Introduction: The Dark Tower
The Dark Tower
Burningly it came on me all at once.
This was the place!
Robert Browning, “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came ”
Abandon a faith that abhors science. But if your newfound science won’t abide faith you’ve left
one narrow minded path to follow another. It’s possible to delight in both, but it isn’t easy.
Shelves sag with exciting books written for laymen like me, about how the universe began and
functions–cosmology and physics, but most are written by scientist who won’t tolerate faith and
thrill to say so. It’s a heavy obligation to show that in their contra-religious mentality these
scientists are narrowminded. Heavier still for a layman like me--I was a roughneck most of my
life, sweating and freezing night and day, summer, winter on an oil drilling rig, making some
oilman rich. We Starks were an uneducated lot, vagabond oilfield laborers who arrived in
California from Oklahoma in nineteen-fort-one. Only I, of four brothers and three sisters, ever
finished high school. I stayed only because of sports. Even then, I’m less an athlete than most in
my family. Less financially successful than most of them, too. So if I’m dwarfed by my seven
self-educated siblings, I’m a fool to take on scientists of Stephen Hawking’s ilk.
Why pick on Hawking?
Please. I can’t pick on Hawking. I agree with most of what he says that I have sense enough to
understand. Much of it I don’t understand and have no reason to object to. Only in those few
areas where Hawking attacks needlessly (and after at least twenty years, fruitlessly) humanity’s
hopes for meaning do I feel compelled to risk my considerable self esteem. His books are
enormously popular and his ideas influential. So if I’m going to make a fool of myself trying to
defeat the message that ours is an accidental universe, devoid of meaning beyond what physics
describes in theory and mathematics, why not at the expense of someone who is most influential
there, someone whose rich intellect can best afford it?
And a fool I am. Fool enough to hope that some young person reads my story and goes early
where, late, I wish I had gone. Or that my story will allay the fears of someone who yearns to
know how the universe began and functions but is afraid his faith won’t survive the
investigation. Oh, that mine had been one long journey of faith and science that began with
deliberation and, as with a Robert Frost poem, “assume(d) direction with the first line laid
down.” That I could reflect on a body of work like that of Arthur Koestler or Graham Greene,
then top it off with something of an autobiography describing the road I had traveled. Had I
talent enough and time...but I’m short of both. I do have a perspective on life denied Koestler or
Greene–I view reality through the lens of an undistinguished education. Should I have
contemplated suicide, as Graham Greene did, it could never have been on the Oxford campus
that I put the pistol to my head. Only by the good grace and long suffering of York College did I
ever set foot on a college campus, and then, nineteen-fifty-six, only because the new school
needed students lest it be a campus with teachers and no students. They scoured the continent
and came up with some surprisingly brilliant students, and me. I went because they allowed me
to and because I detested going back on that oily drilling rig. And while I would never have had
the courage to put a pistol to my own head, I’m sure there were several of my teachers who
would like to have.
Why do I rake up all this oilfield trash? To emphasize that if physics and cosmology excite a
man like me because they illustrate design in the universe, they can excite you, and should. If
you follow the logic of those many science books that sag the shelves, and not their illogical
prejudices against design, you’ll enjoy the splendor of science and remain as convinced as I am
that the evidence for design in the universe is, if not unassailable, compelling.
Nothing rewards like love. It’s its own reason to exist. The same goes for wonder. Love and
wonder are what humans are made for. But when one is confronted with evidence that makes
him suspect that all he has had faith in is fantasy, then wonder turns to despair. That happened to
me when first I peered through a microscope at fossils washed to surface from the bottom of a
ten-thousand foot oil well. There was no more hiding of the facts from what little faith remained
after a lifetime of sheltering it. No chance of holding Galileo in house arrest. I knew that the
earth was no longer the center of the universe, that fossils existed older than Noah’s flood, that
fifteen-billion years ago the universe deployed in what we call the big bang. No Grand Inquisitor
in my lifetime could stifle that knowledge. One follows for years a weak faith that allows only a
biblical interpretation of the physical universe until one day he suspects that he is arguing more
with God’s evidence than with the scientists who interpret it. Better, engage the evidence early.
Ah, there’s the rub; the rules for engaging God through his physical evidence are the same as
those for engaging him in meditation–ask honest questions, accept honest answers and prepare to
have your perspective changed forever.
