|
The Universe in a NutshellHawking, the cosmic joker?THE UNIVERSE IN A NUTSHELL 'I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space', Stephen Hawking is the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge, and is regarded as one of the most brilliant theoretical physicists since Einstein. His book 'A Brief History of Time' (1988) was a publishing phenomenon, selling over nine million copies in over 30 languages. For many, the book was probably little more than a largely unread style accessory, but Hawking caught the world's imagination: a frail figure, suffering since the early 1960s from a progressive and incurable motor neurone disease, confined to a wheelchair, speaking with the aid of a computer, exploring the fundamental questions of how the universe works with his powerful intellect. Over the past decade or so, theoretical physics has undergone something of a renaissance, driven by the search for the 'unified field theory', or 'theory of everything', which would unite our understanding of the cosmos (in Einstein's theory of relativity) with our understanding of the sub-atomic world (in quantum theory). 'We are working', writes Hawking, 'to combine Einstein's general theory of relativity and Feynman's idea of multiple histories into a complete unified theory that will describe everything that happens in the universe. This unified theory will enable us to calculate how the universe will develop if we know how the histories started. But the unified theory will not in itself tell us how the universe began or what its initial state was. For that, we need what are called boundary conditions, rules that tell us what happens on the frontiers of the universe, the edges of time and space' (p.80). Beautifully produced, 'The Universe in a Nutshell' is not just 'Son of Brief History'. The earlier book was organised in a linear fashion which, Hawking claims (p.vii), defeated some readers before they reached the more exciting material in the later sections. The new book is more like a tree, with the first two chapters as a trunk from which subsequent chapters branch off, providing fairly independent pictures of some of the most active fields of current research. Hawking examines such esoteric and exotic topics as supergravity, supersymmetry, superstrings, M-theory, p-branes and 10- or 11-dimensional space-time. By no means an easy read, the book contains cutting-edge work, dealing with, for example, the possibility of time travel. Actually, Hawking attempts to cover too much in too little space, and some of his exposition is rather opaque. Key presuppositionsIn the closing sentence of 'A Brief History of Time', Hawking famously declared that the attainment of a final theory might help us to 'know the mind of God'. However, earlier in that book he conjectured that such a theory would actually exclude God from the universe - and, along with him, all mystery. Indeed, God hardly gets a mention in 'The Universe in a Nutshell'. However, the 'God' to which Hawking refers is some kind of deistic god-of-the-gaps, a philosophical construct which by no stretch of the imagination qualifies as the God of the Bible and Christian faith. For Hawking, the 'most workable philosophy of science' is the positivist approach, combined with the falsification criterion of Popper and others. 'According to this way of thinking, a scientific theory is a mathematical model that describes and codifies the observations we make'. So, for example, 'one cannot say what time actually is. All one can do is describe what has been found to be a very good mathematical model for time and say what predictions it makes' (p.31); and, 'the question "Do extra dimensions really exist?" has no meaning' (p.54); and, 'there is no more experimental evidence for some of the theories described in this book than there is for astrology, but we believe them because they are consistent with theories that have survived testing' (pp.103-4). However, most scientists are realists. Philosophically, scientific realists' dispute with positivism is essentially over the different conclusions drawn from the fact that a given theory is, at a given time, a good explanation of the observable data. Realists argue that theories give knowledge about the unobservable, not just make statements about it; and that sometimes there are good reasons for believing those statements are true (cf. my 'Reading the mind of God' [Apollos, 1998], pp.17-22). Hawking sounds like a realist when he says: 'We can and should try to understand the universe. . . . We don't yet have a complete picture, but this may not be far off' (p.69). He does not believe that the question of the origin of the universe belongs to metaphysics or religion: we must try to understand it on the basis of science. 'It may be a task beyond our powers, but we should at least make the attempt' (p.79). So, 'we don't know' how life originated, but 'what we do know is that by three and a half billion years ago, the highly complicated DNA molecule had emerged' (p.161). The four-and-a-half billion year history of the universe, now familiar as the orthodoxy regularly reiterated in TV documentaries, is spread across pages 168-9. 'In the future', says Hawking, 'we will be on our own, but rapidly developing in biological and electronic complexity' (p.171). Some responsesWhile they do not engage directly with 'The Universe in a Nutshell', some recent responses to Hawking are noteworthy. In 'God, Chance and Necessity' (Oneworld, 1996), theologian Keith Ward has subjected Hawking's essentially atheistic reductionism (shared by Richard Dawkins and Peter Atkins) to searching critique, exposing the logical inadequacy of their assumptions. In 'God, Time and Stephen Hawking' (Monarch, 2001), David Wilkinson welcomes much of Hawking's account of modern cosmology (which he helpfully summarises), but argues that the scientific story does not accommodate all the facts, and that a scientific explanation of the beginning of the universe does not do away with belief in God. In 'Science, Life and Christian Belief'(Apollos, 1998), Malcolm Jeeves and Sam Berry argue that if Hawking is shown to be correct about the initial conditions of the universe, he is not a threat to theism: he is filling in a part of the 'how' story (scientific description), which is complementary to the 'why' story (theology, and religious description). 'We can have a totally naturalistic account of creation without ruling out a providential account' (pp.93-94). The 'totally naturalistic account' is broadly the mainstream cosmological and biological evolutionary scenario already mentioned; but it is also 'how God did it'. This 'complementarity' model is quite popular. However, for some a 'totally naturalistic' account is problematic for a properly theistic approach to cosmology (and other scientific disciplines), and the evolutionary scenarios are susceptible to critique, whether scientifically, theologically or exegetically, at a foundational level or with regard to specific, technical details. In this context, some appeal to infallible Scripture in contrast to fallible, man-made (and perhaps 'unbelieving') scientific theories. 'The infallibility and inerrancy of biblical teaching does not, however, guarantee the infallibility or inerrancy of any interpretation, or interpreter, of that teaching; nor does the recognition of its qualities as the Word of God in any way prejudge the issue as to what Scripture does, in fact, assert. This can be determined only by careful Bible study' (J.I. Packer, 'Fundamentalism' and the Word of God (IVF, 1958), p.96). Regrettably, in some writers the zeal to affirm the 'literal' truth of the Bible can result in less than careful handling of biblical texts, which are pressed too hard for scientific meaning and significance. This is not to deny that there are passages in Scripture of astronomical and cosmological relevance. In a nutshellTo sum up, we might concur with John Horgan's comments in his provocative book The End of Science (Abacus, 1998). He concedes that the visions of Hawking and others 'are both humbling, in that they show us the limited scope of our empirical knowledge, and exhilarating, since they also testify to the limitlessness of human imagination' (p.115). However, he also suspects that Hawking 'may be less of a truth seeker than an artist, an illusionist, a cosmic joker . . . a practitioner of ironic physics and cosmology' (p.95; 'ironic' because of their post-empirical, speculative character; see my review in EN, May 1998). So, whether or not you are awe-struck by Hawking's book, look up into the starry night sky and be awe-struck once again by the universe itself. Better still, pray for Stephen Hawking, and worship the God who is the creator, sustainer and redeemer of the universe, to whom we are accountable for our 'theories of everything', and everything else. Dr. Philip Duce holds postgraduate degrees in both science and theology and is Theological Books Editor at Inter-Varsity Press. © Evangelicals Now - March 2002 |