Tag: Stephen Hawking

Why I Am Not A Christian – 2

In my blog post “Is there a God?“, I pointed out some of the weaknesses in Stephen Hawking’s reasoning for saying there is no God. I suggested he should have stuck with science, where he had expertise, instead of commenting on areas where he was out of his depth. But I made the rash commitment of responding to the arguments of two philosophers, Bertrand Russell and Richard Carrier on why they were not Christians. Philosophers being trained in argument and logic are obviously going to be a tougher challenge. I responded to Richard Carrier HERE. This post is in response to Russell’s essay “Why I Am Not A Christian“.

“Why I am not a Christian” was initially given as a lecture by Bertrand Russell in 1927 and subsequently written and published as an essay, along with other essays in a book entitled “Why I Am Not A Christian”. At least Russell avoids the arrogance of Carrier, who claimed to have conclusively shown that God does not exist and that Christianity is false. Russell limits himself to saying why he is not a Christian.

Quite rightly Russell starts with a definition of a Christian. Unfortunately he gets it wrong. He defines a Christian as someone who believes in God and who believes that Jesus, if not divine, is at least the best and wisest of men. A Christian very simply is someone who believes that Jesus is the Son of God and came into the world to save it. Starting with his incorrect description, Russell gives his reasons for not being such a person. The following is my critique of his reasons for not being a person such as he describes.

Belief In God

Russell could just have said that he didn’t believe in God and saw no reason for doing so. But he starts with disagreeing with attempts to “prove” the existence of God. But why bother? Nobody has ever conclusively “proved” the existence or non-existence of God. Those who believe in God tend do so because of personal experience and those experiences will differ from person to person.

Suffice it to say that the Holy Bible promises that “ask and it will be given you, seek and you will find and knock and the door will be opened”. If people do not bother to ask, seek or knock, they may never receive. However, in my own case, I really didn’t do any of those things and was given faith anyway. I thank God for his amazing Grace, because it happened shortly before discovery of my brain tumour.

The Nature Of Jesus

Russell then sets out to say why he doesn’t consider Jesus the “best and wisest of men”, which he started out by erroneously suggesting is a requirement to call oneself a Christian.

What he does is deliberately misinterpret some of Jesus’s sayings and then use his misinterpretation against Jesus. He also mentions areas in which he considers that Christians do not follow what Jesus said. Whic is surprising for a philosopher to bring up as an argument against Christianity because it is totally irrelevant. Following are some examples:

He told a rich man to sell up everything and give it to the poor and follow Him. Russell misinterprets this as applying to everyone and criticising Christians for not doing that. The correct interpretation is that this man, asking Jesus what he had to do to inherit eternal life, loved his wealth too much to give it up. Jesus perceived this and so said what he said. By no stretch of the imagination is it an instruction to all wealthy people to sell up and give everything to the poor. In reality, there have been and are many wealthy Christians who have used their wealth to provide employment and have given from 50% to 90% of their income to charity. In this way their wealth does much more good than if they were to give it all up in one go. There is a good article on such philanthropists HERE.

In the same way he misinterprets Jesus’s statement “If your hand or your foot causes you to stumble, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to enter life maimed or crippled than to have two hands or two feet and be thrown into eternal fire” (Matthew 18 v.8)). This is clearly metaphorical in that most of us have accumulated some baggage, some habits, whatever, prior to conversion, that we have to shed in order to follow Jesus. And we have the Holy Spirit, the Divine Helper, to help us to do that. It is astonishing how many people, on receiving Jesus, instantly stop drunkenness, smoking, swearing or whatever it is that is holding them back.

He also misinterprets “Do not judge, or you too will be judged” (Matthew 7 v.1) as implying that Christians who are judges in court are going against their faith. It doesn’t mean that at all. It refers only to judging people with respect to their morality in respect of God’s law and God’s expectations and has nothing to do with society’s laws, whether civil or criminal. I don’t know Russell’s motivation for what can only be deliberate misinterpretations. They don’t do his argument any good.

Conclusion

Russell’s failure is simply to take bits of the scripture and misinterpret them instead of looking at them as a whole. Interestingly, we just covered a passage in our Bible study that has a bearing on this – 2 Corinthians 4 v.4 “The god of this age has blinded the minds of unbelievers, so that they cannot see the light of the gospel that displays the glory of Christ, who is the image of God”. The god of this age, meaning the devil, has effectively blinded the minds of unbelievers to the Gospel. This is evident in that atheists who have made up their minds that God does not exist are completely blinded to the fact that he does and mock the experience of those who believe, whereas those who keep an open mind are not blinded and are more likely to come to understand the beauty and simplicity of the Gospel.

What surprise me so much about many atheists is that they are so determined in their belief that God does not exist. Make no mistake that it is a belief just the same as belief that God is. That passage from the letter to the Corinthians above can be the only reason that they are so bigoted – an accusation often unjustly directed at Christians.

