God & the Scientists: Book Review of S. Hawking's The Grand Design - Theosophy.Net2024-03-28T18:53:14Zhttps://theosophy.net/forum/topics/god-the-scientists-book?feed=yes&xn_auth=no …tag:theosophy.net,2011-07-25:3055387:Comment:713692011-07-25T09:44:15.058ZUdaybhanu Chitrakarhttps://theosophy.net/profile/UdaybhanuChitrakar
<p> <b><u>Philosophy is dead. Is Logic dead also?</u></b></p>
<p> </p>
<p>"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."</p>
<p>- Stephen Hawking in “The Grand Design”</p>
<p>“As recent advances in cosmology suggest, the laws of gravity and quantum theory allow universes to appear spontaneously…</p>
<p> <b><u>Philosophy is dead. Is Logic dead also?</u></b></p>
<p> </p>
<p>"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."</p>
<p>- Stephen Hawking in “The Grand Design”</p>
<p>“As recent advances in cosmology suggest, the laws of gravity and quantum theory allow universes to appear spontaneously 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.”</p>
<p> - Stephen Hawking, Ibid</p>
<p><br/>Here three questions can be asked:</p>
<p>1) Which one came first, universe, or laws of gravity and quantum theory?</p>
<p>2) If the universe came first, then how was there spontaneous creation without the laws of gravity and quantum theory?</p>
<p>3) If the laws of gravity and quantum theory came first, then Hawking has merely substituted God with quantum theory and laws of gravity. These two together can be called Hawking's "Unconscious God". Therefore we can legitimately ask the question: Who, or what, created Hawking's unconscious God?</p>
<p> Not only this, but there are other problems also. If the laws of gravity and quantum theory allow universes spontaneously appearing from nothing, then initially there was nothing. Then wherefrom appear those laws of gravity and quantum theory to allow universes appearing spontaneously from nothing? In which container were those two laws of nature?</p>
<p> Now regarding the M-theory: I have already written something on multiverse theory (not yet published anywhere). There I have come to the conclusion that if there are an infinite number of universes, then only within that infinite number of universes there will certainly be at least one universe in which life will emerge. If the number of universes is only 10 to the power 500, then it is very much unlikely that any one of them will support life, because no universe will know which set of values the other universes have already taken, and if everything is left on chance, then there is every probability that all the universes will take only those set of values that will not support life. There will be no mechanism that will prevent any universe from taking the same set of values that have already been taken by other universes. There will be no mechanism that will take an overview of all the universes already generated, and seeing that in none of them life has actually emerged will move the things in such a way that at least one universe going to be generated afterwards will definitely get the value of the parameters just right for the emergence of life. Only in case of an infinite number of universes this problem will not be there. This is because if we subtract 10 to the power 500 from infinity, then also we will get infinity. If we subtract infinity from infinity, still then we will be left with infinity. So we are always left with an infinite number of universes out of which in at least one universe life will definitely emerge. Therefore if M-theory shows that it can possibly have 10 to the power 500 number of solutions, and that thus there might be 10 to the power 500 number of universes in each of which physical laws would be different, then it is really a poor theory, because it cannot give us any assurance that life will certainly emerge in at least one universe. So instead of M-theory we need another theory that will actually have an infinite number of solutions. </p>
<p> Now the next question to be pondered is this: How did the scientists come to know that an entire universe could come out of nothing? Or, how did they come to know that anything at all could come out of nothing? Were they present at that moment when the universe was being born? As that was not the case at all, therefore they did not get that idea being present at the creation event. Rather they got this idea being present here on this very earth. They have created a vacuum artificially, and then they have observed that virtual particles (electron-positron pairs) are still appearing spontaneously out of that vacuum and then disappearing again. From that observation they have first speculated, and then ultimately theorized, that an entire universe could also come out of nothing. But here their entire logic is flawed. These scientists are all born and brought up within the Christian tradition. Maybe they have downright rejected the Christian world-view, but they cannot say that they are all ignorant of that world-view. According to that world-view God is omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent. So as per Christian belief-system, and not only as per Christian belief-system, but as per other belief-systems also, God is everywhere. So when these scientists are saying that the void is a real void, God is already dead and non-existent for them. But these scientists know very well that non-existence of God will not be finally established until and unless it is shown that the origin of the universe can also be explained without invoking God. Creation event is the ultimate event where God will have to be made redundant, and if that can be done successfully then that will prove beyond any reasonable doubt that God does not exist. So how have they accomplished that job, the job of making God redundant in case of creation event? These were the steps: </p>
<p>1) God is non-existent, and so, the void is a real void. Without the pre-supposition that God does not exist, it cannot be concluded that the void is a real void.</p>
<p>2) As virtual particles can come out of the void, so also the entire universe. Our universe has actually originated from the void due to a quantum fluctuation in it.</p>
<p>3) This shows that God was not necessary to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going, as because there was no creation event.</p>
<p>4) This further shows that God does not exist.</p>
<p> So here what is to be proved has been proved based on the assumption that it has already been proved. Philosophy is already dead for these scientists. Is it that logic is also dead for them?</p>
<p> Giving death-sentence to an already-dead God is a joke perhaps!</p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p> This is an excellent book rev…tag:theosophy.net,2010-10-09:3055387:Comment:318322010-10-09T00:58:14.465ZMichael A. Williamshttps://theosophy.net/profile/MichaelAWilliams
This is an excellent book review and other comments by Dr. Chris Holmes. It has seemed that the only person in the popular mass media arena to challenge Dr. Stephen Hawking has been Dr. Deepak Chopra. Where are the other scientists and spiritual leaders who have spoken out for a "New Science/Spiritual" paradigm and frontier? Why aren't they speaking out against Dr. Hawking's latest self styled opus in a more public manner. It's unfortunate that Dr. Holmes review isn't available to a wider…
This is an excellent book review and other comments by Dr. Chris Holmes. It has seemed that the only person in the popular mass media arena to challenge Dr. Stephen Hawking has been Dr. Deepak Chopra. Where are the other scientists and spiritual leaders who have spoken out for a "New Science/Spiritual" paradigm and frontier? Why aren't they speaking out against Dr. Hawking's latest self styled opus in a more public manner. It's unfortunate that Dr. Holmes review isn't available to a wider audience.<br />
<br />
The appalling thing about Dr. Hawking's views in "The Grand Design"is that they are the mainstream paradigm of modern science. In spite of all the evidence in quantum physics and the cutting edge scientists out there, the "reductionist/materialist" still hold control over the thinking in physics and the other sciences. It's been called the "Church of Scientism," with it's Pope/Kingpin being Dr. Hawking. The Arch Deacons and Bishops are many and include Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Michael Shermer, James Randi, and Christopher Hitchins, et. al.<br />
<br />
And the frightening thing is, the mass media and mass education buys into this reductionist paradigm as if it's the "ultimate truth." The stranglehold it has on our whole culture is enormous and most people don't even realize it.<br />
<br />
More can be said, especially about the total ignoring of the role of consciousness the scientism model represents, but I'll await and look forward to other comments on this forum. God & The Scientists: Par…tag:theosophy.net,2010-10-08:3055387:Comment:318202010-10-08T17:07:22.134ZChristopher P. Holmeshttps://theosophy.net/profile/ChristopherPHolmes
<i>God & The Scientists: Part II</i><br />
<br />
Wertheim examines the paradoxes of Hawking’s public image and his inconsistent underlying attitude:<br />
<br />
TOE physicists themselves are associating a unified theory with God. The most famous in this camp is Stephen Hawking. In the introduction to Hawking’s international best-seller A Brief History of Time, Carl Sagan alerts the reader that: “The word God fills these pages. Hawking embarks on a quest to answer Einstein’s famous question about whether God had…
<i>God & The Scientists: Part II</i><br />
<br />
Wertheim examines the paradoxes of Hawking’s public image and his inconsistent underlying attitude:<br />
<br />
