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 PrintableVersion God, Time & Stephen HawkingAn exploration into originsThe cosmic detective storyGOD, TIME & STEPHEN HAWKING: The Rev. Dr David Wilkinson is an eminent astrophysicist, a Methodist minister, and a Fellow in Apologetics at St. John's College, Durham. He has an enviable talent for explaining cosmology to the layperson. This he achieves without jargon, or compromising the essential principles. One must heartily commend his presentation of the subject, even when one does not agree with some of his conclusions. The book is a further contribution to the subject of popular cosmology, pioneered by Professor Stephen Hawking when he published A Brief History of Time in 1988. In its first ten years it sold ten million copies across 33 languages. A principle appears on page 48, that deserves greater emphasis. 'Thus cosmology is a little different to the rest of physics in that it deals with a unique event which happened in the past... Cosmology is more like a detective story, or historical investigation'. When an event happens only once, essential information fades with time, and cannot be recovered. The range of possible explanations cannot then be tested in the normal way. In the last decade it was realised that everything observable represented only a tenth of the mass required for the accepted rate of expansion. Instead of revising their initial assumptions, cosmologists proposed that 90% of the universe consists of 'cold dark matter', so that the Big Bang could remain viable. Recently it has been necessary to further double the mass of the universe by introducing 'dark energy' to explain an apparent acceleration. There is an unacknowledged list of conflicting observations, which makes the origin of the universe a matter of faith and not physics. The final chapters reinforce the 'complementary' view that science examines how God works, and Scripture explains why. Sadly this does not do justice to the alternative schools of thought. Cosmology may be interpreted as needing an Ultimate Architect, but not a Judge or Saviour. Consequently the undeniable beauty of its sophisticated mathematical models is a siren song for all thinking people. The book is not helpful on this point, but it is nonetheless an extremely valuable summary of the subject. Peter Senior© Evangelicals Now - January 2003 |
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