God did not create Universe: Hawking

[DJ Droood]

"Because there is a law such as gravity, the Universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the Universe exists, why we exist," he writes in "The Grand Design", which is being serialised by The Times newspaper.

"It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the Universe going," added the wheelchair-bound expert.

http://ca.news.yahoo.com/s/afp/100902/w ... ks_hawking

[skydove]

Dont understand physics that much, but can you have the force of gravity without first having something for it to act upon?

Is he also saying man created God as soon as he had the understanding that he didn't understand why things happened, and that now Stephen Hawkins understands that there may be other universes besides our own he and we have no need of God as our understanding is getting close to perfect?
Hasn't science been here before?

[Davin Raincloud]

I've been thinking about this statement from Hawking , and I think it is somewhat muddled.

Essentially I believe the crux of the matter is: laws of physics allow the evolution of life and existence as we know it...without the constant guiding hand of an 'intervening God'.

However it doesn't not preclude a creator deity that sets up those laws or gives birth to the universe. I think the Hindu Brahma is somewhat like that.

I think it's an interesting notion about the laws of physics guiding this constant evoltuion of life. Interesting.

[wyeuro]

yes, i agree it's muddled. the ability to spontaneously create and maintain itself cannot exist outside of the creation. you can't have these rules and abilities unless there exists that which has them. i call that 'god' - the whole universe, though it answers just as well to 'the powers that be'.
wyverne /|\

[Jake]

Maybe Hawking's statement will be less confusing if we look at the word he used - "necessary."

Of course the laws of physics as they are currently understood don't preclude the possibility that the universe was created by God or Mothra or any other fictional character. What they do is make the intervention of such a being unnecessary and thus, following the principle of parsimony, irrelevant to the discussion of the origins of the universe.

Wyeuro, leaving aside for the moment the question of what possible motivation (besides obscurantism or some form of cultural atavism) pantheists have for saying "God" when a perfectly serviceable word like "everything" is already in use, since it's clear that Hawking is not saying that the universe doesn't exist or that the universe did not create the universe, isn't it possible that he's using the word "God" in a more normative and much more specific sense?

Wouldn't it sound a little, well, muddled, if I were to claim that Hawking doesn't know what he's talking about since I call my toaster "God" and it clearly exists and is capable of creation since it turned bread into toast for my breakfast?

[DJ Droood]

Wouldn't it sound a little, well, muddled, if I were to claim that Hawking doesn't know what he's talking about since I call my toaster "God" and it clearly exists and is capable of creation since it turned bread into toast for my breakfast?

That is the beauty of "god"..it can be anything, or in the absense of something, nothing....if the laws of physics threaten your perception of "god", simply relabel "the laws of physics" "god" and adjust your world-view three degree to the left. if you look under every rock and in every bird's nest and can't find god, then the rocks themselves must be god. I'm reading a somewhat unsatisfying book called Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, by Daniel Dennett. He says that if we were to zip back in time and talk to, say, an ancient Greek, and the topic of "god" came up, it would be as if we were talking about two different things. He argues that the greeks still had "gods"...thunderbolts and anger, etc....but god has been like a cameleon, or perhaps a virus that adapts to challenges, and has morphed contunously...into the current version which is an amorphous "being" that is neither male nor female, here nor there..certainly not confined by old fashined boxes..the modern, sophisticated mind wouldn't accept it...so instead, god has become unexplained and unexplainable...but still very necessary for many people's understanding of the Unverse.....The best mental trick I learned, years ago, was to simply stop using the more or less meaningless term "god" and subsititue a word that is more evocative, yet still in the same realm...like Santa Clause...is it possible to conceive of a universe that wasn't created by Santa? I think so. (although if I can't, my lack of ability to understand a Santa-less Universe would, of course, be Santa's mystery.)

[Dendrias]

Why's "Santa" still lingering in physics?
As Jake has explained his use of the word - what's Hawking meaning, when he says "god"?

In "A Brief History of Time", Hawking had suggested that the idea of God or a divine being was not necessarily incompatible with a scientific understanding of the Universe.

