Balking at Hawking’s Rejection of God

Although it was a temptation, I resisted titling this article “Gawking at Hawking.” June and I have, though, been “gawking” at Hawking some this past couple of weeks.

We first watched “The Theory of Everything,” the engrossing 2014 film of the world-famous cosmologist, who possesses an extraordinarily brilliant mind despite suffering near total paralysis from ALS. That movie was excellent partly because of the tremendous acting by Eddie Redmayne, who won the best actor Oscar this year for his portrayal of Hawking.

Then we watched “A Brief History of Time,” based on Hawking’s bestselling book published under that title in 1988—and with “From the Big Bang to Black Holes” as the subtitle. In that 1992 biographical documentary film much of narrative is by Hawking speaking through his speech synthesizer.

From early in his life, Hawking has sought to discover “the theory of everything” (ToE), a single, all-encompassing, coherent theoretical framework that fully explains and links together all physical aspects of the universe.

Finding a ToE is one of the major unsolved problems in physics, and Hawking hasn’t made that discovery yet—although just last month he claimed that he’s solved a huge mystery about black holes. (See this article.)

I confess that I don’t understand much that Hawking says. I do, however, have a little expertise on part of what he writes/speaks about: God.

One reviewer calls “The Theory of Everything” a “God-haunted film.” And in A Brief History of Time, Hawkins mentions God more than 20 times.

He concludes that book by asserting that if we humans do find “a complete theory” (the ToE), “it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason—for then we would know the mind of God.”

At the end of the penultimate chapter Hawking states that “our goal is a complete understanding of the events around us, and of our own existence.” But is that possible for a physicist as a physicist?

In the movie version, his and Jane’s friend Jonathan asks, “You no longer believe in the Creation?”

Stephen replies, “What one believes – is irrelevant – in physics.”

That may be true for physics, but one’s beliefs may be highly relevant for life, just as feelings or emotions are in a different sort of way.

When Stephen inexplicably divorced Jane in 1995 and married Elaine, he said, “It’s wonderful – I have married the woman I love.”

Like belief in God, love is also, I assume, irrelevant in physics. It was highly relevant in his life, however. But was there any kind of scientific proof that he really loved Elaine or that she loved him?

Can love ever be proven scientifically? Most probably not, even by a great physicist like Stephen Hawking. So, does that mean love is not real or important?

In Brief History, Hawking’s ideas can be correlated with belief in God to a certain degree. But through the years his ideas have become more and more anti-God. But not all of his students/colleagues agree with him.

Don Page was one of Hawking’s associates/helpers back in the 1970s, a few years after he graduated from William Jewell College. (I have heard about him often from his WJC professor, and my good friend, Don Gielker.)

Page, one of Hawking’s colleagues interviewed in the 1992 film, was and has remained a devout Christian believer, evidently seeing no contradiction between being a first-class physicist/cosmologist and a firm believer in God.

Affirming both science and faith in God is always preferable to needlessly choosing either one or the other.

In May 2011, I posted “Hawking on Heaven,” a blog article I invite you to read (again).

Jane Addams on the New $10 Bill?

As you probably know, in 2020 the Treasury Department is planning to issue a new $10 bill with the picture of a woman on it. Jane Addams was one name on a list I saw suggesting twenty women worth being considered for that honor. 

Wanting to learn more about her life and work, last month I read Robin K. Berson’s book Jane Addams: A Biography (2004)

Berson tells the fascinating story of Jane, who was born 155 years ago tomorrow (on September 6, 1860) in Illinois near the Wisconsin border about 250 miles (as the crow flies) almost due north of St. Louis. Hers was an upper middle class family, and her father served as a state senator for seven terms. (He was also a personal friend of Abraham Lincoln.)

As a girl and young woman, Jane had various health issues. Further, by the time she was 21, she “felt an overwhelming sense of failure, a despairing purposelessness, a debilitating passivity” (Berson, p. 14).

After several unfruitful years, in 1888 during a visit to England she visited Toynbee Hall, a “settlement” in a poor district in London. That visit sparked her desire to open a similar facility in Chicago—and she did. Hull-House opened its doors in September 1889.

A settlement house is defined as “a center in an underprivileged area that provides community services.” And that is what Hull-House was for more than 120 years. Unfortunately, it closed in 2012.

According to the Chicago Tribune article announcing its closing, “The organization, first formed in 1889, has provided foster care, domestic violence counseling, child development programs and job training to 60,000 children, families and community groups each year.”

Jane Addams died in 1935, but during her 75 years she was involved in far more than helping the poor people of Chicago—although those efforts were certainly praiseworthy. Beginning especially in 1915, and for the rest of her life, she was an untiring opponent of war and advocate for world peace.

Addams presided at the International Congress of Women, which met in The Hague, and was the president of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), which grew out of that 1915 meeting.

