Stephen Hawking was a great theoretical physicist and cosmologist, perhaps the most important since Einstein. It is only right that his remains have been interred alongside those of Isaac Newton in Westminster Abbey. He was, furthermore, a person of tremendous courage and perseverance, accomplishing groundbreaking work despite a decades-long struggle with the debilitating effects of Lou Gehrig’s disease. And by all accounts, he was man of good humor with a rare gift for friendship. It is practically impossible not to admire him. But boy was he annoying when he talked about religion!

In the last year of his life, Hawking was putting the finishing touches on a book that is something of a follow-up to his mega-bestselling A Brief History of Time. Called Brief Answers to the Big Questions, it is a series of short essays on subjects including time travel, the possibility of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, the physics that obtains within a black hole, and the colonization of space.

But chapter one is entitled simply “Is There a God?” To the surprise of no one who has been paying attention to Hawking’s musings on the subject the last several years, his answer is no. Now, to anyone involved in the apologetics or evangelization game, this is, of course, depressing, since many people, especially the young, will say, “Well, there you have it: the smartest man in the world says that God does not exist.” The problem is that one can be exceptionally intelligent in one arena of thought and actually quite naïve in another. This, I’m afraid, is the case with Stephen Hawking, who, though uniquely well-versed in his chosen field, makes a number of blunders when he wanders into the domains of philosophy and religion.

Things get off to a very bad start in the opening line of the chapter: “Science is increasingly answering questions that used to be the province of religion.” Though certain primitive forms of religion might be construed as attempts to answer what we would consider properly scientific questions, religion, in the developed sense of the term, is not asking and answering scientific questions poorly; rather, it is asking and answering qualitatively different kinds of questions.

Hawking’s glib one-liner beautifully expresses the scientistic attitude, by which I mean the arrogant tendency to reduce all knowledge to the scientific form of knowledge. Following their method of empirical observation, hypothesis formation, and experimentation, the sciences can indeed tell us a great deal about a certain dimension of reality. But they cannot, for example, tell us a thing about what makes a work of art beautiful, what makes a free act good or evil, what constitutes a just political arrangement, what are the features of a being qua being—and indeed, why there is a universe of finite existence at all. These are all philosophical and/or religious matters, and when a pure scientist, employing the method proper to the sciences, enters into them, he does so awkwardly, ham-handedly. 

Let me demonstrate this by drawing attention to Hawking’s treatment of the last issue I mentioned—namely, why there should be a universe at all. Hawking opines that theoretical physics can confidently answer this question in such a way that the existence of God is rendered superfluous. Just as, at the quantum level, elementary particles pop into and out of existence regularly without a cause, so the singularity that produced the Big Bang simply came to be out of nothing, without a cause and without an explanation. The result, Hawking concludes, is that “the universe is the ultimate free lunch.”

The first mistake—and armies of Hawking’s followers make it—is to equivocate on the meaning of the word “nothing.” In the strict philosophical (or indeed religious) sense, “nothing” designates absolute nonbeing; but what Hawking and his disciples mean by the term is in fact a fecund field of energy from which realities come and to which they return. The moment one speaks of “coming from” or “returning to,” one is not speaking of nothing! I actually laughed out loud at this part of Hawking’s analysis, which fairly gives away the game: “I think the universe was spontaneously created out of nothing, according to the laws of science.” Well, whatever you want to say about the laws of science, they’re not nothing!

Indeed, when the quantum theorists talk about particles popping into being spontaneously, they regularly invoke quantum constants and dynamics according to which such emergences occur. Again, say what you want about these law-like arrangements, they are not absolute nonbeing. And therefore, we are compelled to ask the question why should contingent states of affairs—matter, energy, the Big Bang, the laws of science themselves—exist at all?

The classical response of religious philosophy is that no contingency can be explained satisfactorily by appealing endlessly to other contingencies. Therefore, some finally noncontingent reality, which grounds and actualizes the finite universe, must exist. And this uncaused cause, this reality whose very nature is to be, is what serious religious people call “God.” None of Hawking’s speculations—least of all his musings about the putative “nothing” from which the universe arises—tells against this conviction.

May I say by way of conclusion that I actually rather liked Stephen Hawking’s last book. When he stayed within the confines of his areas of expertise, he was readable, funny, informative, and creative. But could I encourage readers please to take him with a substantial grain of salt when he speaks of the things of God?

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) famously posed the ultimate question: “Why is there something rather than nothing?” To this, theoretical physicist Sean Carroll replies: “The universe can simply exist, end of story.”

Still, as I have shown elsewhere, everything must have a reason for its being or coming-to-be, including the cosmos. This metaphysical first principle is ably defended by others as well.¹ One distinction must be added: either a thing is its own reason or not. To the extent it fails to fully explain itself, something else must be posited as an extrinsic sufficient reason: a cause. So, does the cosmos “simply exist” – or does it need a cause?

The leading philosophers of ancient Greece showed no inkling of the concept of creation ex nihilo in time. For Leucippus (c. 490-430 B.C.) and Democritus (c. 460-360 B.C.), indivisible atoms were eternal in the void and creation of the world simply entailed them becoming packed or scattered, thus producing the world of things about us. For Plato (c. 428-348 B.C.), the creation myth of the Timaeus entailed the demiurge looking up to the eternal forms and patterning the pre-existing unordered material chaos according to them to produce the orderly cosmos. Even Aristotle (384-322 B.C.) appears to argue in his Physics, book one, that matter must have always existed as the substratum for the endless change of forms.

Unique to Western thought was the Jewish and Christian belief in a free creation of the world by God in time – ex nihilo et utens nihilo: out of nothing and presupposing no pre-existent material. Neo-Platonists, beginning with Plotinus (c. 204-270), did have a notion of creation ex nihilo, but solely as a necessary emanation from God, not the free creation of Christian thought.

Flash forward to the seventeenth century and we see a resurgence of philosophical atomism by theists Descartes, Gassendi, Boyle, and others. This later begot scientific atomism in nineteenth century chemistry and physics, which then invited the atheistic interpretations of scientific materialism and naturalism. For centuries, atheistic materialists had assumed the eternity of the material world, a view seemingly harmonious with the “new atomism.” All of this also fit well with twentieth century astronomy’s standard “steady state” theory.

The advent of the “Big Bang” theory of cosmic origins by Belgian priest and astronomer Georges Lemaitre (1894-1966) thus met opposition for proposing a scientific hypothesis that the cosmos actually had a temporal beginning. Among the first to complain was Albert Einstein himself. Science had seemed squarely in the atheist’s corner, until this upstart theory was proposed – a theory that sounded too much like what atheists viewed as the “Christian mythology” of creation in time. As astronomer Robert Jastrow observed, this led to a peculiar reaction by scientists in which they opposed a promising new theory – possibly on grounds more philosophical than scientific. It wasn’t until the 1964 cosmic microwave background radiation discovery by Penzias and Wilson that the Big Bang theory became generally accepted as correct.

