God and Stephen Hawking Read Online Free PDF

could bring the universe (or anything at all, for that matter) into existence is to misunderstand what theory and laws are. Scientists expect to develop theories involving mathematical laws to describe natural phenomena, which enable them to make predictions; and they have done so with spectacular success. However, on their own, the theories and laws cannot even cause anything, let alone create it.
    Long ago none other than the Christian philosopher William Paley said as much. Speaking of the person who had just stumbled on a watch on the heath and picked it up, he says that such a person would not be
    less surprised to be informed that the watch in his hand was nothing more than the result of the laws of metallic nature. It is a perversion of language to assign any law as the efficient, operative cause of any thing. A law presupposes an agent; for it is only the mode, according to which an agent proceeds: it implies a power; for it is the order, according to which that power acts. Without this agent, without this power, which are both distinct from itself, the law does nothing; is nothing. 32
     
    Quite so. Physical laws cannot create anything. They are a description of what normally happens under certain given conditions. This is surely obvious from the very first example that Hawking gives of physical law. The sun rises in the east every day, but this law does not create the sun; nor the planet earth, with east and west. The law is descriptive and predictive, but it is not creative. Similarly Newton’s law of gravitation does not create gravity or the matter on which gravity acts. In fact, Newton’s law does not even explain gravity, as Newton himself realized.
    The laws of physics are not only incapable of creating anything; they cannot even cause anything to happen. For instance, Newton’s celebrated laws of motion never caused a pool ball to race across the green baize table. That can only be done by people using a pool cue and the actions of their own muscles. The laws enable us to analyse the motion, and to map the trajectory of the ball’s movement in the future (provided nothing external interferes); but they are powerless to move the ball, let alone bring it into existence.
    One can understand what is meant by saying that the behaviour of the universe is governed by the laws of nature. But what can Hawking possibly mean by saying that the universe arises naturally from physical law, or that gravity arises from M-theory?
    Another example of this basic misunderstanding of the nature of law is given by well-known physicist Paul Davies: “There’s no need to invoke anything supernatural in the origins of the universe or of life. I have never liked the idea of divine tinkering: for me it is much more inspiring to believe that a set of mathematical laws can be so clever as to bring all these things into being.” 33
    However, in the world in which most of us live, the simple law of arithmetic by itself, 1+1=2, never brought anything into being. It certainly has never put any money into my bank account. If I put £1,000 into the bank, and later another £1,000, the laws of arithmetic will rationally explain how it is that I now have £2,000 in the bank. But if I never put any money into the bank myself, and simply leave it to the laws of arithmetic to bring money into being in my bank account, I shall remain permanently bankrupt.
    C. S. Lewis grasped this issue, with characteristic clarity. Of the laws of nature he writes:
    They produce no events: they state the pattern to which every event – if only it can be induced to happen – must conform, just as the rules of arithmetic state the pattern to which all transactions with money must conform – if only you can get hold of any money. Thus in one sense the laws of Nature cover the whole field of space and time; in another, what they leave out is precisely the whole real universe – the incessant torrent of actual events which makes up true history. That must come