By Thomas Lee
Professor Stephen William Hawking, the author of the 1988 runaway world best seller A Brief History of Time, has declared the dreadful finality that there is no place for God in theories on the creation of the Universe.
Britain’s most famous theoretical physicist and cosmologist had asserted previously that a belief in a creator was not inapposite with science, but in his latest book The Grand Design, he deduces that the so-called Big Bang was an ineluctable consequence of the laws of physics.
According to wire news reports this week, Hawking says in his new book, being serialized in The Times of London, that there is no need to invoke God to set the Universe going.
“Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something,” Hawking said in the book co-written by US physicist Leonard Mlodinow, challenging Sir Isaac Newton’s conviction that the Universe must have a designer or creator as it could not simply have emerged out of nothing and chaos.
Hawking, who calls himself as an agnostic, has often used the word “God” in metaphorical meanings to illustrate points made in his books and public speeches. In A Brief History of Time, he had appeared to accept the role of God in the creation of the Universe, saying “If we discover a complete theory, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason — for then we should know the mind of God.”
Hawking’s latest theory on the origin of the Universe, if true or unilaterally accepted as truth, will have prevalent and regnant implication, impact and influence in the ultimate value and morality of human beings as it renders the whole Universe and everything in it to merely a materialistic impersonal phantasm, resulting in non-authentic veritable moral chaos.
Hawking’s theory means that there is no morality as life is a merely meaningless materialistic mass – a body of matter with no definite distinctive significance and no perspicuous precious value. So, why have ethics and laws? Everyone should just go for the pursuit of pleasure, sensual self-indulgence, and do whatever he likes, including killing each other, since human life is merely a mass of matter that comes together by chance.
Obviously, Hawking’s theory is logically flawed as it does not answer the two fundamental supreme questions of the origin of the very well-designed Universe, and of the intrinsic inborn moral conscience of the human person.
Scientific theories, such as that of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution which derives from natural observations of the universe and life, have never proven the non-existence of God. In fact, the very fact that there is a very well-designed and orderly Universe shows that there is a Designer with great wisdom and intelligence behind it. Screw and nuts and anything else just don’t come together by chance and become a computer. An intelligent designer and creator has to plan, design and make it.
There is this true story of a hardcore evolutionist called Dr Paul Gentuso who discovered the reality and relevance of God while attending a class on anatomy at medical school.
According to Gentuso, he dissected a human hand during one class session, first by removing the skin, then isolated the individual tendons and muscles, and work his way to the bones.
“The tendons of the hand are aligned in tendon sheaths, like self-lubricating pulleys, allowing the hand to move in a tireless, noiseless, almost effortless fashion. It was perfectly designed to carry out all the works it was called to do, everything from lifting a small object to lugging a tree truck,” Gentuso said.
The experience led Gentuso, who had serious doubts about the existence of God, to take an honest look at himself and at the marvelous and magnificent design of the human body with its stupendous functions.
“In seeing how each tendon was perfectly aligned along the axis of each finger and how each figure moved in a coordinated fashion when tugged by individual tendons, it became obvious to me that there was a Creator who had intelligently designed and created the human hand. This was the first time in my adult life that I could say with assurance that a creator existed. It was really a spiritual experience for me. I went from doubt to certainty based on seeing God’s creation,” Gentuso said.
In this age of incertitude and skepticism, the scientific community and the so-called intellectuals have attempted to dismiss and deny the reality and existence of God, but the more we explore the mysteries and marvels of our Universe and experience the astonishing and miraculous birth, growth and development of the human being, we cannot escape the wonderment of the evidence of the truth that God is.
If the human being is merely the result of a Big Bang lumping matter together by chance, as Stephen Hawkings postulated in his new book The Grand Design, then we are simply clods, with no meaning, no intrinsic essential value, no moral, and no purpose.
If the Universe was originated by chance, then the German philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844-1900) was correct in declaring that God is dead, and was justified to launch his “Campaign against Morality”. Nietzsche, who called himself an “immoralist”, had harshly criticizes the prominent moral values of Christianity, and called the establishment of moral systems based on a dichotomy of good and evil a “calamitous error”.
