Hawking Strikes Again – Dr Peter May By Dr Peter May, of the European Leadership Forum.
I hesitate to mention Stephen Hawking’s new book, The Grand Design, as the press coverage of it has been immense and many will have followed the debate line by line. At least, I hope the scientists will have done so.
One of the big issues the book has thrown up is that it is pushing people to decide between science and religion for their understanding of the universe. Many Christians may be driven to treat science with contempt.
Four hundred years ago, Francis Bacon introduced the idea that God has revealed himself in two books – the Book of Creation and the Book of Scripture, the works of God and the words of God, observable truth and revealed truth. The danger of closing one book and reading only the other is destined to lead to a truncated understanding of God. All truth is God’s truth. We cannot turn a blind eye to areas where there are substantial grounds for believing that something is true.
However, it must be admitted that the truths of neither book are entirely self-evident. What appears to be clear may be misleading – in science and in Scripture.
A Humble Approach to Knowing
I studied science at a time when there was a great deal of confident talk about ‘proof’ and scientific ‘certainty’. A revolution has happened in the intervening years. Philosophers (Popper, et al) have challenged the confidence of scientific methodology. Verification is not as simple as we thought. We have rested on assumptions that are unsustainable. Memory is not a reliable indicator of the past – as my wife keeps telling me – and sensory perception is no guarantee of objective reality. We cannot even be sure we are not hallucinating. Logical positivism has consequently shifted towards critical realism.
Four hundred years ago, Francis Bacon introduced the idea that God has revealed himself in two books – the Book of Creation and the Book of Scripture, the works of God and the words of God, observable truth and revealed truth. The danger of closing one book and reading only the other is destined to lead to a truncated understanding of God. All truth is God’s truth.
We have had to learn that we are not the detached, honest, objective observers we thought we were. Rather, we see through coloured lenses. We come to the laboratory bench and to the library table with ‘baggage’. Our prejudices and our blind-spots, our limited intelligence and mistakes, our honesty and arrogance must all be taken into consideration.
This is evident in medical research. Sometimes the enthusiasm of the researcher has led him to falsify the results. Sometimes that focussed zeal – and you need a great deal of enthusiasm to embark on an exhausting research project – limits the searching questions that you ask. When the paper is published, you can be sure no one else has thoroughly checked all your figures, strained to determine your bias or wrestled with all the other ways the data could be interpreted. If five researchers put their names to a paper – and everyone is keen to get his name on published research – it may well be that only one or two of them have carefully studied all the findings. We then have the problems of bias from those who financed the research and from the publisher who placed it in his journal. Why did he publish this paper and not that? Some factors – conscious or unconscious – influence these decisions.
We might, whilst we are at it, also ask why a publisher chooses to publish one book and not another. It is quite evident that a book with Hawking’s name of the front is going to do very much better financially than one with a less famous name on it. (A Brief History of Time sold 6 million hardback copies. Mine cost £15, which was a lot of money in 1988.)
We have had to learn that we are not the detached, honest, objective observers we thought we were. Rather, we see through coloured lenses. Our prejudices and our blind-spots, our limited intelligence and mistakes, our honesty and arrogance must all be taken into consideration.
There is no doubting Hawking’s enthusiasm. Unfortunately, it isn’t just for science. He also appears to be enthusiastic for self-publicity. Some scientists have ventured the opinion that his new book contains little, or indeed nothing, that is new and if it was not for his name on the cover, it may well have been difficult to get it published.
Neither is he immune to prejudice. Those closest to him confirm that he has been an atheist for years. He is hardly unbiased in that department.
It is in the nature of science to be sceptical. The hard questions must be asked and ‘truths’ embraced cautiously and provisionally. However, there is no place for cynicism or wholesale dismissal of science. We have to draw reasonable conclusions about the world we live in, or we will find ourselves in a fantasy world.
To close the Book of Creation, as some do in their outright denial of evolution, is to opt for a divided view of truth and a failure to marvel at the wonders of the way we are made.
Studying the Scriptures is not always straightforward either. Most of us have changed our minds about the meaning of key passages over the years and are by no means certain how some statements should be interpreted.
So both the scientist and Bible scholar must approach their tasks with a good deal of humility and insight into their own weaknesses. Truth is tentative. We deal with probabilities, not certainties. In both science and religion, we are called to walk by faith – trusting in our inadequate understandings of both observed and revealed truths, rather than in any final ultimate ‘knowing’. “Now I know in part…” (1 Cor 13:12) The flipside of knowledge is ignorance and the other side of faith is always doubt. Our understandings in this world are destined to be partial.
