Has Stephen Hawking ended the God debate?

Articles like this one by Graham Farmello in the Telegraph (UK) tend to irritate me. (Yeah, I know. What doesn't?) It's not that it's completely wrong, I suppose, but it's just... irritating.

First of all, it's deliberately sensationalist - for good business reasons, no doubt - while also frowning on others doing the exact same thing:

The science-religion relationship, in so far as there is one, continues to be a crowd-pleaser. It seems to be a fundamental law of PR that the God-science debate is a sure-fire source of publicity. Always welcome when one has a book to sell.

Yeah, do tell. And this just happens to be in an article with the title, "Has Stephen Hawking ended the God debate?" Heh, heh.

Here are some other excerpts that really irritated me:

The point is, he says, that our universe followed inevitably from the laws of nature. But, we might ask, where did they come from?

And if we were smart, we might answer, "I don't know." The fact is no one knows. Inventing a god or gods to explain that, without any evidence whatsoever, is just as wrong as making up any other kind of lie. "I don't know" is a perfectly valid answer. Indeed, it's the only valid answer when it's true, as it is in this case.

That's the thing with scientific research. There are always more questions to answer. But when we didn't know what the sun was, it was an error to assume that it must be a god flying a golden chariot across the sky. (But what else could it be, right?) In reality, back then, "I don't know" was the only valid answer. Inventing a supernatural explanation, just because you couldn't prove it false, was not valid then and it's not valid now.

Of course, Farmello just coyly asks the question, right? He doesn't actually say that "God done it." Yeah, that's kind of irritating, too. If he has a point, let's hear what it is.

He now suggests that the search for this particular Holy Grail is over, now that scientists have come up with a type of theory, known as M-theory, that may describe the behaviour of all the fundamental particles and force, and even account for the very birth of the universe. If this theory is backed up by experiment, it might perhaps replace all religious accounts of creation – in Hawking's capacious mind, it already has.

I did mention that this was sensationalist, didn't I? I haven't read Hawking's new book, and I wouldn't be able to judge the validity of his new theory if I had. This is an idea from a theoretical physicist, that's all. If, eventually, it's backed by experimental evidence, it might become mainstream science. But it's far, far from that right now.

And it's clear that Hawking is also being deliberately sensationalist, too. Well, he's trying to sell a book, isn't he? All of this is from "the flurry of publicity preceding his new book, The Grand Design, to be published next week." Gee, I wonder why anyone would want to be provocative at such a time?

But do the rest of us really have to take this seriously? No, not if we're smart.

The science-religion debate has been going on since science was born, centuries ago. Until relatively recently, it seemed to have quietened down, but now Hawking and others have brought it back into the limelight.

Maybe it "quietened down" in Great Britain, but certainly not here in America, not since I was a kid, at least. (This isn't an irritating excerpt, just a bit surprising.)

Science and religion are about fundamentally different things. No religion has ever been rendered obsolete by facts or observations, but this happens to most scientific theories, at least in the long run.

No religion has ever been rendered obsolete by facts or observations? Well, there are plenty of obsolete religions, though I suspect that most of them were "rendered obsolete" by true believers of some other religion killing off their rivals. But it's true that religious believers often seem immune to facts or observations.

However, there are plenty of religious beliefs which have been rendered obsolete by science. Remember Galileo, anyone? In fact, the history of science is one long parade of supernatural explanations being rendered obsolete by science. And you know, not one natural explanation has ever been found to be supernatural, instead. Funny how that's worked out, isn't it?

Furthermore, the fact that scientific theories change as new evidence is discovered is a great strength of science. Yes, Newton's ideas were superseded in some circumstances. That doesn't mean that Newton was wrong, but only that he wasn't completely right in every detail in every circumstance. At the very least, he was far more correct than the thinking - religious or otherwise - before him.

Admittedly, the article makes up for the above sentence by continuing the paragraph in this way:

Science advances over the wreckage of its theories by continually putting theoretical ideas to experimental test; no matter how beautiful a theoretical idea might be, it must be discarded if it is at odds with experiment. Like any other human activity, science has flaws and does not always flow smoothly, but no one can seriously doubt the progress it has made in helping us understand the world and in helping to underpin technology.

Yes, science is a process, a process that gets us closer and closer to the complete truth. Unlike dogma, it changes when it's been shown to be wrong (or, more commonly, just incomplete). That's a strength, not a liability. In science, nothing is ever an absolute truth, such that it can't, potentially, be overturned by subsequent evidence. Maybe the Earth really is flat. I truly doubt it, but I can think of explanations where that would be true. Right now, I disregard them, because there's no evidence backing them up, but it's always possible - if not at all probable - that that could change.

No religion has ever been set out in terms of scientific statements. This is why scientists are able to mock the claims of religions but have never been able to deal a knock-out blow: in the end, a religious believer can always fall back on a faith that does not depend on verification.

But why is this? If religion really was true, why fear verification? The whole point of the scientific method is to determine the truth, no matter what the current consensus might be. No matter who believes what, no matter what scientific authority backs an earlier theory, no matter how long it's been believed, it is always subject to verification. That never ends. Furthermore, science reserves its highest honors and accolades to those "heretics" who successfully overthrow established thought.

Religion is just the reverse. Religion fears verification. Religion depends on dogma that can't be questioned by the faithful. Even when religion tries to adopt science, it's always just pseudoscience. There are certain things that no believer can question, not and remain in the good graces of his church. You see, religion always thinks that it already knows the truth. Therefore, the only "research" allowed is that which will explicitly back up their claims.