In the final two sentences of his 1978 book, God and the Astronomers, Dr. Jastrow writes: “For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance, he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.”

Battle Over the “Big Bang’s” Significance

Atheistic scientists, like physicist Stephen Hawking, seek to avoid any possible theological implications of the Big Bang by redefining the meaning of this absolute beginning in time in terms that would avoid any need for God. He posits an imaginary time in which there would be no boundaries to space-time just as there are no boundaries to earth’s surface, concluding: “Thus, the universe would be a completely self-contained system. It would not be determined by anything outside the physical universe that we observe.”

Today we see atheists doing all they can to eliminate a cosmos instantly created by an all-powerful God, either by (1) alleging that something can, indeed, be made out of nothing, in light of quantum mechanics, or (2) by claiming, like Dr. Hawking, that the beginning somehow does not really need a metaphysical explanation.

Still, it turns out that the “nothing” that atheists claim can be used to make an entire cosmos from is not really “nothing” at all, but simply the actual something of a quantum vacuum, which entails a lot of matter-antimatter potential that “crackles with energy.” Empty space is not nothing, but something very physically real.

Everyone truthfully knows that you simply cannot get something from absolutely nothing. Even Dr. Hawking tries to evade an absolute beginning in time for the cosmos by his “no boundary” explanation offered above. This also why materialists who would evade a Creator feel forced to affirm the endless past existence of something -- be it physical matter as such, or some kind of minimal energy field from which the Big Bang exploded, or at least, certain laws of physics. Indeed, one method used to defeat the Kalam cosmological argument for God is to claim that the premise that the universe must have had a beginning in time is false.

The fact that such mental gymnastics are engaged in so as to evade precisely an absolute cosmic beginning bespeaks the massive problems it would present to atheistic materialism.

What is there about the very thought of the cosmos suddenly popping into existence out of absolutely nothing that so instantly moves the mind of most sane men to say, “Then, God must exist!’? What is there about such instantaneous creation ex nihilo that bespeaks so unequivocally to the human mind the exclusive mark of true divinity?

Why Infinite Power is Required

Both atheist and theist alike see in the “out-of-nothing” explosive instant appearance of a Big Bang the manifestation of unlimited raw power, infinite power. Just as clear is the fact that infinite power could reside solely in an infinite being that fulfills the classical definition of God. This is precisely why atheists go to great lengths to deny that any such “creation event” could have ever occurred at the beginning of time.

Still, is such instinctive inference rationally justified? What first stands out is the fact that absolutely no one claims that the cosmos actually appeared out of nowhere and from absolutely nothing. Atheists either claim it always existed in some physical form or other, or else, attempt the bait and switch of claiming it came from nothing – but the “nothing” turns out to be the actual something of the quantum vacuum as explained above. In proclaiming the Christian doctrine of true creation in time, theists do not hold that the cosmos arose from absolutely nothing either. Rather, they say the world was made by the power of the eternal God.

Thus, all explicitly or implicitly concur (1) that something has always existed and (2) that you do not get something from absolutely nothing.

But then, why does it take infinite power to create ex nihilo et utens nihilo? After all, the cosmos which is created, though immense, is still existentially limited. So, why would unlimited power be required to create what is itself limited in being?

Well, as St. Thomas Aquinas points out², “… the power of the maker is measured not only by substance of the thing made but also from the manner of its making ….” To build the Empire State Building in one year is impressive. But to build it in a single day would defy belief. To make a chicken from another chicken by cloning is impressive. To evolve a chicken from random subatomic particles is nearly unimaginable – since the distance between what there is to work with and the produced chicken is even greater than in the cloning example. But to produce a chicken from no preexisting matter requires immeasurable power, since there is no proportion at all between nothing and something. Since immeasurable power is the same as unlimited or infinite power, it would take infinite power for God to create the cosmos ex nihilo.

The Real Meaning of “Being Created”

Thus, on the hypothesis that the cosmos did begin in time, it would depend on the infinite power of God to have created it. Now what depends on another to bring it into existence clearly does not account for its own existence, but rather depends on another for the existence it has received. The creature that “pops into existence” is an effect, that is, a being that does not adequately explain its own existence. As such, it depends on an extrinsic cause for its existence.

So, if God exercises his infinite power to bring the cosmos into being, what happens the next moment after he has created it? Can God cease his causal activity in relation to the world, and yet, the world still exists? As St. Thomas observes³, “When the cause ceases causing, the effect ceases.” Were God to withdraw his creative causality from the cosmos, the cosmos would cease to exist. God must continue to create the universe in order for the universe to continue to exist. This creatio continua or “conservation” must continue for as long as the world continues to exist. Thus, God is said, not only to create the world, but also to conserve it in existence.

Moreover, for St. Thomas, there is a real distinction between the world having a beginning in time and its being created ex nihilo. This is clear from the fact that, while St. Thomas maintains that the belief that the world was created with a temporal beginning is a doctrine of Catholic Faith, he does not maintain that this is possible to prove from natural reason. Indeed, in his short work On the Eternity of the World, St. Thomas explicitly argues for the philosophical possibility of the world’s eternity. After all, God could have been creating (conserving) the world from all eternity: it would have no beginning in time, yet still be created.

This means that the concept of the world beginning in time is distinct from the concept of its being created by the power of God. Even if God did not create the world with a beginning in time, the world would still be the object of his creative act in order to sustain it in being throughout eternity.

For the same reason that it would take infinite power to create the world at the beginning of time, it takes infinite power to keep it in existence even if it existed from all eternity. This is because the real meaning of “being created” is not tied to having a temporal beginning, but rather to the fact that anything exists as opposed to non-existence. It takes infinite power to explain why anything simply exists – even the least subatomic particle “popping into existence” for a nanosecond in a quantum vacuum.

In other words, the creative act is not measured by the fact that something goes from non-being to being at the beginning of its existence, but simply by the fact that it manifests the act of existing as opposed to non-being during its existence. Both acts require exactly the same power to explain fully: infinite power.

The key insight here is that existence itself is an act – the most basic of all acts: that by which a thing is constituted as real as opposed to being nothing at all. This act “does something.” It keeps every creature in being. And the power needed to do this is measured by the same criteria we discussed earlier. Since there is no proportion at all between non-being and being, there is no way to measure the power required to posit this act by which a finite being is being continually created, that is, “standing outside of nothingness,” even if it had no beginning in time.

Infinite power is required to explain the existence of every finite being and of that whole collectivity of finite bodies known as the cosmos. It takes infinite power to explain the existence of the cosmos. But infinite power cannot reside in a finite being or even in a collectivity of finite beings.

