My friend and I saw this movie yesterday and something’s been bothering me ever since. At one point the college professor quotes Stephen Hawking and his belief that the universe created itself from nothing. Can anyone link me to anything written by people qualified after his comments that refutes this belief?
In Lee Strobel’s The Case for a Creator, he interviewed William Craig. Below are excerpts of the discussion:
*“The standard Big Bang theory can be represented by a cone,” he said, drawing what looked like an empty sugar cone from BaskinRobbins. “The point of the cone represents the beginning of the universe-the singularity where the Big Bang occurred. It’s the beginning point, and it has a sharp edge to it. The expansion of the universe, as it gets older and grows, is represented by the cone’s overall expanding shape.”
“Hawking’s model is like a cone, too, except it doesn’t come to a point.” He drew a picture of what resembled a badminton birdie; instead of coming to a sharp point, the end of the cone was rounded.
“As you can see, there’s no singularity. There’s no sharp edge. If you were to start at the mouth of the cone and go backward in time,” he said, his pencil tracing the long side of the cone, “you would not come back to a beginning point. You would simply follow the curve and suddenly you would find yourself heading forward in time again.”
… it would be like walking northward until you reach the North Pole, and then suddenly, if you keep walking, you find yourself heading south. “There is no beginning and no end no boundaries,” one writer explained. “The universe always was, always is, and always shall be.”
According to Craig, “I think he(Hawkings) has made a philosophical error by thinking that having a beginning entails having a beginning point. And that’s simply not the case,”
…there isn’t any singular point here, but notice this: the universe is still finite in its past. It still has a beginning in the sense that something has a finite past duration.
… it’s also important to note that he is only able to achieve this rounding-off effect by substituting ‘imaginary numbers’ for real numbers in his equations."…“They are multiples of the square root of negative one,”
“In this model, they have the effect of turning time into a dimension of space. The problem is that when imaginary numbers are employed, they’re just computational devices used to grease the equations and get the result the mathematician wants. That’s fine, but when you want to get a real, physical result, you have to convert the imaginary numbers into real ones. But Hawking refuses to convert them. He just keeps everything in the imaginary realm.”
“What happens if you convert the numbers into real ones?”
“Presto, the singularity reappears!” Craig said. "In fact, the singularity is really there the whole time; it’s just hidden behind the device of so-called imaginary time. Hawking concedes this in a subsequent book he co-authored with Roger Penrose.*
Do not worry. There is not a single scientist who has successfully explained where all these stuff/quantum vacuum/energies came from for the Big Bang. Yes, the Big Bang needed stuff to go Bang too! Where did all these stuff came from? Best they could do is to push back or transferred the problem to some other hypothetical worlds i.e. multiverse based upon wishful thinking and nifty maths and hoping for the magic of probability to cause something to happen. The way it is going, it is even more tougher to believe those hypotheses than a simple Intelligent Mind. One needed a religion to believe in those hypotheses.
