Today I have been mulling again over the views of Stephen Hawking, the physically limited scholar dealing with the great questions of space and stuff. Hawking’s health is in serious decline. The prognosis was made long ago, but he survives. He attracted attention, not only from his creativity in studies, but because of his creativity in facing his personal ordeal. He began his career acknowledging that the start-up of creation came from God, but he gradually moved to doubt, to deism, and, at this writing appears to deny any divine intelligence. He now takes some umbrage at Isaac Newton’s claim that an intelligent and powerful being formed the universe. The key to Hawking’s final statement came, as he writes: . . . when astronomers discovered the first extra solar planets orbiting other sun-like stars. He was driven by a feeling that our universe is now less remarkable. Why would God, he asks, make those redundant and out-of-reach worlds? With co-author Leonard Mlodinow, an American physicist, the two men published The Grand Design in 2010. Early review by Richard Hawkins, an evolutionary biologist and highly visible atheist praises the work as support for: the theory of Darwinism for the entirety of nature. This means that he carries the theory through in all the parts of existence, to whatever accidentally caused unassisted beginnings. There is no room here for even theistic evolution.
In 1944, I turned 21 years of age. I served several churches in Nebraska, in juggling schedules. I had not yet completed college work for a B.A. Degree. With World War II at peak, even lads did full grown work. So I was engaged. On one Sunday I spoke on God and Space. In the course I suggested that there were those who wondered about island universes beyond our own universe, and so my theme proceeded. After the service, a well-educated gentleman challenged me about island universes – that there might be universes beyond our own, and independent of our own. He felt that I was ignorant, and needed further study so to recognize that ours is the only universe that there is. He was old enough to be my father, and certainly had considerably more education than I could offer. So it was that I dropped the idea about expansive creation, which had here caused embarrassment for me. I don’t remember ever preaching that sermon again in a ministry that significantly expanded in the following decades to world ports – even after the idea of other universes or entities had become accepted in theory in astronomy and space science.
I now address the theme after seventy plus years. If there are other universes, as there may be, redundancy has nothing to do with whether or not they have divine origin. God is quite at ease with redundancy. It is a feature of all creation, and may hold some of the mystery of creation. But, what if island universes are different than ours? We are not sure at this writing, what they are like. They may be as pleasurable to God, whether similar or different, as games are to us. I am told that athletes are contradictory, those who never tire of the sameness of what they do in competition. Some ultimately tire of it, and burn out. Arguments for or against redundancy and fragility, seem to have no compelling force against God. Given some belief in cause for nature, Christians insist on positing some intelligence to keep it in mathematical possibility. Happily for mankind, applied science, like medicine, finds the marvel of the formation of redundant eye and ear functions beyond human comprehension. We leave it somewhere in the primeval – with God. When we find repetition, some argue for unguided redundancy, or a type of design, and when we do not, there is denial of design in nature. Design demands some redundancy, or we may question design. Design implies intelligence and power. Playpens look just about the same to me in every part of the world. What the little child does in that playpen is original with the child as perceived by an attentive mother. Whether God exists or not will never be a scientific matter on earth – our playpen. Unassisted mankind, with human insights and prejudices, and nothing higher than self for counsel, idealism, hope (beyond natural life) and culture must wrestle with what is available in nature. Theories emerge, but everything is limited from the human viewpoint. We should be encouraged to seek other pathways to unknown truth. Nature leads up to the boundary of a box canyon. The human direction, like so much of nature, stymies us with endings, blocks, mystery and doubt. Biblical faith guides us out of the box canyon and directs us to a high road to meaning – a spiritual factor. *Mark W. Lee, Sr. — 2016, 2020