What did Hawking say caused the Big Bang?

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Brucejlb said:
Why not find the answers in the Catholic Bible ?
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Because the Bible does not tell us everything about God’s creation. But studying and learning all about His creation is a good thing, even without the technological advances, it helps us to learn about God himself. I am not that great of a Steven Hawking’s fan, but lets not dismiss him or science in general.

As St Albert Magnus (Thomas Aquinas’s teacher) said:

In studying nature we have not to inquire how God the Creator may, as He freely wills, use His creatures to work miracles and thereby show forth His power; we have rather to inquire what Nature with its immanent causes can naturally bring to pass
 
I learned from a documentary he believed in the string theory for his basis of what caused the Big Bang.
 
Are there not more serious questions that need answers, such as why a loving God would permit all the suffering on the earth ? We as human parents would put an end to it if we could. So why does God allow it ?
 
You are saying manknd should devote all of it’s itellectual resources to providing a better answer to The Problem of Evil instead of trying to understand God’s material creation?
I would answer a) the Church gives us an answer to that problem, if it’s not satisfactory, theologians and philosophers should keep trying. B) we can do both
 
There are all kinds of theories having to do with the big bang and what caused it. It wouldn’t surprise me if Hawking had been among those who attempted to explain what caused it, but to my knowledge, or rather the only two of his theories that I know about, were more about the nature of the big bang than about what caused it.

One was that in the beginning, time was not real time but imaginary, which would have rounded off the tip of the bang and made it spacial rather than temporal, thus rendering questions about zero time rather like asking what is north of the north pole on our spherical earth. Time would have been sideways and space-like with no way to get to the initial point. At the earliest attainable point, things would have been very still, monotonously the same, and filled with an unimaginable density of potential energy. This of course, is not the cause of the big bang, but a description of it.

The other thing (that I know of and can understand, or at least think I understand) Hawking tried to do was to portray the initial instant of the big bang as a regular singular point with a removable singularity, a weak singularity. I think he played with that for a while but that he eventually gave up on it. I don’t know the reasons why he gave up because I kind of like it.

I don’t actually put much stock in most of the theories purporting to describe things like the initial instant of the big bang or ‘times before the initial instant’, although I don’t rule out that maybe one out of the hundreds or thousands of mathematical/physical schema might be right. I enjoy reading about them, and if I’m able and have the time, trying to play with them, but I’m not hard and fast about them either way. Just as a matter of probability though, I think that most of them have to be wrong. Not very many of them could be right and still be compatible with each other, and maybe only one or even none of them are right.

I think the stuff after the big bang, and by that I mean the first millionth (or maybe the first billionth or the first trillionth or whatever . . . :roll_eyes:) of a second or something like that, are on pretty solid ground. Before that I’m not particularly trusting that they actually know the physics.

PS: Upon further reflection, and after looking at the definitions, I’m probably all messed up on thinking that all of those singularities refer to the same thing. This is really what I was thinking of: Euler differential equation

That’s the one I know how to handle with pencil and paper (and a big pink pearl eraser too of course :roll_eyes:).
 
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If he held the view that the Singularity can be mysteriously prime, like God, then I suspect that he wittingly or unwittingly subscribed to Hindu/Eastern philosophy which holds that God and the Universe are synonymous/inseparable/interchangeable. God is the Universe and the Universe is God. God/Universe is ALL THERE IS. God/Universe has beginninglessly/eternally existed and could have already gone through countless expansions and collapses. Time would have begun and ended several times before, and even now this could be simultaneously occurring in diverse universes.

I suppose nobody asked him what he thought of Hindu philosophy. I wish someone had! When he took a position of atheism, I think that what he was rejecting was the Western/Christian notion of God. The Eastern version would have fit comfortably with his view.
 
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No, I think he understood perfectly well what he meant. In general, his view seems to have been that the Universe is self-caused, either as some sort initial quantum fluctuation event (ie. some sort of vacuum energy) or by some other means produced itself out of nothing. In his view, there was no God, no Prime Mover, no intellect. There was literally nothing before the event that caused the Big bang. It appears to me that he didn’t even really subscribe to any form of multiverse theory.
 
Someone did ask him, a woman* who wanted to interview a number of scientists and mystics as to their views of the universe and existence. She was quite shocked at the abrupt dismissive rejection of anything other than materialism that she got from people like Hawking and Dawkins. I myself wasn’t a bit surprised, as I had taken the trouble to familiarize myself with what they were actually trying to explain, and I knew what she was going to find out before I ever even opened the book. I admit that I did find her shock and dismay entertaining though.

*A woman interested in how quantum mechanical woo-woo mixed with meditation and yoga and so forth . . .
 
Time does not exist. It only exists for us , or beings or things that are capable of thought.
 
Both ‘pre-existing’ and ‘self-caused’ are terms applied by the western tradition as well as the eastern tradition to God. In the western tradition we ascribe an intellect to the Divine being whereas in the eastern tradition an intellect is not compulsory. In Hinduism they have a concept of nirguna (i.e. to be without attributes) for God. Hawkings may have been dismissive of eastern notions, but I feel his thought was aligned.
 
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I think Mr Hawking is arguing that the laws of physics is enough to explain the activity of physical things. So ideas like the watchmaker argument or the the idea of God being a mechanistic cause of the big-bang becomes redundant. But what he fails to realize is that explaining a things activity according to the laws of physics is not enough to explain the existence of the laws of physics; that’s an entirely different kettle of tuna, and is not something that can be known through science.
 
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He allows it for his glory, to show his justice and mercy. And the justice and mercy of God make his works most excellent. A Chinese proverb says that when you are in the dark you have to try to light a candle, rather than ask yourself why there is darkness.
So everything God does or permit is good, so instead of wondering why he allowed what we do not like, we must trust him and seek the collaboration he expects from us.
 
Brucejlb said:
Are there not more serious questions that need answers, such as why a loving God would permit all the suffering on the earth ? We as human parents would put an end to it if we could. So why does God allow it ?
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The question you ask is categorized under “The Problem of Evil.” This is what the Catechism of the Catholic Church says, in the following link, highlighted here under sections 410-421:

http://scborromeo.org/ccc/p1s2c1p7.htm#IV

Peter Kreeft is a Catholic philosopher and writes of it here in not too long an essay:

The Problem of Evil by Peter Kreeft .

Though these references may be off topic for this thread, the problem of evil is, as Kreeft says, one of the greatest challenges to faith. It is therefore appropriate I think to address related questions in almost any thread of Catholic Answers Forums when it is brought up by a poster.

May all of you have a blessed Palm Sunday.
 
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