Stephen Hawking - "God did not create the Universe"

I'm interested to read the book. In the reviews I've read so far, it doesn't sound like he is making the positive statement some of the headlines make it sound like. Rather, he is saying that god isn't necessary for the universe to happen.

 

Yes, I think that is correct, but of course no one is going to read a headline that doesn't suggest something much more surprising or polemical.

 

Seriously.

Can us atheists/rationalists and faithful/believers get together and kill everyone in the media? They aren't doing any of us any favors.

 

Amen to that.

 

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ImvlS8PLIo"]YouTube- 'A Universe From Nothing' by Lawrence Krauss, AAI 2009[/ame]

 

Misleading title. What he tried to say is that, a God is not neccesary or a universe to exist.

 

In some contexts there is a big difference between "not necessary" and "did not", but in this case I think the media's dumbed-down translation of things seems appropriate. If God is not necessary for a Universe to exist then I think its fair to say that beyond a reasonable doubt God does not exist.

 

Can we honeslty say that the law of physics can be applied to the universe as a whole?

 

Given the data we have gathered over the centuries, it is the most reasonable position that the laws of physics can be applied everywhere just the same.

There have always been fringe theories, claiming for example that the speed of light changes over time, but every such theory has been contradicted by the data, no matter where we look, everything seems to work just the same.

Although I've recently read an interesting article where scientists presented some evidence that the fine-structure constant varies ever so slightly over large distances, meaning that it has slightly different values depending on where in space you are. As of now, we still don't know the answer to that particular claim, but at the same time, would the fundamental constants indeed vary, then this would deal the death-blow to the fine tuning argument. In a universe with varying laws or constants, be it over space or time, you will inevitably get them right somewhere.

 

Another way to look at it is that the universe is the place where our laws of physics apply. Given the possibility that there are countless other universes with different laws of physics, we can't "honestly" make blanket statements like that. Which might be what you were getting at.

 

Which makes hawkings statement blanekt as well?....

It still does not does not answer the existence of God.

My point is that, most of these data ere gathered on earth.....

I understand that. But did we already get it right?....don't know something tells me hawkings is rushing things

 

I guess I just don't get why anyone cares what Stephen Hawking thinks about God. If I want to know stuff about black holes, he's my guy. If I want insight into God, I'm going elsewhere.

 

But oten times, His works dismiises the idea of God. Though, he might not say it straight it......I also don't care o what haw kings thinks, but athesit use him.

 

My point is why should anyone use him? Who cares if he dismisses the idea of God? Is the faith of anyone - anyone at all - going to depend on what some dried-up old scientist has to say? I'm thinking probably not.

 

Ask atheist people why they use him.

 

I understand not using him, but where are you going to look? What human being can claim any knowledge whatsoever of the existence of God?

 

Well, it appears none of us has yet read his new book, so there is still some guessing going on here about what Hawking is saying. Nonetheless, if what one of the most renowned physicists is saying is that the physical universe does not require a god or god-like force to exist, that might be significant. There is still an inference necessary to make a positive statement that god does not exist, and one would guess that Hawking would be intellectually honest enough to recognize that and wouldn't make that statement. If you believe in god and want to investigate her nature, Hawking surely isn't the place to go. If you are interested in whether creation was spurred by god and whether god has physical effects, a physicist is a reasonable person to cite.

 

Well, we've physically been to many places in our solar system, from the Moon, to Mars, Venus, we've even sent a lander to Titan, and we've had lot's of probes orbiting all kinds of bodies. So We can be fairly certain of the laws of nature in our Solar system.

Further, we have light coming in from far away places, both in time and space. From that we can also draw conclusions about stars and the physics within them and now we have the technology to find planes outside of our solar system and it all fits into the puzzle, giving us an image of the world that has the same laws everywhere.

A puzzle is actually a good analogy for most of science. We start out without knowing what the final picture will look like, but once we have enough pieces, we can tell what's on the picture, even if there are still holes. At that point, it's all but certain and that's where we are.
What can of course always happen is that thanks to new technology we find new pieces and it turns out that we thought that we had a puzzle with Donald Duck, but in reality that was only part of the picture and it really is a portrait of Donald Duck sitting on a desk.
But that doesn't mean that the previous assumption was incorrect, it was simply incomplete, and it certainly won't turn into Mickey Mouse.

Without reading the book, it appears as if Hawking said that we don't need god to explain the origin of the universe. I don't think that's rushing things, given the understanding we have of the world.

A believer can of course always go back one step and ask where the properties "nothingness" come from that allow a Universe to come into existence (because when a physicist talks about "nothing", it's different from the philosophical idea we have about it).

So this new understanding of the world is not proving that god does not exists, and it doesn't attempt to (and neither does Hawking), it rather makes it less likely (once again).

 

From his former books, I've gathered that Hawkins was somewhat annoyed by people somehow using the big bang theory as proof of the existance of God. I guess with this book he just intends to argue against people who argument the existence of the divine from scientific theories about the origin of the Universe.

 

That's exactly my point.

 

I disagree. A responsible scientist will say "we don't know what happened before this point" or "we don't know why this happened." But he can't say "well, we don't currently we know exactly what the universe was like before the big bang therefore it must be magic."

Throughout human history, as we've learned more and more about nature and the universe, the things that required divine explanation have been pushed out further and further. Pretty much right now we're at the point of actual creation of this universe. But just because we don't understand doesn't mean that it required a god. It just means we don't undestand.

And nothing that we've learned about science rules out a god, either. I've never understood why the two can't just be part of the same thing. God creates and uses the rules of science to do it. Or not. Who the ******** knows?

 

The thing is that if the rules of nature are sufficient to explain everything, it's unlikely that there is some mysterious thing on top of that.

I've written that in the other thread already.
Think of it like this:
We have A (the laws of nature) being sufficient to explain X (our universe)
So could write it like this: A=X

The believer however doesn't like that equation and brings in the term B (God): A+B=X
We already know that A=X, so B is not only unnecessary, it has to have the same properties as if it wouldn't exist, so effectively B=0. It doesn't exist.

This is of course where the believer says: wait a minute, God is by definition supernatural and hence we wouldn't expect him to leave any natural traces. So for this analogy, A and X are part of the mathematical realm, while B is part of a supermathematical realm which has properties that are unimaginable to us, so that A=X, A+B=X and B=/=0 could all be true at the same time. It might not make sense to us, but we don't understand supermathematics after all.

However, since we don't know anything about supermathematics by definition (not even whether it exists at all), how could we make any statement whatsoever using supermathematics, including B=/=0?
Especially since regular mathematics are good enough to account for both A and X. We only need supermathematics once B gets crammed in there.
In the mathematical realm, the only thing we have access to, A+B=A. So for everything that has any bearing to us, B has exactly the same properties as 0. So for all intends and purposes, B=0 and we have absolutely no reason to think differently.