Well, it appears as though another prominent British intellectual has weighed in on the question of God. This time Stephen Hawking who's probably the best-known
scientist in the world. In a book that's due to come out the very week the pope arrives in England
he's announced that the universe requires no creator. It just struck me as interesting I suppose
there's no intelligent design behind that little arrangement of publication date.
The book on atheism as the pope arrives, but that's commentary bearing for another day
I
must confess something in me always tightens when a
scientist
pontificates about matters properly philosophical or religious. See, there's a qualitative difference between
science and philosophy.
Science seeks after
events and objects and phenomena within the empirically observable and measurable universe. That's the proper purview of science.
Philosophy and Religion seek after
ultimate and final causes.
Science as such simply cannot adjudicate questions that lie outside of its proper purview. Which is precisely why
scientists end up saying a lot of silly things when they talk about philosophy and religion. I'll give you now a good example
I was reading a lot of the articles that have appeared about this book and they give some excerpts. Here's one of them,
from Hawking himself.
Because there's a law such as gravity the universe can and will create itself from nothing.
Well first of all here's the confusion in my mind which is it, Dr. Hawking, is it gravity or is it nothing?
It's quite a difference between the two. If you mean as many have said the universe just
spontaneously creates itself out of nothing, I can only throw up my hands. To look at the universe in all of its
wild and radical complexity and all of its stunning
mathematical
complexity, to say simply all of that came spontaneously
from nothing strikes me as as ludicrous.
There's a adage from the class philosophical tradition. Which is actually hard to improve upon. It says: Ex nihilo nihil fit.
From nothing comes nothing.
If a
teacher heard this from a student who was trying to explain some phenomenon within nature: Oh, it
just happened, it just spontaneously
popped into being. I'd be willing to bet that professor would be pretty unhappy that answer, yet yet when it comes to
the most compelling and the most fascinating question of all why is there something rather than nothing,
we're expected to find that answer
rationally satisfying now.
You know I can only smile because I come up against us a lot in my dialogues with atheists.
When you really push the question you really press the question of where's the universe come from, almost
Inevitably you'll come to this point where they say: Well, it just happened.
Something, meaning the whole of the universe, just came from nothing.
Chris the reason I smile is I'm supposed to be the avatar of medieval superstition.
I'm supposed to be the one defending old pre-scientific views of the world and yet it seems to take a
[creator] leap of Faith to say there's a God, than to say
something came from nothing.
The latter proposition strikes me as far more unreasonable than the first.
Okay, let's say Hawking means
the other side of it if I go back to his I think rather
incoherent statement. Let's say, gravity is the ultimate cause of the universe.
Some force within nature is identified as the ultimate cause of all things of the being of the universe.
Now this does have a long philosophical pedigree going back to the
pre-Socratic philosophers who were trying to find the building block of reality and they would say things like it was Earth
or it was water, it was fire,
it was, it was prime matter that, you know, gave rise to all things.
But as philosophy moved forward and as the influence of the religions was felt, the question became more refined.
Because this question about the universe:
'Why is there something rather than nothing' is not a quest for something within the universe.
Not a quest after one particular cause, it's asking after the very being of the universe.
'Why is there something and rather not nothing' as a way Heidegger put it.
Now,
here we have to look along this line.
What explains
the contingency of the world?
Technical philosophical way of saying:
the fact of the world and things in the world do not explain themselves.
So you and I are contingent. Why we had parents, we eat and drink, we breathe. All signs that we don't contain within ourselves
the reason of our own existence. We're non self-explanatory. Okay, so we have to look for extrinsic causes.
Let's say they're contingent. They too depend on forces outside themselves. We haven't found our answer yet, so we appeal further and
further and further.
What you can't do is appeal
infinitely or indefinitely to other contingent things
because then you have not found what you're looking for, which is to explain our own existence or the existence of the universe today.
What you have to come to, Catholic Philosophy says, is some reality
which is non-contingent,
which does
carry within itself
the very reason for its own existence.
That whose very nature is
to be. And this is precisely what Catholic philosophy identifies as God.
God is the
non-contingent ground of contingency. Now, one more step.
That whose very nature is to be
cannot be limited or
imperfect in its being because its very nature is to be, to exist. It must therefore be
the fullness of existence.
Nothing bought existence and now again you see why we identify it with God it must be that which is properly
unlimited in its being.
What it can't be is some finite and finally contingent for us within the universe.
Gravity is indeed an impressive
law an impressive force, an impressive power.
But gravity is finite.
Gravity is variable. Gravity in itself is not
that which exists through the power of its own
essence and it's ludicrous to suggest that anything like it within the universe is
itself the cause of the being of the universe.
There's a line I came across in one of the articles about Hawking's book and
it was it was illuminating. Maybe despite itself. Here's what the author said:
'In his new book The Grand Design
Hawking sets out a comprehensive thesis that the scientific framework leaves no room for a deity.'
I'm sure he meant that to imply that science proves there's no God. But, see, I would say that's quite right.
The scientific framework means that epistemological
purview that takes in
the world of our experience, the world that we can measure, that we can observe.
It is indeed right to say within that framework
I'm not going to find a deity. Why? Because God is not a being.
God is not one reality among many.
God is not a force within the observable measurable cosmos.
So it's quite right to say: Science qua science is not going to find God. Think of that
famous
cosmonaut it went up into into outer space back in the late 50s.
'I'm up here in the heavens', he said, 'and there's no God.' Well, come on. No one thinks
God is a being you're going to find or force you're going to find within the universe.
The problem here is something I pointed to before which is
scientism -
the tendency to reduce all legitimate knowledge to the scientific form of knowledge. If
science can't get it, it's not real. Now, that's scientism. That's problematic.
You see it very clearly on display in the so-called New Atheists. Look at Christopher Hitchens, look at Daniel Dennett, look
Sam Harris. You'll find over and over again. The reduction of knowledge to
scientific knowledge.
What I found actually kind of
disappointing and disconcerting is that Stephen Hawking, maybe the greatest scientist in the world, has succumbed precisely to this problem.