Stephen Hawking’s body was barely cold (or rather, his ashes were barely cold) when the religionists came muscling in with their tut-tutting and caveats about his accomplishments. For Father Raymond de Souza, a Canadian priest in Ontario (and Catholic Chaplain of Queen’s University), he did his kvetching in yesterday’s National Post. His column, as you see below, claims that “Hawking’s world was rather small.” Really? Why?

Well, because Hawking, while he made big advances in cosmology, couldn’t answer the BIG QUESTIONS about the Universe: namely, why does it exist? Why is there something rather than nothing? Read the good father’s lucubrations in this article (click on the screenshot):

Right now we know how a Universe—or many universes—can come from a quantum vacuum, which some people see as “nothing”, but if you want to go further, the question can be asked: “Why was there a quantum vacuum instead of nothing?” Father de Souza says that the answer is metaphysical, not physical and that’s not the territory of science. But in fact, the Universe could have existed forever, and that is within the territory of science.  Here’s what de Souza says:

In 2010, on his way to Canada for several weeks at the Perimeter Institute, Hawking gave an interview to Diane Sawyer, in which she asked him about the biggest mystery he would like solved.

“I want to know why the universe exists, why there is something greater than nothing,” Hawking explained.

That’s metaphysics. You can do metaphysics without theology, let alone Christian theology — see Aristotle. Nevertheless, the ideological atheism that dominates the hard sciences regards metaphysics as something of an occasion of sin, the sin being thinking that God might exist.

Well, no, physicists could entertain the possibility of God, and in fact there could be evidence for God’s existence (see Faith versus Fact for a discussion of such evidence). It’s just that there isn’t any, and so scientists, having seen that naturalism works just fine in helping us understand the cosmos, thank you, don’t entertain the possibility of God. Saying that God is beyond science is simply a falsehood. He’s invisible to science, but in principle there could be evidence for a theistic God.

But God is de Souza’s answer to this big question, and, further, the priest says that that answer is compatible with science. He winds up chiding Hawking for his limited world (Hawking was an atheist):

Professor Hawking was an ideological atheist, but unlike may of his contemporaries, was open to dialogue with a religious view of the universe which he studied with his equations. He served for 40 years on the Vatican’s Academy of Sciences, which includes scholars independent of religious profession. At the last meeting he attended in 2016 he spoke about the origins of the universe. He gave credit there to the Catholic priest who developed the “big bang” theory.

“Georges Lemaitre was the first who proposed a model according to which the universe had a very dense beginning. He is the father of Big Bang,” Hawking said.

Monsignor Lemaitre knew that the Big Bang and Christian faith were compatible. After all, where did whatever went “bang” come from? Science cannot tell you anything about what existed before anything existed.

Professor Hawking expanded the limits of what physics tells us. It is an elementary part of the philosophy of science that there are limits to what physics can tell us. Hawking insisted, by assertion and not evidence, that there were no such limits, that there was no metaphysics, just physics. Which means that Hawking’s world — despite the fact that saw farther than almost everyone else — was, in the end, rather small.

As Sean Carroll can tell you, the question of “what existed before the Big Bang?” is nonsensical, as the concept of time “before” the Big Bang is meaningless. Further, the Big Bang and Christian faith are compatible only if you think that Genesis is a metaphor, not a real account of creation. Father de Souza is clearly on the metaphorical side. But if we have to interpret Genesis metaphorically, why aren’t Adam and Eve, or the Original Sin, for that matter, also metaphorical? Why isn’t the story of Jesus, including the Ressurrection, a metaphor, too?

Those are some questions for Father de Souza, but I have more:

1. What’s your evidence for God? And why do you adhere to the Catholic conception of God rather than the Muslim conception, which sees Jesus as a prophet but not a divine being? Why aren’t you a polytheist, like Hindus?
2. If God created the Big Bang, who created God?
3. If you say that God didn’t need a creator because He was eternal, why couldn’t the Universe be eternal?
4. And if God was, for some reason, eternal, what was he doing before he created the Universe? And why did he bother to create the Universe? Was he bored?

These questions aren’t original with me; they’re a staple of religious doubters. And of course Father de Souza can’t answer them except by spouting theological nonsense.

Whenever there’s a lacuna in scientific knowledge (the origin of life is another one), some damn religionist sticks his nose in and says, “See! God did it!” But priests said that about lightning, epilepsy, smallpox, the Black Plague, and many other phenomena that we now can explain through naturalism.

If Hawking’s world is “small,” well, at least what he found was testable, and might be true. Father de Souza’s claims are either untestable or have already been shown to be doubtful, and he has no evidence for any of them. In requiring people to believe fairy tales, de Souza’s world is not just small, but nonexistent.

h/t: Thomas