Last week, world-renowned physicist Stephen Hawking addressed legions of enthusiastic students and others at Caltech.\u00a0 According to reports, the gist of his speech was that \u201cgeneral relativity\u201d and \u201cquantum theory\u201d can enable us to account for the origins of the universe without <\/i>positing the existence of God.<\/p>\n
According to The Daily Mail, Hawking ridiculed the religious position on this topic by likening it to the myth of an obscure African tribe whose God \u201cvomited the Sun, Moon, and stars.\u201d\u00a0 He further mocked the traditional theistic explanation of the world\u2019s beginnings by referring back to an exchange that Martin Luther is said to have had with a younger man who ventured to discover what God was doing \u201cbefore\u201d He decided to create the universe.\u00a0 \u201cWas he preparing Hell for people who asked such questions?\u201d\u00a0 \u201cSuch questions,\u201d Hawking maintained, are nonsense.<\/p>\n
As Christians have noted for the better part of 2,000 years, they are indeed nonsensical.\u00a0 Hawking would have known this had he, say, read St. Augustine\u2019s Confessions<\/i>\u2014a Western classic that supplies us with an analysis of time that secular and religious thinkers alike acknowledge remains unrivaled for its insights.\u00a0 Yet this is the problem: Hawking, not unlike most scientists who have made a splash in the popular culture, seems to be almost scandalously ignorant of the philosophical and theological literature that defines his civilization.<\/p>\n
Augustine conceded long ago that the question, \u201cWhat was God doing before He created the world?\u201d is fundamentally misplaced.\u00a0 He knew what Hawking now knows: the world did not come to be in time<\/i>, but, rather, time is an aspect or dimension of the world.\u00a0 Thus, since \u201cbefore\u201d is a temporal word, there was no \u201cbefore\u201d God created the world, for there was no time until God created it.<\/p>\n
As far as the idea of God puking up the universe is concerned, Christians (along with Jews and Muslims, for that matter) have always found this as primitive and repugnant a conception as does Hawking.\u00a0 Again, it is shameful that he apparently doesn\u2019t know this, for it is elementary.<\/p>\n
Unlike, say, Hindus and ancient Greeks, Christians staunchly deny that the universe \u201cemanated\u201d from God, or that God brought it into being from some \u201cstuff\u201d that already existed.\u00a0 And, of course, they just as stanchly deny that God is a physical being, a body.\u00a0 Yet this is all that is implied in Hawking\u2019s metaphor of the god of his African tribe.<\/p>\n
For the Christian, the world is not contemporaneous with God, the way a person is contemporaneous with his shadow, say, or the bile in his stomach.\u00a0 Rather, God is the Supreme Being, immaterial and, thus, invisible, who created the world out of nothing. <\/i><\/p>\n
In fact, ironically, it is precisely because of the belief that the world is the product of an all-good God that science has soared to such heights as it has.\u00a0 In the absence of this Christian doctrine, it is much more likely than not that science itself would have been absent from the West.\u00a0\u00a0 It is the idea that the material cosmos, by virtue of being the handiwork of the Perfect Architect, is both real and good that the universe was deemed an eminently worthwhile object of investigation.<\/p>\n
If not for this \u201creligious position,\u201d there would have been no science\u2014and no Stephen Hawking.<\/p>\n
There is a final point.\u00a0 As Christian (and other) thinkers have noted for centuries and centuries, the universe is not self-explanatory.\u00a0 Hawking might agree, which is why, I think, he has theorized that our universe is but one universe among an infinite number of such universes.\u00a0 But this line only pushes the problem back a step.<\/p>\n
First, since \u201cthe universe\u201d is but a short-hand term for everything or all things, to speak of infinite universes is like speaking of infinite everythings, or limitless all things.\u00a0 Neither logically nor grammatically does it seem to make much sense.<\/p>\n
However, the bigger obstacle to Hawking\u2019s view is philosophical or theological.\u00a0 Let\u2019s just suppose that there is more than one universe.\u00a0 So what?\u00a0 The basic question over which atheists and theists have been clashing from time immemorial is: Why is there something rather than nothing?<\/p>\n
Hawking never states the question this directly\u2014and for good reason.<\/p>\n
Whether there is one universe or an infinite number of universes, nothing composed of parts\u2014as the universe is\u2014is self-explanatory. In other words, to explain the universe or universes, we must go beyond <\/i>them.<\/p>\n
Why is X here?\u00a0 Unfortunately, for the Hawkings of the world, it is logically illicit to answer this by pointing to X itself.<\/p>\n
Hawking may be a great scientist, but he is a lousy philosopher\u2014and an even worse theologian.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Last week, world-renowned physicist Stephen Hawking addressed legions of enthusiastic students and others at Caltech.\u00a0 According to reports, the gist of his speech was that \u201cgeneral relativity\u201d and \u201cquantum theory\u201d can enable us to account for the origins of the universe without positing the existence of God. According to The Daily Mail, Hawking ridiculed the…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":399,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-828","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n