God and Stephen Hawking 2ND EDITION

Whose Design is it Anyway?

John C Lennox

• Publisher: Lion Books
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780745980980
• eBook ISBN: 9780745980997
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

"It is a grandiose claim to have banished God. With such a lot at stake we surely need to ask Hawking to produce evidence to establish his claim. Do his arguments really stand up to close scrutiny? I think we have a right to know."

The Grand Design and Brief Answers to Big Questions by eminent scientist the late Stephen Hawking were blockbusting contributions to the science religion debate. They claimed it was the laws of physics themselves which brought the universe into being, rather than any God. In this forthright response, John Lennox, Oxford University mathematician and internationally-known apologist, takes a closer look at Hawking's logic and questions his conclusions.

In lively, layman's terms, Lennox guides us through the key points in Hawking's arguments – with clear explanations of the latest scientific and philosophical methods and theories – and demonstrates that far from disproving a Creator God, they make his existence seem all the more probable.

1 The big questions

Stephen Hawking and I arrived in Cambridge at the same time in October 1962. I had come to start my undergraduate career in mathematics, and he, having just graduated from Oxford, was starting his research for a PhD. But at this point the resemblance between us ends. For, without doubt, he became the world’s most famous scientist in recent years.

He held the Lucasian Professorship in Cambridge, a chair once occupied by Sir Isaac Newton. Hawking filled this position with great distinction. His academic career was marked by an accolade of honorary degrees from all over the world, and he was made a Companion of Honour by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth.

He was also an outstanding symbol of fortitude, having suffered the ravages of motor neurone (Lou Gehrig) disease for around sixty years. During much of this time he was confined to a wheelchair, his only means of verbal communication being a specially designed electronic voice synthesizer. Its instantly recognizable “voice” was known all over the world.

With many distinguished colleagues and students, Hawking explored the frontiers of mathematical physics, most famously, perhaps, the counter-intuitive mysteries of black holes. His work led to the prediction of “Hawking Radiation”, which, if it had been verified experimentally in his lifetime, would have put him in the running for a Nobel Prize. He died in March 2018, so the work that he began will have to be completed, if it ever is, by someone else.

In 1988, Hawking’s runaway best-seller, A Brief History of Time,⁴ brought the recondite but fascinating world of fundamental physics to the coffee table, although many people have confessed to finding the contents rather beyond them, which has led to the rather unfair description of the book as the “most unread book in history”. It was followed by several others in the same vein, which attempted quite successfully to excite a wider readership with the buzz of great science.

When Hawking began research in the early 1960s, the key question for cosmology was whether or not the universe had a beginning. Not surprisingly, Hawking’s books had much to say about this issue. It was, therefore, inevitable that he should consider the matter of the existence of a Divine Creator of that universe. However, A Brief History of Time left this matter tantalizingly open, by ending with the much-quoted statement that if physicists were to find a “Theory of Everything” (that is, a theory that unified the four fundamental forces of nature: the strong and weak nuclear forces, electromagnetism, and gravity), we would “know the Mind of God”.⁵

However, in his penultimate book in 2010, The Grand Design, co-authored with Leonard Mlodinow, Hawking’s reticence disappeared, and he challenged belief in the divine creation of the universe. According to him it is the laws of physics, not the will of God, that provide the real explanation as to how the universe came into being. The Big Bang, he argues, was the inevitable consequence of these laws: “because there is a law like gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing”.⁶

The title, The Grand Design, will suggest for many people the existence of a Grand Designer, though that is actually what the book is designed to deny. Hawking’s grand conclusion is: “Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist. It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going.”⁷

In this book I wish to engage in the main, not with Hawking’s science, but with what he deduces from it regarding the existence, or rather the non-existence, of God. I wish to be fair to Hawking, and so it is important to say that in his last book he made the following statement: “I don’t have a grudge against God. I do not want to give the impression that my work is about proving or disproving the existence of God. My work is about finding a rational framework to understand the universe around us.”⁸

Two comments on this. Firstly, I would wish to argue to the contrary – that God is actually part of the rational framework that helps us understand the universe. It is an elementary but all too common mistake to think that rationality ends with the natural sciences. History, literature, theology, etc. are all rational disciplines but they are not science. Secondly, in spite of this disclaimer, Hawking argues that science has shown that God is unnecessary. Although this has been hailed by some as ground-breaking thinking, it is not new. In fact, for years other scientists have made similar claims, maintaining that the awesome, sophisticated complexity of the world around us can be interpreted solely by reference to the basic stuff of the universe (mass/energy), or even these days to “nothing” as well as to the physical laws that describe the behaviour of the universe, such as the law of gravity – wherever they came from.

