Much Ado About “Nothing”: Stephen Hawking and the Self-Creating Universe

[Valin]

First Things:

Stephen M. Barr
9/9/10

Has physics done away with God? A newly release book by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow says, “Yes.”

What is a Jewish or Christian believer to make of this? Is the Creator now out of a job? The short answer is (unsurprisingly) no: the ideas propounded in Hawking’s book constitute no threat whatever to the Jewish and Christian doctrine of Creation.

The idea that Hawking is now touting is not new—in fact, within the fast-moving world of modern physics it is fairly old. My first introduction to it was reading a very elegant theoretical paper entitled “Creation of Universes from Nothing,” written in 1982 by the noted cosmologist Alexander Vilenkin, who argued that our universe might have arisen by a “quantum fluctuation.”

(Snip)


Stephen M. Barr is professor of physics at the University of Delaware and author of Modern Physics and Ancient Faith.

[Argyle58]

I once read an essay by Hawking that changed the way I looked at religion and science. I wish I could remember the name of the essay, I'm sure it is included in one of the books of essays available. In it, he proposed that Creationist and Evolution theory are not necessarily exclusive of one another. It really helped a young engineer with the struggle with real world issues and those of faith.