BBC News - Stephen Hawking: God did not create Universe

 

There is no place for God in theories on the creation of the Universe, Professor Stephen Hawking has said.

He had previously argued belief in a creator was not incompatible with science but in a new book, he concludes the Big Bang was an inevitable consequence of the laws of physics.

The Grand Design, part serialised in the Times, says there is no need to invoke God to set the Universe going.

"Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something," he concluded.

It is interesting that Prof. Hawking’s attitude to religion is highlighted in reports on his new book because he is as convinced that the physical sciences have made philosophy just as redundant. The emphasis on religion reflects perhaps the current rabid drive on the part of the neo-atheists to rid the world of believers. But philosophers?

It depends on how you define philosophy I suppose but if philosophy is thinking about how we think about the world then he has just made a philosophical statement and needs the context of philosophy in which to make it and to give it meaning; ergo, philosophy is not redundant.

With regards God, he has made the familiar mistake of assuming that the more science can discover the less need have we for God to explain this world. This is an argument directed at a particular view of God popular in certain fundamentalist circles but fails completely to address what the Bible has to say. It addresses the infamous “God of the gaps” error but not the God of the Bible.

While it is popularly believed (believed, now there’s a loaded term) that the more we have of science and reason the less our need of God, the biblical view is the more we have of science and reason the more we fulfil the creation mandate. In the creation account man is commanded to have dominion over the earth, to replenish it and fill it (Gen.1:28)

This has been interpreted by some as licence to exploit but this is quite wrong. Man’s dominion was to bring glory to the God who made everything and, acting as steward over God’s creation, he was to care for the world. What we see today as exploitation is the fruit of the fall when man’s “dominion” was diminished and lost but…

Hamlet declared, “What a piece of work is man…in apprehension how like a god!” Never a truer word was spoken. Not that man is, or will become a god, but that man was made with godlike qualities, what Christians call God’s communicable attributes. Those attributes of God that, in his wisdom and grace, he has shared with us, his creatures.

An expression of those attributes, albeit marred by sin, is still seen in mankind’s concern for and curiosity about our world. A steward of God’s world, far from being ignorant of his or her charge and duty, is industrious in learning and growing in knowledge of this world. Hence science, far from making God redundant, is, even unknowingly, obeying a godlike instinct to know, understand and responsibly steward the creation.

A Christian has no need to fear science and should rejoice in the knowledge that, even when some in the scientific community are determined to dismiss God, yet they fulfil God’s purposes and will in the end, like everyone else, see God either as their saving Father or as their judge.

BBC News - Stephen Hawking: God did not create Universe

Youth is Curable, Age Inevitable - Eventually

Two stories that caught my attention this week were the news that children born into  affluent homes today can expect to live considerably longer and the details of Michael Jackson’s autopsy.

Times Online reported:

More than half of babies born today in affluent homes are expected to live to the age of 100, based on current life expectancy trends.

Analysis of life expectancy and the quality of life in older age indicates that ageing processes can continue to be extended.

Using demographic modelling, scientists calculated that the average British child born in 2007 could expect to live to 103, while in Japan they would live to 107.

While the BBC Online reported of Michael Jackson:

His weight was in the acceptable range for a man of his height, according to the Associated Press.

But the singer, who died of a heart attack in June, had punctured arms, tattooed lips and eyebrows and suffered from lung damage and some arthritis.

Because of the influence of people like Michael Jackson, of those ubiquitous women’s magazine’s (and men’s magazines these days), and of celebrities queuing up to explain how the latest product means they haven’t any wrinkles except the one their sitting on we have fallen for the lie that we will never get old.

“Forever in blue jeans”, we are in denial and turning to Botox and surgery for appearance and drugs for comfort and to kill the pain. But it turns out that we may be older for longer. In which case we should remember that pop music was always meant to be a joke, teenagers were an unfortunate consequence of war, and maturity is meant to produce the elders of our community and not aged rockers.

