God did not create the universe, gravity did, says Stephen Hawking
God did not create the universe and the “Big Bang” was an inevitable consequence of the laws of physics, the eminent British theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking argues in a new book.
In “The Grand Design,” co-authored with U.S. physicist Leonard Mlodinow, Hawking says a new series of theories made a creator of the universe redundant, according to the Times newspaper which published extracts on Thursday.
“Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist,” Hawking writes. “It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going.”
Hawking, 68, who won global recognition with his 1988 book “A Brief History of Time,” an account of the origins of the universe, is renowned for his work on black holes, cosmology and quantum gravity. His latest comments suggest he has broken away from previous views he has expressed on religion. Previously, he wrote that the laws of physics meant it was simply not necessary to believe that God had intervened in the Big Bang.
For an initial sceptical reaction, see Mark Vernon’s Philosophy and Life blog.
“Human rights” urged for whales & dolphins – is this a good idea?
Whales and dolphins should get “human rights” to life and liberty because of mounting evidence of their intelligence, a group of conservationists and experts in philosophy, law and ethics said on Sunday.
Participants at a University of Helsinki conference said ever more studies show the giant marine mammals have human-like self-awareness, an ability to communicate and organize complex societies, making them similar to some great apes.
“We affirm that all cetaceans as persons have the right to life, liberty and wellbeing,” they said in a declaration after a two-day meeting led by the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society (WDCS).
Thomas White, director of the Center for Ethics and Business at Loyola Marymount University in California who was at the Helsinki talks, said dolphins can recognise themselves in a mirror, an ability rare in mammals that humans only acquire at about 18 months of age. “Whaling is ethically unacceptable,” he told Reuters. “They have a sense of self that we used to think that only human beings have.”
Read the full story here and then tell us what you think about this idea:
GUESTVIEW: No good deed goes unpunished
The following is a guest contribution. Reuters is not responsible for the content and the views expressed are the authors’ alone. Father Joseph Fessio, S.J. is founder and editor of Ignatius Press, which is the primary English-language publisher of the works of Pope Benedict XVI and which has published several books by Cardinal Christoph Schönborn. He is also publisher of Catholic World Report magazine.
By Father Joseph Fessio, S.J.
Did Cardinal Christoph Schönborn of Vienna “attack” Cardinal Angelo Sodano, dean of the College of Cardinals and former Vatican secretary of state? If The Tablet weekly in London were your only source of information, you’d think so, because that’s what the headline screamed.
What happened?
Cardinal Schönborn, who like his mentor Pope Benedict is a model of openness and transparency, invited the editors of Austria’s dozen or so major newspapers to a meeting at his residence in Vienna. How many bishops can you name who have extended such an invitation to the press?
The journalists agreed that this would be an “off the record” meeting so that everyone could take part freely and frankly. Was this to impose silence on the press? To cover up once again the misdeeds of clerics? No, it was an attempt by Cardinal Schönborn to be as open as possible and to make himself available to answer any question that was asked. It was an attempt to help educate the press on matters that the press often finds difficult to grasp—such as the essential foundations of the hierarchical and sacramental structure of the Church, and the intricacies of moral theology.
Cardinal Schönborn is a Dominican and a professor. Which means that he has a serious scholar’s grasp of the foundations as well as the conclusions of moral theology, particularly as expounded by St. Thomas Aquinas.
objective depravity. This is what the church calls part of God’s creation – the gays.
No wonder they are driven to suicide, and sometimes murdered. by the church of “life”
The whole world is changing. Fancy words, and ideas from an age of the ‘anything but’ holy roman empire cannot change the fact that gay people are more and more being accepted as the good people they are. While the church in Europe is dying quickly, and splitting here.
And btw, the two states with the lowest divorce rate in the USA are Mass and Conn. Two of the first states with gay marriage.
And lets not forget that the church has yet to EXcommunicate Hitler. Born and Baptised a catholic in very Catholic Austria. Where he learned his hatred of the Jews – Jesus own people- from the poison the church put into society over a millenia. And it was this hatred that hitler leveraged to get elected. And 50 million people died.
