Stephen Hawking's science cannot find God as just another physical object!
SIR – Stephen Hawking makes a category error in his dismissal of God (Comment, September 3). He will find no God if he looks for God as an object among objects.
We humans live with the mystery of being not only objects (under the laws of nature) but subjects with consciousness and the freedom of rational beings.
We look at the universe through the window of our rationality, just as we might look at a garden through a window. We forget the window but it is always there. Our selfhood is free and transcendent.
Professor Hawking and the scientists rightly explore questions about the physical universe and its chains of contingency and objective causation. What they will not answer is the "why" of the universe. Why is it here? This is not a scientific question – it is not another part of the chain of cause and effect that science is unravelling with such brilliance.
Questions about humans as subjects and persons relate to such categories as love, beauty, freedom, truth and God. These are not matters for science, just as quantum theory and the Big Bang are not part of the orbit of religion.
Not until the play ends and the author walks on to the stage will we know the question, let alone the answer. In the meantime we will have to continue to listen to what is in our hearts.
Dr Robin Brooke-Smith
Shrewsbury
SIR – John Capel (Letters, September 4) rightly points out that spontaneous faith is as old as mankind. This is a powerful argument against religion, for nobody has faith in every one of the innumerable gods worshipped over thousands of years in many different cultures.
Which God is regarded as infallible changes over millennia, but if the majority of worshippers have been wrong, you might as well worship the law of gravity, as the astronomer Carl Sagan suggested.
Professor John L. Burton
North Perrott, Somerset
SIR – I had thought better of Stephen Hawking. God is by definition the One who creates everything out of nothing –
ex nihilo . It means that God created everything, including time, the laws of physics, nature etc. He therefore is of an entirely different order to us and no created thing can scientifically prove anything about him at all.
St Symeon the New Theologian expressed this succinctly 1,000 years ago in Constantinople: "What can a plough know of its maker?"
Very Rev Stephen Maxfield
Greek Orthodox Church of the
Holy Fathers of Nicaea
Shrewsbury
SIR – I am an atheist, and have been for 60 years, so I am not writing in support of God. But to posit "spontaneous creation" – something from nothing – is just substituting one belief for another.
Peter Begg
Shrewsbury
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