Stephen Hawkings' Amazing Revelation

Physicist Stephen Hawking has a new book. According to press reports Hawking answers the definitive question--- GOD IS NOT NECESSARY FOR THE CREATION OF THE UNIVERSE!!!!

Oh dear, what shall we do? All is lost!!! Centuries of writing on science and religion--- centuries of religious faith--- all gone, all wasted.

Because Stephen Hawking says God is not necessary.

Seriously, if this is what sells books I should have thought of that long ago. Of course God is not NECESSARY to understand the universe and its origins. You think Hawking is the first physicist to ever state that the Big Bang is simply the inevitable result of the laws of physics? I know of a certain Cosmology textbook in which the first chapter pretty much differentiates between religious "myth" and science. And it is also available on Amazon! (But it is WAY more expensive)

However, just because Hawking (or anyone else) says God was not necessary for the creation of the universe, this does not mean they are right. The word "necessary" implies an either/or which is not called for. Perhaps, as faith would have it, God is at the heart of the creation of the universe. Perhaps not. But necessary? This sounds like a marketing word. But there is a more important point here. This rhetoric (I have not read his book so do not know all of what Hawking says) diverts us from what I think is a more significant matter. Creation is not an either/or with God and science. We need to be clear as to what "creation" we are talking about.

The Bible does attribute creative powers to God. Beyond the obvious Genesis references, the prophets, such as Isaiah, invoked God's universe creating persona as a way of inducing the people to return to the covenant. After the exiles in Babylon grew accustomed to their new life, the prophetic wing of the faith felt obliged to remind them that, of all the gods at their disposal, only one was capable of creating the heavens and the earth. But this was not a matter of physics, it was a matter of pre-eminance. This claim that God is the Creating God was to differentiate Yahweh from any number of social and cultural gods which vied for the attention of the people. This was a matter of idolatry, not of physics.

Did Jesus ever wonder why he did not just float out into space? Surely an apple fell on his head at least once. Why did that not lead him to think about gravity centuries before Isaac Newton? Perhaps because his attention was diverted by the question of why religious leaders where exploiting the people for their own sakes? He seemed more interested in why people were captive to injustice and disease than why they were captive to gravity. When asked what the greatest of the laws was, Jesus did not respond with the laws of physics. He responded with the laws of ethics. To love one's neighbor as oneself.

In the beginning was the Word. All things were created through the Word. So says the Gospel of John. Now we could spend a lot of time parsing the word Word--its LOGOS origins-- but it is sufficient to say that the Word is, well, the Word. In the beginning was the Word--language, thought, idea. And all things are created through Word. Cat becomes Cat by naming it Cat. Tree becomes Tree by naming it Tree. Language builds and creates world. This is good insofar as we can tell the difference between and cat and a dog. It is bad when language creates a world that is racist, hateful, unjust. If you don't believe that language can create world than you haven't been paying attention to political advertisements, 24/7 cable news and right wing talk radio.

Christianity is a faith rooted in the world creation of the Word. And the Word is not a physical principle, a first cause, or a big bang. The Word is a man--Jesus Christ--who came not to argue with Stephen Hawking but to dwell among us with grace and truth and to witness the love for the Cosmos that God intends. I feel God is necessary for such world creation as this. For the world we inhabit is a world that is created in and around our perception of it, the language we use to describe it, and the communication we use to relate to it and each other. If that is to be a world of mutual love and justice--God is, indeed, necessary.

All of which has nothing to do with the Big Bang.