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As if it were the center of the universe, celebrity physicist Stephen Hawking’s new book The Grand Design rocketed atop the publishing cosmos and reached #1 on Amazon even before its official release date last Tuesday. The book’s speed-of-light ascent was powered mainly by leaked excerpts wherein Hawking and coauthor Leonard Mlodinow assert that the universe can be explained without even inviting God to the party.
This is hardly the first time a world-renowned physicist has suggested that the universe can get along just fine without God. Pierre-Simon Laplace, AKA the “French Newton,” said pretty much the same thing back in 1783. When asked by Napoleon why his theory of the universe’s origins did not mention a creator, Laplace reportedly said, “I had no need of that hypothesis.”
But over twenty years ago in A Brief History of Time, Hawking still was willing to flirt with God. He postulated that human reason is ultimately capable of arriving at a “complete theory” of all existence, enabling humanoids to “know the mind of God.”
These days, Hawking seems willing—even eager—to erase God from his chalkboard entirely. Earlier this year he declared that “science will win” over religion “because it works.” And in The Grand Design, he and Mlodinow (a Caltech physicist and, amusingly, also a screenwriter for Star Trek: The Next Generation) state:
Because there is a law such as gravity, the Universe can and will create itself from nothing….Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist. It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going is unnecessary.
Each universe has many possible histories and many possible states. Only a very few would allow creatures like us to exist. Although we are puny and insignificant on the scale of the cosmos, this makes us in a sense the lords of creation.
My last formal instruction in science came during high school—biology in my sophomore year, then chemistry and physics the next two years. I spent that formative teen era either masturbating or being a fundamentalist Christian—never simultaneously, because I was both a very good Christian and a very good masturbator—and I paid no attention to any of those classes. I finally abandoned Christianity, continued masturbating, decided I was a “creative” person, and have given no further attention to science throughout my life. Therefore, my basic understanding of theoretical cosmology is probably weaker than Stephen Hawking’s biceps.
While researching this article, I was exposed to previously unfamiliar concepts such as dark matter, multiverses, alternate pasts and futures, Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, Pascal’s wager, Schrödinger’s cat, redshifts, wormholes, neutrinos, white dwarfs, quarks, neutrinos, and gravitational lenses. I struggled to grasp the basic tenets of string theory and its apparent successor, M-Theory, which posits 11 dimensions, at least two of which I’ll assume are HBO and Showtime. Even beginning to grasp some of these concepts might cause my brain to hemorrhage, so I will defer to Dr. Hawking’s expertise as far as “the maths” are concerned.
Still, there are some gaping God-gaps in the book excerpt I quoted above. Exactly how are the authors defining “God” and “nothing”? Why does Hawking posit God as intervening in the natural process rather than constituting that process? Why refer to M-Theory as science when, by definition, it cannot be tested by the scientific method? And finally, how in fuck’s name does something come from nothing? I thought the famous speculative physicist Billy Preston settled this question back in the seventies when he sang, “Nothin’ from nothin’ leaves nothin’. You gotta have somethin’.”
There is a cruel, black-hole irony in the fact that Stephen Hawking, the supergenius issuing all these bold proclamations, is very likely at this moment wearing diapers. Hawking at once reminds us of human potential and human limitations. He is considered a peer of Newton and Einstein, yet he has not been able to feed himself or lift himself out of bed since 1974. And I know I’m pushing things into new galaxies of bad taste here, but Stephen Hawking is not exactly what I see when I picture the Lord of Creation. It seems unimaginably mean to say this, but if Hawking truly had everything figured out, he’d be able to stand up and walk out of his motorized wheelchair. As expansive as his mind is, he seems to be reaching beyond his station in this case. In the end, his arms may be too atrophied to box with God.
Hawking’s entropic physical disintegration has occurred before our very eyes, his body increasingly pounded down with atom-smashing mercilessness. His first wife, Jane, disparaged him as an “all-powerful emperor” yet confessed that it was “difficult…to feel desire for someone with the body of a Holocaust victim and the undeniable needs of an infant.” They divorced in 1990.
