In my theology class this afternoon we discussed "Theology in a scientific and technological age". Is there any place for faith in an age of science?
Stephen Hawking apparently isn't so sure. In his book A Brief History of Time, he wrote the following:
With the success of scientific theories in describing events, most people have come to believe that God allows the universe to evolve according to a set of laws and does not intervene in the universe to break these laws. However, the laws do not tell us what the universe should have looked like when it started - it would still be up to God to wind up the clockwork and choose how to start it off. So long as the universe had a beginning, we could suppose it had a creator. But if the universe is really completely self-contained, having no boundary or edge, it would have neither beginning nor end: it would simply be. What place, then, for a creator? (pp. 140-141)
In other words, if the universe if eternal, we don't really need a God to "wind up the clockwork and choose how to start it off". But is that what "creation" means? It seems to me that Hawking is confusing "creation in time" with "creation ex nihilo (lit.: out of nothing)". They do not mean the same thing.
Creation in time means that the universe had a definite starting point before which there was simply nothing. By definition, it cannot be eternal, because there was a time when it wasn't.
Creation ex nihilo can apply to a universe created in time, but can also apply to a universe that is eternal. It does not require for there to have been nothing, and then suddenly for there to have been something. There can always have been something. What counts is not that there is something, but for that something to depend on something else for its existence.
Take the following example. Suppose you were to imagine a world in your mind - you can see the planet, with the blue of the oceans, the brown/green of the continents, the white of the clouds. You zoom in to one part of the land, zoom in closer to a city, zoom in even closer to people chatting in a crowd.
Suppose you were to suddenly stop thinking of that world. What would happen? It would cease to exist. That world requires you for its continued existence. It is not just that you started thinking about that world at some point, bringing it into being: you are also the sustainer of that world, keeping it in being. Creation is not just a moment in time, a brief act of will: it is a continuous act, necessary for the ongoing existence of the world.
Since God is eternal, He could just as easily have undertaken the "act" of creation continuously from all eternity, rather than from a moment in time. Of course, the Biblical witness (and the best current scientific evidence) suggests a creation in time, but Hawking et. al. need to realise that even if it can be demonstrated that the universe is eternal, there is still plenty of place of a Creator as the Source of Being for that eternal universe.
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