In his latest book, misleadingly entitled The Grand Design, Steven Hawking makes the adventurous claim that ” … the universe can … create itself from nothing.” Science tells us this could NOT be true.
1. The universe could NOT have created itself
In his latest book, misleadingly entitled The Grand Design, Steven Hawking makes the adventurous claim that “because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing.” Let’s think about that.
Dr. John Lennox (Professor in Mathematics at Oxford University) acknowledges that Hawking is a brilliant theoretical physicist but responds to Hawking’s assertion that the universe can and will create itself from nothing with; “That sounds to me like something out of Alice in Wonderland … it’s not science!“1
Lennox explains by saying; “If I say ‘X creates X,’ I presuppose the existence of X in order to account for the existence of X. To presuppose the existence of the universe to account for its existence is logically incoherent.”2 Or put simply; ‘From nothing, nothing comes!’ or ‘No-thing cannot do anything!’3
In relation to Hawking’s latest idea Dr. Lennox rightly concludes; “What this all goes to show is that nonsense remains nonsense, even when talked by world-famous scientists”.
The universe cannot have created itself!
2. The universe could NOT have always existed
The idea that the universe has always been in existence has been thoroughly rejected on scientific grounds. The Laws of Thermodynamics show the universe must have had a beginning.
The First Law of Thermodynamics says that there is only a finite amount of energy and the Second Law says that the amount of available energy is continually decreasing. If the universe had existed forever, all the available existing energy would have already been used up.
The universe was Created
The only logical / scientific explanation for the existence of the universe is that it was created.
Acknowledgements
1. Interview with John Lennox and Ravi Zacharias
2. Article: ‘Stephen Hawking and God’ by John Lennox
3. Charlie H. Campbell, DVD ‘Answers to Skeptics’
4. God and Stephen Hawking (Whose Design Is It Anyway?), John C. Lennox, A Lion Book, 2011, page 32
