Stephen Hawking: God NOT Needed For Creation
LONDON -- Did creation need a creator?
British physicist and mathematician Stephen Hawking says no, arguing in his new book that there need not be a God behind the creation of the universe.
The concept is explored in "The Grand Design," excerpts of which were printed in the British newspaper The Times on Thursday. The book, written with fellow physicist Leonard Mlodinow, is scheduled to be published by Bantam Press on Sept. 9.
"The Grand Design," which the publishers call Hawking's first major work in nearly a decade, challenges Isaac Newton's theory God must have been involved in creation because our solar system couldn't have come out of chaos simply through nature.
But Hawking says it isn't that simple. To understand the universe, it's necessary to know both how and why it behaves the way it does, calling the pursuit "the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything."
"We shall attempt to answer it in this book," he wrote. "Unlike the answer given in 'The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy,' ours won't be simply '42.'"
The number 42 is the deliberately absurd answer to the "Ultimate Question" chosen by sci-fi author Douglas Adams.
Hawking, who is renowned for his work on black holes, said the 1992 discovery of another planet orbiting a star other than the sun makes "the coincidences of our planetary conditions ... far less remarkable and far less compelling as evidence that the Earth was carefully designed just to please us human beings."
In his best-selling 1988 book "A Brief History of Time," Hawking appeared to accept the possibility of a creator, saying the discovery of a complete theory would "be the ultimate triumph of human reason – for then we should know the mind of God."
But "The Grand Design" seems to step away from that, saying physics can explain things without the need for a "benevolent creator who made the Universe for our benefit."
"Because there is a law such as gravity, the Universe can and will create itself from nothing," the excerpt says. "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 ... set the Universe going."
Hawking retired last year as the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics at Cambridge University after 30 years in the position. The position was once held by Newton.
More on topic: The Dawning Twilight
http://www.thefreelibrary.com/The+Dawning+Twilight-a01074084467 M. Kerjman
His personal approach to the issue, is it?
More on topic: The Dawning Twilight,
http://www.thefreelibrary.com/The+Dawning+Twilight-a01074084467
Michael Kerjman
On Larry King, the other night, no matter how many times they said that they weren’t trying to prove or disprove the existence of a creator, other panelists kept insisting that their problem was that they were not basing their ideas on the notion of God. It was frustrating to watch.
When Bill Maher, an atheist, appeared on the View, one of the hosts opined that he just needed people to pray for him. This drew applause from an audience that clearly, also, didn’t get the irony of what she was suggesting. Their book doesn't insist that there is or there isn't; just that there is a way that existence can be explained that sidesteps the need for a creator.
1. The fact or quality of being alike; resemblance: "her likeness to him was astonishing".
2. The semblance, guise, or outward appearance of: "humans are described as being made in God's likeness". More »
God is just pretend. Reality is still more profound than we could possibly know.
"perspectival objectification" and wedded to the philosophy of materialism.
to understand REALITY see
http://www.dabase.org/mostrecent.htm
Perfect Dis-illusionment
http://www.dabase.org/dis-illusionment.htm
It could easily be called the "Because I said so" theory, for all the science it contains.
Religion evolves because humanity evolves. The laws and institutions of one age cannot be expected always to suit the needs of a succeeding age, 1000 years or more later. If you believe that all religion is human-made, and that humanity is subject to social evolution as it is to physical evolution, the idea of religious evolution makes perfect sense.
Of course you could also argue that if God truly is omnipotent and omniscient it/she/he would create a perfect world needing no adjustments. That is a question asked for thousands of years: Why this existence and not another? But then not even science can answer that.
If I have a son and 20 years later he's off in Australia doing field work of some sort, am I considered a bad father when gets eaten by a kangaroo?
In the beginning, God was naive, indeed, an innocent. At least three times God had offered a sacred bargain. And twice man had found the bargain wanting. The wickedness of man, the perfect covenants offered to imperfect souls, the unsolvable paradoxes purposefully injected into each bargain - these were indeed the imponderables that these young converts were forced by their circumstance to ponder. But in the end, their conversions were not the offsprings of contemplation, nor prayer, nor epiphany. In the end, each embraced their God's final covenant out of pity. Time and again God had failed to inspire rightousness, had failed to communicate the grand purpose of His creation to His creatures, had failed to offer answers to the questions men ask - and they forgave Him.
W. C. Fields