“Myth” refers to colorful stories that tell about the origins of humans and the cosmos. It’s not facts but figments of imagination. Can we think of a scientific
myth? A Scientific myth is indeed a contradiction in line with the traditional sense of the term. But what Hawking is trying to put forward is a scientific myth which won’t have the scope of experimental validity. This doesn’t mean that I brand all the theories discussed by Hawking as a myth. But Hawking with the craftiness of a cherry picker has arranged those theories in such a manner to give birth to a scientific myth. The purpose of the myth: Do away with God in creation!
A Crafty Cherry Picker
Can you imagine a crafty cherry picker who picks a few ripe cherries, shows you and declares that all the ripe fruits (not cherries) in this universe(not world) are red! This cherry picker comes alive in the form of Stephen Hawking in The Grand Design. Stephen Hawking goes cherry picking a few scientific
theories, finds the ultimate combo in M-theory and puts a big full stop by declaring that gravity fills in God’s shoes in creation from nothingness. This indeed is a leap into darkness. Till this day, faith was considered the leap into darkness. For the book The Grand Design to make sense, the scientific rigor and experiments need to be sidestepped and the whole world should believe that science and scientific theories involves a giant leap into darkness. This is totally unexpected from a scientist like Hawking, who is hailed as the next super genius after Einstein. Living in a market dominated world, Hawking has done justice to market and not science. In the name of populism he sacrifices philosophy, God and Science(even though he says he is promoting science) As atheism is the ‘flavor of the season’ , the book is tailor made for atheists and wannabe atheist. Also yet another book for Richard Dawkins to quote from.
Begin with a Conclusion!
There is no need for God in creations; Hawking has taken for granted this conclusion. And he cherry picks the theories and fits in the premises (arguments) in order to reach this conclusion all through the book The Grand Design. The Grand Design arises out of a dream, given wings by scientific determinism. It is the assertion that science can let you determine anything
and everything and science is the one and only grand path that takes us to true knowledge. The scientific determinism ruled in the eighteenth and nineteenth century basing on Newtonian mechanics. Pierre Simon de Laplace, one of the leading mathematicians of that time said, if we can know all the forces action on both giant bodies and lightest atoms in nature and if we can analyze it and condense it into a single formula, then nothing will be uncertain, the future, just like the past will be present before our eyes. The confidence in science was strong that, physicist Albert Michelson imagined towards the end of nineteenth century that, what was left for us to discover in the science of nature was no more than fine tuning our precision bye a few decimal places.
The subsequent theories like Relativity, Quantum mechanics, Chaos theory took a dig at this scientific determinism and showed the indeterministic aspect that creeps in. Take the case of Chaos Theory also called Butterfly
effect. The simplest way of putting it would be a small flap of wings of the butterfly in Bangalore, India can cause a tornado in Texas, United States. In scientific terms it is the Sensitive dependence on initial conditions. A small change can trigger or can be amplified in the long run producing great consequences. This is the reason why the weather prediction is still not perfect even in the twenty-first century ( it may/maynot rain…the safest way to put it!!)
Hawking’s aim is to combine Force of Gravity, Einstein’s and Quantum theories. So he says that M-theory is the candidate for the ultimate theory of everything. ‘M-theory predicts that great many universes were created out of nothing. Again the much publicized sentence from the book: Because gravity
shapes space and time, it allows space-time to be locally stable but globally unstable. On the scale of the entire universe, the positive energy of the matter canbe balance by the negative gravitational energy, and so there is no restriction on the creation of whole universes. Because there is a law like gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing in the manner described in Chapter 6. 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 torch and set the universe going.But for gravity to act on nothingness, from where will gravity originate? Even though he brings up the John Conway’s game of life,
Feynman’s diagrams, Eddington’s theories and the like what he is cleverly doing is applying the micro to the macro level. An experiment with sub atomic particles need not turn true while applied to macro bodies. Even M-theory which is said to be the ultimate theory for everything hasn’t got a final shape till now. As Craig Callender wrote in New Scientist, “M-theory is far from complete. But that doesn’t stop the authors from asserting that it explains the mysteries of existence.”
Statue! Be still.
