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It is curious to note that a eminent Physicist like Stephen Hawking thinks the universe has a beginning. This has some rather startling Religious implications

You can find the link here: http://www.hawking.org.uk/the-beginning-of-time.html

Now let us take Thomas Aquinas argument for the existence of God. It in its simplest forms says this.

  • Things do not come into existence uncaused
  • The universe came into existence

  • Therefore the universe must have a cause

  • Whatever this cause it had to exist outside of space and time ie spaceless and immaterial

  • It had to be all powerful and all knowing

Before you know it you have your self something resembling a God.

Now the only two outs the atheist has to that argument is either positing a eternal universe or holding to the idea that things can come into existence uncaused.

Now if the first has been dis-proven by science and the idea of things coming into existence uncaused akin to believing in magic.

Has Stephen Hawking proven God's existance?

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    Thomas Aquinas states that things do not come into existence uncaused. Has he just disproved the existence of God, as a logical impossibility?
    – Sklivvz
    Commented Oct 11, 2011 at 3:46
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    How do you from those premises to the conclusion that the creator was your traditional monotheistic Abrahamic God? What about 10 powerful beings, that when combined are all powerful (but not by themselves)? Still follows the same logic...
    – rburhum
    Commented Oct 12, 2011 at 18:30
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    This is the Kalaam cosmological argument and Aquinas rejected it, because while he believed that the universe did have a beginning he also believed that this was not amenable to a rational proof, that is, it was a piece of revealed knowledge. In fact, Aquinas famously argues that even if the universe were past-eternal, as his master Aristotle held, there would still have to be a First Cause.
    – G. Rodrigues
    Commented Oct 18, 2011 at 23:43
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    @Sklivvz - He doesn't say that (the above summary isn't a very good one). If you read his Five Ways, you'll see he works from things in the word to a first cause.
    – danielm
    Commented Nov 23, 2012 at 22:16
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    Assuming for the sake of discussion that the argument is valid, all it says is that the Flying Spaghetti Monster (PBUH) created the universe. Prove me wrong. I.e. why my identification of this being is not radically better than yours.
    – Cheers and hth. - Alf
    Commented Jun 11, 2015 at 0:54

13 Answers 13

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No, Hawking did not just prove God's existence. Here's why:

  • Even if your argument is true (it's not), it would only imply the existence of something that is capable of causing universes. This "universe-causer" need not even be sentient, and certainly wouldn't have to be a God.
  • The problem with invoking God as the cause through arguing that "nothing is uncaused" is that then logically God himself would require a cause. You cannot say "nothing is uncaused" and invoke an uncaused agent. Either there are things that can be uncaused, or there aren't. In other words, if you want to invoke an uncaused God, then the physicist can just as easily invoke an uncaused universe.
  • Steven Hawking didn't prove anything, he merely hypothesized that it had a beginning. In layman's terms, he essentially made a wild guess, because given the nature of the question this is not something anyone would even begin to be able to answer; it wouldn't matter if you were the smartest man in the world.
  • Thomas Aquinas' argument is a non-sequitur. It nowhere follows that "Whatever this cause it had to exist outside of space and time ie spaceless and immaterial", nor "It had to be all powerful and all knowing". These are just arbitrary assertions.
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    I suggest we read Aquinas's original Five Ways. Neil does not provide an equivalent proof. Aquinas proceeds from the premise that all things in the universe are caused, and concludes that in order to avoid an infinite regress would require a first uncaused cause. Also, if we assume that the universe is ALL that is material existing within space and time, then clearly its cause must be not of these qualities. Otherwise, this cause would not have caused the universe as it is defined. A possible point of attack may be the assumed definition of the universe.
    – danielm
    Commented Nov 23, 2012 at 22:42
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    The premise "all things in the universe are caused" is a difficult claim to justify. Things may appear to be caused but what's to say that they can't arise uncaused as well? Further, it's hard to prove why avoiding an infinite regress is something we ought to do. What gives you the basis to say that avoiding infinite regress is better than not avoiding it? :P
    – stoicfury
    Commented Nov 24, 2012 at 4:39
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    Well, first of all, I'm not defending Aquinas, I'm merely correcting a misrepresentation of his actual argument. Second, the above is not the argument you originally presented. In any case, Aquinas assumes the principle of sufficient reason (PSR) which is a commonly accepted induction from observation. You can attack it, but then you're not just undermining Aquinas. Third, Aquinas, again making use of the PSR, argues that an infinite regress of causes itself needs a cause. So really the only assumption one can pick at is the PSR.
    – danielm
    Commented Nov 24, 2012 at 18:12
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    The question doesn't say "nothing is uncaused"? It says "Things do not come into existence uncaused".
    – curiousdannii
    Commented Jul 18, 2019 at 13:21
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    @curiousdannii - Yes, his rephrasing to "The problem with invoking God as the cause through arguing that "nothing is uncaused" is that then logically God himself would require a cause" leads him to respond to a claim that wasn't made.
    – Don Branson
    Commented Jul 18, 2019 at 13:55
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No

