Thursday 2 September 2010

God didn't create universe, says Hawking

I guess there's a God vs. Physics argument, going on somewhere that I didn't know (or care), about...

God didn't create universe, says Hawking

And I still don't care! But this amused me (LOL - I just imagined Stephen Hawking reprising Tommy's words, in Goodfellas: "...I amuse you? I make you laugh? I'm here to fucking amuse you?.."):

"If we discover a complete theory, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason - for then we should know the mind of God."

Fuck off, you cunt! You don't even know the minds of your fellow humans! If, and it's a big if, God exists, and (S)He/It is a supreme being, then you will never catch up with it, unless God's mind is in stasis, and it won't be, because nothing is.

Of course, Hawking's apparently moved on from this idea to one where God doesn't exist, at all, such that knowing God's mind becomes an impossibility, because one cannot know something that doesn't exist. All the same: what a cunt!

Addendum:
Do you know what really pisses me off about this? Of course you don't, because I haven't told you, yet. It's that a person such as Hawking gets kissed on the very same arse that he's talking out of... He's discussing a theory that can no more be proved than the existence of God - he's exchanging one set of unproveable beliefs for another. Am I the only one who sees the fucking irony of that?

And another thing: if "A Brief History of Time" (being the only one of his tedious writings that I've troubled myself with), is anything to go by, he's unbelievably limited in the concepts that he can entertain, simultaneously, or else combine to create a single concept, or else assimilate into his existing belief system. You want to play around in the Universe of Ideas, motherfucker? Then learn the basics.

2 comments:

betasheep said...

I much prefer the Gnostics who believe that the Universe was created by an Evil Pretender, who was incapable of grasping the full designs of the one, true God. It would settle that nagging theodicy question--"If God is good, then why does he allow evil?"-- and it would help explain why everything was so f*cked up.

As for people like Hawking, I would have to say that he is using his talents to the best of his abilities. People like him require the believers to examine their beliefs more fully, which is always a good thing.

Radagast said...

betasheep: Ummm. I don't believe he is achieving that. A person who believes in (some or other version of), God is not going to have that belief shaken by Hawking's arguments, because Hawking's arguments are unproveable... They may sound reasonable to a person who doesn't care, one way or the other, whether God exists, but nobody can test the theories he espouses, because nobody can recreate The Beginning, The Big Bang, The Creation, or whatever it is that one uses to understand how the birth of the Universe took place.

I think the question that overwhelms me is this: does it really fucking matter? I mean, in my tiny world, whilst I am perfectly capable of bending my thought to this subject, I find it utterly tedious, because there's no end product - it has no bearing, beneficial or otherwise, on my day-to-day life. It is, in short, outside the scope of my interest and therefore my understanding.

Anyway, humanity perceives God (if they perceive Him/Her/It at all), as a supreme being at the top of a hierarchy. And they do that, because that's how they organize themselves and they want to validate themselves by pretending that a supreme being would organize things the same way. If God existed, then (S)He/It would most likely have constructed an altogether fairer and more efficient system that didn't require that notionally (and, I would argue, factually), equal beings be given priority and authority, one over another.

As for Good and Evil - that's a matter of perspective. A person who does something to better their own lot that impacts on one's interests is Evil, provided that they do that thing in the full knowledge that they impacted on one's interests, and carried on regardless. A Good person is somebody who is on one's side, unquestioningly. Ergo, there is no objective analysis of Good and Evil, and they cannot exist, in any real sense.

Matt