We need to be reminded that it is not unusual for a fifty-year-old to need treatment for arthritis; that that irritating phase of our lives, youth, can be cured by age; that you don’t have to stay callow and irritating forever, and age should be embraced gracefully and with some style. Otherwise who will pass on wisdom to the next generation?

Babies born into affluent homes can expect to live till 103 - Times Online

BBC NEWS | World | Europe | Dutch leave messages on God phone

Not everybody understands art and I suppose I am not always as savvy as I pretend or would like to be. But in a broad sense whatever art talks about people talk about and, while some may find this offensive, it seems no bad thing that an artist in Holland has aimed to use this exhibition to provoke people to think about God and the priorities of the modern world.

"An art exhibition opening in the Netherlands will allow people to call a telephone number designated for God - but they will have to leave a message.

Dubbed God's Hotline, it aims to focus attention on changes to the ways Dutch people perceive religion."

BBC NEWS | World | Europe | Dutch leave messages on God phone

Darwin and Godlessness

Having slated TV in general yesterday for its parlous state it has to be said that there are some gems still to be found. The coverage of the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth has been excellent so far and two programmes tonight, both on BBC Two, promise to keep up that standard. Jimmy Doherty, in "Darwin's Garden", follows in the footsteps of the great man by recreating his experiments with plants at 8 PM while Andrew Marr (does he ever go home?) looks at "Darwin's Dangerous Idea" at 9 PM.

What caught my attention, though, were the respective reviews for these programmes in the Radio Times. Jane Rackham reviewed Darwin's Garden and seemed to take great pleasure in declaring that:

"The results of Darwin's many years of painstaking experimentation demolished the biblical view of creation and created uproar."

There was a certain irony, then, in the review of Darwin's Dangerous idea by Alison Graham who bemoaned the fact that Darwin's theory proved "so potent and divisive that it was immediately hijacked by godless intellectuals such as Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche, the latter memorably declaring 'God is dead'."

In a few sentences these reviewers illustrated how important is how we think about things. Of course, Darwin's theory did not "demolish the biblical view of creation", although it did create an uproar. It did challenge the way Christians had traditionally thought about and understood the biblical view of creation and that is no bad thing. We may change the way we think about and understand these things but why, when we do that in science, is it called progress but when we do it in religion it is evidence of a devastating blow?

The history of Darwin's Dangerous Idea shows us that the hard science is not all we have to consider. As Alison Graham wrote, godless men did hijack it for their own political and ideological purposes, declaring God dead and man expendable because of the fallacious notion that this was "natural". The consequences demonstrate what ensues when people take comfort from a wrong understanding of Darwin and a simplistic view of the Bible; society becomes godless, this familiar misunderstanding of natural selection becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy and "every man does what seems right in his own eyes" (Judges 17:6)

Proposition 8, Mormons and John Donne

California is in the middle of a constitutional battle over the issue of same-sex marriage, with liberals asserting that they have every right to do as they please in this matter without let or hindrance and conservatives insisting that everyone has the right to do it their way. The liberal argument is a familiar one – the greatest degree of freedom (read licence) with the least amount of interference from any particular (read religious) viewpoint. The conservative argument is as familiar – the greatest degree of responsibility for the greatest number of people to create the widest possible security for society by maintaining the Christian foundations on which that society was established.

I am not a resident of California, neither am I American so my interest in this issue has been what you might call concern from a distance. As a Christian of the conservative variety my sympathies lie with those who wish to strengthen Christian values. What has caught my attention, however, is the way the argument is made on the liberal side and I think it illustrates a fundamental and dangerous flaw in the thinking of those arguing the liberal cause.

The case, as I understand it, is that there are those who wish to enter into law the right of individuals to marry, if they choose, someone of the same gender. Opposed to this are those who wish to enter into law something called proposition 8, a fourteen word amendment to the state constitution to include the words, “Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.” On a blog entitled Daily Mendacity it is argued that the Mormons, who are busy advocating proposition 8, are trying to change the constitution to reflect Mormon doctrine. The writer goes on to argue:

“To be very clear - if a gay couple weds in the United Church of Christ it does not affect Mormon doctrine in any way.But they are determined to use our state constitutions to prevent the UCC from following their beliefs.”

