Professor William Carroll, Aquinas Fellow at Blackfriars Hall, has written a reflection on one point in Professor Stephen Hawking's recent book The Grand Design. Professor Carroll explains what Aquinas's understanding of creation involves and how he developed it in relation to Aristotle's conviction that the universe does not have a beginning in time. It is one aspect of Aquinas's thought that remains remarkably relevant to current debates. Professor Carroll's piece shows also how theological conviction demands good philosophy, and philosophy is now as much under attack from science as theology is. Carroll's piece can be found here.Friday, September 10, 2010
Aquinas and Hawking's 'Grand Design'
Professor William Carroll, Aquinas Fellow at Blackfriars Hall, has written a reflection on one point in Professor Stephen Hawking's recent book The Grand Design. Professor Carroll explains what Aquinas's understanding of creation involves and how he developed it in relation to Aristotle's conviction that the universe does not have a beginning in time. It is one aspect of Aquinas's thought that remains remarkably relevant to current debates. Professor Carroll's piece shows also how theological conviction demands good philosophy, and philosophy is now as much under attack from science as theology is. Carroll's piece can be found here.
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In "The Grand Design" Stephen Hawking postulates that the M-theory may be the Holy Grail of physics...the Grand Unified Theory which Einstein had tried to formulate and later abandoned. It expands on quantum mechanics and string theories.
ReplyDeleteIn my e-book on comparative mysticism is a quote by Albert Einstein: “…most beautiful and profound emotion we can experience is the sensation of the mystical. It is the sower of all true science. To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and most radiant beauty – which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their primitive form – this knowledge, this feeling, is at the center of all religion.”
Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity is probably the best known scientific equation. I revised it to help better understand the relationship between divine Essence (Spirit), matter (mass/energy: visible/dark) and consciousness (fx raised to its greatest power). Unlike the speed of light, which is a constant, there are no exact measurements for consciousness. In this hypothetical formula, basic consciousness may be of insects, to the second power of animals and to the third power the rational mind of humans. The fourth power is suprarational consciousness of mystics, when they intuit the divine essence in perceived matter. This was a convenient analogy, but there cannot be a divine formula.
At least Hawking doesn't resort to the schoolyard abuse that passes for argument from Dawkins, but he is just as muddled. He gives the game away by the use of words such as intervention - which implies there is already something in which to intervene - and be talking as if the laws of gravity were supposed to pre-exist the act of creation. This is a six-year-old's image of God as a big but invisible version of ourselves, which is about the elevel of the media today.
ReplyDeleteO for the days when Herbert McCabe appeared on the BBC! But I'm pleased to see William Carroll carrying on the good work.
It does amaze me that religious people see Science as having the "muddled" arguments, when their own beliefs come firmly from irrationality and implausibility. 'God' cannot be measured, observed, tested, felt, seen, heard or smelt and yet your unwaivering belief you see as totally rational, yet science that offers explanations, can be observed, empirically measured and is always looking to improve on its hypotheses you see as 'muddled'. You take 'creation' as a misguided (and unprovable) assumption in all your arguments, which is fallacious in itself (argument from false assumption) and still you call science 'muddled'.
ReplyDeleteIf you can't see the irrationality in this then there's really no helping you.
Since God is far superior to humans, he is in no way threatened by our sincere questions. Regardless of how deep or profound our questions may seem to us, our deepest questions must seem like simple 2+2=4 arithmetic to God. There are many who deny his existence, but God is in no way threatened by their lack of faith in him. A century ago, most people would have said that man could never fly, travel to the moon, nor perform a heart transplant. Though they were sincere in their beliefs, they were sincerely wrong. Many who deny the existence of God are sincere. God still loves and reaches out to them. However, to paraphrase the song from the 70s, they have been "Looking for God in all the wrong places." God exists and seeks to have a relationship with all people. He has no need to prove his existence. That proof exists in the lives of hundreds of millions of people whose lives he has changed. However, to find God, one must be open to finding him and exercise the God-given faith he grants to all who honestly seek him. A darkened room may be filled with unseen treasure. Though obscured by darkness, the treasure is real and exists within that room. God is a reality, unfortunately, some have simply not discovered him. Rev.Billy Graham once said that people were created with a God-Shaped Void in their Hearts. No person or any material thing can fill this void except God Himself. Unfortunately, many have tried to fill that void with everything except a relationship with God. http://www.christianretirement.com in the Heaven page. Only uninformed or unintelligent reasoning says there is no God. As born-again Christians, we can enjoy a personal and meaningful relationship with him.
ReplyDeleteWhy did Professor Hawking wait for over 20 years before acknowledging Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem as ruling out a complete Theory of Everything (TOE)?
ReplyDeleteAn all-encompassing TOE would not only include a logical derivation of the fundamental laws from a set of root mathematical axioms but would extend this logical derivation to every possible phenomenon in the universe as a mathematical statement.
This is the definition of the TOE used by Professor Hawking, as evidenced, for instance, by his including the Goldbach conjecture formulated as a physical problem – in terms of wooden blocks – as part of “the theory of the universe”, as he puts it in his website.
Applying Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem to the root mathematical axioms shows that the mathematical system is either inconsistent, which we can rule out, or that it is incomplete, ie, there are some true statements of the mathematics – manifest as phenomena in our universe – which cannot be deduced from the root axioms and, therefore, which cannot be predicted from the TOE either, since it is, itself, derived from the root axioms.
The fact that a TOE derived from the root axioms of the type envisaged by Professor Hawking is incapable of predicting all the phenomena in the universe surely deserved a comment!
In “The Grand Design”, again, no mention is made of Gödel, although this is less surprising if M-theory is regarded as a “conventional” TOE, which does not attempt to explain all phenomena.
However, there is a final twist to the tale. While Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem shows that an all-encompassing TOE, which predicts all phenomena, cannot be derived from the root axioms, it is nevertheless true that a TOE which does predict all phenomena could, in principle, be written down without deriving it. It would simply not be possible to prove, in this universe, that what had been written down was, indeed, the genuine TOE. This, and other aspects of the TOE, are discussed in my website, http://www.godel-universe.com.