It is all about honour, funding, building academic fiefdoms, and publishing or perishing, with the economic and political system in the background ready to pounce on any discovery that will meet its end.
God certainly left us a Divine Revelation. That is something objectively true. And that he did so means that Truth was high on his priority list since it is the Truth that sets us free. It follows necessarily that he left us a means to know the Truth without error and that is what the Church is all about. One part of that Truth is his revelation that he created the universe in time out of nothing. Exactly how he did this we do not know, but I doubt very seriously that it involved multiverses or cyclical universes or bubble universes. But I suppose there is no harm in these " fantisies " as long as we give God credit and as long as we believe that Adam and Eve were real people who sinned and transmitted their sin on to the rest of humanity and that God creates each individual soul by a special creative act.Suppose God actually created a proto-world which he destroyed to make the big bang and our world. Or suppose God made some multiverse whatjamacallit and our universe popped out of that. Or suppose even that we’ve misconstrued redshift and the CMB big-time, and actually there was no big bang, God did it some other way.
Did God create us to defend our certainties? Is the purpose of religion to contentedly graze on received dogmas? I guess it could be, but that would be more about protecting tradition than reaching for the truth. A tidy, if dull, world.
And a somewhat remote world, as far as we know 13.798 (±0.037) billion years away from Christ.
Still, if that’s what Catholicism is all about, who am I to disagree.
His says it here in the religious beliefs section: as of September, 2014.
I understand that. but what I proposed WAS a hypothesis, namely on how the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics could be satisfied in a cyclical universe model. St. Michael would dispose of it.
How could there be any way to test the hypothesis there is no God?
I guess he has not been consistent in his religious beliefs? For example, in 1988, in his book A Brief History of Time, he said, “If we discover a complete theory, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason – for then we should know the mind of God.”
Not using the scientific method.
The interplay of physics and math is incredibly interesting. Take for example, Kepler’s three laws of planetary motion. Kepler was able to derive these three laws from the data which was available at the time. But given that the orbit of a planet is an ellipse, you can derive mathematically the second and third laws mathematically by calculus!
Lol. Yeah, but it does not sell. Once most people get through high school and undergrad, they are glad to be done with it. Ideas, that is something different. Most people who go into physics think it’s going to be steady contemplation of the universe. It ain’t. But, I actually do share your interest in math. Part of heaven would be whizzing through those problems that now cause mental gridlock.
A lot of people are not buying, but others have the bug and they thirst for a deeper understanding of the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics as applied to physical real world problems.
. . . and they do math problems? Seriously? When did you last buy any sort of mathematics/calculus/algebra/stats text book when you did not have to as part of your formal education. You are clearly interested in ideas or you would not be here. Take a statistics course for the fun of it. Let us know how it goes. We used to do that stuff in our heads with slide rules. The kids today have fancy calculators that even do graphing because it is that exciting.
How?
How?
I just checked my Amazon account and it shows that I bought three books on November 28, 2014.
I don’t know what his argument is. Possibly something to do with his treatment of time - see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imaginary_timeHow could there be any way to test the hypothesis there is no God?
I think Hawking and some other physicists get this from Einstein. By God I think they mean natura naturans, self-causing nature, so knowing the mind of god = knowing why nature exists and is as it is and is all that there is. So there’s no connection with a theistic personal god, this is a very different notion, naturalism + atheism or maybe a dab of pantheism.