Therefore there must exist an Infinite Being, God, who alone can possess and manifest the infinite power required to create and conserve in existence the finite cosmos.

“Why is there something rather than nothing?” The answer to this ultimate question is simply “because God exists and creates it.” God’s infinite power is the reason for his own existence. My argument here is a redacted version of a formal paper that I have published elsewhere.

Postscript

Given the difficulty that some viewers of Strange Notions have had in grasping the insight that physical laws like inertia fail to fully explain the continued motion of heavenly bodies, I suspect that they may find the argument presented herein demanding full explanation of cosmic existence to be even less compelling. Still, it is curious that these same minds that are so skeptical of any rational explanation of our incredible universe should so easily be intellectually satisfied with the “just so” explanation of a cosmos that has always “just happened to exist” without any real explanation either in itself or from an extrinsic cause.

NOTE: We recently kicked off a new series of posts on popular arguments for God. Each post lays out the argument and is followed by open-ended discussion. The goal is not to offer a thorough defense or refutation of the argument in the original post, but to unpack it together, as a community, in the comment boxes. So far we've covered Alvin Plantinga's modal ontological argument for God, the Kalam cosmological argument, and the moral argument for God. Today, we'll look at the argument from fine-tuning.

Most scientists agree that the universe seems fine-tuned for life. Fundamental constants such as the speed of light, the gravitational constant, and Planck's constant seem so precisely adjusted, that even a minuscule variance in one of the them would throw off the whole universe and make life impossible—not just human life, life of any kind.

As Stephen Hawking, the atheist cosmologist, admits, "The remarkable fact is that the values of these numbers seem to have been very finely adjusted to make possible the development of life."

Paul Davies, an agnostic physicist, agrees, saying, "There is for me powerful evidence that there is something going on behind it all...it seems as though somebody has fine-tuned nature's numbers to make the universe. The impression of design is overwhelming."

So what best explains this "fine-tuning" of the universe? Are these fundamental values necessary (i.e., they can't be anything other than what they are)? Are they arbitrary and set by chance? Or were they precisely ordered by some force or designer outside of the universe?

That question is central to the fine-tuning argument for God. Here's a brief video from William Lane Craig's Reasonable Faith ministry that sums it up:

The video presents the argument like this:

Premise 1: The fine-tuning of the universe is due either to necessity, chance, or design.
Premise 2: The fine-tuning of the universe is not due to necessity.
Premise 3: The fine-tuning of the universe is not due to chance.
Conclusion: Therefore, the fine-tuning of the universe is due to a designer.

From this we can infer that this designer must be a transcendent, supremely intelligent creator of the cosmos. That obviously doesn't prove the fullness of God, as understood by Catholics and other Christians, but it does reveal a huge slice of him—a slice far too big for any content atheist or agnostic.

So what do you think? Is the fine-tuning argument a sound proof for God? If not, how does it fail?

 
 
(Image credit: Reasonable Faith)

Does God still matter? This is the question that seems to be at the heart of the modern debate about God’s existence. Many unbelievers who label themselves agnostic-atheists do not claim definitively that God does not exist. They take the softer position that God probably does not exist, and even if he does exist, he is irrelevant in explaining the universe. As Dr. Richard Dawkins stated in a 2013 Cambridge debate with the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Rowan Williams, “Religion is redundant and irrelevant.”

But why is God seen as irrelevant? Why don’t modern agnostic-atheists think God matters? One reason, so it is claimed, is that science is sufficient to explain the physical universe.

For example, the world-renowned physicist Dr. Stephen Hawking, in a 2010 interview on the Larry King Live show, stated, “God may exist, but science can explain the universe without the need for a creator.” But is this true? Can science give an exhaustive explanation of the universe that would negate the need for God? I’ll give two reasons why I think the answer is no.

Science and the Inductive Method

First, science’s explanatory power is not sufficient, because it relies on the inductive method in order to validate its hypotheses.

Contrary to the deductive method, the inductive method moves from knowledge of particulars to general conclusions. Without getting into the details that differentiate the inductive and deductive methods, suffice to say that absolute certainty about one’s conclusion is impossible when employing the inductive method. Since science relies on the inductive method, it follows that scientists can never be absolutely certain that their theories explaining the universe are complete. They can never be absolutely certain that they have discovered and observed every piece of data necessary to give a complete explanation of the universe—much less a complete enough explanation that would negate the need for God.

My mentor and friend Fr. Robert J. Spitzer likes to say, “Science cannot know what it has not yet discovered, because it has not yet discovered it.” In other words, scientists can be certain only about what they have already discovered through empirical observation. Certainty can never be had for whether there is some piece of data enshrouded in the past or a piece of data yet to be encountered that shifts the paradigm. Therefore, there necessarily exists in science a perpetual openness to discovering something new that could alter its current theory about the universe.

But if this is true, then one can never rationally claim that science can give a complete and exhaustive explanation of the universe—much less a complete enough explanation that God is no longer needed as its creator. So, the claim that God doesn’t matter because science can sufficiently explain the universe is unfounded.

Science and the Universe's Existence

Another way to respond to this objection is by pointing out that science in principle cannot explain why the universe exists in the first place rather than not exist.

Suppose for argument sake that science could give an exhaustive physical description of the universe. Would that necessarily negate the need for God in explaining the universe? Absolutely not! Why? Science has explanatory power given the fact that the universe exists. It presupposes an already existing universe to observe and explain. Consequently, it cannot explain why the universe exists in the first place. It can’t even explain why the universe exists in this way instead of some other way. So, to the question “What determines that there is to be a universe with time, space, and matter instead no universe at all?”, science is silent.

To the question, “What determines the universe to be this way—e.g., governed by quantum mechanics—and not some other way—e.g., not governed by quantum mechanics?”, science is silent. These are philosophical questions that can be answered only by philosophy. Therefore, science cannot take the place of God in sufficiently explaining the universe.

In conclusion, because science must always be open to modification due to its reliance on the inductive method and its inability to explain why the universe even exists rather than not exist, it will never be able to give an exhaustive description of the universe. Therefore, any claim that science has done away with the need for a transcendent creator in explaining the universe is simply unreasonable.
 
 
(Image credit: CNN)

"There is no case known (neither is it, indeed, possible) in which a thing is found to be the efficient cause of itself; for so it would be prior to itself, which is impossible." - Summa Theologiae I.2.3

"If, then, something were its own cause of being, it would be understood to be before it had being – which is impossible…" - Summa Contra Gentiles I.22.6
 
 
Was Aquinas mistaken? Could something be its own cause? Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow seem to think so. In their recent book The Grand Design, they tell us that “we create [the universe’s] history by our observation, rather than history creating us” and that since we are part of the universe, it follows that “the universe… create[d] itself from nothing.”

