I’ve never read any of Stephen Hawkings books, though his ‘Brief History of Time’ is on the Recommended
Reading list below. It’s something I will get to in time.
In constructing an idea of what this author constitutes as the ‘real world’ (the purpose of this blog) I have to date focused specifically on the earth and the evolution of Life and Ways of Life. Anything outside of or before that seemed far too…obvious.
Gravity, atoms, stars and planets. To use a sporting comparison, these were the board or the pitch, while to date I have been mainly focused on the game at hand.
The Universe fascinates me but I am daunted truth be told. Its too distant, impersonal and mathematical in comparison to our immediate, familiar reality on earth – one giant beautiful physics equation.
That being said, the Big Bang theory really caught my attention and my imagination early on. The fact that all the atoms that have ever or will ever be were created in that one instant is something that just blew me away the first time I heard it.
OUR reality, the Universe, everything we know and understand, everything we can ever know and study, in one fraction of a split second. What came before, or what exists outside of our Universe, we simply cannot fathom.
You can understand why the God-boys-and-girls (those who believe in a supreme being who created everything) could always have the last laugh because of these points.
How could you argue with them? What evidence would you use?
God Bless Stephen Hawkings!!
“In The Grand Design, co-authored with US physicist Leonard Mlodinow, Prof Hawking says a new series of theories made a creator of the universe redundant, according to the London Times, which published extracts today.
“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,” Prof Hawking writes. “It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going.”"
You can read on at the Irish Times website here.
I dont understand it, but I am sure it makes sense. Nice work Stevo! You the man!
NEW REALIST RELEVANCE
Because if we are ever going to have a true understanding of reality and our place within it, we must begin at the beginning
SO the universe created itself because Stephen Hawking Said so? A set of theories proves something?
There is a major philosophical and logical error here that has nothing to do with God and more to do with the improper use of Science. Science does not disprove God and no new set of theories ever proved anything. To accept the word of any scientist without question is, put simply, bad science. Anyone who understands scientific method would tell you as much. (Not to mention Hawkings proclivity for error and overestimation of his own opinion. Great self publicist though.)
To preclude the possibility of a supreme being on the basis of mere inconvenience or philosophical prejudice is also bad science. You can propose the non-existence of God as a hypothesis, even believe it if you happen to be a man of faith, but that doesn’t make it so.
The current theories around the origin of the Universe certainly leave plenty of room for a mass of uncertainty in places where science felt explanations would be found. Perhaps the ultimate end of science may actually be a proof of God, although that might mean God isn’t what religious people think he is. Although I think that’s probably the case even if they happen to be right about him existing.
You end this post with a deeply worrying statement
“I don’t understand it but I’m sure it makes sense”
Really?????
It seems to me that this is merely swapping one religion for another. You’re just trusting a different set of priests.
If you don’t believe in God just say so and have done with it. Don’t create a new religion out of science to disprove the value of religion. It can’t work because the two have a fundamentally different purpose.
The hope of some moral philosophy we can all live by and understand coming from science is preposterous because that’s not what science is for.
It is important to remember that discrimination and inequality are an intrinsic part of nature (That is the natural world organic and non-organic) and the only thing that resists this is human moral philosophy.
I would never discourage anyone on the search for moral philosophy or science but I would suggest quite strongly the two have nothing to do with each other. I would also point out that the use of science to suggest a disproof to religious belief in God , even if it could be achieved, does not in and of itself render religion valueless and doesn’t in any way invalidate the moral philosophy that a particular religion chooses to espouse.
Truly some of them CAN be completely invalidated but you’ll have to pick up a different set of tools to achieve that. First you’ll have to decide what the test is though, and then you’ll have to know the detail of the philosophy at hand.
Happy to expand on this in detail if you like. Although you’ll probably have a go at me for not bowing to Hawking.
I don’t believe in the idea of a God. I don’t believe in super natural beings, fairy’s, ghosts, Thor, the Easter Bunny, Santa Claus or any other figment of any collective imagination. If someone wants to believe in the Easter Bunny, or Spiderman, or God, then that is there business.
It is my opinion that they are suffering from a delusion, and are probably being controlled by the masters of that illusion, and that is my business.
I said I don’t understand it because I haven’t read the book yet but I agree this was a bit of a throw away statement. What I will say is that I have a huge amount of respect for Hawking’s method, and I know he applied this when writing ‘The Grand Design’.
I don’t believe that science is in any way a religion. Science is a method of investigation. Religion is a belief in things that are not ‘real’ in the scientific sense (i.e. there is little evidence of supernatural beings to be investigated and those that do exist have proven to be false – hence I can deduce as a logical human being that they are not real).
Religion and moral philosophy? There is a moral philosophy in most religions, as there are in fables, pop songs, movies, poems and any other form of media. These are not downgraded simply because we know the religion itself is based on myths and legends. However, our morality is not reliant on religious dogma or mythology. We are naturally moralistic. If every religion disappeared tomorrow our moral core would remain intact and unpolluted by years of religious bigotry and conflict.
Forget religion mate. Your an intelligent person with reason. I know this is an interesting argument but you are wasted on it. The world is far more interesting than a bunch of antiquated stories and power hungry religious institutions.
Go out an examine the REAL world. Philosophize about IT.