Big todo in the news. Seems that Stephen Hawking’s posthumous book criticizes people on political matters. There’s a point to make on that, but I’ll come ‘round to it later. Bigger focus for me was his funeral in Westminster Abbey, a “rest in peace” ceremony in an “abbey” with a man in a chasuble presiding, choir music, candles, and people in their “Sunday best.”* Hey! Wasn’t Stephen an atheist? What’s with all the pomp and circumstance in a place with daily religious services, services it has held for hundreds of years? And the plaque in the floor? It reads, “Here lies what was mortal of Stephen Hawking 1942-2018.”**
“What was mortal of”? Is there an implication of something else that was Stephen Hawking, avowed atheist? Something immortal? His books maybe? His ideas? Surely, not his soul. The books, of course, will live on as long as no one finds a way to negate his evaporating black holes and other work. But, again, call me a dolt if you want. I’m having trouble with the “buried in the abbey” in a floor above which echo the voices of choirs and priests, all, I assume, of an opinion different from Stephen’s, all of them thinking, “There is something more than ‘what was mortal of.’” And the man in the chasuble? Some sort of “high priest,” I’d guess, maybe a bishop, reading a passage to the assembled, all bowing their heads as he solemnly says, “Heavenly Father, yadablahyadablahyadablah…[something about committing the mortal remains to the ground]” after which not only choir boys sing, but everyone sings a hymn. Hmmnnn.
As a famous scientist who endured decades of debilitating disease to continue his work, Stephen had his fans. I’m one; I admire both the man for his courage under the attack of ALS and for his work. The guy was very bright, and he had more insight into the working of the universe than I will ever have. Yet—I know, here comes the bad stuff—I have trouble with his certainty that there is no God. If a deity is beyond proving, beyond science, then on what ground other than belief does Stephen declare with surety? Isn’t belief the stuff of anti-science? If one has no proof for or against, then what, save belief, is left? Of course, Stephen has an argument in his writings that supports his position, and it’s based on the universe, in a sense, creating itself and/or on the universe as an eternal recurrence, kind of a modern view of Heraclitus’ cyclic pyr aeizoon, the Eternal Fire.
Stephen argues in one of his books that the universe originated from nothing because of natural laws. And he has some really good ground to stand on because of the apparent springing into and out of existence by subatomic particles. Plus, as he might argue in idiomatic British, the maths argue for it. But “natural laws” imply Nature, that is, the universe we know. I suppose for Stephen the “natural laws” existed in the “nothing.”
In that statement I find a circularity little different from any other circular argument (A is true because of B; B is true because of A). In Hawking’s argument there is no God because natural laws are responsible for the makeup and operation of the universe, and they are the reason that the universe formed from nothing. So, before there was a universe in which natural laws operate, natural laws were part of the “nothing.” It’s tough not to make this a teleological argument: Did they (the laws) decide to include themselves in the universe they made in spite of Hawking’s argument that there is no role for Providence? What principle was behind the “law” of gravity that made it capable of pre-existence and existence?
My yard initially had no grass. Seeds formed my lawn. My lawn has grass. My grass produces seeds. Seeds are the reason for my lawn. If there were no seeds before I had a lawn, I would not have the lawn I have with grass that produces seeds. Of course, all analogies fail, and this one relies on seeds being equal to natural laws. But then again, think about their role. They don’t really exist in the pre-lawn state, in the nothing, so to speak. Seeds and grass are metamorphically similar to the proverbial chicken-and-egg dilemma and not to a Nothing versus a Something. Seeds are already part of the universe. Give me some slack here, however. Are natural laws also part of the universal lawn? The point is a simple one. Hawking’s natural laws “demanded” before the Big Bang that the universe come into being. Nothing, that is, The Nothing, apparently has the energy of creation in it. But here language fails us, doesn’t it? If there is a pre-universe that is nothing, is it an “it”? That is, in what do the laws exist? I thought the definition of nothing is the absence of things, forces, processes—and don’t get me started on Heidegger’s “no-thingness.” Hawking’s “nothing” has a process, the process of creation. But even if Hawking is correct in proving the probability of a self-creating universe, he really can’t be sure, save for his faith in that probability, that he has disproved the existence of a Creator.