In the Beginning, Gravity…
Hawking is certainly capable of making mistakes. The gist of his thesis is that the universe is self-generating—an inevitable outworking of the laws of physics. “Because there is a law like gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing.” (p.180) It is at this point that his statement that ‘philosophy is dead’ is so evidently mistaken. Physical laws, such as gravity, are expressions of the relationship between existing entities. If you have not got any objective realities, it is very difficult to see how you can have a relationship between them. It is rather like talking about love in the absence of persons. It does not exist as an abstract idea.
 Hawking’s book does not explain where gravity or quantum mechanics came from.
If John Lennox claimed that the universe spontaneously created itself out of absolutely nothing, you can imagine the mockery he would receive from Richard Dawkins for such an absurd viewpoint.
Philosophy might also have helped Hawking think beyond the simplistic question of ‘who created God?’ as though that settled anything (p. 172).
The relative merits of an uncreated first cause over against an infinite regress of causes are not so easily rubbished. Offering spontaneous creation out of nothing presents us with a third option. A cynic might well argue that all three are patently absurd, but he will be hard put to bring another possibility to the table.
Is M-theory Science?
Hawking’s bias is also shown in his enthusiasm for M-Theory, a unifying theory of superstrings. Many physicists do not share his views. Some point out that the theory can never be verified and if that is true, it fails the first criterion of empirical science. The final sentence in his new book is this: “If the theory is confirmed by observation, it will be the successful conclusion of a search going back more than 3,000 years. We will have found the grand design.”
Hawking’s bias is also shown in his enthusiasm for M-Theory, a unifying theory of superstrings. Many physicists do not share his views. Some point out that the theory can never be verified and if that is true, it fails the first criterion of empirical science.
He leaves us, then, with the impression that scientists are on the case and that any day now M-Theory might be verified. That, of course, is not the case at all or he would presumably have delayed writing his book until he had something compelling to report. Prof. Russell Stannard suggests, “A particle accelerator capable of probing M-theory would, it seems, be the size of the galaxy.” So that shouldn’t happen any time soon! Cosmologist Paul Davies has commented that “the theory is not testable, not even in any foreseeable future. For this reason, M-theory gets a lot of flak from within the physics community.” Physicist Peter Woit has written a book on string theory, entitled Not Even Wrong. He says it could easily turn out to be vacuous idea that doesn’t predict anything. John Butterworth, a particle physicist at University College London who is engaged in experimental research at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, also believes that M-theory could not be tested. He said, “All scientific knowledge is provisional but it lies on a spectrum from very solid to very speculative. M-theory is highly speculative.”
None of this is to say that his book is not worth reading. It is a particularly lucid account of the discoveries of modern physics and is written for people with no background in science. The book itself is not long and is nicely bound, presented and illustrated.
The penultimate chapter on the Multiverse is particularly effective. If any chapter is worth reading in isolation, this one is. The fine-tuning of the universe definitely needs explaining, and the reasons are graphically set out. Hawking and Dawkins opt for the multiverse theory. But this can no more be scientifically verified than the existence of God himself. As such, it falls outside the bounds of scientific ideas.
The End of Science?
There are those who feel that science may be going as far as it can go, at least in terms of theoretical physics. There are two major limiting factors. One is economic. The costs involved in creating the apparatus to test some of these theories may be increasingly unaffordable. For instance, the Large Hadron Collider had a budget of nine billion US dollars. The apparatus to test M-theory would apparently make it look like a pea-shooter in comparison. The second limiting factor is intellectual. It may just be beyond the ability of human comprehension to reconcile quantum theory with general relativity. Perhaps we would need the mind of God.
So humanity may have to come to terms with irresolvable mystery concerning the origins of the universe. Compared with an infinite regress of causes or a spontaneous creation from nothing, an uncaused first cause may continue to be the most intellectually satisfying option.
 Dr Peter May is a General Medical Practitioner in Southampton, UK. He is the author of Dialogue in Evangelism (Grove Books, 1990) and also wrote the Christian Medical Fellowship’s dialogue evangelism training material, called Confident Christianity. He serves on the General Synod of the Church of England and also the Trust Board of the Universities and Colleges Christian Fellowship (UCCF). He is a Forum-approved trainer of evangelists and apologists. |
