The world’s smartest scientist says there is no god. Or, at least, no need for one.
God did not create the universe and the “Big Bang” was an inevitable consequence of the laws of physics, the eminent British theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking argues in a new book.
In “The Grand Design,” co-authored with U.S. physicist Leonard Mlodinow, Hawking says a new series of theories made a creator of the universe redundant, according to the Times newspaper which published extracts on Thursday.
“Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist,” Hawking writes. “It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going.”
Hawking, 68, who won global recognition with his 1988 book “A Brief History of Time,” an account of the origins of the universe, is renowned for his work on black holes, cosmology and quantum gravity. Since 1974, the scientist has worked on marrying the two cornerstones of modern physics — Albert Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity, which concerns gravity and large-scale phenomena, and quantum theory, which covers subatomic particles.
His latest comments suggest he has broken away from previous views he has expressed on religion. Previously, he wrote that the laws of physics meant it was simply not necessary to believe that God had intervened in the Big Bang. He wrote in A Brief History … “If we discover a complete theory, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason — for then we should know the mind of God.” In his latest book, he said the 1992 discovery of a planet orbiting another star other than the Sun helped deconstruct the view of the father of physics Isaac Newton that the universe could not have arisen out of chaos but was created by God. “That makes the coincidences of our planetary conditions — the single Sun, the lucky combination of Earth-Sun distance and solar mass, far less remarkable, and far less compelling evidence that the Earth was carefully designed just to please us human beings,” he writes.
Aside from pumping up book sales, which one presumes irrelevant to a man of Hawking’s stature, I’m not sure what purpose such declarations serve.
Now, I happen to think Hawking is right and have long thought that a creator was not only implausible but served little explanatory value. At very least, it sparks obvious questions about how the creator came to be. And, if one believes in an omnipresent, omnipotent one, all manner of other questions.
Still, the existence of such a being defies falsification. Science simply can not prove that there is no god. So, declarations by scientists that there is no such being — or statements that will be touted that way by journalists and talk show hosts — simply serve to alienate believers from science — 99.99999% of which can co-exist with religious belief without issue — or, worse, reinforce the belief that science is some sort of anti-religion with its own dogmas.
This story, and the fallout from it, will convince no one who now believes in an all-powerful Creator otherwise. But it will convince some of those people that science is their enemy. Why is that a good thing?
