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• Included in the Stephen Hawking Posts List.
• Stephen Hawking says in his book Brief Answers to the Big Questions: “I think belief in an afterlife is just wishful thinking.”

Martin Winfree
January 11, 2023 at 4:02 PM
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(Part II)

An observation by Stephen Hawking in his book Brief Answers to the Big Questions, specifically in the first chapter that is called “Is There a God?”, goes like this: “I think belief in an afterlife is just wishful thinking. There is no reliable evidence for it, and it flies in the face of everything we know in science.”

Now, at least Stephen Hawking didn’t parrot the usual dodge by saying something like: “I don’t believe in God, because there is no evidence for the existence of God.” But I think it is fair to say that belief in an afterlife – in other words, that our life on Earth is not the only life there is – is one of the most compelling reasons that people believe in God. I won’t get into that here, because these are posts that are mostly about Creation; except to note that evidence for an afterlife is clearly beyond the capability of science at this point in time, comparable to evidence about the existence of other universes in the so-called multiverse.

Anyway, science believes in a lot of things where there is no evidence. That has been true in centuries past, and it remains true today. For instance, before the nature of light was established as being simultaneously a wave and a particle, science invented a medium through which light waves would be transmitted that was colloquially called “the ether”. As described in Wikipedia: “Luminiferous æther or ether (‘luminiferous’, meaning ‘light-bearing’) was the postulated medium for the propagation of light.” Following the development of the special theory of relativity by Albert Einstein in 1905, as Wikipedia puts it: “[T]heories using a substantial æther fell out of use in modern physics, and are now replaced by more abstract models.”

More recently, there are “dark matter” and “dark energy”. Many years ago, scientists figured out that the amount of matter that could be viewed directly within a galaxy is not sufficient to keep the galaxy from flying apart based upon its observed orbital speeds. Thus, the concept of “dark matter” was born. Experimental evidence for the existence of dark matter is well documented – at least insofar as filling in the blanks of what quantities of matter would need to be present in a galaxy to provide all of the gravitational force needed – but many years of searching for even a single particle of dark matter have been entirely fruitless. Considering that even the infinitesimal neutrino has been found in nature, you would think that dark matter could be located as well.

Dark energy is even more mysterious. Earlier theories about the Big Bang proposed two possible endings of the Universe: Either there is enough gravitational force to eventually slow the expansion of the Universe that dates from the Big Bang, leading to a “Big Crunch” – and perhaps an emotionally satisfying cycle of Big Bangs and Big Crunches throughout Existence – or there isn’t, in which case the Universe simply expands forever. Instead, detailed measurements of supernovas dating from the late 1990’s established unexpectedly that the expansion of the Universe is accelerating. Science has no idea why that would be true, so the concept of “dark energy” was born. Somewhat surprisingly, Brief Answers to the Big Questions mentions the Big Crunch. The introductory matter states that Stephen Hawking wrote most of the book, but that other parts were assembled from his earlier papers, perhaps explaining why this somewhat out-of-date concept is discussed in passing.

The theory of relativity confirmed that matter and energy are basically the same thing, as illustrated in Albert Einstein’s most famous equation, and perhaps the most famous equation of all time, E = mc². Whatever dark matter and dark energy might be, there is a lot more of both of them than what is known as “ordinary (baryonic) matter”. Again from Wikipedia: “Assuming that the lambda-CDM model of cosmology is correct, as of 2013, the best current measurements indicate that dark energy contributes 68% of the total energy in the present-day observable universe. The mass–energy of dark matter and ordinary (baryonic) matter contributes 26% and 5%, respectively, and other components such as neutrinos and photons contribute a very small amount.”

I actually have no idea what the “lambda-CDM model of cosmology” is, but I suppose that it is currently the best theory about the earliest beginnings of the Universe. So, applying those percentages, about two-thirds of the Universe is dark energy, about one-fourth of the Universe is dark matter, and about one-twentieth of the Universe is regular matter/energy. Put another way, about 5 times as much dark matter exists as compared to regular matter/energy, and about 13 times as much dark energy exists as compared to regular matter/energy.

