As Hawking points out, the first actual scientific evidence that the universe had a beginning did not appear until the early 1900s. The Bible, however, has been quietly asserting that fact for millennia. It would be good if credit were given where it is due.
3 God or the multiverse?
In trying to avoid the evidence that is visible to all for the existence of a divine intelligence behind nature, atheist scientists are forced to ascribe creative powers to less and less credible candidates, like mass/energy, the laws of nature, or even to their theories about those laws. In fact, Hawking has not only not got rid of God, he has not even got rid of the God of the Gaps in which no sensible person believes. For the very theories he advances to banish the God of the Gaps are themselves highly speculative and untestable.
Like every other physicist, Hawking is confronted with powerful evidence of design:
Our universe and its laws appear to have a design that both is tailor-made to support us and, if we are to exist, leaves little room for alteration. That is not easily explained and raises the natural question of why it is that way…The discovery relatively recently of the extreme fine-tuning of so many of the laws of nature could lead at least some of us back to the old idea that this grand design is the work of some grand designer…That is not the answer of modern science…our universe seems to be one of many, each with different laws.39
It is therefore quite clear that Hawking recognizes a “Grand Design”. He devotes almost an entire chapter to giving extensive details of the spectacular fine-tuning of both the laws of nature and the constants associated with fundamental physics. The evidence he gives is impressive, and certainly fits in with what he calls the “old idea that this grand design is the work of some grand designer”. Of course it does: it fits like a glove – because there is a Grand Designer.
The idea of a Grand Designer is certainly old, but the important question to ask is whether or not it is true. Simply to say it is old can give the erroneous impression that what is old is necessarily false and has been superseded. Secondly, it can give the further incorrect impression that no one holds it today. However, as we have seen, some of the finest minds in science do hold it. The conviction that there is a Grand Designer, God, the Creator, is held by millions, if not billions of people – vastly more, incidentally, than those who hold the atheist alternative.
The multiverse
Hawking, therefore, goes too far in claiming that the existence of a Grand Designer is not the answer of modern science. What, then, is Hawking’s preferred answer to what he admits is the “apparent miracle” (of fine-tuning)?
It is the multiverse. The idea is, roughly speaking, that there are several many-world scenarios, and so many universes (some suggest infinitely many, whatever that means) that anything that can happen will happen in some universe. It is not surprising then, so the argument goes, that there is at least one universe like ours.
We note in passing that Hawking has once again fallen into the trap of offering false alternatives. This time it is: God or the multiverse. From a theoretical point of view, as philosophers have pointed out, God could create as many universes as he pleases. The multiverse concept of itself does not and cannot rule God out.40 Hawking does not seem to have provided us with any argument to counter this observation.
In addition, leaving aside other universes, the physical constants in this universe are fine-tuned. They could have been otherwise, so the theory of the multiverse does not, in any case, annul the evidence of God’s “Grand Design” that is to be perceived in this universe.41
What of the multiverse itself? Is it fine-tuned? If it is, then Hawking is back where he started.42 Where is Hawking’s argument to prove that it is not?
With his multiverse Hawking moves out beyond science into the very realm of philosophy, whose death he announced rather prematurely. As Paul Davies points out: “All cosmological models are constructed by augmenting the results of observations by some sort of philosophical principle.”43
Furthermore, there are weighty voices within science that are not as enthusiastic about the multiverse. Prominent among them is that of Sir Roger Penrose, Hawking’s former collaborator, who shared with him the prestigious Wolf Prize. Of Hawking’s use of the multiverse in The Grand Design Penrose said: “It’s overused, and this is a place where it is overused. It’s an excuse for not having a good theory.”44 Penrose does not, in fact, like the term “multiverse”, because he thinks it is inaccurate: “For although this viewpoint is currently expressed as a belief in the parallel co-existence of different alternative worlds, this is misleading. The alternative worlds do not really ‘exist’ separately, in this view; only the vast particular superposition…is taken as real.”45
John Polkinghorne, another eminent theoretical physicist, rejects the multiverse concept:
Let us recognize these speculations for what they are. They are not physics, but in the strictest sense, metaphysics. There is no purely scientific reason to believe in an ensemble of universes. By construction these other worlds are unknowable by us. A possible explanation of equal intellectual respectability – and to my mind greater economy and elegance – would be that this one world is the way it is, because it is the creation of the will of a Creator who purposes that it should be so.46
I am tempted to add that belief in God seems to be a much more rational option, if the alternative is to believe that every other universe that can possibly exist does exist; including one in which Richard Dawkins is the Archbishop of Canterbury, Christopher Hitchens the Pope, and Billy Graham has just been voted atheist of the year!
