Hawking And Creationists

[antihippy]

While arguing about Intelligent Design over on another forum; it became apparent that there are creationists out there who cite Stephen Hawking as as 'supporter' of creationism. The poster in question was quoting passages from a Brief History of Time(BHofT). Because I was trying to refute him, with no copy of BHofT to hand, I did a bit of googling. Now, if you look hard enough you find all these creationisists quoting Hawking in support - an Agnostic at best. I was wondering what others thought of that and whether you had had similar experiences?

And Hi,

Be gentle this is my first post on this board.

Cheers.

 

[Ossai]

Creationists lie. That is their entire argument.

Oh, welcome to the forums.

 

[antihippy]

Thanks.

You and I know both know that. But it still astounds me. And there are serious Creationists (IDers in particular) out there who seem to think that his work supports their views.

 

[Tez]

Physicists often invoke a "god" that is just meant to capture their belief that the laws of physics have a beautiful simplicity - as if they were designed in some sense.

Personally I dislike this attitude as an a-priori stance - I think there is a technical result out there waiting to be proven that given any random Hamiltonian of a hypothetical Universe, there exists what is known as "a factorization of the Hilbert space" in which localised objects see this random Hamiltonian as indistinguishable from one constructed from local and highly symmetric interactions. (The latter being what we observe with our current physical theories.) I've tried hard to prove this, and have some ambiguous numerical evidence for it (programming skills aint hot). So far I have nothing rigorous.

 

[jimlintott]

I have a copy. What is the quote? I'll see if I can find it.

 

[c4ts]

How can they cite Hawking if they hate the Big Bang theory?

 

[Dr Adequate]

(1) The fact that Hawking sometimes uses deistic language does not make him a creationist --- he supports the scientific views of cosmology and evolution, not half-baked creationist nonsense.

(2)

The idea that space and time may form a closed surface without boundary also has profound implications for the role of God... So long as the universe had a beginning, we could suppose it had a creator. But if the universe is really self-contained, having no boundary or edge, it would have no beginning or end: it would simply be. What place, then, for a creator?

Stephen Hawking, from A Brief History Of Time, Chapter 8.

 

[Dr Adequate]

Hawking on Darwin, abiogenesis, evolution and human origins:

How can anything we say have any validity? My answer to this is based on Darwin's theory of evolution...

I take it that some very primitive form of life arose spontaneously on earth from chance combinations of atoms. This early form of life was probably a large molecule. But it was probably not DNA, since the chances of forming a whole DNA molecule by random combinations is small.

The early form of life would have reproduced itself. The quantum uncertainty principle and the random thermal motions of the atoms would mean that there were a certain number of errors in the reproduction ... a very few errors would be beneficial, by pure chance. The organisms with these errors would be more likely to survive and reproduce ...

The human race has carried this to another stage. We are very similar to higher apes, both in our bodies and in our DNA; but a slight variation in our DNA has enabled us to develop language.

Stephen Hawking, from Black Holes and Baby Universes, chapter 12.

How can they claim this man as a "creationist"? Do they have their fingers crossed or something?

Oh, and welcome to the forums, antihippy!