SEPT 8 — Stephen Hawking’s publishers must have thought it would be great publicity for the celebrated physicist to declare that God “is not necessary” last week. And they were probably right.
Publicists know that when famous physicists talk about God, people tend to listen.
In the same vein as the new atheists’ strategic controversy courting — best exemplified by Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and the cancer-fighting Christopher Hitchens — a slew of high profile op-eds in major Fleet Street papers followed on the trail of Hawking’s declaration of divine absence, generating plenty of online and offline chatter in the process.
Mission accomplished then. The stage is set for the landing of The Grand Design, Hawking’s most anticipated popular science book, co-authored with Leonard Mlodinow, and keenly expected to match up to his wildly successful 1988 A Brief History of Time.
As a popular science buff it’s interesting for me to note how Hawking’s language and at one-time almost accommodationist image has shifted today. Formerly, you could almost peg him as a science populariser who was keen to appeal to both sides of Stephen Jay Gould’s “non-overlapping magisteria” of science and religion.
For the longest time, Hawking’s famous ending paragraph to A Brief History of Time — where he used the phrase “mind of God” — made him a darling of the religion and science conciliation brigade. Here it is again in full:
This was much in the same way, incidentally, as Einstein who said, “I cannot believe that God plays dice with the cosmos” on his discomfort with quantum mechanics.
But when asked if he believed in God, Einstein explained: “I believe in Spinoza’s God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with fates and actions of human beings.”
Contrast that with what Hawking has publicly said in more recent years: In 2008 at an evolution gathering at the Vatican which the Pope attended, Hawking said that “the universe is governed by the laws of science. The laws may have been decreed by God, but God does not intervene to break the laws.”
Earlier this year on American TV, he compared religion and science, saying: “There is a fundamental difference between religion, which is based on authority, [and] science, which is based on observation and reason. Science will win because it works.”
It would appear Hawking has gone the whole enchilada in his latest book, saying that the laws of physics can create the universe out of nothing; and that it doesn’t require “God.” For good measure, he also clarifies his previous use of the word as metaphorical and rhetorical.
Clearly, Hawking has dropped all pretences of Albert Einstein’s and Baruch Spinoza’s deist god which he, like many physicists, might have found handy in the past. He has joined the likes of Pierre-Simon Laplace, the 18th century French mathematician and astronomer who, when asked by Napoleon how he could make a detailed model of the solar system and not invoke God, answered: “I had no need of that hypothesis.”
Deist
This, unfortunately is the longstanding issue when scientists in general — especially physicists — talk about God. They very rarely, and perhaps never, mean the Abrahamic God do they?
In philosophical (but perhaps not all theological) discourse, distinction is usually made between what is meant by “God”: Polytheism — think Norse, Greco-Roman or aspects-of-God religions such as Hinduism; Theism — monotheist usually, in reference to the three major Abrahamic religions; Pantheism — nature or even a “universal spirit” type; and Deism — an entity or intelligence that sets the laws of the universe in motion and then promptly exits the stage.
In the polytheist and theist’s case, God or gods are very much a personal one, intercessory and usually involved in the day to day. In the pantheist and deist’s case, the definition ranges from a super intelligence to simply a metaphor for the laws of nature and the universe; not a personal god by any stretch.
The Dawkins, Harris and Hitchens of the world go after theistic belief systems, in particular the Abrahamic traditions; and they do not pay much attention to deists. Physicists like Hawking and Einstein, on the other hand when referring to God, never mean it in any theistic sense of the word.
Ah, but then people ask — well then, who created the creator? Physicists go one step at a time, otherwise the infinite regress of creators would make any hypothesis in that direction untenable. For them, until and unless empirical evidence is found of an intelligent designer, a-la Laplace there is “no need of that hypothesis.”
So Hawking’s shift over the years is ever so slight, but certainly significant. He has joined the likes of Laplace, Richard Feynman and Lawrence Krauss in declaring the non-requirement of a creator in a Grand Unified Theory that reconciles the Standard Model with quantum mechanics strangeness.
So was Hawking arrogant in declaring that last week? Perhaps so in everyday parlance, but certainly not in terms of genius, eccentric expression.
At least with Hawking and most scientists, we know exactly what it would take to change his mind and rescind his position: any evidence presented to the contrary — which is exactly what Hawking did when proven wrong in 2004 by theorist John Preskill of Caltech with regards to his earlier position on information escaping from a black hole.
Yet would any of his detractors, and in particular those representing theism, care to stake a similar position with regards to their proofs and evidence?
* The views expressed here are the personal opinion of the columnist.