Jesuit brother trusts Hawking’s physics, but not his ideas about God
OTTAWA (CCN)
Stephen Hawking says he can show there is no need for God to have launched the Big Bang, and the Director of the Vatican Observatory says, “He is right.”
In his book “The Great Design,” Hawking says the universe began with a “fluctuation of the quantum gravity field. That is the reason there is something instead of nothing,” Brother Guy Consolmagno, SJ, told several Catholic young adults here Feb. 11,
The Jesuit brother said based on the observations we have, he trusts Hawking’s physics, but not his ideas about God.
“The God I believe in is a super-natural God, a God Who is not part of nature, Who can be found in nature and measured and weighted in nature, but a God Who is outside nature, Who already is before creation starts, and that’s a very different kind of God than the kind of God Stephen Hawking is looking for,” Brother Consolmagno said.
Hawking’s views are based on Einstein’s general view of relativity, he said. “Einstein changed our common sense, showing space and time are two aspects of the same reality.”
One proof of Einstein’s theory of generational relatively came with the observation during an eclipse that starlight was bent a little when it went past the sun, the Jesuit brother said.
Another proof came was released the morning of his lecture, when a team of scientists announced they had detected gravitational waves from the collision of two immense black holes more than a billion light years from earth. “The idea that gravitational force would be propagated by a wave was finally proved in an announcement this morning,” Brother Consolmagno said. “All of this indicating that Einstein had an idea what he was talking about.”
Einstein’s theories are “far beyond our ability to imagine,” he said.
Yet, if you go outside at night, you are going to see the earth as “a flat plane with a dome,” he said. “The stars would look like a dome. I don’t care how many PhDs you have.”
The ancients thought since water comes down from the sky, sometimes frozen in snow, there must be water above the dome. Since you find water when you dig a hole, there must be waters under the earth. “This is not silliness; it is just observation,” he said.
The writers of Genesis were going by the best observations of the time. “The new thing in Genesis was it was God who created it. That was the radical idea,” he said.
Scientific changes in cosmology have changed greatly over the millennia, but these changes have not challenged the Christian belief in a supernatural God, who exists outside the universe and who gives it meaning, he said. The Christian God is not the God “of the gaps” who fills those areas of science that we do not yet understand. Nor is He the “watchmaker God” gets things started and then leaves the universe to operate according to mechanistic laws.
Even the ancient Greeks knew the earth was not flat, and the stars were not fixed in place in the dome, he said. They knew the earth was round and had calculated how large it was.
The Aristotelian view saw the earth at the centre of the universe. But at the centre of the earth was hell, “fire and brimstone,” Brother Consolmagno said. This led to the view the earth was at the “bottom of the chain of creation.”
“The idea of a universe with a set order, and a set ranking of who goes where and how things work, tied into the astrology of the day, and tied into our understanding of our own place in the universe, at the bottom of the universe, sinful man, is described by C.S. Lewis in his book The Discarded Image as a discarded image,” he said. Understanding this view, however, makes it possible to understand the writings of Dante and Chaucer.
“This idea of ranks of angels, this idea of spirits that inhabited not just one great planet, but all of the intermediary spheres as well, this was the foundation of the way the human race understood itself that lasted 1500 years,” Brother Consolmagno said. It was understandable “why people were reluctant to let go of this foundation of our civilization,” a foundation that was held by the Medievals before us, and the Romans and the Greeks before them. “Everybody understood this was how the universe worked.”
When Isaac Newton developed his theory of gravity began to make calculations on how planets would move due to gravity, the view developed of the universe as a “one giant machine,” he said.
“Where do you need God? Somebody had to build the machine. Somebody had to wind the watch, so God becomes the great clock maker and the great clock winder,” said Brother Consolmagno.
Newton’s physics can’t explain things that Einstein could explain, he said. “Einstein is saying a lot of the things we assumed with Newton aren’t true.”
Einstein’s theory of general relativity did not account for why all the matter in the universe together did not warp together into one massive point.
Fr. Georges Lemaitre in the 1930s “was a fellow who could read equations the way you and I might be able to read poetry,” Brother Consolmagno said. “He was able to accept and understand general relativity, the equations possibly better than Einstein himself.
A Catholic priest who taught mathematics at Louvain in Belgium, Lemaitre saw in the equations not only the possibility of an expanding universe, but also the universe as having a starting point. This idea was greatly resisted by cosmologists at the time.
The term “Big Bang” was coined pejoratively by British Cosmologist Fred Hoyle, who accused Lemaitre of being influenced by the Book of Genesis, Brother Consolmagno said. “Lemaitre denied it. ‘It is in the physics,’ he said.”
In 1963, scientists found the radiation that proved the Big Bang, and Hoyle finally accepted that it did happen, he said.
“We have to be prepared to accept that just as the ancient Greek and the ancient medieval cosmologies were brilliant but found lacking,” who knows what our cosmology is going to look like a thousand years from now, he said.
“We believe in a God outside of the universe who also so loved the universe that He became incarnate within the universe,” he said. “That’s a pretty weird thing to believe and if people have a hard time with that I don’t blame them. But this is Christian belief.”
Yet that believe “has held constant and makes sense whether you’re in the cosmology of the flat world with the dome,” the Medieval cosmology, that of Newton, Einstein or whatever the next cosmology that comes along, he said.
“Every new revelation in cosmology allows us to see what are the essentials and to be able to set aside the trapping that help us understand the universe,” he said.
Scientists can look at the universe and in attempting to understand it see “logic, and reason but also beauty, but also joy,” he said. “As a result, in a whole new way we recognize how the heavens proclaim the glory of God.”
