John Robson | November 1, 2018
This article was reproduced on Intellectual Takeaway
Stephen Hawking’s own personal
brief history of time is up. But he left as he lived, feisty, modern and…
depressing. And without finding the Grand Unified theory he was famous for
being about to discover.
Hawking
was once equivocal about the meaning of life or lack thereof. In his popular
1988 book A Brief History of Time he didn’t
just say a complete theory of the universe would let us “know the mind of God”
-- which takes some doing if no such thing exists.
He asked
the crucial question: “Even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is
just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the
equations and makes a universe for them to describe? The usual approach of
science of constructing a mathematical model cannot answer the questions of why
there should be a universe for the model to describe. Why does the universe go
to all the bother of existing?”
Alas, in
his final book, Brief Answers to the Big Questions, he
puts out the fire. There’s no God, afterlife, heaven or point. No, wait. There
is a point. It’s really exciting to contemplate the great mystery of … um…
nothing very much.
Brief
Answers addresses
the 10 basic questions readers had been asking since A Brief History of
Time appeared, including such chestnuts as “Is time travel possible?”
and “Should we colonize space?” But it’s a pretty weak nuclear force he offers
us.
He says
time travel could not currently be ruled out. But of course it can, through the
familiar paradox of going back and altering the timeline so you don’t (or
can’t) go back. As for colonizing space, “I expect within the next hundred
years we will be able to travel to anywhere in the Solar System.” But why would
you want to? Nowhere else is remotely hospitable, we’ll never reach the stars,
and we’re as far from God on Titan as on Earth.
Even life
on Mars, if we find it, is liable to be a drab affair especially if whatever
organic molecules may be self-organizing there, or may once have, never got to
the point of photosynthesis where things get a bit interesting. Where they
really get interesting, of course, is with self-awareness.
Life
without mind, not mere calculating power but reflection, is barely more
interesting than rock. Especially to itself. It only gets interesting when we
wonder why we’re born, why we die, and why we spend so much time in between
wearing digital watches. And 42 isn’t much of an answer.
Unfortunately
it’s all Hawking has in his cold, soulless, material universe. In response to
“How do we shape the future?” he says, “Remember to look up at the stars and
not down at your feet.” See, they’re these giant balls of nuclear-fusion gas,
inaccessible and pointless. They don’t even sparkle. Next?
OK. God.
In a speech shortly before his death he said “We are each free to believe what
we want, and it’s my view that the simplest explanation is that there is no
God. No one created the universe and no one directs our fate. This leads me to
a profound realisation: there is probably no heaven and afterlife either. I
think belief in the afterlife is just wishful thinking. There is no reliable
evidence for it, and it flies in the face of everything we know in science. I
think that when we die we return to dust. But there is a sense we live on, in
our influence, and in the genes we pass to our children.”
Talk
about clutching at straws. The genes we pass on to our children aren’t
immortality. They’re just more dust. Like our fast-fading influence. Who now
remembers your great-grandmother’s pixie laugh? All dust and ashes. Wheeee! In
what conceivable sense is that “living on”? It literally makes no sense.
Indeed,
the odd thing is just how unscientific his sentiments are. Especially “We are
each free to believe what we want”. Oh really? Can I believe the Earth is flat?
Well no. Logic and evidence prove it’s round. OK. Can I believe there’s no God?
Sure. If you want.
I don’t.
If I’m free to believe, I will. As Puddleglum says in C.S. Lewis’s fantasy
novel The Silver Chair, “Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of
yours is the only world. Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one…. four babies
playing a game can make a play-world which licks your real world hollow”. If
you want an attitude of heroic resistance to a pointless universe, be “on Aslan's
side even if there isn't any Aslan to lead it”. Which in a weird way Hawking
was because we’re not free to believe what we like.
Our moral
choices matter and at some level we all know it. And no Grand Unified Theory of
life, the universe and everything is worth a load of dingoes’ kidneys if it
can’t say why.
At the
book launch for Brief Answers, Hawking’s daughter Lucy said despite
his atheism her father would be happy to be buried at Westminster Abbey because
“He never liked to be alone… and I like to think that he would find his final
resting place between Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin and he would never be
alone again.”
But dust
can’t keep dust company or be kept company.
He’s
smuggling in immortality, albeit a grimly unsatisfying kind. But in the process
he seems to me fatally to beg his own big question: “What breathes fire into
the equations?”
Something
does. It won’t do to say, as he does, it all began “In a hot Big Bang.” Oh
really? The universe started itself? Time came from nowhere at no time for no
reason, and with it not just length, width and depth but causality itself, all
the physical laws and some ineffable thing for them to be about? I think not.
That God
said “Let there be light” I can buy. But not this explosion in a non-existent
junkyard. The universe exists. But it not only doesn’t have to. It can’t “go to
all the bother of existing” unless it already does. So something must have
caused the Big Bang that does not itself need to be caused, some
“self-grounding” creator whose existence is inherent, that is causation and
truth and being all at once. God is not an empirical proposition. He’s more
like a logical necessity. It can’t just be turtles all the way down.
Hawking
is also inconsistent in saying life does not matter but does. Even in his
position about other intelligent life, the dogmatic “There are forms of
intelligent life out there. We need to be wary of answering back until we have
developed a bit further.” No evidence of the afterlife, but no doubt about
aliens? And why should we be wary of answering, not that it matters since we’ve
been beaming “I Love Lucy” and “The Three Stooges” at them for decades so they
know we’re fools if they’re listening?
He also
worries that “A super-intelligent AI will be extremely good at accomplishing
goals and if those goals aren’t aligned with ours we’re in trouble.” But how
does it matter if robots or aliens wipe us out, for food, as pests, or just on
a whim? Also, developed a bit further into what? Smarter beings? More dangerous
ones? Nicer ones? What does it matter? And by what standard? Is there some
moral code being smuggled in here?
As to
“Will we survive on Earth?” his deep thought is “The present world order has a
future but it will be a very different one.” Which is a bit of a bait and
switch. We’ll stay by leaving, apparently. And how shall we know if this
different future is better? Or are we in an evolutionary, materialist,
heartless universe where might makes right faute de mieux?
In the
speech quoted above Hawking urged people to “Shape the future.” But he has
given no useable blueprint. Nor could he, as he’s basically echoing Max
Quordlepleen from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,
whose comedy routine at the Restaurant at the End of the Universe (time travel
being possible) includes “So many of you come time and time again to watch this
final end of everything, which I think is really wonderful, and then to return
home to your own eras and raise families, and strive for new and better
societies and fight terrible wars for what you know is right, it gives one real
hope for the whole future of lifekind…. Except of course we know it hasn't got one.”
Hawking
says “It matters that you don’t give up.” But what else can you do with no God,
no morality, dangerous aliens, hostile AI and no inherent point to anything?
Well, you
can start by wanting to be buried in a church with other immortals. And you can
end by praying to the God who breathed fire into the equations and still does.
--
John
Robson is a crowdfunded documentary filmmaker and freelance journalist in
Ottawa, Canada. See his work and support him at www.johnrobson.ca. This articlehas been
republished from MercatorNet under a Creative Commons license.
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