I examine their position (and the many things that are wrong with it) in my review of the book for National Review. What is of interest for present purposes is their suggestion that future events can bring about past ones. Could this be a way of making plausible “the dreaded causa sui” (as I seem to recall John Searle once referring to the idea in a lecture)? That is to say, might a thing A possibly cause itself as long as it does so indirectly, by causing some other thing B to exist or occur in the past which in turn causes A?

To be sure, Hawking and Mlodinow provide only the murkiest account of how their self-causation scenario is supposed to work, and do not even acknowledge, much less attempt to answer, the obvious objections one might raise against it. But one can imagine ways in which such a scenario might be developed. Suppose for the sake of argument that the doctrine of temporal parts is true. And suppose we consider various examples from science fiction of one temporal part or stage of an individual playing a role in bringing about earlier parts or stages of the same individual.

In his 1941 short story “By His Bootstraps,” Robert Heinlein presents a tightly worked out scenario in which his protagonist Bob Wilson is manipulated by time-traveling future versions of himself into carrying out actions that put him into a series of situations in which he has to manipulate his past self in just the way he remembers having been manipulated. That is to say, temporal stage Z of Wilson causes temporal stage A of Wilson to initiate a transition through various intermediate Wilson stages which eventually loop back around to Z. In the 1952 E.C. Comics story “Why Papa Left Home” (from Weird Science #11), a time-traveling scientist stranded several decades in the past settles down to marry (and later impregnate) a girl who reminds him of the single mother who raised him, only to discover, after his abrupt and unexpected return to the present and to his horror, that she actually was his mother and that he is his own father. Doubling down on this Oedipal theme in what is probably the mother of all time travel paradoxes, Heinlein’s ingenious 1959 short story “–All You Zombies –” features a sex-changing time-traveler (“Jane”) who turns out to be his own father and his own mother. (Don’t ask, just read it.)

Now, if we think of each of these characters as a series of discrete temporal parts – again labeled A through Z for simplicity’s sake – then we might say that each part has a kind of independent existence. A, B, C, D, and on through Z are like the wires making up a cable, in which each wire can be individuated without reference to the others even though they also all make up the whole. The difference would be that while the wires are arranged spatially so as to make up the cable, the stages in question are arranged temporally so as to make up a person. And what we have in the science-fiction scenarios in question is just the unusual sort of case wherein some of the stages loop back on the others, just as some of the wires in a cable might loop back and be wound around the others.

Mind you, I do not in fact think any of this is right. I do not accept the doctrine of temporal parts, and I do not think that such time travel scenarios really are possible even in principle given a sound metaphysics. But as I say, we’re just granting all this for the sake of argument. And if we do, it might seem that we are describing a kind of self-causation.

In fact we are not, at least not in the sense of “self-causation” that Aquinas is ruling out as impossible in principle. For notice that in order to make sense of the scenarios in question, we have had to treat each of the stages of the persons involved as distinct, independent existences. For instance, in “– All You Zombies –” it is, strictly speaking, not that Jane causes herself/himself to exist so much as that the later stages of Jane cause earlier stages of Jane to exist. And since each stage is distinct from the others, we don’t really have a case of self-causation in the strict sense. For none of the stages causes itself – each is caused by other stages. The situation is analogous to the “self-motion” of animals, which Aristotle and Aquinas point out is not really inconsistent with their principle that whatever is moved is moved by another, since such “self-motion” really involves one part of an animal moving another part.

We might also compare these scenarios to the kinds of causal series ordered per accidens that Aquinas is happy to allow might in principle regress to infinity. The stock example is a father who begets a son who in turn begets another. Each has a causal power to beget further sons that is independent of the continued activity or inactivity of any previous begetter. Contrast a causal series ordered per se, the stock example of which is a hand moving a stone with a stick. Here the stick’s power to move the stone derives from the hand, and would disappear if the hand were to stop moving. In the strictest sense, it is not the stick which moves the stone, but the hand which moves it, by means of the stick. By contrast, if Al begets Bob and Bob begets Chuck, it is Bob who begets Chuck, and in no sense Al who does it. The reason the latter, per accidens sort of causal series might in principle regress to infinity, then, is that the activity of any member does not of necessity trace to the activity of an earlier member which uses it as an instrument. But things are different with a per se casual series, in which no member other than the first could operate at all were the first not working through it. (I had reason to say more about the difference between these sorts of causal series, and about what is meant by “first” in the expression “first cause,” in this recent post.)

Aquinas allows for the sake of argument that the universe might have had no beginning, given that the series of causes extending backward in time is ordered per accidens. When he argues for God as first cause of the world, then, he does not mean “first” in a temporal sense. His argument is rather that the universe could exist here and now, and at any particular moment, only if God is conserving it in existence, for anything less than that which is Pure Act or Being Itself could not in his view persist for an instant unless it were caused to do so by that which is Pure Act or Being Itself, to which it is related in a per se rather than per accidens way. In particular, anything which is in any way a compound of act and potency (as all compounds of form and matter are, and, more generally, as all compounds of existence and essence are) must be continually actualized by that which need not itself be actualized insofar as it is “already” Pure Actuality. (See my book Aquinas for the details.)

Now every temporal part of the characters in our hypothetical science-fiction examples is relevantly like the particular moments in the history of the universe. Even if the universe had no beginning but regressed back in time to infinity, it would still have to be sustained in being at any particular moment by God. It could not at any particular moment be causing itself. And even if the temporal parts of the characters in question looped around back on themselves, they would still at any particular moment have to be sustained in being by God. They too could not at any particular moment be causing themselves. In short, the theoretical possibility of a circular temporal series would be as irrelevant to Aquinas’s point as the theoretical possibility of an infinite temporal series is. When Aquinas denies that anything can cause itself given the absurdity of a cause preceding itself, what he is most concerned to deny is, not that a cause can be prior to itself temporally (though he would deny that too), but that it can be prior to itself ontologically, that it could be more fundamental than itself in the order of what exists at any given moment, as it would have to be if it were sustaining itself in being. (And again, in any event no cause strictly exists prior to itself even temporally in the scenarios we’ve been describing; for each temporal part of the characters in question is caused by a distinct temporal part, not by itself.)

Hence, even if the universe were (as it is not) as Robert Heinlein or Stephen Hawking describes it, it would require at any particular instant a cause distinct from it in order for it to exist at that instant. (The same would be true if we consider the universe as a single four-dimensional object. It would still be a composite of form and matter and essence and existence, and thus of act and potency, and could therefore not in principle exist were it not caused by that which is not composite in any of these ways but just is Pure Act and Being Itself.) When we carefully unpack what the scenarios would have to involve, we can see that they do not entail any sort of causa sui, nor anything that could in principle exist apart from a divine first cause.
 
