Deus Aderit—But Only if We Need Him

Programs on Stephen Hawking and his ideas are proliferating, and with good reason.  The man is willing to go out on a limb to try to find some ultimate answers, even if he might end up on the wrong track and be attacked by his rivals as not being as smart as he’s cut out to be.

At the outset the other night, a number of questions he has asked were played, including “Do we need God?”

I thought, “What a puerile question for a man of his over-the-top brilliance to ask!”  Is he really implying that God only exists if we need him?  Is he really in the camp of Carl Sagan, who airily pronounced that religion only exists to explain things science hasn’t got to yet?

What if we turn it around?  What if it’s a matter of science’s existing only to explain what theology hasn’t got to yet?  After all, theology was originally considered the queen of the sciences.

Later in the program we were reminded that Hawking said he “wanted to read the mind of God.”  I got the impression at that point that he was using the word “God” in the rather loose way that Socrates used it.  I never did quite catch on to exactly what Socrates meant, but he was executed in part for “insulting the gods” or whatever.

Whatever is the case with the always stimulating thought of Hawking, I’m impressed by the fact that science keeps bouncing off the very extremes of the human understanding of the cosmos.  What do we mean by the “singularity” at the very center of black holes, where all the things that came into being at the moment of the Big Bang—spacetime, matter, energy and physical law—disappear?  What can that teach us about conditions in the singularity where the Big Bang initiated this vast universe?

What bemuses me is how a lot of those mind-bogglingly complex equations cosmologists put up on blackboards end up in impossible infinities.  Even the great Albert Einstein had to invent an uncomfortable “cosmic constant” to cheat his way into making the whole thing work.  Of course, being Einstein, he was later vindicated.  It makes me think of a cartoon, probably by Gary Larson, showing a physicist at a blackboard, staring hands on hips at a long equation, in the midst of which are the words, “And then a miracle occurs.”

So, do we need God to produce that miracle when our equations don’t work otherwise?  Do we need him only until we figure out how to make it work another way?  I mean, M-theory solves a lot of those problems but raises plenty of its own.  Hawking has toyed with an eternally-existent universe in which time was just another spatial dimension.

Somewhere in the Old Testament it is stated that the glory of God is to hide a matter, but the honor of kings is to search it out.  Hawking keeps asking, “Why?,” and why ultimately belongs to metaphysics.  Maybe all those infinities are telling us something, and metaphysics just might want to intrude upon all the branches of physics.

Meanwhile, I wish Dr. Hawking would take time to review a study of mine on the negative energy state of the futon.