I heard Stephen Hawking mentioned yesterday in a movie trailer for Skyline :) ...
... and today I saw him mentioned again - US Catholic has Vatican astronomer Christopher Corbally guest blogging on Hawking's book, The Grand Design. Here's the beginning of his post ......
The media has been highlighting some pretty provocative quotes from Stephen Hawking's new book. One such runs: “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.”
I'm a Catholic so I might react to this by thinking, "Who does Hawking think he is, God?" But I'm also a Jesuit astronomer with a deep respect for Hawking's cosmology. If Hawking is talking from the "mechanical metaphor", interpreting reality solely from physics and mathematics, then quantum gravity can give rise to spontaneous creation and be the physical reason there is something rather than nothing.
Notice the word "solely". It leaves out the "metaphor" of philosophy, one that would speak of quantum gravity itself being contingent, since this law could "not be" at all. Quantum gravity does not have in itself the reason for its existence .....
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The idea that God didn't actually create the universe from nothing is not new. As I wrote in a past post ....
Most scientists support the big bang theory of the universe's beginning (the Church is on-board with this) but there are also some other explanations by guys like Stephen Hawking (quantum cosmology?) that aim to compensate for the ways the big bang theory disappoints (you can read more about this at counter-balance). I'm wondering what this all has to do with the idea of creatio ex nihilo, or creation out of nothing - need to read more.
