God, Hawking and the Universe By William Crawley

The Stephen Hawking story is front page news today, with radio shows and news programmes also carrying it. But what is the story? If you trust some press coverage, Hawking claims that modern science forces the conclusion that "God did not create the Universe". If you read other press coverage, he has concluded that "It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the Universe going." These are two very different claims. The first claim is as difficult to prove (some would say as impossible to defend) as the claim that God did create the Universe; I suspect Hawking is actually arguing for the latter claim. But notice that the former claim is not logically entailed by the latter.

Let's consider the claim that God's existence is not "necessary" to explain the existence of the Universe. Even if Hawking is right -- and it is evidentially too soon to say -- that M-theory can explain the "spontaneous creation" of the Universe, without any assistance from a divine being, it does not follow from that claim that God's existence is "unnecessary". All one could argue is that one can offer a coherent causal explanation for the Universe which does not make reference to God's existence. But God's existence may still be considered "necessary" for non-scientific reasons. I'm not suggesting that God's existence is necessary even at the level; merely that some could mount a coherent case for the necessity of God as a "personal" or "teleological" explanation regardless of the causal implications of M-theory.

Take what Hawking says about M-theory. He writes: "According to M-theory, ours is not the only universe. Instead, M-theory predicts that a great many universes were created out of nothing. Their creation does not require the intervention of some supernatural being or god. Rather, these multiple universes arise naturally from physical law."

Set aside the question of why a multiple-universes-ex-nihilo explanation would be more acceptable than a single-universe-created-ex-nihilo explanation. Instead, focus on the physical law that spontaneously gave rise, according to Hawking, to multiple universes. Why those laws rather than some others? Who or what determined that our universe is "governed" by these physical laws rather than some others? This, perhaps, is a variant of the classic philosophical question: Why is there something rather than nothing in the universe? Hawking's answer appears to be a variant of the classic agnostic response: There just is. But people of faith are quite within their epistemic rights in regarding that answer as insufficient. The physical laws which gave rise to the universe (whether a single universe or a muliplicity of universes) are themselves in need of a full and final explanation. Hawking has given no reason at this stage to rule out a religious explanation. That's not to say that a religious explanation is the best possible explanation for the physical laws at work in the universe, but it does mean that these are still open questions. In an excerpt from his book published in The Times today, Hawking confidently dismisses the entire discipline of philosophy as "dead". He might usefully reconsider that brash allegation.