And in 2009, RATZInger UNexcommunicated a Bishop Williamson, who is a holocaust denier / minimizer. To bring Williamson’s 600,000 mad followers back into the church.
At least Argentina had the you know whats to throw Williamson out of the ocuntry. And just recently their legislature passed a gay marriage bill.
I used to think that Ratzinger was a hitler in disguise. Now I believe he is part of Gods plan to help change, or destroy, the church that has always needed some victim to hate, to sell their corrupt brand of love.
The catholic church is, as we’ve seen in endless revelations of the cover up of sexual (and mental) abuse of children, like a Pathological liar. So corrupt that it cant possibly even understand its own corruptness.
it fits perfectly the definition of Power: Power corrupts,and absolute power corrupts absolutely. And when you claim to speak for God, it gets just that much more worse.
“Return to past” is SSPX motto for doctrinal talks with Vatican
As planned negotiations between the Vatican and the ultra-traditionalist Society of Saint Pius X (SSPX) near, the group’s Swiss leader, Bishop Bernard Fellay, has spelled out his view of what the Roman Catholic Church must do to resolve the crisis he believes it is in. “The solution to the crisis is a return to the past,” he has told a magazine published by the SSPX in South Africa.
Fellay said Pope Benedict agrees with the SSPX on the need to maintain the Church’s links to the past, but still wants to keep some reforms of the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965). “This is one of the most sensitive problems,” he said. “We hope the discussions will allow us to dispel the grave ambiguities that have spread through the Catholic Church since (the Council), as John Paul II himself recognised.”
Benedict has, in fact, listed SSPX acceptance of Vatican II reforms was a Vatican conditions in the talks.
In the same interview with the magazine Tradition, he also indicated the SSPX was ready to add several new issues to the agenda of the talks that could drag on the sessions for years. The talks are due to start later this month.
Fellay, who was readmitted into the Roman Catholic Church in January with three other bishops after two decades of excommunication, said the Church was in such a crisis that it would take more than one generation of “constant efforts in the right direction” and possibly as long as a century to overcome it.
He said he had no idea how long the SSPX’s doctrinal discussions with the Vatican would take. “This will certainly also depend on what Rome expects. They could take quite a long time.”
Bishop Fellay is only reiterated what has already been taught by Blessed Pius IX in his encyclical letter Quanta Cura & The Syllabus of Errors dated December 8, 1864 which is a list of 80 errors of modern times infallibly condemned. Two articles,which are relevant to to the discussion here, are cited. N.B. the statements or propositions have been condemned:#ll The Church not only ought never to pass judgment on philosophy, but ought to tolerate the errors of philosophy, leaving it to correct itself. (condemned)#80 The Roman Pontiff can, and ought to, reconcile himself, and come to terms wtih progress, liberalism and modern civilization. (condemned)
Is a moral instinct the source of our noble thoughts?
Until not too long ago, most people believed human morality was based on scripture, culture or reason. Some stressed only one of those sources, others mixed all three. None would have thought to include biology. With the progress of neuroscientific research in recent years, though, a growing number of psychologists, biologists and philosophers have begun to see the brain as the base of our moral views. Noble ideas such as compassion, altruism, empathy and trust, they say, are really evolutionary adaptations that are now fixed in our brains. Our moral rules are actually instinctive responses that we express in rational terms when we have to justify them.
Thanks to a flurry of popular articles, scientists have joined the ranks of those seen to be qualified to speak about morality, according to anthropologist Mark Robinson, a Princeton Ph.D student who discussed this trend at the University of Pennsylvania’s Neuroscience Boot Camp. “In our current scientific society, where do people go to for the truth about human reality?” he asked. “It used to be you might read a philosophy paper or consult a theologian. But now there seems to be a common public sense that the authority over what morality is can be found by neuroscientists or scientists.”