Allegations regarding Hawking’s second marriage to his nurse, Elaine Mason, paint a more massive black hole on an even emptier canvas. Elaine was accused of fracturing Hawking’s wrist, slashing his cheek with a razor, denying him his urine bottle and thus forcing him to wet himself, nearly allowing him to drown in the bathtub, leaving him unattended in the garden to get a severe sunburn, publicly bullying and berating him as an invalid, and beating, bruising, and bashing him so frequently that it led to multiple hospital visits and a subsequent police inquiry. Hawking always denied such allegations and police never charged Elaine, but the two finally divorced in 2006. While still married, someone asked Hawking why he tolerated the abuse. Hawking reportedly responded that he found any human relationship preferable to none.
Stephen Hawking may be the world’s smartest man, but he may also be the loneliest. It’s possible he’s bitter at the very concept of a personal God who willed Hawking’s unimaginably sad condition into existence.
Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion, has welcomed Hawking’s most recent pronunciamentos. Dawkins also frames the controversy in intriguingly aggressive terms. He claims that Darwin “kicked God out of biology” and that Hawking “is now administering the coup de grace” to God’s carcass via physics. Such borderline-violent terminology suggests that Dawkins has some emotion invested in his side being vindicated.
I’m not sure whether or not the universe needs God to exist, but I’m certain that we don’t need God for human folly to exist.
The Dawk and The Hawk are a formidable atheistic tag-team duo, but they both seem a wee bit too cocksure for me to trust them. Their statements are definitive rather than speculative, peppered with an underlying hubris and arrogance. I realize that darkness and nothingness and meaninglessness can be sexy. But are they logical? Ultimately, don’t atheists demand a confidence in the reliability of human cognition that resembles blind religious faith?
Perhaps the defining factor of being alive is having no idea how we got here or why we exist, so increasingly it seems as if agnostics are the only honest ones. It’s gotten to the point where I distrust anyone who claims they’ve personally seen God or the Void.
I have my own Theory of Everything, which doesn’t take a whole book to explain: Everything sucks.
If there’s a personal God, he apparently likes to hide. It may be that God merely enjoys watching us stumble around the basement without a flashlight. I don’t believe in miracles, only a vast amount of phenomena we may all be too stupid to ultimately understand.
In an increasingly secular world, atheism has become fashionable and isn’t nearly as “edgy” or provocative as it once was. And Hawking, who seems nearly certain that extraterrestrial life exists, made a statement earlier this year that is far more offensive to modern sensibilities than denying God’s existence.
“If aliens ever visit us,” Hawking warned, “I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn’t turn out very well for the Native Americans.”
By making the point that aliens may be far more advanced than us, he was also implying that Columbus and his crew were far smarter than the Injuns. Now that’s the sort of heresy that can get you burned at the stake these days.
(Written in 2010. You can buy Jim Goad’s books signed HERE. Now accepting PayPal.)
17 comments
Ultimately, don’t atheists demand a confidence in the reliability of human cognition that resembles blind religious faith?
Yes, this is why agnostism > atheism.
No matter how smart, we’re still just humans, and Stephen’s later-life dismissal of a righteous supernatural authority over mortals, may have been influenced by a personal crisis of conscious, & the possibility of his being judged over his presence at Jeff Epstein’s free-for-alls.
It’s difficult to imagine being so smart and trapped in such a crippled body.
“Ultimately, don’t atheists demand a confidence in the reliability of human cognition that resembles blind religious faith?
“Yes, this is why agnostism > atheism.”
I just submitted a wall-text essay on cosmology and epistemology that the board’s Cloudfare firewall must not have liked. In the time it took me to compose it, I was apparently logged out and I neglected to save the text before hitting the Submit button. And I ain’t doing it again.
The short answer is that although I am probably more of an Agnostic, I usually prefer the stronger term Athesist because I feel that Superstition is always harmful, and that Religion on balance is not a net positive.
But I am not a Moral Absolutist, which is why I always favor open-debate regardless of what we are examining.
