First post -- Stephen Hawking

I recently could hear a broadcast of a Hawking's talk in Geneva, Switzerland about the Origin of our Universe.

Hawking is without doubt a very respected and acclaimed scientist, especially for his very well known discovery of the so-called "Hawking radiation", which is the fact that black holes emit radiation and evaporate after some amount of time. This is a beautiful consequence of quantum mechanics when applied to black holes, and its importance is very well known by any physicist.

Prof. Hawking is also known for other things in physics, such as the "no-boundary" proposal. This is the proposal that time shoud be perhaps treated in a particular way in quantum mechanics, so that one does not need to specify an initial condition for our Universe.

I would like to comment about this second issue. There are two facts which should be kept in mind.

First: unlike "Hawking radiation", the "no-boundary proposal" is by no means a direct consequence of the laws of physics that we know.
The fact that this is called "proposal" gives, in fact, an idea of its scientific status: it is more a speculation than a result. In fact, this is a not a consequence of well known physics, but a speculation about exotic physics proposed by prof. Hawking.
By no means this is a well established fact, and among physicists there is no-consensus about this.

Second: the fact that an initial condition for the Universe in this proposal is not needed leads, in prof.Hawking's opinion, to the conclusion that our Universe does not need a Creator and that the Universe can be born out of nothing .
However, even this conclusion is highly misleading from a philosophical point of view, as I want to show in this post, since the existence of initial conditions for a physical system has nothing to do with the existence of a Creator.

Summarizing my objection to prof. Hawking's point of view is that his ideas are based on a speculation (and therefore should be not advertised as a scentific result) and second that his philosophical conclusions are naively mistaking a mathematical idea with the philosophical concept of Creation.

Before showing what are the flaws in his reasoning, I'd like to stress the fact that prof. Hawking philosophical ideas look to me more like the "scientific" propaganda of atheism and materialism, rather than an attempt to look for the truth.


Let me finally briefly make the statement about the initial conditions of the Universe.
Hawking starts with the point of view, alike to many scientists, that modern science has disproved irrational beliefs such as the fact that ancient civilizations used to explain every physical phenomenon (thunderstorms, earthquakes, the motion of the planets,...) by the action of a supernatural entity on our world, due to ignorance.

This is certainly true.

However one should keep in mind that this does not imply that supernatural entities do not exist, or that they cannot have any impact on our Universe. This simply implies what it states: just the fact that many phenomena can be explained by some mathematical law.

Now, he seems to want to push this idea to its extreme limit: all phenomena and all that exists can be explained by physical laws.
At first sight this seems like a logical step to take, since many phenomena have already been explained.

But, taking such attitude is actually not easy from an intellectual point of view. It may seem easy, since we live in an era in which ideologically this point of view is supported by many intellectuals.
However, when confronted to the reality of our knowledge of physics, any intellectually honest thinker has to admit that this is far from true, at least for our present knowledge.

There are two major issues, in my opinion, which prevent to take such a step.
The first is quantum mechanics: there is no physical law explaining, for instance, what determines the fact that a radioactive nucleus decays after 5 minutes, while an identical nucleus may decay after 10 minutes and another one after 1 hour.
We can only predict averages: but not a single event.
So we cannot at all say that physics explains everything in a deterministic way.
There remains a huge mystery in how Nature behaves at the fundamental level.

The second issue is more based on our own existence. Our Universe is an extremely special one.
In the sense that there are physical laws (such as the forces between particles, gravitational attraction,...) , physical constants (numbers such as the mass of the electron with respect to the mass of the proton, or the amount of matter in the Universe, and many others...) and initial conditions (why the matter is distributed in some way in galaxies, why the age of the Universe is long enough to have formation of galaxies, why the energy of the vacuum is very small, ....)
If one could make very minimal modification to the laws, numbers, and initial conditions the result would be catastrophic in most cases: there would simply be no galaxies around, or no stars, or no planets, or the universe would recollapse immediately, or the atoms would never form...

It is a big mystery (and every scientist would agree) why we live in such universe, which allows life.
Now, I do not want to go too much in detail on this issue. However let me just state some fundamental points.

If one could get rid of the issue of the initial conditions (as Hawking tries to do stating that there is actually no choice in the initial conditions) there still remains the issue of the physical laws and the physical constants to be solved before claiming that our Universe is not a special one.

Then: the action of a supernatural agent (as Thomas Aquinas already concluded about 700 years ago) is not naively restricted to the initial conditions at some time.
In fact: a supernatural agent can be, perhaps, only the writer of the laws of physics. And if this agent has decided to write a system which needs initial condtions or a system without initial conditions is only a detail.
In other words, Creation is not meant to be creation at some point in time, but Creation is meant to be the fact that out Universe exists because some other agent thinks and cares about it at any time and at any space point, in some way.
After all a supernatural entity is by definition outside space and time. So, why its actions should be localized at one point in space?
After all maybe a supernatural actor (which we may define as God) can interact with it at several points of time and in several ways, and not necessarily violating the physical laws (which he has written himself, according to this point of view).

Comments and questions are welcome!