God did not create the universe, says Hawking

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buffalo said:
A great point here: The multiverse odds are so absurd that it is indeed “magic”. Every time a theory is advanced the odds get worse.

It is more rational to be a believer.
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I don’t know what you mean by “multiverse odds” but the anthropic principle combined with a multiverse does provide us with a mathematically sound explanation for any seeming fine tuning or the like.
 
psify said:
I don’t know what you mean by “multiverse odds” but the anthropic principle combined with a multiverse does provide us with a mathematically sound explanation for any seeming fine tuning or the like.
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Consider, the multiverse includes fake universes and a universe with a God.

The anthropic “coincidences” by themselves have spawned the idea of the multiverse.

What are the odds of the anthropic coincidences we are now aware of?

The multiverse is absurd, cannot be observed and cannot be proven. It is simply a science of the gaps argument. It is grasping at straws idea. It also would have God as the ultimate creator of the many universes.
 
As God is metaphysical, he is not bound by the laws of physics, forces, being made of atoms, cells, or DNA, and time. He is also unimaginable to humanity (besides being humanoid and perfect). Therefore, he does not need a cause.
 
Touchstone said:
Well, who caused God, then? By your own standards (which I think are unsupportable, but you endorse them), it’s irrational to eschew a cause, so how do you rationally support belief in an uncaused God? Or is this something you just accept from yourself as irrational (your use of the term)?

-TS
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God is the uncaused- cause. Wrap your head around that one 👍
 
from our Catechism:

[34](javascript:openWindow(‘cr/34.htm’)😉 The world, and man, attest that they contain within themselves neither their first principle nor their final end, but rather that they participate in Being itself, which alone is without origin or end.** Thus, in different ways, man can come to know that there exists a reality which is the first cause and final end of all things, a reality “that everyone calls God”.**10
[35](javascript:openWindow(‘cr/35.htm’)😉 Man’s faculties make him capable of coming to a knowledge of the existence of a personal God. But for man to be able to enter into real intimacy with him, God willed both to reveal himself to man and to give him the grace of being able to welcome this revelation in faith. The proofs of God’s existence, however, can predispose one to faith and help one to see that faith is not opposed to reason.
 
Touchstone

*The deer has a natural, and so far as it goes, “rational” bias towards paranoia. It’s frequently mistaken, but better to error on the side of caution. For humans, something similar seems to obtain. We profit immensely from thinking in terms of narratives, schemes and designs. It produces lots of errors, but mostly ones that are good tradeoffs, errors we can survive and thrive with. *

I agree. So does Blaise Pascal. 😃 And so does virtually every man and woman on a deathbed. Nothing gets us so focused on our immortal souls as the prospect of immortal nothingness.
 
buffalo said:
Consider, the multiverse includes fake universes and a universe with a God.
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I again don’t know what you mean by “fake universes” – all the universes would be real. As for “universes with a God”, that would then only mean that in some universes some god-like being exists. It would not mean that there exists an omni-God. As you in fact implicitly acknowledge below:
The multiverse is absurd, cannot be observed and cannot be proven. It is simply a science of the gaps argument. It is grasping at straws idea. It also would have God as the ultimate creator of the many universes.
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If according to Catholic doctrine one can know by philosophical reasoning alone that there exists a personal God – and you adhere to that doctrine – then you yourself are acknowledging that the domain of the knowable is a proper superset of the domain of the knowable by strictly empirical means. David Lewis proposed that every possible world has ontological reality. And he proposed that to resolve some long standing philosophical problems with possible worlds. So there’s a God-question-independent reason to accept something like a multiverse.