If that is what we human beings and our Universe are all about, then nothing matters anymore. Let’s eat, drink and be merry, for life has no essential meaning and value.
Otherwise, we should pause, and reflect on the reality and truth of Who created us and what he wants us to be and to do.
Here is what the bible has to say:
2Pe:2:1: But there were false prophets also among the people, even as there shall be false teachers among you, who privily shall bring in damnable heresies, even denying the Lord that bought them, and bring upon themselves swift destruction.
the computer he uses, did someone made it or some big bang and gravity somehow thru some obscure reactions created it for him? our brains are 1 billion times more complicated than his computer, yet he wants us to believe there is no creator.
Hawking was correct, as he had been 2 M’sia in d 1990s
He knew dat MMK is god who used UmnoB 2 achieve his vision n mission in M’sia
The bible had its own saying!
The koran had its own saying!
Every so-called holy scriptures have their very own ways of interpretation of god.
Why are human so confused anyway?
We do good, we also die painfully.
We do bad, no proof that we’ll die comfortably.
Bad people die, we say they’ll go to hell.
Good people die, we say that they’ll go to heaven and what’s there to prove it?
All I get are, the bible said that and the bible say these and what made you damn so sure!
If god do exist, why make it so difficult for us all to play a guessing game!
If god do exist, why not “zap” those bad, bad Umno goons into charcoal.
So please, don’t rely or blame god whenever we need help or are in trouble.
Each and everyone of us have our very own belief so why not keep it to ourself and wait till the day when such real god do materialise.
To hawking, he might has his own version and to me, I might have my very own version.
To me, god and satan are inside everyone of us and it depends on what we want to be.
So, that doesn’t meant that you’ve to believe in me so why not leave “god” out and concentrate more on kicking out the self proclaimed “Umno god” in the next GE.
Thomas Lee’s comments are also (logically) problematic.
Firstly, it does not mean that if Hawkins were right that Universe was not created by God or that there was doubt that He really exists, it logically means that there will correspondingly be no place for law and ethics, and that humans would be bereft of ethics, life bereft of meaning and that we could all “eat, drink and be merry, for life has no essential meaning and value”!
This is an extreme position. Empirically it could not be proven. Not, in any case, if there are atheists and agnostics who are moral and ethical, and have meaning in life and the devout believers who are immoral, unethical and hypocritical (at best) equally if not more empathetic of material concerns.
Secondly Thomas’s further argument, stressing on the wonderment of how “the tendon of a human hand was perfectly aligned along the axis of each finger and how each figure moved in a coordinated fashion”, raises the question : does wonderment of how things are so wonderfully designed logically imply that there is intelligence by way of the Almighty behind such creation????
Such an argument ignores two anomalies:
The first is that whilst we witness with astonishment the “mysteries and marvels of our Universe and experience the “miraculous birth, growth and development of the human being”, we have to admit from observation that alongside the harmony and beauty of coordinated design there’s also a lot of disharmony and chaos, and it does not help the argument to selectively choose to focus on the former, ignoring the latter.
Then there is limitation in the other what we call a “First Cause Argument” – that anything wonderfully designed must have something to design and create it, which begs the question who then created and designed that wonderful designer and creator Himself (ad infinitum)?
There is, thirdly, another issue regarding why the Almighty, if he exists of benign disposition and mighty powers, He would allow Evil to subsist, whether such Evil is in the form of natural disasters or an innocent new born baby coming into the world without prior sins and bad deeds but with life threatening deformities (eg hole in the heart) or why sometimes very moral and ethical people suffer and immoral and wicked people prosper in happiness.
To Thomas I would further ask what was God’s benign design for Malaysia at the crucial time of Ku Li’s contest with Tun Dr Mahathir for UMNO presidential post – the outcome of which determined the course of the nation – to allow the latter to win?
At the end of the day, our relationship with God is personal and based on realm of belief and not logics.
One either believes or sees no reason to do so. What Thomas seeks to do here is to intellectualize and rebut Hawkin’s conclusions by a series of arguments based on logic. This is wrong because the rules of logic hardly favour the establishment of a place of His existence – rather more the other opposite way around….
it is a coincidence that big bang formed the earth suitable for human beings.
it is a conincidence human breathes air while plants breathe CO2, complementing each other.
it is a coincidence female and male somehow came out from the soup, perfect mtach to multiply.