It should be most alarming for White Nationalists and any kind of Skeptics to realise that modern countries still use the force of law to criminalize whatever they consider Denial. That is an existential issue for White Nationalism and therefore a litmus test, in my opinion.
Also, I don’t really care if the Big Bang is the proper cosmology or not because it does not really affect my life much. All theories will certainly be replaced by another theory that better explains the observable evidence. That is how it works.
Too many people confuse Science with something that it is not. Science is not catechism, and it not the same as science-popularization or science-journalism.
Even in the so-called Hard Sciences like Chemistry, experts can do deep dives that are extremely reductionistic, absolutely meticulous, and yet on the proper levels, very debatable.
Just because it is hard for non-specialists and children to follow this reasoning, it does not either make it Alchemy nor essentially make Santa Claus into something real.
What I do know is that if the Church were still dictating epistemology, we never would have done any space exploration, let alone global circumnavigation. Fortunately, only a small set of Internet cranks believe in Flat Earth.
🙂
Well, that needs a correction.
First, Kant and Fichte have written a lot on the subject, it’s enough to consult them here. Other suggested reading: acad. I.R. Shafarevich, “The Socialism Phenomenon”; “On some paths of mathematics’ development” (also by him); acad. Rauschenbach, “On Science and Religion”. (Rauschenbach is the developer of all control systems for our primary space programme, including Sputnik and Gagarin’s Vostok.)
Second, “Flat Earth” has nothing to do with the Church. I don’t know where all that originated. The Greeks knew well centuries before Christ that the shape of the Earth is spheroid, observing ships moving behind the horizon. The epicycles theory of planetary movement was also developed before Christ and widely used from that time on. Of course, all planets and the Sun are deemed to be spheric in that model, Earth included.
Moreover, Columbus and Magellan clearly knew what they were doing, and they started their adventures at the brink of the Middle Ages. It’s even before the Inquisition. So, there certainly was no problem with circumnavigation.
I think I was being a bit hyperbolic about Flat Earth. I doubt that the FE trolls on the Internet today really believe it.
The Greek mathematician Eratosthenes (ca. 276 BC – ca. 195/194 BC) already calculated the circumference of the Earth to surprising accuracy, within less that 1 percent.
However, Galileo faced the Inquisition in 1615 because they would not have anything other than Geocentrism ─ with the crystal spheres around the Earth as the center of the Universe ─ and they would not even look into his telescope themselves to see the other worlds grimly circling the Jovian planet.
In the time of Columbus in 1492, most educated people did not believe that the Earth was Flat. However, Columbus, who had practical knowledge of the Atlantic trade winds and skill with Ptolemaic navigation, erroneously used parts of the Ptolemaic system, which put the globe considerably smaller in estimation. Otherwise, Columbus would not have been so keen to sail West to Asia. Fortunately for him and his expedition, he ran into the New World about where he was expecting Asia to be.
The (1497–1499) trip around the Cape of Africa to India by Vasco da Gama was probably as difficult for the time as the idea in the 1960s of flying a man to the Moon and bringing him home safely back to the Earth. And it was the same kind of difficulty, no doubt, with the first circumnavigation of the Earth by Ferdinand Magellan, completed in 1522.
The Church has not always impeded scientific progress, but what I object to is when they give Scripture or gobbledygook an otherworldly or transcendental status that precludes the Scientific Method ─ which begins with observation, uses testable hyopotheses to winnow out errors, and which is always a revisionist epistemological process in any case, and thus never a canon of belief or enforced dogma (like geocentrism was in its day).
🙂
Third, the Christian Church has definitely hugely impacted the Western science. Very important ideas, like the concept of experiment, were developed by theologians in the Middle Ages. (The idea of natural laws also follows logically.) The streak of infinite also comes partly from Christianity, partly from the Aryan soul. The Greeks could calculate volume of a sphere or a cone, for example, but they used an approach different from ours – although they approximated it sequentially, it wasn’t differential calculus, and they couldn’t invent it. Spengler is correct that each civilisation has its own mathematics, and the Western one is a product of both particular ethnicities and Christian culture.