God no longer has any place in theories on the creation of the Universe due to a series of developments in physics, British scientist Stephen Hawking said in extracts published Thursday from a new book.

I haven't read any of Hawking's books - have You? - but as far as the article goes, the creation of the universe was not to be thought to be undertaken by some mystic being. Would it be too compartmentalised to say, that, yes, gravity exists and the universe created itself spontaneously, and yes, when I pray someone invisible is listening to me? As far as I understand, Hawking didn't deny that, as far as the first quote goes. Am I right?

Now, in the second quote, god or Santa or Mothra are finally kicked out of ... the creation story, aren't they? Were they in there beforehand?

Could someone help out with his knowledge of Hawking's books?

[wyeuro]

hallo jake,

Wyeuro, leaving aside for the moment the question of what possible motivation (besides obscurantism or some form of cultural atavism) pantheists have for saying "God" when a perfectly serviceable word like "everything" is already in use, since it's clear that Hawking is not saying that the universe doesn't exist or that the universe did not create the universe, isn't it possible that he's using the word "God" in a more normative and much more specific sense?

yes it is. i find it cute the way some people use the word 'God' in its naivest least credible sense when intending to refute it. it's not a widespread concept of god these days, and not at all the one i encounter when i look about me. few people i know believe in the being that most of us want to dispel - the biblical 'let-there-be-light' ancient, white-bearded, patriarch-gone-cosmic of yore. most people i speak to about cosmology are tending towards pagan viewpoints, which put the divine firmly in nature where necessity perceivable by humans just isn't the point, and refutation isn't so easy. but then i hang out mostly with pagans. maybe its different nearer to the bible belt?

but i nearly agreed with you here and have often tried to discard the word for the reason you give, but i keep finding it useful. god is a name that acknowledges the mindfulness and purposefulness of nature. 'everything' or 'the universe' could all be so much mindless mechanism, whereas 'god' is mindful mechanism, or 'mechanistic mind'.

it's easier to refute the biblical god than the more reasonable, more widely believed in 'god' = 'mindful nature'. i wouldn't attempt to engage the whole of it in conversation - it's inconceivably bigger than i can conceive of - and not likely to respond except from the bit i'm embedded in - my culture, the communities i belong to, the ecosystem i'm in, so i address those instead, via the pantheon i select from mythos, legend etc. most of it is composed of human personalities, which drive and respond to my life and actions more forcefully usually than any of the other physical forces described in physics.

but thoughts and attitudes are forces, and dreams and desires are physical systems - constructs in which forces and forms interact. they're not not physics. i believe they're purpose built from within without and all around and then some, so calling it 'god' fore-grounds the inherent mindfulness and purposefulness that mechanistically drives visible, discernable evolution.

in another sense, at the rsik of almost repeating myself, the use of the word 'god' is distinguished from 'all there is' by its referring to the creative organising principle of 'all there is' from a religious position. hawking doesn't identify this principle at all, or regard it as to do with physics, although of course it's there, beyond the range of their instruments. the sociological (religious response to the perception of mind in the all of everything, in this instance) is a force-wielding, form-generating aspect of the physical (the mechanical force) after all. so is till call all of it 'god'.
wyverne /|\

[Frog]

few people i know believe in the being that most of us want to dispel - the biblical 'let-there-be-light' ancient, white-bearded, patriarch-gone-cosmic of yore. <snip>
maybe its different nearer to the bible belt?

I would have thought that too - but after an elightening short conversation with a muslim colleague of mine, you don't need to be there. His belief disputed evolution and that things had always been there.

Interestingly, the argument gets backed up with the most recent findings in the infamous "which came first - the chicken or the egg" riddle - where the answer is the chicken - or rather the protein that makes the shell, which only exists in chickens (Source: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1 ... 9/abstract)

But to my mind, Mr Hawking is entitled to his beliefs and I am entitled to mine. At this stage, until scientists can work out how to spark life from nothing no-one can prove conclusively - on theoretically - how it all started. (I'd suggest that even the discovery of that partical - if it is ever found - doesn't provide the start point, just what happens when you bang two things that already exist together).

