ANALYSIS: Hawking because he denied that God is needed to explain the
universe and that the universe is just spontaneous in its origin and not divine
is accused of having rejected philosophy.
Lie.
Philosophy no matter how abstract needs to get information about empirical
things you can sense to get started. Everybody does philosophy. Hawking cannot
reject philosophy. He may do it badly but that is not rejecting it but trying to
do it.
Philosophy is in principle if not in practice based on reason and Hawking uses
reason to work out his system and mathematics involves thinking and reasoning.
Hawking objected to philosophy only in relation to the following questions:
How can we understand the world in which we find ourselves?
How does the universe behave?
What is the nature of reality?
Where did all this come from?
Why do things behave as they do?
Did the universe need a creator?
The Christians want to present Hawking as ignoring reason and philosophy to
justify his non-belief in God. But Hawking explained that his problem with
philosophy was that it was out of touch with the discoveries of modern science.
It was really incorrect and uninformed philosophy he was and is against. He
rejects philosophical arguments for God as unnecessary in the light of the
discoveries of the laws of physics.
Philosophy is the search for wisdom and the study of wisdom. Wisdom is based on
truth. Physics is practically a branch of philosophy that uses logic and
experimentation to get at the truth. Physics is a search for wisdom about how
all things came to be and how they work. Hawking rejected not philosophy but bad
philosophy. He rejected it for the philosophy of experimentation, mathematics
and physics. That's all he did.
Christians think about how things came to exist and conclude that a totally
simple being made all things. This being is so simple that he didn't need any
being to make him. For them, God is essence that has no components or parts. God
is real but is not a material thing or material substance. They offer the
analogy of our thoughts. They are real but they are not made up of material
things. For example, a thought has no parts. It is quite a leap to assume that
our thoughts have no parts! Memories are stored in our brains meaning they feel
ghostly to us when we have them but that is just our experience and the way we
perceive them. In reality they are not that ghostly.
The believers think they see intelligent design in the universe. So they reason
that the simple being who designs must be intelligent. But that is the wrong way
to go about it. It is like, "I see a beautiful landscape painting. Somebody
painted it for it couldn't have been painted by accident. Somebody also must
have designed the landscape in the painting."
A totally simple being cannot be a mind or have one. Unless the believers can
explain how a simple being can be a mind they should not argue the way they do.
We cannot explain our own minds or how to make them or how they work. We know
what they do but we don't fully know what they are. We only understand a bit. We
know we are beings made of parts and that indicates that the mind is made of
parts too.
Suppose the simple being can be a mind. Suppose there is another simple being
that is not a mind. Because they have no parts we will see no difference between
them. We can never know if a simple being is or has a mind. If we look into
somebody's brain and see nothing there but silver then clearly that person does
not have a mind.
God can be a life force but not a conscious being. A God who is really an
impersonal mechanical intelligence makes more sense than a God who actually is a
mind. It is less complicated. The Christian personal God is not simple.
If Hawking rejected philosophy then what if he had no choice over what he
learned in physics?