God and Stephen Hawking Read Online Free PDF Page A

just choose God and then Hawking could be accused of putting people off science!
    Sir Isaac Newton, a previous holder of the Lucasian Chair at Cambridge, did not make Hawking’s category mistake when he discovered his law of gravitation. Newton did not say: “Now that I have the law of gravity, I don’t need God.” What he did was to write Principia Mathematica , the most famous book in the history of science, expressing the hope that it would “persuade the thinking man” to believe in God.
    The laws of physics can explain how the jet engine works, but not how it came to exist in the first place. It is self-evident that the laws of physics could not have created a jet engine on their own. That task also needed the intelligence, imagination, and scientific creativity of Whittle. Indeed, even the laws of physics plus Frank Whittle were not sufficient to produce a jet engine. There also needed to be some material that Whittle could use. Matter may be humble stuff, but laws cannot create it.
    Millennia ago Aristotle thought a great deal about these issues. He spoke about four different “causes” that we can, perhaps, reasonably translate informally as “levels of explanation”. Thinking of the jet engine, first there is the material cause – the raw material out of which the engine is crafted; then there is the formal cause – the concept, plan, theory, and blueprint that Sir Frank Whittle conceived and to which he worked. Next there is the efficient cause – Sir Frank Whittle himself, who did the work. Fourthly, and last in the list, there is the final cause – the ultimate purpose for which the jet engine was conceived and built: to power a particular aircraft to fly faster than ever before.
    The example of the jet engine can help us to clear up another confusion. Science, according to many scientists, concentrates essentially on material causation. It asks the “how” questions: how does the jet engine work? It also asks the “why” question regarding function: why is this pipe here? But it does not ask the “why” question of purpose: why was the jet engine built? What is important here is that Sir Frank Whittle does not appear in the scientific account. To quote Laplace, the scientific account has “no need of that hypothesis”. 29 Clearly, however, it would be ridiculous to deduce from this that Whittle did not exist. He is the answer to the question: why does the jet engine exist in the first place?
    Yet this is essentially what many scientists (and others) do with God. They define the range of questions that science is permitted to ask in such a way that God is excluded from the start; and then they claim that God is unnecessary, or doesn’t exist. They fail to see that their science does not answer the question as to why something exists rather than nothing, for the simple reason that their science cannot answer that question. They also fail to see that by assumption it is their atheist world-view, not science as such, that excludes God.
    The scientists did not put the universe there. But neither did their theories, nor the laws of mathematical physics. Yet Hawking seems to think they did. In A Brief History of Time he hinted at this kind of explanation, suggesting that a theory might bring the universe into existence:
    The usual approach of science of constructing a mathematical model cannot answer the questions of why there should be a universe for the model to describe. Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing? Is the unified theory so compelling that it brings about its own existence? Or does it need a creator, and, if so, does he have any other effect on the universe? 30
     
    Much as I find it hard to believe, Hawking seems to wish to reduce all explanation to formal causes only. He claims that all that is necessary to create the universe is the law of gravity. When asked 31 where gravity came from, he answered: “M-theory.” However, to say that a theory or physical laws