WoW!!! What a con-incidence.
This is the exact reason why there are religions. When there is no hope in men, there is still a hope in God with His different names in different religions. Please empathise and sympathise this great sciencetist. If no one in the world wants to get sick, who wants to be permanently confined to a wheelchair and a laptop that speaks for him ? Pray for him so that the Creator, his Creator will comfort him and lead him to know more of His greatness.
Chinese Gods are real. Tua Pek Kong, Goddess of Mercy, God of Wealth, Tai Seng Kong, Pa Seng Kong, Monkey God, etc, are all real Gods.
Christians has the habit to influence and force others to believe in the bible, while believers of a certain religion seem to claim ownership of the faith.
Chinese Gods will eventually rule the world.
“Hawking’s latest theory on the origin of the Universe, if true or unilaterally accepted as truth, will have prevalent and regnant implication, impact and influence in the ultimate value and morality of human beings as it renders the whole Universe and everything in it to merely a materialistic impersonal phantasm, resulting in non-authentic veritable moral chaos.”
What a bunch of baseless fear-mongering. First and foremost, what Mr. Hawking is saying is what any knowledgeable person has been saying for ages, i.e. “God is not the compulsory explanation for what we currently know about the universe”, so this is nothing new at all for anyone who has tried to look beyond their own religious dogma. In other words, he’s pointing out that “hence God DOES NOT HAVE TO exist”, which is not the same as “hence God DOES NOT exist”.
Also, your argument about “no God” = “no morality” is a tired piece of false belief only to held by the parochial people. Contrary to popular belief, not everyone before the Christ / Prophet Muhammad / Moses were evil-worshippers and rape every woman in his sight; morality has existed quite independently of religious beliefs before the modern Abrahamic faiths. The golden rule “do unto others as you would have them do unto you” has existed in philosophies in China, Egypt, Babylon, India amongst other places long before these religions came along. It would take the most naive and brainwashed mind to believe that a world without a theistic belief would quickly spiral down to a world where all sons rape their mothers and all men kill their neighbours. Never mind the fact that slavery was human race’s most embarrassing moral blemish which was condoned in the biblical days but abolished by bona fide common empathy.
I believe what I have written above would be enough to rebut your entire writing, Sir. And don’t worry, Stephen Hawking didn’t say he’s “disproved” God – anyone who knows a fair bit about the nature of science and religion would know that “disproving God” is impossible due to the way God is defined. No one can disprove Xenu and Russell’s teapot too.
Along with anecdotes of people being amazed by living creatures’ intricacy and hence the necessity of an intelligent creator, there are as many, if not more evidence of various lifeform’s idiotic designs. Do you know that the nerve that controls our vocal cord (recurrent laryngeal nerve) actually takes a detour all the way to our chest, and goes back up to its destination? And in a giraffe, the detour is a few metres long, an engineering faux pas that demands the most incredulity?
No place for God?
It is in our hearts. Either you personally experience Him or you don’t. And personal experience cannot be translated into faith for others upon sharing. It has to be a personal choice to experience God in your life, so the freedom to choose Him or not to choose Him is up to the individual.
Our human reasonings of life’s daily contradictions vis-a-vis God can go to no ends. We think our brains, faster than a computer, can reason beyond doubts to the non-existence of God according to our high standards of physics and metaphysics, moral fairness, acceptance or rejection of evils and sufferings measured to the cry of “where is God?” We think we are the ultimate standard bearers of all things in existence (in our limited consciousness). The unknown, unproven and unmeasurable are rendered unreal, the stuffs of myths or fantasies. Whatever happens is mere coincidence. We are all coincidence! Our lives, our human histories are all coincidence!
When everything is sunshine and blue sky, we don’t think of God. When problems, challenges and deaths come knocking at our doors, we ask ‘where art Thou, God?’ But then why cry God if He is not in our standards of existence?