Statue! You must stand still, till one of your friends fails to do so. That’s a game played by children. Hawking plays the same game with the readers of The Grand Design. All his assertions can be accepted only if all the human
beings stand still as statues. Humanity has been evolving and innovations are happening in split second time. So at a time of technological and scientific revolution does it mean that M-theory as Hawking say, is the ultimate theory of everything and it will explain everything? Will the entire scientist and all researchers be jobless? Of course he makes a humble attempt towards the end: If the theory(M-Theory) is confirmed my observation(!) it will be the successful completion of a search going back to 3000 years.
But is he sure that there will be no other theories other than M-theory in the near future that can provide better explanations? Is he unconsciously repeating the same mistake committed by scientists who relied on scientific determinism after Newtonian scientific revolution or is he consciously dancing to the ‘popular’ tunes to sky rocket his book sales?
Everything matters
Human beings have immense potential. But all will accept that his not a perfect being. But there is always an inner urge to attain perfection. From this
arises the craving for ‘everything.’ Just have a glance of the subtitles of tworecent bestselling books. Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explains the Hidden Side of Everything, and Eat, Pray, Love: One Women’s Search for Everything. Everything; it’s a human weakness. When Freakonomics had a sequel Super Freakonomics, the authors admitted the mistake and pointed out that Everything in the subtitle was wrong. (If there was everything, they needn’t write a sequel!!!)
Hawking too says M-thoery is the theory of everything and there is no need to bring in God, to explain creation. This is a clever ploy to cash in on the new gen who need ‘everything’ and also wants to do away with God. Grand design shows a great scientist being reduced to a puppet of the popular culture.
Present vs Past
Hawking brings in many myths from various cultures and shows it irrelevance. He even ridicules the church’s attitude during the medieval times. But the pertinent question to be asked here is can we criticize past
based on our present understanding? The position of the Church or any religion for that matter, might seem meaningless at present owing to advancements in science and technology. If Church was the sole reason for backwardness of science, then progress would have happened in non Christian dominated areas. But it didn’t happen and the scientific progress gained momentum from these Christian Church dominated areas ( no religious fundamentalism intended!) The interesting thing again to be noted is that Galileo, Newton and Einstein believed in a God (which God is not relevant here!!). This means that believing in God doesn’t mortgage ones scientific spirit.
Stephen Hawking seems to be in a hurry to conclude that there is no God. If the power of human reason can be believed, the system he built up in the book Grand Design , will surely be replaced by more convincing theories. Grand Design is nothing but a scientific myth.
Science is a Leap into Darkness!
As Fritjof Capra says in The Tao of Physics, “Neither science need religion nor religion need science, but human being need both science and religion.” The
Grand Design is a deliberate attempt to divorce religion from human life. If Hawking would have argued in his book that this is one of the probable conditions, then it would have made sense. But an outright assertion that too without experimental evidence won’t command respect. Because, Science is not Faith, and it will be unbecoming for a scientist to ask people to leap into darkness.
Jeff Shawn
Jeffz Buzz 
Good! Rather convincing. Keep it up.
Dear Brother,
I follow your write ups regularly. Kudos for your efforts and I must say you are truly gifted. But, there are some aspects in this article which I cannot agree with. As you quote towards the end of the prose, science and religion are two independent events. They cannot deny each other for any reason. But, at the same time science cannot prove the existence of god also. I would say, it is not the job of science to do that.
Leave out M theory, 11 dimensions and stuffs as they are too immature to predict or craft anything out of themselves. But, I don’t think it is appropriate to comment on relativity, chaos etc. because they explain the beauty of non linearity at innumerable levels. I would say, they actually reveal the extent of physical science parameters that one can reach with every possibility. Yes, these theories tell the stochasticity, randomness, uncertainty and non predictability of situations but, this does not mean that the theories are limited. We cannot loop these reasons to prove the existence of god or the incapability of theories which explain this.
Secondly, one should think that science started grow in west (post Newtonian age) largely because, it got relieved from faith and people started to think out of the boundaries of religion. The concept of divinity of knowledge was lost and a habit of questioning and reasoning came up in renaissance. But, what happened here in east was, science continued to remain associated with spirituality and divinity and because of our social system, it remained within elite people without being questioned or commented. So, the urge of people to come out of the religion largely helped the development of science in west. I think the kind of suffocation people felt with religion helped science to spread out and grow.
I totally agree with you in the aspect that a human being needs spirituality and science but if we do science, it is better to keep all gods and demons on the bay as to avoid our internal conflicts and do justice to what you are doing.
