Is Stephen Hawking Right About God?

[Music] welcome back to the word on fire show I'm Brandon Vaught the host and the content director here at word on fire and joining us finally back in the United States is the great Bishop Baron Bishop Baron how're you doing Brandon I'm doing well I'm glad to be home I must say because I've been on the road constantly for the past several months I've been in Europe three separate times in the past what three months so well including a month in Rome so it was a lot of traveling the first thing I wanted to ask is how are you adjusting I know after being gone a month your whole body must have been attune to Rome time are you at all but California time getting there it takes me a long time it's always easier for me for some reason going to Europe but when I come home I have a much tougher time you know I was for a month eight hours off the rhythm of pure and so last night I was in my room about 8:30 p.m. completely dead tired stayed away till about 9:00 then woke up at about 4:00 this morning so I'm like an hour off my usual rhythm or hour and a half I'll get there the trouble is now I'm leaving about four days for Baltimore which is three hours off my schedule here so my poor body has no idea you know where it is well part of the difficulty was this long transatlantic flight from Rome all the way back to or from Rome to Frankfurt I think you went and then all the way back to California and you were on that flight you read a book that I want to devote our episode to today it's one of the I also read it was written by Stephen Hawking the great physicist and cosmologist I'm holding up here for those watching this on the YouTube video the book is titled brief answers to the big questions and it made a big splash when it was released I think it got up to number four or five best-selling books in the entire country it was written kind of as Stephen Hawking was dying he passed away back in March of this year and I think it was sort of finished up by some of his peers and colleagues but the book again has made an enormous splash in no small part because of the first chapter which is titled is there a God so he dresses several of these big existential and scientific questions in the book and that chapter is the one that focus on here so maybe Bishop let's start off first of all with the question who is Stephen Hawking and why is he still important well you know when I was coming of age the standard answer to the question who was the smartest man in the world would have been like Albert Einstein you know and I think in more recent years if you ask that question to most people they'd say Stephen Hawking so he was known as no the greatest scientist in the world and I think what made his story so much more compelling is that from the time he was I think 20 years old he was stricken with Lou Gehrig's disease and struggled with it I mean for many many decades which is relatively unusual and I think you know everyone admired him for his courage in the face of that disease and then first extraordinary achievements in theoretical physics and you know the beauty of someone who is very confined by the limitation of his own body and he lived in a wheelchair and then the last many years his life couldn't speak without the aid of a machine I think people were so intrigued by it by the contrast with this mind that went soaring through the whole cosmos and searching out its deep its secrets so you know of course he was an intriguing figure it's plain - in this book that as you say was finished by some of his great friends that he had a great gift for friendship and had a sort of a wicked sense of humor so he was a very attractive personality as well as a great mind I think it's fair to say the greatest theoretical physicist since Einstein buried his ashes were interred in Westminster Abbey alongside of those of Isaac Newton so you know he ranks with the very greatest of cosmologists and theoretical physicists you know near the end of his life I'd say maybe the last 1224 months of his life he was speaking pretty often about God every now and then you'd see an article on one of the major news sites with Stephen Hawking's latest Proclamation about God or meaning or religion or something like that so it's clearly a topic that was haunting him as he was reaching his final days what did you think what was your order your initial impressions when you picked up and read this latest book I want to get down to the nitty-gritty on that chapter on God but what were your initial impressions well you know I've been reading him a lot in the last several years around this question and I've you know seen him on television programs and so on so I wasn't too surprised by his claim that you know there is no God maybe a little bit surprising was the confidence with which he laid it out in this book that it's like you know it wasn't really an agnostic position it was a pretty thorough going atheist position that there's no possibility of God so I wasn't totally surprised by it though I was very sure grinned by it as we'll we'll discuss you know cuz I not because his arguments are that good they're not in my judgment but I just don't like this the PR of it if you want you know that for a lot of people especially young people who aren't well versed in in philosophy hey the smartest man in the world says there's no God so that had I think a really negative impact so I wasn't surprised but I was kind of chagrined by how confidently he laid out this position okay well let's look through sort of section by section in this short chapter is there a guy I want to get your reaction to some of his main points and arguments again the book is titled brief questions to our brief answers to the big questions so chapter one is there a god this is how he begins the chapter science is increasingly answering questions that used to be the province of religion religion was an early attempt to answer the questions that we all ask but nowadays science provides better and more consistent answers but people will always cling to religion because it gives them comfort and they do not trust or understand science oh we're off to a really bad start I mean when I read that I think the reaction I just gave you now is what I did on the plane when I read that sentence it's it's dripping with the worst of arrogant scientism you know now I've articulated as many times both in speech and in writing the Catholic Church at its best has nothing against the sciences but we stand to thwart scientism which is the reduction of all knowledge to the scientific form of knowledge and it's something that