The first book i finished this year was Stephen Hawking’s new collaborative work The Grand Design. Hawking piqued a lot of people’s interest by ending his bestseller A Brief History of Time with the poetic assertion that a unifying theory of physics would allow us to “know the mind of God.” In his new book, it is revealed that Hawking, as a scientist, actually sees no place for God in the creation of the universe.
The book was interesting by default, but it was a little bit hard to follow. For the most part i understood it, thanks to all the YouTube videos i’ve watched about quantum physics and the multiverse theory. There were just a couple of brief points in the book at which i felt that i was in totally over my head, and this is coming from someone who, admittedly, never even took high school physics. It seemed, though, that the argument against a creator wasn’t all that clearly spelled out. The book was more of a discussion of the current state of physics and how it’s trying to find a unifying theory, possibly to no avail. It’s the idea that time began when our universe—which may be one of an infinite number of universes—began, at the big bang, that shoves God out of the picture; but that point is only lightly touched upon in the book.
So i wouldn’t call this another atheist text by any means. It’s really more of an overview of quantum physics; it doesn’t seem to be meant as an argument for the nonexistence of God, and i think it was just played up by the publisher in that respect as a way of selling more copies. I’ve found that people of faith don’t base their belief in God on what scientists have discovered about the nature of the universe, anyway, no matter how famous or intelligent those scientists may be. I recommend this book to people like me who have watched those YouTube vids and would like to know a little more about the physics behind all the crazy-sounding findings in physics without getting too deep into the nitty-gritty science. And if you have faith, i doubt this book will shake it much.
Monday, January 31st, 2011 2:24 pm • books
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August 20th, 2011 at 5:13 am
Beginning of any universe cannot be governed by its own laws, for the simple reason that a universe that has not yet come into existence cannot have any laws in it. But Hawking has written that when the universe was small enough it was governed by both general relativity and quantum theory. But these are the two laws of our universe and therefore these laws could not be there when the universe has not yet begun. So how did Hawking come to know that these two laws governed the beginning of our universe? Is he all-knowing God?
Singularity theory of Penrose and Hawking was correct in showing that all the known laws of science would break down at the point of singularity, because when there is no universe there is also no arena in which these laws can appear. Nothing is more obvious than this that there cannot be any laws of science when there is no universe. Universe coming to an end means with it all the known laws of science also coming to an end. If we cannot believe in the existence of God due to lack of evidence, then it is equally true that due to this same lack of evidence we cannot believe that the laws of gravity and quantum theory were already there at the beginning of our universe to govern that beginning.