Hawking: God Not Needed for Universe to be Created

by Nancy Atkinson on September 2, 2010

Physicist Stephen Hawking has written a new book called “The Grand Design.” While the title might seem like Hawking could be delving more into the “mind of God” that he alluded to in his earlier book, “A Brief History of Time,” Hawking actually says that the universe’s beginnings – or the “Big Bang” was an inevitable consequence of the laws of physics and that God wasn’t needed to “light the blue touch paper and set the universe going.”

Co-authored with US physicist Leonard Mlodinow, in “The Grand Design” Hawking says a new series of theories made a creator of the universe redundant. The Times of London newspaper published excerpts from the book today. The book goes on sale on Sept. 9.

The laws of gravity rather than the intervention of a divine being set the Universe in motion, Hawking wrote, and he contests Sir Isaac Newton’s belief that the universe must have been designed by God as it could not have created out of chaos.

“Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist,” Hawking wrote.

He said the first blow to Newton’s contention was the observation in 1992 of a planet orbiting a star other than our Sun. “That makes the coincidences of our planetary conditions – the single sun, the lucky combination of Earth-sun distance and solar mass – far less remarkable, and far less compelling as evidence that the earth was carefully designed just to please us human beings,” he wrote.

For decades, Hawking has been at the forefront of looking for a ‘theory of everything,’ and in “A Brief History of Time” he wrote, “If we discover a complete theory, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason — for then we should know the mind of God.”

Hawking, has a neuro-muscular dystrophy that is related to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a condition that has left him almost completely paralyzed. He is only able to speak through a computer-generated voice synthesizer, and in the video above he discusses related issues with British biologist and atheist Richard Dawkins.

Read more reviews and commentary on the book at Cosmic Log, The Guardian, The Times of London (subscription required) and Reuters.

Tagged as: Stephan Hawking

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  • jimhenson

    Hawking states that the law of gravity exists, and is causing spontaneous creation, which is why the universe is “something” rather then “nothing”. Large-scale cosmological events take long eons of time to form structures, like the Sloan Great Wall, and can hardly be called spontaneous creation. Hawking can’t doesn’t even try to explain what causes Gravity to exist. what happened to utter nothing of nothing of nothing? could infinite beings all be nothing each unable to explain why every individual is so ignorant compared to the universe itself of ultimate nothing?

  • hydrazine

    As I am both versed in science and theology I would like to point out that while Stephen Hawking makes for a great theoretical physicist he is a lousy theologian. He doesn’t seem to understand what the concept of “divine creation” refers to. It’s not the popular mass media version with some old guy waving his hand and BOOM! the Earth comes into being. It’s about what or who makes the laws of physics and then maintains and enforces them. What Stephen Hawking does is a little bit like contending that behavior of the cars in the streets proves there is no Department of Motor Vehicles because the drivers follow a set of consistent rules all by themselves. There is simply *no* way you can understand God (if there is one) with the tools provided by physics. You need philosophy and theology for that. Not theoretical physics.

    Kind regards,
    /hydrazine

  • Lawrence B. Crowell

    The beginning of the universe as we understand it may be parochial in some sense. It may only pertain to a local region in a grand superspace where there is an onset of symmetry breaking or compactification of 6 of the 10 dimensions in the superspace. This means the universe is a far grander system than just our 4-dimensional spacetime, and our 4-D spacetime is just a region of symmetry breaking with a particular arrow of time. There exists a vast number of such spacetime cosmologies (large scale regions where 6 dimensions are compactified) within this grand space which can have + or – directions in time. It is similar in a funny way to the Ising chain in statistical mechanics. So while this local compactification of dimensions frames the arrow of time and “origin” of our observable universe, this really is a sort of illusion in a way within a timeless universe that has no preferred direction of time. Other cosmologies may have opposite directed arrows of time from ours, and the total system of such spacetime cosmologies might be compared to a chain of spins in an Ising system.

    As for disproving the existence God in a grand sense, there is something I have found a bit curious. I am interested primarily in what underlies string theory. Strings are similar to hadrons in a way, and indeed were derived from hadronic physics beginning with the Veneziano amplitude. Strings on a Dp-brane act to valence chaotic fluctuations. The string as it moves defines sheets or tubes, which cover these chaotic rips. I think that on a fine scale, such as with the analogue of there being something like quarks and gluons, but which make up the string, there is a substratum of structure closer to the Planck scale. This tames these chaotic rifts some as by countering them with topological numbers. However, there is still chaos as one approaches the Planck scale. At the Planck scale it appears that everything may just to total chaos, indeed possibly self-referential chaos. Underneath things on this ultimate scale may consist of states of some sort that are self-referential codes of each other,

    I mention this for Douglas Hofstadter thinks that consciousness involves some approximation or physical mirror of Godel’s theorem with self-reference. If this is so then if underneath physical existence there is this self-referential chaos then it is at least tempting to ponder whether this is, well for lack of a better word God. It could also be argued to be a sort of Tao as well. So what has happened here is that the concept of God, and it is best to think of the concept of God more than God, has re-emerged in another form. The Upanishads makes similar references to the role of consciousness in the universe, where our conscious existence is just some illusion from the entire wholeness of things.

