“The Grand Design” reviewed on Apologetics 315
Book Review: The Grand Design by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow
By Brian Auten of Apologetics 315
The Grand Design by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow landed on bookstore shelves in 2010 following a great deal of pre-release buzz from newspapers, blogs, and television. The authors’ conclusion was no secret: “Because there is a law like gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing,” and therefore, “It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going.” Have Hawking and Mlodinov found the theory of everything, as they seek to answer the ultimate questions about life? “How can we understand the world in which we find ourselves? How does the universe behave? What is the nature of reality? Where did all this come from? Did the universe need a creator?”
The authors believe that science is the surest way to answer these questions, as other means have failed. “Traditionally these are questions for philosophy, but philosophy is dead.” They write that philosophy hasn’t kept up with the physics and can’t speak to such questions. Instead, the reader should look to science: “Scientists have become the bearers of the torch of discovery in our quest for knowledge.”While rejecting philosophy in word, Hawking and Mlodninow nevertheless affirm it in practice, adopting scientism as their philosophy.
Read the full review here.
Udaybhanu Chitrakar
on June 26th, 2011
“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.”
- Stephen Hawking in “The Grand Design”
“As recent advances in cosmology suggest, the laws of gravity and quantum theory allow universes to appear spontaneously from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist. It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going.”
– Stephen Hawking in the same book.
Here three questions can be asked:
1) Which one came first, universe, or laws of gravity and quantum theory?
2) If the universe came first, then how was there spontaneous creation without the laws of gravity and quantum theory?
3) If the laws of gravity and quantum theory came first, then Hawking has merely substituted God with quantum theory and laws of gravity. These two together can be called Hawking’s “Unconscious God”. Therefore we can legitimately ask the question: Who, or what, created Hawking’s unconscious God?
Not only this, but there are other problems also. If the laws of gravity and quantum theory allow universes spontaneously appearing from nothing, then initially there was nothing. Then wherefrom appear those laws of gravity and quantum theory to allow universes appearing spontaneously from nothing? In which container were those two laws of nature?
Now regarding the M-theory: I have already written something on multiverse theory in Bengali. There I have come to the conclusion that if there are an infinite number of universes, then only within that infinite number of universes there will definitely be at least one universe in which life will emerge. If the number of universes is only 10 to the power 500, then it is very much unlikely that any one of them will support life, because no universe will know which set of values the other universes have already taken, and if everything is left on chance, then there is every probability that all the universes will take only those set of values that will not support life. There will be no mechanism that will prevent any universe from taking the same set of values that have already been taken by other universes. There will be no mechanism that will take an overview of all the universes already generated, and seeing that in none of them life has actually emerged will move the things in such a way that at least one universe going to be generated afterwards will definitely get the value of the parameters just right for the emergence of life. Only in case of an infinite number of universes this problem will not be there. This is because if we subtract 10 to the power 500 from infinity, then also we will get infinity. If we subtract infinity from infinity, still then we will be left with infinity. So we are always left with an infinite number of universes out of which in at least one universe life will definitely emerge. Therefore if M-theory shows that it can possibly have 10 to the power 500 number of solutions, and thus there might be 10 to the power 500 number of universes in each of which physical laws would be different, then it is really a poor theory, because it cannot give us any assurance that life will certainly emerge in at least one universe. So instead of M-theory we need another theory that will actually have an infinite number of solutions.
Blesson Varghese
on July 1st, 2011
Imagine you were forced to parachute yourself on to the Alps with a bottle of water in your hand. As you touch ground, it starts snowing heavily and so you take cover inside a cave. Keeping down the bottle in your hand, you clean the snow off your attire and then go out to gather rest of your gear. When you return in a few minutes, you observe that the bottle of water has frozen. What was water in liquid form is now ice. You panic and frantically try to search for someone who did this act, but there’s nothing in the cave. Eureka ! you cry out, nothing can convert water in to ice, and you write a book on the theory of everything and try to explain that God is now fully kicked out from the equation.
