- Included in the Stephen Hawking Posts List.
- Perhaps religion and science alike might understand each other better if they both face up to the fact that neither has all of the answers.
(Part VI)
So, returning to Stephen Hawking’s quotation in Brief Answers to the Big Questions that I have been examining here – “The basic assumption of science is scientific determinism” – what do we have here? Well, they aren’t called the “big questions” for nothing. Trying to get to ultimate causes and likely beginnings is the tallest of tall orders. Almost anything that could be expounded, by me or anyone else, is open to attack. In other words: If you don’t like what I have been saying, have at it! 
I can take it.
As I see it, inertia is an important factor here. Religions, and Christianity specifically, are in the Truth business – something that was True thousands of years ago is still True. I can go along with that to a certain extent, needless to say. However, humanity lives a lot differently and knows a lot more about the Earth and the Universe than was the case in Old Testament days – in other words, during the Bronze Age. The Church cannot successfully pretend that science and modernity don’t need to be positively acknowledged in their teachings, without seeing their influence in the world continue to erode.
The wonder is that the great majority of the stories and concepts and moral precepts in the Bible are just as valid in modern times. Not everything, of course – slavery was a fact of life when the Old Testament as well as the New Testament were written, rendering some Biblical passages uncomfortable reading. How the Church has treated and continues to treat the LGBTQ community is a more recent issue that refuses to go away.
The tendency is that the big questions are answered from untenable and extreme positions. Either God created the Heavens and the Earth and is still fully in charge – so life is simply what detractors sometimes describe as “God’s great puppet show”? – or there is no point to anything; all is just random chance and chaos. Can there be no middle position here? To me, life is just not that simple.
It seems clear to me that God does NOT know everything that is going to happen. That kind of omniscience is counter to science and is also not representative of what happens in the Bible, when God as well as Jesus are regularly surprised by what people say and do. Certainly, God has a Plan and might know the big picture; but not all of the details, I think.
I grew up in the Presbyterian Church, and that denomination is known for believing in predestination – many people have a lot of issues with that, including me. Although I don’t remember all of the details now, my most vivid memory of Sunday School in my boyhood days was a presentation that examined all sides of the predestination question, and arriving at questionable if not startling conclusions for all of them.
But inertia is an issue for science as well. Even though scientists are not aiming for capital-T Truth, the findings of science are still seen as being true; and the history of science also stretches back thousands of years. Hanging on to 19th and 20th Century frameworks like scientific determinism and the Standard Model of particle physics as though nothing has changed is just as problematic as the moss-backed attitudes of some religious personages.
One example of those changes is something that I stated in Part III: “[C]onsidering that dark matter and dark energy are not represented at this time, just 5% of the Universe is accounted for in the Standard Model”. Not only that: In order to allow for the existence of the Universe and of life as we know it, dark matter and dark energy are as finely tuned as is the case with ordinary matter and energy. Is that just luck – or something else?
Scientists don’t like to address such things and usually fall back on some variation of the “anthropic principle”. As taken from a book guide on the website Shortform.com about Stephen Hawking’s best-known book A Brief History of Time (1988): “The weak anthropic principle (WAP) states that you observe the universe having the right parameters to allow your existence because if it had different parameters that didn’t allow you to exist, you wouldn’t be here to observe it. Hawking acknowledges that the weak anthropic principle is true, but points out that it doesn’t really explain why the universe is the way it is.”
Borrowing a quote from my 2009 post called “Scientific Proof of the Existence of God”, here is what I said about the fine-tuning issue: “Now, the curious thing about dark energy is that it, too, is finely tuned so as to allow for the existence of the Universe and life: The amount of dark energy is just enough to accelerate the expansion of the Universe, but not enough to make the Universe tear itself apart. In this instance, however, the ‘just right’ aspect of dark energy involves more than one-half of the entire Universe. The Nobel-Prize–winning physicist Steven Weinberg of the University of Texas has been quoted as saying: ‘This is the one fine-tuning that seems to be extreme, far beyond what you could imagine just having to accept as a mere accident.’”
I mentioned Steven Weinberg’s book about the Big Bang, The First Three Minutes (1977) in Part III of these posts, not recalling that I had previously included one of his quotes in “Scientific Proof of the Existence of God”.
A final thought that I have here is about relativity. Considering that Albert Einstein was still alive when I was born, it is difficult for me to wrap my head around the idea that the theory of relativity is now well over 100 years old; from Wikipedia: “The theory of relativity usually encompasses two interrelated theories by Albert Einstein: special relativity and general relativity, proposed and published in 1905 and 1915, respectively.” Likewise, however, as I mentioned in Part II, the stark incompatibility of two major scientific theories, relativity and quantum mechanics, also dates back 100 years.
Perhaps religion and science alike might understand each other better if they both face up to the fact that neither has all of the answers.