When prejudice beats I.Q.

Michele Ramarini · Apr 14 · Medium.com

Prof. Stephen Hawking needs no introduction. As a theoretical physicist and cosmologist, he significantly contributed to our knowledge of the universe. Besides being a huge bestseller, his A Brief History of Time was my first acquaintance with cosmology many years ago.

The God Hypothesis

And yet, the late professor had a blind spot when it came to the “God Hypothesis”. I am calling it that way on purpose because I am not going to talk about religion, spirituality, or any man-made image of the “Heavenly Father”. his piece is about philosophy, with the meaning of rational thinking and argumentation.

Hawking’s Atheism

Prof. Hawking’s atheism is well-known. He never shied away from stating his disbelief in the existence of a creator of the universe. Sadly, he did not stop at expressing a personal belief, to which we are all entitled in one way or the other:

“We are each free to believe what we want and it is my view that the simplest explanation is there is no God.”

He added seemingly apodictic assertions (affirmations that are considered beyond dispute, being self-evident or necessary), which cannot be disproven but cannot be proven true either:

“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.”

And fell in a trap of his own making by uttering a platitude accompanied by a misrepresentation:

“Before we understand science, it is natural to believe that God created the universe. But now science offers a more convincing explanation.”

Sorry, Prof. Hawking. Not so fast.

The Grand Design

My rejection of Prof. Hawking’s views about God is based on one of his later works, The Grand Design, a book entirely dedicated to demonstrating that the laws of physics alone explain the origins of the universe, making the “God Hypothesis” superfluous.

Referring to questions such as: “What is the nature of reality? Where did all this come from? Did the universe need a creator?”, Hawking writes:

Traditionally these are questions for philosophy, but philosophy is dead. Philosophy has not kept up with modern developments in science, particularly physics. Scientists have become the bearers of the torch of discovery in our quest for knowledge. (p. 13)

Already in the second paragraph of the book, Prof. Hawking shows us how little appreciation he has for a field of knowledge that happens to be outside of his professional expertise.

Claiming that “philosophy is dead” is not only offensive to legions of philosophers and Philosophy students, who could all explain to him that philosophy is alive and well. It is also false. Philosophy is so well, in fact, that any freshman in the discipline should be able to identify no less than two blunders in that segment alone.

Is Philosophy Dead?

First, Prof. Hawking declares philosophy dead, not realizing that his endeavor is eminently philosophical by nature. Trying to prove that the laws of physics explain the existence of the universe is philosophy (dare I say metaphysics?), even when some very famous and very respected physicist believes it is science. Any scientific investigation back in time can only go as far as the Big Bang, never beyond it — note how I wrote beyond, and not before, a term that would instantly trigger physicists and materialists to overreact — where there is no natural world to research.

Second, he makes a serious mistake of epistemology: Prof. Hawking seems to imply that there is only one form of knowledge, the one he masters. That is not the case. We must establish a critical distinction: Physics (as well as all science) does not deal with the same kind of knowledge that is the realm of philosophy. Physics deals with facts, physical objects,and natural laws; philosophy deals with meanings and actions. Science studies the natural world as it presents itself to us and tries to identify the laws that govern it; philosophy studies something different entirely. One definition I like, by the Department of Philosophy of a U.S. university, is as follows:

“Philosophy is an activity people undertake when they seek to understand fundamental truths about themselves, the world in which they live, and their relationships to the world and to each other.”

Philosophy or Science?

Let me expound on this a little. One of the keenest minds of all time, the 18th-century Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kant, thus articulated the three questions philosophy was called to answer: What can I know? What must I do? What may I hope? None of those questions can be answered by physics, nor by science as a whole. Not even the first of the three, despite it seemingly having to do with knowing the phenomenal (physical) world.

Kant himself explained why in his Critique of Pure Reason (1781). Our knowledge’s boundaries are not those imagined by Hawking (telescopes, microscopes, mathematical calculations, bright minds like his own, etc.), but those constitutive of what we are as humans. For example, any knowledge of the world we may ever achieve will always be mediated by our senses; there is no way around it. Hence, we cannot know a world beyond the sensible one and have no way of knowing if such a world — a supersensible world — does indeed exist. Can science refute the existence of such a world? No, and religious beliefs have nothing to do with it. Pure reason is all it takes.

