Stephen Hawking’s big mystery

It is said that Stephen Hawking knows more about the universe than almost any other person to ever walk the planet. His accomplishments are legendary. Yet some answers still escape even him.

• When asked by ABC News’ Diane Sawyer which is the biggest mystery he would like solved, he said, ‘I want to know why the universe exists, why there is something greater than nothing.’ ¹
• ‘Into the Universe with Stephen Hawking‘ is a Discovery Channel TV mini-series written by him. A problem he raised was, ‘exactly what triggered life here is still a mystery.’  ²
• Stephen Hawking wrote a book with Leonard Mlodinow, The Grand Design, in which it is claimed that ‘because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing.’ ³  Laws of nature only come into effect after creation, it cannot create. Another scientist, Lawrence M Krauss, wrote a book ‘Why is there something rather than nothing, A Universe from Nothing.’  The notable evolutionist and well known atheist, Dr Richard Dawkins wrote in the afterword: Krauss believes that nothing is something. ⁴

So the origin of the universe and life on earth has not yet been solved by science. If Stephen Hawking, with his brilliant brain, and years of study and meditating on it, has not solved it, who will? Yet Hawking claims that science will win (it is no secret that Hawking has no faith in either the Bible or God.): ‘There is a fundamental difference between religion, which is based on authority, [and] science, which is based on observation and reason. Science will win because it works.’ ⁵

The question Stephen Hawking is asking, has nothing to do with science. Science has to do with what can be observed, and repeatedly tested by experiments.  That excludes the origins issue. How can one repeatedly test how the universe came into existence? How can science explain the reason the universe exists? Is it illogical to say it happened by chance? Why would that happen? Is such science logical and rational?

This is one of the issues we want to explore. How irrational is belief in creation by God? Why do people deny it is the truth, but they cannot agree on the basics? The Bible says God created the universe (Genesis 1:14-18). ⁶  We want to explore what science has revealed about the universe, and what conclusions we can draw from Genesis 1:14-18.

We want to know why the origin of the universe is so fascinating, but for sceptics any other answer than the Bible’s will do.

References

1. http://abcnews.go.com/WN/Technology/stephen-hawking-religion-science-win/story?id=10830164.
2. http://creation.com/stephen-hawking -aliens.
3. Cited by J C Lennox, God and Stephen Hawking, location 120 of 1361 in e-book.
4. http://www.evolutionnews.org/2012/02/what_part_of_no056761.html
5. http://abcnews.go.com/WN/Technology/stephen-hawking-religion-science-win/story?id=10830164, p2
6. “And God said, ‘Let there be lights in the expanse of the sky to separate the day from the night, and let them serve as signs to mark seasons and days and years and let them be lights in the expanse of the sky to give light on the earth.’ And it was so. God made two great lights – the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night. He also made the stars. God set them in the expanse of the sky to give light on the earth, to govern the day and the night, and to separate light from darkness. And God saw that it was good.”