is just endemic in so many a scientists in the modern period they're so impressed legitimately so by the success of the physic Sciences in their proper realm that they tend then to go over the top when I was a young man the great example of this was Carl Sagan and his book and film series cosmos at the end of which Carl Sagan remember delivers himself of this sort of poetic and Co Miam to the sciences and you know there's nothing the sciences can't articulate nothing they can't explain I mean it's just breathtaking in its in its arrogance and see what Hawking is doing there is a standard modern approach namely that I'll pour religion you'll god bless it it was an early primitive attempt to answer scientific questions why is there thunder why is there lightning why is the Sun come up and oh the gods did it it's a sort of deeply condescending approach to religion now I mean can you show anthropologically that there's some overlap between primitive forms of religion and what we now consider scientific questions sure sure but anyone that's the least bit attentive to religion in its more mature sophisticated forms realizes religion is not asking and answering scientific questions in a primitive way it's asking and answering qualitatively different types of questions now see I'd first of all broaden it out to include philosophy so before we even get to religion let's stay with philosophy for section second because there are people who like Hawking will say the same thing of philosophy well isn't that nice you know back in the ancient times people like you know Anaximander and nxm eni's and Parmenides and Pythagoras and Plato and company we're you know poor things trying their best to answer scientific questions but they were doing in this ham-handed primitive way well come on anyone that reads Plato certainly or Aristotle seriously Aristotle indeed does engage and we'll call scientific analysis and he can be claimed legitimately as one of the great fathers of the sciences you know sure but in his properly philosophical work think of the ethics the metaphysics etc the de anima he's not dealing with science he's dealing with qualitatively different types of questions improperly philosophical questions so what Hawking is doing there is something that's really I think reprehensible really it's a it's a sort of condescending back of a hand dismissal of non scientific questions as you know just not really legitimate because they're they're primitive science no they're qualitatively different types of questions and answers and making that distinction I think is something that's it's fundamentally important in this conversation so moving on Hawking seems to suggest that really the only reason to believe in God is if you think he's necessary to explain the universe that God would have been the only possible cause of the universe and so the rest of the chapter aims to show why the universe could have been created without God so Hawking says explicitly I think the universe was spontaneously created out of nothing according to the laws of science and then he later says the laws of nature itself tell us that not only could the universe have popped into existence without any assistance like a proton and have required nothing in terms of energy but also that it is possible that nothing caused the Big Bang nothing what's your take on that analysis I think it's just so much nonsense I mean and he's doing there what a lot of his acolytes do which is equivocate on the term nothing I know it seems odd to put it that way because you know nothing is nothing huh but they really are their equivocating on the meaning of the term so in let's stay within the the philosophical framework within philosophy nothing designates absolute non being write the absolute negation of being of any kind but when the theoretical physicists use the word nothing they're using in a highly equivocal way they are not intending by that word absolute metaphysical non-being they're talking about a really a very rich and fecund field of energy out of which these subatomic particles emerge because the minute you say what they came from and what they returned to you're not designating nothing you're not designating absolute a physical non-being you're pointing to this very richly textured field out of which these energies appear and so it's throwing the word nothing around as though it's solving a metaphysical problem what they mean by it is is not like a measurable thing so you might be pointing to a dimension of reality which is not a measurable thing in the in the conventional sense okay if by that you mean nothing fine but see what they in fact are indicating is a contingent state of affairs that therefore needs to be explained metaphysically we still can ask the question what's the condition for the possibility of that state of affairs now in the thing that you read the passage when I read that in the plane I remember I laughed out loud because so the universe comes out of absolute non-being but then but given the the laws of nature say what you want about the laws of nature they're not nothing the laws of nature are naming certain fundamental constants that the scientists are operating out of that's the the epistemological context in which scientists are operating well say what you want about us they're not absolute non-being so then the question arises well how do you explain the laws of nature which I think actually is a very searching a question look all the sciences are predicated upon the assumption that there's a fundamental intelligibility about being and laws of nature is just a way of saying that right there's a there's an intelligible structure to reality at the ordinary level of our experience and at the most fundamental levels of theoretical physics and and Hawking is calling those for sake of argument the laws of nature I want to know where those come from I want to know how it's just the case that reality is explicable in terms of densely complex mathematical intelligibility and all the sciences assume it they don't prove it they assume it there they rest upon it where did those come from I want to know that and don't play the game of saying oh it's coming from nothing it just comes out of absolute non-being oh and of course conditioned by the laws of nature I mean philosophically speaking you're just trading a nonsense there I I think I know what he means in terms of his own theoretical physics when he says that but philosophically speaking or then a fortiori religiously speaking it's just a lot of incoherence one thing that struck me when I read those passages was how he seems not to