This change has come over the past decade as brain scan images began to reveal which areas of the brain react when a person grapples with a moral problem. They showed activity not only in the prefrontal cortex, where much of our rational thought is processed, but also in areas known to handle emotion and conflicts between brain areas. Such insights cast doubt on long-standing assumptions about reason or religion driving our moral views. “A few theorists have even begun to claim that that the emotions are in fact in charge of the temple of morality and that moral reasoning is really just a servant masquerading as the high priest,” University of Virginia psychologist Jonathan Haidt, one of the leading theorists in this field, has written.
Haidt’s Moral Foundations Theory argues that morality is based on five concepts that evolved in all cultures: harm/care, fairness/reciprocity, ingroup/loyalty, authorty/respect and purity/sanctity. Those concepts have real-life consequences, he says — political liberals and conservatives disagree so much on so-called “culture war issues” because liberals base their moral views on the first two concepts while conservatives use all five. Other theorists such as Marc Hauser of Harvard and John Mikhail of Georgetown suggest humans have a universal moral grammar akin to the universal grammar that linguist Noam Chomsky claims underlies all the world’s languages.
For more on these ideas, see review articles such as “The Moral Instinct” (Stephen Pinker, New York Times), “Do The Right Thing” (Rebecca Saxe, Boston Review), “The Emerging Moral Psychology” (Dan Jones, Prospect), “The Roots of Morality” (Greg Miller, Science) and “The End of Philosophy” (David Brooks, New York Times). Hat-tip to fellow boot camper Tamar Gendler for pointing them out.
Does this mean that public opinion will turn away from seeing reason or religion as the bases for morality, in favor of the brain? Robinson doubts that. “I don’t know that they will shift to a completely neurobiological view of morality (and) I don’t think this is a fundamental shift away from religion. But it will mean that religion will have to come to terms with the public’s perception.
“I think there will be a greater acceptance of biology as an accepted domain within which to ask certain types of questions. That isn’t to say that people will understand morality completely differently in the future, or won’t have any morality. But they will at least know that (neuroscience) is another domain to go to for answers. The question of authority is a big one. Who is the ultimate authority on these issues about the fundamental nature of human morality?”
Clearly inherited morality exists in that children are powerful, albeit primitive, moralists. The endless plaint of siblings that ‘it isn’t fair’ is actually a moral pronouncement because the child is indicating that it wants its share but does not want its brother to go completely without.
However, there is a knockabout silliness to arguments which say ‘science says A, you say B, therefore you are a gullible fool’. The major problem with an exclusively scientific explanation of morality is that it begs the question ‘where does ultimate moral authority lie?’ And it is this question which religion identified a long time ago and imputed to God.
Science is on somewhat shaky philosophical foundations itself. It may seem that its laws are immutable, but eventually most are superceded when more information is acquired. ‘Survival of the fittest’ which is the basis of evolutionary science is particularly dubious because it is circular in its fundamental argument: ‘that which survives is fittest, that which is fittest survives’.
Any scientific theory is potentially falsifiable, but most people think it is wrong to kill another human with an absolute conviction that could not possibly be ‘explained away’ by a scietific theory.
God on the brain at Penn’s Neuroscience Boot Camp
Neurotheology – the study of the link between belief and the brain – is a topic I’ve hesitated to write about for several years. There are all kinds of theories out there about how progress in neuroscience is changing our understanding of religion, spirituality and mystical experience. Some say the research proves religion is a natural product of the way the brain works, others that God made the brain that way to help us believe. I knew so little about the science behind these ideas that I felt I had to learn more about the brain first before I could comment.
If that was an excuse for procrastination, I don’t have it anymore. For all this week and half the next, I’m attending a “Neuroscience Boot Camp” at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. This innovative program, run by Penn’s Center for Cognitive Neuroscience Director Martha Farah (photo below), aims to explain the latest research in neuroscience to 34 non-experts from fields such as law, business, philosophy and religious studies (as well as to a few journalists). The focus is not only on religion, but faith and issues related to it are certainly part of the discussion.