Addendum – Hell

Since writing this, I have taken an interest in Biblical Greek. I took Greek O-Level some 65 years ago and actually passed, much to my teacher’s surprise. I have to admit that I really didn’t enjoy it and never got to grips with it. If not always bottom of the class I must have been near it. Strangely, I was always top of the class, or near it, in Latin. But really the Classics were not for me. Maths and Physics were what I enjoyed. Anyway, now that it has a purpose, I am eager to understand Koine Greek (Κοινη) which is the language of the New Testament (most, if not all). Add to that, I am reading that probably much of Jesus’s ministry was likely in the Greek language.

This new-found interest in Greek has got me interested in the original meanings and use of words for Heaven, Hell and Paradise. I am doing more research on this and plan to document my results, either online or in a book, depending on how substantial it is.

Anyway, it is relevant to this post because one of Russell’s criticisms of Jesus is his warning some people they are destined for “Hell”. So I wanted to discover whether it was true and what it really meant. So I went back to the original Greek. The word translated as Hell is γέεννα, anglicised as Gehenna. Gehenna was actually Jerusalem’s rubbish dump, where fires were kept burning to control pests and disease. It is widely taken as a metaphor for “Hell”, being a fiery place where souls are tortured for eternity. Perhaps it is not such a metaphor after all. Perhaps it is a way of saying that those who have spent a life opposing God will be ended and discarded.

In common with a lot of people, whether God-loving or God-hating, I think that an eternity of torture is a bit harsh for a lifetime of disobedience. If God created mankind as an immortal soul, then God is the only one who can undo that immortality – by metaphorically throwing them onto a fiery rubbish dump, so suffering briefly, not eternally. This is pure conjecture at this point and I need to do more research.

The reason that I am mentioning this is that “orthodoxy” may not necessarily be correct. It is not that I spend any time on pondering what happens after death, even though closer than many as an 80-year-old with cancer. My belief is that, however we lived our lives, we will accept God’s judgment as just, when it comes to the time. I actually have a distaste for statements too often made that someone is destined for Hell, or even for Heaven. I imagine that God doesn’t like people pre-judging what He will do either.

Is There A God?

I have taken the title of this post from the title of a chapter in Stephen Hawking’s last book, which I have just read – “Brief Answers to the Big Questions“. This book was published posthumously. It is quite a good read in spite of our difference in knowing of God’s existence. He looks at the question from a scientific point of view. Seemingly, in my opinion, he starts out with the negative view and then tries to justify it scientifically.

It would probably take a whole book to refute all his arguments. I am rather left with the feeling that if that is the best an atheist can do, even someone with a brilliant mind like Stephen Hawking, then it adds to the probability of God’s existence. Kind of like I felt after reading “The God Delusion” by Richard Dawkins.

In matters of science, I have to accept what Hawking says. I don’t know enough to be able to refute his scientific statements, but I can detect the gaping holes in his reasoning.

Beginning of the Universe

His belief, currently widely accepted, was that the universe started as a “singularity” which is a point of no size and infinite density. Think of it as a tiny object that has lots and lots and lots of mass (mass is what causes things to have weight in the presence of gravity – feathers don’t have much mass, lead weights do). Apparently the mass of the known universe is often quoted as 1053 kilograms (that is a number 1 with 53 zeros behind it). Then this singularity exploded with a Big Bang to form the universe as we know it. Observation shows that it is still expanding and this led to the idea that it was all together at some point billions of years ago.

Hawking states that time does not exist within a singularity.

I have no reason to dispute these “facts”, nor do I need to.

First Error – Laws

I quote from his chapter “Is There a God?”: “The universe is a machine governed by principles or laws …..These laws of nature will tell us whether we need a god to explain the universe at all. ……… Unlike laws made by humans, the laws of nature cannot be broken“. He then goes on to say: “These laws may, or may not, have been decreed by God, but he cannot intervene to break the laws, or they would not be laws.”. The big problem with this is his huge assumption that God is subject to the laws that he made for the universe.

Looking at it from a Christian point of view actually makes more sense. If there are “laws of nature” they were established by God to govern the creation and evolution of the universe. The fact that God made laws to govern the universe does not at all mean that He made any laws, of nature or anything else, to govern His own actions. God is a free agent not constrained by any imaginary laws. He is perfectly free to intervene in any way He pleases. The beauty, elegance and consistency of the “laws of nature” is more of an argument in favour of God’s existence than against it. Many scientists believe in God.

Hawking then makes the assumption that everything since the Big Bang is governed by the laws of nature and that there is therefore no need for God because Hawking thinks Him constrained by those same laws. This is of course a nonsense and completely denies reality.

The second part of this error is Hawking’s questioning whether “the laws of nature will tell us whether we need a god to explain the universe at all“. How can you question whether the laws that God made tell us whether we need God? If God didn’t make the laws of nature, how were they made? Bearing in mind that nothing existed prior to God, how could there be laws that governed matter and energy and the relationship between them before they existed, unless He made them?

Hawking would either have us believe that the laws that govern the universe were spontaneously created at the same time as the universe, or that they existed before the universe, even though there was nothing for them to govern prior to creation. I think that is much more of a stretch than believing that there is a God.

