God and Stephen Hawking by John Lennox Read Free Book Online

TOEs [Theories of Everything].
     
    Paul Davies says of M-theory: “It is not testable, not even in any foreseeable future.” 51 Oxford physicist Frank Close goes further: “M-theory is not even defined …we are even told ‘No one seems to know what the M stands for.’ Perhaps it is ‘myth’.” Close concludes: “I don’t see that M-theory adds one iota to the God debate, either pro or con.” 52 Jon Butterworth, who works at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, states: “M-theory is highly speculative and certainly not in the zone of science that we have got any evidence for.” 53
    Before the appearance of Hawking’s book Roger Penrose wrote some cautionary words:
    It has been a not uncommon view among confident theoreticians that we may be “almost there”, and that a “theory of everything” may lie not far beyond the subsequent developments of the late twentieth century. Often such comments had tended to be made with an eye on whatever had been the status of the “string theory” that had been current at the time. It is harder to maintain such a viewpoint now that string theory has transmogrified to something (M- or F-theory) whose nature is admitted to being fundamentally unknown at present.
     
    Penrose continues:
    From my own perspective, we are much farther from a “final theory” even than this…Various remarkable mathematical developments have indeed come out of string-theoretic (and related) ideas. However, I remain profoundly unconvinced that they are very much other than just striking pieces of mathematics albeit with input from some deep physical ideas. For theories whose space-time dimensionality exceeds what we directly observe (namely 1+3), I see no reason to believe that, in themselves, they carry us much further in the direction of physical understanding. 54
     
    In a radio discussion with Alister McGrath after the appearance of Hawking’s book, Penrose was even more forthright. 55 Asked whether science shows that the universe could “create itself from nothing” Penrose responded with a strong condemnation of the string theory that Hawking espouses: “It’s certainly not doing it yet. I think the book suffers rather more strongly than many. It’s not an uncommon thing in popular descriptions of science to latch onto an idea, particularly things to do with string theory, which have absolutely no support from observation. They are just nice ideas.” He stated that M-theory was “very far from any testability…It’s a collection of ideas, hopes, aspirations.” Referring directly to The Grand Design , he then said: “The book is a bit misleading. It gives you this impression of a theory that is going to explain everything; it’s nothing of the sort. It’s not even a theory.” Indeed, in Penrose’s estimation, M-theory was “hardly science”. 56
    It should be noted that Penrose’s criticisms are scientific and do not arise from any religious convictions. He is, in fact, a member of the British Humanist Association.
    In Hawking’s view, a model is a good model if it:
     
is elegant;
contains few arbitrary or adjustable elements;
agrees with and explains all existing observations;
makes detailed predictions about future observations that can disprove or falsify the model if they are not borne out. 57
     
    Comparing these criteria with the comments about M-theory above, it is unclear why M-theory is the good model that Hawking appears to think it is. Accounting for the fine-tuning of the cosmos by postulating one intelligent Creator seems much more elegant and economical than postulating 10 500 different universes that are unobservable by us, and is surely a much better “model”.
    A move to advance the cause of atheism by means of a highly speculative, untestable theory that is not within the zone of evidence-based science, and which, even if it were true, could not dislodge God in any case, is not exactly calculated to impress those of us whose faith in God is not