This article was originally published on January 16, 2011.

What do the Pope and Stephen Hawking have in common? Both propagate a Christian view of how the universe came into being: While the Pope is direct, seeing the hand of God in the Big Bang, Hawking does it more subtly. His popular books provide a scientific veneer to Christian theology, while projectingnon-Christian views of creation as unscientific, reveals Professor CK Raju, who is currently with the School of Mathematical Sciences, Universiti Sains Malaysia.

Book: The Grand Design: New Answers To The Ultimate Questions Of LifeAuthors: Stephen Hawking and Leonard MlodinowBantam Books199 pagesRs599

Stephen Hawking’s new book, The Grand Design: New Answers To The Ultimate Questions of Life, has a misleading subtitle. It aims to answer the ultimate questions not of life, but of theology.

Those concern creation and God.

Science, too, has a big bang theory of the origin of the cosmos. How does that compare with the religious account of creation given by (Christian) theology?

This question has preoccupied Hawking since his first book in 1973. (That was not the Brief History Of Time, but a book on general relativity called The Large-Scale Structure Of Space-Time.) The concluding sentence of that book spoke of a “moment of creation” (called a “singularity”) when the laws of physics break down (see box). Hawking claimed to have proved that the “laws of physics” imply creation.

Does the big bang (a dense state of the cosmos) coincide with creation (a true beginning of time)? People commonly confound the two; that includes scientists—the website of the Large Hadronic Collider also speaks of creation. But a dense state of the cosmos need not be a moment of creation. In the Hindu view of a quasi-recurrent cosmos, the cosmos periodically goes through a dense egg state (hiranyagarbha).

The same is true of general relativity. If the cosmos rotates, for example, the big bang might not be a beginning of time, but only the other side of a big crunch. So, while the observed cosmic microwave (millimeter) background might be evidence for a past dense state of the cosmos, it is no evidence for creation or a beginning of time. The whole point of Hawking’s singularity theory was to try to settle this doubt whether the big bang did amount to creation. Strangely, this book never comes to grips with the common confusion between the big bang and instantaneous creation.

Creation and the BibleNow instantaneous creation, a few billion years ago, is not exactly the Bible story of creation in 7 days, some 6,000 years ago. But Christian theologians explained long ago how the two are compatible! Hawking’s earlier view coincided with those of Thomas Aquinas, a key 13th century church theologian, who stated in his Summa Theologica that after creating the world, God ruled it with eternal laws.

Theology is about power, not the Bible. This was renamed “soft power” by Huntington, a modern strategist, who recognised its role in the US agenda for global hegemony.

The politics of “science and creation” relates to the civilisational clash between Christianity and Islam. Creation at one instant in the past is opposed to the Islamic view of continuous creation, or the Buddhist view of non-creation, or even the Hindu view of a quasi-recurrent and long-lived cosmos.

So, the subtle propaganda point in Hawking’s work has all along been that science is opposed to all non-Christian views of creation, which are hence false. This influences large numbers of people who implicitly believe in science, especially if they don’t understand it.

FJ Tipler even argued that singularity theory shows that “Judeo-Christian theology is a part of physics”. The book under review obliquely refers to that argument through the Hollywood film, The Matrix, which combines Tipler’s idea of humans as characters in a computer-generated virtual reality with the story of Christ as saviour.

The weaknesses of singularity theory were pointed out by various people including CJS Clarke and this reviewer. The theory had no experimental consequence, and hence was not science. A singularity is merely a mathematical infinity which can be easily eliminated by changing a mathematical definition.

In a public debate with this reviewer, Roger Penrose, the originator of singularity theory, could not defend the physical interpretation of a singularity (it might be just a common shock wave, as this reviewer argued). The proofs of Hawking’s singularity theorems used biased assumptions about time, called the “chronology condition” (that time is not ‘cyclic’) which are central to the revised Christian theological dogma from the 4th century.

Hawking justified those assumptions using arguments very similar to Augustine’s (a 4th century theologian). This was explained in this reviewer’s book The Eleven Pictures of Time. In an indirect acknowledgment of this critique, Hawking’s latest book has only a single passing line on singularity theory: “It seems the laws of evolution of the universe may break down at the big bang”.

The Brief History Of Time pushed that creationist idea, and gave Hawking the image of a super-scientist, among laypersons. But the weakness of singularity theory, combined with its proximity to Christian theology, damaged Hawking’s image among scientists. The inspired (if devious) marketing line for the present book is that, according to Hawking, God is not needed for creation.

So, what is the new answer to the mystery of creation? This is never explained in the book, surely by design. That subtlety has also been missed by reviewers, so it needs to be made explicit.Hawking’s earlier answer (like Aquinas’ theology) had a defect. If the “laws of physics” break down at the moment of creation, then how can they be eternal? So the new answer given (implicitly) by Hawking is that God created only the laws of physics, which are “eternal” in the sense of being outside time. The cosmos was created according to these laws, and hence does not (directly) require God for its creation. That is, Hawking, the scientist, can speak comfortably only of the “laws of physics”, while the Christian theologian can say those “laws” were created by God just as they had been saying all along.

Patchwork models, not realityHow do we know that there are “laws of physics”, or that they do not change capriciously with the epoch? Or that they exist when/where the cosmos does not? Hawking appeals to “model-dependent realism”: only models matter, there is no reality.

Even a comprehensive model is not needed, a patchwork will do. Hawking advocates this “philosophy” since he needs to patch general relativity (which models the cosmos at large scales) with quantum field theory (which models the cosmos at very small scales). Though Hawking suggests that the two can be patched together, the lay reader is never warned that no one has quite succeeded in doing that so far.

How did the “laws of physics” create the cosmos? The authors use Feynman’s idea of alternative past histories without pointing out its key lacuna. (Feynman’s idea was that all that could have happened did happen.) That formulation can make predictions, like astrology, but those predictions cannot be refuted by experiment. Science must be refutable, but Hawking has changed that to mean that it must be reputable.

Why did God create the world he did? The new answer (using alternative past histories) is that he just haphazardly created all possible worlds — billions of them — of which we are aware of only one. The final leap in the book is into M-theory, which supposedly explains everything, but is never explained in the book. Instead, the book just concludes by passing it off as the unified theory Einstein was looking for. The authors apparently think this is a book in the Complete Idiot’s series.

Hawking’s claim—that he has no need for God in his system—is not original: a similar claim was made long ago, in a similar context, by Laplace. Not only al Ghazali, but also Isaac Newton thought that God intervenes in the cosmos from time to time. The universe may be like a giant piece of clockwork, but it was necessary to wind up the clock (or recharge the batteries) occasionally. Newton needed God’s intervention since he was unable to prove the stability of the planetary system. Laplace did so, hence his boast that he had no need for God in his system.

So what does that mean for the layperson? This iron “rule of law” not only eliminates divine intervention, it also eliminates any creative human intervention, to bring about a particular future. This not only makes life utterly pointless, it cuts out the basis of the belief in science. In contrast, the Islamic belief in continuous creation allows human creativity, like the Buddhist belief in conditioned coorigination (paticca samuppada) or the Hindu belief in creative action (karma). Hawking’s answer to this is very very old hat—something called Conway’s “Game of Life” which shows how complexity may give rise to the illusion of creativity. The authors neglect the whole host of difficulties with that, perhaps because they believe “philosophy is dead”. But what they give in its place is half-baked science to support full-blown theology which suits the pursuit of world power by one superpower.