M-theory
To be serious once more (but perhaps I was being serious), Hawking’s ultimate theory to explain why the laws of physics are as they are is called M-theory: a theory of supersymmetric gravity that involves very sophisticated concepts, such as vibrating strings in eleven dimensions. Hawking confidently calls it the “unified theory that Einstein was expecting to find”. If it is, it will be a triumph of mathematical physics; but, for the reasons given above, far from administering the death-blow to God, it will give us even more insight into his creatorial wisdom. Don Page, a theoretical physicist from the University of Alberta, who is a former student of Hawking and has co-authored eight papers with him, says: “I certainly would agree that even if M-theory were a fully formulated theory (which it isn’t yet) and were correct (which of course we don’t know), that would not imply that God did not create the universe.”47
Once again it needs to be stressed that M-theory is an abstract theory, and not a creator. It describes a scenario (or, more accurately, a series of scenarios, as it is a family of theories) that has solutions which allow for 10500 different universes48 – assuming of course that M-theory is true, which is by no means certain, as we shall see. However, even if it is true, M-theory itself doesn’t create a single one of those universes. What Hawking says is: “The laws of M-theory allow for different universes with different apparent laws.” “Allow for” is one thing, “create” is something completely different. A theory that allows for many universes is not the same as an agent who designed them, or a mechanism that produces them.
What is very interesting in all of this is the impression being given to readers of The Grand Design that God is somehow rendered unnecessary, or non-existent, by science. Yet when one examines the arguments one can see that the intellectual cost of doing so is impossibly high, since it involves an attempt to get rid of the Creator by conferring creatorial powers on something that is not in itself capable of doing any creating – an abstract theory.
Tim Radford captures this very cleverly in his review of The Grand Design:
In this very brief history of modern cosmological physics, the laws of quantum and relativistic physics represent things to be wondered at but widely accepted: just like biblical miracles. M-theory invokes something different: a prime mover, a begetter, a creative force that is everywhere and nowhere. This force cannot be identified by instrumen
ts or examined by comprehensible mathematical prediction, and yet it contains all possibilities. It incorporates omnipresence, omniscience and omnipotence, and it’s a big mystery. Remind you of Anybody?49
A similar point had already been made by physicist Paul Davies: “The general multiverse explanation is simply naïve deism dressed up in scientific language. Both appear to be an infinite unknown, invisible and unknowable system. Both require an infinite amount of information to be discarded just to explain the (finite) universe we observe.”50
The validity of M-theory
Although it does not affect my argument, it should be noted that not all physicists are as convinced as Hawking about the validity of M-theory, and they have been quick off the mark to say so. For instance, theoretical physicist Jim Al-Khalili says:
The connection between this multiverse idea and M-theory is, however, tentative. Advocates of M-theory such as Witten and Hawking would have us believe that it is done and dusted. But its critics have been sharpening their knives for a few years now, arguing that M-theory is not even a proper scientific theory if it is untestable experimentally. At the moment it is just a compelling and beautiful mathematical construct, and in fact only one of a number of candidate TOEs [Theories of Everything].
Paul Davies says of M-theory: “It is not testable, not even in any foreseeable future.”51 Oxford physicist Frank Close goes further: “M-theory is not even defined …we are even told ‘No one seems to know what the M stands for.’ Perhaps it is ‘myth’.” Close concludes: “I don’t see that M-theory adds one iota to the God debate, either pro or con.”52 Jon Butterworth, who works at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, states: “M-theory is highly speculative and certainly not in the zone of science that we have got any evidence for.”53
Before the appearance of Hawking’s book Roger Penrose wrote some cautionary words:
It has been a not uncommon view among confident theoreticians that we may be “almost there”, and that a “theory of everything” may lie not far beyond the subsequent developments of the late twentieth century. Often such comments had tended to be made with an eye on whatever had been the status of the “string theory” that had been current at the time. It is harder to maintain such a viewpoint now that string theory has transmogrified to something (M-or F-theory) whose nature is admitted to being fundamentally unknown at present.
Penrose continues:
From my own perspective, we are much farther from a “final theory” even than this…Various remarkable mathematical developments have indeed come out of string-theoretic (and related) ideas. However, I remain profoundly unconvinced that they are very much other than just striking pieces of mathematics albeit with input from some deep physical ideas. For theories whose space-time dimensionality exceeds what we directly observe (namely 1+3), I see no reason to believe that, in themselves, they carry us much further in the direction of physical understanding.54
In a radio discussion with Alister McGrath after the appearance of Hawking’s book, Penrose was even more forthright.55 Asked whether science shows that the universe could “create itself from nothing” Penrose responded with a strong condemnation of the string theory that Hawking espouses: “It’s certainly not doing it yet. I think the book suffers rather more strongly than many. It’s not an uncommon thing in popular descriptions of science to latch onto an idea, particularly things to do with string theory, which have absolutely no support from observation. They are just nice ideas.” He stated that M-theory was “very far from any testability…It’s a collection of ideas, hopes, aspirations.” Referring directly to The Grand Design, he then said: “The book is a bit misleading. It gives you this impression of a theory that is going to explain everything; it’s nothing of the sort. It’s not even a theory.” Indeed, in Penrose’s estimation, M-theory was “hardly science”.56
It should be noted that Penrose’s criticisms are scientific and do not arise from any religious convictions. He is, in fact, a member of the British Humanist Association.
