So, Stephen Hawking says that heaven is a fairy tale for ‘fraidy-cats and there is no need for God to have started the grand pageant we call the Universe. This has caused some griping comment and that is a bit astounding – while this argument has not been settled in the sense of everyone coming to an agreement, it is an argument which we’ve pretty much gone over from start to finish.
To me, the denial of a belief in God – either as a mere First Cause or as a personal God who takes a hand in His creation – is an arrogant presumption of impossible knowledge. You can’t know that God doesn’t exist – you can’t know that something isn’t there unless you can go where it is and ascertain its non-existence. As God is not “in” our Universe in the sense of being bound by it there is no place to look to make the determination of non-existence…you’d have to go outside the Universe, you see?
Smart people like Hawking – and he is clearly a brilliant man – routinely fall in to this error. It is a failure to think things all the way through – a failure not of intellect, but of imagination. As the Universe does exist, it must have come in to existence at some point – whatever power caused this start to existence is God; and anything capable of setting the Universe in motion is fully capable of taking a personal interest in it, and ordering its life towards a desired goal. This is just common sense – and it takes years of narrow-minded concentration to ignore such a thing. Hawking seems to have finally achieved this (earlier works by Hawking left a place for God; I guess that is out the window, now).
The really sad part about this is that Hawking seems to be wanting to show courage – suffering greatly from disease and probably not too long for this world, there is a desire to appear indifferent to it all. Hawking’s mistake lies in fact that he wants a full and complete explanation – no mystery out there unresolved. And so his vision has narrowed – “if I must die, then so bet it: but that will be the end of it all, because there is nothing but this universe, which started itself, and there will be nothing of me once my heart stops beating”. This has the quality of being a complete view, but it leaves out the most important thing – and the one thing which Hawking cannot know: if there really is nothing but the universe we can see and measure?
If Hawking – and those like him – could just step outside of themselves for a moment and acknowledge that there is one Fact they’ll never get to the bottom of, they’d be able to understand everything else. Not for nothing does Christianity urge humility upon us. Bend the knee to that one thing, and the rest becomes remarkably understandable…even if all the particular details are not fully known. I hope for the day when Hawking is walking, again…in full command not just of a revived body of this world, but in the glorified body of the life of the world to come. Freed finally from all perils and able to fully use the reason God gave him…what an astounding thing that will be. If he’s there…if he’s there; but he has to ask to go…and he can’t ask until he broadens his mind to include his own inadequacy.
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