Why God doesn’t exist according to Stephan Hawking.
Last Sunday I was reading Stephen Hawking’s Book — Brief answers to the big questions and one particular chapter re-sparked a deep curiosity within myself, and intrigued me to the point that I want to share it with you.
Our individual understanding of god is often only limited to our surroundings and the religion we were brought up into. Different religions have different perspectives on god, but mostly boil it down to, the true supreme being that is timeless, immortal and non-temporal.
Having a vague understanding on any subject often leads to an Individual taking what’s being stated as the truth. Thus for centuries many theist’ have grown up accepting god as the ever existing energy that governs our universe and is the force behind the actions of every entity down to the atoms. However Late.Stephan Hawking questoned this existence through the laws of nature and physics in his book - Brief answers to the big questions.
Stephan Hawking was an English theoretical physicist and cosmologist at Cambridge University. In simple terms he studied physics, and through that tried to explore the universe through laws of physics and nature itself. His greatest scientific achievement was the discovery about black holes in 1974 and the beginning of time, which supposedly shook the world of physics.
You might recognise him from his photo:
“Science is increasingly answering questions that used to be the provence of religion”. For example the Vikings used to believe that natural phenomenas such as lighting, storms and eclipses were caused by supernatural beings. However in 300BCE the philosopher Aristarchus uncovered that the eclipse was really the shadow of the Earth passing over the Moon, and not a divine event.
Hawking argues that the laws of nature are a description of how things actually work in the past, present and future. Things like the strike direction of a tennis ball, to how the energy of the shot is produced in the players’ muscles to the speed at which the grass grows beneath their feet.
“If the laws of nature are fixed, then what role is there for god?” — he argues. God can be defined “as the embodiment of the laws of nature”.
But didn’t god create the universe!?
Hawking believed the universe was spontaneously created out of nothing, according to the laws of science. These laws may or may not have been decreed by God, but god cannot intervene to break the laws, else they wouldn’t be laws.
The creation of the universe requires three ingredients:
- Matter (Dust, rock, ice, liquids)
- Energy (Sun) — Energy permeates the universe, driving the processes that keep it dynamic.
- Space — lots of space.
Space and energy were spontaneously created in an event known as the Big Bang. At the moment of Big Bang the universe came into existence and inflated like a balloon.
But how does the entire universe essentially come out of nothing?
The laws of physics demand the existence of something called “negative energy”. It’s one of the strangest facts about our cosmos. To get your head around this, Imagine a man wants to build a hill on a flat piece of land. The hill will represent the universe. To make this hill he digs a hole in the ground and uses that soil to dig his hill. But then, he’s not just making a hill — he’s also making a hole, in effect a negative version of the hill.
When the Big Bang produced a massive amount of positive energy, it simultaneously produced the same amount of negative energy. This way the positive and negative energy add up to zero, always. Another law of nature.
All this negative energy exists today in space. To ensure everything adds unto zero, space itself is a vast store of negative energy. The endless web of billions upon billions of galaxies, act like a giant storage device that store negative energy. So how is this relevant in our conversation on God? if the positive mass/energy and negative energy add up-to to nothing, it means you don’t need a God to create it.
Now you may be wondering how does this spontaneous appearance of a universe is caused. It not like one could snap his fingers and summon a cup of coffee or a sandwich. However, breaking down the coffee cup to the milk particles, down to the atomic and sub-atomic level, we realise that conjuring something out of nothing is actually possible. In quantum mechanics (an area of physics) particles such as protons can appear at random, stick around for a while and then vanish again, to reappear elsewhere.
Since the beginning of the universe was from particles 1 trillionth the size of a pencil dot, it remarkable could be possible that all this ungraspable vastness and complexity, could simply have popped into space without violating laws of nature.
Now the final argument becomes, did god invent the laws of quantum physics to allow particles to appear out of nowhere and turn into the Big Bang? Not quite. Imagine a river is flowing down a mountine side, what caused that river? Perhaps the rain that fell earlier in the mountains? What caused the rain? The sun shone down on the ocean and lifted water vapour into the sky and made clouds. So then what caused the Sun? A process known as fusion, in which hydrogen atoms join to form helium. So where does the Hydrogen come from then? Answer: The Big Bang.
Without getting into the physics of Black Holes. Imagine a clock being sucked deep inside a black hole. Assuming it withstood the immense gravitational pressure, the clock will actually stop. Not because it ran out of battery, but time itself doesn’t exist inside a black hole. As we travel back in time, the universe gets infinitesimally small, dense black hole. You can’t get to a time before the Big Bang, because there was no time before the Big Bang.
Finally we found something that doesn’t have a cause because there was no time for a cause to exist in. Thus for Stephan Hawking it meant no possibility of a creator, because there is no time for a creator to have existed in…
Disclaimer: I do not intend to hurt any sentiments. Read this article with a rational and open mindset. Though I do believe that he’s got some logic to backup his claims, I also do feel he does make many blank assumptions and calls it science. Which really isn’t much different than giving it gods name. So Yeah.
This is my first every medium post!
Written with thought and love, by Harjot 🛸
