in for the shit storm.

Groan.

Does he explain how gravity came about? Or why? Or was it always there? Without a beginning? Is there an end?

Why should we be surprised about his views? I don't understand how anyone could be genuinely surprised at the position he takes on the origin of the universe.

what exactly are you looking to discuss?

Atheism sells books - Dawkins learned that and has raked in the $$$.

Hawking probably figures it's his turn to milk the cow.

Apparently his thesis is that the universe as we know it is an inevitable consequence of the laws of physics (which is not unreasonable to me). However those laws are completely random.


I'm OK with the first part, but really can't muster up the faith to believe him on the second part.

Gravity is a law that was formed during the planck epoch of the big bang.  Unless you accept the graviton theory
The Big bang was the beginning.

I beleive in the Big Freeze and maximum entropy. To me this is the most logical

I think what he was stating in the book is not necessarily "There is no God, see I have equations that prove it"

What he is saying, is that everything balances out.  According to physics, there is no mysterious, unaccounted for "jump start" to the universe.  That's not to say that there is not a God, but that there is not a "God-shaped hole" in physics.  I will be curious to read about this more in depth than just what the news article has to say, however, as it is my understanding that there are a few particles and concepts that are merely a theoretical framework, as yet unproven, so obviously, if physicists run into an unknown and throw in some constant to make the equations balance, there will be no missing pieces.

I don't think he was making some big atheist pronouncement that he had disproved God.

I allways find it interesting how those that don't believe in the God's C reation, Will create all kinds of ideas and theory's claiming something came from nothing. By definition nothing =nothing. I am in. This should be good. I am ready hear their latest high doller educated

Actually, there is a God-shaped hole in physics.  It is called a singularity and they theoretically exist at the center of a black holes.  Gravity is the cause of it.  We don't know what causes it (gravity).  We know what it does though, but not what causes it.  You can talk about curved space/time until you are blue in the face, but why does mass curve space/time.

Ask a physicist about them and how they work and what goes on there.  They will just look at you.  Both relativity and quantum theories break down when trying to describe a singularity.  Divide by zero failure.  If I remember correctly, relativistic modeling of a singularity leads to an infinite answer and quantum modeling leads to infinite infinities.  Either case, it is .

"Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist," Hawking writes.

He can believe that nothing created everything, but he can't believe that there is an intelligent designer? He can believe whatever he wants,
but I will have to disagree with him on this one. I think it is sad how these brilliant men who are atheist struggle when they try to find the meaning
of life. They usually end up very bitter.

Rom 1:20- For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead, so that they are without excuse,  
Rom 1:21- because, although they knew God, they did not glorify Him as God, nor were thankful, but became futile in their thoughts, and their foolish hearts were darkened.  
Rom 1:22- Professing to be wise, they became fools,  

The poster can believe in a prime mover who pushes out the breadth and depth of creation, and that that prime mover has no creator, but finds it strange, ridiculous and worthy of contempt that someone can believe that there is no prime mover?



< Last comment removed.  Please read the tacked threads at the top before posting further in this forum. HS >

I certainly wish I knew more about physics to be able to discuss the matter with some intelligence, but my point is that he appears simply to be saying, there is nothing in physics which demonstrates that everything must have been started by an outside source.  He's not saying "There is no God", he's not saying, "I've disproven God", only that there is no evidence in physics for which God is the only possible solution.  He's simply saying that there's no physical evidence of God's existence, which we all know already - there's nothing groundbreaking here.

His statement that, "Because of gravity, everything starts itself..." is obviously a gross oversimplification for the benefit of news article.  If you were as smart as Stephen Hawking, you'd have to dumb things down for the general public as well.  I'm interested to read his book.

Sad, but everybody who rejects the concept of God MUST replace Him with something. In this case, God got replaced by gravity.

Who created your prime mover?

False.  You are speaking from a perspective of someone who believes in a thing and then applies that thing to everything around you.  For a non-believer it isn't about disproving god or replacing god with something.  It is simply that they believe in the scienctific explanation and not the religous one.  Trying to replace something that you don't believe in doesn't make any since from a philisophical perspective because it was never there and thus does not need to be replaced.  