Hold on. Remember that Hawking gives us a metaphor. Essentially, he argues that there’s nothing south of the South Pole. That’s how he pictures the Origin that he follows to the present like lines of latitude toward the Equator, though in his thinking, it is imaginary time that operates like a spatial dimension. As Hawkingites (my word, not theirs) argue when they say the universe is eternal, the universe in imaginary time “looks” like a shuttlecock. Think of putting a “South Pole” on the rubber end and its feathers as the universe’s expansion (or inflation) in imaginary time. So, how did the South Pole come into existence if the universe might be eternal? Well, there was a previous shuttlecock in reverse, butt against our universe’s butt end, one that collapsed and then expanded into ours. And in the shuttlecock image, you have a cone that has “smooth” cross sections on which lie all the universes in the multiverse. Whoa! Am I wearing you out? You know you can take a break and come back to this later, but now you’re going to walk around with this universe-as-a-shuttlecock image in your brain, asking yourself what lies on the outside of the feathers or why there wouldn’t be many shuttlecocks trying to collapse and squeeze their rubber butts into a single South Pole. Just keep in mind that the “maths” work.
Fine-tuning, or the anthropic principle, says we exist because the universe is just right for us to exist. And Stephen didn’t like the anthropic principle. I think I understand. The principle is a declaration that all the forces are just what they need to be: Gravity, the weakest of the four fundamental forces (10^-41 times weaker than the strong nuclear force, for example), couldn’t have been much stronger without collapsing the early universe; the strong nuclear force is “just right” for fusion; if weaker, it’s a no-go for carbon, you, and burned toast. Now there’s some fine-tuning for you. Hawking says ignore the fine-tuning. Fine-tuning is just like winning the lottery. Yeah. Maybe there’s a one in 180-million-chance of winning, but someone eventually wins. And in a multiverse with untold billions of other universes (or shuttlecocks), one of those universes becomes life’s lottery winner, and on top of that, not just life, but conscious life. This is suspiciously similar to eighteenth-century optimism so famously satirized by Voltaire in Candide.
So, for Hawking, because there are more universes than one can identify, ours exists in that lottery, and it’s just right for us. But that brings us back to the nothing which Hawking acknowledges as the pre-multiverse condition, the south of the South Pole chaos. And, here we are, back to belief. We’re also stuck on a principle of exclusion. Just because a universe can theoretically form without God doesn’t mean that it did form without a Creator. (I told you that you should consider taking a break. This thing reads on)
In The Grand Design, Hawking and Mlodinow adopt “model dependent realism: the idea that a physical theory or world picture is a model (generally of a mathematical nature) and a set of rules that connect the elements of the model to observations” (42,43).*** In explaining “model-dependent,” the authors tell of two views of reality, one by a goldfish in a fishbowl and the other by a person outside the fishbowl. The perspectives of both differ, but from either’s point of view, the model of reality that they hold works because it “matches observations.” So, as long as models match observations (or observations support models), the perspective is valid. But then we have to ask whether the “model” for the quantum world is actually a “model.” Right now the “standard model” works, and according to Hawking and Mlodinow, a version of string theory called M Theory gives the big picture. Yet—here we go again—the authors say, “The brain…builds a mental picture of the model” (47).
