Evicting the Creator

The title of this post may sound familiar to readers of this blog. It is, of course, the title of Fr. Jaki's review of Prof. Hawking's grand foray into popular science called 'A Brief History of Time'. Now some twenty-two years after the publication of that bestseller, Hawking is making waves in the news-sphere with his latest book 'The Grand Design' to be released shortly. The 'God' question and the search for the elusive Theory of Everything (ToE) feature heavily in the previews and if reviews of the proof editions are accurate, then the grand conclusion of this latest venture may not be too different from his prior writings:

"the authors made their point quite convincingly: philosophy is dead in the sense of answering the most mysterious of life's questions. It is up to science, and scientific theory, to provide clues to the true answers, as philosophy in its most ancient forms has taken a back seat, but modern philosophy, that of scientific philosophy, has taken root." From 'Memoiai's' Amazon Review.

Old wine in new skins? Here are some extracts from Fr. Jaki's review of the original ~ JT.

"What place then for a Creator?" This question of Professor Hawking received wide publicity in a two-page profile on him in Time just about a month before his book appeared in tall piles in countless stores. Professor Hawking makes no secret of his aim: it is to find the answer to the question of the why of the existence of all matter, mind, and will in terms of that science, physics, which presumably can answer questions only about the how of purely physical processes.

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Professor Hawking philosophizes from the start and he does it badly. He does not notice the irony when at the end he complains about the comedown of philosophy from its Aristotelian heights to its Kantian shallows and to the wastelands where philosophers offer only talk about talk. [His] book is less about the history of time than about his own ideas on it. Worse, if in any prestigious post of physics, then certainly in the Lucasian Chair one should have at least been familiar with a famous twentieth-century remark that the reality -so fleeting and so fundamental - of the now is beyond the competence of physics. Coming as it does from Einstein, the remark should seem important for two reasons. One is the rather unfortunate predicament of our culture which takes note of a basic philosophical truth only when registered by a prominent scientist. The other is that Hawking has Einstein for his chief antagonist, though for a reason which was not altogether unknown to Einstein, but for which Hawking's insensitivity is almost complete.

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Professor Hawking's chief purpose is to create the impression that a perfectly homogeneous beginning of the universe is a most plausible state of affairs and is therefore in no need of further explanation. His road there leads through a recount of the latest research on black holes to which he contributed greatly.

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Not only hypothetical but philosophically wholly unjustified is the very earliest phase of the universe as imagined by Professor Hawking. He begins with a most unjust report about the address which Pope John Paul II gave to a conference on astrophysical cosmology at the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in the Fall of 1981. According to Hawking, the Pope told the participants that "it was all right to study the evolution of the universe after the big bang itself because that was the moment of Creation and therefore the work of God" (p. 116).

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As anyone can ascertain from pp. xxvii-xxxii in the thick volume of the proceedings of that conference, published in 1983 under the title, Astrophysical Cosmology, the Pope merely noted that it was not within the competence of the physical method to discuss the origin of the universe insofar as it is a creation out of nothing. The Pope's reminder was merely an echo of a remark by James Clerk Maxwell, after Newton the greatest physicist at Cambridge University: "One of the severest tests of a scientific mind is to discern the limits of the legitimate application of scientific methods." Only physicists who think that physics enables them to observe the nothing would ever have any problem with that wise and fully scientific reminder.

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Professor Hawking makes it clear right then and there that he wants to be one of those physicists. Their number is fairly large, as most physicists have subscribed for over two generations now to the ontological fallacy of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics [i.e. an interaction that cannot be measured exactly (in the operational sense), cannot take place exactly (in the ontological sense)], though relatively few of them are so flippant with reality as are Professor Hawking and some of his colleagues.

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Scientifically the saddest aspect of Professor Hawking's book is his failure to refer to Gödel even once. I cannot imagine that Professor Hawking would be as ignorant about Gödel's incompleteness theorems as was a world-famous Nobel-laureate expert on quarks, gluons, and charms as late as 1976. The luminary in question, a fellow panellist with me at a conference attended in that year by more than 2,000, was rather miffed when I told him that he would certainly fail in his attempt to come up within three months or even three years with a necessarily true theory of fundamental particles. Such a theory, he believed, would tell us why the universe is what it is and cannot be anything else, and that therefore it need not have been created.

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Professor Hawking seems to be unaware of a point I have been making since 1966 in the pages of books published by leading university presses, including my Gifford Lectures given at the University of Edinburgh in 1975 and 1976. The point is that Gödel's theorems exclude the possibility of necessarily true theories about the universe. Physical or cosmic infinity can have no abstract or purely geometrical proof. The geometry of a cosmology may of course be so satisfactory, so simple, and so symmetrical as to suggest that it is the necessary form of physical existence. The philosophical fallacy latent in that suggestion should be clear. Here the scientific fallacy should be recalled briefly. According to Gödel's theorems, no non-trivial set of mathematical propositions can derive its proof of consistency from the set itself. Consequently, the cosmological theory in question, that obviously implies many non-trivial mathematical propositions, has to obtain its proof of consistency from a proposition lying outside the set of those propositions.

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Those familiar with the fallacy of regress to infinity would now be fully entitled to say, sapienti sat. Those not so wise should perhaps turn to Professor Hawking for an answer to the question why he as a cosmologist chose to ignore Gödel's incompleteness theorems. Had he considered them, his book would not have become a futile move to evict the Creator from the business of creating nothing less than the universe itself.

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[Extracts from 'Evicting the Creator', Chapter 10, The Only Chaos and Other Essays (1990) pp. 152-161]