There are several problems with your assumption

  • How did God come into existence if things do not come into existence? You would need to alter the first statement to "Created things do not come into existence uncaused"

    This argument can be expanded indefinetely and is known as Turtles all the way down. The Cosmological argument exaplains other objections to this statement.

    Additionally the current sientific census states, that quantum mechanics allows things to come into existence uncaused. The most known example are virtual particles. You can read some more here

  • A first cause does not prove God, especially not the God of Abraham.

    Just because something is unexplainable for us, it does not prove God in any way. Ancient people tried to explain a lot of things with God, don't make the same mistake. Using a supernatural explanation for unknown phenomena is not modern science.

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    Do I need to explain again why the idea of who created the creator is fallacious?
    – Neil Meyer
    Commented Oct 10, 2011 at 16:48
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    @Neil: As appealing as it is, comments are not the place to discuss. Take it to chat.
    – El'endia Starman
    Commented Oct 10, 2011 at 16:51
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    @Neil Meyer: you presume that you have explained it once in the first place; I didn't notice, frankly.
    – Niel de Beaudrap
    Commented Oct 11, 2011 at 1:34
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    Virtual particles do not come into existence at all. That's why they are called virtual.
    – Sklivvz
    Commented Oct 11, 2011 at 3:43
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    @BeatMe: Surely this depends on exactly what you mean by cause? If I ran a program on a computer and I got points randomly appearing and disappearing on a monitor, if someone was then to ask what causes those points to flicker; surely the best answer would be I just ran 'flashing sparks' program. Analogously could I not then say the cause of virtual particles is the 'choice' of physical theory?
    – Mozibur Ullah
    Commented Oct 20, 2011 at 3:02
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Aquinas claims that "Things do not come into existence uncaused", but how does he know this to be true? Is there any rigorous way he can eliminate the possibility that every once in a very great while (perhaps just once, in fact), something did arise uncaused?

Second: if he is willing to accept an uncaused God, is there any reason not to accept an uncaused universe? Or, contrariwise, if he is not willing to accept that the universe is uncaused, why does he accept that God is uncaused? (And, saying that the universe is created and God is not simply begs the question; there's no way for him to know that the universe is created or that God is uncreated.)

Finally, Hawking hasn't proved anything-- he's merely hypothesized.

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    What Aquinas actually says in the Five Ways is that all things in the world have a cause (and arguably all these things in the world are the world). This is, of course, a commonly accepted induction from observation, and the reason why "proof" is de facto synonymous with "argument". Second, if the universe is all those things which have a cause, and if one is to avoid an infinite regress (which he seeks to do), one must conclude that there must have been a first cause that was itself uncaused. It's a simple argument, and its points of attack are not those given.
    – danielm
    Commented Nov 23, 2012 at 22:50
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Not only is the answer an obvious "no" because the premises don't restrict the solution to an entity that would conventionally be called God (e.g. the universe is a forgotten and unattended simulation on a computer in another universe with vastly more computational power than ours), there are other possibilities that haven't even been considered. For example, the universe could be self-causing (e.g. the "end" of the universe causes the "beginning"). This breaks temporal causality, but we don't have much evidence that temporal causality makes sense outside of the universe anyway.

We can conclude that the Big Bang was a unique event, but there is insufficient information to conclude much more.