Another point is to look at the boundary between Middle Ages and the modern era. One of the reasons 1453 is deemed the beginning of the modern period is because Constantinople fell in 1453, and Greek intellectuals fled from Byzantium to Italy and other European countries, becoming a major Renaissance influence. The Byzantium Empire has always been an Orthodox Christian monarchy and a powerful White civilisational centre throughout 476-1453. As you can see, there’s no problem with Christianity, to the contrary.
Don’t forget that a lot of famous scientists happen to be clerics, theologians etc. For example, Copernicus was both serving at a church and doing his astronomical, mathematical, medical and other research. Not to mention that universities appeared as centres for theological studies.
Without all that, things like space flight would certainly be impossible.
If you want to invoke religious wars or something like that, let me remind you that the XX century has seen absolutely horrific wars and mass slaughters of several hundred million people, and most of those are ideological. One particular militant atheist ideology that stands out is communism. You can add here the French and Mexican revolutionaries, anarchists, Russian terrorists etc. Also don’t forget more than 1 billion abortions. All these horrors overshadow everything else over several thousand years.
I’m not a believer in Marx’s “linear” theory of history. In other words, I don’t think that Progress necessarily follows from Point A to Point B.
Also, I am not discounting that great scientists have ever been pious. That is not really my objection. My objection is that the Old Believers, by definition, do not have a history of asking skeptical questions.
And not just Skepticism for its own sake. There has been discussion on this very board of people like Michael Shermer or Richard Dawkins who are professional Skeptics, and yet are thoroughly blinded by the dogma of their own Liberal ideologies.
I would have to agree that the Dark Ages might not have been so dary as I implied earlier. The newer historiography says that the Renaissance began demographically with the end of the Black Death of 1348 which had the side effect of improving per capita wealth and income. Thus, the Renaissance was not unalloyed Progress after the Dark Ages.
The new historiography also shows that the High Middle Ages was a time of tremendous progress, and that the foundations for Western Civilization were largely laid here as much if not more so than Classical Antiquity.
>> “The Byzantium Empire has always been an Orthodox Christian monarchy and a powerful White civilisational centre throughout 476-1453. As you can see, there’s no problem with Christianity, to the contrary.” <<
That’s an excellent point. The Muslims crushing Constantinople in 1453 and thus controlling the traditional trade routes was the economic engine for Vasco da Gama and Columbus, etc. to explore and establish cheaper routes overseas between Europe and the Orient.
My point is that although Christianity is part of how we got to Modernity, and this is not linear progress nor a millstone, I just don’t see this as our salvation and don’t think history supports that view.
The Church supports scientific discovery and exploration into the unknown until they don’t.
In any case, I’m a Skeptic and do consider that extremely important, but I don’t think I am dogmatic about it. Whether instauration involves Christianity or anything else, I do support White people having peace with their own consciences; they have certainly earned it.
🙂
Atheists stopped even appearing to be smart a long time ago. Now, they’re just leftish bandwagoneers regurgitating the same anti-White equalitarian blarney. Arrogant atheist campus guy wouldn’t dare sound off on muslims like he would a White christian republican pushover any more than gender studies girl would about muhammeds and their actual rape ‘culture’. The ‘science says’ admirers of pests like sam harris and rogan’s boring regulars are just a secular and more hateable version of the westboro baptist church.
I’m not even close to a Leftist and I don’t particularly “tolerate” activist Muslims.
Atheism isn’t a Church or an organizing principle. It is simply a non-belief in Superstition in general, and certain kinds of “Afterworldish” (as Nietzsche might have put it) Groupthink in particular.
If there is no evidence that Santa Claus exists, it is not being “mean” for adults to say so.
Leftists and some Libertarians have traditionally been obsessed by utopian and universalist platitudes, which is one reason why they were and are loath to criticize Communism, or Judeo-Bolshevism behind the egalitarian and ecumenical mask.