Second Error – Time

As stated above, time does not exist within a singularity. So Hawking leaps to the conclusion that there was “no time before the Big Bang ……….. For me this means that there is no possibility of a creator because there was no time for a creator to have existed in.“. Absolute nonsense! There is no time within the singularity, but that is not to say there isn’t time outside it for God to “exist in”. For proof just look at black holes. As Hawking says, at the heart of a black hole is a singularity and there is no time within them, but we know there is time outside them because the rest of the universe goes on regardless and we couldn’t observe them if it didn’t. By extension, this means that there was as much time as the creator God wanted to “exist in” prior to the Big Bang, because He was obviously outside the singularity. Hawking’s argument just doesn’t hold water.

Conclusion

So as I see it, these are the two glaring errors. There is plenty more to disagree with in his “answer”, but that would take too long and someone more patient and painstaking than I. On a personal note, I was surprised that Hawking’s reasoning was so weak. He did try, whereas some atheists, realising the futility of trying to prove that God doesn’t exist, demand that we prove He does. We have no need to.

At least Hawking limited his reasons for not believing in God to one chapter, whereas Richard Dawkins found it necessary to write a whole book of bad argument and non sequiturs to state the reasons for his atheism. It seems to me that scientists would be better to limit themselves to studying the wonders of God’s creation rather than trying, and failing, to explain that it wasn’t His creation. Slightly ironic that Hawking’s ashes reside in Westminster Abbey, a place dedicated to the glory of God.

There is obviously a problem that we cannot prove or disprove the being of God with repeatable experiments, which are what science demands. So we look at the evidence. Jesus repeatedly rejected the requests of sceptics to show “proof” of who He was. He left them to consider the evidence for themselves. Christians believe there is plenty of evidence. We find our own experience and others’ experience of the Holy Spirit compelling. We see miracles and answers to prayers rather than coincidences because there are so many of them. We believe in the resurrection of Jesus, not just because the Holy Spirit and scripture tell us so. Even after this length of time and with no contemporary news reports, we do know that His crucifixion left his disciples fearful and demoralised, and then His resurrection and the Holy Spirit energised them to preach the Gospel and even die for it. People are not generally prepared to suffer and die for something they don’t know to be true.

As Gamaliel said to the Sanhedrin “But if it is from God, you will not be able to stop these men; you will only find yourselves fighting against God” (Acts 5 v.39) . And that was 2,000 years ago and the Gospel is still going strong, in spite of the many attacks against it. It is worth reading the whole chapter because he describes sects that vanished when their leaders were killed, and therefore the expectation that Christianity would vanish unless it were from God. Paul experienced a miraculous conversion and got to know the disciples and wrote about it in his Epistles, and Luke travelled with Paul and wrote about it in the Acts of the Apostles and was motivated to write the Gospel account that bears his name .

And as Paul so succinctly put it in one of his letters: “For the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God” (1 Corinthians 3 v.19). Which is one way of saying that God is immeasurably more powerful and wise than we are. Atheists using their “wisdom” to argue that He doesn’t exist would do well to bear this in mind. He created the universe and all the “laws” that govern its evolution. Awesome!

You will note that I have steered clear of Biblical creation as outlined in Genesis, because all I set out to do was demonstrate Hawking’s faulty reasoning. I am inclined to accept the Big Bang, or something like it, as the beginning of the universe. In fact, it completely blows my mind to think that God could create a singularity from which our planet evolved with all the life and resources that we need. Sad to say, we are not very smart and are in danger of mucking it all up even more than we have already.

I realise that faith has more to do with our receptiveness and the Holy Spirit than with intellectual argument. The best that argument can do is open someone’s mind to a point where they search for themselves and ask for help – “So I say to you: ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you” (Luke 11 v.9).

Addendum

I am reading Hawking’s book “A Brief History Of Time” and interesting it is too. I mention this as an addendum here because he essentially contradicts what he wrote in his answer to the question “Is There A God?”.

One of his arguments is that the Big Bang was the beginning of time, so there was no time before it for God to exist in. But in “A Brief History Of Time” he plainly states that there was time before the Big Bang, and only that the Big Bang is taken to be the beginning of time because it coincides with the beginning of the universe and that what happened before is not relevant to the mathematical and physical analysis of the universe.

Therefore taking the beginning of the universe as the beginning of time is a purely human construct for human convenience, because we know nothing of what went before. To then conclude in a different book that there was no time in which God could exist is patently ridiculous.

Hawking should really have limited himself to the mathematics of God’s creation. He was certainly no philosopher if even I can pick holes in his logic. Richard Dawkins is equally ignorant of philosophy, which is why his book “The God Delusion” is such rubbish.

On the other hand, Bertrand Russell was a philosopher, and he wrote “Why I Am Not A Christian”. Looking where to buy that book, I came across another with the same title by another philosopher, Richard Carrier. So I seem to have set myself the challenge of reading their books and seeing whether their arguments hold water.

I certainly believe my faith is up to this challenge – and I couldn’t have confidence in it if it wasn’t. I’ll keep you posted!

On the other hand, I wouldn’t want it thought that faith is an intellectual exercise, because it most definitely isn’t. But if men are going to use their intellect to challenge it, then they need to be challenged.