If you’ve cocked half an ear to the news over the last few weeks or glanced at the newspapers, you’ll know that the Cambridge scientist Stephen Hawking, together with some of his colleagues, has published a book called The Grand Design. It’s all about the latest theories in physics.
The thing which has caught the press’s attention is what he has had to say about God: God isn’t needed to light the blue touch paper.
Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist.
There’s another reason why God isn’t needed in Hawking’s world. It’s to do with something else that has caught the press’s attention, a theory of everything. If physicists have a theory of everything then that explains everything. There is therefore no need to bring God in to explain anything. Most of us are lost at this point and think clever scientists. But let’s just pause for a minute and think about the idea of ‘a theory of everything’.
Remember at school when you played with magnets. There were things that we learnt about magnets and their north and south poles. And perhaps we even sprinkled iron filings on a piece of paper with a magnet underneath and produced pretty patterns. On other days in physics we learnt things about electricity with batteries, bulbs, wires and galvanometers.
Now if you have ever ridden a bicycle with a dynamo or taken an electric motor apart, you will know that moving magnets about near coils of wire produces electricity. Or pass electricity through coils of wire near to magnets and things move. There’s a connection between electricity and magnetism. That is pretty extraordinary. You can convert electricity in magnetism and magnetism into electricity.
And once physicists get on the case they come up with yet more equations for us to learn in our physics lessons about something they call electromagnetism.
Electromagnetism turns out to be a pretty basic force in our universe.
And what about some of the other things we learnt about in physics, gravity for instance. Apples fall to the ground because of gravity. Planets whizz around each other because of gravity. There’s less of it on the moon and there’s zero gravity in space because the astronauts float about in their spaceships. Is gravity connected to electromagnetism? Apparently there are two other fundamental forces in our universe. Are they related to electromagnetism and gravity?
Well, it turns out they might be. Certainly physicists want to create equations that link all these forces together.
Einstein did a pretty good job in bringing space and time and gravity together and energy and mass and the speed of light.
That’s also pretty weird. Space and time are somehow connected and connected to mass and energy, gravity and the speed of light.
So a theory of everything is a mathematical equation that has in it references to things like space, time, gravity, mass, energy, electro-magnetism and all the forces of quantum mechanics. Now I hope there are no physicists here because I am sure they are already seething at this very simplistic explanation. But it’s complex enough for some things to be immediately very obvious.
What about the idea of this being a theory of everything? Everything? – what about joy and happiness and love and imagination and redness and ugliness and crime and hope? Now I suppose it may be argued that things like joy and love are simply the result of particles whizzing about in our brains. But it won’t quite do to say joy is simply particles whizzing about in the brain and if we make things whizz around in our brains in a particular way we will feel joy. If joy is confined to brain function so too is courage and bravery and self-sacrifice. What does that say about our commemoration of the Battle of SOF Sermon Stephen Mitchell preached this sermon at St Mary’s Daleham and All Saints’ Church Gazeley on Sunday 12th September 2010, the Fifteenth Sunday after Trinity.
Joy and love are more than whizzing things in the brain.
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Joy and love are more than whizzing things in the brain. They are about how we describe the world, how we think about the world, how we experience the world, how we imagine the world and picture the world, how we are aware and conscious of the world.
It’s a very, very, very long way from a mathematical equation to a Shakespeare Sonnet.You may remember the book and the radio series The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy which had the famous answer 42. (If, by the way, you put the answer to life, the universe and everything into Google it comes up with 42 at the top of the list!) The joke in the book is that the computer which has spent millions of years working this answer out doesn’t know the ultimate question for which 42 is the answer. 42 is the answer but the question which it answers seems to have been forgotten. It’s a bit like that with theories of everything. What has 42 got to do with 9/11?
Now the way physicists have brought all the different elements of the physical world together and come to understand their relationships is an awesome intellectual achievement and one which has helped shape our technological world. But we mustn’t be misled by the physicists’ everything. It isn’t everything – it isn’t poetry and art and love.
The second thing that should strike us about theories of everything is that they don’t actually explain everything. If we come up with an equation like E = mc2 then that may tell us how the speed of light is related to energy and mass but it doesn’t tell us why there is light. It doesn’t tell us what we might do with light or what meaning light might have in our life or how we might use light as a metaphor for understanding, God or a margarine.
E = mc2 won’t tell us anything about the life cycle of an eel - not that I particularly want to know anything about the life cycle of eels. It won’t tell us which spending cuts to make in the economy or how deep to make them. It won’t tell us which school to send our children to or who would make a suitable wife or husband. It won’t tell us where our lost coin is or whether to forgive our neighbour.
In fact a theory of everything doesn’t have very much say about anything in our day-to-day lives. A theory of everything is almost a theory of nothing. And it should be said, in passing, that many physicists don’t think it possible to produce a theory of everything. There will always be a missing link. But even if such a theory is possible it wouldn’t be the answer to everything. There would be many more practical things to answer. It would be a bit like this sermon on life, the universe and everything. You wouldn’t expect it to be the last sermon that I ever preach. You might hope that it was the last sermon that I ever preach. But there are so many other things to talk about.
There is one thing about which Stephen Hawking is right and that is that we are not going to find God in cosmological theories about the beginning of the universe. God is to be found in day-to-day living. God is to found in making our lives meaningful and valuable. God is to be found in love and imagination and forgiveness.
We’ve always known that. We’ve always known that God is love and that the commands of God are to love one another and our neighbours as ourselves. We know God is to be found in acts of forgiveness.
It’s sometimes said that religion gets above itself.
Well science can get above itself too. And we shouldn’t feel over-awed by the astonishing and marvellous revelations of science. As people of faith we have our own gifts of faith to reveal to the world.
Stephen Mitchell is the Vicar of Gazeley and four other parishes and Rural Dean of Mildenhall, Suffolk. He is a former Chair of SOF trustees.