In his book, The Grand Design, Stephen Hawking has three questions to ask about the laws of nature.
These are: ‘What is the origin of these laws?’, ‘Are there any exceptions to the laws, i.e. miracles?’ and ‘Is there only one set of possible laws?’
He suggests that the traditional answer to the first question, given by the great pioneers of science like Galileo, Kepler, Descartes and Newton, is that the laws are the work of God. Hawking adds: ‘However, this is no more than a definition of God as the embodiment of the laws of nature. Unless one endows God with some other attributes, such as being the God of the Old Testament, employing God as a response to the first question merely substitutes one mystery for another’.
Intelligent Creator
However, the God in whom Galileo, Kepler, Descartes and Newton believed was not merely the embodiment of the laws of nature. He was (and is) the intelligent Creator and upholder of the universe, who is a person and not a set of abstract laws. He was, in fact, the God of the Bible. Hawking’s statement, therefore, seems somewhat confused.
We speak of Newton’s laws, and not God’s laws. The reason for doing that is simple. It was Newton who formulated the laws that encapsulated the behaviour of bodies in motion under certain conditions. Newton’s laws describe the regularities, the pattern, to which motion in the universe conforms under certain initial conditions. It was God, however, and not Newton, who created the universe with those regularities and patterns. It was also God who ultimately was responsible for the intellectual power and insight of the mind of Newton that recognised the patterns and gave them elegant mathematical formulation. The laws were, therefore, in that sense, the work of Newton.
It would surely sound rather foolish to say that, in ascribing the laws to Newton, it is no more than a definition of Newton as the embodiment of the laws of nature. It does not sound any less foolish when applied to God. Some people may wish to define God as the laws of nature. Indeed, it seems to me that Hawking is effectively doing just that when he assigns creatorial powers to those laws. That inadequate view of God is surely not what Galileo, Kepler, Newton and Descartes believed.
God or the laws of physics?
Hawking’s faulty concept of God as a ‘God of the Gaps’ now has serious consequences. This ‘more science, therefore less God’ kind of thinking inevitably leads Hawking to make the mistake (frequently made by Richard Dawkins and others) of asking us to choose between God and science; or, in Hawking’s specific case, between God and the laws of physics. Talking about M-theory (his chosen candidate for a final unifying theory of physics), Hawking writes: ‘M-theory predicts that a great many universes were created out of nothing. Their creation does not require the intervention of some supernatural being or god. Rather, these multiple universes arise naturally from physical law’.
A supernatural being or god is an agent who does something. In the case of the God of the Bible, he is a personal agent. Dismissing such an agent, Hawking ascribes creative power to physical law; but physical law is not an agent. Hawking is making a classic category mistake by confusing two entirely different kinds of entity: physical law and personal agency. The choice he sets before us is between false alternatives. He has confused two levels of explanation: agency and law. God is an explanation of the universe, but not the same type of explanation as that which is given by physics.
Jet engine
Suppose, to make matters clearer, we replace the universe by a jet engine and then are asked to explain it. Shall we account for it by mentioning the personal agency of its inventor, Sir Frank Whittle? Or shall we follow Hawking: dismiss personal agency, and explain the jet engine by saying that it arose naturally from physical law?
It is clearly nonsensical to ask people to choose between Frank Whittle and science as an explanation for the jet engine. For it is not a question of either/or. It is self-evident that we need both levels of explanation in order to give a complete description. It is also obvious that the scientific explanation neither conflicts nor competes with the agent explanation: they complement one another. It is the same with explanations of the universe.
Sir Isaac Newton, a previous holder of the Lucasian Chair at Cambridge, did not make Hawking’s category mistake when he discovered his law of gravitation. Newton did not say: ‘Now that I have the law of gravity, I don’t need God’. What he did was to write Principia Mathematica, the most famous book in the history of science, expressing the hope that it would ‘persuade the thinking man’ to believe in God.
The laws of physics can explain how the jet engine works, but not how it came to exist in the first place. It is self-evident that the laws of physics could not have created a jet engine on their own. That task also needed the intelligence, imagination, and scientific creativity of Whittle. Indeed, even the laws of physics plus Frank Whittle were not sufficient to produce a jet engine. There also needed to be some material that Whittle could use. Matter may be humble stuff, but laws cannot create it.
Four kinds of causes
Millennia ago, Aristotle thought a great deal about these issues. He spoke about four different ‘causes’ that we can, perhaps, reasonably translate informally as ‘levels of explanation’. Thinking of the jet engine, first there is the material cause — the raw material out of which the engine is crafted; then there is the formal cause — the concept, plan, theory, and blueprint that Sir Frank Whittle conceived and to which he worked. Next there is the efficient cause — Sir Frank Whittle himself, who did the work. Fourthly, and last in the list, there is the final cause — the ultimate purpose for which the jet engine was conceived and built: to power a particular aircraft to fly faster than ever before.
The example of the jet engine can help us to clear up another confusion. Science, according to many scientists, concentrates essentially on material causation. It asks the ‘how’ questions: how does the jet engine work? It also asks the ‘why’ question regarding function: why is this pipe here? But it does not ask the ‘why’ question of purpose: why was the jet engine built? What is important here is that Sir Frank Whittle does not appear in the scientific account. To quote Laplace, the scientific account has ‘no need of that hypothesis’. Clearly, however, it would be ridiculous to deduce from this that Whittle did not exist. He is the answer to the question: why does the jet engine exist in the first place?
Yet this is essentially what many scientists (and others) do with God. They define the range of questions that science is permitted to ask in such a way that God is excluded from the start; and then they claim that God is unnecessary, or doesn’t exist. They fail to see that their science does not answer the question as to why something exists rather than nothing, for the simple reason that their science cannot answer that question. They also fail to see that by assumption it is their atheist worldview, not science as such, that excludes God.
The scientists did not put the universe there. But neither did their theories, nor the laws of mathematical physics. Yet Hawking seems to think they did. In A Brief History of Time he hinted at this kind of explanation, suggesting that a theory might bring the universe into existence: ‘The usual approach of science of constructing a mathematical model cannot answer the questions of why there should be a universe for the model to describe. Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing? Is the unified theory so compelling that it brings about its own existence? Or does it need a creator, and, if so, does he have any other effect on the universe?’
Much as I find it hard to believe, Hawking seems to wish to reduce all explanation to formal causes only.
This article is an edited extract from God and Stephen Hawking by John Lennox, published by Lion Hudson (£4.99, ISBN 978 0 745 955 490), and is used with permission.
