From Meghan Bartels at MSN:
Hawking approaches the problem by offering a detailed analogy, comparing space-time to any other continuous, curved surface, like the surface of the Earth. “There is nothing south of the South Pole,” Hawking says. The same principle holds with the universe: “There was nothing around before the Big Bang.”More.
“Nothing” is actually a big word. It can mean many different things while purporting to be one big Nothing. Fine print.
Ken Francis replied to this line of thinking at New English Review:
About seven years ago, during a talk on Hawking at a university, I raised my hand and criticised comments he made in his then latest book, The Grand Design, which he co-wrote with Star Trek screenwriter Leonard Mlodinow.
My question was, “why did Hawking write such a nonsensical idea that the universe created itself because of gravity?” (In order for the universe to create itself it would have to have existed before it exists, and gravity is part of the universe). I also asked why did Hawking write “philosophy is dead” at the beginning of his book (a self-refuting statement, as it’s philosophical), while constantly philosophising throughout the entire book?
There was an awkward silence in the lecture hall and the speaker looked at me in what seemed like a confused expression. He said, “Did he really say that?” (He hadn’t read the entire book). I told him the page numbers where he could find the quotes. I wasn’t criticising Hawking the man (a man enduring a severe neurone disease that has paralysed him for decades), but Hawking the scientist.
But, as the speaker looked at me with what seemed like an expression of disbelief, to my rescue came a distinguished astrophysicist on the panel, who stood up and said, “Kenneth is right; Hawking did write those things”. The subject was quickly changed in a ‘move-along-nothing-to-see-here’ kind of way. Because Hawking is an atheist and doesn’t believe the universe was created by God, his views on the origin of the cosmos generally go unchallenged by secular academics and the mainstream media who are generally hostile to Christianity.
And he’s not alone in this view. … (September 2017) More.
Yeh. We see it all the time here at our UD News Free Cold Shower Clinic 😉 : Atheism rots the brain. At a basic level, it produces a bad orientation to reality. Let to go far enough, it leads to PoMo rot, where science becomes the enemy for trying to measure anything at all.
See also: At BigThink: Top ten greatest scientists alive today – Are Stephen Hawking and James Watson oversold?
Must we understand “nothing” to understand physics?
NPR: Can everything come from nothing?
That weasel word “nothing” … which “nothing” does Hawking think created everything?
The Big Bang: Put simply,the facts are wrong.
and
Memo to Marx: Technology, not religion, is now the opiate of the people (Ken Francis)
From “Think like a Genius” by Stephen Hawking
http://nonlin.org/think-like-a.....n-hawking/
…
5. To address just two of the “experiments”: in Episode 5: “What Are We?” a seemingly random collection of yellow and blue magnetic pieces are held in a tray that is shaken in an apparent random motion. Some yellow pieces attach to each other forming yellow balls while some blue pieces form blue balls. The idea is that order and complexity “evolves” from chaos without any intervention. This is nice, except the pieces were designed to fit just right and the setup was probably thoroughly tested before the show. Had the audience known, the whole premise of random and chaos would have been compromised.
6. The following experiment takes place at a castle where the “mindless” volunteers make initially “random” shapes that then are launched with a trebuchet at an establish target. The closest landed pieces are then duplicated by the “mindless” until all pieces converge “unguided” to the “fittest for survival” shape. But again, the whole set-up is designed by humans and if the target means anything, it means only to the designers.
…
The guy’s a fraud…
Look, I have no problem with the man speculating on what might have preceded the Big Bang, but I sure would like to hear him admit that he is merely guessing… like the rest of us. I wish he would just admit that.
Hawking’s view of humanity is bleak:
Besides Hawking, many other atheists have made such disparaging comments about humanity,,,
Hawking’s main, supposedly, scientific evidence that we are nothing but chemical scum comes from the supposedly unquestionable Copernican principle.
Yet, contrary to what is believed by the vast majority of people today, apparently by both Christians and atheists alike, recent advances in science have restored the earth and humanity to a special, even central, position within the universe.
First off, in the 4 dimensional spacetime of Einstein’s General Relativity, we find that each 3-Dimensional point in the universe is central to the expansion of the universe,,,
,,, and since any 3-Dimensional point can be considered central in the 4-Dimensional space time of General Relativity, then it is now left completely open to whomever is making a model of the universe to decide for themselves what is to be considered central in the universe,,,
Einstein himself stated, The two sentences: “the sun is at rest and the earth moves” or “the sun moves and the earth is at rest” would simply mean two different conventions concerning two different CS [coordinate systems].”