If we are that great, great a walking species among all living species that evolve till this day without God, why are we still pitifully stuck here on earth for million of years? The universe already should be our playground by now, not our nightly dreams of Star Trek or the nearer Blue Moon!
@tunglang
It’s tempting to besmirch the whole rational exploration about the Creator by making them sound ridiculous, in yoru case you are doing it by lumping them together in a silly sounding conclusion “it’s all coincidence”. Unfortunately this adds nothing to the whole argument apart from satisfying one’s superiority complex in subscribing to the “truer version of the truth”. Coincidence is nothing to be laughed at, otherwise going along your yardstick of “coincidence”, it’s also quite coincident that God, the first cause which is infinitely more complex than the whole universe added together (otherwise He won’t be able to design it would He?) would exist without Himself being created, wouldn’t it?
This is going no where. At the end of the day we need to concur that no one knows everything – even if you believe that your version of belief tells you everything, it doesn’t mean that you really know everything. You might think that I sound hypocritical, in that deep within I think my “scientific” version of truth is higher than your faith. But then again I don’t claim to know everything either, and no one should. For example, while science can confidently say that the current diverse biosphere comes about from the process of evolution, scientists would have to concur that they still know very little about how the first cells come about.
You are right in saying no one knows everything.
Thus we are not an all-knowing living thing, not even with our so-called ‘superior’ science of not understanding the beginning of cells!
To know God, He does not ask us to know everything. He merely asks us to take away our pride (of knowledge). Otherwise we think we are too superior to experience Him. This is the trouble with man’s purpose of knowledge in the beginning. To subjugate others, even gods for our superiority, pleasures and lust for power. A classic example is Lucifer.
We can never understand God’s nature, His beginning, His creation of the Universe, His power. But we can understand His love for mankind. That is all that is required of us – to experience His Amazing Grace, His Blessings, His Forgiveness, His Walk with us in times of good or trouble, He’s always there for us. It is a personal experience, not for testing in science labs or metaphysics experiments, not for intellectual discourse for the ‘truth’ void of spiritual experience. It’s between you and Him. No scientific equations, not formulas, no testings.
No man should feel superior over others with his experience of God. This is altered ego. The same goes for the scientific man. One should be more humble sharing God’s existence, His love, His humbleness to forgive and accept those who come to Him. It is that simple. But it is also very hard for pride man to swallow.
Why ask God: ‘who created You? As our degree of understanding in terms of time, space and dimension is just that limited, are we qualified to ask?. To apply that limited standard and understanding to God is foolish of us. Already we can’t surpass time, space and dimensions, much less death itself. Why ask God?
Your reply would have been perfect if your listener was a lost Christian, but if you are saying this to a non-believer then it wouldn’t make much sense. If someone said the same thing but swap the word “God” to Xenu how would you have reacted?
God is not only for Christians, lost or faithful. God is for every human being, believer, atheist, agnostic or new age follower.
See, God is still reaching out to man, His own creation in His own image. It is up to the individual to accept Him or reject Him. The choice is his, not God’s. This is the freedom God gave to mankind – freedom of choice to choose or reject Him.
God is God. It is very clear. He cannot be Darth Vader, Xenu, or any other character that is man-made. He is infinite, so to introduce some entities that can be traced to some distant stars is doubtful a God. I will have my reservation.
The idea in this discourse is whether we choose to believe in Creation or Evolution by Chance. To choose Creation, God has to exist as the Creator because of man. Man is His creation in His own image with mastery over all creatures on earth. Otherwise we are only as good as an amoeba.
If to say that man is an evolution species, man would have already evolved many times into something else, physically, mentally and maybe transgenic into hybrids of unimaginable proportions – part man, part insect, part bird, part amphibian, part plant. Yet man stays the same for thousands of years.
Some scientists already are experimenting with genetic manipulation, to be creators of new life forms against the law of nature/universe which we have yet to fully comprehend.
I would rather not play God.
Your short spiel on evolution shows a rather shallow and incorrect knowledge about evolution. Today evolution is an established fact well corroborated by all domains of science, including geology, molecular genetics, biochemistry, anatomy, embryology, paleontology, geography, and simply observation. That evolution has occurred is as established a scientific fact as the fact that the Earth goes around the Sun, and such conclusion has been reached with the same rigorous logical inference process as the establishment of the orbit of the Earth.
