Hawking's Godless Universe
abracad, · Categories: in the news, purpose, science and spiritualityor Why do Seagulls Exist?
The BBC reports English physicist Professor Stephen Hawking's latest book The Grand Design concluding there is no place for God in theories on the creation of the Universe, with Big Bang merely an inevitable consequence of the laws of physics. Hawking says there is no need to invoke God to set the Universe going, "Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something."
I have enormous respect for Prof. Hawking who, despite suffering Motor neurone (Lou Gehrig's) disease, has become a leading cosmologist and made theoretical physics accessible to the masses through classic bestsellers such as a Brief History of Time. However, I am inclined to suggest that the existence or otherwise of God is a matter that science is ill-equipped to answer. There is a limit or hidden layer beyond which the tools of science cannot penetrate; eg even if existence is an inevitable consequence of the laws of physics one might ask how those laws came about in the first place?
Perhaps coincidentally (as these things happen and as kids do) while feeding the seagulls near our house today my daughter asked what is the purpose for seagulls' existence. They hatch, grow, live, possibly reproduce, and inevitably die and so the cycle repeats itself - but why?
As all too often I found myself struggling to answer the question, for we cannot know for certain the reason why seagulls exist. Perhaps they have no purpose at all and, like us, they are mere products of chance in an infinitely vast possibility space? Or are they stages on a "Darwinian journey" towards a perfect gull? Maybe they, and we, are part of some grand plan by the universal source to seek evermore experience? Or does all life exist solely to maximize its pleasure? We cannot know.
But we can invoke a variant of Pascal's Wager and, on the basis that we might have some reason for being, make the effort to both discover and fulfill the purpose of our life. In so doing we have nothing to lose but everything to gain, not to mention the moral dimension introduced by the "something beyond science" perspective.
I wish Prof. Hawking every success in his exploration of the origins of the physical universe, ie his purpose, but respectfully suggest there might be some deeper Spiritual purpose to our physical existence.
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In this book Stephen Hawking reveals the motivation behind the attempt to get closer and closer to the physics at the time of the big bang. To draw the precise conclusion that this article mentions. The determinist theory of how the universe began, even were it accurate, would point to something outside the universe to provide the initial conditions. Knowledge is always relative, never absolute, and only earthly idols can temporarily convince people otherwise with the intimidating fruits of a lifetime of scientific study. Such focused life-time study requires a dogmatic motivation, so that Stephen Hawking should choose now to make claims of this kind, to try and secure his legacy as a social idol does not surprise me at all.