Hawking and the ever more abstract God

There is something rather premature about the recent “controversy” over Hawking’s statements on God’s existence. Firstly, there is nothing at all new in what we know of Hawking’s views. Theists (and believers of all varieties in a creator) might have held open the possibility of Hawking’s agnosticism, but this agnosticism was only ever a purely theoretical one anyway. The hope seems to have arisen largely from the concluding paragraph in A Brief History of Time:

However, if we do discover a complete theory, it should in time be understandable in broad principle by everyone, not just a few scientists. Then we shall all, philosophers, scientists and just ordinary people, be able to take part in the question of why it is that we and the universe exist. If we find the answer to that, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason—for then we would know the mind of God.

“The mind of God” is naturally an alluring term that sounds like the product of an agnostic brain. It carries with it an appeal to our civilization-long search for the answer to the question, why are we here? But it really only shows the usefulness of God as a metaphor. “God” is simply the origin of all our laws—and clearly, if this was all that a theist believed in, he would be no theist at all.

On the other side, there are those atheists who believe Hawking’s views are in any way revelatory, or constitute any real progress in the debate—including, presumably, Hawking himself. My understanding is that his new book posits M-theory (an extension of string theory) as the final explanation for the existence of the universe, thereby closing off the final gap for God to reside in. Even if M-theory were a fully explanatory theory that answered all our fundamental questions (which it isn’t), Hawking does not appear to see that this line of reasoning, of persistently squeezing God’s role into a singularity, is ultimately futile. Theists who want to believe will always find a way of interpreting the evidence conveniently, or they will simply point out that to conclude God’s non-existence is a misinterpretation, which technically is true. (That is not the point, though: such a bare role for God obliterates all the meaning he might have had.) If it were proved beyond any doubt that there is no possible way in which God could have helped in the creation of the universe, theists will simply reply, as they have done here, that God’s role is not a physical one, and that his job was far more profound than that—he created the laws of physics whereby the universe could create itself. As the Jesuit priest and scholar Fr Robert Spitzer says, “[the law of gravity] has a specific constant associated with it and specific characteristics, and it has specific effects on mass-energy and even on space-time itself. This is a very curious definition of ‘nothing’.” It seems absurd, but even if it could be shown that the laws of physics were a mathematical necessity (and most theologians agree that God is not above that), theists might still find a way around that, arguing that, inconceivable though it might be to us mere humans, there might be nothing necessary about necessity. There, at least, the theistic position might be reduced to literal absurdity, but that seems far off.

There is, perhaps, a larger force here at work. With every new year, science unearths discoveries that seem to hack away at the necessity of a god for our understanding of the universe and our place in it. The inevitable result in the religious communities of the world, if they are thoughtful, is that they resign themselves to an ever more abstract God, that has an ever more subjective value. Even though it sometimes seems that everyone has their own definition of God, from bearded Michelangelo figure to love, nonetheless this (relatively) new understanding of the creator has evolved by natural selection up to the point that it now looks perfectly designed to withstand these insults to his integrity. What this means for the future of religion (in the West, at least) is hard to tell. This increasing separation from practical reality might begin to expose itself to believers as a fraud. On the other hand, its strength might lie exactly in its subjectivity.