"Now that's randomly insignificant."
Sunday, I caught most of the Curiosity series premiere on the Discovery channel, where Stephen Hawking presents his conclusions about the creation of everything. Personally, I love thinking about the universe as a whole, and am fascinated by the different theories of creation. Not so much the physical aspect of it, but more the intent of it (or lack thereof), the purpose (or lack thereof) and the sheer scope if it.
Christian theologians may balk at this statement, but I have never held the opinion that it was necessary to create a universe 14 billion years ago with 200 billion stars in our own galaxy, countless billions of galaxies more or less like this one and unfathomable distances between them all for 20,000 or so years of human history. God is many things, but the term 'wasteful' has never been used to describe him. I do not believe that humanity is the center of the universe, or that God created the entire universe for our singular benefit.
But all of that is conjecture. Hawking, as a scientist and professor, avoids conjecture and tries to look at the facts to see what story they tell us about our universe and our role in it. And it is his conclusion that, given the facts as we know them, there is no need to invoke God to explain creation, existence or intelligence.
My understanding of his conclusion is that the laws of nature, which are fixed, explain to us a universe created randomly, and that the fixed laws of nature are simply a random part of that equation. Further, in an insignificant part of an insignificant galaxy, orbiting an insignificant star is a place we call earth on which life happened to develop randomly and insignificantly in the context of the universe as a whole. There is no plan, no intent, no destiny, no significance to it at all. It just is. And it is beautiful and wonderful. Making more out of it is unnecessary scientifically, and misleading.
Obviously, I don't believe his conclusion. But I do respect his thought process, and the work he has done, and the insight he has given us into cosmology and physics. I actually think very highly of him, and wouldn't try to argue with him about things he has studied successfully his whole life. I just think he's missing some things here and there.
The whole scenario reminds me of Solomon, and the book of Ecclesiastes. Solomon was the wisest and smartest man to have ever lived in biblical days anyway, and the conclusion he came to, with all of his intelligence and wisdom, is that "All is Vanity." There is no significance. Nothing really matters.
It seems to me that a lot of people come to that conclusion without thinking about it at all. With no wisdom, understanding of the nature of things or intelligence, I could look at the vastness of the starry sky and just know that I, my species, my planet, my perspective, my struggles, my successes, my pleasure and my pain are meaningless, insignificant and irrelevant in that context. You don't have to think about that your whole life to come to that conclusion. In fact, if there's not a better possibility, this one will probably have to do.
But there are better, credible, feasible, possibilities that explain the creation of the universe, humanity and me individually. Possibilities that include intent, destiny and hope. We may not be able to understand these possibilities within the confines of physics. But we can conceptualize the infinite. I know Hawking can do this. He's a math genius, and you can't even do high school calculus without infinity. As infinity is to calculus, so God is to creation and existence.
I get what Hawking is saying. But I am unwilling to settle for that. I think we can do better, both individually and corporately. And because we can, we should. And the world will be a better place because of it.