It’s interesting that for a long time we have known that observing and measuring tell us something about, say, photons, telling us how they behave. But point or wave? Well, the wave function isn’t a wave like a wave on the ocean. It’s a mathematical construct that tells us something about probability. That’s not going to sit well in anyone’s brain as a “mental picture.” And there is in the maths a wave function for the universe as a whole (Don’t bother; I’ve already tried to picture it in my feeble brain). With regard to subatomic entities, we are not like fish in the bowl or people outside the bowl. Those are macro experiences and the models are large and clear. What model-dependent realism can account for natural laws before the advent of a nature that contains them? And how can the brain make that into a mental picture. Go ahead: Picture nothing with a process of creation in it. You’re going to need “the maths” because, as Morris Kline informs us, “All proofs consist in transforming collections of symbols into new collections by rules for the transformation of symbols that replace the verbal laws of logic” (231).**** Kline argues that modern mathematics is about the non-visualizable—save for shuttlecocks and imaginary time, right?
Now back to Hawking’s last book and his comments on political matters. Who cares? If there is nothing left of Stephen—remember that his “what was mortal of” is ash beneath a stone in the floor of Westminster Abbey—and Stephen has returned to the nothing, then literally nothing in this world is worth a concern. Conscious beings, however fine-tuned their universe, might as well adopt some existential nihilism. Did Stephen not know how many political changes have occurred since humans formed societies? How many people must have said, “The world is changing for the worse” or “Things today just aren’t what they used to be”? Haven’t we all heard some form of “the end of the world is near,” especially when social turmoil prevails? Can you imagine the opinions of people in a medieval village overrun by Huns? Can you imagine strikers battling Chicago police in 1930? Can you “feel” the news that Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in a manner similar to your reaction to the 9-11 terrorist attack? Those alive during those incidents probably felt their world was never going to be “the same.” It’s the nature of political and social worlds to form new shuttlecock universes, all of them expanding into new multiverses. Why should Hawking have cared to focus on the temporary condition of a world not only in flux, but also the product of random quantum fluctuations? Was he envisioning an ideal moral condition of love and peace and all those other non-vizualizables?
Maybe the atheist in Hawking might have believed that there is in consciousness a drive toward ethics—as he defined them. No one needs to postulate the existence of God when humans have their self-interest at heart. If I’m nice to you, and you’re nice to me, then in this brief meaningless existence inside one of gajillions of universes, we prolong our brief stay comfortably. We don’t go to war. We get along harmoniously. It’s a utilitarian thing independent of any “higher” law. It’s the Age of Aquarius without belief in astrology. Natural law somehow accounts for brains that consciously demand our getting along or we annihilate one another. Humanism springs forth from being human just as a YouTube video shows a leopard care for a baby baboon. Hawking would probably say, “See, we don’t need God. Even the brain of a big cat has a model of morality built into it.”*****
Now we’re talking humanism, but Hawking mentions the election of Donald Trump and Brexit in his “the-world-ain’t-what-it-used-to-be” moment. No, Stephen, the world is never what it used to be. Look at you. You were here, and now you’re not. Those of us who are still here are certainly happy you gave us your insights about physics. You did much to advance our knowledge. And you certainly gave us a model of a human who could accomplish much in dire circumstances. But, if your vision of the non-visualizable universe is correct, you’re nothing now except for some formulae and books that, in some future society, might meet the same fate as the books in the library at Alexandria. We can’t know the future, can’t scientifically predict it, but that library’s fate seems to be a possibility in this and other doppelganger universes. Look what ISIS did to Palmyra and ancient statuary for an example.
“We are the product of quantum fluctuations in the very early universe,” Stephen and a co-author write in The Grand Design. That might be true, but it is “in the very early universe” that the fluctuations occurred. They occurred “in something,” not “in nothing.” And right now, we are part of an unfolding universe that can be scientifically measured according to natural laws. Yet, regardless of the determinism on which science relies, here we are still incapable of knowing the future and incapable of predicting that Stephen’s books will be treasured or burned, whether Brexit, a concern of his, will be of any consequence a thousand years hence, whether or not the election of an American president will be significant when the sun turns red giant and scorches Earth.