    Absolutely killing God, in contrast to killing a certain deity or some theological narrative, is a much more slippery matter than one might presume. Of course in this setting God becomes almost wraith-like or something more similar to the Tao. As the Buddhists say, maybe God is so ultimate that God is unconcerned with God’s own existence.

    LC

  • Dark Gnat

    I agree with LC on most points. This whole evangelical atheism is really obnoxious, and it is becoming a distraction from real science.

    If a person wants to believe in a higher deity, or a creator of the universe, then they will. No amount of “disproving” will stop them. I tend to think that humans are naturally religious in some way, possibly a result of self awareness, and the awareness of our own mortality. For many people, the thought of God and heaven, or similar concepts is a comforting one, and validates their existence. Why should we take that away from them, even if we believe it is for their own good? It is a part of our culture, and until we accept that, we will never be able to coexist with other cultures.

    In a way, we are all salespeople. A good salesman isn’t going to come up to you in a car lot and say, “you are an idiot…but I’d like you to take a look at this new model…” That would offend the customer, and they would lose the sale. Scientist will never win over minds with these tactics. The best we can do is present the idea, and let people chose to accept it, knowing full well that the idea itself may be flawed, and replaced with a better idea in the future.

  • Olaf

    The so called new atheists is nothing more than an allergic reaction on the push of creationists trying to force their religion onto them. Most atheists including my girlfriend have no interest in science whatsoever. And live without any basis of religion.

    LBC, your definition and even hydrazine is so unlike the gods in all religious texts. I would call the Universe = god. But that does not mean that it had intelligence. I could also have used the scientific way call it the Force-X.

    We do not know if there is a god or now, but we do know that there is no experimental evidences or measurable evidences showing that god exists so rendering any god basically useless for this universe.

  • Lawrence B. Crowell

    I like the following bit by George Carlin on the 10 Commandments

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YzEs2nj7iZM

    In the audio version he has an introduction about how this was ll set up to keep people in line.

    Eastern religions have somewhat deeper ideas about these things, wheras Abrahamist religions tend to be set up more as narratives and polemics meant to establish political systems of control.

    LC

  • jimhenson

    Gravity God created the dark energy devil of deception illusion? If Gravity is a law of the universe, then why is it weakening by dark energy expansion since the last 2 billion years? I don’t buy Hawkings Gravity Universe of Nothing idea. Spontaneous annihilation of everything is equally applicable to spontaneous creation. Perhaps the Universe is fractal size-scaled by the CMB as a bose-einstein condensate. When space expands cools to absolute zero, it condenses into one huge black hole like the big-bang, or mini-black holes heat evaporating constantly would be fractal size-scaling. space would simulaneously exist and vanish during condensation into a black hole. Dark energy constantly cools more space and forms more larger black holes.

  • jimhenson

    black and white holes spontaneously annihilate and create everything, at all fractal size-scales from mini to monster CMB. The big-bang could have been a huge chunk piece of space a bose-einstein condensate that formed at absolute zero by dark energy expansion condensation cooling. this could explain the coma cluster galaxy observations being older then the big-bang CMB age. Condensates imploding like the big-bang 14.6 BY ago, would not disturb pre-existing galaxies like the coma cluster !

  • Lawrence B. Crowell

    The structures the SDSS has found is similar in structure to the fractal structure of the anisotropy of the CMB. There is this problem of so called fine tuning. Yet I suspect that there is some renormalization of structure that preserves a Hausdroff dimension. These structures are signatures of some type of scaling principle that as yet is not known.

    LC

  • BHA-in-LA-CA-USA

    Hydrazine wrote ideas similar to mine (HTTP://BHA-in-LA-CA.Spaces.Live.com/default.aspx). Her analogy surpasses in clarity anything I conceived, though I would substitute “legislature, police and courts” for the DMV.

    Lawrence B. Crowell (September 2nd, 2010 at 2:43 pm) clarified some of the issues which I posed in my earlier opinion at that URL.

    Olaf writes agreeably too.

    Thank you all.

    Unless UniverseToday censors the URL, efficiency demands that I not copy here the text I posted there (quod vide).