From boyhood, Hawking loved questions. In the eulogy at Hawking’s funeral, his long-time friend and collaborator, Kip Thorne, summed up Hawking’s life by saying: “Newton gave us answers. Hawking gave us questions.”⁹ Here are some of them that he lists at the beginning of The Grand Design: “How can we understand the world in which we find ourselves? How does the universe behave? What is the nature of reality? Where did all this come from? Did the universe need a Creator?”¹⁰ These questions, emanating from such a famous person, excited my imagination with the anticipation of hearing a world-class scientist sharing his insights on some of the profoundest questions of metaphysics. It is, after all, fascinating to listen in on a great mind exploring the philosophical questions that we all ask from time to time.

An inadequate view of philosophy

If that is what we expect we are in for a shock; for, in his very next words, Hawking dismisses philosophy. Referring to his list of questions, he writes: “Traditionally these are questions for philosophy, but philosophy is dead. It has not kept up with modern developments in science, particularly in physics. As a result scientists have become the bearers of the torch of discovery in our quest for knowledge.”¹¹

Apart from the unwarranted hubris of this dismissal of philosophy (a discipline well represented and respected at his own university of Cambridge), it constitutes rather disturbing evidence that at least one scientist, Hawking himself, has not even kept up with philosophy sufficiently to realize that he himself is engaging in it throughout his book. To say that philosophy is dead at the beginning of a book on the philosophy of science is not a very convincing start, to say the least.

Furthermore, come to think about it, Hawking’s statement about philosophy is itself a philosophical statement. It is manifestly not a statement of science: it is a metaphysical statement about science. Therefore, his statement that philosophy is dead contradicts itself. It is a classic example of logical incoherence.

Hawking’s attitude to philosophy contrasts markedly with that of Albert Einstein, in a letter supporting the teaching of history and philosophy of science to physicists:

I fully agree with you about the significance and educational value of methodology as well as history and philosophy of science. So many people today, and even professional scientists, seem to me like someone who has seen thousands of trees but has never seen a forest. A knowledge of the historic and philosophical background gives that kind of independence from prejudices of his generation from which most scientists are suffering. This independence created by philosophical insight is, in my opinion, the mark of distinction between a mere artisan or specialist and a real seeker after truth.¹²

Furthermore, Hawking’s statement that “scientists have become the bearers of the torch of discovery” smacks of scientism – the view that science is the only way to truth. It is a conviction characteristic of that movement in secular thought known as the “New Atheism”, although its ideas were mostly only new in terms of the aggressive way they were presented, and not in their intellectual content.

For any scientist, let alone a science superstar, to disparage philosophy on the one hand, and then at once to adopt a self-contradictory philosophical stance on the other, was not the wisest thing to do.

At the time of the publication of Hawking’s book, the British Astronomer Royal, Lord Rees, said: “Stephen Hawking is a remarkable person whom I’ve known for 40 years and for that reason any oracular statement he makes gets exaggerated publicity. I know Stephen Hawking well enough to know that he has read very little philosophy and even less theology, so I don’t think we should attach any weight to his views on this topic.”¹³

It is important to note that these are the words of a friend and a fellow physicist and cosmologist. They were not said in a fit of pique, but were measured words not intended to detract from Hawking’s scientific brilliance, which was not in question, but to point out the all too frequently ignored fact that expertise in one field is no guarantee of expertise elsewhere. The physics Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman made the same argument rather pointedly: “I believe that a scientist looking at non-scientific problems is just as dumb as the next guy.”¹⁴

The Limits of science

The point here is that “non-scientific” problems are often both rational and important. Not only that, many of them have answers that science is incapable of giving. This means that we need to think about the limits of science.

In order to do so it is important to think about what science is. It turns out that defining science is not easy. However, in his book, The Meaning of It All, Feynman devotes his first chapter to answering the question “What is science?” He writes:

The word is usually used to mean one of three things, or a mixture of them. I do not think we need to be precise – it is not always a good idea to be too precise. Science means, sometimes, a special...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• Contents
• Preface to the First Edition
• Preface to the Second Edition
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: The big questions
• Chapter 2: God or the laws of nature?
• Chapter 3: God or the multiverse?
• Chapter 4: Whose design is it anyway?
• Chapter 5: Science and rationality
• Conclusion