Hawking hasn't changed his mind about God

New Scientist (09-02-10)

by Roger Highfield

Hold the front page: the big bang was an inevitable consequence of the laws of physics. Or indeed, as the front page of the London Times put it today: "Hawking: God did not create universe".

Media furore over Stephen Hawking's new book, The Grand Design, has made it the biggest science news story of the day. But it's not like Hawking has suddenly given up a religious belief – let alone proved that God doesn't exist.

Hawking's position on religion has remained unchanged since he wrote his bestseller, A Brief History of Time. At the end of that book he famously used God as a metaphor for the laws of nature: "If we discover a complete theory, it would be the ultimate triumph of reason – for then we should know the mind of God."

This quotation is billed in The Times today as his "previous view" on religion. It was certainly influential – the book sold 6 million copies – but Hawking has always looked at God metaphorically, in much the same way, incidentally, as Einstein. "I cannot believe that God plays dice with the cosmos" was Einstein's famous quip about his discomfort with quantum mechanics. He also declared, "I want to know how God created the world."

But Einstein was not really religious. He remarked that "the idea of a personal God is an anthropological concept which I cannot take seriously". When asked if he believed in God, Einstein explained: "I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with fates and actions of human beings."

Dodging the inquisition

Likewise, in 2001 I interviewed Hawking and he made a telling remark underlining how he was not religious. He told me: "If you believe in science, like I do, you believe that there are certain laws that are always obeyed. If you like, you can say the laws are the work of God, but that is more a definition of God than a proof of his existence."

And in a piece by him that I edited in 2008, he described how he attended a conference on cosmology at the Vatican, where the pope told the delegates they should not inquire into the beginning of the universe itself, because that was the moment of creation and the work of God.

Hawking joked, "I was glad he didn't realise I had already presented a paper at the conference investigating precisely that issue: I didn't fancy the thought of being handed over to the inquisition like Galileo."

Silly season

As Hawking's long-suffering assistant dealt with a deluge of enquiries from journalists from around the world, she told me how the furore says more about the silly season than any change of mind. It also says much about how God is used to sell science to the public. The Higgs boson, labelled the "God particle" – a moniker that Peter Higgs himself finds embarrassing – springs to mind. And after all, The Times is serialising Hawking's book, which he wrote with Leonard Mlodinow.

In it, Hawking describes how M-theory, a candidate ultimate theory of everything, may offer answers to the question of creation. "According to M-theory, ours is not the only universe," Hawking writes. "Instead M-theory predicts that a great many universes were created out of nothing. Their creation does not require the intervention of some supernatural being or god."

The universe arises from scientific processes, not God – as Hawking himself would have agreed decades ago.

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