We can’t get around belief. We start by believing in our axioms. We use the axioms to establish proofs. We verify the proofs repeatedly, but nothing changes the fact that we believe in the efficacy of the axioms. As I have said before, we think Greek. Euclid and others way back then set the pattern of thinking that Hawking and you and I use to justify our interpretation of the world. Belief at the most rudimentary level of any thought runs us up against the “nothing” that Stephen, if he could be—he says he isn’t—conscious, is currently (but outside of time) exploring.
Once again, in my ignorance, I seem to be missing something, and that, I’m guessing, is the nature of the “nothing” from which all “somethings” came. I can’t imagine a “nothing” that contains “laws” for the formation of something. Hey, but what do I know? I wish I could talk to Stephen about it.
After reading all this, you say, “Well, if your purpose here was to prove there is a God, you missed the mark.”
I, in response, say, “You’re right. I haven’t ‘proved’ the existence of God. But I believe I have shown that Hawking’s argument against God’s existence is flawed and that his model-dependent realism that rejects a Creator doesn’t negate a two-model model like the two ascribed to the fish and human inside and outside the fishbowl. Belief appears to operate in both realities. The one Hawking ascribes to a model-dependent realism that starts with axioms and relies on observations that are mathematical constructs like wave functions and the one that the guy standing in the chasuble in Westminster Abbey constructs as he intones prayers that a celebrity audience politely follows with bowed heads in deference to 'Heavenly Father,' who, in Hawking’s view, is some fictional character irrelevant to the formation of the universe in which 'what was mortal of Stephen Hawking' now lies."
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLerGQOxJMs
**https://www.google.com/search?q=pic+of+Hawking%27s+burial+stone+in+westminster+abbey&client=safari&rls=en&tbm=isch&source=iu&ictx=1&fir=T9rRnPSHFF1_nM%253A%252CAQU_oLRSO-OwFM%252C_&usg=AI4_-kQQew4Usih7oqKwVpaFpfwL9y42Jg&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiwjbXn2JfeAhVPj1kKHavWDNYQ9QEwC3oECAYQGg#imgrc=T9rRnPSHFF1_nM:
***Hawking, Stephen and Leonard Mlodinow. The Grand Design. New York. Bantam Books. 2010. p. 139.
****Kline, Morris. Mathematics: The Loss of Certainty. New York. Fall River Press, 1980.
***** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ugi4x8kZJzk
“What was mortal of”? Is there an implication of something else that was Stephen Hawking, avowed atheist? Something immortal? His books maybe? His ideas? Surely, not his soul. The books, of course, will live on as long as no one finds a way to negate his evaporating black holes and other work. But, again, call me a dolt if you want. I’m having trouble with the “buried in the abbey” in a floor above which echo the voices of choirs and priests, all, I assume, of an opinion different from Stephen’s, all of them thinking, “There is something more than ‘what was mortal of.’” And the man in the chasuble? Some sort of “high priest,” I’d guess, maybe a bishop, reading a passage to the assembled, all bowing their heads as he solemnly says, “Heavenly Father, yadablahyadablahyadablah…[something about committing the mortal remains to the ground]” after which not only choir boys sing, but everyone sings a hymn. Hmmnnn.
As a famous scientist who endured decades of debilitating disease to continue his work, Stephen had his fans. I’m one; I admire both the man for his courage under the attack of ALS and for his work. The guy was very bright, and he had more insight into the working of the universe than I will ever have. Yet—I know, here comes the bad stuff—I have trouble with his certainty that there is no God. If a deity is beyond proving, beyond science, then on what ground other than belief does Stephen declare with surety? Isn’t belief the stuff of anti-science? If one has no proof for or against, then what, save belief, is left? Of course, Stephen has an argument in his writings that supports his position, and it’s based on the universe, in a sense, creating itself and/or on the universe as an eternal recurrence, kind of a modern view of Heraclitus’ cyclic pyr aeizoon, the Eternal Fire.