 
NOTE: Dr. Feser's contributions at Strange Notions were originally posted on his blog, including this article, and therefore lose some of their context when reprinted here. Dr. Feser explains why that matters.
 
 
(Image credit: MoviePilot.com)

The great British physicist Stephen Hawking has emerged in recent years as a poster boy for atheism, and his heroic struggles against the ravages of Lou Gehrig’s disease have made him something of a secular saint. The new biopic “The Theory of Everything” does indeed engage in a fair amount of Hawking-hagiography, but it is also, curiously, a God-haunted movie.

In one of the opening scenes, the young Hawking meets Jane, his future wife, in a bar and tells her that he is a cosmologist. “What’s cosmology?” she asks, and he responds, “Religion for intelligent atheists.” “What do cosmologists worship?” she persists. And he replies, “A single unifying equation that explains everything in the universe.” Later on, Stephen brings Jane to his family’s home for dinner and she challenges him, “You’ve never said why you don’t believe in God.” He says, “A physicist can’t allow his calculations to be muddled by belief in a supernatural creator,” to which she deliciously responds, “Sounds less of an argument against God than against physicists.”

This spirited back and forth continues throughout the film, as Hawking settles more and more into a secularist view and Jane persists in her religious belief. As Hawking’s physical condition deteriorates, Jane gives herself to his care with truly remarkable devotion, and it becomes clear that her dedication is born of her religious conviction. Though the great scientist concluded his most popular work with a reference to “knowing the mind of God,” it is obvious by the end of the film that he meant that line metaphorically. The last bit of information that we learn, just before the credits roll, is that Professor Hawking continues his quest to find the theory of everything, that elusive equation that will explain all of reality. Do you see why I say the entire film is haunted by God?

As I have argued elsewhere, it is by no means accidental that the modern physical sciences emerged when and where they did, namely, in a culture shaped by Christian belief. Two suppositions were required for the sciences to flourish, and they are both theological in nature, namely, that the world is not divine and that nature is marked, through and through, by intelligibility. As long as the natural world is worshipped as sacred—as it was in many ancient cultures—it cannot become the subject of analysis, investigation, and experimentation. And unless one has confidence that the world one seeks to analyze and investigate has an intelligible structure, one will never bother with the exercise. Now both of these convictions are corollaries of the more fundamental doctrine of creation. If the world has been created by God, then it is not divine, but it is indeed marked, in every nook and cranny, by the intelligence of the Creator who made it. We recall the opening lines of St. John’s Gospel: “In the beginning was the Word…and all things were made through the Word.” The universal intelligibility of nature is a function of its being brought into existence by an intelligent Creator. The young Joseph Ratzinger stated the relationship as follows: the “objective mind” discoverable in finite reality is the consequence of the “subjective mind” that thought it into reality. Ratzinger furthermore observes how a peculiarity of our language discloses the same truth. When we come to know something, we speak of “recognizing” a truth, but the word “recognition” (re-cognition) implies that we have thought again what had already been thought by a more primordial intelligence. Long before Hawking used the phrase, Albert Einstein characterized his own science as a quest to know the mind of God, and in so doing, he was operating out of the very assumptions I’ve been articulating.

In light of these clarifications, let us look again at the central preoccupation of “A Theory of Everything,” namely, Hawking’s quest to find the one great unifying equation that would explain all of reality. It is always fascinating to go to roots of an argument, that is to say, to the fundamental assumptions that drive a rational quest, for in so doing, we necessarily leave the realm of the purely rational and enter something like the realm of the mystical. Why in the world would a scientist blithely assume that there is or is even likely to be one unifying rational form to all things, unless he assumed that there is a singular, overarching intelligence that has placed it there? Why shouldn’t the world be chaotic, utterly random, meaningless? Why should one presume that something as orderly and rational as an equation would describe the universe’s structure? I would argue that the only finally reasonable ground for that assumption is the belief in an intelligent Creator, who has already thought into the world the very mathematics that the patient scientist discovers. In turning his back on what he calls “a celestial dictator,” Stephen Hawking was indeed purging his mind of an idol, a silly simulacrum of God, but in seeking, with rational discipline for the theory of everything, he was, in point of fact, affirming the true God.
 
 
(Image credit: Circle Cinema)

“We have to make this planet as good as we possibly can and try to leave it a better place than we found it.”

The crowd, gathered to hear Richard Dawkins debate the Archbishop of Sydney, Cardinal George Pell, responds to the trite apothegm with unsurprising applause. But off-stage, after the cameras are turned off, the proverbial devil of the details rears his ugly head.

A weary Dawkins—one almost gets the sense that he’d rather not talk to anybody at all—kneels besides a disabled woman in a wheelchair, handing her a signed copy of his book and forcing a smile for the camera. The woman looks ecstatic to meet her hero; Dawkins seems to still be busy pummeling on Pell in some dusty corner of the same restless mind that gave rise to The God Delusion almost a decade ago.

We see this all play out in the 2013 homage to the New Atheism, "The Unbelievers", a sort of promotional travelogue which follows Dawkins and fellow atheist Lawrence Krauss around the globe to—like two real-life Hazel Moteses—spread the gospel of unbelief.

But Dawkins recently admitted something about people who, like this particular fan, suffer from a lifelong disability: it would have been better for them to have never been born.

Contemplating over Twitter what a woman pregnant with a Down Syndrome child ought to do, Dawkins said: “Abort it and try again. It would be immoral to bring it into the world if you have the choice.” The controversial and callous remark—certainly not the first from Dawkins—was not so much walked back as walked forward in his formal apology.

Dawkins is not the only New Atheist that has been mired in public controversy in recent years. From Krauss' cringe-worthy debate with a Muslim scholar to Sam Harris' recent comments about Islam on Bill Maher's show, bizarre, off-color public statements from the New Atheists—often made, or at least said to be made, because of an unflinching commitment to naturalism—are resulting in charges of brutality, misogyny, bigotry, and the same kinds of unflattering associations Dawkins had hoped to keep squarely on God’s head.

Of course, no mountain of personal controversies could discredit the claims of these self-styled “brights” or of atheists more generally. To suggest otherwise would be to engage in the very ad hominem attacks of which some of them are all too fond. But these headlines are, in their way, a visible symptom of what seems to be the diminishing traction and declining vitality of the entire New Atheist movement.

To put it in no uncertain terms: the New Atheism, if not already dead, is quickly dying.

This is first evident in a very literal way, in their fallen ranks. The “fifth horsemen” of the New Atheism, Victor Stenger, passed away a few months ago, but the loss of their leading horseman Christopher Hitchens in 2011 immediately comes to mind.

