Stephen Hawking and Leonard MlodinowNew York: Bantam Books, 2010
$28.00/Hardcover
Stephen Hawking's latest popular press book, The Grand Design (co-authored with Leonard Mlodinow) generated controversy with the claim: "It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going" (180). Hawking's alternative to creation rests on M-Theory, multiverses, and gravity—though I won't try to offer a detailed explanation of those subjects here (more on that shortly). The no-need-for-God claim led to soundbytes from various theologists. "The 'god' that Stephen Hawking is trying to debunk is not the creator God of the Abrahamic faiths who really is the ultimate explanation for why there is something rather than nothing," CNN quotes Cambridge theologian Denis Alexander, "Science provides us with a wonderful narrative as to how [existence] may happen, but theology addresses the meaning of the narrative." The scientist versus theologian debate has gone on since the Catholic Church ex-communicated Galileo in the seventeenth century. Not much in the language of the debate itself has changed, despite the spate of popular, "New Atheist" books like those of Richard Dawkins.
Unlike Dawkins, Hawking does not initiate The Grand Design calling for God's non-existent head. His first target is not religion, but philosophy: "How can we understand the world in which we find ourselves? What is the nature of reality? ... Traditionally these are questions for philosophy, but philosophy is dead. Philosophy has not kept up with modern developments in science, particularly physics. Scientists have become the bearers of the torch of discovery in our quest for knowledge" (5). It's this claim, and its place in a popular press book, that I find more provocative than theological debate.
For one thing, Hawking is right. Philosophy is dead—or at least might as well be—if one measures its success in terms of funding and political prestige. In April 2010, for example, Middlesex University announced that it was closing its philosophy department, "for financial reasons" and because the Middlesex philosophy department made no "measurable contribution" to the university. Religion, if not theologians specifically, at least continues to enjoy widespread financial support and political representation in the United States.
So why kick philosophy when its down? And why do it in the popular press rather than in academic media? The answer might simply be an elite scientist's unawareness of philosophy's suffering rather than a deliberate piling-on. But the abject presentation of philosophy, literature, and myth in The Grand Design is worth a closer look. Popular publications on science make clear just how much science relies on linguistic representation even as it tries to dissociate itself from the un-scientific representations we call myth or fiction.
Hawking agrees, arguing that there can be no knowledge without models, and that particularly well-constructed models actually generate knowledge. He writes, when talking about the possibilities of multi-verses forming with the Big Bang:
There will be different histories for different possible states of the universes at the present time. This leads to a radically different view of cosmology, and the relation between cause and effect. The histories that contribute to the Feynman sum [a quantum mechanical equation of probability... I think] don't have an independent existence, but depend on what is being measured. We create history by our observation rather than history creating us (140).
It's easy enough to hear in that last sentence a philosophical "sounding" claim about subjectivity. Hawking argues that it's important how and when one arrives at such a statement, and it's clear that for him science is the first and best method for doing so. This makes it seem as if philosophy is merely appropriating (or misappropriating) the language of science—a critique that has also been leveled against certain theological arguments, such as Creation Science.
But this turf war rhetoric neglects to take into account the turf itself: language. The success of language in The Grand Design might be measured by its correctness—which is to say, its mimetic correspondence to the mathematics behind quantum physics. Lest we forget, mathematics, too, is a language of representation. Not surprisingly, Hawking believes that math is where the "real" representation is at—one can tell this because not a quotient of math appears in the whole book. The Grand Design is for the reading public, not for the mathematician. It is a linguistic and pictorial representation of mathematical representations of the universe.
But just because this is a representation of representation doesn't mean its stakes are necessarily lower. Hawking scolds scientists for trying to come up with a "bottom-up," unified theory of the universe. He argues instead for a top-down method of understanding: "... the universe does not have a unique observer-independent history... An important implication of the top-down approach is that they apparent laws of nature depend on the history of the universe. Many scientists believe there exists a single theory that explains those laws as well as nature's physical constants... But top-down cosmology dictates that the apparent laws of nature are different for different histories" (140). Lest this sound like a tautology, Hawking makes clear that we can perceive, if only indirectly, these other possibilities through the knowledge of quantum physics.
To use one of Hawking's examples: we have observed in "our" history that the moon is not made of cheese, but there might be another history in which the moon is made of cheese: "Hence histories in which the moon is made of cheese do not contribute to the present state of our universe, though they might contribute to others. That might like sound like science fiction, but it isn't" (140). This example of the moon being made of cheese was probably meant as something of a joke, but it reminds us of the contributions philosophy can still make to knowledge and understanding.
Although Hawking probably has a better understanding of science than any philosopher, I doubt very much that he has a better understanding of fiction. When fiction appears in The Grand Design, it is always delineated as such. Hawking invokes Viking mythology, the Christian creation story, the Boshongo (a tribe in central Africa) creation story, and a Chinese legend about a planet with ten suns. In every case he makes clear to the reader that these are mythologies, whereas what he proposes, again, is not science fiction.
Hawking invokes these myths—and philosophy—to suggest that science has moved beyond them. But even if it has, the appearance of The Grand Design in popular form reminds us that we have not. Just because myth and philosophy have been proven incorrect (in this universe), does not at all suggest they are "dead." So long as science is dependent upon language for representation—and for meaning making—mythography survives, no matter what the bottom-up mathematics. So is the relationship between science and language a scientific question or a philosophical one? Is the ability to even pose that question derived from scientific method or other epistemologies? And finally, in such a vast multi-verse, might there still be a little "space" for philosophy?
