11^th. September 11, 2010

PETER McKNIGHT pmcknight@ vancouversun. com

VANCOUVER SUN

2010-09 God and philosophy in Hawking’s universe

Given that the celebrated physicist’s thought is bathed in philosophical theories, it’s folly to assert that science has dispatched metaphysics

Stephen Hawking claims that ‘ It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going’ in his new bestselling book, The Grand Design.

Etienne Gilson ( 1949)

Philosophy is dead.

Philosophy always buries its undertakers.

Upon reading The Grand Design, one gets the impression that Stephen Hawking has come a little late to the party. Sure, he manages to pronounce philosophy dead on page one of his new book, but philosophers have been heralding the death of philosophy for centuries.

Indeed, virtually every generation has produced at least a few philosophers who describe their subject as either finished or futile. It’s doubtful Hawking is aware of this, though, since The Grand Design provides abundant evidence that the celebrated physicist’s philosophical education has been sorely neglected.

Most people won’t be particularly troubled by that, of course. What has troubled people – and consequently rocketed The Grand Design up the bestseller lists – is Hawking’s claim that, “It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going.”

Yet God and philosophy are intimately related in Hawking’s universe, for it is the same philosophy – yes, philosophy — that tried to kill them both.

In The Universe in a Nutshell, published in 2001, Hawking called this philosophy “ positivist,” and described positivism as an “ approach put forward by Karl Popper and others.”

Now let’s stop right there, since this is example No. 1 of Hawking’s philosophical ignorance. For Popper did not “ put forward” positivism; on the contrary, he argued vehemently against it. In fact, he devoted an entire section of his autobiography to explaining how he was responsible for destroying positivism.

Positivism is more properly associated with Auguste Comte, a 19th century French philosopher and founder of sociology. In an attempt to provide an account of social evolution, Comte argued that human societies progress through three stages: the theological, the metaphysical and the positive ( scientific.) Hence, early societies will rely on appeals to a deity or deities, later societies will wax philosophical ( metaphysical), and the most advanced societies will turn to science.

There is reason to believe that Hawking is sympathetic to this philosophy. In an interview with MSNBC, Caltech physicist and Hawking’s co-author Leonard Mlodinow displays how deeply committed he is to Comtean positivism: “ Where did the universe come from? Why is nature the way it is? At first we had mythology to answer that question ... Later we had the religions that we have today, and philosophy grew up ... A few hundred years ago we developed this thing called the scientific method.”

Comte could have written that himself – in fact, he nearly did. But Comte’s thesis was a sociological one, in that it was an account of how societies develop. This, however, is not Hawking’s concern; rather, he and Mlodinow argue that when it comes to understanding the world, scientific explanations are preferable to religious or philosophical explanations.

In this sense, their philosophy resembles a species of positivism known as “ logical” positivism, a philosophy developed in the early 20th century by a group of physicists, philosophers and scientists known as the Vienna Circle. Incidentally, the Circle disagreed with Comte’s sociological thesis, and hence they preferred that their philosophy be known as logical empiricism, but much to their dismay, the positivist label stuck.

In any case, the Vienna Circle argued that for a statement to have “ cognitive meaning” – for it to concern knowledge – it must, in principle, be verifiable. This idea, which became known as the verification principle of meaning, renders all metaphysical, religious and ethical statements ( cognitively) meaningless, since they can’t be scientifically verified.

So when one makes a metaphysical or religious statement – say, “ God exists” – or an ethical statement – say, “ wanton cruelty is bad” – one is not saying something objectively true or false, but is simply stating how he or she feels, because there’s no way to verify ( test) those statements.

It’s not clear if Hawking would go this far, but he clearly does believe that metaphysical ( and presumably, religious) statements have nothing to do with knowledge. And the reason they don’t, for Hawking and Mlodinow, is that they aren’t testable – they don’t make predictions that can be tested.

We have seen, therefore, that despite his dim view of philosophy, Hawking does subscribe to a philosophy of science. And, in The Grand Design, he gets caught in further metaphysical muddles.

At the root of Hawking’s theory of “ spontaneous creation” of the universe lies string theory – a theory that suggests oscillating strings are the fundamental constituents of reality, and that attempts to reconcile quantum theory and the theory of relativity, thereby providing us with the elusive “ Theory of Everything.”

The trouble, though, is that string theory is now five theories, and having five theories of everything isn’t much good.

Furthermore, we can’t determine which, if any, of the theories are true because they’re not testable. So Hawking’s anti-metaphysical thesis relies on theories that his own philosophy would condemn to metaphysics, and hence to death.

It gets worse. Hawking’s response to the proliferation of string theories is to propose a theory called “ model-dependent realism” which asserts that there is no single theory of the universe, that there might well exist different theories that are equally true.

In New Scientist, philosopher of physics Craig Callender notes that model-dependent realism is an explicitly philosophical theory, and furthermore, it’s a theory that philosophers have discussed for decades, though under a different name ( perspectivalism).

Callender further argues that in Hawking’s and Mlodinow’s hands, “ this position bleeds into an alarming anti-realism: not only does science fail to provide a single description of reality, they say, [ but] there is no theory-independent reality at all.”

So Hawking’s world view is thoroughly informed by a philosophy, and not a very good one. Hawking ultimately decides, however, that Mtheory – a theory that considers membranes in addition to strings – is the Theory of Everything.

This seems to contradict his model-dependent realism, but that’s not the only problem, for M-theory is not presently testable, which means it should be consigned to metaphysics, and is woefully incomplete. In fact, no one even knows what the “ M” refers to.

Of course, M-theory might ultimately prove to be the Theory of Everything, but it is far too soon to make such claims, as Hawking does.

And given that Hawking’s thought is literally bathed in untestable philosophical theories, it’s pure folly for him to assert that science has effectively dispatched philosophy.

Indeed, Hawking’s – and everyone else’s – extensive reliance on untestable theories reveals that such theories might express truths that are inaccessible to science.

And this suggests the existence of a whole different universe, a universe of metaphysics and morals, where it is science that must remain silent.