With Hitchens’ death, the New Atheism lost its scintillating, seductive flair. The wittiest, most likeable new atheist may not have converted as many as he would’ve liked, but certainly won the attention and admiration of many in the Christian community. In one of the first articles at Strange Notions, titled “Why I Loved to Listen to Christopher Hitchens,” Father Robert Barron confesses:

“I think I watched every Hitchens debate that I could find on YouTube; I subscribed to Vanity Fair largely because Hitchens was a regular contributor; I read every one of his books...No one wrote quite like Christopher Hitchens. Whether he was describing an uprising on the streets of Athens, or criticizing the formation of young men in the British boarding schools of the 1950s, or defending his support of the Iraq war, or begging people to let go of what he took to be their childish belief in God, Hitchens was unfailingly intelligent, perceptive, funny, sarcastic, and addictively readable.”

If Christopher Hitchens was the most stimulating New Atheist, the erudite Santa-lookalike Daniel Dennett was always the most scholarly. But, like Saint Nick himself, the philosopher has vacated the public eye so suddenly as to cast doubt on his very existence. Dennett has made no new enemies, inflamed no Twitter wars, and penned no blog screeds about the stupidity of faith. Instead—perhaps with an eye toward securing his legacy as a serious philosopher—he’s been sitting down with respected Christian thinker Alvin Plantinga for a civil, serious dialogue about science and religion.

And here, we see the root cause of the New Atheism’s decline: its lack of a sturdy philosophical foundation. Any organization can withstand its bad press if it’s grounded in something human, something wise, something timeless. But all along, scholars have grumbled that—unlike the writings of a Nietzsche, Sartre, or Russell—the New Atheism lacked intellectual depth and was doomed to self-destruction.

And they were right. Krauss looks like a farm team player brought up to revitalize a crumbling organization, trying (and failing) to recreate Hitch’s signature rhetorical jukes. Meanwhile, Dawkins is resorting to odd trick plays which never get off the ground. (His bizarre mutations of the mind art show comes to mind.) Nothing is meshing the way it used to, and the overcompensation on the part of the remaining leaders—and pushback from their rank and file—is telling.

Meanwhile, less vociferous unbelievers are gladly rushing in to fill that profitable cultural space. Neil deGrasse Tyson, for example, has rightly been accused of bungling the history of the Church with relation to science in his new "Cosmos" series—but he’s also quick to admit that he doesn’t have all the answers when it comes to God. “The only ‘ist’ I am is a scientist,” Tyson says in a Big Think interview. “What is my stance on religion, or spirituality, or God? I would say if I’d find a word that came closest, it would be agnostic...Atheists I know who proudly wear the badge are active atheists. They’re like in-your-face atheists, and they want to change policies, and they’re having debates. I don’t have the time, the interest, the energy to do any of that. I’m a scientist.”

Then there is Thomas Nagel, a renowned philosopher who—going beyond Tyson—is an avowed atheist. Nagel’s recent book Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False drove fellow atheists up the wall, not only for its defection from the creed of naturalism, but for its alignment with the arguments of Alvin Plantinga—the same Christian enemy who has been sitting down with Dennett for tea.

Lastly, there’s physicist and atheist Sean Carroll who—going even beyond Nagel—is committed to the materialist conception of nature. Carroll penned an insightful piece recently titled “Physicists Should Stop Saying Silly Things About Philosophy.” While men like Dawkins, Krauss, and Stephen Hawking routinely dismiss philosophy as obfuscating gibberish that only serves to embolden the theologians, Carroll acknowledges that philosophy adds quite a lot to the modern scientific project. “The point, I take it, is to understand how nature works,” Carroll writes. “Part of that is knowing how to do calculations, but another part is asking deep questions about what it all means. That’s what got me interested in science, anyway...It’s a shame that so many physicists don’t see how good philosophy of science can contribute to this quest.”

This, happily, is the new tenor of the conversation. The apparently intramural rivalry between two fundamentalist spins on the world looks increasingly at odds with the problems and possibilities an open-minded majority face on the ground, and warriors from each side are deigning to say to the other, like Pound to Whitman:

I have detested you long enough...
Now is a time for carving.
We have one sap and one root –
Let there be commerce between us.

That’s not to say that passionate disagreement has ended—it hasn’t, and never will. But the tone and style of "The Unbelievers" seems a decade too late; the moment has passed. As celebrities like Bill Pullman and Cameron Diaz offer public support for this un-dynamic duo, and Krauss proudly holds up a tweet from Miley Cyrus with his picture and the quotation “forget Jesus,” the only real message that gets across is that intellectual fashions, like all fashions, come and go.

And as things continue to change where philosophical substance is concerned, the New Atheists and their readers will either change too, or fade away, raging against the dying of the brights.
 
 
(Image credit: YouTube)

Recently there was an excellent question in the Strange Notions comment boxes from Rob Tish. He wanted to know what the Bible means when it says God created man in His own image: "If God is so fundamentally and essentially different from us, then in what sense are we made in His image?"

In a word: We are free-thinkers.

Since invoking that word requires some explanation, the response is three-fold. First is the answer to Rob's question, with explanation and reference to the Catechism of the Catholic Church. Second is a summary of atheists' views on this matter, with explanation and reference to popular atheist scientists. Third are some questions.

First: What Made in God's Image Means

 
The Christian doctrine of free-thinking is tied to the revelations of the Holy Trinity and the Incarnation, and it explains why humans have intellect and free will, that is, the ability to freely decide what to think.

Some background: In trying to understand the revelation of the Holy Trinity, theologians had to define the word "person" more precisely. Historically, the Latin word “persōna,” after the corresponding use of the Hellenistic Greek πρόσωπον (prosopon), meant a mask on a character in a play or a juridical entity. Christian theology clarified the meaning of "person" dating back to the third century writings of Tertullian (Adversus Praxean) and the sixth century writings of Boethius (De Duab. Nat. as referenced by St. Aquinas, ST I.29.1.1).

"Person" was defined as “an individual substance of a rational nature” and the theologians applied it to an understanding of the Holy Trinity, One God and three Persons. Since the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit share fully in the Divine Nature, yet each is an individual, then they are Persons, each "an individual substance with a rational nature" but also united as One God.

Theologians also worked out the order of the processions of the Three Persons of the Trinity, and it has significance for the understanding of humans. The Son proceeds from the Father as an act of divine intellect, somewhat like a word is conceived in the mind. Christ is the Word, the Logos, the Truth personified. From the Father and Son together as one substance the Holy Spirit proceeds as an act of divine will, Love personified. The Three Persons are in perfect, eternal communion.

In Genesis, God said, "Let us make man, wearing our own image and likeness." This divine image is, thus, present in humans, and the human person is "an individual substance of a rational nature" too. The creature is not equal to the Creator though. Humans are rational, but they are not omniscient, almighty, or able to create out of nothing.

