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Stephen Hawking Should Visit Elfland

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Some people say that Stephen Hawking is the smartest man in the world, and doubtless he is a brilliant physicist. But when it comes to metaphysics he has said some silly things. Consider his famous universe-from-nothing quote: “Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing.”

Read that statement again. It is gobsmackingly stupid. First, as we have discussed before, the statement “because there is something the universe can create itself from nothing” is self-referentially incoherent.

But more importantly consider this. The statement appears to confer causal agency on “gravity.’ But what is gravity? It is a “law” of nature. What is a law of nature? It is an observed regularity that has been modeled mathematically. Last time I looked, observed regularities do not cause things to happen. They are descriptions of what happened, not explanations of how it happened. And what is the source of the mathematically modeled observed regularity that we call gravity? We have no idea*

Why does water flow downhill? It does no good to say that “gravity” makes it run downhill. Gravity is not a causal agent. It is an observed regularity. Saying that gravity makes water rundown hill is the same as saying “every time we looked water ran downhill and that is why water runs downhill,” which, of course, is no explanation at all.

Chesterton knew better:

All the terms used in the science books, ‘law,’ ‘necessity,’ ‘order,’ ‘tendency,’ and so on, are really unintellectual, because they assume an inner synthesis, which we do not possess. The only words that ever satisfied me as describing Nature are the terms used in the fairy books, ‘charm,’ ‘spell,’ ‘enchantment.’ They express the arbitrariness of the fact and its mystery. A tree grows fruit because it is a MAGIC tree. Water runs downhill because it is bewitched.

______________

*Actually, we have a pretty good idea. I mean scientists doing science have no idea.

UPDATE: In a comment Tim unpacked some of this issue nicely:

I am somewhat familiar with the text from which Chesterton was quoted and find it unfortunate that following recent OPs concerning evidence that our critics haven’t taken a closer look at what Chesterton wrote.

Consider the Ethics of Elfland (Chapter 4 of Orthodoxy) and you will discover that upon closer inspection of Chesterton’s thought, one might claim that he himself was a “mountain of evidence”, a claim that I think he would happily and fullheartedly support.

It always seems to go this way: the closer we look two claims like these, Hawking’s and Chesterton’s, they at first glance (and I do mean the most cursory of glances) seem to favor Hawking. You know, gravity is scientific, the universe is scientific, causes, effects. . .
We can have nothing of the word bewitched and cast it off as an Edwardian relic. As the scrutiny becomes more focused, though, we see that it is the “unscientific journalist” who is making sense.

Critics say that Chesterton was too prolific to be called a great writer, but this is wholly unfair, especially when we see all that he has to put forth and set in context in such a short space. I implore the doubtful reader to explore The Maniac, The Suicide of Thought and The Ethics of Elfland (Chapters 2, 3 and 4) to see the greatness of his thought (and his writing as well). Chesterton was referencing the thought of McCabe, a materialist, but as with all great and timeless writing it persists today for Hawking:

He understands everything, and everything does not seem worth understanding. His cosmos may be complete in every rivet and cog-wheel, but still his cosmos is smaller than our world.

One last note on Chesterton, I am currently making some notes on Orthodoxy, and just for fun began challenging myself to find at least one sentence or phrase per paragraph that was worthy of underlining; it is a happy little excursion and, with a bit of humor and latitude, easy to find a most suitable candidate sentence in practically every one. Ok, try THAT for any other writer!

Materialists! Tell us about the workings of the “inner synthesis”, was GKC blowing smoke? or was he simply and plainly correct? And . . . game over.

