Thinking Faith and the Grand Design

Last week Brother Robert Verrill attended the Thinking Faith week at Boarbank Hall and he gave a talk about Stephen Hawking’s latest book ‘the Grand Design.’ Here is a summary of his talk.

Stephen Hawking’s latest book ‘The Grand Design’ has the subtitle ‘New answers to the ultimate questions of life,’ and Hawking clearly has in his sights those of us who find meaning in life by turning to God. Whilst being a physicist doesn’t guarantee that Hawking has anything particularly insightful to say about theology, it is still worthwhile listening to the theological concerns of someone like Hawking because it can give us an opportunity to think more deeply about our own beliefs.

Hawking devotes a considerable amount of effort to debunking a concept of God traditionally known as the God of the Gaps, which is just as well, because this is not the traditional Christian concept of God anyway. It shouldn’t be of any great concern to Christians if physicists can give a scientific account of why the physical constants of the universe appear to be so finely tuned for life to evolve. Invoking God to explain this fine tuning is bad theology and such explanations are liable to lead to the idea that once God set everything in motion, he no longer had anything to do with the universe. So we have some common ground here – neither Stephen Hawking nor I believe in the God of the Gaps.

But the big problem for Stephen Hawking is that his basic philosophical outlook means that the God the Gaps is the only concept of God that he can comprehend. He is unable to consider God as the ever-present cause of being. He refers to his own philosophical outlook as model dependent realism. This is how he explains it:

[Model-dependent realism] is based on the idea that our brains interpret the input from our sensory organs by making a model of the world. When such a model is successful at explaining events, we tend to attribute to it, and to the elements and concepts that constitute it, the quality of reality or absolute truth.

Earlier on in the book Hawking claims that philosophy is dead and so he sees no alternative to his concept of reality which is only concerned with those ideas which can explain particular physical phenomena. Hawking is clearly heavily influenced by the philosophical tradition of Descartes who called into question everything conceivable – the only thing Descartes was sure of was that he thought, hence the famous saying ‘I think, therefore I am'. And so like Descartes, Hawking struggles to come to terms with a reality that doesn’t depend on the way he thinks about it.

But Descartes' is not the only philosophical tradition one can choose from. Aristotle doesn’t start his philosophical endeavour from a position of extreme scepticism, but takes the more common sense approach that we live in a real world of real causes and effects and all our knowledge comes to us through our senses. This is the philosophical starting point many Christians have followed. Hawking does have a go at challenging this common sense view. He uses the example of a fish in a goldfish bowl: what appears to be a straight line to us outside the goldfish bowl would appear curved to the fish. Hawking’s claim is that we are like that fish – our senses are so distorted that they don’t give us any reliable information about reality. However, this is not a particularly good example because although the world is distorted to the fish, it is not so distorted that causes and effects in the world can no longer be correctly apprehended.

Hawking tries to prove the inadequacy of our senses by using examples from modern physics, but these arguments are unconvincing because one needs first to accept his idea of model dependent realism beforehand. Despite the great value of mathematical models in their ability to make predictions, making such predictability the only measure of reality is not the kind of philosophical outlook that many people can honestly embrace. It certainly isn’t a philosophy that provides new answers to the ultimate questions of life.