Hawkings and atheism

Just finished reading Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time. Curious Book. It started off sort of interesting but then seemed to get very abstract and theoretical and I couldn’t tell what was real and what was ideas. Gluons? Glueballs? Strange quarks? Charmed quarks? And then all that stuff about antiparticles and virtual antiparticles and imaginary time? The more I got into it the more it sounded like some grand, mad mythology. I dunno: perhaps there’s a point to all this looking for a unified theory and trying to figure out how the universe began – but I couldn’t see it.

It sort of made me cross at certain stages – to imagine the world’s governments putting money into this sort of thing and yet totally neglecting the useful things in life, like teaching children about emotions, goodness, peace of mind, and love. How much did that large hadron collider thing cost? And to what avail? Why not at least balance the picture out a little by chucking a couple of quid at helping kids not knife each other?

Still, it did teach me something interesting – something to do with what I perceive as the growing fight between atheists and religionists, which is waging stupidly and ignorantly on internet chat places such as yahoo answers and youtube as we speak. See, like I said, much of what I read in that book seemed like conjecture, mythology, making stuff up. In parts it came across just as far-fetched and grasping for answers as anything the Old Testament might have to offer. I mean, where’s the reality in imaginary numbers? Self-cancelling infinities? Curved, wormhole-riddled, 26-dimensional Euclidean space-time? You’d be hard pressed to prove those things to me.

And yet: that’s not really the point; the point is this: there’s an impulse to dismiss a lot of that stuff as nonsense, but I don’t – I simply acknowledge that it’s over my head, that I don’t understand it, and that that’s okay. It seems like weird mythology, and makes little sense – and comes across as rather pointless, all things told – but I’m not stupid enough to declare that as grand reality – that my reality is the reality of everyone. Similarly, the wise atheist is the one who, having at least attempted some understanding of the divine – perhaps through good source material such as Neale Donald Walsch’s Conversations With God – then holds up his hands and says, well it don’t make much sense to me but I guess I’ll be open to the possibility. And the dumb atheist? The dumb atheist is the one whose inner-voice screams at him, it’s over my head, it must all be bullshit – and he agrees.

We can take the analogy further, of course. Mr Hawking, in response to my declaring antiquarks a mythological legend, could take me into a laboratory, show me some, explain them, and I’d go, oh yeah, that’s cool, now I see they’re real. But that would require a couple of things: mainly, my willingness to get off my arse and go to the lab, and also my being open to new and strange realities. Likewise, the atheist who wants proof of a spiritual reality could, with openness and willingness, be led to the laboratory and shown a little something of the world divine. But is he up for that?

There are differences. Maths and science exist in and explain the physical realm, and therefore can be viewed physically, with the brain and the eye. Hawking could show me an equation, or stick me in front of a microscope, and I could be satisfied with that. The laboratory of the spiritual, however, is the human heart and the human mind, and that’s a little more difficult to demonstrate. In truth, the only proof is the proof you experience yourself: it’s not a theory that one can explain or understand, or something to which I can lead you by the hand and show you. I mean, even looking into Hawking’s microscope would take some level of willingness of my part: putting the quarks and an instrument to view them in front of me still wouldn’t mean anything if I refused to take a glance. It’s really all up to the experimenter – and that’s what I think atheist’s don’t understand. They say they want proof and yet they do nothing about it: they refuse to step into the laboratory. So do they really want proof? Because wanting’s the only thing that’s going to bring it to them.

So here’s my scientific challenge to those who parade and trumpet their atheism so loudly and proudly – Mr Dawkins, Mr Brown, and all the gleeful little simple minds who ride on their coattails and satisfy their insecurities and ignorances with childish arguments and shallow thought – simply take a few weeks, or a month, or a year, to undertake the experiments many millions of people have done before, and see if you come to the same conclusions they did. Meditate 8 hours a day. Abstain from distractions. Spend one solitary 24-hour period completely absorbed in the present moment. Take a month or so to sit atop a mountain and investigate your own inner-nature. Follow a saint for a year and figure them out. And for heaven’s sake, read the decent books of spiritual literature, and stop bandying about the silly Old Testament as though finding flaws in that were synonymous with finding flaws in God. Try the Buddha for size. Have a look at Amma. Using the Bible to disprove God is about as scientific as me disproving the possibility of intelligent human life by studying only a Friday night pub in Wakefield.

Dr Hawking, by the way – and you too Eric – I don’t lump into that crowd. ;-)

So that’s what I learned from A Brief History of Time. Couldn’t help but feel that the whole ‘quest to understand and predict the physical universe’ thing was slightly pointless but I guess each to their own. And I suppose I would love an answer to questions like, is the universe infinite and, if so, how the hell does that work? If not, what’s outside it? And, when all things were just contained in one tiny little dot, what was that dot suspended in anyway? I dwell on those questions every now and then but I think the real answer is that it’s simply not possible to understand the infinite with a finite machine such as the human brain – just as it’s not possible for a simple calculator to perform the complex calculations that a powerful computer can. Not that there’s anything wrong with a simple calculator – it’s a good little instrument, and it does many jobs well – but there is much that lies outside its sphere of possibility: things that it could never really imagine.

In conclusion:

1. Science deals with the physical universe, spirituality with the non-physical

2. Science and spirituality have got plenty in common

3. Scientists are really into their science thing and that’s okay by me

4. It’s just a shame that we’re so obsessed with the physical when the real questions of human life – love, happiness, satisfaction, understanding – all find their answers in the non-physical

5. So why not study and investigate and experiment with both? Why not seek to understand the non-physical universe too? Why not universities and university courses and government funding and a societal drive geared towards understanding and predicting well-being and spiritual growth? Why not teach those things to our children too?