You might be thinking, "Jon, you're pretty smart, but you're no Stephen Hawking." Agreed. Your next thought might amount to, "You haven't even read the book." Correct. But what I have done is pretty significant -- my friend scanned a couple chapters and summarized them for me, and I read the book's wikipedia page. I rest my case.
No, no, I'm not qualified to talk about cosmology or physics. But I have a brain, and it usually works, so I'm qualified to talk about my thoughts.
My first thought is that this argument is ooooold, but by leaking to the press that the book would denounce God and using the ethos of Hawking's name, Bantam Books and Hawking were able to recycle it and make tons of money.
Secondly, I'm thinking his argument doesn't give us any more explanatory power than a creation hypothesis. One classical argument for God's existence is as follows:
- Everything that has a beginning has a cause (or complex series of causes).
- The great host of physicists agrees there was a "Big Bang," an actual event that occurred a certain number of years ago, at which point matter and time first came into being. In other words, our universe had a beginning.
- Therefore, our universe had a cause outside of our universe -- something or someone that made matter and time emerge from nothing.
But what gravity does he mean? It can't be the gravity of our universe and its 11 dimensions. That property didn't exist until after the Big Bang, like all other physical properties in our universe. So Hawking must be referring to a "supernatural" (i.e. "outside of our nature or universe") gravity. This is a gravity in one of those other many universes that we've never seen, felt, or experimented on. Sounds pretty... unscientific.
My third thought is an attempt to understand the idea fully. We can study our gravity. We learn its properties and infer how a gravitational force might operate in a completely different universe. We make some prediction, and (this is the point in the book at which Hawking humorously says there is ample scientific evidence to support the theory) we find that yes siree, if the gravity of another universe were such-and-such a force, it could cause an entirely new universe to form.
Fourthly, I ask myself the many, many questions that stem from this line of reasoning:
- Why is it more reasonable/scientific to assume there is some other universe out there completely separate from ours that somehow -- via pure gravitation -- gave birth to ours (but remained completely separate from us), than to believe there is intelligence outside our universe that caused it to exist?
- What caused that universe to exist? Another universe with the same sort of gravity? What about that one? If we never trace back to an uncaused cause, we eventually have an infinitely old chain of infinitely many universes. But since all of these apparently have different sets of natural laws (and Hawking admits only a very few could conceivably support life, let alone intelligent life), what laws dictate which universes will have which properties? Wouldn't you need some over-arching "meta-laws" that are unchanging and eternal that determine this infinite chain of universe-spawning? And -- hammerstroke -- where do these meta-laws come from?
- How is any of this testable? Provable? It's nice that you predicted that a parent universe would have a certain gravity, and then coincidentally those properties theoretically would allow the generation of a new cosmos. But it sounds, to me, a lot like the natural theologian's exercise of predicting (from nature, human experience) what a Parent Deity would be like, and then coincidentally it's precisely that kind of Deity who would create a universe that supports intelligent life.
One Columbia physics professor said a few weeks ago, "I'm in favor of naturalism and leaving God out of physics as much as the next person, but if you're the sort who wants to go to battle in the science/religion wars, why you would choose to take up such a dubious weapon as M-theory mystifies me."
The Economist -- deciding to review a pop physics book? -- slammed it as well, pointing out that "the authors’ interpretations and extrapolations of [m-theory] have not been subjected to any decisive tests, and it is not clear that they ever could be. Once upon a time it was the province of philosophy to propose ambitious and outlandish theories in advance of any concrete evidence for them. Perhaps science, as Professor Hawking and Mr. Mlodinow practice it in their airier moments, has indeed changed places with philosophy, though probably not quite in the way that they think."
Renowned scientific journalist John Horgan said that if we believe the book's claims that we've reached a trustworthy explanation of the universe's origins, "the joke's on us."
Sixthly (<-- nice), I'm realizing how tired I am. I really need to get some sleep. So I'll move on to thought seven:
Stephen Hawking is a brilliant man. Maybe the most brilliant man in the world when it comes to physics and math. I'm sure I couldn't ever grasp the full breadth of most ideas in his book, and that what I've done above is almost certainly attacking a straw man. But I can't help but wonder about his motives -- or others', like Dawkins -- for coming out with a public attack on God's existence.
Of course there are the typical reasons you could imagine. They simply don't believe, and they want others to see the world the way they do. Sure. Maybe they see a lot of hypocrisy, or even evil, done in God's name, and since they don't even believe in Him, it seems like the world would be better if no one else did. Okay. Or the grandest of them all -- perhaps they are so convinced of atheism that, in the spirit of the world being educated and knowledgeable, it would only be right for the world to be enlightened and atheistic as well.
But why, then, are their attacks so full of anger and based on bad logic? Dawkins is almost unreadable to me because he is so full of condescension and underlying rage toward anyone who's a theist. Even Hawking is willing to imagine this multi-verse universe-popping scheme and then claim that it's supported by empirical evidence!
I guess I just suspect that in many cases, the crusade to refute God is not an educational or purely intellectual one, but a deeply personal and emotional one. Or possibly a greedy one (the book in question hit #1 on Amazon the day it was released).
I don't know how to best generate conversation about this, except that I would love to hear any and all thoughts regarding the book (if you've read it... or skimmed wikipedia), the existence of God, and the above arguments for and against God's existence.