Also, gravity isn't an alternative explanation to creationism.  No one has ever asked, "how did we all end up on earth" only to be told that it was because of gravity.  Gravity may keep us here but it didn't put us here.  So, even if your statement that 'everyone who rejects the concept of God must replace him with something' was even acceptable gravity wouldn't be what was used to replace it.

Finally, referring to god as 'him' really degrades your argument because it takes something said to be all powerful and brings it down to our level.  Christians refer to god as if it were a person all of the time.  I guess it is easier to comprehend a relationship with something tangible and since people feel as though they have a relationship with god they make that leap.  However, telling someone that HE is an all powerful being not bound by space and time doesn't add up.

500 years ago humans thought maggots came from rancid meat and rats came from old rags, we now know this is not true
600 yrs ago humans thought the earth was flat, we now know this is not true
2500 yrs ago humans thought the sun and the moon were Gods, we now know this is not true.
When I was 2 years old I could't read and write, now I can

Humans as individuals and as a speices learn and become smarter, just because we don't know something rigth at the moment doesn't mean we won't

But at least we are smart enough as a race to know that we don't know the answers and to start looking, this is science.

Louis Pasteur, Christopher Colombus and Nikolas Copernicus were all devout Christians.  

The premise that an appreciation of science inherently predisposes a person to atheism is FALSE.

Any study of the history of science shows that Christians have contributed mightily to scientific understanding.  The pioneer of genetics was an Augustinian Priest, for example.

and Galilo was forced to spend the rest of his life under house arrest because the church thought his discoveries went against the Bible

I was just making a point that if humans don't understand something we try (or at least should try) to understand why, instead if just shrugging our shoulders and saying God did it.

Galileo remained a devout Christian even in the face of his dispute with the Church.  The way atheists try and use him to illustrate their anti-God agenda is extremely disingenuous.

I wasn't making a point about his personal beliefs but how the church reacted to something they didn't like because they did not know at the time.
When Mike Brown discovered Eris was he forced to live the rest of his life locked in his home? (I'll admit I don't know his religous veiws) No he wasn't.
This is because humans got smarter and realize there are other things out there we didn't yet understand.
So just relying on the theaching of a 2000+ years old book with very little if any substantiation for the answers to everything does not make sence to an inquisitive species such as humans

and on a side note I'm not an atheists and don't have an anti-God agenda, anti-religion maybe, anti-God no.

what does all of this have to do with good science verse make it up as you go along science. What science claims as truth today will be proven false tommorow. God is the same yesterday today and tommorow.

But God would have came from nothing.

God did not come from nothing. God always was, even before time.
here is the begining of time.
Genesis 1:1
1 In the beginning (the starting point of time) God created the heavens and the earth.

John 1:1-5
1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
2 He was in the beginning with God.
3 All things were made through Him, and without Him nothing was made that was made.
4 In Him was life, and the life was the light of men.
5 And the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it. (darkness does not understand light and darkness would be those who would argue against God)

I've always viewed a lot of science as stating your latest views as proven fact, until they are dis-proven, and then stating the latest theory as fact.

Lather, rinse, repeat.

And no man can disprove the existence of God, he can only put forth a theory.

What is the context in which gravity existed prior to the existence of the universe?

That's not a hole in science?

That was my thought too. If there is no matter, what mass with gravity is effecting the nothing to cause spontaneous creation of matter?

Not to carry this hijack too far, but Galileo continued to write and study under his 'house arrest'.  Both sides of that story, Galileo's 'opposition' to the Church and the Church's 'persecution' of Galileo, are hugely distorted.

Exactly.  Gravity, like time, is inseparably connected to materiality.

All modernism boils down to materialism, I'm convinced of that - they can't accept that something stands outside the material world and preexisted it.

What would you consider "make it up as you go along science"?

When you have something you don't understand, you sit down, think about it, and creat a hypothesis. This is made up as you go along, but is tested to prove or dis-prove the idea.

