Stephen Hawking Eliminates God

Physics super-brain Stephen Hawking does not believe in God. Even more importantly, he sees no need for an intelligent force that has made some or all of what is in the universe.

Energy is the power of doing work. Science finds that energy has to be detectable in principle to be able to do anything. The idea that God is an energy outside of all that is anti-science. Why not say that electricity exists instead of God but a spiritual type? You may as well say that. That is why supposing a spiritual or non-material realm is antiscience. It attacks the credibility of science.

Stephen Hawking said there is a way that you can deny that the universe had a beginning. He agrees with the Big Bang theory of the origin of all things but holds that something was there to explode in the first place. He thinks that in the moments before the big bang, time rounded off. He used Einstein's equations to work this out and added in numbers that made the result of the equations verify this (page 77, Is God a Human Invention?). The Christians respond that he admitted that the numbers were imaginary ones so they say his argument doesn't work. They say it does not fit the facts. But the mere fact that the equations show that the universe might not have had a beginning in the sense of being made from nothing proves that there is nothing illogical about saying the universe or whatever it was "before" the big bang always existed.

According to Hawking in 2010 "spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist". He added, "Because there is a law like gravity the Universe can and will create itself from nothing". This information is from his book, The Grand Design.

The main point is that whatever did it was spontaneous. That remains true and is what matters. The gravity thing is merely elaboration. Nobody knows what God means so if God can be a person type being why can't he be an it and be a gravity of a kind we cannot comprehend?

Christians have downplayed this declaration from one of the greatest minds of all time. They seem to think they know more than he does. How dare they? They are theologians not physicists. Hawking unlike Christian doctors of theology deserves his academic accreditation. Christians steal theirs. For example, they know fine well that a Muslim who becomes a doctor of a theology that denies that Jesus died on the cross should not receive recognition for his learning is not learning. But he does even though the Christian will get that too for completing a course that teaches the opposite! What next? Accredited PhD's in astrology or palmistry? Why not?

You can speculate rationally about how things came to be and what they are. But looking is better. That is what physicists do. Thus we should listen to Hawking before listening to any metaphysician or supernaturalist.

HAWKING AND THE POPE

Stephen Hawking met Pope John Paul II at Vatican cosmology conference in 1981. Hawking tells us some interesting things about this intercourse: "He [the pope] told us that it was all right to study the evolution of the universe after the big bang, but we should not inquire into the big bang itself because that was the moment of Creation and therefore the work of God. I was glad then that he did not know the subject of the talk I had just given at the conference - the possibility that space-time was finite but had no boundary, which means that it had no beginning, no moment of Creation. I had no desire to share the fate of Galileo, with whom I feel a strong sense of identity, partly because of the coincidence of having been born exactly 300 years after his death!" Brief History of Time (page 116).

The Pope was trying to engage in damage limitation for Hawking was clear that there was no big bang at all and thus the universe is just a brute fact meaning not only was a God not needed to explain it but is an “is”. For religion the “is” is God alone. So it is both a dismissal of the need for a God and a refutation of God.

And it should be.

CONCLUSION:

Hawking's logic is impeccable! Science does not need the God hypothesis. God by definition is that which is so perfect that anybody that doesn't have him is deprived. If there is no evidence for God, or if the evidence isn't good enough, then God cannot exist for the notion of a good God who makes us but who does not make us need him is contradictory.

NOTE: Christians are so anxious to promote the idea of God because it empowers them. When you obey God, you objectively really obey the Christians you consider authoritative. That is because it is they you have to go to to learn the supposed will of God. To obey the manager is not the same as obeying the boss. It may be thought that you mean to subjectively obey God and not those who reign in his place though you do obey them. But when we consider the fact that we always deceive ourselves when we think we are completely objective then we do mean to serve the men of God rather than God. The extent differs from person to person. I would ask who passes the bias detector - Hawking or a Christian?

Books Consulted

Is God a Human Invention? And Seventeen Other Questions Raised by the New Atheists, Sean McDowell and Jonathan Morrow, Kregel Publications, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 2010

God and Stephen Hawking, Whose Design is it Anyway? John C Lennox, Lion, Oxford, 2010