As for your last sentence, what would motivate such a hypothesis? And if such an omni-God existed, there would be no free will as it would be a fact now in God’s eternity that I will do x, y, and z tomorrow, etc. Since the reality of free will seems self-evident to me, that motivates my rejection of such a hypothesis. But even Thomas Aquinas said God’s existence was not self-evident. So again, what would motivate such a hypothesis? (and the question would remain whether we accept the metaverse or not)
 
psify

*But even Thomas Aquinas said God’s existence was not self-evident. So again, what would motivate such a hypothesis? (and the question would remain whether we accept the metaverse or not) *

Again:

Nothing gets us so focused on God and the fate of our immortal souls as the prospect of immortal nothingness. 🙂
 
psify said:
If God exists, God is part of “the reality” whether it be “around us” or not. Surely you are not suggesting that whether God exists or not is not a significant or profound question. Whether it can be answered, whether it’s answer would affect the natural sciences is a separate matter.
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Just by observation, humans have a predilection toward this god concept. We are late developing beings compared to other animals, mentally, and are extraordinarily vulnerable and shapeable; this is a huge innovation stumbled upon by our evolution, as it allows for very complex and nuanced (meta-representational) conceptual processing. But it makes parents and other older humans around us “gods” to us when we’re young. We’re wired that way, and this makes it not just an important question, as part of our natural psychology, but a pervasive one, too.

My point on God as redundant/superfluous was speaking to explanatory models for reality around us. One can simply suppose that the most ornate and belabored explanations are the best if they are sufficiently appealing. But if one favors economy and parsimony as guides in seeking knowledge (and these are well proven heuristics in knowledge building), God just doesn’t add any value explanatorily.

If we understood how oxygen and hydrogen combine to form water, we might suppose that in addition to hydrogen and oxygen’s chemical bonds, the process requires “water pixies” in attendance to make things happen. That could be the reality, but given what we know, the water pixies are just not adding anything of value to our explanations that chemistry alone doesn’t provide. Water pixies may be a question people find intensely interesting, but that doesn’t make them useful in explaining how water molecules form.

-TS
 
coolduude said:
God is the uncaused- cause. Wrap your head around that one 👍
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That really isn’t a problem for me – my point here was to show that that must be the case somewhere in the chain, or else we must accept an infinite regress. I was responding to others here who I think have not thought that through, and if they did would realize that the accusations of “irrationality” implicate them by their own standards. A self-refuting argument being offered there, when it comes from a Catholic who affirms YHWH as uncaused cause, and at the same time declares the positing of a uncaused causes to be irrationality in action.

There’s nothing irrational about it. The only alternative is infinite regress. Something come from nothing, or something always was. And “something from nothing” is a statement that reflects our experience in this universe, and (until very recently), our little narrow slice of experience at the scales we exist at. That’s fine as far as it goes, but there’s perfectly nothing obliging a transcendent reality to be consistent with those obligations that we can identify.

-TS
 
There is a lot of speculation in this thread about “physics outside the universe vs inside the universe”. I know for a fact that stephen hawking believes that before the universe there is “nothing”. he has been quoted as saying so many times. Therefor, i know that because of stephen hawkings astounding intellectual prowess, that there is no way that he wouldn’t compensate for this.

I fully intend to buy this book on the 7th, and i will remake this thread with all the details of this theory and we can further discuss it from there.
 
Touchstone said:
First, naturalism doesn’t suppose ‘all’ is self explanatory. Manifestly, much of what naturalists do is provide explanations from data and experience that perform empirically. The explanations are hard won, and come through rigor and effort from humans applying naturalism as a method.
I haven’t read the book. I haven’t hardly skimmed the article. But Hawking’s thesis has come up several times now on email loops I’m on for physicists and astronomers (I’m neither, btw, but have finagled my way onto several of these managed loops because I’m just really interested).

It’s right in one sense to say Hawking’s ideas in this book are not new; he’s talked about this before, and for some ideas, he’s been advancing them for years now. But there is something new in terms of the traditional credulity of “something for nothing”. The developing picture in physics and cosmology is a universe that is an emergent property of the larger fabric of reality – call it the ‘metaverse’, perhaps.

The insight that is new is that given the way we are now beginning to understand our universe, the dynamics involved suggest that a universe like this (and innumerable related permutations) are simply “automatic”. That’s new because it’s both a) impersonal in nature as a creative dynamic, and b) well ground in quantum and macro-physics, theoretically.

