Did God Just Lose the Argument?

Spirituality Column #201
September 14, 2010
Current in Carmel - Current in Westfield - Current in Noblesville
(Indianapolis north suburban home newspapers)

Did God Just Lose the Argument?
By Bob Walters

Some years ago I picked up Prof. Stephen Hawking’s popular 1988 physics book, A Brief History of Time.

About halfway through, I realized I was mentally overmatched. I generally enjoy complex reading, but Hawking is one smart dude and the physics of time is one mammoth mental challenge. Time, so to speak, wasn’t on my side. I put it down.

It’s not the only book I couldn’t finish the first time I picked it up. The Bible was like that. I grew up Christian and understood I was supposed to believe the Bible, but on several attempts, I couldn’t understand the Bible. Even in English, it seemed like a foreign language.

That changed about 10 years ago when, in my mid-forties, the eyes of my heart opened to the meaning of the Bible. I read it, I got it, I still read it, and I still learn new things every time I open it.

Hawking – who closed Time stating that when man achieved a complete understanding of science, it would “reveal the mind of God” – has published a new book this month, The Grand Design. In it he reverses field and announces that God is unnecessary to the universe and irrelevant to Creation.

“Because there is a law such as gravity,” Hawking writes, “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.”

So God, it is widely reported, has been declared not only irrelevant but nonexistent. Stephen Hawking said so.

Let’s not panic and think that settles it.

Hawking, recently retired, held the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics at Cambridge University, England, a post once held by Sir Isaac Newton. Suffering life-long ill health and confined, paralyzed, in a wheel chair, Hawking is the most celebrated scientist on the planet since Albert Einstein.

It is beyond odd that a guy that smart would claim that physical “law” and “gravity” had to exist for “spontaneous creation” (on its own) to happen. It’s borderline hopeful that academics and secularists, despite their initial “God is gone” glee, could not overlook that statement’s inherent oxymoron: that gravity had to exist before the universe could independently, exclusively, and spontaneously create itself.

Even secular CNN quickly asked: Who created gravity?

Good question. I, for one, don’t think Prof. Hawking’s mathematical mastery has sufficient gravity to unseat God as Creator.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) is pretty sure Hawking has underestimated God.