Hawking Nonsense
Posted by Rebecca Teti in Reviews on Monday, September 13, 2010 2:00 PM
“Hawking says Science proves there is no God” read the headlines.
“Here we go again,” thought I.
I read the lengthy excerpt from the great physicist’s new book hoping for an intellectual challenge and found the same old thing: “Science” pretending to prove what “Science” cannot even speak about.
I use the scare quotes not to imply disrespect for scientists or scientific inquiry, or even for Mr. Hawking, but because ever since Francis Bacon, science as a field has self-consciously limited itself to matter and motion—that which can be empirically observed or deducted—and ceased investigating what classical science called the final and formal causes—the metaphysical “why” as opposed to “what” and “how.”
That intellectual turn has been a decidedly mixed blessing. On the one hand it unleashed a dynamic era of discovery and technological advance that has lifted people out of poverty, freed us from back-breaking labor, connected the far corners of the globe through quick travel and instant communication, and lifted us into the heavens.
On the other, it has unleashed as well an intellectual materialism. Apparently studying matter exclusively tempts one to believe that’s all there is. Which has had some unpleasant moral and political side-effects, to say the least.
Two comments, then, on this latest “scientific” assault on belief in God.
For the first, I’ll let a professional do the talking, namely Father Robert J. Spitzer, SJ, Ph.D, a scientist and philosopher himself. In a new book reviewed here, Fr. Spitzer argues that Prof. Hawking’s theories in the realm of Physics actually point toward the Creator, not away from him:
if the physical universe had a beginning (a point at which it came into existence) then prior to that point it was nothing. And if it was nothing then it could not have created itself (because only nothing can come from nothing). So what does that imply? The very reality that Dr. Hawking wants to avoid, namely, a transcendent power which can cause the universe to come into existence.
Of course “Science” as such can neither prove nor disprove a creator, but that is a rational deduction from what Physics is showing us now:
Why should we consider this power to be transcendent (that is – transcending the universe as a whole)? Because if the universe was nothing prior to its beginning, then the reality which causes it to exist must be completely beyond it (independent of it),” and this independence is not something that can belong unconditionally to the laws of gravity and quantum theory (which Hawking mistakenly thinks can replace God as the only truly unconditioned reality).
The fact that scientists like Hawking (and not just metaphysical philosophers) are talking today about the universe coming “out of nothing” is revealing, argues Father Spitzer. It shows that physics today, as never before, has overwhelming evidence pointing to how the universe has a beginning.
John Paul the Great made a similar argument—that physics can’t prove God but points to Him—back in 1981:
Any scientific hypothesis on the origin of the world, such as the hypothesis of a primitive atom from which derived the whole of the physical universe, leaves open the problem concerning the universe’s beginning. Science cannot of itself solve this question: there is needed that human knowledge that rises above physics and astrophysics and which is called metaphysics
The second comment is my own, and simply an expression of exasperation with the kind of scientist who delights in telling the Church to butt out of physics, but can’t resist tampering with our metaphysics.
Yes, we get it, the Pope doesn’t have an infallible microscope or telescope, and the Church respects the authority of science to use its own modes of inquiry to tell us about the material world.
But just as the theologian is not the authority on particle theory, so scientists must play by their own rules and not stray into other scholars’ disciplines. Especially when by their own definition they have nothing to say.
John Paul II once reminded a roomful of scientists this.
Our fundamentalist brothers and sisters, using their sometimes unerring ability to miss the point where papal statements are concerned, turned his 1996 address to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences into the claim that the pope declared his agreement with Charles Darwin.
Not so. He did say the creation accounts in Genesis are clearly not intended to be scientific texts, but moral ones, teaching the proper relation of Creator to created. He also deferred to scientists on the matter—though not without pointing out that there are so many variations on the theory of evolution that it’s hard to say what that term means anymore.
All of that was in a sense beside the point, however, which was John Paul II’s reminder to scientists that they aren’t metaphysicians.
The sciences of observation describe and measure, with ever greater precision, the many manifestations of life, and write them down along the time-line. The moment of passage into the spiritual realm is not something that can be observed in this way—although we can nevertheless discern, through experimental research, a series of very valuable signs of what is specifically human life. But the experience of metaphysical knowledge, of self-consciousness and self-awareness, of moral conscience, of liberty, or of aesthetic and religious experience—these must be analyzed through philosophical reflection, while theology seeks to clarify the ultimate meaning of the Creator’s designs.
Which was his polite, diplomatic, charitable, popely way of telling them to quit making nonsense claims in matters outside their field of expertise.
I do so weary of the blithe assumption that believers are the closed-minded, intellectually benighted ones.
If I might make a leap into another field, here, Pope Benedict XVI recently made a similar suggestion to a group of artists and intellectuals.
At Fatima last Spring, in a meeting with “the world of culture” as the Vatican calls it, the Holy Father made what we might think is a rather obvious point: that open-mindedness requires an open mind.
Given the reality of cultural diversity, people need not only to accept the existence of the culture of others, but also to aspire to be enriched by it and to offer to it whatever they possess that is good, true and beautiful.
Which would mean imply entering into dialogue with believers rather than writing them off:
You who are representatives of culture in all its forms, forgers of thought and opinion, “thanks to your talent, have the opportunity to speak to the heart of humanity, to touch individual and collective sensibilities, to call forth dreams and hopes, to broaden the horizons of knowledge and of human engagement. […] Do not be afraid to approach the first and last source of beauty, to enter into dialogue with believers, with those who, like yourselves, consider that they are pilgrims in this world and in history towards infinite Beauty!”
The two popes’ response to Steven Hawking then might be :
1) Please respect the modes of inquiry of metaphysics as you ask us to respect the modes of physics.
2) We are willing to listen and learn and grow from the genuine insights of your discipline. Are you willing to do the same from ours?
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