In Hawking’s view, a model is a good model if it:
is elegant;
contains few arbitrary or adjustable elements;
agrees with and explains all existing observations;
makes detailed predictions about future observations that can disprove or falsify the model if they are not borne out.57
Comparing these criteria with the comments about M-theory above, it is unclear why M-theory is the good model that Hawking appears to think it is. Accounting for the fine-tuning of the cosmos by postulating one intelligent Creator seems much more elegant and economical than postulating 10500 different universes that are unobservable by us, and is surely a much better “model”.
A move to advance the cause of atheism by means of a highly speculative, untestable theory that is not within the zone of evidence-based science, and which, even if it were true, could not dislodge God in any case, is not exactly calculated to impress those of us whose faith in God is not speculative, but testable and well within the zone of evidence-based rational thought.
Modelling reality: the nature of perception
Since Hawking understands M-theory to be a model, it is important to say a few words about Chapter 3 of his book, where he explains his view of mathematical theories as models. Using an analogy of a goldfish that sees the world through the distorting lens of its bowl, Hawking affirms:
There is no picture-or theory-independent concept of reality. Instead we will adopt a view that we will call model-dependent realism: the idea that a physical theory or world picture is a model (generally of a mathematical nature) and a set of rules that connect the elements of the model to observations … According to model-dependent realism, it is pointless to ask whether a model is real, only whether it agrees with observations.58
Roger Penrose is less convinced by this anti-realism. Referring to Hawking’s stance, he writes: “My own position, on the other hand, is that the issue of ontology is crucial to quantum mechanics, though it raises some matters that are far from being resolved at the present time.”59 In his review of The Grand Design he records his antipathy to subjectivity:
Among Einstein’s difficulties with current quantum mechanics was its leading to subjective pictures of physical reality – as abhorrent to him as to me. The viewpoint of “theory-dependent realism” being espoused in this book appears to be a kind of half-way house, objective reality being not fully abandoned, but taking different forms depending upon the particular theoretical perspective it is viewed from, enabling the possibility of equivalence between black and white holes.
Penrose then comments on the “goldfish bowl”:
An illustrative example the authors provide involves goldfish trying to formulate a theory of the physical space outside their spherical goldfish bowl. The external room appears to them to have curved walls, despite being regarded as rectilinear by its human inhabitants. Yet the goldfish’s and human’s viewpoints are equally consistent, providing identical predictions for those physical actions accessible to both life forms at once. Neither viewpoint is more real than the other, being equivalent for making predictions.
I do not see what is new or “theory-dependent” about this perspective on reality. Einstein’s general theory of relativity already deals with such situations in a completely satisfactory way, in which different observers may choose to use different co-ordinate systems for local descriptions of the geometry of the single fixed over-reaching objective space-time. There is a degree of subtlety and sophistication in the mathematics, going significantly beyond what is present in Euclid’s ancient geometry of space. But the mathematical “space-time”, whereby the theory describes the world, has complete objectivity [italics mine].
It is nevertheless true that current quantum theory presents threats to this objectivity of classical physics (including general relativity) and has not yet provided an accepted universally objective picture of reality. In my opinion, this reflects an incompleteness in current quantum theory, a
s was also Einstein’s view. It is likely that any “completion” of quantum theory to an objective picture of reality would require new mathematical ideas of subtlety and sophistication beyond even that of Einstein’s general-relativistic space-time, but this challenge is addressed to future theorists’ ingenuity and does not, in my view, represent any real threat to the existence of an objective universe [italics mine]. The same might apply to M-theory, but unlike quantum mechanics, M-theory enjoys no observational support whatever.60
Hawking’s view of reality is derived from what he thinks about human perception. He says that perception is “not direct, but rather is shaped by a kind of lens, the interpretive structure of our human brains”.61 Hawking is now entering one of the most complex and difficult areas of philosophy, the realm of epistemology. Epistemology has to do with theories of knowledge – how we know what we know, and with what justification. Epistemology challenges us to consider how far our prejudices, values, and even our methods of scientific investigation limit or even distort the impressions we receive.
For instance, we see from quantum mechanics that the very means used to investigate elementary particles so affects those particles that the scientist cannot simultaneously determine both the location and the velocity of any one particle. It is also well known that a scientist’s personal world-view can affect the interpretation he places on the results of his experiments, and on the theories he forms.
God and Stephen Hawking Page 4