Religion isn't "set out in terms of scientific statements" because it doesn't dare to do so. It fears finding out the truth. It's ironic that people who so fervently believe they already know the truth are so terrified of really looking into the subject, isn't it? Shouldn't they be supremely confident that verification would uphold their claims? But in fact, it's just the reverse. They don't dare open their eyes.

Powerful and eloquent though it [The God Delusion] was, religion continues to flourish, and scientists (albeit a minority) continue to go to church, just as Galileo, Newton, Faraday and others have done in the past. I suspect that none of them would have abandoned their respective faiths after reading Dawkins (admittedly, not a scientific statement).

Yes, some scientists are religious believers. Well, scientists are human, too, and they were raised in the same religion-saturated environments as the rest of us. But in fact, far fewer scientists are religious believers than in the population as a whole. In fact, education itself is associated with the loss of religious belief. The more you know, the less you believe in the fairy tales of your youth. And the top levels of science, the Nobel Prize winners, those scientists at the cutting edge of scientific discovery, are even less religious in general than those "scientists" further down the ladder.

And who knows what Galileo, Newton, and Faraday would think today, with modern knowledge. As a matter of fact, many religious believers have abandoned their faith after reading Dawkins and other authors. People willing to look at the evidence, willing to consider logic and reason, do lose their religious faith sometimes. In fact, sometimes priests do the same. It does happen. So I'm not quite willing to just assume that those famous scientists would cling to dogma in today's world.

Religions will survive so long as they steer clear of making statements that can be shown to be factually wrong.

Heh, heh. Now isn't that the truth! In order to survive, religions need to avoid saying anything that can be, you know, checked out. If you're a believer, how does that make you feel? Still think you know the absolute truth? Of course, you don't dare actually research the question. You can believe anything you want, but you don't dare look at it skeptically. You don't dare make any claims at all that can be investigated impartially. Yeah, that really sounds like you know the "truth," alright.

The kind of science done by Stephen Hawking, one of the leading theoretical physicists of modern times, has an almost religious ring to it. He and his colleagues are trying to find the patterns in the basic fabric of reality – the mathematical laws that govern the workings of nature at its finest level. There is plenty of evidence that these laws hold good all the way back to the beginning of time, which is how scientists have put together an extremely detailed and well-tested theory of the Big Bang, the first few minutes of the universe.

This is nothing like religion. It's like Farmello didn't even read what he wrote previously. (You see now why I get irritated by this?) Scientists have used evidence to put together a well-tested theory. How does that have any kind of "religious ring" to it? Religion shies away from evidence and tests as if they were the devil himself.

This has led writers to invest these experiments with a theological significance. The distinguished experimenter Leon Lederman labelled the Higgs particle, being sought at the Collider, as the God Particle, with no good reason except as a hook to promote his book, which he named after it. Yet these experiments will tell us nothing about God.

This whole article uses "God" as a hook to get readers. And it's ostensibly about a book that's also using the same hook. So how is the so-called God Particle, "with no good reason except as a hook to promote his book," surprising in any way?

And no, these experiments will tell us nothing about God, because God doesn't actually exist outside our own imaginations. These experiments will also tell us nothing about Narnia or Hogwarts. Is that at all notable? Despite Lederman's book-selling hook, has any scientist working at the Large Hadron Collider stated - or implied in any way - that their experiments would tell us something about God? I really doubt it.

Einstein, to the frustration of many of his colleagues, was fond of referring to God when he was talking about the laws expressing the fundamental harmonies of the universe. As Dawkins rightly stresses, it is quite clear that Einstein did not think of God as a white-bearded benefactor capable of interfering with the functioning of the universe. Rather, Einstein followed closely the views of the philosopher Spinoza, for whom the concept of God is an expression of the underlying unity of the universe, something so wondrous that it can command a spiritual awe.

OK, you can define "God" as meaning "the underlying unity of the universe," but how many believers will go along with that definition? I can define a cat as a "dog" if I want, but it's not going to be very useful in real life if no one agrees with me.

What the author is describing is atheists, or at best deists, who are trying to avoid offending the overwhelming number of religious believers. So Dirac said that mathematical beauty is "is almost a religion to me." Well, I know people who say that golfing is their religion. Do you think they really mean that? Honestly, this is just ridiculous!

Even religious scientists – and there are still a few – never use the God concept in their scientific work. Perhaps it is time for a moratorium on the use of the concept in popularisations, too? This would avoid mixing up scientific and non-scientific statements and put an end to the consequent confusions.

Confusions? Who's actually confused by this (except for the author of this article)? If you're confused by this sort of thing, you want to be confused. In fact, you're probably desperate to be confused. There's really no other way.

I think it wise for scientists and religious believers to keep out of each other's territory – no good has come out of their engagement and I suspect it never will.

OK, that sounds good to me. Scientists will say nothing about the supernatural realm if religious believers say nothing about this universe, nothing that applies to the real world at all. How do you think that will work?

Because I'll tell you this: if religions make any claims about the real world - any claims about biology, physics, geology, history, sociology, ethics, morality, government or anything else affecting this universe we live in - then those claims can and should be investigated using logic, reason, and, above all, evidence.

You can see why this whole article was irritating, I hope. But I suppose it did what it was supposed to do, get attention (mine, at least).