Tags: atheism , Creation , ex nihilo , Galileo , gravity , Kepler , Law of Gravity , M-Theory , mult

Tags: atheism , Creation , ex nihilo , Galileo , gravity , Kepler , Law of Gravity , M-Theory , multiverse , physical law , Richard Dawkins , spontaneous creation , Stephen Hawking , The Grand Design
Stephen Hawking is doubtless a very intelligent man, but in his most recent book The Grand Design (surely a title that is supposed to be ironic) he has shown that even the most intelligent of scientists gift miles flight information american status airline can write like a fool, and this monograph will become gift miles flight information american status airline a classic for that very reason. He followed up his inanities in an interview on Larry King Live on September 10, 2010. It is now evident to all (if anyone was hitherto in any doubt) that Hawking's brilliance is in a very narrow field indeed, apart from which he gropes and stumbles gift miles flight information american status airline like a drunken man. Early in his book he announces
Philosophy is dead. It has not kept up with modern developments in science, particularly in physics. As a result scientists have become gift miles flight information american status airline the bearers of the torch of discovery in our quest for knowledge.
Indeed, Hawking and his sidekick Mlodinow proceed to show just how ignorant they are of philosophy, theology, the philosophy of science, the history of philosophy, the history of science, and general gift miles flight information american status airline science itself. In the Larry King Live show Hawking gift miles flight information american status airline was asked who his hero was, and why, to which he responded:
Well, you can have who you like as your hero, of course, but the historical gift miles flight information american status airline claim about Galileo is utter rot. He couldn t hold a candle to the likes of Kepler, for one. Galileo was a second-rate scientist gift miles flight information american status airline in the main, who continued to his dying day to deny gravitational force as constraining bodies to rotate gift miles flight information american status airline around the sun, clinging to an Aristotelian idea that celestial gift miles flight information american status airline bodies naturally moved in perfect circles because they were not acted upon by a centripetal gift miles flight information american status airline force, and he refused to accept Kepler s careful gift miles flight information american status airline observations gift miles flight information american status airline and tabulated data that planets were subject to gravitational pull and moved in ellipses. He likewise refused to believe that the sun and moon caused the tides, as Kepler showed, because he denied gift miles flight information american status airline extraterrestrial gravity. Apart from his last work, under house arrest, on mechanics, the myth of Galileo s supposed greatness is the deliberate invention of atheists, gift miles flight information american status airline communists and other anti-Christians, who have cunningly warped history since the nineteenth century to promote a conflict thesis . Mighty interesting that Hawking, who has built his reputation on pushing cosmic gravity into the absurd, without observational corroboration, should have as his hero one who denied extraterrestrial gravity and who often espoused dogma over meticulous observation.
But if philosophy is dead, it is dead only in the mind of Stephen gift miles flight information american status airline Hawking, where it was delivered stillborn, gift miles flight information american status airline or smothered at birth. As someone gift miles flight information american status airline has said, when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. And if 'scientific' gift miles flight information american status airline conjecture is all Hawking has by way of explanation, it does the crudest of jobs, riding roughshod over and mangling all understanding, rationality and logic, so that he ends up making puerile statements unworthy of an intelligent man. Just as, by definition, 'Intelligent Design' is not a scientific hypothesis because it deals with causes outside the realm on natural science, likewise a physical explanation cannot be an explanation for a metaphysical problem.
Note that these are 'why' questions, which can only be answered by invoking purpose (as in theology, and Intelligent Design) or at the very least function . There is no sloppy mistake here on the Larry King Live show King attempts some clarification between the how and the why :
One of your colleagues out of Cambridge says that science provides us with a narrative as to how existence may happen [the 'how'], but theology addresses the meaning of the narrative [the 'why']. How do you respond to that?
That s clear, then. Hawking really is claiming gift miles flight information american status airline to answer the why questions. In his previous book, A Brief History of Time , he had mentioned these ultimate why questions and concluded the work with the words
Then we shall all, philosophers, scientists and just ordinary people, be able to take part in the discussion of the question gift miles flight information american status airline 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 should know the mind of God.