There was no point at the end of my wandering where faith suddenly stepped forward like the
priests bearing the ark of the covenant, their feet striking the flowing waters of the Jordan and
halting it and Joshua leading the children of Israel into the promised land. Mine was a journey
like “Child Roland To The Dark Tower Came.” I was not sure I was even on a quest, I had
wandered aimlessly so long. “Burningly it came on me all at once. This was the place,” and I
was dauntless before the dark tower. But I was a battered old man at the end of a quest I began as
a boy. I had not conquered fear; somewhere on the long journey fear became disinterested in me,
shrugged his shoulders and walked away. Go early into science, it will alter your faith, but if this
book is successful it won’t destroy it.
What this book won’t do: It won’t change–does not attempt to change–people whose tragic
experiences in life have robbed them of faith–“If there were a God, how could He have let such
an evil thing happen?” I have nothing but compassion for such people. Not pity, compassion.
God’s existence is not contingent upon our belief in him, nor is he good or evil because we think
he is or is not. If God is good and someone rejects him because their experience in his creation
has been tragic and they can’t believe that a good God would allow such bad things to happen,
then their reasons for rejecting God as evil are good reasons. If God exists and is good, he thrives
in such doubts. But it is the good that drives these doubts. It is not scientific observation and
mathematical calculations. This book is zeroed in on scientific and mathematical calculations
aimed to dissuade people from believing in design in the universe. Physical things are neither
good nor evil, and physical existence is the study of physics. Scientists who argue that it is
impossible that a good god could have created a world riddled with evil should frame their logic
in theological or ethical proofs, not scientific ones.
But this book is not about religion poking holes in science, it is about logic poking holes in the
non-scientific claim against design in the universe. I’m convinced that the universe was
designed. Why it was designed as it is, and why there is evil in it, I do not know. The tsunami in
south Asia, the day after Christmas, two-thousand-four, left me shaking my fist at the heavens
one moment and perplexed the next at why a lotus eater like me, who flees catastrophe, is
privileged to share the same planet with others who rush to it risking their lives to bring relief;
and others who voluntarily leave the wealth and comfort I avidly pursue, to live in squalor so as
to make life less miserable for those who can’t escape it. When in this book I reason from first
cause, which has traditionally been called God, it is not because I aim to sell anyone on religion,
I am not associated with organized religion and have nothing to sell. I am grateful that mine is a
rich niche in time and place, a paradisaical time warp in man’s usual fare of famine, disease, war
and death. I cannot show you how a path back to the beginning will put you at the feet of a
beneficent First Cause of creation. But as I follow logic back to the big bang it leads inevitably to
the yawning question of First Cause and before I know it I have fallen in and can no more escape
than if it were a black hole.
Burningly it came on me all at once.
This was the place!
Robert Browning, “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came ”
Abandon a faith that abhors science. But if your newfound science won’t abide faith you’ve left
one narrow minded path to follow another. It’s possible to delight in both, but it isn’t easy.
Shelves sag with exciting books written for laymen like me, about how the universe began and
functions–cosmology and physics, but most are written by scientist who won’t tolerate faith and
thrill to say so. It’s a heavy obligation to show that in their contra-religious mentality these
scientists are narrowminded. Heavier still for a layman like me--I was a roughneck most of my
life, sweating and freezing night and day, summer, winter on an oil drilling rig, making some
oilman rich. We Starks were an uneducated lot, vagabond oilfield laborers who arrived in
California from Oklahoma in nineteen-fort-one. Only I, of four brothers and three sisters, ever
finished high school. I stayed only because of sports. Even then, I’m less an athlete than most in
my family. Less financially successful than most of them, too. So if I’m dwarfed by my seven
self-educated siblings, I’m a fool to take on scientists of Stephen Hawking’s ilk.
Why pick on Hawking?
Please. I can’t pick on Hawking. I agree with most of what he says that I have sense enough to
understand. Much of it I don’t understand and have no reason to object to. Only in those few
areas where Hawking attacks needlessly (and after at least twenty years, fruitlessly) humanity’s
hopes for meaning do I feel compelled to risk my considerable self esteem. His books are
enormously popular and his ideas influential. So if I’m going to make a fool of myself trying to
defeat the message that ours is an accidental universe, devoid of meaning beyond what physics
describes in theory and mathematics, why not at the expense of someone who is most influential
there, someone whose rich intellect can best afford it?
And a fool I am. Fool enough to hope that some young person reads my story and goes early
where, late, I wish I had gone. Or that my story will allay the fears of someone who yearns to
know how the universe began and functions but is afraid his faith won’t survive the
investigation. Oh, that mine had been one long journey of faith and science that began with
deliberation and, as with a Robert Frost poem, “assume(d) direction with the first line laid
down.” That I could reflect on a body of work like that of Arthur Koestler or Graham Greene,
then top it off with something of an autobiography describing the road I had traveled. Had I
talent enough and time...but I’m short of both. I do have a perspective on life denied Koestler or
Greene–I view reality through the lens of an undistinguished education. Should I have
contemplated suicide, as Graham Greene did, it could never have been on the Oxford campus
that I put the pistol to my head. Only by the good grace and long suffering of York College did I
ever set foot on a college campus, and then, nineteen-fifty-six, only because the new school
needed students lest it be a campus with teachers and no students. They scoured the continent
and came up with some surprisingly brilliant students, and me. I went because they allowed me
to and because I detested going back on that oily drilling rig. And while I would never have had
the courage to put a pistol to my own head, I’m sure there were several of my teachers who
would like to have.