This is exactly what Stephen Hawking’s new book “The Grand Design” is trying to explain mankind, about how everything that is, has come in to being. Stephen’s book although has not ignited physics, as the theory proposed by him is just an old idea in a new garb. It is a simplistic approach, yet in our secular age it is one that seems to have resonance with a skeptical public. The reason the book has sparked lot of discussion is the philosophical conclusions that he is drawing from his proposed theory.
Stephen Hawking who was till date teasing people whether or not his theories leave room for God, has now clearly made a move to the other side, which is what people like Richard Dawkins and others conclude and harp about, after the words of this book.
An excerpt featured in London’s The Times reads as follows“It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the Universe going,” The Big Bang was a natural event which would have happened without the help or involvement of God, he argues.” 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,” Hawking writes.
Now lets look at it logically : When we say x creates y. It presupposes that x existed before y, in order to bring y in to existence. So when Stephen says that x created x, he presuppose the existence of x in order to bring x in to existence, however x always was in existence. This is self contradictory, is logically inconsistent & incoherent.
But perhaps it’s much worse than that when He says because the law of gravity exists the universe will create itself from nothing. So setting aside the logical problem let’s look at the other noose that Stephen ties around himself. Stephen states that gravity already existed for spontaneous creation; but that’s not nothing. Indeed when physicists talk about nothing, they mean much more than simplistic nothing, they normally mean or refer to quantum vacuum. Hence what Stephen is referring to is not exactly about nothing. But like every other atheist he too can take his freedom to choose to call the cause behind all the effect – nothing. However its impotent to negate the fact that there was a great cause behind all that is.
Now the other problem Stephen shies away from is to explain how the gravitational forces ever existed when there was absolutely nothing – Remember he is giving us a theory how everything came in to being from nothing.
We all have enough common sense to know that Laws themselves do not create anything, they are merely a description of how things behave under certain conditions. To use a simple analogy, Isaac Newton’s laws of motion in themselves never sent a cricket ball racing across the green fields. People using a cricket bat and the actions of their own arms can only do that.
What Hawking appears to have done is to confuse law with agency. His call on us to choose between God and physics is quite demanding – its like someone asking us to chose between Thomas Edison and the laws of physics to explain the light bulb. I would say that Hawking’s claim is misguided, when he asks us to choose between God and the laws of physics, as if they were necessarily in mutual conflict.
Its quite evident that we need more faith to believe that gravitational forces from nothing, created the intensely complex and highly fine tuned world that exists, than to say – In the beginning God….
Udaybhanu Chitrakar
on July 12th, 2011
Philosophy is dead. Is Logic dead also?
How did the scientists come to know that an entire universe could come out of nothing? Or, how did they come to know that anything at all could come out of nothing? Were they present at that moment when the universe was being born? As that was not the case at all, therefore they did not get that idea being present at the creation event. Rather they got this idea being present here on this very earth. They have created a vacuum artificially, and then they have observed that virtual particles (electron-positron pairs) are still appearing spontaneously out of that vacuum and then disappearing again. From that observation they have first speculated, and then ultimately theorized, that an entire universe could also come out of nothing. But here their entire logic is flawed. These scientists are all born and brought up within the Christian tradition. Maybe they have downright rejected the Christian world-view, but they cannot say that they are all ignorant of that world-view. According to that world-view God is omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent. So as per Christian belief-system, and not only as per Christian belief-system, but as per other belief-systems also, God is everywhere. So when these scientists are saying that the void is a real void, God is already dead and non-existent for them. But these scientists know very well that non-existence of God will not be finally established until and unless it is shown that the origin of the universe can also be explained without invoking God. Creation event is the ultimate event where God will have to be made redundant, and if that can be done successfully then that will prove beyond any reasonable doubt that God does not exist. So how have they accomplished that job, the job of making God redundant in case of creation event? These were the steps:
1) God is non-existent, and so, the void is a real void. Without the pre-supposition that God does not exist, it cannot be concluded that the void is a real void.
2) As virtual particles can come out of the void, so also the entire universe. Our universe has actually originated from the void due to a quantum fluctuation in it.
3) This shows that God was not necessary to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going, as because there was no creation event.
4) This further shows that God does not exist.
So here what is to be proved has been proved based on the assumption that it has already been proved. Philosophy is already dead for these scientists. Is it that logic is also dead for them?