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• Included in the Stephen Hawking Posts List.
• I have always been fascinated by the intersection of science and faith, but my research shows that scientists are often quite hostile to the idea of God.

Martin Winfree
January 9, 2023 at 11:35 AM
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Shared with Public

Happy New Year!

Here’s something for y’all to think about; more coming.

(Part I)

I’m not sure why I am doing this. God certainly doesn’t need any of my help, and what chance do I really have of helping people see God as something real in the universe? I have always been fascinated by the intersection of science and faith; but my readings and my research into scientific matters shows, time and again, that scientists are often not merely indifferent to the idea of God, they can be quite hostile.

Why is that, I wonder? Do they think of invoking God as some sort of copout, when no scientific answer is forthcoming? Is worship to them something from our species’ primitive beginnings that is best forgotten in this so-called modern age? Not sure. But I have posted about this subject before; see my December 2009 post, dating from my early months on Facebook, “Scientific Proof of the Existence of God“.

I am in the process of reading Stephen Hawking’s final book, Brief Answers to the Big Questions. So, I figure, if Stephen Hawking can tackle the Big Questions, why not me? Perhaps some of my assertions will seem naïve to more scientific-minded people out there; my sister Julie observed as much about one of my recent posts about abortion. But many thought of Albert Einstein’s political views as being naïve as well, so I am okay with that.

I am in total awe of the brilliance, the achievements, the determination, the courage of Stephen Hawking – how he was able to become the greatest and most renowned scientist during my lifetime, and being married twice and fathering three children, while living for several decades in the throes of debilitating motor neurone disease, is beyond my capacity to understand. Stephen Hawking’s best-known book, A Brief History of Time (1988) is one of the best-selling science books of all time, with 25 million copies sold. The book was also the basis for an absorbing film, also called A Brief History of Time (1991).

The first Big Question in Brief Answers to the Big Questions, not surprisingly, is God; specifically, his Chapter 1 is entitled, “Is There a God?”. His conclusion is: “We are each free to believe what we want, and it’s my view that the simplest explanation is that there is no God. No one created the universe, and no one directs our fate.”

Now, I could not even begin to match wits with the great physicist. I’m just talking here, that’s all. I was first told about Stephen Hawking by my mentor during the early years of my career as a commercial real estate appraiser.

I cannot disagree that Stephen Hawking’s conclusion is the “simplest explanation”; I would submit, however, that we do not know enough about the Universe to know whether this is the correct explanation. Speaking for myself, I take the existence of God on faith. In fact, after writing the first sentence in this paragraph, I found a quote from Carl Sagan along these lines; Sagan is another legendary scientist who caught the imagination of the general public:

“An atheist is someone who is certain that God does not exist, someone who has compelling evidence against the existence of God. I know of no such compelling evidence. Because God can be relegated to remote times and places and to ultimate causes, we would have to know a great deal more about the universe than we do now to be sure that no such God exists. To be certain of the existence of God and to be certain of the nonexistence of God seem to me to be the confident extremes in a subject so riddled with doubt and uncertainty as to inspire very little confidence indeed.”

First off, almost every place I go, almost everything I think about, almost every person I meet, almost every creature and almost every plant I view – all of it simply screams out: “Not Random!” That is all you have, after all, once you discard the idea of God: Random chance. Stuff just happened. I don’t buy it.

I remember my junior high school biology class, where we viewed supposedly primitive lifeforms under a microscope. The first, naturally, was an amoeba. I remember looking at this critter with all of this stuff inside, including a nucleus and who knows what else; and thinking: “This is the simplest lifeform? It sure doesn’t look like it to me!” The second one we viewed was a paramecium; and that one is so complex that I wondered why a paramecium is described as being only one cell.

Carl Sagan often talked about what billions upon billions of years of evolution can accomplish; for example: “We are the representatives of the cosmos; we are an example of what hydrogen atoms can do, given 15 billion years of cosmic evolution.” “What hydrogen atoms can do” . . . think on that for a moment. Scientists are willing to talk about what atoms can do, or what cells can do, or what DNA molecules can do; but not what God might do.

Quotations like this one were so indelibly linked with him that Sagan was popularly but incorrectly credited with the phrase, “billions and billions”. He was rankled about this misquotation for much of his life, but Carl Sagan finally gave in and named his final book after the phrase: Billions and Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millennium (1997).

So, what about that? How many billions of years are we talking about? Yes, the Universe is approximately 13.8 billion years old. Yes, the Earth is approximately 4.54 billion years old, or roughly one-third of the estimated life of the Universe as a whole. Yes, there has been liquid water on Earth – considered to be essential for the development of life as we know it – for almost all of that time, beginning about 4.40 billion years ago. Yes, there has been life on Earth for most of that time also: The earliest lifeforms on Earth showed up between 4.28 and 3.77 billion years ago. Everything on Earth happened really quickly in the Beginning.

But after that? Not so much. For over half of the time that life has been on Earth, all of it was bacteria. Yes: all of it. Eukaryotic cells, that is, cells that have a nucleus – which include all plants and all animals – showed up by 1.85 billion years ago. The first protozoa, marking the beginning of animal life, date to about 750 million years ago – about ¾ billion years ago, in other words. The famous Cambrian Explosion, when most modern animal Phyla appear – a Phylum is the biological grouping just below a Kingdom – happened between 580 and 500 million years ago; that’s about ½ billion years ago.

How about mammals? The first monotreme mammals date from 115 million years ago, or around 1/10 billion years ago. Monotremes are egg-laying mammals; only two are known today, the echidna and the duckbill platypus of Australia, although platypuses themselves don’t show up in the fossil record until 9 million years ago.

Moving on, the first members of the genus Homo, i.e., Homo habilis, appear in the fossil record about 2 million years ago. And, you know, us? Homo sapiens? We came along around 250 thousand years ago. Let’s see, that’s 0.025% of a billion years ago, or 25/100,000 of a billion years ago.

Maybe Carl Sagan should have been talking more about “millions and millions” of years ago, or even “thousands and thousands” of years ago, at least when it comes to human evolution. But then again, this argument kind of falls flat when we are talking about periods of time which are that short. At least, IMHO it does.