Stephen Hawking passed away today, so I anticipate a lot of Hawking quotes on the Internet. Most people are not especially conversant in contemporary experimental physics (myself included) and, under the misunderstanding that everything a scientist says is necessarily a statement of science, will consequently be mostly quoting Hawking’s philosophical pronouncements about reductive materialism. I became familiar with Hawking’s thoughts about cosmology largely through one of his critics, Oxford mathematician John Lennox, who neither takes issue with Hawking’s scientific work nor tolerates his philosophical illiteracy. Hawking seems to have been an atheist, so we can expect atheists to once again insecurely assert their pretensions about the alleged intellectual superiority of atheism, steadfastly ignoring scientific elites (such as Sir John Polkinghorne) who profess a theistic view in contradiction to Hawking’s. This is a mistake because it ignores some disastrously poor philosophy. Lennox observes, for one example:
“What does Hawking mean when he uses the word ‘nothing’ in the statement ‘The Universe can and will create itself out of nothing’? Because, if you notice the assumption in the first part of the assertion–because there is a law of gravity (so there is something), the Universe will create itself out of nothing …. And one presumes, therefore, that he is assuming that a law of gravity exists. But I would presume that he also believes that gravity exists, because what would a law of gravity mean if gravity itself didn’t exist? … [g]ravity is not nothing, if [Hawking] is using that word in its usual philosophically correct sense of non-being (and if he isn’t, he should have told us so). So, on the face of it, this key assertion of [“The Grand Design” (2010)] appears to be simultaneously asserting that the Universe is both created from nothing and from something, which is not a very promising start. Of course one might add, for good measure, the fact that when physicists talk about nothing, they often appear to mean a quantum vacuum, which is manifestly not nothing, and in fact Hawking is probably alluding to that when he later writes ‘We are a product of quantum fluctuations in the very early Universe.’ I’m very tempted to say, ladies and gentlemen, possibly this is a little bit too much ado about nothing.”
Lennox is just getting warmed up at that point, but you need not hear the rest to understand what all the forthcoming Hawking quotes about theism will amount to (nothing): Argumentum ad verecundiam, or argument from authority, is a logical fallacy because it gives the user a false sense of security by ignoring the substance of the arguments at issue. The real tragedy of today isn’t so much that the world lost a brilliant scientific mind but rather that in the culture at large the beneficiaries of Hawking’s scientific legacy will be greatly outnumbered by the casualties of his demonstrably bad philosophy. A wise man once said that predictions are difficult, especially when they’re about the future, but I feel safe in predicting that people will use Hawking’s philosophical sophistry to bolster their “loyalty oath of of modernity,” and precisely nothing will change.
Which is disappointing. In Hawking’s death, we have cause to mourn the living as much as the dead.