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Just because the Universe has a beginning does not mean that there had to be a god to create it. There could have been a cause that was not God. Perhaps there was a Universe that Predated our that no longer exists but was the roots of the creation of our universe. As we have no data upon which to evaluate this universe or any other competing or complementing universes there is no reason to think that the laws of this universe were identical or even similar to those of any previous universe.

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  • "Preceding universes" would be tantamount to infinite regress, though, which Neil Meyer does mention as a possibility (while supposing however that it has been ruled out).
    – Niel de Beaudrap
    Commented Oct 11, 2011 at 1:38
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    @NieldeBeaudrap - It does not have to be infinite. A single preceding universe that caused ours would be sufficient.
    – Chad
    Commented Oct 11, 2011 at 2:28
  • Yes, except that this would not satisfy most people; they would ask where that universe came from. ("Preceding universes" was really meant as a category of object that one might consider; cosmologists would likely extend their definitions to say that what came before was still the universe, and the modern pocket of familiar rules and matter would be called something quite like the "modern pocket" or something.)
    – Niel de Beaudrap
    Commented Oct 11, 2011 at 10:04
  • @NieldeBeaudrap - I am not trying to solve the ultimate question just show that it does not prove the existance of god.
    – Chad
    Commented Oct 11, 2011 at 14:18
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It's not a counter-argument to Aquinas, but others have already adressed it.

I just want to say that Hawking's actual stance on the subject has changed. He argues that the Hawking-Hartle no boundary proposal (which is a way to compute the wavefunction of the universe) can be interpreted to mean that the universe had a beginning and still was not created.

Finally, whatever Hawking thinks about the matter, it is totally irrelevant to the existence of God. There's no sense speaking about God and arguing that some sophisticated piece of math proves or disproves his existence, if you can't even formulate what "God" means in that mathematical framework. In other words, Hawking is just doing very bad philosophy there.

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    Hawking did not prove god, and he did not attempt to prove god. All he said was that our universe began. Hawkings wasn't doing any philosophy at all.
    – CognisMantis
    Commented Nov 5, 2014 at 19:11
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The fifth point is troublesome. He claims the cause for the universe "had to be all powerful and all knowing". Why? It had to be very powerful. There is no need for it to be "all knowing" or even "a little bit knowing". What reason is there to believe that a hypothetical god who created the universe actually survived the creation and didn't die of exhaustion on the eighth day? Or committed suicide because he wasn't needed anymore?

There is no logical argument there, just idle speculation. Not that the other four points are much better.

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No, because people don't agree with you.

"God" is just a word, which theoretically refers to an entity. Not everybody's definition of "God" is exactly the set of behaviors identified by Thomas Aquinas. As a trivial counter-example, many people's definition of God is "whatever the Bible says God is."

You could make a claim that "some entity must have the following traits if a universe has a beginning." You may even choose to label this entity "God." However, you do not automatically solve every God related question by doing so. You must first successfully defend the argument that your "God" entity is the same entity as the entity someone else refers to as "God."

Similar constructs appear in the debate of physicalism vs. dualism when talking about "the illusion of mind." Just because you can define an illusion with a given set of properties and call it "mind" does not mean it satisfies the needs of others who have dualistic definitions of "mind."

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No. The argument equates having a beginning with having a cause. These are not the same thing.

For example, if all of existence had a first state, it clearly had a beginning (that state). But that first state must have had no cause, because that would imply a state prior to the first state.

Also, this first state of existence is nothing like a god, since it ceases to exist as soon as the second state of existence comes along.

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  • "that first state must have had no cause, because that would imply a state prior to the first state." - That only works so long as time is absolute and only moves forward.
    – Chad
    Commented Oct 14, 2011 at 16:12
  • The OP's argument only works if the notion of a "cause" is meaningful. That doesn't require absolute time, but it does require at least a notion of successive states.
    – David Schwartz
    Commented Oct 14, 2011 at 19:07
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God's existence is beyond any scientific fact, although logic could come to rescue.

As Thomas Aquinas, Blaise Pascal also addressed this issue.

When he chose to believe in God, it was just the most primitive self-preservation instinct manifested as an unconscious rational choice (pretty much a conscious one, in his case).