Why do I rake up all this oilfield trash? To emphasize that if physics and cosmology excite a
man like me because they illustrate design in the universe, they can excite you, and should. If
you follow the logic of those many science books that sag the shelves, and not their illogical
prejudices against design, you’ll enjoy the splendor of science and remain as convinced as I am
that the evidence for design in the universe is, if not unassailable, compelling.
Nothing rewards like love. It’s its own reason to exist. The same goes for wonder. Love and
wonder are what humans are made for. But when one is confronted with evidence that makes
him suspect that all he has had faith in is fantasy, then wonder turns to despair. That happened to
me when first I peered through a microscope at fossils washed to surface from the bottom of a
ten-thousand foot oil well. There was no more hiding of the facts from what little faith remained
after a lifetime of sheltering it. No chance of holding Galileo in house arrest. I knew that the
earth was no longer the center of the universe, that fossils existed older than Noah’s flood, that
fifteen-billion years ago the universe deployed in what we call the big bang. No Grand Inquisitor
in my lifetime could stifle that knowledge. One follows for years a weak faith that allows only a
biblical interpretation of the physical universe until one day he suspects that he is arguing more
with God’s evidence than with the scientists who interpret it. Better, engage the evidence early.
Ah, there’s the rub; the rules for engaging God through his physical evidence are the same as
those for engaging him in meditation–ask honest questions, accept honest answers and prepare to
have your perspective changed forever.
There was no point at the end of my wandering where faith suddenly stepped forward like the
priests bearing the ark of the covenant, their feet striking the flowing waters of the Jordan and
halting it and Joshua leading the children of Israel into the promised land. Mine was a journey
like “Child Roland To The Dark Tower Came.” I was not sure I was even on a quest, I had
wandered aimlessly so long. “Burningly it came on me all at once. This was the place,” and I
was dauntless before the dark tower. But I was a battered old man at the end of a quest I began as
a boy. I had not conquered fear; somewhere on the long journey fear became disinterested in me,
shrugged his shoulders and walked away. Go early into science, it will alter your faith, but if this
book is successful it won’t destroy it.
What this book won’t do: It won’t change–does not attempt to change–people whose tragic
experiences in life have robbed them of faith–“If there were a God, how could He have let such
an evil thing happen?” I have nothing but compassion for such people. Not pity, compassion.
God’s existence is not contingent upon our belief in him, nor is he good or evil because we think
he is or is not. If God is good and someone rejects him because their experience in his creation
has been tragic and they can’t believe that a good God would allow such bad things to happen,
then their reasons for rejecting God as evil are good reasons. If God exists and is good, he thrives
in such doubts. But it is the good that drives these doubts. It is not scientific observation and
mathematical calculations. This book is zeroed in on scientific and mathematical calculations
aimed to dissuade people from believing in design in the universe. Physical things are neither
good nor evil, and physical existence is the study of physics. Scientists who argue that it is
impossible that a good god could have created a world riddled with evil should frame their logic
in theological or ethical proofs, not scientific ones.
But this book is not about religion poking holes in science, it is about logic poking holes in the
non-scientific claim against design in the universe. I’m convinced that the universe was
designed. Why it was designed as it is, and why there is evil in it, I do not know. The tsunami in
south Asia, the day after Christmas, two-thousand-four, left me shaking my fist at the heavens
one moment and perplexed the next at why a lotus eater like me, who flees catastrophe, is
privileged to share the same planet with others who rush to it risking their lives to bring relief;
and others who voluntarily leave the wealth and comfort I avidly pursue, to live in squalor so as
to make life less miserable for those who can’t escape it. When in this book I reason from first
cause, which has traditionally been called God, it is not because I aim to sell anyone on religion,
I am not associated with organized religion and have nothing to sell. I am grateful that mine is a
rich niche in time and place, a paradisaical time warp in man’s usual fare of famine, disease, war
and death. I cannot show you how a path back to the beginning will put you at the feet of a
beneficent First Cause of creation. But as I follow logic back to the big bang it leads inevitably to
the yawning question of First Cause and before I know it I have fallen in and can no more escape
than if it were a black hole.