    BHA (my initials)

  • astroquest09

    As we can see over the course of history that scientists give a theory and after a while change their statements. Theories keeps changing and its not a new thing in Hawking’s case. He might switch back to God if he didn’t like his new “discovery”
    He says the science laws can be called a God but not a living being. Rules are also made by someone and they do not create themselves.

  • Olaf

    @astroquest09

    Rules are also made by someone and they do not create themselves.

    How come you to this conclusion that something must create it?
    And please, don’t use the mantra: “because it is logical”, or “I have a hunch”
    What scientific measurable data do you have that it must be created by someone?

    When you dig deeper into the mathematics then you pretty fast that no one with logical thinking could ever deduce these types or rules in the universe. The speed of light only is one such example. The speed of light and moving of light is so crazy that it is impossible to even come to this conclusion by logical thinking only. But it is there, it is measurable, and you can measure it by yourself at home just having a laser and a bit of optics right there at your kitchen table.

    The reason why you come to the conclusion that something must have created it is because your human mind simply cannot grasp what the maths mean and somehow tries to make a human representable out of it to get some oversimplified grasp of reality. This oversimplification induces artefacts like assuming that something intelligent must have created it.
    This same oversimplification assumes that electrons orbits an atom just like a mini planetary system. It is a model, a very oversimplified model, but the model is useful to do chemical and electronics calculations with it.

  • Uncle Fred

    I really think there is a need for many to simplify reality and assume some fatherly figure made the laws of physics. We tend to think understanding of our world can be had by “deducing” and “thinking” rather than testing. Take Hydrazine’s comments on understanding God through theology. We create these demons and angels in our minds to represent our own problems and virtues. These ideas are written down and passed down through the ages and become theology. Knowledge of “God” is a fine philosophical endeavor – but it doesn’t mean in reality, a God actually exists.

    Gods exists in our heads.

  • Uncle Fred

    Maybe I need to correct myself. Gods exist: they are the civilizations that have survived their technological adolescence. Few and far between as they may be.

  • Olaf

    @Uncle Fred

    An alien is not exactly what I would call a god what most people believe.
    Even if you have listening devices and recording devices in every human implanted you still cannot process the data having a private god alien that is always near you unless you crate a planet sized call centre of a billion aliens looking at the monitors? .

  • jimhenson

    Paul Davies & John Webb say new evidence from two telescopes from quasar light beacons, reveals the fine-structure constant alpha 1/137 value has weakened and strengthened in opposite directions in space and time. This means Newton’s Grav Constant would vary, as we know light speed does vary c traveling slower thru liquid water. The laws of physics believed the same everywhere in the universe would change too ! They will be publishing a new update later this year with far better data then in 2002. If proved true, then the atoms in our body are unique to our visible universe, and cannot exist when these otherwise believed irrefutable mathematical constants have even slight changes. Black holes have incredible constants proportional relationships that could instead be near approximations that change over time. Anything GOES including E=mc2 if the fine-structure constant changes, or perhaps just a minor velocity factor would be added to Einstein’s relativity equation to fit the measurements?

  • Uncle Fred

    Lol OLAF.

    Very true. Yet maybe the idea that civilization can be made successful in the long term IS something worth believing in?

    Besides, given a few million years of development, they’d likely be Gods to us anyway (=

  • bcwiemann

    I agree with Stephen Hawking. The whole concept of God along with the thousands of Gods that we have created, have all been intelligently designed by man, not the other way around. As time on earth goes on and older generations of people pass each younger generation will have ever increasing access to the growing mountains of scientific evidence that disproves our god delusions and opens humanity’s eyes to the natural beauty and complexity of the universe. The supernatural is purely superstition. Eventually our species will grow out of our superstitions as we mature in our evolution as an intelligent species, and science is the reason we will do this.

  • Lawrence B. Crowell

    As for who made the so called laws of physics, it could be argued we did. The laws of physics are mathematical axiomatic systems which derive regular patterns or occurrences observed in nature. There are various schools of thought, but it might be considered that there are really no laws as such, but that we humans impose them on nature based on what we observe. This is the thesis of Victor Stenger. Others would argue that the regular patterns observed must point to some mathematical regularity, where quantum mechanics could further be argued as the fundamental “logic” underlying everything. There is one guy (Polis as I recall his last name), who I don’t agree with particularly, who says there must be a meta-conservation law which keeps a law working. Of course this requires a meta-meta-law and infinitely up the chain, which results in his argument for the necessity of a God to hold the laws of the universe together. I am not interested in these hierarchical arguments that have the laws of nature stove-piped this way.

    LC

  • Olaf

    LBC I never thought about it. The physic laws, also time is an invention by humans. Simplifications in order to understand reality.

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