How can Stephen Hawking say there "IS NO God" (i.e., with certainty)?

[AlNg]

Nothing is not real

Here is a set with nothing in it and it is real:
{ }.

 

[IWantGod]

Here is a set with nothing in it and it is real:
{ }.

I see two brackets on a white background. Unless of course you intend to symbolize nothing as an empty set, in which case it’s not really nothing.The word nothing is intended to signify the absence of some possible or impossible being in comparison to actual reality, not the presence of an actual nothing. An empty room doesn’t really have nothing in it. It just means that all the possible things that could be in the room are not in the room; but there is always reality in the room, not nothing.

The other problem with turning the idea of nothing into a possible absolute is that if it is possible for there to be absolutely nothing, an absolute absence of an ontology, then that would mean there is no actual being that exists necessarily. In which case only contingent beings would exist. No being would exist because of it’s own nature, and since out of nothing comes nothing and because nothing is not a cause, contingent beings would ultimately exist for no logical reason, which means that reality would be fundamentally irrational.

Existence only makes logical sense if there is a necessary being that cannot not exist and it is that which is keeping contingent beings in existence. In which case the absence of all reality is an impossibility. In fact there can be no possibility without a necessary being.

 

[ProdglArchitect]

Yes. The scale of change doesn’t change the fact that it’s still change.

 

[Yeoman]

A better question may be why does anyone care what Stephen Hawking had to say on the topic.

I know that sounds rude in the extreme, but in my view Hawking had an overblown reputation as a scientist to start with. That doesn’t mean he wasn’t a smart guy, he was, but that doesn’t mean he was a great as commonly supposed. Having achieved a certain celebrity status, however, in a culture that really values celebrity status, and also being horribly afflicted with a terrible debilitation and having worked anyhow, the dual societal impulses of not wanting to say anything negative about disabled person and not saying anything ill about the dead combines with the tendency to take seriously anything a famous person says about something.

It’s not as if Hawking wasn’t disputed on topics even inside of his own field. I don’t know that his opinion on metaphysics is really even that interesting. Indeed, his opinion here seem rather narrow minded in its conclusiveness and not of the intellectual caliber that individuals like Aquinas have in reaching the opposite conclusions.

FWIW, I feel the same way about almost all of Carl Sagan’s opinions on anything.

 

[niceatheist]

His work on black holes was the first serious attempt at marrying classical physics and quantum mechanics. That was and remains a major accomplishment, so I don’t see how you can suggest his reputation was overblown.

 

[AlNg]

The scale of change doesn’t change the fact that it’s still change.

One possible problem with your argument is that holy Scripture reports that God has changed. Perhaps you will argue that these changes were not essential changes, but the same thing can be argued about the universe as a whole. That essentially, on the macro level, there have been no essential changes in the universe, only non essential ones on the micro level.

 

[AlNg]

His work on black holes was the first serious attempt at marrying classical physics and quantum mechanics.

But he was wrong in his claim that everything swallowed up by a black hole must be lost forever.

 

[niceatheist]

And? Einstein was wrong about the expansion inherent in GR. Being wrong is part of science.

 

[JapaneseKappa]

Something that must exist does not change, it is not in a continuous state of becoming, it does not move from potentiality to actuality.

I didn’t say that a particular thing exists necessarily. I said it is necessary that something exist, not that some particular thing exists.

 

[JapaneseKappa]

You’re confusing the two philosophical uses of “necessary”

Necessary can be used to mean either “cannot fail to exist” or “does not depend on anything else for its existence”

Those are strictly separate. For example: If God cannot fail to exist, and God cannot fail to create the universe, then the universe is necessary in the sense that the universe cannot fail to exist, but is not necessary in the sense of not depending on anything else.

 

[giuseppe96]

Because he was a stubborn atheist who’s disbelief was grounded in the false conviction that there is nothing beyond the physical realm.

 

[JapaneseKappa]

For an informed philosopher’s discussion of cosmology, see http://www.commonsenseatheism.com/w...runbaum-the-poverty-of-theistic-cosmology.pdf

 

[Wozza]

At most, can’t you only say God is improbable?

Doesn’t saying absolutely “there is no God” suggest irresponsible use of reason?

How can someone say there IS NO God, therefore implying certainty?

Stop press: Earlier today an atheist was asked if he believed that God exists and he said ‘No’. As yet there has been no response from the Vatican.

 

[BornInMarch]

The Vatican has a top-notch science academy. Those who disagree on metaphysics can still respect each other as colleagues; as another example, Albert Einstein often worked with Fr. Georges Lemaître.

 

[Aloysium]

Being wrong is part of science.

I wouldn’t say so, but then it depends on one’s definition of science. If we mean the empirical data, it is always valid to a certain degree of error. People can and do fudge results, the numbers or their statistical interpretations. I suppose here it is meant to address the stories we construct about our world using scientific information. These stories always change. What we see in our minds eye when we gaze upwards was an immense dome and now it is Hubble images.

Science, I would say, increases our knowledge of the mystery of existence. The more we know, the more we know what we don’t know.

In saying that there is no God, Hawking reveals the limits of science, and the bizarre place to which it brings us when we limit our reason and imagination to the world of sensory experience, no matter to what extremes we increase our perceptual capacities through technology.

 

[niceatheist]

We all have to find our path. I understand enough to understand where Hawking was coming from. We went from ancient “some of heaven” cosmographical beliefs to our modern understanding of the Universe was by challenging orthodoxies.

I find your last paragraph unfairly derogatory. Just because Hawking came to a different conclusion to you is hardly an excuse for you to call his views on the existence of God bizarre. After all, the Deists who first arose during the Enlightenment may have believed in God, but it certainly wasn’t the Biblical Yahweh, and I see Hawking’s view just another step on the continuum of certain groups of thinkers rejecting Judeao-Christian views of God. You can disagree with them, but just because they challenge your views on God and Creation is hardly a reason to cast aspersions on them.

 

[meltzerboy2]

Not only do we insist that G-d exists, but we also insist that we understand (to a certain extent) the exact nature and behavior of G-d and that He exists mainly for our human benefit. Still, Hawkings’ flat denial of G-d is outside his scientific domain and cannot be justified from a scientific perspective.

 

[niceatheist]

And I see nowhere where he tried to. Even the idea of the universe coming out of a quantum fluctuation doesn’t disprove God, though from a certain perspective one might argue that it sharply limits what it is He could have done. That is what Hawking wrote about in the past, though my view is that he was critiquing the Strong Anthropic Principle as much as the existence of God.

 

[Uriel1]

Hawking used his scientific skills to assert that there is no God, but that assertion is outwith the scope of science; he could say there is no God, but it was a philosophical position and not scientific

 

[niceatheist]

He attempted to come up with an explanation for the universe’s origin. Again I doubt he would ever have asserted it was a scientific explanation, though the “quantum fluctuation” claim might be testable one day. But even that wouldn’t disprove God, any more than, say, biological evolution did.

Ultimately even the primordial quantum fluctuation claim isn’t all that satisfactory if we insist that causality applied even at that moment. But then again, I really don’t see how invoking God solves that problem. We’re still left with entity that somehow isn’t bound by causality. I think Hawking was simply saying that maybe the universe itself was uncaused. Ultimately we’re talking about a primordial region where the physics would have been entirely different, where all the fundamental interactions were united, where space-time, at least as we understand it, didn’t exist at all. Thus causality itself probably wouldn’t make any sense in this kind of physics.