Professor Hawking is out with a new book, and in The Grand Design, he, along with co-author Leonard Mlodinow, now presses his case against God — or at least against any role for God in the origin of the universe or the beginning of time.
Asking the most basic questions of the universe's existence, Hawking and Mlodinow assert: "Some would claim the answer to these questions is that there is a God who chose to create the universe that way. It is reasonable to ask who or what created the universe, but if the answer is God, then the question has merely been deflected to that of who created God. In this view it is accepted that some entity exists that needs no creator, and that entity is called God. This is known as the first-cause argument for the existence of God. We claim, however, that it is possible to answer these questions purely within the realm of science, and without invoking any divine beings."
In the pages of The Wall Street Journal last week, Hawking and Mlodinow summarized their case against God. After presenting a case for the incredible fine-tuning that was required for conscious life on earth, they argued that the incredible "coincidences" involved in this fine-tuning are not evidence of the work of God. To the contrary, they conclude that science can provide all the necessary answers: "As recent advances in cosmology suggest, the laws of gravity and quantum theory allow universes to appear spontaneously from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist. It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going." The headline of their article, "Why God Did Not Create the Universe," pulled no punches.
Major newspapers and media outlets across the globe announced that Stephen Hawking had now come out against belief in God. Yet, a closer look at the evidence suggests that this is actually nothing new for Professor Hawking. All of the major arguments presented in The Grand Design have appeared earlier in Hawking's previous books or in interviews.
As has been argued before by others, Professor Hawking tends to deploy arguments about God when he wants to sell books. Nevertheless, given his stature and influence, his ideas are worth careful attention.
The major thrusts of The Grand Design are the magnificence of the universe and the glory of theoretical physics. Hawking is committed to what he calls "M-Theory," a "super-string theory" that encompasses a host of theories and predictions about the nature of matter and time. Most importantly, this theory allows Hawking and Mlodinow to advance Hawking's theory that space and time have no boundary. If such a boundary did exist, Hawking allows that God might be a necessary or allowable theory of how all this began. But, if there is no boundary, there is no reason for God at all — the universe is self-explanatory.
Hawking actually believes that there are countless universes, and that the laws of physics on each might be radically different from all the rest. What we do know is our own universe and its operational laws, and these, he insists, do not require any notion of a divine Creator. "Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing," Hawking and Mlodinow explain.
But is this really new? In his 1988 best-seller, A Brief History of Time, Hawking made very similar arguments and received strikingly similar press coverage. "So long as the universe had a beginning, we could suppose it had a creator," he explained. But, Hawking rejected the very idea of a beginning as such, and so he actually dispensed with the need for any Creator. Furthermore, he was certain that his theories rendered any belief in a traditional deity to be groundless.
