Stephen Hawking had no time for
God. In Brief Answers to the Big Questions and other places he claimed
that the role played by time at the beginning of the universe is the final key
to removing the need for a grand designer and revealing how the universe
created itself.
On Hawking’s view, time itself
began at the instant of the Big Bang. This claim is not uncontroversial among
scientists.* But if we accept for the sake of argument Hawking’s understanding
of the physics of the big bang, what are we to make of his claim that this
removes “the need for a grand designer” and reveals “how the universe created
itself”?
Three observations:
(1) The question of the
existence of God should not be reduced to the question whether we need to
postulate a god to explain the existence of everything else. The only “theology”
with which Hawking shows familiarity is one that uses “gods/God” to plug in the
gaps in our knowledge. This is completely inadequate for Christian theology and
I am not sure that it is adequate for any other major religion.
(2) The conflation of the
language of causation (used in his argument in a specific sense) with that of
design (used in his conclusion about “the need for a grand designer”) seems to
be indicative of a more general failure to differentiate causality. Since
Aristotle four types of
cause have been distinguished: formal, material, efficient and final. Natural
laws define material and efficient causes. To deny that there are formal and
final causes on the basis that the natural sciences cannot demonstrate them is
a logical fallacy.
(3) Language of the universe
creating itself is not unproblematic, not only because it attributes agency to
the universe but also because we cannot readily conceive of an action of which
we cannot say that there was a before and after. In other words, we could just
as well say that the universe is eternal: if time does not exist apart from our
space-time universe, there is no time at which the universe is not. If Hawking’s
science can be shown to be correct, we can exclude a temporal cause for
the universe but this not only fails to demonstrate that the big bang was an
uncaused event but also still leaves us short of a compelling answer to the question
why there is something rather than nothing. (Hawking seems to claim that there
really is nothing because for everything positive matter there is, there is negative
energy to cancel it out, cf. this
previous post, but this does not sound to me like an answer.)
What then is the relationship
between God and time? Gregory E. Ganssle who authored the entry on “God and Time” in the Internet
Encyclopedia of Philosophy also edited God and Time: Four Views (Downers
Grove, IL: Inter Varsity Press, 2001) which hosts a discussion between proponents
of four different views: Paul Helm who defends the view of divine eternity as
timeless, Alan G. Padgett who argues that God is everlastingly temporal but not
in physical (metrical) time, William Lane Craig who speaks of God as timeless
without creation and temporal within creation, and Nicholas Wolterstorff who advocates
“unqualified divine temporality.” As far as I can see Hawking’s science would
not rule out a single one of these options.
The leap from Hawking’s
reconstruction of the origins of the universe to atheism is not made on the
strength of the science but relies on the truth of his premises, namely (a)
there cannot be causality without temporality and (b) all temporality is
material. This means that we seem to be dealing with an entirely circular
argument.
* Other physicists favour “the
idea that our universe is but one expanding bubble in a much larger
pre-existing area of space-time, sometimes called the multiverse” (source).