She presided at six congresses of WILPF, and partly for her work with that organization she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931—the first American woman to win a Nobel Prize.

Addams was an untiring supporter of those who were exploited and/or discriminated against. Accordingly, she was a co-founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909 and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in 1920.

She was also prominently involved in the labor movement and a strong advocate of unions. Because of that kind of activity and advocacy, as well as because of her unwavering pacifism, she came under considerable criticism during the 1920s.

In fact, J. Edgar Hoover went so far as to characterize Addams as “the most dangerous woman in America.”

The Road to Character by the New York Times op-ed writer David Brooks has been one of the bestselling non-fiction books of 2015. In the second chapter Brooks writes appreciatively of the life and work of Jane Addams, highlighting how she “dedicated her life to serving the needy.”

In spite of the criticism by Hoover and others, at the time of her death she was, once again, very high regarded. Although she likely will not be the one selected, Jane Addams is indeed a woman worth being considered for the new $10 bill.

Religion and Irreligion: Friends or Foes?

Atheists, agnostics, and other people who profess no religious faith have often been criticized, ostracized, ridiculed, discriminated against, and belittled.

Especially in recent years, such people have begun to fight back. Some of that fight has been rather hostile towards religion.

The writings/talks of the “new atheists”—Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens—are strong attacks on religion and belief in God. (I have read at least one book by each of these.)

But a milder form of irreligion is developing. One key spokesman for this movement is Phil Zuckerman, a professor of sociology and secular studies at Pitzer College, a not widely-known but highly-rated school in California.

This month I sped-read Zuckerman’s Faith No More: Why People Reject Religion (2012) and read more carefully his Living the Secular Life: New Answers to Old Questions (2014).

The latter will be discussed at the September meeting of Vital Conversations here in the Northland (of Kansas City) with Helen Springer as a guest resource person.

Helen is the Executive Director of Oasis, a secular “church” in Kansas City. Their website, which you can access with this link, says, “Here, you’ll find a retreat—an oasis of sorts—for Agnostics, Humanists, Skeptics, Atheists, Freethinkers, Deists, questioning Theists and the like.”

Those are the kind of people Zuckerman writes for or on behalf of.

Although he seems a bit caustic at times (but those of the majority always have to be careful in criticizing the statements of those in a discriminated-against minority), Zuckerman writes mostly in an irenic manner that suggests irreligion and religion can be friends rather than foes.

The secularists he writes about are mostly, like he himself, highly moral people who would rank rather high on Maslow’s scale of self-actualization. On the other hand, the religious people he refers to are mostly narrow-minded conservatives/fundamentalists or hypocrites.

There is little, if any, recognition of the irreligious people who are self-centered, ill-willed, insensitive individuals and detrimental to society.

It is not hard to see that there are good, moral secularists such as those he mentions and such as he himself doubtlessly is. But it is also not hard to see that there are some (many?) secularists who are not so good or moral.

It is also not hard to see that there are some (many?) religious people who are like the unattractive individuals or groups he mentions. But there are also many religious people who do considerable good in society.

To his credit, though, early in the book Zuckerman writes,

Admittedly, secular men and women don’t outshine their religious peers in every way. For example, when it comes to generosity, volunteering, and charitable giving, secular men and women fall short, with religious people being more likely to donate both their time and their money (p. 22).

What he says about Greg Epstein, the humanist chaplain at Harvard and author of Good Without God (2005), is something I can appreciate.

In reading the pages following Epstein’s introduction, though, I thought that humanism is probably right in much that it affirms and wrong in much that it denies.

Surely a clearer both/and viewpoint is not only possible but also definitely desirable.

Religious humanists can, and do, work on all the problems of people in this world that secular humanists do. Thus, healthy religion and healthy irreligion can, and should, cooperate as friends; they don’t have to be foes.

Moreover, the limited worldview of secularists should not be touted as superior to the broader worldview of those with mature religious faith.

Is Gov. Huckabee Right?

To be fair, since earlier this summer I wished Sen. Lindsey Graham a Happy Birthday (here), I am now wishing ex-Governor Mike Huckabee a Happy Birthday.

Huckabee celebrated his 60th birthday yesterday, and as I said in the article about Graham, in some places (such as Japan and other Asian countries) one’s 60th birthday is considered especially momentous.

I am writing this, however, mainly to question one of Huckabee’s recent assertions. We all know that he is very much on the political right. But is he right (correct) in all he says about the highly controversial matter of abortion?

During the August 6 Republican presidential debate, Huckabee declared, “I think the next president ought to invoke the Fifth, and Fourteenth Amendments to the constitution now that we clearly know that that baby inside the mother’s womb is a person at the moment of conception.”

And then in stringent criticism of Planned Parenthood, he stated, “It’s time that we . . . protect children instead of rip up their body parts and sell them like they’re parts to a Buick.”

The Constitution is quite clear in affirming personal rights: part of the Fifth Amendment states, “No person shall . . . be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.”

And Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment says, “No State shall . . . deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

It is by no means clear, however, when “personhood” begins. How does Huckabee “clearly” know that personhood begins at conception?

If he were a Catholic, he might claim to know that because it is the Church’s dogma. The Catechism of the RCC states, “Human life must be respected and protected absolutely from the moment of conception. From the first moment of his existence, a human being must be recognized as having the rights of a person” (2270).

But Huckabee is a lifelong Southern Baptist, and not long before his 16^th birthday the SBC adopted a resolution that expressed support for abortion in cases of “rape, incest, clear evidence severe fetal deformity, and carefully ascertained evidence of the likelihood of damage to the emotional, mental, and physical health of the mother.”

In a 1974 resolution, the SBC adopted an official position that “reflected a middle ground between the extreme of abortion on demand and the opposite extreme of all abortion is murder.”

And Foy Valentine, the executive director of the SBC’s Christian Life Commission at that time, was particularly vocal in his support of abortion rights.

I was a SB missionary in Japan in those years, so I was not at the 1971 and ’74 annual meetings of the SBC. But I would, no doubt, have voted for the resolutions had I been there.

What does Huckabee know about the beginning of personhood now that Baptists didn’t know then?

What new scientific, or other, discovery in the last 40 years clearly substantiates the claim that a human zygote or embryo is a person, qualifying for protection under the Constitution?

None that I know of.

Even though I disagree with many (most) of his political and some of his ethical views, I am serious in wishing Gov. Huckabee a Happy Birthday. I affirm the sanctity of his life—and of all persons who have been born, as he was 60 years ago yesterday.

But I still insist that he is not right in his beliefs about when personhood begins.

Iran: 1953, 1979, and Now

Iran is much in the news these days, mainly because of the conflicting views about the “Iran deal,” which is highly touted by the Obama administration and highly trashed by most Republicans—and some Democrats such as Senator Schumer.

And most people remember well, and with great negativity, the events of the Iranian Revolution in 1979—and the Iran hostage crisis when 52 Americans were seized and held for 444 days.

The latter was particularly a bitter pill for President Carter: it was perhaps the decisive reason he was not re-elected for a second term. Most of you will perhaps recall that the hostages were released as President Reagan was being inaugurated in January 1981.

But not so many people now remember what transpired in Iran back in 1953.

On August 15 that year, exactly eight years after the surrender of Japan, the U.S. began to determine the fate of another country. That was the start of Operation Ajax, the coup d’état orchestrated by the CIA against the democratically elected prime minister of Iran.

That prime minister was Muhammad Mossadegh, and his story is told in Christopher de Bellaigue’s notable book Patriot of Persia: Muhammad Mossadegh and a Tragic Anglo-American Coup (2012).

Perhaps few now remember Mossadegh. He was, however, widely known 65 years ago—so much so that he was Time magazine’s Man of the Year for 1951, chosen over such outstanding personages as General Eisenhower and General McArthur.

The 1953 crisis in Iran developed, not surprisingly, because of oil. The Anglo-Iranian Oil Company was an English firm—the first company to extract petroleum from Iran, beginning in 1908 when Iran was still called Persia. (The year after the coup, the company’s name was changed to what we know it as today: British Petroleum or BP.)

The strong dissatisfaction with Mossadegh as the political head of Iran was primarily because of his drastic act of nationalizing the oil company that was so lucrative for Britain, but which seemed exceedingly unfair to most Iranians.

President Truman refused to approve the U.S. action to overthrow Mossadegh, but soon after President Eisenhower took office, the plan was approved and executed that summer. The pretext was the necessity of combatting a possible Communist takeover of Iran.

Two powerful brothers were behind the planning and implementation of the coup: John Foster Dulles, who was Eisenhower’s Secretary of State, and Allen Dulles, the Director of the CIA. (The new airport on the Virginia side of Washington, D.C., which opened in 1962, was named for the former.)

Kermit Roosevelt, the grandson of President Theodore Roosevelt, was the head of the CIA’s Middle East Department and charged with carrying out the coup. His undercover activities and details of the coup are well told in journalist Stephen Kinzer’s All the Shah’s Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror (2003).

Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was the Shah (king) of Iran beginning in 1941, but his direct rule came mostly after the 1953 coup. According to Kinzer, in the 1960s and 1970s he “became increasingly isolated and dictatorial. He crushed dissent by whatever means necessary” (p. 196).

Strong dislike of the Shah’s cruel rule fueled the 1979 Iranian Revolution.

Much of Iran’s current hatred of the U.S. can be traced back to the CIA sponsored coup in 1953 and to the Shah being put in power then. As Kinzer concludes, “Operation Ajax has left a haunting and terrible legacy” (p. 215).

The “Iran deal” will, we hope and pray, be the beginning of an improved relationship between the U.S. and Iran.