But, having explicitly eliminated God and theology from his purview to please his atheist constituency, Hawking s answer to all three questions is just another 'miserable refuge' – spontaneous creation. gift miles flight information american status airline An uncaused cause. And that is supposed to be the ultimate triumph of human reason ?!! Creation, of course, implies a creator, and the uncaused cause has traditionally been identified with deity, but Hawking will have none of that. As a native English writer, he could have chosen the more neutral term 'spontaneous generation'; but as an atheist he delights in purloining words from the vocabulary of theists, such as 'creation'. Not only is this creation spontaneous, gift miles flight information american status airline but the universe creates itself – it is its own creator, self-creating, self-organizing. Its purpose and function and meaning is to create itself.
No, the universe brought itself into existence because that s the sort of thing universes do all the time. Stuck for a physical and scientific explanation for a finite universe with a defined stating point in time (as Hawking holds), then the universe has to be the cause of itself. This brings us back to where we started in Part I. If you insist on a scientific explanation for an event that is caused by primary causation, or for which a scientific explanation cannot be found, then you will end up with a very silly one, as Hawking s hypothesis exemplifies. He would have done better to keep his inanities to himself, but he makes himself a laughingstock by parading this nonsense so publicly. Richard Dawkins thinks that just as he himself pretends to have eliminated God from biology, so Hawking has delivered the coup de grace and eliminated God from physics as well. Indeed not, though all he has done is make the atheist gift miles flight information american status airline position look ever more ridiculous gift miles flight information american status airline and untenable.
Note carefully: the universe does not come into existence contingently, but it necessarily and infallibly comes into existence ex nihilo because of the law of gravity . Quantum theory causes universes to be created gift miles flight information american status airline spontaneously. Note also that Hawking appears to be saying that it is gravity itself that causes the spontaneous generation, for which gravity would have to be a property of pre-existent material, which by definition cannot exist. Charitably, we must surely take it that he means the theory or law of gravity itself, but who knows? What an amazing Just So , Porquoi story. All part and parcel of atheist mythology , as we ve come to expect.
To assert that gravity, a property, is a consequence of a theory is plain nutty. gift miles flight information american status airline And don t fail to spot the ultimate unscientific hubris: that M-theory, a speculative unfalsifiable and untestable string theory is the only possible unified theory . History is littered with such stupid claims by scientists to have attained the ultimate and only possible theory. M-Theory is nothing more than a candidate for a unified theory, and these string theories are in a state of flux all the time.
There are breathtaking logical fallacies here. Firstly, Hawking is effectively saying that the law of gravity applies when there is 'nothing'; that X creates X; and that 'nothing' becomes something. But a physical law is not a physical thing, it is merely a description of properties and behaviours of something that already exists. Laws have no power over anything, they do not control, gift miles flight information american status airline regulate, create, explain or cause. They produce no events, they merely describe patterns to which events conform; they have no causative or sustaining power. No snooker balls ever moved on green baize because of Newton's laws of motion or as a consequence of any theories, their motion has only ever been described in accordance with Newton's laws and physical theories. And for causation one would have to look elsewhere.
But there can be no laws of motion without motion, no laws of gravity without gravity etc because the laws are merely the descriptions of the properties of the things themselves. Laws of nature do not have any real and independent existence apart from the properties and phenomena they describe except in the mind of God, which Hawking now disavows.
Now, a law describing a property that is uninstantiated gift miles flight information american status airline (i.e. no examples found) is known as a vacuous law, and we can all make up any number of them covering the properties of things that do not exist, and never be able to prove whether such laws do or don't apply because there are no examples to examine. Quite apart from the fact that you can't have physical laws if you have 'nothing', physical laws don't and can't do anything with 'something', never mind with 'nothing' . Hawking has the whole thing round the wrong way: physical laws don't make things happen, or ensure that things happen, or prevent things from happening: they are merely abstract descriptions of the things that actually do happen.
Our universe and its laws appear to have a design that is tailor-made to support us That is not easily explained and raises the natural question of why it is that way… The discovery relatively recently of the extreme fine-tuning of so many of the laws of nature could lead at least some of us back to the old idea that this grand design is the work of some grand designer….That is not the answer of modern science…our universe seems to be one of many, each with different laws.
Oh, here we go again, just as with Richard Dawkins , that tired old despicable 'multiverse' argument gift miles flight information american status airline and the anthropic principle get trotted out, that miserable gift miles flight information american status airline refuge that if there are trillions upon trillions of universes with all sorts of different laws, surely one of them is going to come up trumps as a good one, like the one we are in. That atheistic admixture of Micawberism and the best of all possible