Q&A: Hawking
Hawking
Question
I heard that Hawking said a world can come into being without a creator. It’s just that our intellect can’t grasp it. [Big deal—after all, you can’t really discuss what you can’t grasp.] Can one claim what he said is possible?
This also opens the door to so many things that can’t be grasped by the intellect. For example, that everything is one thing, including us and the world and God [not pantheism/atheism where the world itself is God, but that there is also the spiritual God as in your view of the story, unity of opposites, and many other things, a stone He cannot lift. I know your excellent example: that it’s like a square triangle. There simply is no such concept, so He cannot create it, because He is indeed subject to the laws of logic. But according to what Hawking says—or if God has a different conceptual framework—then everything (maybe not everything, but many things) is possible, and it is not even a contradiction, because there is a conceptual world that cannot be grasped by us.]
Answer
This collection of words sounds familiar to me—if only I were fortunate enough to understand even a single sentence of it.
Discussion on Answer
It’s like saying that God does not fit any human definition. So from our human perspective, He is absolute nothingness, because every definition limits Him. Even the word “He” limits Him.
And then, if He has a different conceptual framework, then in that conceptual framework, “cannot” is not necessarily the opposite of “can,” and so on. You can say whatever you want. A world could come into being with no contraction at all, with contraction in the literal sense, and even with contraction not in the literal sense. None of these things has to occur, but everything is possible from the standpoint of our knowledge, because we have no grasp of God. In such a situation, you’ve basically turned God into something illogical. Not according to our logic, of course. If you like: divine intellect/logic.
In such a situation, if you could ask God whether atheism is a faith, He would answer: yes.
If you hold [based on other discussions] that God exists in a different conceptual framework, that means He could have a logic—just one different from ours. And we cannot understand it because it is not in our concepts. So in such a situation, where we do not know because we cannot understand, you can say anything—not that everything is true, but you can say it. Because in such a situation all possibilities are open. And then you can also say that He has no logic, because we do not know Him or understand Him.
Hawking said so many foolish and absurd things that trying to decipher some fragmentary quote of his seems completely unnecessary to me. If you have a question, please go ahead and formulate it here.
If Hawking had not been disabled, his thought—most of which is utterly crooked—would not have left any trace behind, and the man would have remained an obscure physicist.
Hawking said that a world can come into being without a creator, it’s just that we as human beings can’t understand it? What does that even mean—did you understand it?