Today, a new book by Stephen Hawking, with co-author Leonard Mlodinow, hits the stands. (Available locally here and here among other places.) It's called The Grand Design.
Since last Thursday, though, they've been teasing the public by releasing excerpts and generating headlines. The Big Deal is that, in this book, Hawking says, "It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going." This has produced headlines such as:
"God did not create the universe, says Hawking"
"Stephen Hawking: God was not needed to create the Universe"
"Stephen Hawking says God isn't necessary"
and so on, along with, of course:
"Stephen Hawking: religious leaders dismiss 'God not needed' comments"
"Chief rabbi challenges Stephen Hawking in row over origins of universe"
"Stephen Hawking: Archbishop of Canterbury attacks his claim God did NOT create universe"
Since the book only came out today, I of course haven't read it. But I am going to go out on a limb and make a guess at what Hawking is saying, a little more exactly.
First, he is NOT saying that physics has disproved the existence of God. He does not, in fact, believe in God, according to Wikipedia, but I doubt that he is saying physical science disproves Him. That would be good, because I can't imagine how physics could do any such thing in anything remotely like its present state.
I am guessing that Hawking is saying physics shows the Big Bang is not a miracle, or need not be supposed to be a miracle. This rather suggests people regarded it as a miracle until now, but they didn't, certainly not universally. However, natural explanations for the Big Bang have all been very speculative, and people who are fans of both science and religion have often played with the idea that the Big Bang was a miracle, the response to the original "Let there be light."
What Hawking is saying is that he is backing an explanation for the Big Bang in terms of natural causes.
A fuller quote from Hawking on this reads: "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. It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going."
This leads me to think Hawking is backing a particular theory of the Big Bang:
In quantum theory, even a pure vacuum is not truly empty, but contains a constant background buzz of random energy fluctuations. One speculation has it that such a fluctuation produced forces of cosmic inflation that expanded outward, causing the Big Bang.
Gravity comes into it because gravity fields have negative energy, and the total gravity field of the universe could exactly cancel the positive energy of all the matter and radiation in the universe. So that inflating fluctuation can start tiny and grow indefinitely, net energy staying zero.
In short, a Big Bang is just the sort of event that sometimes happens at random. No need for God to light the fuse (Hawking's "touch paper") on the cosmic fireworks.
Okay, maybe. But the religious leaders of the world have every reason to be unimpressed. First of all, this is an enormously speculative theory. There is observational data supporting the idea that there was a period of cosmic inflation in the early universe, but the forces that drive cosmic inflation are highly speculative, as is the larger cosmology the inflation takes place in.
Second, even assuming this is how the Big Bang happened, it's hardly "from nothing." It only happens because there are laws of gravity and quantum mechanics operating in an eleven-dimensional hyperspace (that hyperspace being the "Grand Design" of Hawking's book).
There is no physical explanation for where the laws or the hyperspace come from. I am guessing that Hawking feels they need no explanation, but philosophers, theologians, other physicists, and interested parties generally may see it differently.
It is perfectly in the cards for a physics-minded believer to imagine God creating hyperspace and decreeing those laws, with a Big Bang (or several) as the planned natural result — a translation in current physics of "Let there be light." In a few decades, we will likely have another translation. From such a perspective, Hawking has not eliminated God from the picture, but has only provided the Big Bang with a slightly longer fuse.
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