It's a silly thought, but why hasn't Stephen Hawking been burned to death at the stake for heresy, witchcraft and general weirdness? Oh, yeah -- he lives in Cambridge which is radically more rational and civilized than Arizona, Georgia, or Wassila. Still, the latest piece due out on the 7th of September is probably going to bother people. Hawking once again makes a point made by lots of other cosmologists, including Terry Pratchett in Small Gods... a god may or may not exist, but it exists only because of the believers. God is largely irrelevant. This is the true intelligent design argument seen through a contemporary deist lens -- the universe has rules and they make sense but they don't depend on god to exist or to make sense.
Many people would like us to use these coincidences as evidence of the work of God. The idea that the universe was designed to accommodate mankind appears in theologies and mythologies dating from thousands of years ago. In Western culture the Old Testament contains the idea of providential design, but the traditional Christian viewpoint was also greatly influenced by Aristotle, who believed "in an intelligent natural world that functions according to some deliberate design."
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.
This argument isn't any better than any religious nonsense... oh, everything just is... don't ask any more questions.. move along
Posted by: Rick | 08 September 2010 at 09:41 AM