Of course, we all know that religion is a hot topic in America, what with the militant idea of the separation of church and state (originally intended to separate the state from the church, not the church from the state), the preoccupation with private morality and the insistence that public leaders show themselves believing something even if they privately harbour doubts. The thing that has caught my attention, however, is not a religious so much as a philosophical problem, and one that shows up the inherent weakness of every liberal argument I have ever heard.

No Man is an Island

First there is the notion that “believers” of any stripe must not be allowed to bring their faith informed views into the public square where all the great issues are debated, while those with no particular faith may bring forward any idea that suits them however it is informed or arrived at. It amounts to insisting that a person must vote with their conscience so long as their conscience isn’t informed in church, in which case – what? It is a view that has people of a liberal bent free to lobby canvas and promote while those of a religious bent are denied the same privilege. It appears that “One nation under God” cannot countenance the views of those who trust the God under which that nation prospers.

Then there is the idea that what people in one part of society do need not have an effect on what those elsewhere in society experience. But, surely, that is what the liberal is complaining about, i.e. if the conservative argument holds sway it will impact others because whatever is passed into law is binding on everyone. John Donne famously wrote:

“No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less...any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind... and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”

The naked truth is that, whether liberal or conservative, any view that holds sway over such an important issue will impact everyone. When people debate such things they are not arguing over private morality, or any individual group’s rights but over what sort of society everyone wishes to live in. All have an interest and perhaps one of the great complaints in the political arena today is that not enough people engage with the issues that potentially impact them. Those who do so engage will find people of like mind and work together to an end common to those of that particular view. It is not a question of whether that view should be heard but whether it is heard and found to be compelling enough to influence others.

If the conservative view wins then the consequences are perhaps more immediate and obvious in that the law will immediately have a proscribing effect. But if the liberal view prevails, while the effect on a wider society may not be as immediate, make no mistake it will prove as far-reaching and ultimately more insidious, its influence being felt by many more people than the island of liberalism envisioned by the blogger. Ideas know no borders and “the madness of crowds” is contagious.

Totalitarians Need Not Apply

The blogger goes on to wave at us the usual bogeyman of religious totalitarianism:

“What the church is doing is within the law, but I think that it also shows how vulnerable we have become to a theocracy as oppressive as those Islamic Republics we claim to deplore and how little regard we have for human rights when religions enter the mix.”

The irony here is that the human rights which he is so anxious to protect are founded on Christian values and, far from being ancillary to the main business of life, religion is integral to people’s lives as well as to the communities in which they live. It is not a question of whether religion is permitted a place but whether it takes its place in a way that recognises the high values common to a democratic society. Perhaps we need to deal with the bias that highlights religion as the totalitarian threat we should concern ourselves with when history teaches us that totalitarianism is the product of wrong thinking not particularly religious thinking. As though to prove the point the great totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century, surely the bloodiest century in history, were secular. Whether an ideology wins adherents and wields influence depends on how society engages with ideas, religious or secular, and it is quite wrong and misleading to suggest that secular thought is somehow better than religious.

Conclusion

Mormons, Baptists, Presbyterians etc, are not inhabitants of individual island communities, for each is part of the continent. In the same way, liberals do not inhabit islands of private morality in which they can do as they please with no thought for the consequences on a wider society. Of course, it is the ambition of liberals to spread the message of liberalism as much as any other ideologues and by any means. The conservative, the Christian wishes to be heard above the cacophony in the marketplace of ideas while the liberal wishes to dictate who is allowed a voice in the public square before the argument begins. Totalitarianism indeed! It was once considered a virtue to declare, “I don’t agree with what you say but I will defend your right to say it”. This is no longer the case as the liberal declares, “I don’t agree with what you say and I will go to any lengths to deny you the right to say it.”