After only two of 8-1/2 days of lectures, one takeaway message is already clear. You can forget about the “God spot” that headline writers love to highlight (as in “‘God spot’ is found in Brain” or “Scientists Locate ‘God Spot’ in Human Brain”). There is no one place in the brain responsible for religion, just as there is no single location in the brain for love or language or identity. Most popular articles these days actually say that, but the headline writers continue to speak of a single spot.
“There isn’t a separate religious area of the brain, from what we can tell from the data,” said Dr. Andrew Newberg, an associate professor of radiology and psychiatry at the Penn university hospital and author of several books on neuroscience and religion. “It’s not like there’s a little spiritual spot that lights up every time somebody thinks of God. When you look at religious and spiritual experiences, they are incredibly rich and diverse. Sometimes people find them on the emotional level, sometimes on an ideological level, sometimes they perceive a oneness, sometimes they perceive a person. It depends a lot on what the actual experience is.”
In their research, Newberg and his colleagues have scanned the brains of Buddhist monks and contemplative Catholic nuns to see if their long experience of meditation and prayerhad left its mark on their brains. One thing they noticed was that their prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain linked to concentration and decision making, seemed to be more active than usual even in a resting state, and more active still while meditating. Some studies showed it was even larger in long-term meditators than other people. “It’s almost like a muscle,” he said. “If you exercise it every day through meditation, you enhance and increase its function.”
Rather than being located in separate areas, religious and spiritual phenomena “tend to be built upon the existing framework of how the brain works”, said Newberg (photo left). “So if we have an experience of the love of God, there is an underlying biology of that experience that is probably the same as how you feel love for your wife, for example. On the other hand, what we also tend to find is that there seems to be a larger network of structures that do tend to get involved. The data seem to suggest that (faith) probably activates these structures to a slightly stronger degree.
“If you’re doing math, your frontal lobe turns on. If you’re doing meditation, your frontal lobe turns on. But if you’re solving math, the frontal lobe turns on and that’s about it, you solve the math problem and then you’re done. With meditation, the frontal lobes turn on, but based on our research, then there’s activation in the temporal lobes, the parietal lobes are changing, and then it starts to activate the limbic system, the emotional drivers of your brain. So a lot more is happening.
Excellent article. It provides compelling reasons to believe that spirituality is a higher order function of the brain and that the brain has evolved towards this capability.
D J Wray
Packaged Evolution: The Intelligent Universe
http://www.atotalawareness.com/documents /packagedevolution.pdf
French high schoolers struggle with philosophical puzzles
One of the things that makes France so French is the annual philosophy exam that traditionally kicks off the week-long series of tests for the baccalauréat diploma at the end of the lycée (senior high school). While France is a proudly secular state, the questions asked often pose puzzles with ethical aspects that many religions also contemplate. They are usually very broad — some would say impossibly broad — questions, leaving the student to decide how to understand and discuss them in a long essay.
Here are some of the questions the nervous students were given four hours to sweat over today:
- Is it absurd to desire the impossible?
- Are there questions that no science answers?
- What does one gain by exchanging?
- Does technical development transform humans?
- Does language betray thought?
- Does historical objectivity presuppose an impartial historian?
Are 18-year-olds set questions like this in exams in your country? If not, would it be worthwhile to ask them?
I like such questions! It’s much more interesting to think about philosophical puzzles than to describe what Camus or Hehel or whoever else thought 
The scientist who leaves room for spirituality
The German philosopher Immanuel Kant once wrote that he “had to deny knowledge to make room for faith.” The French physicist Bernard d’Espagnat hasn’t denied knowledge in his long career developing the philosophy that won him this year’s $1.42 million Templeton Prize. He was pursuing knowledge to better understand what we can know about the ultimate reality of the world. But just like his philosophy echoes that of Kant’s with its conviction that there are limits on knowing reality, his work leaves some room — he would say for spirituality — by saying that human intuitions like art, music and spirituality can help us go further when science searching to understand the world reaches the end of its tether.
