1 of 1- AKG
- Banned
Offline - Registered: 7/08/2015
- Posts: 375
Stephen Hawkins Classical Theism
I was surfing the web and found these links showing an interesting relationship between Hawking's idea of creation and Classical Theism:
So what do you guys think? Could Hawking's account of creation with further thought lend support to classical theism? I'm particularly interested in these phrases but I'm not sure if it's an accurate representation of Hawking's views considering he does not know much philosophy:
"But a system of laws is at least immaterial, right? So suppose we give Hawking the benefit of the doubt. He claims that the universe comes into being "from nothing." Yet he also says there is something prior to this nothing, which he calls "the laws of gravity and quantum theory." Since they exist, they have being. But they are, however, themselves immaterial. So Hawking postulates that the universe was created by an immaterial being"
"Let's assume that he wasn't serious when he said, "from nothing," but that he meant only "from no matter." (This is "nothing" only in the sense of "absence.") So Hawking says that once upon a time the universe [space-time manifold] did not exist. There is a "beginning" or "finiteness" to time," and therefore an "outside" to time. And the laws of physics somehow exist outside of time. He is flirting with Platonism here. I wonder if he knows it."
"This makes the Law the formal cause - i.e., "the form-specifying principle" - of that which would otherwise be formless."
"So according to Hawking, there was a beginning; and in the beginning was the Law and the Law was all there was; and without the Law nothing came to be. And the Law was an immaterial being that was pureλογοϛ. And this Law gave form to the void of pure potency, prime matter."
- iwpoe
- Member
Offline
- From: Knoxville, TN
- Registered: 6/26/2015
- Posts: 1,080
Re: Stephen Hawkins Classical Theism
This is good, but too apologetic. Hawking, if he'd ever bothered to thinking about this, would probably end up saying that the out-of-which isn't the laws as such but is describable in terms of nothing more than the laws of physics.
To say that a thing is done according to the laws of physics is not to say that the doer is the laws of physics. I mean, look, I think contemporary cosmology probably boils down to a highly sophisticated version of the old debate about whether matter is eternal or has a beginning, and what he really is going to mean is that there is an eternal present that generates everything which is exhaustively described by the physical sciences. This won't work, for reasons that will be obvious philosophically, but I guarantee Hawking will never cop to "immaterial (non-physical in any sense) laws which in some respect might imply a divinity, as such, generated the cosmos".
Last edited by iwpoe (3/05/2016 10:34 am)
Fighting to the death "the noonday demon" of Acedia.
My Books
It is precisely “values” that are the powerless and threadbare mask of the objectification of beings, an objectification that has become flat and devoid of background. No one dies for mere values.
~Martin Heidegger
- dingodile
- New member
Offline
- Registered: 3/02/2016
- Posts: 9
Re: Stephen Hawkins Classical Theism
I prefer the term "natural order" over "universe", but I guess "time-space manifold" will do as well. One way to approach Hawking's views is to ask whether the laws of physics are part of the natural order or not. If they are, then the next question is whether they are brute facts or is there something that explains why they are what they are.
If they are not part of the natural order, but stand in some kind of explanatory relation to it, then the natural order is the way it is because the laws are what they are. It's certainly fair to ask what the ontological status of those laws is, and how they can, of themselves, "give rise" to the natural order.
I don't think Hawking would take the second lemma and concede the existence of anything external to the natural order that stands in an explanatory relation to it. So he'd take the first, and accept that something must be a brute fact, and the laws of physics are as good a candidate as anything, and better than an immaterial personal agent.