Posts Tagged stephen hawking
Hawking Keeps Hacking: “Philosophy is Dead”
Posted by Wes Alwan in Web Detritus on September 7, 2010
Apparently Stephen Hawking not only thinks that spontaneous creation from nothingness is somehow a scientific concept: he also claims that “philosophy is dead” (and as I point out, this is hardly surprising given the core anti-intellectualism lurking behind his amateur philosophizing).
Here’s a reaction from Burke’s Corner:
In his failure to exercise modesty in his pursuit of scientific knowledge, Hawking makes a particularly startling claim – that “philosophy is dead“. From Plato and Aristotle to Maimonides and Aquinas to Kant and Hegel, Hawking dismisses how the human mind across cultures and millenia has reflected on transcendence and humanity’s place in a vast universe. Hawking’s lack of humility before this endeavour is staggering. In her Absence of Mind, Marilynne Robinson rightly states that this approach to science excludes “the whole enterprise of metaphysical thought,” despite metaphysical reflection being a defining characteristic of the human experience.
Stephen Hawking: “Nothing” has more explanatory value than “God”
Posted by Wes Alwan in Web Detritus on September 7, 2010
Stephen Hawking makes perhaps one of the dumbest forays by a scientist into philosophy that I have ever seen:
That is not the answer of modern science. As recent advances in cosmology suggest, the laws of gravity and quantum theory allow universes to appear spontaneously from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist. It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going.
Well that settles it. Something spontaneously arose out of nothing. No need for an explanation of that. Move on people, nothing mysterious here, stop asking questions. The blue touch paper lit itself, and there is something called “nothingness” which contains that blue torch paper as well as laws governing it. Perhaps this is all, in some Deepak Chopra sense, true. But it is not “the answer of modern science.” It is purely speculative, and whether we want to use the word “God” to describe the mystery of spontaneous generation or leave it at a nothing containing the seed of spontaneous generation seems to be a semantic distinction, with the latter in no way naturalizing or demystifying the former.
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