Friday, September 3, 2010

Stephen Hawking: Physics Leaves No Room For God


September 2, 2010 on C4 News

12 comments:

  1. McGrath is such a windbag.

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  2. McGrath sounds like a pompous ass to me. Why does he believe in god would have been an excellent question. The answer would have been ripped apart in any logical and rational dialogue. Why postulate a single monotheistic God. Surely the Universe is too large and complicated for one measely God. We need a God for every point in space, and an extra one sitting in every dimension that the string theorists hope there is (11 and counting). Then there would be more than the inverse of planck constant raised to the inverse of plancks constant number of gods. With that many gods that  would explain everything! 

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  3. I like Hawking as much as the next guy, i read and enjoyed some of his earlier work, it started me thinking about origins and astronomical theories. But He's not some super scientist, who knows it all. Sometimes i have the feeling he gets treated like that by the media.

    In this case he gets the debate running "is there room for god?" and in my opinion this is a good thing. But what if he were to make a semi-lucid deathbed conversion? Or make any unscientific statements? would we follow those as the great "oracle of science" has spoken?

    Hawking should keep up the good work. But we should not perceive him to be some super intelligence who knows all.

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  4. if a creator of matter, what ever it may be called, does not exist, how do we exist? the irony being that if a creator of matter does not exist, creation of matter did not occur and thereby, we cannot exist, or at least we couldn't be commenting here.

    so... is it really a lack of common definition of "creation" or "god" that is the issue? i find it hard to conceive of the idea of nothing that spontaneously  organizes in to something without a cause.

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  5. if a creator of matter, what ever it may be called, does not exist, how do we exist? the irony being that if a creator of matter does not exist, creation of matter did not occur and thereby, we cannot exist, or at least we couldn't be commenting here.

    so... is it really a lack of common definition of "creation" or "god" that is the issue? i find it hard to conceive of the idea of nothing that spontaneously  organizes in to something without a cause.

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  6. if a creator of matter, what ever it may be called, does not exist, how do we exist? the irony being that if a creator of matter does not exist, creation of matter did not occur and thereby, we cannot exist, or at least we couldn't be commenting here.

    so... is it really a lack of common definition of "creation" or "god" that is the issue? i find it hard to conceive of the idea of nothing that spontaneously  organizes in to something without a cause.

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  7. Agreed, but I didn't detect any of that in this clip. You?

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  8. I take it then, that you have an answer to "who created the creator?"

    Because, if you say that the creator exists spontaneously without cause, then you've contradicted your statement that you can't conceive of the idea of the universe existing without a creation event. You're just talking about the second creation event, the creation of the universe, and skipping over the actual first creation event, the origin of the diety. Which you believe requires no "creation".

    Either they both need an explanation, or neither.

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  9. That is precisely what's happening. Hawking is an enormously charismatic figure (rightly) and the media, made up largely of plebs as it is, simply cannot help itself. Hawking says "we must leave Earth", queue global headlines trumpeting civilization's doom because "Hawking says...", Hawking says "alien life is probably hostile", queue worldwide headlines touting the end of civilization if we dare to broadcast our existence to the cosmos because "Hawking says...", Hawking says "M-theory's predictions about vacuua obviate the need for a creator", queue headlines proclaiming "Hawking kills Jebus!". And all these actually happened only in like the last year alone!!

    Hawking is a obviously a pretty smart guy so maybe he's just trollin' the media for lulz, but either way he certainly seems to enjoy the fact that he's got them firmly wrapped around his finger. He's brilliant, and he's made some very substantive and important contributions to physics, but he really isn't the most important or brightest physicist around, and he certainly isn't the demi-god the media regularly make him out to be.

    Does anyone here even know the name of Ed Witten for instance? No, of course not, because he stays out of the limelight and gets about a trillionth the media coverage as a Hawking or a Michio Kaku (who, other than whoring himself out to respectable venues like Fox News in order to explain the latest transhuman-robot-whatever, seems to do fuck-all in terms of actual contribution to physics), but WITTEN was the one in '95 that unified the 5 different versions of string theory into the one self-consistent theory that subsumes them: M-theory (dispite the weirdly incorrect assertion in this clip that it was done "by British scientists").

    This latest proclamation from Hawking smacks of a man who, to paraphrase Hitchens, knows the number of sunsets already seen is larger than the number remaining in his life and who is becoming a little desperate to see things wrapped up in a neat bow before he checks out. It's sad, it's tragic, but it happens to the best of 'em (eg. Linus Pauling) and I can hardly blame him. But we can and should blame the media, whose incessant credulous peddling of whatever comes out of a famous person's mouth does no one any valuable service. M-theory remains just as totally unsupported by empirically derived experimental evidence, untested and thus far unfalsifiable as string theory ever has and as long as that remains the case, I don't even trust it to tell me the correct spin of a muon neutrino, let alone whether the universe needs a creator. Anyway, it doesn't. ;o)

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  10. Sorry perk, but that made no more sense the third time than it did the first two times.

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  11. Exactly Shep,

    That is the number one reason that people tell me they couldn't be an athiest. But saying god is the originator of matter or natural processes doesn't solve anything, because nobody can answer who is the originator of god. I have yet to see or hear one person or theologian intelligently address this.

    Actually the question of who created god is an even tougher question to answer if you believe God is the creator of the universe's intrinsic properties, because an entity capable of creating this would have to be extremely intelligent and complex, maybe even more so than the universe he created (supposedly that is)

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  12. The definition of god would include He who is self-creative, like his offspring. He thus created himself. Perplexed? It is definitely awesome. Indeed if one tried to imagine this, it takes over ones whole globe (the head) and pushes it to its boundary. So what do you have to work on at the moment? The self serving analogies of life. You are self-creating. How do you know of a beginning? Because they were inspired by observing living analogies (the birth of a plant, a baby). These are the philosophical root of searching these thing out. You accept that something cannot be created from nothing, you accept a beginning and an end. You accept these things because they are what you know and see. What sort of matter creates itself? Matters of imagination, the work of the mind, the most malleable and subtle material. God, the matter.

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