"The divine image is present in every man. It shines forth in the communion of persons, in the likeness of the unity of the divine persons among themselves." (Catechism of the Catholic Church 1702)

Because we bear this likeness, we bear a natural yearning for the organization of the Holy Trinity. We have the spiritual powers of intellect and will, which instill in us the natural reciprocal desires to love and be loved, to know and be known, to learn and make choices, to seek what is good and to abhor what is evil.

We also naturally desire to belong to our families and communities—many persons united as one entity. The more people freely give, receive, and search for good, the more they are united, the more they learn, the more the human race progresses.

"By virtue of his soul and his spiritual powers of intellect and will, man is endowed with freedom, an 'outstanding manifestation of the divine image.'" (CCC 1705)

Families are the most intimate reflection of the Holy Trinity, two become one and born of their love is a new person. This is the basis of arguments against laws of man that break these natural, divine laws. They are disordered laws that break the unity of people, families, and societies, and diminish the freedom and dignity of each person.

"By his reason, man recognizes the voice of God which urges him "to do what is good and avoid what is evil." Everyone is obliged to follow this law, which makes itself heard in conscience and is fulfilled in the love of God and of neighbor. Living a moral life bears witness to the dignity of the person." (CCC 1706)

The Second Person of the Blessed Trinity became man to heal the union of mankind with God. That redemption is available to anyone who freely chooses to accept it.

"It is in Christ, 'the image of the invisible God,' that man has been created 'in the image and likeness' of the Creator. It is in Christ, Redeemer and Savior, that the divine image, disfigured in man by the first sin, has been restored to its original beauty and ennobled by the grace of God." (CCC 1701)

This means we are made to search for God, as every human culture in recorded history has done. It means we are made to form communities and to seek just laws, as cultures also sought to do even though they all have failed to do it perfectly. This also means that we are made to search for what is true and good, and to be united with God in Heaven where we find perfection. Not only is there a logic to this doctrine, there is a primal beauty.

"Endowed with 'a spiritual and immortal' soul, the human person is 'the only creature on earth that God has willed for its own sake.' From his conception, he is destined for eternal beatitude.
 
The human person participates in the light and power of the divine Spirit. By his reason, he is capable of understanding the order of things established by the Creator. By free will, he is capable of directing himself toward his true good. He finds his perfection 'in seeking and loving what is true and good.'" (CCC 1703-1704)

Of course, because we possess the power of free will and intellect, humans can make the choice to reject faith in what God has revealed and turn away from it.

Second: Atheism and Free-Thinking

 
Most people probably think "free-thinking" is an atheist term, but the idea was more or less borrowed. It emerged in the 1700's among groups who rejected Christianity. The rationalist sect, prominent from the early 18th century, typically capitalized the word as a label for themselves. "Free-thinker" is defined today as a label for a person who professes independence of thought, withholds assent to widely held beliefs or ideas, and refuses to submit his or her reason to the control of authority in matters of religious belief. (Oxford English Dictionary)

The James Hastings 2003 Encyclopedia of Religion says that Free-thinkers strive to build their opinions on the basis of facts, scientific inquiry, and logical principles, independent of any logical fallacies or the intellectually limiting effects of authority, confirmation bias, cognitive bias, conventional wisdom, popular culture, prejudice, sectarianism, tradition, urban legend, and all other dogmas.

While all of that sounds impressive on the surface, the rejection of Christian doctrine has its logical implications. Without acknowledging the soul of man created in the image of God, there is no basis to acknowledge the spiritual powers of intellect and free will. Some of the most respected modern atheists have followed atheism to its logical conclusion and admitted as much.

"The facts tell us that free will is an illusion." (Sam Harris, neuroscientist)
 
"Since, as far as physics is concerned, we are all just particles, then this would seem to make free will an illusion indeed." (Dr. Victor Stenger, physicist)
 
"I would like to convince biologists that a belief in free will is nothing other than a continuing belief in vitalism (or, as I say, a belief in magic)." (Dr. Anthony Cashmore, biologist)
 
"It is hard to imagine how free will can operate if our behavior is determined by physical law, so it seems that we are no more than biological machines and that free will is just an illusion." (Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow, cosmologist and physicist)

There is, according to them, no supernatural realm and thus, no soul. There is only the physical body. The brain runs its program like a computer obeying the laws of physics, and consciousness, if there is such a thing, is an emergent and measurable property of the brain-machine.

Without the power for a person to freely chose what to think, there is no basis to claim the power of actual free-thought. That is not only an "intellectually limiting effect" (from authority figures nonetheless), it is a fatal contradiction of the atheistic free-thinking identity.

Third: Where Does That Leave You?

 
It gets back to Rob's question and the importance of the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, the Incarnation, and the definition of "person" made in the image and likeness of God.

If free-thinking is an illusion, then aren't intellectual pursuits illusions too? Isn't searching for truth like trying to lift yourself up by your bootstraps? You are free to reach down and do it, tug and tug until you are exhausted, but you get nowhere except where the laws of physics land you if your feet move out from under you. Are your thoughts, then, in vain?

If free-thinking is a human power of the soul because the human person is made in the image and likeness of God, then aren't intellectual pursuits more like reaching for something beyond yourself while planting your boots firmly on the ground? Searching for truth, guided by an assent in faith, is a reasonable way to understand more about yourself, your world, your purpose, and your origin. Does that mean your thoughts, then, are imprisoned?

Perhaps an atheist will follow up with answers to these questions, including an explanation about how there can be actual free thought if free will is an illusion—with particular emphasis on why it is reasonable to believe the intellectual conclusions of scientists who claim to have no free will.
 
 
(Image credit: University of Michigan)

There's an old saying about giving a man enough rope, and he'll hang himself. The idea is that if someone is wrong or lying, the longer they go on, the more obvious this becomes.  Well, Bantam Books gave Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow all the rope they wanted, and the result is The Grand Design, a new book in which they argue against the necessity (and existence) of God.  Here's the core of their argument:
 

“[Just] as Darwin and Wallace explained how the apparently miraculous design of living forms could appear without intervention by a supreme being, the multiverse concept can explain the fine tuning of physical law without the need for a benevolent creator who made the Universe for our benefit. Because there is a law like 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.”

 
They then explain the basic theory behind the "multiverse," which presupposes that multiple universes exist:
 

“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. Rather these multiple universes arise naturally from physical law.”

