because of science? Do you understand the science that Hawking is basing his claim on … even a little? You are certainly free to value Hawking’s explanation above one that invokes God, but if you do so that has NOTHING TO DO WITH SCIENCE, because “science” has not yet vetted Hawking’s claims.

    As a scientist, I was trained to keep an open mind. I see no value in trying to convince someone to adopt a view that I hold for which I HAVE NO EVIDENCE. If I want to convince the general public that a world view based on science is better than one founded on religion, I’m going use actual science, not speculation that has yet to be proven.

  24. Owlmirror,

    You’re acting way too hostile to me. You’re a complete waste of my time. And since when was Godel a Christian theologian anyway? You probably NEVER read any of the writings of those theologians. Have a good night.

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