Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!clyde.concordia.ca!uunet!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!cs.utexas.edu!rutgers!aramis.rutgers.edu!athos.rutgers.edu!christian From: firth@sei.cmu.edu Newsgroups: soc.religion.christian Subject: Re: A Brief History of Time Message-ID: Date: 21 Dec 89 04:26:52 GMT Sender: hedrick@athos.rutgers.edu Organization: Software Engineering Institute, Pittsburgh, PA Lines: 60 Approved: christian@aramis.rutgers.edu In article aas@sat.datapoint.com (Adrienne Stipe) writes: >Does anyone know anything about a book called "A Brief History >of Time: From Big Bang To Black Holes" by Stephen Hawking? >My husband heard that it was a defense of creationism... First, I have read the book, and recommend it to anyone interested in current thinking about cosmology. Hawking is not only a brilliant scientist, he can write a reasonable popular book. Secondly, I'll venture to comment about it. (For those who care, I studied theoretical physics at Cambridge under Paul Dirac, among others, so have some claims to competence.) The book is not in any sense a defence of creationism; indeed, Hawking's attitude to God is much the same as Laplace's: "I have no need of that hypothesis." The issue that seems most interesting is that of the 'Big Bang'. If we look at the universe, we see that it has been changing over time. As best we can determine, by projecting our current knowledge backwards, and asking what the universe was like earlier in time, we reach a "singularity": a moment in time when the universe was very small, very hot, and very dense, and at which our methods of retrodiction break down. This is the moment of the big bang. It is tempting to identify that moment as the moment of Creation. But it is not the traditional creation: if it occurred it was a very long time ago (about 18 thousand million years), and what was created was very different from today's heavens and earth. Hawking does not take this stance. His answer to the obvious question "what came before the big bang?" is not "the spirit of God brooded over the face of the waters", is not even "I don't know". His answer is to say that the question is meaningless. The analogy he gives is interesting. On the Earth, we have North and South. We can ask "what is north of Algiers?" and get the answer "Marseilles", perhaps. We can then ask "What is north of Marseilles?" and get the answer "Orleans". And so on. As we go further north, the distance around the earth contracts, and if we project our measurements far enough north, it contracts to a point, a singularity. So the ulimate answer to "what is north of X?" is "the North Pole", the singularity. And the question "what is north of the North Pole?" is meaningless; there is nothing north of the North Pole. Similarly, says Hawking, our dimension of time terminates at the pastward singularity; there is nothing before the Big Bang. Moreover, recall that these are the answers of a physicist. Hawking's argument makes a case that the question "what came before X" is a question of physics, not of religion; this is evidently an argument hostile to creationism, which rests ultimately on the belief that for some "X" the question "what came before?" is indeed a religious one. I think he makes a pretty good case, too. But that still leaves a lot of other religious questions. Robert Firth [I think this is about as far as this topic can go without becoming a discussion of creationism, something I'm unwilling to have in this group. --clh]