Comments
Mung Are you interested in discussing this or do you just want to stick to exchanging insults?Mark Frank
April 4, 2015
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Mark Frank:
I am quite surprised by your aggressive responsive to my statement that I would be delighted if the Christian God came down and announced his presence to me today
I am not at all surprised by your passive-aggressive response. : Why do you doubt my sincerity? What sincerity? : I imagine you believe in the Christian God and are delighted he exists. Imagine all you like. : I know people close to me who get immense fulfilment from their belief in him. Why would I not be equally delighted if something happened that convinced me he existed? Who cares?Mung
April 3, 2015
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#66 Tim #67 Mung I am quite surprised by your aggressive responsive to my statement that I would be delighted if the Christian God came down and announced his presence to me today. For some reason you assume I am "disingenuous" and a "liar". Why do you doubt my sincerity? I imagine you believe in the Christian God and are delighted he exists. I know people close to me who get immense fulfilment from their belief in him. Why would I not be equally delighted if something happened that convinced me he existed?Mark Frank
April 3, 2015
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Mark Frank:
I was trying to explain that I could not see why anyone would not want there to be God
So you admit atheists are deviants?
.., live forever, someone to tell you what is right and wrong, father figure to confess to etc.
That's what God means to you?
I would be delighted if the Christian God came down and announced his presence to me today.
I don't believe you. I think you are a liar. If "the Christian God" came down and announced his presence to you today how would you know?Mung
April 3, 2015
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MF@65 With all due respect, your post indicates that evidence is absent and therefore you are compelled ("have to") accept the bad news. I find comments like these to be disingenuous. Most people, writing more candidly, admit that there is evidence that they find unconvincing and that they then decide to reject it (and thus live lives, more or less, of their choosing). Your stance and writing cuts off any chance of addressing the statement that preceded it; i.e. that you would be delighted . . . Supposing just for a moment that such an annunciation of the Christian God could be accomplished in a way that did not annihilate any chance of personal love and relationship, how might God accomplish this? Well, it would have to be as a person, humble, ready to bring us back no matter what the personal consequence, and etc . . . Hmm that sounds like . . . This leads us to "delighted". It is not enough and could not describe what we are talking about.Tim
March 31, 2015
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#63 groovamos By cutting off the quote I think you have reversed my meaning. I was trying to explain that I could not see why anyone would not want there to be God - live forever, someone to tell you what is right and wrong, father figure to confess to etc. I would be delighted if the Christian God came down and announced his presence to me today. However, in the absence of evidence I have to accept the bad news.Mark Frank
March 30, 2015
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Mapou: Don’t read anything written by Hawking. This is a man who teaches that the laws of nature do not forbid time travel. Star-Trek got their physics from Hawking and his black hole and wormhole buddies, a bunch of time travel propeller heads.... I got about half way through "A Brief History..." and got pretty disgusted with the guy telling us there are things out there called "the laws of science" in control of everything since the beginning of time. I mean really, before science existed, before humans, there were "laws of science"? Naturally I put the book down and resented him for misleading the public and this book is what made him as famous as he is. The public was duped and surely the advance of philosophical materialism was much helped by all this. I did enjoy the movie however.groovamos
March 30, 2015
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Mark Frank: ... SH doesn’t want there to be a God (although why anyone should want that I can’t think). This is the usual materialist confusion. All you have to do is look at the history of materialist approaches to the deepest human suffering such as experienced by the unfortunate pilot flying the most complex machinery nose first into the French Alps. And licensed by a nation surely in the top 3 scientifically advanced. Explain this man's behavior and then explain the failure of science to identify his delusional state in advance. Then look at the abject failure of Western materialist science at expunging any mental illness against the success of non-materialist approaches as in employment of non-ordinary states of consciousness. These approaches are now being used (by very forward thinking psychotherapists) with PTSD. Just google 'psilocybin' and 'PTSD'. If you think people come through this approach to mental healing with a resentment of theists and theism think again and give up your dream of your own personal annihilation.groovamos