But science that is just made up as you go alon is not science. And considering Hawking is one of the greatest physicist to ever live, he's not just guessing, he can back up his facts with math, and math is the absoult truth in the universe.

EDT: God may stay the same but the way people use Him changes over the course of time, ie. the Earth is the center of the universe

For any serious discussion, I'd assume we'd need to read the book rather than just reading a few select clips from the drive by media.

Could not the same be said about the an atheistic universe?





If god could always exist, than a natural potential for the universe could similarly always have existed.





Faith aside, there is no need for the uncased cause to be a conscious all powerful, omnipotent being.





Will you admit that?
 

"One of the greatest physicist to ever live   he's not just guessing, he can back up his facts with math, and math is the absoult truth in the universe. (well the not so smart Hawking seems to have forgot that 0+0=0 or 0/0=0 or 0x0=0 will always =0) Now the bible teaches that God spoke the the heavens and earth into being. God did this in 6 days. Hawking has to us concepts already created by The God of Creation to expline why we need a little of this and a little that, shake it up pour it out and super bango presto universo. lol

Really? I'd love to see the mathematical proof on that one.
 

This is based on the vague teachings of a 2000k year old book, with no evidence to support such claims.
and I disagree, it's not 0x0=0, it's energy=mass at rest x the constant squared = science

Also, becuse you don't understand the mathematics behind something doesn't mean the person who developed the theory is "not so smart"

Ohhh...you have gone done it now! That is called logic my friend and it can just cause a big ol stink.

i was hopeing for a better defense than na na na you don't understand the math involved. Problem is any first grade student understands that 0+0=0 that is a constant and does not change unless you use, what The God of Creation already spoke into exsistance  mass, energry, light, gravity,velocity,time.

Here is another article about Stephen Hawking's new book. I liked the last paragraph.

" But this is naive. The science-religion relationship, in so far as there is one, continues to be a crowd-pleaser. It seems to be a fundamental law of PR that the God-science debate is a sure-fire source of publicity. Always welcome when one has a book to sell. "
Link



Has Stephen Hawking ended the God debate?
Stephen Hawking has declared that his latest work shows there was no creator of the universe. But we shouldn't imagine that will settle the God vs science debate, says Graham Farmelo.

By Graham Farmello
Published: 9:20AM BST 03 Sep 2010


Hawking says science will explain the beginning of the universe Photo: PA God did not create the universe, Stephen Hawking revealed yesterday. In the flurry of publicity preceding his new book, The Grand Design, to be published next week, he does some serious dissing of the Almighty, declaring him/her/it irrelevant. The point is, he says, that our universe followed inevitably from the laws of nature. But, we might ask, where did they come from?

It is perhaps a bit rich for Hawking to make God redundant after granting him/her/it a celebrity cameo at the end of his multi-million selling A Brief History of Time. In his famous conclusion to the book, Hawking wrote that if scientists could find the most fundamental laws of nature "then we should know the mind of God". To be fair, he was writing metaphorically – we all know what he meant.

He now suggests that the search for this particular Holy Grail is over, now that scientists have come up with a type of theory, known as M-theory, that may describe the behaviour of all the fundamental particles and force, and even account for the very birth of the universe. If this theory is backed up by experiment, it might perhaps replace all religious accounts of creation – in Hawking's capacious mind, it already has.

The science-religion debate has been going on since science was born, centuries ago. Until relatively recently, it seemed to have quietened down, but now Hawking and others have brought it back into the limelight. It's striking that the scientists who contribute most vociferously to the arguments work in the field of evolutionary biology and fundamental physics. These, at least superficially, appear to be the territories where science and religion can make conflicting claims, leading us to ask which has the better case. But are they alternatives? Is there really any serious argument between the two?

Science and religion are about fundamentally different things. No religion has ever been rendered obsolete by facts or observations, but this happens to most scientific theories, at least in the long run. Science advances over the wreckage of its theories by continually putting theoretical ideas to experimental test; no matter how beautiful a theoretical idea might be, it must be discarded if it is at odds with experiment. Like any other human activity, science has flaws and does not always flow smoothly, but no one can seriously doubt the progress it has made in helping us understand the world and in helping to underpin technology.

