The Big Question is that of our creation.
"One can't prove that God doesn't exist," physicist and Professor Stephen Hawking told ABC News in early September. "But science makes God unnecessary.
Stephen Hawking is an accomplished physicist and glorified academic, but can science alone answer the Big Question?
Hawking with his latest book, “The Grand Design,” went from scientist to preacher, in comparison to his previous books that showcase the fascinating nature of black holes and the cosmos.
But the agnosticism that Hawking is projecting is really atheism.
It indirectly negates the notion of the “supernatural” because science may not have the necessary tools to answer the question.
By creating this gray area that widens the definitions of agnosticism and atheism they become the same in principle. Both ideas don’t attribute to the belief of a supernatural power or God. Atheism just seems more assertive than agnosticism by a little bit.
Hawking is certainly more knowledgeable in the biological and cosmological sciences than I am, but he states that, due to gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing. But what is nothing? Even if nothingness can be measured, where does it come from?
This double-edged sword Hawking uses bleeds arrogance with atheist philosophy sprinkled with some science.
Newton saw God as the master creator whose existence could not be denied in the grandeur of creation.
It is important to note that if God is the creator of the universe, then he has the ability to create the universe in a way where empirical evidence will not trail back to him.
In Abrahamic scripture, man is being tested to use faith or rational intuition based on authority of God rather than by humans’ conclusions.
The universe with its complexity is nearly impossible to not have existed without order. If the earth was a couple of degrees closer to the sun, we would all be dead.
Obviously there are physical and mathematical constants found to be universal in nature and constant in time.
For example, the speed of light is 299,792,458 meters per second, the earth made of four layers, and humans have 46 chromosomes in their DNA.
I humbly ask who set these constants with which our Earth and life could not have existed?
To say the universe was created randomly out of nothing is to say a wind whipped through a warehouse of airplane parts and blew the pieces around until they formed a perfect, functional 747 jet airplane. This scenario is possible, but it’s highly improbable.
According to Al-Gazaliwho is , a respected Muslim philosopher and pioneer of methodic doubt and skepticism, noted that whatever begins to exist has a cause.
Thus, by using metaphysical intuition, it is extremely difficult to believe that something can come into being from nothing.
Because of the Big Bang, the universe has a cause. Similarly, the earth is aged 4.5 billion years and must have a cause. The burden of proof comes on nonbelievers to answer the question of what or who is the cause.
A Sufi scholar once that said using science to prove God exists is like using a flashlight to prove the sun.
Science is not contradictory to God, but making science godly by daring to answer these questions is intellectually dangerous.
Reach Oday at oshadin@asu.edu
