Science and religion: Another ungodly squabble
Posted by Wendy King on 09/07/2010
WHEN a prominent man (or woman) of faith asserts the existence of God, nobody takes notice. But whenever a prominent scientist raises the opposite prospect, all hell is sure to break loose. The latest furore was provoked by Stephen Hawking, one of Britain’s best known scientists and a likely future recipient of the Nobel prize in physics (if, as expected, his 1974 theory that black holes emit radiation despite their notorious all-engulfing gravitational pull is confirmed by experiments at the Large Hadron Collider in CERN). On September 2nd The Times, a British daily, published an extensive excerpt (this and other Times links behind a pay wall) from “The Grand Design”, Dr Hawking’s first major book in nearly a decade, which will hit the shelves on September 9th (reviewed here in the Financial Times by Roger Penrose, another big name in British physics).
Never mind the niceties of string theory and its implications for physics. What really got everybody aflutter was his contention that the Big Bang is an inevitable consequence of the laws of physics, so that “it is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper.” The jury is still out on whether current theories really are enough to explain the origins of the universe. And the scientific method, with its laborious procedures and peer review, ensures we won’t know for certain in the foreseeable future. But the proposition elicited an immediate if predictable response from another quarter.
Clerics representing the Abrahamic faiths (supported by a handful of religiously-minded physicists) weighed in, rehearsing all the tired arguments about science providing explanations and religion offering interpretations, science being concerned with “is” where faith is concerned with “ought”, etc. On cue, militant atheists trotted out their own hoary lines: vacuity of the god of the gaps, meaninglessness of the questions about the meaning of it all, and so on.
via Science and religion: Another ungodly squabble | The Economist.
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