March 30, 2015
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Zachriel:
That is incorrect. Hawking trained as a theoretical physicist under Dennis Sciama, and has published extensively in the field.
Don't read anything written by Hawking. This is a man who teaches that the laws of nature do not forbid time travel. Star-Trek got their physics from Hawking and his black hole and wormhole buddies, a bunch of time travel propeller heads who proudly wear their "Mr. Spock" t-shirts in public. :-DMapou
March 30, 2015
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butifnot: Hawkings is a mathematician, not a physicist. That is incorrect. Hawking trained as a theoretical physicist under Dennis Sciama, and has published extensively in the field.Zachriel
March 30, 2015
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Hawkings is a mathematician, not a physicist. Cosmology took leave of reality long ago. It was sucked into a black hole of mathematics with no correlation to reality. It is unrecoverable at this point and only adds to the fantasy - witness dark matter, dark energy, magnetic field 'lines' reconnecting, infinities, endless fudge factors and on and on.butifnot
March 30, 2015
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Sorry to Box, Mapou and all. I was trying (and apparently failing) to be funny. Yes, Tim's take on what I was trying to do is correct. I attribute it to posting on a phone while laying over between flights. Mapou, yes, my humor can be obscure. Pity my poor wife.Barry Arrington
March 30, 2015
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Barry #50 & #51, Mapou# 53 That was me - not Mapou - suggesting "negative-information" (#26) and yes it was supposed to be a joke.Box
March 30, 2015
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ppolish
But the debate here is Hawking’s belief that nothing “pulled the trigger”.
That is not the point of the OP. The idea that nothing pulled the trigger goes back much further than Hawkings and has been debated to the point of no return many, many times on UD.Mark Frank
March 29, 2015
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Tim @54, OK, I was confused, probably on account of being stoned. Weed does that to you :-D. But Barry's humor is sometimes kind of obscure.Mapou
March 29, 2015
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Mark Frank @ 47 "If you can get your mind round the idea that it is not caused and there is no time in which it is an event then the problem goes away." Sounds like a great description of a " first cause" or God. CheersCross
March 29, 2015
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If I may, Mapou, I believe that Barry is riffing in a way that actually supports your ideas. The "AS" is not the word "as" as in "while", but a reference to Aurelio Smith or some such poser/troll with similar initials. Just my take . . . Barry may clarify.Tim
March 29, 2015
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Barry @51, Assuming this is not a joke, I'll stop commenting on UD if it bothers you. I don't really need it. I'll just move on.Mapou
March 29, 2015
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Mark Frank, Believing in spontaneous creation is about as scientific as believing that "13" brings bad luck.Mapou
March 29, 2015
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Mapou, the more I think about it your theory of negative information is extremely robust in its explanatory power. As another corollary let me posit "information black holes." We experience them from time to time on these pages when some troll jumps into a thread (AS I'm kinda thinking about you) and seems to suck the information right out of it like that salt sucking monster in one of the original Star Trek episodes.Barry Arrington
March 29, 2015
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Mapou, negative information. Brilliant. As a corollary negative information and positive information tend to balance and that is why when you read a materialist try to defend the proposition that nothing can cause everything, you feel a little more stupid than before. :-)Barry Arrington
March 29, 2015
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"He is saying that the spontaneous creation of the universe is consistent with natural laws – just as the gun recoil is consistent with Newton’s third law of motion." Yes, Mark, understood. But the debate here is Hawking's belief that nothing "pulled the trigger".ppolish
March 29, 2015
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Mark Frank,
Mark Frank:If their “involvement” is just that the process conforms to them then I don’t see why they must have an existence apart from the universe.
I'm not sure I get your point. If you are saying that the laws have no explanatory power at all wrt to the creation of the universe, then you are clearly deviating from SH's ideas (see quote in OP).
Mark Frank: I think you are still working to model where the creation of the universe is caused by something else.
True, because every effect needs a cause. However even a universe that creates itself needs space and time in order to be able to self-create in. On a more general note: every event needs a context.Box
March 29, 2015
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#46 Box