TOE physicists themselves are associating a unified theory with God. The most famous in this camp is Stephen Hawking. In the introduction to Hawking’s international best-seller A Brief History of Time, Carl Sagan alerts the reader that: “The word God fills these pages. Hawking embarks on a quest to answer Einstein’s famous question about whether God had any choice in creating the universe. Hawking is attempting, as he explicitly states, to understand the mind of God. The implication throughout his book is that a unified theory transcends space and time and somehow exists “beyond” the realm of material manifestation–a feat traditionally attributed to God alone. ... (p. 217)<br />
<br />
The immense success of A Brief History of Time–it has sold more than 5 million copies worldwide–and Hawking’s personal success in the public arena, are, I believe, in part attributable to the quasi-religious tone in which he presents the enterprise of contemporary physics. Although his reference to “the mind of God” actually occurs at the every end of the book, it opens the film of the same name. As the filmmakers rightly recognized, in an age when many people are hungering for a rapprochement between the spiritual and the scientific, the concept of the physicist as high priest is immensely appealing. And, like Einstein, Hawking is very convincing in the role. He too has assumed an almost mystical aura, which in his case is compounded by the extreme disjunction between the power of his mind and the lameness of his body. … Hawking may be confined to a wheelchair, but his mind soars. Not even many physicists understand the concept of “imaginary time.” He is a being seemingly poised at the junction of the human, the subhuman, and the superhuman—and many people long to believe that this disabled physicist might just take us to God.<br />
<br />
Ironically, it is Hawking himself who has suggested that his relativistic-quantum cosmology might obviate the need for a “Creator.” But he seems to want to have it both ways—at the same time pushing God out of the universe although invoking him as a constant subtext of his work. It is not at all clear from A Brief History of Time whether Hawking genuinely believes in a god, or whether he is just indulging in self-aggrandizement. Unlike Copernicus, Kepler, and Newton (and even Einstein in his own way), Hawking is not a serious theological thinker ... Yet, whatever Hawking’s true feelings about God, many people have come to see him as a scientific high priest, the inheritor of Einstein’s mantle. (pp. 217-219)<br />
The use of the words God, the mind of God, the God particle, and the God like Superforce are endemic to popular science writers and TOE theorists. However, the underlying attitude is usually that we no longer need God, now that we have modern physicists, as high priests, to answer the ultimate questions about cosmic origins, even having to spend long hours sitting at their desks.<br />
Hawking is hoping to fill in the last “gap” in contemporary science, trying to exclude God from the universe by accounting for creation events in purely mathematical and physical terms, thereby explaining away the Big Bang singularity. Of course, to Hawking, there would be nothing “mystical” about singularities, quantum theory or the quantum vacuum. Carl Sagan similarly bandies about the name of God, admitting God only if we define “him” as the sum of all the physical laws, but not accepting any of the traditional attributes of God–that is, as an omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent Being.<br />
Scientists often regard science as the new religion and want to metaphorically see into the mind of God but they do not take to heart the deeper mysteries of what that quest might entail. Scientists leave themselves, their own consciousness and being, out of the equation. Furthermore, scientists simply do not realize the extent to which their own theories are beginning to vindicate mystical teachings –because of the pervasive lack of familiarity and appreciation of what such occult teachings entail.<br />
Indeed, what is it that leads scientists to conclude that there is nothing ‘mystical’ about singularities, superstrings, the nothingness and plenum of the quantum vacuum, M-theory and the holographic model, or other emerging ideas in physics? It is just as ‘mystical’ to have the singularity eventually smeared out, beyond the level of the zero point into imaginary time and the infinite, as for it to appear as a point source at all. Dr. Hawking does not even consider that such zero points, aethers, space and higher dimensions, the void and the plenum, have been the domain of occultists for hundreds and thousands of years. In fact, metaphysical expositions of creation bear profound relationships to modern theories.<br />
In the 1970s and 80s, astronomer Robert Jastrow was comparing the big-bang scenario to the Genesis account of creation and noting certain similarities. All major religious and esoteric teachings depict creation as having occurred once upon a time and this basic idea was confirmed by the discovery of the big bang. Jastrow noted further how the idea—that God willed that there should be ‘light”—made sense in terms of trying to depict early creation events, as energetic photons can create material particles. However, thirty years later, scientists have advanced from the big bang scenario to singularities, vacuum states and higher dimensions, we must consider how these concepts have also been articulated by occultist Blavatsky as within other esoteric teachings.<br />