As Blaise Pascal stated (see Pascal's Wager): He chose to believe in God as there is no proof that God doesn't exist. So, should God exist, his reward would be heaven and eternal joy. Should God not exist, he didn't lose anything.

In our days, insurance works more or less the same way. You choose to have insurance because it's better to have one though you're possibly never going to use it than to need one and not to have it.

Eventually a hypothetical religion could emerge, with a divinity that could create "everything" in such a way that proof of that divinity's existence could never be found. In which case Pascal is 100% right... again. Thus, atheists could not blame believers of that religion, as it is their most rational response to the uncertainty (though believers could blame atheists trying to find out whether God exists, as being somewhat masochistic, from their point of view of course).

Regarding that hypothetical religion one thing is for certain: believers and atheist both could agree that, if such a divinity exist, it is more likely that they're never going to find any proof of its existence.

I'd like to call this hypothetical religion "Religion 2.0", where even science could be considered part of its rituals, and every attempt to prove the non-existence of their God could be celebrated and glorified.

As a premise the question named God, no whose God, so in the case of religion 2.0 (the example above), Hawkings' argument is not sufficient as God could create an eternal universe, in the same way as one with a begining.

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    You are not directly referring to the question in your answer. You're touching the subject of proving God, but your idea of a Religion 2.0, which seems fragmentary has nothing to do with the question whether Hawking proved God's existence.
    – iphigenie
    Commented Nov 27, 2012 at 23:01
  • As a premise the question named God, no whose God, so in the case of religion 2.0 (the example above), Hawkings' argument is not sufficient as God could create an eternal universe, in the same way as one with a begining.
    – rraallvv
    Commented Nov 27, 2012 at 23:30
  • Maybe you should add this to your answer then.
    – iphigenie
    Commented Nov 27, 2012 at 23:34
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No. If the universe had a beginning that does not prove that God exists. No. Hawking did not prove that God exists. It has to be considered that the universe was its own cause. Panpsychism proposes that the universe is conscious. See Thales, Plato, Leibniz, William James, Bertrand Russell, Galen Strawson, Timothy Sprigge, Philip Goff, and William Seager. Therefore, it is possible that the conscious universe caused its own existence by deciding to exist.

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Not necessarily. There are facts and arguments one can submit either way regardless of how you believe the universe came to be.

More important than this issue, I think, is the issue of personal beliefs regarding life in general. I think that what you believe about life in general is more likely to influence what you believe the beginning may or may not mean than the other way around.

To put it differently: Your religious (or irreligious, however the case may be) beliefs are more like to dictate your beliefs regarding origins than vice versa.

I believe Aquinas' argument has been brought up to date in the Kalam Cosmological Argument, which has it's roots in Christian, Jewish, and Muslim philosophers. Though most strongly with the Muslims.

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Okay, in regard to the question whether the universe having a beginning is the evidence for the existence of God, my thinking grounded on facts and reason is yes: because otherwise where does the universe come from, from randomness and/or from nothing literally nothing, not nothing but understood as something like vacuum fluctuation but still with the psychology of literally nothing? That is being silly.

That is what atheists are always into, that randomness can lead to the existence of the universe because of the law of evolution, hahahaha! Or the law of nothing is the creator of everything, hahahahaha!

The task is how to put in words that facts and reason dictate that the universe having a beginning proves that God exists; and here is where we must all first work together to concur on the concept of God.

Of course atheists will try to muddle up the concept of God by bringing in flying spaghetti, pink unicorn, Santa, orbiting teapot, trying to sound flippant, and that is all they do all the time, if not resorting to cuss language then with dodging the issue all the time resorting to flippancy, or even worse, presenting a video of the entire female genitals, and claiming that that graphic is more interesting than their thinking on facts and reason to resolve the issue God exists or not -- again on facts and reason or logic.

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    The concept of "before" becomes meaningless when considering a situation without time. -- Ricardo
    – Marius Dejess
    Commented Jun 10, 2015 at 22:44
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    This answer is pretty random in its flow and seems to intermingle some claims about atheists that aren't necessary to answer the question and distract from the position you're suggesting (at least as philosophy). Could you clean it up and make clearer how you think the connection works?
    – virmaior
    Commented Oct 8, 2015 at 11:12

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