What the Most Eminent Cosmologist Believed

Could the most eminent and honored physicist of our lifetime actually believe such a thing as this?

How Does The Most Eminent Cosmologist Answer the Origin of the Universe?

by Dr Jerry Bergman

When one has questions about a topic, he goes to the leading authorities for answers. For the question ‘How did the universe and life begin?’ no better authority exists than Methodist-reared, Cambridge University Lucasian Professor of Cosmology, Stephen William Hawking (1942-2018). Hawking’s prominence in answering the question ’How did the Universe and life begin?’ is indicated by the fact that the leading astrophysicist, Kip Thorne, pointed out that Hawking is buried in one of the most hallowed places on Earth, Westminster Abbey in London between creationist Isaac Newton and agnostic Charles Darwin.[1] Hawking’s daughter, Lucy, wrote her father was “dearly loved and respected . . . by millions of people . . . from all around the world,” especially by scientists and educated laymen.[2] He is also “one of the most celebrated and respected personalities of our century . . . the Einstein of our time” whose theories influenced “heads of state, students, scientists, and even the Pope.”[3]

Hawking was born on 8th January 1942, exactly 300 years after the death of Galileo. His many scientific books included The Large-Scale Structure of Spacetime with G. F. R. Ellis, General Relativity: An Einstein Centenary Survey, with W. Israel, and 300 Years of Gravitation, with W. Israel. Among the popular books Stephen Hawking published are his best seller A Brief History of Time, Black Holes and Baby Universes and Other Essays, and The Universe in a Nutshell, The Grand Design and My Brief History. He received thirteen honorary degrees. And was awarded Companion of Honor (1989) and the Presidential Medal of Freedom (2009). He was the recipient of many awards, medals and prizes, most notably the Fundamental Physics prize (2013), Copley Medal (2006), and the Wolf Foundation prize (1988). He was a Fellow of the Royal Society and a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and the Pontifical Academy of Sciences.[4] No one on Earth in recent times has been so honored in the field of Cosmology. Now that we have established his qualifications, we will summarize his answer as recorded in his new book written to answer this question.

His Answer

Hawking’s answer to how the universe began is the Big Bang.[5] He explains that religion was an early attempt to answer where all matter and life came from until science began developing about 200 years ago. Now, he informs us, science has shown religion was wrong. In his words, “science provides better and more consistent answers, but people will always cling to religion, because it gives comfort, and they do not  . . . understand science.”[6]

In this, Hawking ignores the fact that many people both trust and understand science and still accept the theological explanation for life and the Universe. A page later in his book, Hawking admits he “prefers to think that everything can be explained . . . by the laws of nature,” but never attempts to explain the origin of, and what sustains, these laws. These laws include the four forces that hold the Universe together: gravity, the strong and weak nuclear forces, and electromagnetism.

These forces are called laws because they function consistently. For example, any two masses always attract each other with a force equal to the gravitation constant multiplied by the product of the two masses divided by the square of the distance between them. Gravity always works, but as to why and how action at a distance works (meaning an object can be moved, changed, or otherwise affected without being physically touched by another object), Hawking does not even attempt to answer this question in his book, or elsewhere.[7] Nor has anyone else documented how this law works, and why it always works. Even a 1,280-page book written by leading scientists attempting to answer this question has failed.[8]

Hawking believes these self-sustaining forces are laws that ultimately explain the existence of everything in the Universe. Consequently, he believes (contrary to those who push the idea that science and religion are separate and distinct fields of inquiry) that we do not need God to explain the existence of the Universe or life. Some claim that God’s existence “is an invalid question for science,” but Hawking has concluded that this question has already been rejected by science.[9]

On the Fifth Day, Stuff Happened

Hawking also attempts to explain how life was created without God as follows: “somehow, some . . .  atoms came to be arranged in the form of molecules of DNA . . . . As DNA reproduced itself, there would have been random errors, many of which would have been harmful, and . . . a few errors would have been favorable to the survival of the species—these would have been chosen by Darwinian natural selection.”[10] Thus, humans and all life are the result of billions of mistakes, mistakes that an estimated 99.9 percent are harmful or near neutral, which, in fact, have been shown to add up to produce genetic damage and eventually meltdown, not evolution.

