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God and Stephen Hawking

Stephen stringing us along

GOD AND STEPHEN HAWKING
Whose design is it anyway?
By John C. Lennox
Lion Hudson. 96 pages. £4.99
ISBN 978 0 745 955 490

Eminent physicist Stephen Hawking claimed, in his recent book The Grand Design, that science had left no room for God in the creation of the universe: ‘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 touchpaper and set the universe going’.

Christian and mathematician John Lennox gives a robust response to this in his brief but helpful book, God and Stephen Hawking. Lennox demonstrates that the theory which Hawking claims eliminates God from the picture, in fact furthers the evidence that God exists by highlighting the mathematical beauty of the laws of nature.

Hawking bases his claims about the universe around his favourite candidate for a so-called ‘unifying theory of physics’. This theory is called M-theory. Lennox points out (in agreement with many physicists, both secular and Christian), that it is far from clear that this theory is true and there is no empirical evidence to say that is so. More importantly, Lennox also demonstrates that even if it is true, the claim that it renders belief in God redundant is false. Among other things, Lennox calls us to consider why we should expect the universe to be so rational and ordered if it is not the product of an ordered mind. That mind is God’s.

Many of Lennox’s key points about the relationship of faith to science and the weaknesses of naturalism cover ground already trod in his previous book in response to Richard Dawkins, God’s Undertaker. That said, this is an extremely readable Christian viewpoint on a topic which generated a lot of media hype when Hawking’s book came out. I recommend it to anyone interested in how theories of physics like Hawking’s relate to belief in a creator God.

Owen Benton,
PhD student in Physics, University of Bristol