No Need for God

Our post on Stephen Hawking's new book in which he apparently claims that all that's necessary to account for the existence of the universe is a force like gravity, and that there's no need to posit a role for God, reminded a reader of this old joke:

God was sitting in heaven one day when a scientist said to Him, "God, we don't need you anymore. Science has finally figured out a way to create life out of nothing - in other words, we can now do what you did in the beginning."

"Oh, is that so? Explain..." replies God. "Well," says the scientist, "we can take dirt and form it into the likeness of you and breathe life into it, thus creating man."

"Well, that's very interesting... show Me."

So the scientist bends down to the earth and starts to mold the soil into the shape of a man. "No, no, no..." interrupts God, "Get your own dirt."

This is precisely the problem Hawking has. Where does the dirt - the energy as well as the dozens of laws and forces that comprise the universe - come from in the first place? What determines that these essential components of the cosmic structure will have the precise values they do such that had the value of any one of them deviated by as much as the mass of an electron compared to the mass of an aircraft carrier, the universe would not have formed?

What Hawking wants us to believe is the equivalent of asserting that an aircraft carrier could have been built such that had its mass varied by as much as an electron, had its height been off by as much as the thickness of an atomic nucleus, had its width fallen short by the width of a razor blade, had its color been any shade but precisely the one it is, had the friction in the propeller shaft been different by the weight of a mosquito, had any of these and more been the case the carrier would have collapsed in the drydock and never made it to sea. Then Hawking serves up the pièce de résistance by assuring us that these extraordinarily exacting specifications notwithstanding, blind, purposeless forces just accidentally managed to pull all the requisite parts together and perform the dazzling feat of arranging them with such astonishing precision that those specifications would be satisfied and the ship would be launched.

And then he and his fellow atheists scoff at Christians for believing in miracles. Pretty funny.