🙂
Do you notice in western civilization that among higher, more noble strata of people, there is a tendency to try to compensate peers who have suffered a calamity in their lives? I think that’s what was going on with Hawking. How can we really know what’s going on inside a black hole or at the start of the universe? There are so many variables and unknowns. This stuff is really sci-fi. Black holes, while fun to speculate about, are probably just big burned out neutron stars. The community “blew up” Hawking because of what befell him. The situation was probably similar with Nashmo and his Nobel prize. I’ve noticed that poets also behave this way toward one another in European history, when you see someone praised outside of their apparent merits from time to time, too often posthumously(jk toole?). It’s an impulse of the most noble spirits, perhaps.
They just redefined “nothing” as a very minimal something, which strikes me as dishonest.
A mathematically gifted but spiteful and mutated in extremis? A thought struck me when you described the severe abuse he suffered at the hands of his wives. What if God, nature, stimulates a disgust response that led to that abuse; the one that once led to the mutants being put outside the village. Did God imbue in His creation this response in order to compel those He made in His image to not perpetuate the occasional mutation/mistake? It is a dangerous line of thinking, but one worth considering.
In the end, what is the great contribution of this towering genius? Has he produced anything of tangible value? Have any of his speculative ventures led to a positive outcome? In the age of, “the Science guy”, and ayahuasca induced new age quantum physics meets Yoginanda cargo cultism have his speculations even led to men abandoning reason for some goofball primitivism? Or have they justified and driven an already degenerate ruling caste toward ever deepening levels of madness justified by a mirage that they are being guided by pure reason?
Is Hawking the poster child for transhumanism? If so, all the lipstick in the world can’t cover up the invalid.
I always thought what a terrible cruelty it was to let that man live in such a crippled body. Worse torture could not have been conceived. He should have known it and asked for a lethal injection for his own dignity alone.
The very first beginning of my political interests was terry schiavo during the tea party years when christopher was ‘hitchslapping’ the petulantly religious. Kinda like the ‘own the libs’ of that era.
I’d say that this thesis is pretty close to incontrovertible. The aboriginals had never advanced beyond the Stone Age and their actual history is rife with cannibalism.
Now, I am not saying that Injuns can’t be educated, but their own native cultures had not developed very far.
I am also highly suspicious of belief systems that overly sacralize Nature or romanticize primitive agriculture. The reality is that Nature is a system where life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”
Henry Morgenthau, Jr. ─ an unironic Jeffersonian Democrat and Jewish plutocrat ─ understood this, which is why he wanted to impose the Morgenthau Plan onto defeated Germany after WWII.
Going back to the space-alien discussion, I would have to agree with the idea that a comparison between a species that has mastered interstellar space travel would be more than a few light years in technology ahead of a planet-bound (or close to it) species. That would indeed put one side at a tremendous disadvantage.
But the real crisis with First Contact was not that Injuns were exposed to Europeans and their advanced technology. The real tragedy for the “natives” was that they were first exposed to the diseases of the wider world that they had no natural immunity for. Their overpopulated and filthy “urban” enclaves were especially vulnerable.
So the native populations were decimated by disease ─ but that was hardly the fault of the Europeans. To call this Genocide is absurd.
The Europeans certainly did not invent smallpox, and even they barely understood such viral pathologies until near the end of the 19th century. In fact, it was the White man who eradicated this worldwide scourge (and many others).
🙂
Regarding Stephen Hawking’s illness, most people who are diagnosed with ALS last from two to five years. Baseball player Lou Gehrig (1903-41) lasted less than two years.
I would support assisted suicide if that is what the patient wants ─ but the Papists tend to have a problem with that, the same as with capital punishment.
I don’t really understand why they wax so favorably on Life Without Parole when it should be fairly easy to dispatch the worst criminals, were there not so much Leftist subversion of the state and the justice system. That so many prosecutors are loath to call for the Death Penalty does not in any way “cull the Kangaroos” inside the system itself.
🙂
I like the “upshot” in the last paragraph that we would be as inferior to aliens, as the non-whites were to whites, in the lands they colonized. 🙃
I’m no cosmetologist, but I do know that cosmetology is the study of the make-up of the Universe.
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