Despite my reluctance to question a genuine genius, I'm skeptical that we're anywhere close to doing what Stephen Hawking claims we're on the verge of doing:
Acclaimed British physicist Stephen Hawking has said that humanity is finally getting close to understanding the origin of the universe. Speaking at a lecture in Hong Kong, Hawking said that despite some theoretical advances in the past years, there are still mysteries as to how the universe began.
"Despite having had some great successes, not everything is solved. We do not yet have good theoretical understanding of the observation of the expansion of the universe," he told an audience of 2,500 at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology Thursday. "Without such understanding, we cannot be sure of the future of the universe.
"New observational results and theoretical advances are coming in rapidly; cosmology is a very exciting subject. We are getting close to answering these old questions: why are we here, where did we come from?"
My skepticism arises from the fact that even if we do elucidate the Big Bang and figure out how it occurred, we still will not know why it did. "Why" questions are metaphysical and beyond the purview of scientific discovery.
There really are only two candidates vying for the honor of answering the "why" and "where from" questions: Either we are a flukish by-product of the cosmic birth pangs having no reason for being here and having come from nothing but primordial star dust, or we are here because a loving, powerful being intentionally caused it to be inevitable that we would emerge. Perhaps this being - perhaps it is the God of the Bible - desired significant, conscious beings upon which to lavish, and with which to share, the gift of existence, and so created us.
We are here, in other words, because God has willed it. If that is not the case then there is no reason at all why we are here. Life is totally void of purpose and meaning. We are like insects which live, reproduce and die. Nothing we do, no matter how impressive, means a thing.
Science, at least as so many of its practioners insist, is not equipped to endorse either alternative and is not competent to answer the "why" question.