Chapter One : “Infinite Fear, Infinite Regress,”
Infinite Fear, Infinite Regress
...the end of things and their beginning are hopelessly hidden from (man) in an impenetrable
secret: he is equally incapable of seeing the Nothing from which he was made, and the Infinite in
which he is swallowed up.
Blaise Pascal, Thoughts
Standing aquiver beside my desk, I was a biblical fundamentalist of the strictest order
confronting a teacher who was describing how life began and evolved to what we see today.
“Where did the water that the amoeba formed in come from?” I asked.
“The earth’s gravity drew oxygen and hydrogen to it and these mixed and became water.”
“Where did the earth that drew the oxygen and hydrogen come from?”
“It began as a gaseous cloud that got closer and closer together until it began to form into a
“Where did the gaseous cloud come from?” And so on, an infinite regress.
“Sit down, Donald, I am your teacher, you are not mine.”
She was, and would have been the following year had my family not followed the old drilling rig
from the gas fields of Rio Vista, California to an oil well two-hundred miles south at Greenfield
and spared me the embarrassment of having to repeat her class. But there was more afoot in the
world of science in nineteen-fifty than a seventh grade teacher trying to sort out how a failing
student had got her in an infinite regress--Einstein was in search of a unified theory, a theory that
would explain everything. I had no knowledge of Einstein’s search in those days, little of
Einstein. I could not have understood the first thing about a unified theory if it were explained to
me. Nor had I the slightest formal concept of such a thing as an infinite regress. But I knew what
infinite fear was. I was silently terrified that one day science would arrive at an explanation for
everything and it wouldn’t be God. That fear dogged me for forty years.
The impulse that moved my argument in the seventh grade, that there must be a first cause for
there to be any following affects, was a natural knee-jerk kind of impulse, had to be. Any
concept demanding brain power was hopeless with me--I was and am a slow learner. But knee-
jerk impulses have served me well over the years. Drilling rig roughnecks keep their fingers and
toes by going with first impulse--if things feel unsafe, they probably are. In my whole oilfield
career I’ve only mangled one finger.
Slow learner that I am, should I come into an apparently empty pool hall and see balls knocking
around on a pool table, I wouldn’t scratch my head and say, now if those balls are moving, either
they moved themselves or something moved them. I’d impulsively look around for a pool
shooter. If there really is no one in the pool hall, a pool hall in California, I’d run into the street
Something set those balls to moving. The logic to ask what is basic--cause and affect. The
process of following cause to affect, cause to affect, until one arrives at a first cause is regressive.
If the trail leads forever back, one cause to another, infinitely, it is an infinite regress.
Plato denied that there was an infinite regress--one must come to a stopping place, he said. His
stopping place was at a first cause -- the soul that moves all things but is moved by no other. This
first cause, a prime moving soul, he called the self moved mover and referred to it as God.
Aristotle went a step beyond his teacher, Plato, and reasoned that a first cause would move only
if he desired or needed something. Since he is complete in himself, desires or needs nothing, he
himself does not move. All things that exist have coexisted with him forever, but only because he
moves them to exist. They need him to exist, he does not need them. He needs nothing, he exists
by necessity, the existence of all other things is contingent upon him. Aristotle called this
Twenty-three-hundred years after Plato and Aristotle, Stephen Hawking, in his book, A Brief
History of Time and subsequent books, sidesteps the term, first cause. He says instead, there was
a time, called the big bang, “when the universe was infinitesimally small and infinitely
dense.”What this infinitely small dense object was that banged time, space and matter into
existence, Hawking never says. Nor does he say what it existed in if not in time and space.
It’s unwise for a person who is no historian to disagree with a history book, but unless one is a
cosmologist with expertise in quantum theory, he’d be a fool to disagree with Stephen
Hawking’s A Brief History of Time. I’ve never claimed to be a historian or a cosmologist with
expertise in quantum theory, and I’ve admitted being a fool. So, with my backside covered by
the assurance that fools have little to lose, I take issue with Stephen Hawking’s book.
Chapter Two : The Smallest Ball
The Smallest Ball
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it toward some overwhelming question
T. S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
Stephen Hawing’s A Brief History of Time recounts that in 1929, Edwin Hubble made the
observation that wherever you look, galaxies are moving rapidly away from us, just as the
Russian physicist, Alexander Friedmann had predicted they were. Friedman took Einstein’s then
recent theory of relativity more at face value, it seems, than even Einstein did, and accurately
described our universe as expanding evenly in every direction.