So, to return to the topic of God . . . Evidence of the existence of God, or evidence of the existence of an afterlife – what would that look like exactly? Warriors fighting dramatically with swirling, lighted swords, along with impressive parlor tricks like levitation and astral projection and throwing lightning bolts, plus cryptic pronouncements about The Force – would that do it? Or flows of light along the roots of enormous trees that have illuminated fruit and a globally interconnected ecosystem, along with animated thistledown plus a mysterious deity called Eywa – how about that?

As I see it, the enduring appeal of science-fiction epics like the Star Wars franchise and the Avatar franchise is due in no small part to those worlds having a greater connection to the spiritual realm than we seem to experience directly here on Earth. That kind of connection seems to me to be a basic human need. Among the myriad human communities that have existed on Earth over the millennia, all or virtually all of them believed in God; and a Supreme Being or Beings was typically at the heart of their belief system. Even these days, many if not most still at least pay lip service to the existence of God.

Science prides itself on having figured out almost everything about Creation – that there is really nothing left for God to do. Stephen Hawking introduces some other concepts that I had not heard before; as an example, he says in his book: “Time didn’t exist before the Big Bang so there is no time for God to make the universe in.” I would submit that time as we know it didn’t exist before the Big Bang, but Time for God could be a very different thing indeed.

IMHO, before taking this kind of forthright stance about Creation, science has a major incompatibility that needs to be solved which has been hanging around for a full century now: Albert Einstein’s world-famous theory of relativity is fully at odds with quantum mechanics, described in Wikipedia as being “a fundamental theory in physics that provides a description of the physical properties of nature at the scale of atoms and subatomic particles”. Einstein himself spent much of his later years trying without success to come up with a “theory of everything” that would resolve this glaring anomaly.

If that phrase rings a bell, you might be remembering the Oscar-winning film called The Theory of Everything (2014), about the life of Stephen Hawking and his first wife, Jane Hawking. At present, there is no theory of everything; as Wikipedia succinctly puts it: “Finding a theory of everything is one of the major unsolved problems in physics.”

And then, there is the uncertainty principle which states outright that some things cannot be known, or as stated in Wikipedia: “In quantum mechanics, the uncertainty principle (also known as Werner Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle) is any of a variety of mathematical inequalities asserting a fundamental limit to the accuracy with which the values for certain pairs of physical quantities of a particle, such as position (x) and momentum (p) can be predicted from initial conditions.”

One of the concepts derived from quantum mechanics is “virtual particles”; that is, pairs of particles that are winking in and out of existence continuously, everywhere. One of Stephen Hawking’s most celebrated insights, and one that bears his name, is that near the boundary of a black hole, one of such a pair of particles might be sucked into the black hole, while the other escapes from the influence of the black hole. This concept, called “Hawking radiation”, is a mechanism by which a black hole might eventually evaporate away into nothingness.

Of course, this is yet another scientific concept having no direct evidence; from Wikipedia: “The accuracy and use of virtual particles in calculations is firmly established, but as they cannot be detected in experiments, deciding how to precisely describe them is a topic of debate.”

This lack of evidence presents a difficult problem for science. For example, many scientists are wondering if there aren’t some other explanations for what we are calling dark matter and dark energy besides actual, unknown forms of matter and energy; much as the special theory of relativity eliminated the necessity for the existence of the ether.

Anyway, the concept of virtual particles has been expanded more recently – and not only in Brief Answers to the Big Questions; I read the same thing in Discover magazine many years ago – to the rather outrageous idea that the Universe might have spontaneously come into existence all by itself. As Stephen Hawking expresses the idea: “The universe is the ultimate free lunch”. I would submit instead that this property of quantum mechanics should be viewed as establishing scientifically that God COULD have created the Universe. The astronomical odds of an entire universe popping into existence is completely ridiculous to me, not least because the existence of even a single virtual particle has not been proved.