A Common Gap of Atheism, Part 2: Hawking's New Book

Stephen Hawking is, in my mind, one of the most brilliant people on the face of the planet. His quest for truth is admirable, but it is his ability to communicate some of the universe's most complex sciences that is his greatest talent.

His latest book is called The Grand Design and is the next step after his now-22-year-old book, A Brief History of Time.

In just reading the first chapter online, it's clear to me that this is another shock-book. Hawking's last book claimed that we were so close to understanding everything about how all things were made. This book was supposed to be the answers to those questions, but apparently falls short, even with the co-authorship going to Leonard Mlodinow, physicist from California Institute of Technology.

While I haven't read it entirely, Hawking's work is getting similar (and in some places more harsh) criticism as Dawkins. The Economist was frank:

"Their [historical] account [of physics] appears to be based on unreliable popularisations, and they cannot even get right the number of elements in Aristotle’s universe (it is five, not four)."

Yikes. Go on….

"It is hard to evaluate their case against recent philosophy, because the only subsequent mention of it, after the announcement of its death, is, rather oddly, an approving reference to a philosopher’s analysis of the concept of a law of nature, which, they say, ‘is a more subtle question than one may at first think.’ There are actually rather a lot of questions that are more subtle than the authors think. It soon becomes evident that Professor Hawking and Mr Mlodinow regard a philosophical problem as something you knock off over a quick cup of tea after you have run out of Sudoku puzzles."

They end the review like this:

"Once upon a time it was the province of philosophy to propose ambitious and outlandish theories in advance of any concrete evidence for them. Perhaps science, as Professor Hawking and Mr Mlodinow practice it in their airier moments, has indeed changed places with philosophy, though probably not quite in the way that they think."

The book begins with the bold declaration that "philosophy is dead." Yet in all actuality there is still so much to know and to speculate about and the authors end up philosophizing.

The issue is that we are continuing to separate science and philosophy, and even more so science and theology. What we should be busying ourselves with is the word Truth, which is a combination of the disciplines and a greater awareness of the conscience.

Next: Christians making the same mistake and perhaps a way out with help from Marilynne Robinson.