Paul Johnson in the 12 November Spectator completely misunderstands Stephen Hawking, relativity, time and religion in one very short piece. What an excellent achievement!

For example he asks why God chose to create the universe at the time he did; “Why did he do it then, and not earlier or later?”

This question suggests a time context that is entirely absent in a universe where time is dependent on not only our human perception of it but also gravity. Neither God or anyone else can do something when or after or before because time has not started to flow. The universe began at the Big Bang and at that moment time started. To talk of a “before” in linear temporal terms is, as Stephen Hawking said to trigger Paul Johnson’s article, “meaningless”.

If the question were not meaningless the question of what the universe was like before is, as Stephen Hawking would readily admit, entirely impossible for scientists or theologians to know with today’s understanding of science. In this imaginary temporal situation the laws of physics established by Special Relativity and Quantum theory were not valid and cannot be used to understand anything. And Mr Johnson makes the same mistake about the word “theory” as do evolution advocates - the word does not imply a lack of conviction or any idea that there is likely to be a need for revision.

A scientific theory is a set of rules that accurately describe a given situation. No scientist born since 1900 would pretend that science will not adapt to reflect newly discovered truths or insights, but that doesn’t mean we should doubt what is known now. What we know is only what we can know with the knowledge available today. Science is flexible, as religion has been, to amending itself to new truths.

In this way the Big Bang has been incorporated into accepted theory since Hubble noticed the expansion of the universe. Observations since have backed this up and there is no reason to expect, yet, that this is wrong. The observations do suggest that current understanding collapses at the ‘time’ of the Big Bang but that does not require God as a catalyst. In fact it’s a weakness of humanity that God needs to be invoked, continually, at the limits of understanding.

A Brief History of God:

  1. The Earth was flat

    2. - God was some distance away and if you reached the edge of the Earth you would fall off

    - God created man a few thousand years ago

  2. The Earth was round

    - Observations suggested that the sun was at the centre of the solar system

    - The Pope called heliocentric descriptions of the universe, heretical

  3. The Sun was the centre of the solar system / Evolution

    4. - The Sun is the centre of the universe

  4. Some stars are identified as actually being distant galaxies and the universe is expanding

    5. - God created the conditions necessary for the Big Bang

    The Future

  5. A new scientific advance rules out God’s involvement in the Big Bang

    6. - Religion’s goal posts move to purely spiritual influence

    - Organised religion accepts defeat

Religion may not be false, I cannot know, but science is not the measure of fantasy or the immeasurable. It is a genuine attempt to understand and utilise the universe. Lay observers can, and should, make attempts to understand but…

But Paul Johnson shouldn’t take his half-understanding to mean that there are holes in the understanding of science generally; or specifically in the writing of a man (Stephen Hawking) who is the closest thing to a genius alive today.


Posted In: Science, Religion