And, it is not uncommon in science and among scientists to speak up against god. If you want further thought provoking stimulations on the same matter, I suggest you to read Richard Dakin’s book ‘God Delusions’.
Philosophy is dead. Is Logic dead also?
“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.”
– Stephen Hawking in “The Grand Design”
“As recent advances in cosmology suggest, the laws of gravity and quantum theory allow universes to appear spontaneously 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.”
– Stephen Hawking, Ibid
Here three questions can be asked:
1) Which one came first, universe, or laws of gravity and quantum theory?
2) If the universe came first, then how was there spontaneous creation without the laws of gravity and quantum theory?
3) If the laws of gravity and quantum theory came first, then Hawking has merely substituted God with quantum theory and laws of gravity. These two together can be called Hawking’s “Unconscious God”. Therefore we can legitimately ask the question: Who, or what, created Hawking’s unconscious God?
Not only this, but there are other problems also. If the laws of gravity and quantum theory allow universes spontaneously appearing from nothing, then initially there was nothing. Then wherefrom appear those laws of gravity and quantum theory to allow universes appearing spontaneously from nothing? In which container were those two laws of nature?
Now regarding the M-theory: I have already written something on multiverse theory (not yet published anywhere). There I have come to the conclusion that if there are an infinite number of universes, then only within that infinite number of universes there will certainly be at least one universe in which life will emerge. If the number of universes is only 10 to the power 500, then it is very much unlikely that any one of them will support life, because no universe will know which set of values the other universes have already taken, and if everything is left on chance, then there is every probability that all the universes will take only those set of values that will not support life. There will be no mechanism that will prevent any universe from taking the same set of values that have already been taken by other universes. There will be no mechanism that will take an overview of all the universes already generated, and seeing that in none of them life has actually emerged will move the things in such a way that at least one universe going to be generated afterwards will definitely get the value of the parameters just right for the emergence of life. Only in case of an infinite number of universes this problem will not be there. This is because if we subtract 10 to the power 500 from infinity, then also we will get infinity. If we subtract infinity from infinity, still then we will be left with infinity. So we are always left with an infinite number of universes out of which in at least one universe life will definitely emerge. Therefore if M-theory shows that it can possibly have 10 to the power 500 number of solutions, and that thus there might be 10 to the power 500 number of universes in each of which physical laws would be different, then it is really a poor theory, because it cannot give us any assurance that life will certainly emerge in at least one universe. So instead of M-theory we need another theory that will actually have an infinite number of solutions.
Now the next question to be pondered is this: How did the scientists come to know that an entire universe could come out of nothing? Or, how did they come to know that anything at all could come out of nothing? Were they present at that moment when the universe was being born? As that was not the case at all, therefore they did not get that idea being present at the creation event. Rather they got this idea being present here on this very earth. They have created a vacuum artificially, and then they have observed that virtual particles (electron-positron pairs) are still appearing spontaneously out of that vacuum and then disappearing again. From that observation they have first speculated, and then ultimately theorized, that an entire universe could also come out of nothing. But here their entire logic is flawed. These scientists are all born and brought up within the Christian tradition. Maybe they have downright rejected the Christian world-view, but they cannot say that they are all ignorant of that world-view. According to that world-view God is omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent. So as per Christian belief-system, and not only as per Christian belief-system, but as per other belief-systems also, God is everywhere. So when these scientists are saying that the void is a real void, God is already dead and non-existent for them. But these scientists know very well that non-existence of God will not be finally established until and unless it is shown that the origin of the universe can also be explained without invoking God. Creation event is the ultimate event where God will have to be made redundant, and if that can be done successfully then that will prove beyond any reasonable doubt that God does not exist. So how have they accomplished that job, the job of making God redundant in case of creation event? These were the steps:
1) God is non-existent, and so, the void is a real void. Without the pre-supposition that God does not exist, it cannot be concluded that the void is a real void.
2) As virtual particles can come out of the void, so also the entire universe. Our universe has actually originated from the void due to a quantum fluctuation in it.
3) This shows that God was not necessary to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going, as because there was no creation event.
4) This further shows that God does not exist.
So here what is to be proved has been proved based on the assumption that it has already been proved. Philosophy is already dead for these scientists. Is it that logic is also dead for them?