How does it feel to be Stephen Hawking?

Stephen Hawking has been engaging in some deep thinking lately. Here are a few samples:

... our genetic code carries selfish and aggressive instincts that were a survival advantage in the past. It will be difficult enough to avoid disaster in the next 100 years let alone the next thousand or a million.

Our only chance of long-term survival is not to remain on planet Earth but to spread into space.

But I am an optimist. If we can avoid disaster for the next two centuries our species should be safe as we spread into space

I had the great privilege of studying with William Dray and I remember him saying once that it is fascinating that when great physicists start talking about the big questions outside Physics they inevitably end up sounding like philosophy undergrads who have just smoked a joint while reading Horton Hears a Who.*

I don't mean that as the put down it might come across as. Professor Dray's point, and mine, is that these questions are great equalizers. Being really, really smart doesn't make questions regarding the meaning and purpose of life any easier to answer and being an Albert Einstein or a Stephen Hawking doesn't give these guys any significant advantages over Deepak Chopra or Shirley MacLaine.

And if we devote much time or energy to the pronouncements above, we will see that any first year student, once the effects of the joint had worn off, could blow them to bits logically and they'd be absolutely correct to do so.

For starters, who exactly do you mean as "we" Kimosabe Hawking? You and me, we're going to be dead. What comfort is there exactly in knowing that the human race will survive for a few hundred more years? Neither of us will be there.

Underlying everything Hawking says are some stunningly naive articles of faith. There is a faith that the future will be exactly like the past. Just as European civilization survived by colonizing the Americas, so too will earth's civilization survive by colonizing space. Just as technology has overcome problems in the past, so too will "we" use technology to move somewhere else when the earth comes to an end. No doubt when the universe also comes to an end billions of years from now "we" will have thought of a way to colonize another universe.

Why does he believe these things? Well, put yourself in his wheelchair, you'd want to believe in something wouldn't you?

But the very science that Hawking champions tells us that the odds against pulling off what he hopes for are well, astronomical. We do not know of a single other planet that could support human life. Even if there is such a planet, the odds are that it will be so far away we will A) never find it and B) never be able to get there even if we did find it.

Evolution is true but it is only true in certain fairly narrow conditions and the only place we know of where these conditions hold is on the earth. Species adapt but they only do so so long as the sun continues to beam the right amount of energy onto exactly the right sort of planet and only so long as one of the trillions of pieces of heavy stuff floating around in space doesn't crash into that planet. The sun would only have to change a little bit, relatively speaking, for all life here to begin, slowly or quickly, dying off.

The fact that this is the only place life exists that we know of, tells us that the odds against life surviving are very high. We are a bizarre fluke in a universe that has no place for us.

When my mother died a little more than a year ago, I found myself talking to another relative who was simply stunned at her faith. He kept saying that he didn't know how she kept on believing 'til the bitter end (and it was bitter). I said to him, "The thing about my mother was that she really believed what she really believed."

The stunning thing about Stephen Hawking is that he really doesn't. The science Hawking professes to believe in says that the odds that the human race will come to an end are almost certain. In the face of this, he comes up with a lot of sophomoric nonsense to help him deny his own beliefs. And he has done so for so long now that it would be cruel to tell him that the possibility that the universe came out of nothing, far from refuting Christianity, is actually a central tenet of the faith.

And yet, somewhere in all this there is the wonderful truth that happiness matters to Hawking. It matters a whole lot to him that people he does not know who will live far off in the future will thrive and seek happiness. There is absolutely no scientific or logical reason to believe that. There might be some genetic urge to wish for this survival but Hawking doesn't believe there is anything necessarily good about the genetic code. And yet the possibility of human happiness really matters to him to the point that he hopes it goes on after he and everyone he knows has died.



* That's my metaphor. Professor Dray said something more like "it's like Philosophy 101 at a high level, like students discussing metaphysics after their third beer."