Stephen argues in one of his books that the universe originated from nothing because of natural laws. And he has some really good ground to stand on because of the apparent springing into and out of existence by subatomic particles. Plus, as he might argue in idiomatic British, the maths argue for it. But “natural laws” imply Nature, that is, the universe we know. I suppose for Stephen the “natural laws” existed in the “nothing.”
In that statement I find a circularity little different from any other circular argument (A is true because of B; B is true because of A). In Hawking’s argument there is no God because natural laws are responsible for the makeup and operation of the universe, and they are the reason that the universe formed from nothing. So, before there was a universe in which natural laws operate, natural laws were part of the “nothing.” It’s tough not to make this a teleological argument: Did they (the laws) decide to include themselves in the universe they made in spite of Hawking’s argument that there is no role for Providence? What principle was behind the “law” of gravity that made it capable of pre-existence and existence?
My yard initially had no grass. Seeds formed my lawn. My lawn has grass. My grass produces seeds. Seeds are the reason for my lawn. If there were no seeds before I had a lawn, I would not have the lawn I have with grass that produces seeds. Of course, all analogies fail, and this one relies on seeds being equal to natural laws. But then again, think about their role. They don’t really exist in the pre-lawn state, in the nothing, so to speak. Seeds and grass are metamorphically similar to the proverbial chicken-and-egg dilemma and not to a Nothing versus a Something. Seeds are already part of the universe. Give me some slack here, however. Are natural laws also part of the universal lawn? The point is a simple one. Hawking’s natural laws “demanded” before the Big Bang that the universe come into being. Nothing, that is, The Nothing, apparently has the energy of creation in it. But here language fails us, doesn’t it? If there is a pre-universe that is nothing, is it an “it”? That is, in what do the laws exist? I thought the definition of nothing is the absence of things, forces, processes—and don’t get me started on Heidegger’s “no-thingness.” Hawking’s “nothing” has a process, the process of creation. But even if Hawking is correct in proving the probability of a self-creating universe, he really can’t be sure, save for his faith in that probability, that he has disproved the existence of a Creator.
Hold on. Remember that Hawking gives us a metaphor. Essentially, he argues that there’s nothing south of the South Pole. That’s how he pictures the Origin that he follows to the present like lines of latitude toward the Equator, though in his thinking, it is imaginary time that operates like a spatial dimension. As Hawkingites (my word, not theirs) argue when they say the universe is eternal, the universe in imaginary time “looks” like a shuttlecock. Think of putting a “South Pole” on the rubber end and its feathers as the universe’s expansion (or inflation) in imaginary time. So, how did the South Pole come into existence if the universe might be eternal? Well, there was a previous shuttlecock in reverse, butt against our universe’s butt end, one that collapsed and then expanded into ours. And in the shuttlecock image, you have a cone that has “smooth” cross sections on which lie all the universes in the multiverse. Whoa! Am I wearing you out? You know you can take a break and come back to this later, but now you’re going to walk around with this universe-as-a-shuttlecock image in your brain, asking yourself what lies on the outside of the feathers or why there wouldn’t be many shuttlecocks trying to collapse and squeeze their rubber butts into a single South Pole. Just keep in mind that the “maths” work.
Fine-tuning, or the anthropic principle, says we exist because the universe is just right for us to exist. And Stephen didn’t like the anthropic principle. I think I understand. The principle is a declaration that all the forces are just what they need to be: Gravity, the weakest of the four fundamental forces (10^-41 times weaker than the strong nuclear force, for example), couldn’t have been much stronger without collapsing the early universe; the strong nuclear force is “just right” for fusion; if weaker, it’s a no-go for carbon, you, and burned toast. Now there’s some fine-tuning for you. Hawking says ignore the fine-tuning. Fine-tuning is just like winning the lottery. Yeah. Maybe there’s a one in 180-million-chance of winning, but someone eventually wins. And in a multiverse with untold billions of other universes (or shuttlecocks), one of those universes becomes life’s lottery winner, and on top of that, not just life, but conscious life. This is suspiciously similar to eighteenth-century optimism so famously satirized by Voltaire in Candide.
