Hawking’s Curiosity

Stephen Hawking was recently featured in a Discovery Channel Curiosity episode, asking “Did God create the Universe?” Videos of the show, plus the panel discussion which followed, can be found at Discover's Cosmic Variance blog.

It starts with a whole bit about Vikings yelling at an eclipse, with the point being that now that we can explain eclipses using science, we don’t need to scare away the sun-eating Wolf God anymore. Awesome! But this is actually setting up the whole tone of the show: science has replaced God as an explanatory force for the natural world. For example, it is explained that the universe’s total energy adds up to net zero, including positive energy in the stuff and negative energy in the vacuum, so you don’t need anything extra to create it. OK, got it. But at some point Hawking says something like “let’s see what the laws of nature tell us about whether we need a God.” No, let’s not! The laws of nature don’t tell us anything about God because they are laws of nature and therefore of things that exist!

After some Galileo, Einstein, and modern physics, Hawking is basically saying: because the universe works the way it does, i.e. the known laws of nature are what they are, we don’t need to explain its existence using God; they provide a better explanation themselves. The problem here is the implication that the laws of nature could have led us to the conclusion that God must exist, which is patently not possible! The laws of nature tell us about nature. And btw, these “laws” are constantly changing as our understanding grows and as we collect data about the universe. Inserting God as an explanation at any point is giving up in the same way as the anthropic “landscape” explanation for the value of the cosmological constant is giving up. The natural laws don’t always make sense (for example, who really understands quantum mechanics?) but that doesn’t mean they require supernatural explanation, and inversely, to get back to Hawking, our ability to understand the laws of nature can neither prove nor disprove the existence of a supernatural being.

The final point relates to how the Big Bang was a singularity, and like in a black hole, time stops, so with the Big Bang we’ve “found something that doesn’t have a cause because there is no Time for a cause to exist in… no Time for God to create the Universe in.” This argument, which Hawking spends a lot of time with at the end, can be easily refuted by saying that God is outside of the Universe and therefore outside of Time (a common theological idea is of God Eternal), and so God can create Time itself along with the Universe. Hawking doesn’t get any points here.

Overall, what’s wrong with the episode is the same problem I have with Sean Carroll’s "God as a theory" argument, which is the method of positing God as a theory that explains things, then proving how the theory doesn’t work. The problem is, God is not a scientific theory, so the fact that science wins such arguments is meaningless. This is the God vs. Science argument. It is a valid way of talking to people who think the Bible disproves evolution or global climate change, but does nothing for rational theists. To most people, God is not an explanation for why the world works the way it does but a more personal entity.

No, you don’t need God to explain the world, but you also don’t need modern cosmology and particle physics to explain why you don’t need God. In some ways it is embarrassing to have this simplistic, materialistic, and somewhat condescending narrative as representative of both cosmologists and atheists. Most atheists did not reject the God hypothesis only after several years of graduate physics! Most cosmologists don’t go around thinking that the fascinating universe they study also disproves God! The real stories for both are undoubtedly way more interesting, and complicated, than this episode implies. Maybe it has been useful for opening a dialogue for those who are curious, however, because I’m sure everyone can find things in it they disagree with!

Then there is the follow up “Curiosity Conversation” hosted by David Gregory. A lot of it is frustrating as a direct result of the reasons why the show itself was frustrating. Here is the play-by-play:

Paul Davies says what I said, that Hawking’s idea of God as existing in time doesn’t match up with what most theologians talk about. A lot of the early discussion is about how science has now explained God away, that “after years of careful study” Hawking has concluded that God didn’t create the universe. As if! Sean Carroll reiterates that “we don’t need God to explain cosmology,” which is mundane because it’s true. Michio Kaku brings up the multiverse as if to say God must explain that (even though there is no evidence for a multiverse! string theorists….) Jennifer Wiseman brings up that people believe in God for a multitude of reasons other than to explain why the universe exists. Jon Haught says Hawking is redefining what science is capable of, which has traditionally avoided questions of God, morality, meaning, and purpose, and that most scientists would be uncomfortable with Hawking’s treatment. (I think science can and does say a lot, but the questions themselves about what these concepts mean are not scientific in nature.) I like Carroll’s point: if your idea of God interacts with the physical world, judge the scientific merits of that idea, and if God doesn’t interact with the world, go nuts! Then he stands up for skepticism, woot! Haught says theology answers why the universe is intelligible, which is a basic assumption of science. That is an interesting point that could lead to a whole different discussion, but suffice it to say that I don’t think God is the only possible explanation for why the universe is “intelligible” for a reasonable definition of the term.

Near the end there is a nefarious question by David Gregory based on Paul Davies’ comment that religion can let people live better lives: he says to Sean Carroll, roughly, “you are saying to people, you can do that, find inspiration from the Bible and live a better life, but you can’t believe in a creator without denying what science is telling us as of now.” Hold Up! No, religion doesn’t necessarily give people better lives, it can in fact go both ways, depending on the morality of the religious beliefs (yes, I think I know what morality is better than many religions, so there). No, you aren’t denying science if you believe in a creator, but you certainly aren’t justifying your belief through science. And then Carroll responds by saying “I think that’s right”!!! He goes on to say something very true about basing what you believe in on reality instead of imposing what you want on reality, but still! He complained about the editing, though, in his live blog post, so maybe that’s it. 

All in all, despite its faults, at least the show happened at all. Stephen Hawking is popular enough to pull it off, and we shouldn’t be afraid of talking about science and religion in the public sphere instead of theologians and scientists keeping to their respective selves. Now to read Carroll’s “Why (Almost All) Cosmologists are Atheists.”