Previously, it was just so much theology – as vacuous as theism – to say “the universe just impersonally popped out of the void”. Could be, but it’s untethered speculation, just as “God did it” is.

But here, Hawking is matching up a deep reading of quantum physics with this idea, and finding resonance. Physics points to a generative model for universes that needs no magic worked by a will or personality. Or, perhaps it’s better to say that at the very lowest levels “something does come from nothing”, not per our foolish intuitions, but as an extrapolation of our performative theories.

Naturalism works. It’s performative, and incorporates objectivity and feedback loops in ways not non-naturalism (in the known varieties) does not. That’s why science makes the gains it does – it can separate more performative models from less performative models (or non-performative models), and thus is a cumulatively progressing enterprise. The reason science uses methodological naturalism is because it is itself a method, rather than an “ultimate questions” philosophical framework. It’s natural explanations for natural phenomena. But if it’s parasitic to pay heed to the performative nature of science, and to apply its principles of empirical grounding, objective analysis and liability to falsification more broadly, then so be it. Would that I (and you) be parasitic, if we esteem ideas that perform and are accountable to the extramental world.

Uh, they’re not that at all. They are “anti-pope”. They don’t speak from ecclesiastic or theological “authority”; their credibility, in stark opposition to the Pope, obtains only in the performance of their ideas in the real world. Science rejects the principle of authority the Pope and the Church rest on. *Eppur si muove, *and all that…

That’s quite a baroque, and I think self-flattering rendering of “irrational” you are using there. Anyone who’s delved into quantum physics just a bit will understand that such a view is quaint at best. If “irrational” is just that which the mind intuitively struggles with or objects to, then yes, much of science is “irrational”; science is in large part the scythe that cuts down man’s hubris in his intuitions, and annihilates the conceits one has about “rationality” as something “I just know when I see it”. Quantum physics, in particular, is spooky weird in an exquisitely mind-bending way, as “irrational” as it gets in the sense you are using it.

But yet, it moves. Science is notable as an enterprise that just shrugs at such criticism. What does the data say, and how do the models perform? If that’s squared away, then charges of “irrational” ring hollow. It’s just polemics at that point. This is where Hawking gets to be quite disruptive. He has the natural models mastered as well as anyone going. I’ll wait to read the book before producing any substantive judgment on his thesis in the book, but my understanding is the implications of physics, in his expert view, make God unneeded, extraneous to economical models.

-TS
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this is a rather simple post:) could you please elaborate?🙂 you may want to research the meaning of faith, a good reference is the Catholic catechism.You might try to agitate over in the non catholic religion forum here at Catholic answers…God bless you:signofcross:
 
I find the entire subject of the origin of the universe to its present state to its disintegration in billions of trillions of years to be the most remarkable thing that we can ever know.

I can’t get my mind to wrap around the idea of the universe expanding — expanding into what? an infinity of infinities? People a lot smarter than me can prove infinity mathematically, and I believe it, but I can’t comprehend it. So much more cannot I comprehend the infinity of space, galaxies speeding away from us faster than the speed of light (!) which we will never see, etc.

All of these infinities have been proven or accepted as proven.

All of these infinities are just the foothills of the infinity that I ascribe to God. I don’t think that I could believe in a God that didn’t have a lot of infinities up His sleeve, so to speak. And, we believe in this God right from the beginning of our inspired writings, the God who made the heavens and the earth.

People like Hawkings do well to study how God put things together, but their methods assume that there is no God to begin with. His statements are simply an assertion of his belief, not a proof of it. Faith in God is a gift, and we see in Hawking another prime example of someone who does not have that gift – if everyone had it, it wouldn’t be the gift that it is.
 
This is ridiculous… he denies the axiom that ex nihilo nihil fit(from nothing nothing comes).

“Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist,” Hawking writes.