understand that the laws of nature have no power in themselves to cause anything and so for example he writes this line he says I prefer to think that everything can be explained by the laws of nature they govern everything that is going on now in one sense if he kind of just means everything tends to follow the laws of nature then that makes sense but the laws themselves are causally inert so they can't bring a universe into being they're descriptive not prescriptive I think that's right yeah they're the the constants that we recognize as we analyze the way being behaves in terms of nature you know it actually is very helpful here again is is the old to Aristotle because Aristotle speaks of physics and by physics he means the study of matter and motion right but then he speaks of metaphysics what goes beyond the physics and and one of the problems if you want to put an Aristotelian terms is the tendency today to reduce the metaphysical to the physical as though the physicist now I'll use our contemporary sense of that term the physicists can explain all the reality but see they bring the interesting question Brandon is what's the nature of being quoi being what does it mean to say something exists so not its features that can be determined empirically and through measurement experimentation that's the domain properly of the sciences but what makes something to be as such or do Leibniz and Heidegger the question why is there something rather than nothing see as far as I'm concerned Hawking and company aren't aren't helping us in any way to answer that question they're properly operating within a theoretical physics standpoint and you'll come up with statements like that well the the laws of nature are fundamental and and the subatomic particles come up out of this fluctuating vacuum or this primordial field of energy okay fine fine I have no quarrel with any event that that's the domain of theoretical physics but it leaves unanswered the question why should there be such things at all why should there be something rather than not nothing is the way Leibniz and Heidegger put it that remains a valid metaphysical question and see I don't want to be bullied by the physicists into not asking that question no no I'm gonna stay on my ground and say no no that's still a valid question that has to be answered but the thing is you kua theoretical physicists can't answer that question you've got to get out of the cave Plato's cave and move to a higher level of epistemological consciousness in the prologue to the book Stephen Hawking traces some of the touch points between religion and science and particularly regards to the universe and in its length of existence so he said and decades past most scientists believed the universe existed eternally in the past and some of that was to avoid a beginning moment which would imply a creator but he says in recent years the almost universal consensus is that both space and time had a beginning at the at the Big Bang and interestingly I'm sure you picked this up too he doesn't mention that the big bang theory was first proposed by father Jerry a Catholic priest that was mysterious by his absence but he says that the reason why he doesn't believe in God is because if time began at the moment of the Big Bang then and I'm quoting here this means there is no possibility of a creator because there is no time for a creator to have existed in what do you make of that I wish you'd go back to Agustin I mean that's a classic question in philosophy and the Philosopher's have entertained that for a long time Thomas Aquinas speaks about it because Thomas knows exactly that point if create Co is really ex nihilo right creation from nothing but it's not a change acquaintances because a change happens within space and time so there's one state of affairs and undergoes a reduction from potency to act within that state of affairs so we can measure it temporally and so on so Aquinas knows that whatever we're talking about when we say creation is not a temporal event because he himself knew read it in the 13th century that there's no time prior to the commencement of creation so there's nothing puzzling at all about that and see Kriya causality as Aquinas knew and so did Agustin so all classical philosophy causality as such is not tied to temper ality now our normal sense of creation is tied to temporarily because that's what we you know here's this thing now I pick it up I move it here it's this time to that time sure but causality is not in itself tied to temporality so God gives rise to the whole of the universe but it's not a temporal event we still have to ask the question what's the condition for the possibility of a contingent event whether it's a temporal event or not see so his observation is a valid one but as no bearing whatsoever on the legitimacy of of the metaphysical claim of causality it also seems like he's kind of stuck in a place that a lot of scientists are where they they have this anthropomorphic conception of God as a being within time and who must operate on this sort of same ontological playing field as the rest of us and so he just can't expand the horizon of his view of God to just being something outside of time yeah there's something in there I can't find it right away Brandon but where he does describe the sort of human like you know being who operates alongside of and I'm like no but that's not what God is and all of our great thinkers go right back to the very beginning of Christian philosophy nobody makes that argument that God is a conditioned being among many and so that's a that's again a scientistic sort of misunderstanding of the nature of God you know bishop we've done several different podcasts on many of these popular scientists from Stephen Hawking to Bill Nye to Neil deGrasse Tyson Lawrence yes it seems like the same story repeated look after book after book I'm wondering what your advice would be on how we can solve this dilemma of scientists not being really at all well-versed in philosophy do you think for example that that science majors and undergraduate programs should be required to take philosophy yeah I know I do and I think you're putting your finger Brandon as something important that the breakdown of the humanities has really dilute areas effect if all people know are like business and science so science articulates the nature of reality and then business shows me how I kind of make my way in the in the world practically if that's all you've got you're living right in the heart of Plato's cave and you've come nowhere out to higher dimensions of reality and the breakdown of the