A useful characteristic of a scientific theory is that it must be possible, at least in principle, for experimenters to prove it wrong. Newton and Darwin, two of the greatest theoreticians, both set out ideas in this way, putting their heads on Nature's chopping block. In Newton's case, at least, his ideas have been superseded after proving inadequate in some circumstances. Unlike many religions, science has no final authority; the Royal Society, the UK academy of sciences, expresses this neatly in its motto "Take nobody's word for it".

No religion has ever been set out in terms of scientific statements. This is why scientists are able to mock the claims of religions but have never been able to deal a knock-out blow: in the end, a religious believer can always fall back on a faith that does not depend on verification.

The most famous atheist scientist of our times is the fearless Richard Dawkins, whose God Delusion set out to discredit religion once and for all. For him, it was Darwin's theory of evolution that dealt the fatal blow to religious belief. Powerful and eloquent though it was, religion continues to flourish, and scientists (albeit a minority) continue to go to church, just as Galileo, Newton, Faraday and others have done in the past. I suspect that none of them would have abandoned their respective faiths after reading Dawkins (admittedly, not a scientific statement). Religions will survive so long as they steer clear of making statements that can be shown to be factually wrong.

The kind of science done by Stephen Hawking, one of the leading theoretical physicists of modern times, has an almost religious ring to it. He and his colleagues are trying to find the patterns in the basic fabric of reality – the mathematical laws that govern the workings of nature at its finest level. There is plenty of evidence that these laws hold good all the way back to the beginning of time, which is how scientists have put together an extremely detailed and well-tested theory of the Big Bang, the first few minutes of the universe. The Large Hadron Collider will soon be reproducing, at will, the conditions in the universe within a billionth of a second of the beginning of time.

This has led writers to invest these experiments with a theological significance. The distinguished experimenter Leon Lederman labelled the Higgs particle, being sought at the Collider, as the God Particle, with no good reason except as a hook to promote his book, which he named after it. Yet these experiments will tell us nothing about God. They will simply steer us towards an improved theoretical understanding of our material universe, ultimately in terms of principles set out in mathematics.

Yet this is where religion can sneak back into the picture. Einstein, to the frustration of many of his colleagues, was fond of referring to God when he was talking about the laws expressing the fundamental harmonies of the universe. As Dawkins rightly stresses, it is quite clear that Einstein did not think of God as a white-bearded benefactor capable of interfering with the functioning of the universe. Rather, Einstein followed closely the views of the philosopher Spinoza, for whom the concept of God is an expression of the underlying unity of the universe, something so wondrous that it can command a spiritual awe.

Einstein's views were largely shared by his acquaintance Paul Dirac, the greatest English theoretician since Newton. Dirac, like Newton and Hawking, held the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics at Cambridge University. For Dirac, the greatest mystery of the universe was that its most fundamental laws can be expressed in terms of beautiful mathematical equations. Towards the end of his life, in the 1970s and early 1980s, Dirac often said that mathematical beauty "is almost a religion to me".

As a young man, he was an outspoken atheist, drawing his colleague Wolfgang Pauli to comment, "There is no God and Dirac is his prophet." Decades later, in 1963, Dirac was happy to use theological imagery: "God is a mathematician of a very high order." He was speaking metaphorically, but we know what he meant. Yet I think it is misleading, especially when talking about science to non-specialists, to play fast and loose with the idea of God.

Hawking's view appears to be that the belief in a God-created universe can be supplanted by a belief in M-theory, a good candidate for a fundamental theory of nature at its finest level. Experts assure us of the potential of this theory and I for one am quite prepared to believe them.

One problem with the theory is that it looks as though it will be extremely difficult to test, unless physicists can build a particle accelerator the size of a galaxy. Even if the experimenters find a way round this and M-theory passes all their tests, the reasons for the mathematical order at the heart of the universe's order would remain an unsolvable mystery.

