From the Church Times-
BELIEF in God is not about plugging a gap in explaining how one thing relates to another within the uni verse, the Archbishop of Canterbury said last week. He was responding to Professor Stephen Hawking’s assertion, in his new book, that there is no place for God in theories of the creation of the universe.
The Big Bang was an inevitable consequence of the laws of physics, Professor Hawking argues in The Grand Design, co-written with the American physicist Leonard Mlodinow. The book suggests that M-theory, a type of string theory, could be the “holy grail” that would explain everything in the universe.
Professor Hawking contends: “Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist. It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touchpaper and set the universe going.”
Dr Williams told The Times that belief in God: “is the belief that there is an intelligent, living agent on whose activity every thing depends for its existence. Physics on its own will not settle the question why there is something rather than nothing.”
The Bishop of Swindon, Dr Lee Rayfield, a member of the Society of Ordained Scientists and a former science lecturer, told the BBC’s Newsnight that Professor Hawking was “not saying anything devastatingly new”. He said that Professor Hawking’s suggestions were “a reworking of the God-of-the-gaps argument”: seeing the world “like a jigsaw puzzle and you find out a bit more about the way the universe works, and as soon as you’ve got another piece of puzzle you know everything.”
Dr Rayfield proposed another way of looking at the universe, which sees “knowledge as a circle”. “You expand the circle, but there’s still more things that are unknown.” He said that “questions of meaning, of purpose, of existence, the very biggest issues of identity, aren’t solved by physics.”
More here-
http://www.churchtimes.co.uk/content.asp?id=100356
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