So, no, evolution does not mutate human into part-man-part-insect creatures because it simply doesn’t. Just like a human can’t have sex with a horse and give birth to a centaur. I wish you would have the open mind to learn more about science before you throw claims on it.
As with Craig Venter’s venture in synthetic life, I do agree that there are potentially far-reaching ethical issues that need to be looked at.
What Jeffrey (#22) has explained is more to the point of an individual’s choice of accepting God or plainly rejecting Him as a non entity in a personal way.
As I had explained earlier, it is up to an individual, thro’ personal spiritual experience to come to know God personally. God is not going to ask anyone of us to test Him in a test tube in a hitech lab with all the vagaries of scientific enquiries before believing in Him. Why should He be treated so by His little perishable creation!
So to accept God’s existence, one has to experience Him personally.
If Evolution by Chance favors man exclusively to the exclusion of other species left to evolve / change form or become extinct, it beats me who is behind it! Throw a dice and see what happens to probabilities.
Yeah I agree that the matter of faith is very personal.
For evolution, there is indeed a strong camp within the Christian community who believes that God could be playing a part behind the whole process, if one is to hold evolution as the truth.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theistic_evolution
Well said. China is a growing and growling economic giant of the world.
Mr Hawking is a physicist, he need to see it, prove it, and calculate it before believing. But religion is about believing, before you could see it, feel it, two different schools of thoughts, no definite right nor wrong, depending which school are you referring too.
But as Malaysian, like Thomas, we are put high hope on the God, we ask for help so often, even Tunku Aziz pray so hard for Musa to be replaced, and he thank God for that, he reasons Musa’s outgoing is God’s answer to his pray, and nothing wrong with that. Is between you and your God, nothing to do with Hawking or other.
People said “Knowledge is useful to solve a problem, but sometime create other problems. Wisdom, on the other-hand, stress on way to deal with problem, sometime does not directly solve that problem, but it creates no another problem.”
God or No God, kick out the Barisan next G.E.
God created Adam and Eve and told the to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth. So we are all descendants of Adam and Eve and that makes us brothers. God must be very disappointed in us because we are dividing ourselves into Malays, Chinese, Indians…….and quarreling among ourselves. But God loves us so much and He is not blaming us because even Adam and Eve who He created perfect beings were deceived by Satan the Devil into sinning against Him. God Knows that in Malaysia Satan is using someone he brought from Kerala to cause division among the races. God is real. Satan is real. Satan’s chief follower in Malaysia is also real. So don’t play play.
Good old good coolie.
Yes keep to the objective.
Rid malaysia of that hideous umno god.
Big bang goes bang bang bang. Like the way umnoputras fire their infinitely stupid remarks (e.g. prinsip prinsip economi pokok rambutan). Actually no. There was no explosion. Just an expansion. And still expanding today. Before then there was no time. And no space! The area between the tip of your nose and the computer screen you are now staring is space alright. But before the bang, that little space does not exist. So what do we have then? Dr mamak? No. Obviously he was not around then. No one. Well not yet for a very very long time. Sharks. How wonderful if he never showed up. Or better still, showed up as a singaporean (hows dat cintanegara? Good one eh?) What we have then (thats the theory anyway) is an infinitely dense lump of energy. I cant picture this really. It is only a mathematical expression, signified by a sort of flatish wrigglish symbol. So one may picture it in any way one fancies. I suppose I would not be too for off the mark to imagine that dense energy lump looking something like kerismudin. You see the intense pressure could have given him the joker’s grin. Or maybe muhideen for the intense heat generated by that lump could have toasted the right side of his face. I am sure umnoputras must have seen the umno logo instead and that was how the umno god was created. These are all merely human interpretations ok.
When Hawkins “declared the dreadful finality that there is no place for God in theories on the creation of the Universe” what he is basically saying is that when study and try understand the “universe”, including planets and galaxies or black holes within, our knowledge, understanding and standard system of explanations for it are always customarily based on science using, as frame of reference, observation and verifiable empirical evidence, and hence the speculation that the universe was created by God is pointless and unnecessary as it is totally outside this standard referencing system. In that sense there is “no place for God in theories on the creation of the Universe”!
