No friend of God

Sometimes you don’t appreciate your allies till they’re gone. Apparently the world’s religions had a friend in Stephen Hawking, the Cambridge cosmologist, until this week when he proclaimed in a highly publicised book that God could not after all have created the universe. His previous view was slightly more supportive: God might have been involved.

Such is the cult of the celebrity scientist – and the skill of Prof Hawking’s publicists – that his conversion from agnostic to atheist was the main front page story in The Times for two days running. While Richard Dawkins exulted that physics had joined biology in kicking God out of science, Britain’s religious leaders combined to attack Prof Hawking.

The furore shows how invoking the name of God, in a positive or negative sense, can attract attention. Prof Hawking himself has done it before, and so have other famous physicists, with phrases like “finding the God particle” and “seeing the face of God”.

In reality, Prof Hawking’s latest thinking should not affect anyone’s views about the likelihood of divine creation. He has espoused a speculative framework called M-theory, which shows how multiple universes – each with different laws of physics – could arise out of nothing. But this cannot exclude the idea that God (whatever that means) set the conditions for existence of the “multiverse”.

Cosmology is on the threshold of a golden age, in which new data from space observatories and atom smashers will feed a ferment of theories. We shall learn a lot more about the origins and structure of our universe – and possibly other universes too – but none of it can tell us anything about God.

Our human minds have not evolved in a way that will allow us ever to understand scientifically the ultimate secrets of existence. The field will therefore remain clear for those who want to invoke a deity to explain what science cannot.