“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. It is not necessary to invoke God to set the universe
going.” Stephen Hawking & Leonard
Mlodinow, in their latest book, The Grand
Design.
When I saw Stephen Hawking many years
ago in a lecture hall in Cambridge, the experience was awe-inspiring, almost
spiritual. He is probably the greatest physicist alive, and rivals Einstein’s
mystique – especially so because he suffers from a neuro-muscular disorder (known as Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis) that has
left him almost completely paralyzed. So he dabbles with the most intricate
theories on black holes, cosmology and quantum gravity without the ability to
use his arms, legs and even voice. As Time once commented,
"Even as he sits helpless in his wheelchair, his mind seems to soar ever
more brilliantly across the vastness of space and time in order to unlock the
secrets of the universe."
The God vs. Gravity statement made at the end of The Grand Design unleashed quite a stir.
It does not necessarily amounts to God denial, but it is pretty
close! The assertion is on the futility of invoking God in the creation of the
universe – gravity is quite enough, it seems. This may be viewed as a
contradiction to what he wrote in his 1988 bestseller, A Brief History of
Time, where he tried to fathom His thought processes in search of
explanations. But clearly, Hawking never believed in the supernatural. It is
probably impossible to prove that God does not exist, but increasingly creation
and the subsequent existence of time, space, energy and life seems to make His interventions
unnecessary.
The Big Bang model postulates that our universe
originated 13.7 billion years ago as an extremely hot and dense state that
expanded rapidly, cooled and continues to expand even today. In his latest
work, Hawking uses the M-theory (an extension of string theory) to claim that
there are a very, very large number of universes (or multiverse) that create
themselves from nothing, on a non-stop basis, each with its own physical laws.
In the universe we live in, yes the sun does not revolve around the earth, and
we human beings are no special. We gradually evolved from very basic life forms,
from bacteria through apes.
In fact, humans and other life forms are probably mere
biological machines, governed by laws of physics and chemistry, like everything
else. Thus our free will could be just an illusion. Can human behavior be
predicted through computation? It may cost millions of years of processing to
predict your mood swings, but at the end of the day, humans and their brains
are made of matter, and human behavior may be as predictable as a falling
apple.
These arguments can be very counter-intuitive and
disconcerting. But the march of science has inexorably shown the fallacy of
“common sense”, brushing aside supernatural refuges in our search for
understanding and comfort. From Galileo’s and Darwin’s proof that the universe
was not engineered to produce us, and now the very origin of the universe, the
Big Bang, was not an externally-administered bang after all i.e. no divine
finger snapping was needed to create the universe. Richard
Dawkins, an ardent atheist, evolutionary biologist and popular author, sums it up
rather brutally: "Darwin kicked [God] out of biology, but physics remained
more uncertain. Hawking is now administering the coup
de grace."
Nonetheless, we can still argue if science
really renders the God hypothesis superfluous. The ad
infinitum argument of a first uncaused cause, a prime mover, would naturally
follow: now, where does gravity come from?
Who wrote the ultimate laws of nature? The
regularities of nature, from multiverses to nanoscale particles, seem to beckon
some higher or different purpose beyond the realms of science. Despite the
radical transformation science has brought about in the pursuit of knowledge
and construction of artefacts, there is still room for scientific humility.
Heisenberg has shown us that we just cannot accurately know everything.
Knowledge is limitless, whereas the scientific method is not.
But there is need for religions to step
up and reconcile with scientific progress. Science has its limits; it is just a
methodology, based on Karl Popper’s idea of dealing only with falsifiable
arguments. But it is the best tool we have. As logical positivists would argue,
the gaps in science should not be obstinately filled with semblances of
rationalisation. The intrinsic contradictions and fallacies in belief systems should
be recognised. For instance, why would an omnipotent
and omnibenevolent
allow evil
and suffering?
What is the point for the omniscient to tempt and test its subjects in complex
scenarios, knowing well the outcome? Anyway, it is gravity that seems to rule.
Do we have the free will to objectively deal with it or deny it? Who really
knows?
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