humanities is is one of the problems there the fact that even our brightest people don't have an acquaintance with philosophy is a problem go back now like to John Henry Newman 'he's time when he was talking about a liberal education and he would have meant someone that has a really broad sense of the whole range of the intellectual disciplines the sciences yes I mean I want everyone to have a keen sense of the sciences I want young Catholics studying science at the highest level but I also want them a dialogue with the deeper and higher questions of philosophy and religion and also the ways that truth is mediated through non scientific forms like richer and drama and art and poetry and architecture which are not just diverting but their truth bearing I think the loss of all that has in fact contributed to this reductive scientism which is sadly infected the minds of a lot of our younger people so yeah I quite agree with you on that so again the book we've been discussing is titled brief answers to the big questions it was Stephen Hawking this last book that he wrote before he died the first question on is there a God little shaky but the rest of the book I think you'd agree bishop was was pretty interesting he talks about time travel black I like this yeah alien I'm the plane I hit this is this infinitely long a trip home from Rome it was like a 12-hour flight so you had given me the book when you came to Rome and so I read not every word I read most of it on the plane I liked it you know I think he's a kind of a winning personality obviously a brilliant guy and you know time travel and space travel I mean all these things he speculates about sure interesting but the trouble is the book see it left a bad taste my mom cuz it gets off on such a bad footing is somewhat we've got this god thing off the table before we can really get to the interesting stuff no no why don't you forget about why don't you Stephen Hawking quoi physicists forget about God for a while leave that to other people talk about what you would he no I think that would be a better book but his his reputation is such that he'll have an impact that I think in this regard is unfortunate [Music] what's time now for our regular question from one of our listeners if you have a question we would love to hear it just visit ask Bishop Baron comm and you can record your question on any device today we have a great question from Elizabeth in Atlanta Georgia who's asking about a famous quote coming from Karl Marx so here's Elizabeth's question [Music] hi bishop Aaron my name is Elizabeth from Atlanta Georgia and my question is what are your thoughts on Karl Marx's famous quotation religion is the opiate of the masses thank you okay good Karl Marx when I was a young kid at Catholic University I did my master's thesis on Marx and it was because I had read so much of kindness in the classical tradition I wanted to get to know this other you know strain of thought coming from Hegel and then after Marx so many important people I thought it's me good to know him so I wrote my first really lengthy piece about 75 pages on Marx's philosophy of man and so yeah I know his system pretty well and within the confines of Marcus's system that statement makes perfect sense I mean because he thought the first critique would be the critique of religion so his master of Ludwig Feuerbach who said that religion is simply a projection of our idealized self understanding and so the first step for Bach thought was to get up off of our knees and realize we've invented this fantasy of God and then get to work make the world a better place so Marx followed up and he said well okay why do we engage in this in this self-defeating fantasy and his answer was because we're so alienated by our economic situation we're so denied in our humanity by our capitalist system that we invent this fantasy and then of course the opium image comes from the 19th century in London where Marx was writing and opium dens were becoming popular at that time where people were bringing this drug in from the Middle East and then people were literally are just wiling away their lives in this fantasy world and that was induced by by opium right so Marx at ah that's religion is instead of getting to work and making the world a better place and making ourselves who we can be we kind of wile away our lives with this wild fantasy about God in heaven so within Marxist system yeah it makes perfect sense that line the trouble is Marx's system is all off kilter you know I mean does it function that way sometimes for certain people sure I'll grant you that sometimes people misuse religion in just that way but you know here's a quick answer to it think of Jesus on the cross when they lifted the equivalent of opium up to his mouth you know so the the wine was not just to quench his thirst but they think it was kind of a drugged wine that was meant to ease the suffering right of the cross and Jesus refuses it that's a telling little icon is authentic religion an attempt to run away from the suffering the world well maybe some realities are but Christianity sure ain't right we hold up precisely God's entry into deep injustice deep cruelty deep hatred pain all the negativity of life God doesn't encourage us to run away from it in a fantasy world rather God in Christ goes into it fights it and transforms it through his merciful love and then invite us to get on board this great mission called the kingdom of God so that we can through the divine love also fight the deep injustice of the world so I would say mark some within his own system that statement makes sense and it might be a legitimate critique of some forms of of errant religiosity but it pure is not a legitimate critique of authentic Christianity well thanks so much for that question Elizabeth and thank you Bishop Erin first been in this time with us listen Advent is right around the corner it begins on December 2nd and we have something special to help you from word on fire you can get a free Advent reflections booklet from Bishop Baron all you do is cover the shipping and it contains not only the gospel readings and reflections from Bishop Baron but also special journaling pages and a free DVD so just go to word on fire show.com slash Advent to get yours today well thanks again for listening and we'll see you next week on the word on fire show [Music]

Channel: Bishop Robert Barron

Views: 114,961

Rating: 4.7648993 out of 5

Keywords: Stephen Hawking, God, Atheism, Brief Answers to the Big Questions

Id: KYXPIy3MzoM

Length: 27min 44sec (1664 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 05 2018