Hawking notes that, “Hubble’s observation suggests that there was a time, called the big bang,
when the universe was infinitesimally small and infinitely dense.”1
backward from a universe that is expanding in every direction, one arrives at a starting place
where it was all together before it began to expand. Conceptualize it like this: reverse an air
pump and suck the air out of a basketball and see the basketball collapse. Think of the big bang
in the same way, the universe is sucked in upon itself until gravity makes it, in Hawking’s words,
“infinitesimally small, infinitely dense.” If one comes upon a pool table with balls exploding
from the middle of it, he doesn’t have to be familiar with pool, which I am not, to know that the
balls were originally all together in the middle and something burst them apart.
We may assume the same thing about our expanding universe–probably it originally was tiny
and dense. Good that it began to expand, otherwise time and space would not exist and we would
not exist. But how that original spot came into existence before time and space; what it was
before time and space; and why it deployed into time and space is out of reach for anything but
speculation. Hawking says of the big bang:
At that time...the density of the universe and the curvature of space-time would have been
infinite. Because mathematics cannot really handle infinite numbers, this means that the
general theory of relativity predicts that there is a point in the universe where the theory
itself breaks down. In fact, all our theories of science are formulated on the assumption
that space-time is smooth and nearly flat, so they break down at the big bang singularity2
This singularity, this maybe-something-maybe-nothing, as a foothold, is a quandary for
cosmologists struggling to construct a ladder to the heavens–a unified theory of everything that
tells us what the universe is and perhaps what it was before time and space and why it became
the universe in time and space. Hawking says that in order to predict how the universe should
have started off, one needs laws that hold at the beginning of time. He and Roger Penrose proved
that if the classic theory of relativity is used as the model for how the universe started off, one
arrives at a point of infinite density and infinite curvature of space-time where all the known
laws of science break down–a singularity. But, by the use of quantum mechanics, Hawking says
that one may arrive at a model of how the universe started off and avoid the singularity. His own
personal model of how the universe started out has remained unproven since the nineteen-
eighties, but were it worked out, it is doubtful that it would tell us how the universe started off.
And no theory can tell us why.
Quantum mechanics, hard at work in the minutia all these years, is short sighted. It has a good
vision of the tiny, but can’t see into the distance far enough to make out where the pieces go
when they explode. The general theory of relativity, however, is far sighted. It describes the big
picture but can’t make out the nitty-gritty. The theories need to work together if they are to solve
the “small” that began at the big bang and became the “large” that is the present universe. As of
now they are involved in a family quarrel and are not compatible. Hawking believes that he can
devise a theory that will resolve their disagreement, but such a theory must meet his criteria for
what a good theory is:
In order to talk about the nature of the universe and to discuss questions as to whether it
has a beginning or an end, you have to be clear about what a scientific theory is. I shall
take the simple minded view that a theory is just a model of the universe, or a restricted
part of it, and a set of rules that relate quantities in the model to observation that we
make. It exists only in our minds and does not have any other reality (whatever that might
mean (his parenthesis)). A theory is a good theory if it satisfies two requirements: it must
accurately describe a large class of observations on the basis of a model that contains
only a few arbitrary elements and it must make definite predictions about the results of
future observations3
I lack the expertise to understand the theory of relativity or quantum mechanics. Given a lifetime
to study, I would lack the intellect to understand them. I must rely on scientists to tell me if and
when they resolve the differences between the general theory of relativity and quantum
mechanics. If these difficulties are resolved, Stephen Hawking probably will resolve them. If
someone else does, he has the intellect to understand how they did it. If Stephen Hawking says
the problems are resolved, I trust him to believe that they are. He knows all the theories out
there. Thus far Stephen has said nary a word about a resolution of the difficulties between
quantum mechanics and the general theory of relativity.
He does say, “We don’t yet have a complete and consistent unified theory that combines
quantum mechanics and gravity. But we are fairly certain of some features that such a unified
theory should have.” For clarity and brevity, we will avoid an explanation and description of
these features and just mention that they are Feynman’s sum over histories and Einstein’s idea
that the gravitational field is represented by curved space-time. All attempts to combine the
general theory of relativity with quantum mechanics have, to this day, failed. Should they have
succeeded, here is what Hawking assumes will follow:
When we apply Feynman’s sum over histories to Einstein’s view of gravity, the analogue
of the history of a particle is now a complete curved space-time that represents the history
of the whole universe.4
He concludes on the following page:
There would be no singularities at which the laws of science break down and no edge of
space-time at which one would have to appeal to God or some new law to set the
boundary conditions for space-time. One could say: ‘The boundary conditions of the
universe is that it has no boundary.’ The universe would be completely self-contained and
not affected by anything outside itself. It would neither be created nor destroyed. It would
just BE.5
BE what? Remember, this small dense particle is posited as existing before the big bang,
therefore before the existence of time and space and matter. Absent time, space and matter, there
are no particles to BE, and therefore no “large class of observations” upon which Hawking can
construct a model that makes “definite predictions about the results of future observations.”