So, for Hawking, because there are more universes than one can identify, ours exists in that lottery, and it’s just right for us. But that brings us back to the nothing which Hawking acknowledges as the pre-multiverse condition, the south of the South Pole chaos. And, here we are, back to belief. We’re also stuck on a principle of exclusion. Just because a universe can theoretically form without God doesn’t mean that it did form without a Creator. (I told you that you should consider taking a break. This thing reads on)
In The Grand Design, Hawking and Mlodinow adopt “model dependent realism: the idea that a physical theory or world picture is a model (generally of a mathematical nature) and a set of rules that connect the elements of the model to observations” (42,43).*** In explaining “model-dependent,” the authors tell of two views of reality, one by a goldfish in a fishbowl and the other by a person outside the fishbowl. The perspectives of both differ, but from either’s point of view, the model of reality that they hold works because it “matches observations.” So, as long as models match observations (or observations support models), the perspective is valid. But then we have to ask whether the “model” for the quantum world is actually a “model.” Right now the “standard model” works, and according to Hawking and Mlodinow, a version of string theory called M Theory gives the big picture. Yet—here we go again—the authors say, “The brain…builds a mental picture of the model” (47).
It’s interesting that for a long time we have known that observing and measuring tell us something about, say, photons, telling us how they behave. But point or wave? Well, the wave function isn’t a wave like a wave on the ocean. It’s a mathematical construct that tells us something about probability. That’s not going to sit well in anyone’s brain as a “mental picture.” And there is in the maths a wave function for the universe as a whole (Don’t bother; I’ve already tried to picture it in my feeble brain). With regard to subatomic entities, we are not like fish in the bowl or people outside the bowl. Those are macro experiences and the models are large and clear. What model-dependent realism can account for natural laws before the advent of a nature that contains them? And how can the brain make that into a mental picture. Go ahead: Picture nothing with a process of creation in it. You’re going to need “the maths” because, as Morris Kline informs us, “All proofs consist in transforming collections of symbols into new collections by rules for the transformation of symbols that replace the verbal laws of logic” (231).**** Kline argues that modern mathematics is about the non-visualizable—save for shuttlecocks and imaginary time, right?
Now back to Hawking’s last book and his comments on political matters. Who cares? If there is nothing left of Stephen—remember that his “what was mortal of” is ash beneath a stone in the floor of Westminster Abbey—and Stephen has returned to the nothing, then literally nothing in this world is worth a concern. Conscious beings, however fine-tuned their universe, might as well adopt some existential nihilism. Did Stephen not know how many political changes have occurred since humans formed societies? How many people must have said, “The world is changing for the worse” or “Things today just aren’t what they used to be”? Haven’t we all heard some form of “the end of the world is near,” especially when social turmoil prevails? Can you imagine the opinions of people in a medieval village overrun by Huns? Can you imagine strikers battling Chicago police in 1930? Can you “feel” the news that Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in a manner similar to your reaction to the 9-11 terrorist attack? Those alive during those incidents probably felt their world was never going to be “the same.” It’s the nature of political and social worlds to form new shuttlecock universes, all of them expanding into new multiverses. Why should Hawking have cared to focus on the temporary condition of a world not only in flux, but also the product of random quantum fluctuations? Was he envisioning an ideal moral condition of love and peace and all those other non-vizualizables?
