STEPHEN HAWKING’S ABSURD STATEMENT
“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. It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going.” [1]
Hawking in this quote gives causal power to the Law of Gravity; this power is what would be traditionally ascribed to the classical ideal of God. The problem with this approach is that it makes the mistake of transferring the causal power of God to what would be an attribute of God that has no causal power in it apart from God. This amounts to Hawkin’s definition of God being too small. Any causal agent of the universe will have unfathomable attributes that are His alone and these attributes cannot be separated from the causal power of God.
To illustrate this point, the Law of Gravity by itself cannot create anything just like the law of thermodynamics cannot create the internal combustion engine; laws in of themselves cannot create anything, they need causal power. It seems physicists trivialize the immense power that brought forth our universe by ascribing that power to a physical law. By giving causal power to any physical law sounds exceedingly close to what God would be like without the baggage of traditional religion for the scientist. This is a rhetorical sleight of hand to wiggle out of the concept of God and place the creation of the universe firmly into the materialist’s worldview. They are playing a shell game.
A further problem with this approach of laws having causal power is that when the universe was before its singularity, where are the laws? There was nothing physical that would have the imprint of such physical laws upon them. If the laws could not have any base in the physical universe they would have to reside in a metaphysical mind of some sort. This mind would have to reside outside of our space-time and have the causal attributes to bring forth the whole universe. This still sounds exceedingly close to God.
[1] Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow, The Grand Design, Bantam Books in 2010
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