 
Let's leave aside the question of the "multiverse" theory, which John Haldane addresses in First Things. Hawking and Mlodinow have done a thoroughly sufficient job of defeating their own argument. Let's simply outline their three major claims above:

1. Claim 1: Spontaneous Creation is the reason that there is something rather than nothing, including the Universe; (“Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the Universe exists”).  This applies to all universes, meaning it applies to the entire multiverse.
2. Claim 2: Spontaneous Creation requires the law of gravity; (“Because there is a law of gravity, the Universe can and will create itself from nothing”; “Rather these multiple universes arise naturally from physical law”).
3. Claim 3: The multitude of universes are responsible for producing fine-tuned physical laws (“the multiverse concept can explain the fine tuning of physical law”)

Reduced to its bare-bones, the argument looks like this:
 

 
The problem, of course, is that it's circular. You can't have a universe without it being created, you can't have spontaneous creation without physical laws, and you can't have physical laws without a universe.

As Hawking and Mlodinow concede, without Creation, there's nothing.  To have anything - a universe, a multiverse, the law of gravity, "finely-tuned" physical laws, anything - you have to first have Creation.  And they've shown pretty effectively that "spontaneous" creation is impossible, since it requires physical laws like the law of gravity. So we've established that there was Creation, and that the universe/multiverse didn't (and couldn't) create itself.

On this view, it seems the only two possibilities are "God" or "circular irrational nonsense."  Hawking and Mlodinow may be brilliant physicists, but at least in this book they present themselves as poor philosophers and logicians. Their futile efforts to outline an atheistic creation story lend more credence to theism than atheism.
 
 
Originally posted at Shameless Popery. Used with author's permission.
(Image credit: ABC News)

A few weeks ago, Stephen Hawking delivered a lecture at the California Institute of Technology titled "The Origin of the Universe," and you’re likely to have heard about it because, according to mainstream media outlets, Hawking has put God out of a job. In an article headlined “Stephen Hawking lays out case for Big Bang without God,” NBC News describes the presentation:
 

Stephen Hawking began the event by reciting an African creation myth, and rapidly moved on to big questions such as, Why are we here? He noted that many people still seek a divine solution to counter the theories of curious physicists, and at one point, he quipped, “What was God doing before the divine creation? Was he preparing hell for people who asked such questions?”

 
It’s somewhat annoying that Hawking implicitly uses the argument “Some religious explanations are silly (such as myths about gods laying eggs that become the universe), therefore all religious explanations are silly.” Surely he would know that Cal Tech is the site where Fr. George Lemaitre discussed the first incarnation of the Big Bang theory seventy years ago with a skeptical Albert Einstein (who felt that the idea of the “beginning of the universe” smacked too much of religion).

Fr. Lemaitre firmly believed in following the scientific evidence where it led, and this did not exclude God from his view of the universe. The NBC News article also describes Hawking as claiming that Pope John Paul II told scientists visiting the Vatican to study the universe but not the beginning of the universe since that is "holy" (this claim is also found in Hawking's A Brief History of Time, 120). There's no way to verify that this exchange took place because Hawking claims that it was said in a private audience. My money is on the Pope telling the scientists that there is a difference between studying the scientific question of the beginning of the universe and the philosophical/religious question of the origin of the universe, something Hawking apparently fails to grasp.

If Hawking wants to exclude God’s creative activity from the beginning of the universe, he’s going to need a pretty good argument. Does he have one? Unfortunately, this particular NBC news article is short on specifics. The articles says only that Hawking believes that a variant of string theory proves that multiple universes can come into existence from nothing and one of those universes will, by chance alone, have the physical properties necessary for life to emerge.

The problem with appeals to string theory is that the theory is as malleable as pizza dough and is almost impossible to empirically verify. Famed Cal Tech physicist Richard Feynman, whom Hawking mentions in his talk, said, “For anything that disagrees with an experiment, [string theorists] cook up an explanation—a fix-up to say, ‘Well, it still might be true’”(quoted in Lee Smolin. The Trouble With Physics: The Rise of String Theory, The Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next, 2007, 125.)

Lee Smolin, whose cosmology influenced Richard Dawkins’s proposal to explain away God in his 2005 book The God Delusion, writes, “The scenario of many unobserved universes [in string theory] plays the same logical role as the scenario of an intelligent designer. Each provides an untestable hypothesis that, if true, makes something improbable seem quite probable.”

The other problem with Hawking’s proposal is the answer to the question “How did the universe begin to exist from nothing?” The metaphysical principle “out of nothing, nothing comes” would preclude an entire universe emerging from nothing through a singularity. The NBC article is confusing because Hawking’s preferred model for the beginning of the universe (the Hartle-Hawking “no-boundary” model, pictured below) does not include a singularity.

The model has a beginning but it has no beginning point or boundary to the universe’s past. Asking what occurred before the beginning of this model is like asking what is north of the North Pole (time just goes in the other direction just as once you reach the North pole you start to go south).

The model simply exists without a beginning event that needs an explanation. The problem with this model is that Hawking relies on imaginary numbers, or the square root of negative numbers, for the time variables in order to preserve a purely spatial representation of the beginning of the universe. While imaginary numbers are helpful in abstract mathematics, it becomes absurd to measure a real entity such as the flow of time using something like “3i” minutes. Even Hawking admits that this is something of a mathematical trick and that “when one goes back to the real time in which we live . . . there will still appear to be singularities” (Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time, 144).

Hawking may have one alternative proposal for the beginning of the universe, but does he have any argument against the idea that God created the universe? The article alludes to one when Hawking makes the joke which Augustine first made about “what was God doing before he created the universe?” Augustine answered the question by noting that before creation there was no time so God was not “doing” anything within a temporal realm.

In other venues, such as the television show Curiosity, Hawking uses this observation as a springboard to argue that time did not exist at the Big Bang, so no cause is needed because causation only applies in time. According to Hawking, since all causes operate in time, not even God could make the universe while he exists timelessly.

However, the cause of an event does not have to be temporally prior to an event in order to be the event’s cause. In his Critique of Pure Reason, Immanuel Kant writes, “The greater part of operating causes in nature are simultaneous with their effects...If the cause had but a moment before ceased to be, the effect could not have arisen.”

To understand this, consider a hammer smashing a window. In this case, it is clear that the hammer is swung before the window smashes; the window doesn’t smash before the hammer hits it. However, if the cause (or the hammer moving through the air) disappeared even a microsecond before it touched the window, then the effect would never happen. Instead, there has to be a moment where the cause and effect “overlap” and both happen at the same time. Likewise, the cause of God creating the universe and the effect of the universe coming into existence are simultaneous events that happen at the first moment of time.

Stephen Hawking is a brilliant expert in the area of physics, but just because someone is an expert in how one part of reality works does not mean he is an expert in how all of reality works (or what is called metaphysics). Hawking's claims in this area should be reviewed carefully and not taken solely on his scientific authority.
 
 
Originally posted on the Catholic Answers blog. Used with author's permission.
(Image credit: Reuters)