Throw away your bibles and buy Hawking's book.
Fri, 3. September 2010
The Hawking Proclamation
"It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going. To understand the universe, it's necessary to know both how and why it behaves the way it does. Physics can explain things without the need for a benevolent creator who made the Universe for our benefit."
Stephen Hawking, one of the world's most respected astro-physicists, has repudiated Sir Isaac Newton's theory that God must have created the Solar System because it couldn't have come into being through natural events. He said the discovery of planets orbiting other stars "makes the coincidences of our planetary conditions far less remarkable and far less compelling as evidence that the Earth was carefully designed just to please us human beings."
"Because there is a law such as gravity, the Universe can and will create itself from nothing."
This proclamation might be one of those turning points in the scientific enlightenment of the world, where public understanding of the Universe is dramatically influenced and boosted by what one inflential person said. I hope so and I predict that Hawking's comments (which admittedly were a long time coming) will ignite a long debate on something that has long been swept under the carpet. Many people will not like Hawking's statements one bit - but they will no longer be able to ignore it. The more they protest, the more silly their arguments look and the more they draw attention to what Hawking said.
It took several centuries of denial and violent repression before religion came to terms with the Heliocentric Theory of the Solar System. Now everybody accepts that the Sun is at the centre of the Solar System. Copernicus and Galileo were vindicated and not long ago the previous Catholic leader finally apologised for the church's appalling attitude to them. Always denying progress, they are are now repudiating one of the world's finest brains. Who best to believe - an eminent scientist who changes his views to fit the facts or a group of dotty old men dressed in robes who will always deny the facts to suit their entrenched views? Some still reject the reality of Evolution - even after more than a century of hard evidence piling up - but their arguments are getting wackier and more desperate all the time. I hope it will not take them so long to accept the Hawking proclamation.
"Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the Universe exists, why we exist. It is not necessary to invoke God ...to ... set the Universe going."
It is now up to Hawking to properly explain to laymen in his book how something can come from nothing. It is also up to all of us to read it and try to understand it. Throw away your bibles and buy Hawking's book. The truth should not hurt and the world will be a better place if people find themselves adjusting their beliefs to suit the evidence, rather than the other way around.