A few observations on the first BBC
Radio 4 Book of the Week in 2019, Stephen Hawking’s Brief Answers to the Big
Questions, beautifully read by Anton Lesser.
“Science is increasingly answering questions that used to be the province of religion. Religion was an early attempt to answer the questions we all ask: why are we here, where did we come from? Long ago, the answer was almost always the same: gods made everything. The world was a scary place, so even people as tough as the Vikings believed in supernatural beings to make sense of natural phenomena like lightning, storms or eclipses. Nowadays, science provides better and more consistent answers, but people will always cling to religion, because it gives comfort, and they do not trust or understand science.”
Hawking believed that religion and
science are two fundamental belief systems, competing frameworks for understanding
the universe around us. The better we are able to explain events and phenomena
in terms of natural causes, the less need there is to appeal to the
capriciousness of the gods until the god who lives in the gaps of our knowledge
can abdicate because no gaps are left. The final loophole to be closed, in this
view, was the question of the origin of the universe. Who or what was there
before the Big Bang to get everything going? Because we are (nearly) able to offer
a definitive answer to the question how the universe begun by the application
of universal and unchangeable physical laws alone,* Hawking felt, there was no longer
any need for a god. Science offers a simpler alternative.
I cannot judge the soundness of
Hawking’s science (and have no great issues with accepting it) but it is clear
to me that Hawking pronounced on more than science and in ways which are
clearly unsound.
The claim that “people will always cling to
religion, because it gives comfort, and they do not trust or understand science”
is untrue. I do not know whether this sentence was meant as a dig at his
first wife, whether the claim was informed by some unfortunate encounters, or
whether it is purely the result of wishful thinking. In any case, it is not
plausible that Hawking did not come across a good few people to whom this verdict
does not apply and we therefore seem to have prima facie evidence here for a refusal on his part to acknowledge facts that do not fit his world-view.
Science is a method, not a belief
system. The scientific method is capable of being turned into a belief system
but only by the addition of non-scientific propositions about the nature of
reality. The method itself does not yield the world-view Hawking espoused.
Religion is not a belief system
either. This is so not only because every religion is a cultural system that
encompasses far more than belief, including also behaviours and practices, but, more importantly, because “religion” in the abstract cannot
be a belief system. The various cultural systems we designate religions and the
world-views they imply are incompatible with each other and cannot add up to any system.
Whether the Vikings “believed in
supernatural beings” in order “to make sense of natural phenomena like
lightning, storms or eclipses” is a matter for historians to debate. As a
biblical scholar, I claim that this will not do as an explanation for any “religion”
promoted in the Bible.
First, there is little concern with
explaining natural phenomena in the Bible. There is a delight in creation expressed in various places and no attempt to curb curiosity about explaining phenomena naturally.
Secondly, the understanding of disasters as divine punishment is not a given. There is no assumption that we can readily deduce anything about the divine will from the presence of disastrous natural or historical events and several explicit warnings against assuming that suffering is the result of having offended God.
Thirdly, biblical authors assume a version of compatibilism and the possibility of explaining events at different levels (the destruction of the city can be seen as a divine judgement even when it did not involve any unusual, supernatural or otherwise inexplicable events), philosophical views that are at odds with Hawking’s zero-sum-game assumptions.
Fourthly, the Bible speaks of a Creator God who is logical and has imposed order on his universe. This renders the language of “laws of nature” plausible (see, e.g., Jeremiah 31:35-36; 33:25), if the genitive is understood as “laws pertaining to nature” rather than “laws given by Nature,” as if nature was a personal agent.
* The explanation is roughly as
follows: It seems at first as if three ingredients are required to build a
universe: matter, energy, and space. Einstein taught us that mass and energy
are basically the same thing. Energy and space are therefore the only
ingredients needed and these were spontaneously created out of nothing
according to the laws of science. The laws of physics demand the existence of
something called ‘negative energy’ (if you build a hill on a flat land, you
also make a hole; the stuff that was in the hole has now become the hill, so it
all perfectly balances out). Laws concerning gravity and motion tell us that space
itself is a vast store of negative energy, enough to ensure that everything
adds up to zero (the mass and the energy is like the hill; the corresponding
hole is spread throughout space). If the universe adds up to nothing then you
don’t need a god to create it. So what triggered the whole process? Quantum
mechanics tells us that particles such as protons really can appear at random,
stick around for a while, and then vanish again, to reappear somewhere else. Because
the universe was very small at its beginning there is no need for an
explanation beyond the laws of nature. The Big Bang was a random act of the
sort quantum mechanics observes for protons.