Hawking added that evolution first produced organic molecules, then multi-cellular organisms which, after another few billion years, evolved into fish that after another million years or so, evolved into mammals, and, after a few hundred more million years, evolved into humans.[11] Needless to say, the evidence for this view is very problematic[12] at best and, as a whole, the evidence clearly refutes it.[13]

In the Beginning, Stuff Happened

Since Hawking concluded that science has proven the origin of all life by biological evolution, the last question left for religion is how the Universe began. This question, Hawking assures us, has been answered by the Big Bang. The Big Bang is ultimately the creation of everything from nothing. The first something that appeared from nothing was “perhaps smaller than a proton.”[14] Then the expansion of the Universe occurred from this smaller-than-a-proton object and the stars and planets soon followed. Thus, the Big Bang explains the origin of space, matter, energy, and time as evolving from nothing.[15]

In other words, Hawking opines, thanks to the Big Bang “you can get a whole universe for free” because “the fantastically enormous universe of space and energy can materialize out of nothing” by the Big Bang.[16] Thus, Hawking writes, “the universe itself, in all its mind-boggling vastness and complexity, could simply have popped into existence. . . [and] we do not need a God to set it up so that the Big Bang could bang.”[17] Atheists respond that, If God created the Universe, who created God?, yet argue that nothing can create everything.

The ‘people of the book’ (Jews, Christians and Muslims) have long taught that God always was and always will be. They feel this choice is more consistent than the view that teaches, in violation of the law of causation, that nothing created everything. Scientists say they agree with this law, but make an exception in the case of the Big Bang, which they say came from nothing.  The price for disagreeing with this view and supporting ‘the God Conclusion’ is loss of one’s career. As I document in three books, dogmatic Darwinists have ruined literally hundreds of careers of those who voice skepticism of the reigning materialistic worldview.[18]

Incredulity or Incredibility?

The Big Bang that hatched from the small proton is the ultimate black hole that does not behave like the black holes Hawking describes in his chapter five.[19] Before the Big Bang there was no matter, no space, no energy, and no time.[20] After reading this chapter, I was baffled as to how this first smaller-than-the-size-of-a-proton particle was a billion-trillion times more dense than the black holes existing today, yet exploded (actually, time and space rapidly expanded) to produce the many trillions of stars in the many billions of galaxies existing in the universe today. Not only is the origin of the proton-particle unexplained (other than the claim that God was not required to create it), but also unexplained is why it behaved so much unlike black holes. Black holes don’t just absorb matter that comes too close. They have gravity levels so great that they do not normally even allow light to leave – hence the name ‘black hole’.

Hawking also has no doubt that this reasoning explains the origin of the universe, but admits this Big Bang “is hard to grasp, but it’s true . . .  [and] you don’t need a God to create it,” because it (the universe) can create itself.[21] In an attempt to explain the idea that nothing produced everything, Hawking notes matter and anti-matter annihilate each other, producing gamma rays. Consequently, the reverse reaction produces matter, ignoring the fact that it is energy in this reaction that produces matter – not nothing.

A Brief Hysteria of Time

Hawking adds that before the Big Bang there was no time, thus this was the first uncaused cause, because there was “no time for a cause to exist in.”[22] As is obvious, his entire line of reasoning rapidly degenerates into speculative, often nonsensical circular reasoning by a man who has been given the stature by his peers, and society as a whole, as one of the greatest scientists that has ever graced the surface of the Earth.

For example, Hawking adds, “when people ask me if a God created the universe, I tell them the question itself makes no sense.” The reason is because “Time didn’t exist before the Big Bang so there is no time for God to make the universe in.”[23] If God existed before the Big Bang, He could have created time, then, once time existed, he could have created the Universe. Or instead of the Big Bang somehow doing the creating, God could have created time, space, matter and energy simultaneously, then the Universe.

This entire issue of the origin of the Universe was ignored for much of history because it was widely believed by the Greeks, Romans and other major civilizations that the Universe, including time, space, matter and energy, has always existed.[24] As Hawking correctly pointed out, if the Universe has always existed it would have heated up equally everywhere, producing uniform temperature throughout the Universe due to entropy. For the same reason the night sky would be lit up equally everywhere.[25]

Infinity Affinities

Hawking opines about another problem: “as far as we can tell, the universe goes on in space for ever and is much the same no matter how far it goes.” If it was infinitely old it would appear to go on forever, but if created by the Big Bang as Hawking believes, depending on how long ago the Big Bang occurred, it must have distance limits. In the end, Hawking admits that “the origin of the universe [is] apparently …  beyond the scope of science,” adding we haven’t solved the origin-of-the-universe problem yet, “but we have made a lot of progress.”[26]  In this convoluted view, science cannot explain the origin of the universe, yet claim they have explained it.

