Thursday, 2 September 2010
Life, The Universe and Everything
This notion strikes me as rather attractive, perhaps because it's a thoroughly humanising scientific account of the origins of the universe - and it seems to chime with the feeling we all get from time to time (or is it just me?) that perhaps the whole thing is a set-up, someone's idea of a joke. Of course, it begs the question of where these intelligent beings and their original starter universe came from - who made that one? Meanwhile, everyone's favourite genius scientist Stephen Hawking has made up his mind that there's no need for a God to be involved in creating the universe. I don't know quite what he means by 'because there is a law such as gravity' - is gravity a law, and how does its existence mean that the universe can create itself from nothing? He seems to have a strange idea of a 'personal God' too - 'a personal God that you could meet, and ask questions.' I doubt that many believers in a personal God would expect to meet Him and ask Him questions - in fact that God sounds more like the kind of intelligent entity envisaged in the other theory, the 'designer universe' one. And to the question 'Why?' the answer would apparently be 'Because we could'.
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The idea that it's all a put-up job must be as old as the hills. Buddhism, for example, proposes that the self, our personality, is an illusion and doesn't really exist. There is no me. I wonder if the queasy feeling we all sometimes have that consciousness is a trick we can never quite see behind has now found its way into a grand scientific theory about the universe. Anyway, as you suggest, the idea sounds more appealing that the notion of God as the Principal of an Oxbridge College.
ReplyDelete“There’s no God” announced Stephen Hawking,
ReplyDeleteThe result was a great deal of squawking,
‘Til someone came clean
That his voicebox machine
Had been sabotaged by Richard Dawking*
*(sic).