Even religious scientists – and there are still a few – never use the God concept in their scientific work. Perhaps it is time for a moratorium on the use of the concept in popularisations, too? This would avoid mixing up scientific and non-scientific statements and put an end to the consequent confusions. I think it wise for scientists and religious believers to keep out of each other's territory – no good has come out of their engagement and I suspect it never will.

But this is naive. The science-religion relationship, in so far as there is one, continues to be a crowd-pleaser. It seems to be a fundamental law of PR that the God-science debate is a sure-fire source of publicity. Always welcome when one has a book to sell.

This sentence is important.



Its the equivalent of the science community saying "Cool story bro."



Unless something can be tested, there is no way to verify it scientifically.



What is boils down to is this: The math may look pretty, but that doesn't mean its true.
 

This isn't the point.  Science is the study of our world and per every christian that I have ever talked to god exists beyond space and time.  No one in their right mind is going to try to disprove god to a believer because you will believe on faith and faith alone which means that it is a fools errand to debate the point with you.  Science simply looks at the world around us and attempts to explain it with generally accepted scientific principles.  People trying to disprove god either miss the point or they are trying to sell something.

So a God can come from nothing and create everything, but a singularity can't?

The Bible isn't a scientific book, it doesn't answer any scientific questions, it doesn't offer any reasoning (other than the vauge God did it) or proof.
There are no physical reasons that 99.999% of it should be believed, and therefore can not be qualified as evidence of a Creator.

Well said,
The red is also true for Christians and any religion that try to use the Bible or other Holy book as evidence that their was no big bang, evolution, old age universe ect. to someone that looks at the facts of science

I see your error in understanding,God did not come from nothing. The Lord God of Creation always was no begining no end.I know it is hard for humans with a capcit;y to reason confined between to ears to try and understand this.

Assuming you believe He has always been (which is physically impossible, everything has a begining) that does not refute my statement about the singularity and the facts (or lack there of) of the Bible

And for the 10,000th time, logically, the "universe" (using that term a little incorrectly) itself could fit the same criteria.
No god needed.





A theist says "god always existed, he is outside of our physical reality", and atheist says "the potential for the universe always existed, it is outside of our physical reality."





Its the same damned argument.  The only difference between the two is if the "higher order" is a conscious omnipotent being or not.  An atheist assumes it is not, an theist assumes that it is.  







I have yet to see a theist who can admit this.
 

"The only difference between the two is if the "higher order" is a conscious omnipotent being or not. An atheist assumes it is not, an theist assumes that it is."

Well.....it sounds like we'd both agree that the boundaries of science lie exactly right there, don't they?

"I am very astonished that the scientific picture of the real world around me is very deficient. It gives us a lot of factual information, puts all of our experience in a magnificently consistent order, but it is ghastly silent about all and sundry that is really near to our heart, that really matters to us. It cannot tell us a word about red and blue, bitter and sweet, physical pain and physical delight; it knows nothing of beautiful and ugly, good or bad, God and eternity. Science sometimes pretends to answer questions in these domains but the answers are very often so silly that we are not inclined to take them seriously."

––-Erwin Schroedinger, Nature and the Greeks, 1954.

That Schrodinger.....a pretty good metaphysical philosopher he was.  Stephen Hawking....not so much.

This is far different than what I've read and heard represented as the atheist position.  Most of the atheists I've ever discussed this with reject the idea of a 'higher order' out of hand, claiming that nothing existed before matter and that what we perceive as a preexisting 'order' is simply a reflection of how matter spontaneously 'ordered' itself.

To me, that's the defining characteristic of atheism, its radical materialism - nothing existed before matter and everything, even our very consciousness, can only be properly understood in material terms (a worldview atheists conveniently like to equate as synonomus with science, although it's not in the least).

Although this is more a discussion of idealistic metaphysics v. materialistic metaphysics.

I would argue precisely the opposite that you do and say that anyone who believes that order preexisted matter is by definition an idealist and already a theist in all but name only.