He’s much much much smarter than I am, and where we disagree, he’s probably right and I’m probably wrong.
“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.
I wish I could ask him who or what created the law of gravity. At some point, there was a beginning. I don’t understand spontaneous creation.
Yes, yes, Occam’s razor and all that.
I still don’t see how something can be created without a Creator. Bah.
Prof. Hawking has let his intelligence run away with his common sense. When I lay out the parts of a watch on my table, why don’t they “spontaneously combust” and form a watch? The laws of physics were sufficient to form a planet but insufficient to form anything else from nothing? Why? Why aren’t new “creations” popping up all of the time? It’s foolishness.
20For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.
21For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. 22Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools 23and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like mortal man and birds and animals and reptiles.
I have no doubt that Prof. Hawking has a very intellectual, verbose answer to my questions. I don’t have to hear it to know it’s nonsense.
You can’t summarily dismiss him, as much as we both would want to.
Until Prof. Hawking proves his theories by showing “the court” that a something can spontaneously combust out of nothing then I grant summary judgment to God.
Where’s the evidence that things suddenly appear from nothing? When he demonstrates a something coming from nothing then we can proceed with the trial. Until then, he’s wasting the court’s time with frivolous lawsuits.
Fine, if you want to go with the trial analogy, then at the most all you have done is defeated Hawking’s summary judgment, you (on behalf of God) have not won a summary judgment, so thus it is on to a trial on the merits.
Stephen Hawking has declared that God was not needed to create the universe. For those who revere Stephen Hawking, I’m sorry but this nonsense is what passes as the pinnacle of modern reason. Quoting Hawking from the linked article, “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.”
The so-called “law of gravity” is nothing more than a term to describe observable properties of matter. There is no per-se law that dictates how matter is to behave. Therefore if matter didn’t exist then neither would laws such as gravity exist. You cannot have laws such as gravity without matter. Quite simply laws such as the law of gravity did not exist before matter in order to dictate that matter should somehow create itself. So then quite obviously neither ‘the law of gravity” nor any other law could have anything to do with “spontaneous creation.”
So Hawking’s explanation is basically an exercise in circular logic. Matter exists because of gravity which exists because of matter which exists because of gravity . . . and so on and so forth.
The only explanation to the origin of the universe that is intellectually honest is that it was created by an eternal, intelligent being: God.
If Hawking’s only evidence is that there is gravity, he’s already lost his case.
The problem is, even if Hawking has lost his case, that doesn’t mean that God has won his.
And even though it doesn’t make sense now, I’m not ready to dismiss Hawking’s case, not without trying to understand it further. The man has one of the greatest minds in history, his ideas deserve more consideration than simply reading a brief article.