Without those observations from which future observations can be made, Hawking’s theory fails
as a good scientific theory.
Hawking posits this infinitesimally small, infinitely dense particle from whence all other
particles – an infinite number of them perhaps – derived, as an analogue of the universe, an
analogy. But nowhere does his tiny ball stop being a tiny ball and become an analogy. He even
gives physical properties to this tiny ball:
Using the no boundary condition, we find that the universe must in fact have started off
with just the minimum possible nonuniformity allowed by the uncertainty principle...
This would lead to the formation of galaxies, stars , and eventually even insignificant
creatures like ourselves.6
Later in this book we shall see how fine tuned this minimum nonuniformity had to be in the first
billionth of a second into the big bang for there ever to be a universe like the one we experience,
but that is not the point of this chapter. Nor is “Insignificant creatures like ourselves.” We’ll
disregard the snub for now, noting only that intelligence is the most marvelous thing in creation,
and Hawking’s theory can’t be a theory that explains everything if it dismisses intelligence as
insignificant.
The point here is that Hawking is describing an analogy as if it were not an analogy at all, but a
thing the analogy was supposed to be like. Given such detailed characteristics of the ball, this is
no analogy, this is what Hawking thinks that infinitely tiny ball really was.
Granting that the non-uniformity necessarily existed in the infinitely small, infinitely dense
analogue of a universe and the analogue was ready to explode into the big bang, what was this
analogue? Stephen Hawking describes it as “finite in size but (does) not have any boundary or
edge.” Of course it is a contradiction to describe something as “infinitesimally small” and
“finite” in size. It can’t be both infinitely small and finitely small at the same time. This is not to
quibble, it is only to ask what Hawking means.
Disregarding this seeming contradiction, we blow up this small particle to see what it looks like:
It’s a sphere, a basketball. That is, an immortal ant could walk forever around a basketball and
come to no boundary or singularity--he would not fall off. This is the example that Hawking
gives of his infinitely small, infinitely dense ball, but instead of a basketball, he describes it as
being like the earth, which he says he traveled round without ever having run into a singularity or
an edge. One cannot conclude from such an analogy that the earth is infinite. I know personally
that basketballs are not, and they fit the same analogy.
Moreover, until this “infinitesimally small, infinitely dense” ball explodes, it does not exist, the
universe does not exist, space and time or space-time does not exist (a note here: “explode” is
inaccurate if one is made to think of bombs and firecrackers. Even though the big bang’s first
three second enlargement makes a detonation of TNT look as if it were in slow motion, its
deployment was near perfect in symmetry). Obviously the ball has not become the universe at
this point, has not deployed in the big bang. The universe that we know exists only in time and
space–it is time and space! But time and space did not come to exist until after the big bang, and
so the universe did not come to exist until after the big bang. Until the big bang, nothing exists.
To talk about any configuration that fits Hawking’s description of “finite in extent...(with no)
boundary or edge,” as if it existed before time and space, is to talk about it as if it existed before
existence, which makes as much sense as to say that because an immortal bug could crawl
around a basketball for eternity, basketballs are infinite.
It is unimportant what precisely the configuration was that Hawking uses the shape of the world
as an analogy of, but it is of utmost importance that it had a configuration. Things have
configuration, non-things don’t. When Hawking talks about that infinitely small, dense particle,
he is talking about something rather than nothing. It makes no sense for an analogue to be
analogous of nothing; no sense for a theory to be a theory about nothing. Keep in mind the
criteria Stephen Hawking says a good theory must conform to: It must describe a few arbitrary
elements, and from those observations, make predictions. “Infinitesimally small, infinitely
dense” describes something that exists. There was a time, he says, when all the galaxies were
together at the same place. What place did they exist in before space; what time before time?
We laymen are not limited by the limits that Hawking places on himself. His science can’t
describe something beyond time and space, and time and space did not exist beyond fourteen
billion years ago. His mathematics meets with a paradox, and mathematics does not deal well
with paradoxes.
But we laymen know how to handle paradoxes without resorting to mathematics. We simply
point to what we see must have happened in reality, and draw logical conclusions. Mathematics
is an indispensable tool, but it can’t explain how something came from nothing or describe how
something can exist forever. Hawking can’t describe this infinitely small dense ball as existing
forever, because forever began fourteen billion years ago for Hawking’s science.
If we are not careful, Hawking will roll that particle into an infinitesimally small, infinitely dense
ball and sneak it by us without our seeing it and asking the bothersome metaphysical question,
“Where’d that come from?”