In order for laws to be involved in the creation of the universe, they must have an existence apart from the universe.
If their "involvement" is just that the process conforms to them then I don't see why they must have an existence apart from the universe.
Similarly there must be a space and time apart from the universe in which the creation of the universe took place.
I don't see this at all. I think you are still working to model where the creation of the universe is caused by something else. If you can get your mind round the idea that it is not caused and there is no time in which it is an event then the problem goes away.Mark Frank
March 29, 2015
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Mark Frank #45, allow me rephrase what I said in #43: In order for laws to be involved in the creation of the universe, they must have an existence apart from the universe. Similarly there must be a space and time apart from the universe in which the creation of the universe took place.Box
March 29, 2015
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#40 ppolish
Hawking is saying In the beginning a Law such as gravity created the heavens and the earth.
#42 mapou
The point of Barry’s article is that Hawking is positing the existence of a physical law before the existence of the physical universe
#43 box
they must have an existence apart from the universe.
As I tried to explain in #17 , I don’t think Hawkings is saying that the law of gravity is something separate from the universe which caused it to come into existence.  He is saying that the spontaneous creation of the universe is consistent with natural laws – just as the gun recoil is consistent with Newton’s third law of motion.Mark Frank
March 29, 2015
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I am somewhat familiar with the text from which Chesterton was quoted and find it unfortunate that following recent OPs concerning evidence that our critics haven't taken a closer look at what Chesterton wrote. Consider the Ethics of Elfland (Chapter 4 of Orthodoxy) and you will discover that upon closer inspection of Chesterton's thought, one might claim that he himself was a "mountain of evidence", a claim that I think he would happily and fullheartedly support. It always seems to go this way: the closer we look two claims like these, Hawking's and Chesterton's, they at first glance (and I do mean the most cursory of glances) seem to favor Hawking. You know, gravity is scientific, the universe is scientific, causes, effects. . . We can have nothing of the word bewitched and cast it off as an Edwardian relic. As the scrutiny becomes more focused, though, we see that it is the "unscientific journalist" who is making sense. Critics say that Chesterton was too prolific to be called a great writer, but this is wholly unfair, especially when we see all that he has to put forth and set in context in such a short space. I implore the doubtful reader to explore The Maniac, The Suicide of Thought and The Ethics of Elfland (Chapters 2, 3 and 4) to see the greatness of his thought (and his writing as well). Chesterton was referencing the thought of McCabe, a materialist, but as with all great and timeless writing it persists today for Hawking:
He understands everything, and everything does not seem worth understanding. His cosmos may be complete in every rivet and cog-wheel, but still his cosmos is smaller than our world.
One last note on Chesterton, I am currently making some notes on Orthodoxy, and just for fun began challenging myself to find at least one sentence or phrase per paragraph that was worthy of underlining; it is a happy little excursion and, with a bit of humor and latitude, easy to find a most suitable candidate sentence in practically every one. Ok, try THAT for any other writer! Materialists! Tell us about the workings of the "inner synthesis", was GKC blowing smoke? or was he simply and plainly correct? And . . . game over.Tim
March 29, 2015
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One more thing: why would natural laws that are only known to be valid within our universe apply at our universe’s creation? In order for laws to create the universe, they must have an existence apart from the universe. On what basis does Hawking assume that these laws are the same as the ones we know now? Ironic that such a baseless assumption comes from ppl who speculate about some multiverse with an endless variety of laws; where each individual universe has its own set.Box
March 28, 2015
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Whether or not we only have approximations of natural laws has no bearing on the existence of natural laws. The point of Barry's article is that Hawking is positing the existence of a physical law before the existence of the physical universe and claiming that, on this basis, the universe can spring itself into existence by effing magic. It is, as Barry so eloquently put it, gobsmackingly stupid. LOL. PS. And this guy is one of the smartest men on planet earth? We're doomed. Lord help us.Mapou
March 28, 2015
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Barry Arrington: Why do materialists like Hawking think they can get their gravity for free?
Indeed, and how about space and time? Surely those virtual particles that momentarily appear within a vacuum, are appearing in space and time.Box
March 28, 2015
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