Creation came ‘from nothing,’ not God: Stephen Hawking – USATODAY.com.
Anyone paying any attention to current theoretical physicists should, like me, be in a continual state of giggles. This one from Mr. Hawking is the latest giggle. Mr. Genius believes:
“Because there is a law such as gravity, the Universe can and will create itself from nothing,” the excerpt says. “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 … set the Universe going.”
So Mr. Genius places his faith in “nothing” as he can no more “prove” his assertion that the universe spontaneously created itself any more than I can “prove” God did it (none of us were there). At least this purported “man of science” has named the object of his faith… nothing. All faith to be faith must have an object. I had faith when I sat in the chair I’m typing this from, that it would hold me up. Hawking has faith that nothingness was able to spontaneously burst for everythingness that became the universe that has congealed over time through natural processes such as gravity.
Is this what Hawking really meant to say? He says that because it has “a law such as gravity” the Universe creates itself. How can that be when in a state of nothingness there is no law of gravity, there is no concept of matter or even of space or time… nothing. I know it is unfathomable for us to grasp or picture the “reality” of nothingness or non-time, non-space, but without a “causer”, that is what everything came from. Of course, this is ridiculous as all effects must have causes, so what caused there to be matter, space, time, gravity… the universe? Sounds to me like Hawking has placed his faith in some magical, but certainly not God-initiated accidental, self-causing (impossible of course, because in nothingness there are no selves) event.
Hawking loses this round to Augustine, Aquinas and all other men of true reason that realized that there has to be a “first cause” and that it is impossible for something to come from nothing. Effects have to have causes, but causes do not have to have causes. It is much easier and more rational (scientific) and more fear inducing (ah, now we’re getting to the heart of the matter) to argue that the something, indeed everything, of the universe came from something instead of nothing and that the something is God. That’s where I’ll choose to put my faith, because faith should be rational and placed in only those objects which are worthy and nothingness does not fit the bill in any rational way.