Of course there was no literal “small” or “dense” before the particle exploded at the big bang--
there was no space before the big bang for “small” to describe, nor matter for “dense” to
describe. Hawking’s usage of “infinitesimal” and “infinite” to describe conditions at or before
the big bang, explodes into a giant complication. If something is infinitely small, it follows that
there is an infinite number of divisions that are smaller than it, and an infinite number of
divisions larger. If it is infinitely dense there are an infinite number of divisions that are denser
than it and an infinite number of divisions less dense. That’s what infinite means.
No one illustrates better the breakdown of mathematics when it meets with the infinite than the
fifth century B.C. E. Greek philosopher, Zeno of Elea. Here is one of his paradoxes: Two runners
are racing around a track; the second runner is gaining on the first. He halves the distance
between himself and the lead runner, then halves the distance again, then halves that distance and
so forth. It is mathematically impossible for the second runner to overtake the lead runner
because however many times the second runner halves the distance between himself and the lead
runner, there will forever be another mathematical number to halve--divide two and you get one;
divide one and you get one-half; divide one-half and you get one-fourth. You can divide forever
and never arrive at a last division between the two runners.
Zeno used that paradox to show some illustrious Pythagorean mathematicians of his day that
their theories and formulas can lead them into absurdities. It’s a lesson that has escaped Stephen
Hawking and modern day scientists. Laymen need have no such problem. We may simply point
out to the Pythagoreans of Zeno’s scorn that the second runner did indeed overtake the first. The
problem lies with the primacy the Pythagoreans attribute to mathematics. For centuries, math
was a religion to the Pythagoreans. They are something of an historical allegory of a tendency in
humanity to put too much faith in scientific systems, the blessings of science not withstanding.
But Zeno’s paradoxical infinite number of mathematical divisions between two points is less a
problem than Hawking’s paradox. The failure of mathematics to describe one runner overtaking
the other is not a denial that in reality the second runner often overtakes the first runner, but a
demonstration of a our inability to describe the infinity of mathematical divisions between the
two. Zeno’s “infinite” is not a difficulty in reality but in math. Stephen Hawking’s difficulty is
not in mathematics but in reality–how describe something as existing either before time and
space, or describe something as coming from nothing? In this case the whole universe as existing
before existence or as coming from nothing.
The only apt description of the universe at or before the big bang is that there is no description,
squeeze it into as small a ball as one wishes. Reduced smaller and smaller it either vanishes into
nothing, and therefore we cannot describe it nor can we attribute to it any power to become
materially existent, or it exists small but materially and in time and space. The universe did not
exist before the big bang, because time and space and matter did not exist before the big bang. It
was nothing and there are no words that can describe nothing, no theories to explain it, no apt
analogy for it. Hawking himself says we cannot talk about events in the universe without the
notions of space and time. Although he does not suggest that space and time existed before the
big bang, he does insists that his little ball did. Until he proves that it did, we are left with all
scientific evidence that says that only after the initial bang was there any tiny particle to balloon
into the universe we know. There was nothing before the big bang, no particles to speed, no
space for a particle to speed in and no time with which to measure a particle’s speed travel.
There was nothing! The kind of nothing that you and I understand as well as any scientist.
Hawking knows a great deal about science and mathematics, but he can’t know more about
nothing than I do; I’m a specialist in nothing.
Were it possible, I would like to trace back one of those billions of particles speeding away from
the big bang, blossoming into the universe; trace them back to that tiny speck in which all of
them a fraction of a second previously were fused and from which they all exploded; then trace
that speck back as gravity shrinks it ever smaller and denser until it arrives at a point that
Stephen Hawking in the Twentieth Century would describe as “infinitesimally” small,
“infinitely” dense. Having gotten that far, I would insist on going further back--back, back, back,
because there are an infinite number of smallers and densers to trace back, and because time also
came into being with the big bang and is a property of it, I have an infinite stretch of duration,
prior to the advent of time, in which to do my tracing. Eventually my pursuit tires me and I
finally ask the question that’s bugging me, “Does this speck get so small that it finally
disappears? finally ceases to exists?”
If it doesn’t arrive at a point where it is small but existent one second, and a second beyond, non-
existent, then it must have existed always. The other alternatives are that it materialized out of
nothing (absurd), or it was created by something that already existed.
For Hawking to describe a configuration of something infinitely small and dense is to describe
something that can only exist as matter in space and time: “small” is contingent on space;
“dense” is contingent on matter, and both are contingent on duration in time. But before the big
bang, nothing existed in space or time because space and time did not exist. Is that small dense
configuration, that Hawking talks about, something or nothing? If time does not exist before the
big bang, which Stephen says it did not, and illustrates how even God could not have created the
universe before time, then in what land before time did this eternal BE just be?