Fred Hoyle and George Ellis add their considerable weight here in these following two quotes:
As Einstein himself notes, there simply is no test that can be performed that can prove the earth is not the center of the universe:
Here are a few more references that drives this point home:
Even Stephen Hawking himself, who claimed that we are just chemical scum on an insignificant planet, stated that it is not true that Copernicus proved Ptolemy wrong,,, the real advantage of the Copernican system is simply that the equations of motion are much simpler in the frame of reference in which the sun is at rest.”
Even individual people can be considered to be central in the universe according to the four-dimensional space-time of General Relativity,,,
,,, In fact, when Einstein’s formulated both Special and General relativity, he gave a hypothetical observer a privileged frame of reference in which to make measurements in the universe.
Whereas, on the other hand, in Quantum Mechanics it is the measurement itself that gives each observer a privileged frame of reference in the universe.
In fact, in quantum mechanics humans are brought into the laws of physics at the most fundamental level instead of humans being a result of the laws of physics as Darwinists had falsely imagined us to be.
Richard Conn Henry who is Professor of Physics at John Hopkins University states “It is more than 80 years since the discovery of quantum mechanics gave us the most fundamental insight ever into our nature: the overturning of the Copernican Revolution, and the restoration of us human beings to centrality in the Universe.”
Since seeing is believing, in the following video one can actually see the overall ‘centrality’ of the earth in the universe in its relation to the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB)
And here are a few bible verses that predicted the existence of the CMB a few thousand years before it was discovered
Thus, although Hawking has tried to get around God by ‘selectively’ using quantum mechanics with general relativity in such a way so as to produce a supposedly ‘curved’ Big Bang instead of a ‘pointy’ Big Bang,, a pointy Big Bang that had a sharp beginning in the finite past, the fact of the matter is that when both quantum mechanics and general relativity are looked at objectively, in total, instead of only in a selective way as Hawking does in his attempt to get past a definite beginning for the universe, then both quantum mechanics and general relativity clearly undermine Hawking’s, and everybody else’s, foundational presupposition of mediocrity for humanity that is based on the now falsified Copernican principle.
In further establishing our centrality in this vast universe, in the following video, physicist Neil Turok states that we live in the middle, or at the geometric mean, between the largest scale in physics and the smallest scale in physics:
Here is a picture that gets his point across very clearly:
The following interactive graph is also very interesting to the topic of geometric ‘centrality in the universe’:
As you can see, the preceding interactive graph pegs the geometric mean at 10^-4 meters , which just so happens to correspond to the limits to human vision as well as the size of the human egg.
This is very interesting for, as far as I can tell, the limits to human vision as well as the size of the human egg could have, theoretically, been at very different positions than directly at the geometric mean.
In the following video, there are many more lines of evidence that are discussed that further establish the fact that humanity is not nearly as insignificant in this universe as many, supposedly educated, people have presupposed.
Moreover, besides proving that man is nearly as insignificant in this universe as we have been falsely led to believe, quantum mechanics, and both special and general relativity, also give the Christian Theist solid scientific evidence for his belief that God upholds this universe in its continual existence as well as giving him solid scientific evidence for his belief in a higher heavenly dimension and in a hellish dimension:
In fact, Christ’s resurrection from the dead itself also provides a very credible reconciliation between both quantum mechanics and general relativity into the much sought after ‘theory of everything’.
Video and Verse:
two observations and a question
The con of the emperor with new clothes has always had its strength in the unsubstantiated belief that “smartness” in one area denotes “smartness” in all areas. Hawking gets away with total foolishnes in so many areas because of this belief. As friends well acquainted with Harvard and Yale have assured me over the years – brilliances sometimes lives together with stupidity in the same vessel at the same time. Hawkins is very smart in physics but nearly brain dead in any issue that intesects with his atheism.
Being never observed the concept of complete nothingness and comparing it to the south pole is a bit of philsophy – NOT science. Thats interesting from Hawking because the other great claim in Hawking’s book is that philosophy is dead and worthless. However the new atheists temporarily resurrect it for their own purposes constantly – but neatly lay it back in its coffin until the next ressurection.
The question –
When are we going to be effective in pointing out that laws of physics arising or existing without reference to anything physical is one of the strongest arguments that can be made for Id and in particular the judeo-Christian versions of creation? Writers thousands of years before Darwin proclaimed that stated laws from the “mouth” of God were the means of creation yet more than once in the Grand Design Hawking implies he had devastated the concept of God by claiming nothing was needed more than those same laws. The man has not the drop of a clue when it comes to theology.
We should have mostly agreed with him and then pointed out his vast ignorance of what Religion actually teaches. especially since he ducked the entire book from explaining where any such laws originated (or even how they even work in the absence of physical dimensions).
William Lane Craig covers Hawking’s model in this video (approx. 28:00 minute mark):