Frog

[Dendrias]

Well said, both of You. I learned a lot from it.

I don't want to stray too far off-topic, but, methinks, DJ Drood didn't have any particular outcome of the discussion in mind.

hawking doesn't identify this principle at all, or regard it as to do with physics, although of course it's there, beyond the range of their instruments.

I don't believe, or I think that if science reduces certain aspects of the universe to what instruments show, a whole lot of what makes "life" is lost up to the end that we're left with atoms that swirl in endless cold nothing. But, wyeuro, is there instance when You can sense / feel / perceive what You call "god"?

[DJ Droood]

The "grand design," says Hawking, is to be found in M-theory, an idea launched in the mid-1990s.

"According to M-theory, ours is not the only universe. Instead, M-theory predicts that a great many universes were created out of nothing. Their creation does not require the intervention of some supernatural being or god," the book says. "Rather, these multiple universes arise naturally from physical law."

This idea may trouble anyone who was fair at high school math but didn't major in the subject in college.

"M-theory has solutions," the book says later, "that allow for many different internal spaces, perhaps as many as 10 (followed by 500 zeros), which means it allows for 10 (followed by 500 zeros) different universes, each with its own laws."

A layman may wonder if one of those multitudinous laws might furnish a simple explanation of why something exists instead of nothing — and also wonder if there might be no such law in any of the possible universes.

Hawking writes that M-theory is a unified "theory of everything" that Albert Einstein was looking for but never found.

"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."

http://www.google.com/hostednews/canadi ... PLDaO2LpLA

[wyeuro]

(I'd suggest that even the discovery of that partical - if it is ever found - doesn't provide the start point, just what happens when you bang two things that already exist together).

hear hear! well said,frog.

Dendrias asks

But, wyeuro, is there instance when You can sense / feel / perceive what You call "god"?

well, no, but i use the mythic(?) idea and it does work. i understand the awen to be an icon that mediates between me and the unfathomable 'one' in a manageable way, three-fold for magical and practical reasons. it certainly delivers 'good medicine' to me, and because it does, it doesn't matter that belief about it goes way beyond the evidence. so i don't really feel it, but i rationalise and then observe the quite startling effects of naively expecting it to work. there are small miracles and i've been awed to feel it reshaping my whole life for the better (though still tough and demanding in places) in the decade since i began invoking it. even god on a cloud is on my pantheon, and though i rarely take him/her seriously, using him/her as a kind of security blanket when i'm feeling flippant, s/he sometimes initiates quite lovely, subtle meditations with suprising insights.

great thread - everyone's getting really articulate, deep insight. it's so life-enhancing.

wyverne /|\

[Dendrias]

Ga raibh maith agat, a whyeuro.

Because, DJ Drood, as Your second article arrogantly states, I haven't majored maths in college and thus are in trouble, I can't fully understand the connections to Your first article.

Despite: "An old man with beard didn't say: Let there be light." Is that Hawking's great achievement? I didn't expect a santa-clause-like chappy to be involved in pulling matter out of his caftan, anyway. Was Hawking? Or is his audience to be found somewhere between Florida and Texas, where burning religious books is some kind of protest?

I don't know exactly where from, but the "more than one universe"-thought seems to be some thousand years old. I can remember the stoics to have said that a lot of heavens (meaning "worlds") do exist, with a lot of gods. But it might have been the sophists to have said that. I could do some research. It doesn't sound very new to me, as a layman.

What's the outcome, so far?

[Binky]

I have known of Hawkings' Multiverse theory for some years, I believe I have also seen another; or maybe an earlier interpretation. The one presented in the series I am about to describe however does not detail a possible method/reason for universe creation, just that it happens.