It is necessary, according to Hawking, to know what a good scientific theory is before one can
talk about what the universe is and how it got started. A good theory, he says, “is just a model of
the universe, with rules that relate quantities in the model to observations that we make.” But
does he mean by “model,” or theory, what I mean, or you mean? If we know this, then we can
compare what he expects from a scientific theory and see if it is what we expect from a scientific
theory. I would hope a scientific theory would give me some idea if some power, call it God or
nature, that caused the universe to exist. If the universe did not exist before the big bang, what
was the big bang that caused it to exist? If the universe existed infinitely into the past, I want to
know that. If it exists now, in infinite space, or if it has finite dimensions as my house does, I
want to know. Those are some of the questions I would hope that a scientific model, or theory,
could tell me. My questions have to do with physical existence, they are what a philosopher
would call ontological questions.
Roger Penrose sometimes uses the terms, “good physical”answers in reference to descriptions of
things that mathematics is used to describe. Always, when evaluating a mathematical formula
that represents something other than itself, one must make sure he is not swept away by the
beauty of the formula rather than how well it represents what it is supposed to represent. Penrose
cautions with a question: “What is the physical justification in allowing oneself to be carried
along by the elegance of some mathematical description and then trying to regard that
description as describing a ‘reality?”7What he means by “good physical” I take to mean real in
the sense that physical things are real in a way that mathematics is not real. For instance, 2 + 2
only represents itself as a mathematical formula. Use the formula with apples and you have a
mathematical formula that descries a physical phenomena: 2 apples + 2 apples equals four
apples. Here mathematics is used to describe reality. Penrose is a co-publisher with Hawking of
several books, and he quotes Hawking in regards to scientific descriptions:
I don’t demand that a theory correspond to reality because I don’t know what it is.
Reality is not a quality you can test with a litmus paper. All I’m concerned with is that
the theory should predict the results of measurements.8
On the same page Penrose says that Hawking is one of those “‘positivists’ who have no truck
with ‘wishy-washy’ issues of ontology in any case, claiming to believe that they have no concern
with what is ‘real’ and what is ‘not real.”
The difficulty with Hawking’s procedure is that he may create a theory that is true in
mathematics but false in defining what the physical world is and how the world started off. In
other words, his mathematical formula may give a mathematical description of how the world
started off that is accurate as a mathematical formula, and is real in the sense that mathematics is
real, but which describes nothing that ever happened in material reality. It would not be a lie, it
would just be a mathematical formula that does not relate to space, time and matter. There are
mathematical formulas whose truth is so objectively apparent that no objection can be logically
leveled against them. Hawking’s no boundary theory is not one of them, that is why it remains
unproven after these many years. Objective language (with its limitations as a conveyor of ideas
that are themselves not physical entities) may explain time, space and matter with greater
accuracy than a less objective mathematical formula can explain it. A mathematical formula,
however elegant, does not accurately describe the universe that physically exists. Hawking closes
his book with precisely this point: “Even if there is one possible unified theory, it is just a set of
rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them
to describe?9
Unfortunately, the humility demonstrated in this closing statement is absent in most of A Brief
History. He opens his book by requiring that a theory of cosmology conform to close rules of
science. He closes the book with a confession that mathematics does not answer the crucial
question of reality. And between the opening and closing he makes unwarranted claims for what
his mathematical model, the no boundary little ball, does. Mainly, he claims that it displaces any
need for a creator. That is a pretty hefty ambition for “...just a set of rules and equations.” If his
theory displaces a need for a creator, one would at least expect it to know what creation is; what
reality is. This, however, he says he does not know.
We must not conclude that a mathematical formula whose figures hold throughout, represents
reality or tells us anything about how the universe started out. After all, there are numerous other
mathematical formulas – indeed, as many as there are cosmologists – whose formulas hold, and
yet which differ with Hawking’s. They can’t all be right. That a theory hold in its mathematical
integrity is not a criteria for being a true representation of what is real. It may be objectively true
as mathematics, but false in what it claims it represents in the physical world. To reiterate, in
some instances mathematics may be less adequate to tell what physical reality is and how the
world started off, than language is.
Give Hawking his due, but not more. It is of utmost importance to remember that this no
boundary theory, for all its ambition to displace a creator, remains with those that Brian Greene
characterizes as valiant but non-conclusive.It is unproven.10
Chapter Three : Land before time
Coming Soon!!!
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Tag der Veröffentlichung: 17.08.2015
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Stephen Hawking