The search for unity itself arises out of the Judeo-Christian tradition of monotheism and the faith that all things are unified and part of one super-force or Divine Being. Although modern physicists associate their theories with the search for God, this is not usually accompanied by any serious spiritual search or informed mystical understanding. References to God and physics may help to sell books but they can obscure the basic mechanistic and materialist philosophy underlying scientific theories.<br />
Madame Blavatsky (1888) noted that: “the occult side of Nature has never been approached by the science of modern civilization.” Although Blavatsky wrote this over a hundred years ago, she would likely not change her attitude if she were familiar with Stephen Hawking’s M-theory and the so-called scientific theory of creation out of nothing. Scientists are arriving at a knowledge of the profound depths of creation, but because they subscribe to a simplistic mechanistic outlook, they do not recognize or appreciate the mystical and metaphysical dimensions of their own theories. Blavatsky embodied the truly scientific attitude in her recommendation:<br />
The Secret teachings ... must be contrasted with the speculations of modern science. Archaic axioms must be placed side by side with modern hypotheses and comparisons left to the sagacious reader. (SD I, p. 480)<br />
Unfortunately, Stephen Hawking does not have such perspective, as most scientists do not.<br />
Steven Weinberg, a well-known physicist and cosmologist, is the author of The First Three Minutes (1979) which chronicles the physics of the early universe. After providing a fascinating account of the origin and evolution of matter and energy in the early universe following the Big Bang, Dr. Weinberg concludes with these philosophical ruminations:<br />
<br />
It is almost irresistible for humans to believe that we have some special relation to the universe, that human life is not just a more-or-less farcical outcome of a chain of accidents reaching back to the first three minutes, but that we were somehow built in from the beginning. … But if there is no solace in the fruits of our research, there is at least some consolation in the research itself. Men and women are not content to comfort themselves with tales of gods and giants, or to confine their thoughts to the daily affairs of life; they also build telescopes and satellites and accelerators, and sit at their desks for endless hours working out the meaning of the data they gather. (pp. 143-4)<br />
In Dr. Weinberg’s view, to engage in tales of gods and giants or to feel that human life has some “special relation to the universe” is nothing more than a source of self-consolation and self deception. Such ideas, he believes, have nothing to do with the nature of reality discovered by science. Instead, he suggests that human life is more like a “farcical outcome of a chain of accidents.” Humanity’s saving grace consists of those scientists who struggle so valiantly to collect data and solve the mysteries of life and the universe--all while sitting at their desks. It seems quite evident to Drs. Weinberg, as to Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking, that there is less and less for God to do, now that we have real science and scientists who sit at desks.<br />
Drs Hawking and Mlodinow provide a valuable service in arguing their perspective on the mysteries, and raising what i would call 'the problem of God's contracting universe.' I would argue, quite contrary to the stance of such scientists, that the findings of modern physics are confirming ancient claims made within the mystery teachings themselves. God, Science & The Secret Doctrine is actually the most appropriate work to lay side by side with Dr. Hawking and Mlodinow's Grand Design, to highlight the many enigmas and mysteries of science, creation and the issues of God.<br />
<br />
Bravo, Dr. Hawking, for an interesting and provocative work.<br />
<br />
---------------------------<br />
<br />
Dr Holmes' God, Science & The Secret Doctrine presents a comparative study of The Secret Doctrine with current ideas in physics and cosmology, laying mystical axons side by side with modern hypothesis. The Stanzas of Dzyan and the Secret Doctrine anticipated vacuum genesis, singularities, and seven dimensional hyperspace, non-local effects, and much more, a century before Dr. Hawking thinks that science has discovered such things.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/God-Science-Secret-Doctrine-Metaphysics/dp/096894356X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1286161743&sr=8-1" target="_blank">http://www.amazon.com/God-Science-Secret-Doctrine-Metaphysics/dp/096894356X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1286161743&sr=8-1</a>