What Hawkins has not done – which we jump into conclusion imputing as if he has done so by his declaration and readily take sides in debate on this – is to go one step further to assert whether God exists or does not or whether there is a place for God in our lives or no place!
These are questions that perhaps don’t stop at our universe but go even further to ask – from the outside of everything in the moment before the first event – why did it become so?
Obviously this kind of metaphysical and philosophical question does not seek answer based on normal referencing system of demanding logic or scientific proof.
Our standard system of explanations based on facts logic and proof cannot answers these questions – or prove either existence or non existence of the Almighty!
That must be left as some posters say to individual experience – and in other cases with hopes and beliefs jumbled in…..
It should be left at that. It is when believers start arguing His existence based on our standard system of referencing based on (say) logic (eg surely wonderful design has to be created by a First Cause) (which I have already argued is an irrelevant and inapplicable referencing) that invites non believers to engage in opposite side of the debate and apply this same [non applicable] referencing system of logic to rebut and question, if everything has a first Cause who then created the first Cause?
It’s just one example.It can extend to others like the problem of Evil, why it exists if God by definition is benevolent and more powerful than Satan allow Evil to sometimes happen, the existence of which is inconsistent with either notions of all benevolent or all powerful but not both at the same time!
This kind of discourse may make independent good debate (intellectually) if opposite sides are civil and respectful in arguing their opposite points of view – but it is essentially an unnecessary debate if one thinks what Hawkins has declared invites or requires it.
I don’t what he said does invite so.
Well said. In other words, I can see the two different axiomatic systems in play here.
One is the strictly logical axiomatic system, where if A implies B and B implies C then A implies C. This is the basis of all science and human reasoning.
The other one is the “God-said-so” axiomatic system, where God is right because God is right. It requires no logical proof as it’s quite often futile (we are “too small to understand him”), and God is above all your feeble human logical axioms anyway. In other word, God is THE axiom.
It’s natural that the first axiom is employed by the agnostic crowd while the second axiom is the natural basis of the believers.
When the agnostics argue with the believers, the most frustrating thing is that the believers would try to use the logical axioms to “demonstrate” God’s various attributes, but when you point out the flaws in the said demonstration, they would fall back to the comfort of the “God-said-so” axiom and say “well, God said so, who are you to try to argue about why God does what He does”.
In other words, the believers always “win” since they cherry pick the axiomatic system in their argument whichever way they see fit. I often call it “axiom hijacking”.
Correction – “I don’t THINK what he said does invite so.”
Ooops – “which is CONSISTENT with EITHER notion whether all benevolent or all powerful but not CONSISTENT with application of both at the same time within that definition!
Yes, and going with that logic, chicken and eggs existed from the big bang theory as well. No one initiate the beginning… it just happened.
Dr. Frank Turek, a very staunch theist and strong debater, authored the book called “I don’t have enough faith to be an atheist”. Turek says he has no problem with the Big Bang theory and does not see why Christians cringe at the mention of it. He says, there was a Big Bang at the very beginning of our cosmos but I just know Who banged it. To find out more about him, you can youtube it up with the keywords “Frank Turek vs Christopher Hitchens”. By the way, Christopher Hitchens is a much more prolific and creative debater than Turek is.
One good read to suggest to you viewers is God: The Failed Hypothesis – How Science Shows that God does not Exist by Victor J. Stenger. It makes a clear case that if God exists, He has to exist within nature in order to be part of the universe and everything in it. It is impossible for him to exist outside of time, space and matter but at the same time govern it. Richard Dawkins pointed out that the existence of God is very improbable and even if there is a god, it’s certainly not the Judeo-Christian or monotheistic one.
If creator God exist, then Adolf Hitler and Japanese imperial army of world war 2 should not exists. If Adolf Hitler and Japanese imperial army of world war 2 are creation of the creator God, then Mr Hawking is right, creator God does not exist. The theory of Creator God is actually an economical, commercial and political entity of the human race to control others. It creates a small group of powerful society to control the bigger groups. That’s why they say “God is Great”.