Stephen Hawking's new book, The Grand Design, is receiving a lot of attention, even though there's nothing really new about his claim that the universe is self-creating. That idea has been around since the ancient Greeks and received a big boost from the French philosophes in the 18th century. The nub of it, essentially, is that once the universe got started it pretty much unfolded in a deterministic, inevitable way and we don't need to posit God to explain any of it, not even as a first cause. The universe, modern cosmologists like Hawking tell us, could have simply caused itself.
Well, maybe, but beyond seeming counter-intuitive, to say the least, this idea has another problem that I think can be illustrated by comparing the universe to a Rube Goldberg machine that's set in motion by a single falling domino. The materialist wants to say that that first domino could have been knocked over by some pre-existing impersonal force, like wind, setting off the whole grand system. There's no need to say that "God did it."
Perhaps, but even if we set aside the problem of where the pre-existing force came from, or what it acted upon, or how it acted, there's another very serious problem in accounting for the complex precision of the machine itself. Watch this (Turn your sound on):
It's not hard to imagine the domino falling by some accident without the intelligent agent knocking it over with the toy car. What is hard to imagine, though, is this system constructing itself, not out of the parts we see but out of raw energy, and then arranging those parts to do precisely what it does purely through impersonal, purposeless accident, without any input from an intelligent agent.
This machine was designed by the engineers who are seen in the video standing on the platform overlooking their creation. It may seem superficially to be able to run it's course without their intervention, but not really. Their intervention came in the planning, design, and construction of the apparatus. Without them it never would have existed.
I wonder if Stephen Hawking has ever watched this video of This Too Shall Pass. He should. It sounds like an appropriate title for an assessment of attempts to do away with the need for God.