This week we look to see if Stephen Hawking’s philosophical ideas rise to the same level as his scientific work. Do the philosophical conclusions of a scientist speak on behalf of science? Can Stephen Hawking come up with a way to rule God out of bounds and produce everything from nothing? Um…no. By the way, God loves you!
“Naturalism, in contrast, is not agnostic. Rather, it is the claim that there is nothing that explains the ultimate laws of nature…Theism’s rival is naturalism, not science, and theism offers and explanation where naturalism offers none. If naturalism turns out to be more likely than theism, it will be because theism unwisely tried to explain the unexplainable, not because naturalism offered a better, or indeed any, explanation of the ultimate laws of nature. And certainly not because of any scientific theory.” Lewis and Barnes, A Fortunate Universe, 2016
“The role played by time at the beginning of the Universe is, I believe, the final key to removing the need for a grand designer and revealing how the Universe created itself.” Stephen Hawking’s Grand Design: Did God Create the Universe?, Discovery Channel, 2011
“They tell us that here too, time itself must come to a stop. You can’t get to a time before the Big Bang because there was no before the Big Bang. We have finally found something that doesn’t have a cause, because there was no time for a cause to exist in. For me this means there is no possibility of a creator because there is no time for a creator to have existed. Since time itself began at the moment of the Big Bang, it was an event that couldn’t have been caused or created by anyone or anything. So science has given us the answer that we set out to discover.” Stephen Hawking’s Grand Design: Did God Create the Universe?, Discovery Channel, 2011