His review of the problem documents my conclusion that secular scientists are farther from an explanation of the origin of the universe than ever before. Hawking even admits that “all we can do is assign a probability to a particular history of the universe” to explain its origin.[27] What is the probability? 90%? 50%? 10%? or 1%? This is a far cry from Hawking’s claim that we have answered the problem of the origin of the universe and the case is now closed.[28]

Hawking also reviewed the evidence for the Big Bang, but he ignored many good opposing explanations for the evidence adduced to support the Big Bang.[29] He admits that the Big Bang has created problems for atheistic science because this view requires one “to invoke an outside agency, which for convenience one can call God, to determine how the universe began.”[30] Since the worldview of scientists determines their interpretation of the facts they discover, the Big Bang was reinterpreted by scientists to fit into an atheistic scenario.

As an example, Hawking notes that the Soviets proposed, and attempted to prove, the theory that the Universe which the Big Bang came from was only one of an infinite series of expansions and contractions. This ‘oscillating universe’ view “became an article of faith for Soviet scientists” because it fit into their Marxist-Leninist worldview of dialectical materialism.[31] In fact, it is clear, rather than being science, modern cosmology is a set of vaguely connected just-so stories driven by an ideology, namely naturalism. The cosmological discoveries have only created more questions that naturalism cannot answer without matter, energy, time and space popping into existence for unexplainable reasons in unexplainable locations.

Nothing Times Nobody Equals Everything

The answer where the universe came from? Nothing. In short, Hawking’s very revealing work will serve to reinforce those true believer readers who want to believe in materialistic naturalism. Hawking’s daughter, Lucy, wrote that the arguments reviewed above have been used by her “to reduce a vicar to tears with her [Lucy’s] close examination of his [the vicar’s] proof of the existence of God.”[32] To critical readers, it illustrates the feet of clay of at least this theory proposed by the world’s leading cosmologist.

References

[1]Hawking, 2018, p. xvi.

[2] Hawking, 2018, p. 214.

[3]Lieth, N. 2018. “The Death of a Genius and the Life of the Savior.” Midnight Call, November, pp. 24-25.

[4] http://www.hawking.org.uk/about-stephen.html

[5] Hawking, Stephen. 2018. Brief Answers to the Big Questions. New York, NY: Bantam Books. Introduction by Kip Thorne.

[6] Hawking, 2018, p. 25.

[7] Hawking, Stephen. and W. Israel. 1987. 300 Years of Gravitation. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

[8]Thorn, Kip. 2018. Introduction to Brief Answers to the Big Questions. 2018. New York, NY: Bantam Books.

[9] Hawking, 2018, pp. 27-29.

[10] Hawking, 2018, pp. 73,75.

[11] Hawking, 2018, pp. 75-76.

[12] One reviewer added here “non-existent is more accurate”

[13] See Bergman, Jerry, 2019. Science is the Doorway to God. Southworth, WA: Leafcutter Press.

[14] Hawking, 2018, p. 34.

[15] Hawking, 2018, pp. 29-31.

[16] Hawking, 2018, pp. 31-32.

[17] Hawking, 2018, p. 34.

[18] See Bergman, Jerry. 2012. Slaughter of the Dissidents: The Shocking Truth About Killing the Careers of Darwin Doubters. Revised version. Southworth, WA: Leafcutter Press; 2016. Silencing the Darwin Skeptics. Southworth, WA: Leafcutter Press; 2017. Censoring the Darwin Skeptics. Southworth, WA: Leafcutter Press.

[19] Hawking, 2018, pp. 99-122.

[20] Hawking, 2018, p. 37.

[21] Hawking, 2018, p. 33.

[22] Hawking, 2018, p. 38.

[23] Hawking, 2018, p. 38.

[24] Hawking, 2018, p. 43.

[25] Hawking, 2018, p. 45.

[26] Hawking, 2018, pp. 50, 53.

[27] Hawking, 2018, p. 53.

[28] Hawking, 2018, p. 33.

[29] Hawking, 2018, pp 46-47.

[30] Hawking, 2018, p. 47.

[31] Hawking, 2018, p. 48.

[32] Hawking, 2018, p. 216.

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Dr. Jerry Bergman has taught biology, genetics, chemistry, biochemistry, anthropology, geology, and microbiology at several colleges and universities including for over 40 years at Bowling Green State University, Medical College of Ohio where he was a research associate in experimental pathology, and The University of Toledo. He is a graduate of the Medical College of Ohio, Wayne State University in Detroit, the University of Toledo, and Bowling Green State University. He has over 1,300 publications in 12 languages and 40 books and monographs. His books and textbooks that include chapters that he authored, are in over 1,500 college libraries in 27 countries. So far over 80,000 copies of the 40 books and monographs that he has authored or co-authored are in print. For more articles by Dr Bergman, see his Author Profile.