There is another point to clarify that is often misunderstood by laymen. Science is not a doctrine, let alone a collection of truths. If it were, it would be awkwardly similar to a religious cult, wouldn’t it? Science is a method of investigation of the natural world, where natural is the defining word; it is called the scientific method for a reason.

M-Theory

It would be impossible to summarize the content of Hawking’s book in the space of a post. Luckily, it won’t be necessary. To achieve this piece’s aim, it will suffice to reject the authors’ conclusions, which I shall do shortly.

The body of the book consists of citations from ancient philosophers, creation myths, historical anecdotes, and, above all, Hawking’s introduction to the M-theory, a “network of theories” (p. 77) which he considers “the only candidate for a complete theory of the universe” (p. 228)

“According to M-theory, ours is not the only universe. Instead, M-theory predicts that a great many universes were created out of nothing. Their creation does not require the intervention of some supernatural being or god. Rather, these multiple universes arise naturally from physical law. They are a prediction of science. (p. 18)”

Unfortunately, what seems to escape the authors of this book is that anything they describe is not creation. It is something that follows creation, whatever meaning you want to give that loaded word. That’s not a scientific observation but a logical inference. And it is decisive.

Conclusion and Refutation

This is the authors’ conclusion, as expressed towards the end of the book:

Because there is a law like gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing in the manner described in Chapter 6. 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. (p. 227)

The whole paragraph is highly problematic from a philosophical standpoint. It is based on two colossal logical fallacies, and it leaves no doubt about how flawed the authors’ reasoning is.

1. The authors would like us to believe that the “universe can and will create itself from nothing”. If we use Aristotle’s model of the four causes, we are supposed to believe that the universe is the efficient cause of itself. It is literally the same as asking us to believe that we can pull ourselves up by our bootstraps. Did that ever work?
2. The authors aren’t really advocating for a universe that created itself from nothing, either. First, “there is a law like gravity”. How clever. Yet, a natural law is not nothing; it is something. May I also point out that there cannot be any natural law in the absence of a universe? What we call nature emerges with the Big Bang. Talking about laws of nature in the absence of nature — i.e. the universe — does not make any sense. Put another way: The word gravity comes from the Latin word gravitas, which substantivizes the adjective gravis, which means heavy. Referring to gravity in the absence of objects with mass, on which the force of gravity would act, is patently absurd.

Gravity as the Creator

To sum it up: In Hawking’s magical world, the universe is the efficient cause of itself, and gravity works in the void — possibly a quantum vacuum state, which is still something, not nothing — without any objects on which to exercise its force. How this bizarre explanation, that is anything but scientific (for starters, it is not falsifiable, like any other theory that tries to go beyond the so-called Big Bang), is in any way superior to the idea of a creator — which, of course, would need to be postulated as being eternal, existing outside of time and space, to avoid the contradictions of Hawking’s model — remains unsolved.

To be clear: I am not alone in finding fault in Hawking’s theory of “spontaneous creation”. Physicists and philosophers alike have criticized this approach, sometimes in harsh terms.

Paul Davies wrote: “The multiverse comes with a lot of baggage, such as an overarching space and time to host all those bangs, a universe-generating mechanism to trigger them, physical fields to populate the universes with material stuff, and a selection of forces to make things happen. Cosmologists embrace these features by envisaging sweeping “meta-laws” that pervade the multiverse and spawn specific bylaws on a universe-by-universe basis. The meta-laws themselves remain unexplained — eternal, immutable transcendent entities that just happen to exist and must simply be accepted as given. In that respect, the meta-laws have a similar status to an unexplained transcendent god.”

Final Thoughts

It is the lack of an agent operating outside the laws of nature to make every model of creation conceived by atheists so murky. In getting rid of the “God Hypothesis”, Prof. Hawking is left with a “Gravity Hypothesis”. But a law has no agency, and it does not seem plausible that it might “create” anything. Furthermore, a natural law outside or before nature is a contradictory concept. But that’s philosophy, and Prof. Hawking shows little sign of understanding this discipline.

I don’t know if something that resembles the most common definitions of God exists, and neither did Stephen Hawking. What I do know is that Prof. Hawking’s attempt at explaining the coming into existence of our universe by way of “spontaneous creation” is at the very least unconvincing. Speaking of the origin of the universe and why and how the so-called Big Bang occurred, “we don’t know” is the only honest answer.

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Thanks to Jon Hawkins. 

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Michele Ramarini

Politics, society, religion. Unceremoniously.

The Apeiron Blog

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