Is cosmology really ‘a kind of religion for intelligent atheists’?
This is what Stephen Hawking (Eddie Redmayne) claims in the recent film The Theory of Everything. The Oscar-tipped flick is based on the memoir of Hawking’s first wife, Jane Wilde. It tells of their marriage and the period during which Stephen develops motor neurone disease.
Time
The Stephen we meet at the beginning of the film is a carefree student who, after much deliberating, finally chooses a subject for his physics PhD: time. His girlfriend – and, later, his wife – Jane (Felicity Jones) shares his fascination with ‘time travel’, but whereas she dives into the past through medieval poetry, he does so by studying the stars. As a physicist, Stephen becomes fascinated by the beginning and end of time, the ways in which it might be manipulated in space and the possibility that in some situations it might stop altogether. ‘What happens if I reverse time’, he asks, ‘to see what happened at the beginning of time itself?’.
Can’t wind back the clock
This is in stark contrast to the unstoppable flow of time that governs his life. As his health declines and he is eventually diagnosed with a terrible degenerative disease, there is nothing he or Jane can do to slow down time or to make it stop. As much as they might wish to, they can’t ‘wind back the clock’. The more serious his condition becomes, the more they wish that they could return to the early days of their love and to freeze time as they stood on the bridge at St John’s May Ball and shared their first kiss.
Many of us may have shared this feeling at some point in our lives. On occasions, we want to be able to travel in time, whether through poetry, the planets or perhaps something else altogether. We’d like the chance to try again, to right past wrongs, and to prevent the future from catching us. The film asks: how can we learn to live in a world where this is not possible?
The Theory of Everything suggests that, as life becomes increasingly challenging, it is Jane’s selfless love for Stephen that keeps him alive. Yet Jane also needs help. She finds love and support by joining the church choir. Here, she meets Jonathan, who is able to offer her physical and emotional support as she struggles to care for Stephen.
Faith in God
Both Jane and Jonathan share a faith in God. Their choir sings hymns with lyrics like ‘Christ came to save’, which reassure Jane that the whole of her life is lived under the gaze of a loving creator God. Stephen does not share this faith, but for Jane it provides her with strength and hope, and allows her to go on loving Stephen even in the darkest moments.
Stephen and Jane are both, in their own way, searching for a way to make sense of what is happening to them. They each need a ‘theory of everything’ to help them understand their lives: ‘one simple elegant equation to explain everything’. According to Stephen, this kind of enquiry is nothing new. He claims that since the dawn of civilisation people have ‘craved an understanding of the underlying order of the world’. Some people have sought this explanation in science, as Stephen does. Others, like Jane, look to religion.
Different conclusions
Clearly, these two paths lead to very different conclusions. For Stephen, the philosophy of life that eventually allows him to cope is a firm belief in the uniqueness of each human being and their boundless capacity for endeavour. For Jane it is a daily reliance on the God who she believes created the heavens and the earth. As the film hints, this is what allows her to keep going in the face of intense personal adversity.
In an interview some years ago, the real Jane said: ‘Without my faith in God, I would not have been able to marry Stephen in the first place, because I wouldn’t have had the optimism to carry me through and I wouldn’t have been able to carry on with it’. Whatever you think of the Hawkings’ marriage, their decisions and the way these are portrayed in the film, Jane’s life is a powerful testament to the sustaining power of God’s love in life’s most difficult moments.
