Slashdot Mirror
Hawking Picks Physics Over God For Big Bang
Hugh Pickens writes "The Guardian reports that in his new book, The Grand Design, Professor Stephen Hawking argues that the Big Bang, rather than occurring following the intervention of a divine being, was inevitable due to the law of gravity. '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 writes. 'It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going.' Hawking had previously appeared to accept the role of God in the creation of the universe. Writing in his bestseller A Brief History Of Time in 1988, Hawking 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.'"
Humans evolve. Humans create self replicating robots. Humans go away. Some robots say they were built. Other robots rebut 'But who built the builders?' No one, they were not built.
Or to put it another way, what if a self-aware cartoon character asks 'Who drew the drawers?' No one, they were not drawn.
Point is, what applies for one level doesn't necessarily apply for the one above it.
Until we can point an exact and computable equation for the entire past, present and future of existence, there will always be unexplored parts of the map. You can fill that void with any assumption you want - from dragons to flying spaghetti monsters, a big fat zero to $God. If you assume that this placeholder is omnipotent and mysterious, that removes all the messy frustration about why it's hiding out in the ignorance section.
Where you run into problems is that these seemingly harmless placeholders become memes. As you add lore around your placeholder of choice, there is competition between memes. Some survive. Some die. Some mutate. Evolution now kicks in. The placeholders become resistant to being replaced with other placeholders. As people start filling in the map, knowledge itself becomes a threat to the meme and it begins to complete for mindspace in which to live.
Now this harmless placeholder is, for all practical purposes, a real living thing scratching at your mind from the void beyond knowledge like some quantum virtual particle leaping out of a black hole.
Reason would only take you so far anyway. Instead of answering "why" once or twice, science enables mankind to answer it to 5 or 6 levels of depth. That level of knowledge has given most of us life (multiplying the carrying capacity of the planet by orders of magnitude) and allowed us to live better and longer lives, too. But there are no ultimate explanations. Any chain of logic (or causality) must either extend forever and ever, or stop at something that just "is," and both options are nonsensical. (This is equally true whether or not any of the links in the chain are God).