D’Espagnat’s prize was announced at UNESCO in Paris on Monday. The quantum physics at the core of his work presents baffling insights about reality, but his philosophical conclusions from them sound like common sense. Science is an amazing discipline that opens vast areas of knowledge but cannot go all the way to explaining ultimate reality. There’s a mystery at the core of our existence that we can get a little closer to through the untestable but undeniable intuitions we have. That “little closer” still leaves a large black hole in our knowledge, but it is more than we have if we only rely on empirical science.
As often happens in cases like this, d’Espagnat was available for embargoed interviews several days before the prize was announced. I had the pleasure of meeting him on Friday at the Lutetia, a five-star hotel only a short bike ride from my more modest digs in Paris. Now 87 years old, d’Espagnat can look back on a long and illustrious career as a senior physicist at the CERN laboratory in Geneva, professor at the University of Paris (at its science hub in the suburb of Orsay) and guest lecturer at universities and conferences abroad. His latest book in English, On Physics and Philosophy, came out in the United States in 2006.
At the end, I asked what he would do with his prize money. After paying the taxes on it, he stressed as he started his answer, he would divide it into three equal parts. One would go to promote the study of “negative theology,” a theology that he says fits his spiritualist outlook and conviction that we can only describe God by concepts that say what God is not. The second part would go to associations helping the homeless. And the last third he and his wife would use to make their home more senior-friendly. “My wife is handicapped and she would very much like to remain at home as long as possible,” he said.
You can read our story here or consult the prize website for more information and an extensive collection of links about his work. Some excerpts from my interview with d’Espagnat are on the next page. Taking a page from Paul Krugman’s economics blog, let me put a health warning on it right away — (wonkish).
At points in the history of the western world, science has been viewed as an opposition to the religious establishment, and people with new ideas censored. An example being Galileo, who was put under house arrest for reasserting previous claims that the earth went around the sun.
Another German scientist, Nietzsche also commented upon similar affects upon thought and the scientific community in “Beyond good and Evil”.
Science is observation, and being able to make accurate predictions based upon what is learned. A healthy curiosity and desire to learn exists no matter what a person believes, but in that frame of reference beliefs would evolve and change with time as more is learned.
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Resident FaithWorld Expert
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Okay, I am not a scientists, and I am a dumb when it comes to mathematics, but very soon, we’ll see true facts behind every false theories from our scientists ( Science is not the problem, the problem is “some” of our feeble scientists who wanted to be renowned by force, thus creating problems to make science a problem). They are using calculation to define issues of observation; they are proving to you things they themselves haven’t seen with their own eyes; they designed cameras and computers to make their theories work in line; they thoughts ” we can remove the hand of the Creator by denying Him in our theories, so people could believe they existed for nothing”. They said things drop to the centre of the earth because a force attract them, and whatever does go up must come down. Well, I have seen things which goes up but never come down- How about that? Why isn’t gravity attracting it? Can we breathe in the air in the space? Is there atmosphere there atall? Not really! The theory of gravity is hoax; there is no gravity! Though it may be in the space, but never ever on this very planet I live.
Was this not the same Hawking who said God created the Sun? Few months later, he denied God didn’t! Now he is telling you gravity formed you from nothing, to make you feel nothing from nothing, so you can live for nothing and die for nothing! Guys, wake up! If you need to understand any mysteries behind human existence, please read the Bible, and simply ask for wisdom, knowledge and understanding. I did just this and I have been inspired things that can be done to effectively stop the “giant pilar that riad our lands”. All I know, and that I’ll adhere to is that there is a Creator whose hands are full of wonders and mind with creative thoughts; He created the stars and the sun, he created the moon, too. HE CREATED YOU- All these I knew before reading the Bible atall. And if you don’t want to bring in religion in this sense, simply put away religion theories and explanation of Life, and embark on serious NATURE EXPLORATION, and you’ll see a creative mind in the centre of everything in LIFE.
There is a loving, intelligent, sweet, faithful and mighty creator who created every discovered and undiscovered species we have seen and yet to see and that we’ll never see; His name is Jehovaah, the almighty, the all-powerful, the all-controller!
Thank you,
Emmanuel.