Not only is it self evident that from nothing nothing comes but if the universe came into being uncaused out of nothing then it is inexplicable why we do not observe things popping into exist uncaused out of nothing. If he is implying that the universe is self-caused then that is contradictory as well.

Holding to such a view is testament to how desperate non-believers will go to deny the existence of God. They must either choose that the universe is uncaused,self-caused or caused. And if they choose its caused they must accept the attributes of that cause by way of the KCA (if sound). And that is no option for them… they would rather resort to contradictions then to postulate a God.
 
Pieman333272 said:
There was an article on this on the Magis Center of Reason and Faith’s Facebook page.

THE CURIOUS METAPHYSICS OF DR. STEPHEN HAWKING

Worth giving a read.
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That was good.
From Fr. Spitzer’s commentary …

Let’s take the law mentioned by Dr. Hawking above – the law of gravity. It has a specific constant associated with it and specific characteristics, and it has specific effects on mass-energy and even on space-time itself. This is a very curious definition of “nothing.”

Well, he meant “mostly nothing”. 🙂
 
MindOverMatter2 said:
This is false. Firstly, empirical data is interpreted according to non-empirical rational principles. I am glad that you identified empirical science as a sub set of philosophy. Empirical science, by itself, cannot determine what is a logical interpretation and what isn’t. It cannot determine between truth and falsehood by itself. The empirical method merely measures a physical event; and then the scientist interprets that event, and thus there must be certain presupposed rules of thought before scientists go about interpreting that data. True science presumes the objectivity of logical truth when it interprets empirical data. Otherwise one would have no reason to develop rational concepts such as Occam’s razor.
I think you are confusing different senses of ‘truth’ here, or equivocating between them. A “logical truth” is not an “empirical truth”. Logical truths are just consistent products of underlying rules, and in and of themselves tell us nothing about the real world around us. For example, here’s a logical truth:

A: parallel lines never cross
B. L1 and L2 are parallel lines
:. L1 and L2 never cross.

The conclusion is definitionally true given the premises. It’s a “logical truth”, which is nothing more than to affirm that the conclusion proceeds from the premises by rule.

But this “truth” is utterly detached to any empirical truth. It tells us nothing about the real world, and us completely detached from any liability to empirical accountability.

Logic is a tool science uses to build performative models. Much of science succeeds by treating the physics as a kind of “natural logic”, a set of rules and consistent dynamics that we can reverse engineer to some degree (cf. conservation of energy). But nature is what it is, and when our intuitions about what “makes sense” fail, as as they often do, especially at quantum scales, nature doesn’t change to accommodate our conceits, science does whatever it can to build more and more performative models that provide increasingly effective approximations. Our notions of logic are only as useful scientifically as those rules are effective in developing and supporting models that perform. One might call quantum superpositioning “irrational” or “illogical”, but nature doesn’t care a whit what we think, it is what it is. Science finds no solace in harumphing that nature is being “illogical”. It only pursues performative natural models.

-TS
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Touchstone said:
I think you are confusing different senses of ‘truth’ here, or equivocating between them.
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Assertion.
Touchstone said:
A “logical truth” is not an “empirical truth”.
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I never said that it was; I do not equate physical laws as necessarily being synonymous with logical/metaphysical laws. However, if an empirical reality exists, it exist within the context of being possible as opposed to impossible. Some things are truly impossible, which I made evident in my previous post to you. Your blind denial of this fact will not help your case.

Again, as many people have pointed out, you have to deny objective logic and thus give up rationality in order to be consistent in your belief. For that reason, regardless of whether Christianity is true or not, I reject naturalism as an irrational attempt to avoid the existence of God and the supernatural in general, and the mere fact that you have to give up logic and rational discourse in order to achieve naturalism is justification enough for me to continue believing in a supernatural cause of all potential reality.
 
edwest2 said:
“none of us know anything”? A bit over the top, don’t you think?

God bless,
Ed
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How is it over the top? We can debate all we want about the creation of the Universe, and in the end it is all speculation and faith, on any sides of this arguement. I mean, it does leave for a good debate though 😉
 
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