Maybe the atheist in Hawking might have believed that there is in consciousness a drive toward ethics—as he defined them. No one needs to postulate the existence of God when humans have their self-interest at heart. If I’m nice to you, and you’re nice to me, then in this brief meaningless existence inside one of gajillions of universes, we prolong our brief stay comfortably. We don’t go to war. We get along harmoniously. It’s a utilitarian thing independent of any “higher” law. It’s the Age of Aquarius without belief in astrology. Natural law somehow accounts for brains that consciously demand our getting along or we annihilate one another. Humanism springs forth from being human just as a YouTube video shows a leopard care for a baby baboon. Hawking would probably say, “See, we don’t need God. Even the brain of a big cat has a model of morality built into it.”*****
Now we’re talking humanism, but Hawking mentions the election of Donald Trump and Brexit in his “the-world-ain’t-what-it-used-to-be” moment. No, Stephen, the world is never what it used to be. Look at you. You were here, and now you’re not. Those of us who are still here are certainly happy you gave us your insights about physics. You did much to advance our knowledge. And you certainly gave us a model of a human who could accomplish much in dire circumstances. But, if your vision of the non-visualizable universe is correct, you’re nothing now except for some formulae and books that, in some future society, might meet the same fate as the books in the library at Alexandria. We can’t know the future, can’t scientifically predict it, but that library’s fate seems to be a possibility in this and other doppelganger universes. Look what ISIS did to Palmyra and ancient statuary for an example.
“We are the product of quantum fluctuations in the very early universe,” Stephen and a co-author write in The Grand Design. That might be true, but it is “in the very early universe” that the fluctuations occurred. They occurred “in something,” not “in nothing.” And right now, we are part of an unfolding universe that can be scientifically measured according to natural laws. Yet, regardless of the determinism on which science relies, here we are still incapable of knowing the future and incapable of predicting that Stephen’s books will be treasured or burned, whether Brexit, a concern of his, will be of any consequence a thousand years hence, whether or not the election of an American president will be significant when the sun turns red giant and scorches Earth.
We can’t get around belief. We start by believing in our axioms. We use the axioms to establish proofs. We verify the proofs repeatedly, but nothing changes the fact that we believe in the efficacy of the axioms. As I have said before, we think Greek. Euclid and others way back then set the pattern of thinking that Hawking and you and I use to justify our interpretation of the world. Belief at the most rudimentary level of any thought runs us up against the “nothing” that Stephen, if he could be—he says he isn’t—conscious, is currently (but outside of time) exploring.
Once again, in my ignorance, I seem to be missing something, and that, I’m guessing, is the nature of the “nothing” from which all “somethings” came. I can’t imagine a “nothing” that contains “laws” for the formation of something. Hey, but what do I know? I wish I could talk to Stephen about it.
After reading all this, you say, “Well, if your purpose here was to prove there is a God, you missed the mark.”
I, in response, say, “You’re right. I haven’t ‘proved’ the existence of God. But I believe I have shown that Hawking’s argument against God’s existence is flawed and that his model-dependent realism that rejects a Creator doesn’t negate a two-model model like the two ascribed to the fish and human inside and outside the fishbowl. Belief appears to operate in both realities. The one Hawking ascribes to a model-dependent realism that starts with axioms and relies on observations that are mathematical constructs like wave functions and the one that the guy standing in the chasuble in Westminster Abbey constructs as he intones prayers that a celebrity audience politely follows with bowed heads in deference to 'Heavenly Father,' who, in Hawking’s view, is some fictional character irrelevant to the formation of the universe in which 'what was mortal of Stephen Hawking' now lies."
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLerGQOxJMs
**https://www.google.com/search?q=pic+of+Hawking%27s+burial+stone+in+westminster+abbey&client=safari&rls=en&tbm=isch&source=iu&ictx=1&fir=T9rRnPSHFF1_nM%253A%252CAQU_oLRSO-OwFM%252C_&usg=AI4_-kQQew4Usih7oqKwVpaFpfwL9y42Jg&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiwjbXn2JfeAhVPj1kKHavWDNYQ9QEwC3oECAYQGg#imgrc=T9rRnPSHFF1_nM:
***Hawking, Stephen and Leonard Mlodinow. The Grand Design. New York. Bantam Books. 2010. p. 139.
****Kline, Morris. Mathematics: The Loss of Certainty. New York. Fall River Press, 1980.
***** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ugi4x8kZJzk
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