Fairly recently (back in May I think) there was a short series (3 episodes: 'Aliens', 'Time Travel' and 'The Story of Everything') aired on the Discovery channel called 'Into The Universe With Stephen Hawking', where through lots of CGI and other effects he demonstrates and explains the workings of the universe and how it began in Episode 3. From the Big Bang, through the pre-stellar state, how stars began to form, how they acted as factories and spread their products, the creation of life, evolution and much more including a small section on a multiverse theory. It also explains quite in depth about gravity and how it has from the beginning and will continue to play its part in affecting everything in our universe. (I would attempt to explain it, but without all the imagery etc it would be somewhat long-winded... and boring)

At this stage, until scientists can work out how to spark life from nothing no-one can prove conclusively - on theoretically - how it all started. (I'd suggest that even the discovery of that partical - if it is ever found - doesn't provide the start point, just what happens when you bang two things that already exist together).

The particle is well known; hydrogen (everything else is formed from hydrogen through nuclear fusion and the resulting effects), the precursor is pure energy. In Episode 3 he explains that pure energy was the start of things, only as space began to expand and the energy spread out did it begin to cool and matter/anti-matter form. Science I feel has now gone about as far as it can conceivably go with the quest to find the beginning. The multiverse theory itself acts as an impenetrable wall past which we will never see, and therefore never know of the true beginnings of things including our universe (unless it comes up with a radical new way of seeing everything, or we can gain an outside-our-universe perspective).

Hawking himself states that nothing can be perfect. And it's possible that many universes before and since the creation of ours failed to create much if anything at all (assuming the multiverse theory is correct), or if they have they may have very different laws of physics etc. How these universes are created or where these universes are is unknown as we have no outside perspective. As far as we know there is an edge to space. The laws outside may be radically different and this seems to cause a problem with explaining where all the energy came from at the time of the Big Bang.

If you can find some way of watching even just episode 3 I found it to be really interesting and surprisingly easy to follow, though all of them are good.

[DJ Droood]

If you can find some way of watching even just episode 3 I found it to be really interesting and surprisingly easy to follow, though all of them are good.

Haven't seen it, but I agree...well done sci fi can be visionary...look at Gene Roddenberry and Star Trek...

[Merlyn]

Math, perhaps gives us a window to see.
In the case of Hawking, I understand his mind a little (far from knowing him well) that in his mind he can see with numerology and math, like we would see looking over the mountain tops into the sky.

I think we, unlike him, have a more finite view through math and numbers, however he sees more this way than my 'normal' imagination. This is what I noticed watching this show he was on.

As to god creating the universe,
If it's a difficult to thing to imagine, then the big white bearded fellow, the age of time but stronger and more agile than time itself, is the mythos. We can probably figure that god is a lot more than just this mythical/biblical figure. To me god and goddess are life forces, not really taking any kind of human form except in my simple mind as a way to understand them.

In this sense, of life force, yes they created and are creation always, in motion always, never ending and with no point of creation or end...

That, might fit into some math as infinity, or something like that, but I can see how Hawking would reject god creation theory as how he sees it.
I agree with him on 'nothing is perfect' and frankly I like that nothing is.

[DJ Droood]

Math, perhaps gives us a window to see.

Oh sure...trot out your Welsh gods now...

[Merlyn]

Naaa, my welsh gods don't like math. They stopped multiplying long ago.

[Dendrias]

I can imagine the judeo-christian god petting his cat or his beard, looking down on Hawking and saying:

So, my little boy. Solved one riddle, but never going to lift the veil, eh?

[wolf560]

Hello All..!!!

I must admit I was thrilled to see the announcement by Hawkings. The closer we can even imagine the physics of what it took to start everything, the better an understanding might eventually be hundreds of years from now. I don't see the harm in this, we do live in a world of physical laws after all in addition to the meta-physical laws.

I could be wrong but I believe what Stephen Hawking was saying is that "God was not necessary to light the fuse" that resulted in the "Big Bang".

The Big Bang is a highly debated "beginning of the Universe" with one thing as a counterpoint... "What started the Chain Reaction that resulted in the Big Bang".

Steven Hawkins theories now point to the fact that the laws of gravity and string theory show the inevitability of the Big Bang without a Deity "flipping a switch" to cause it.

In simpler terms the Big Bang happened because it had to and not because a Deity willed it to happen. But don't fret ... there still is the question of what put all the mass there in the first place.... 'Deity' still has a place in this consciousness of ours..!!!