Literature: Stephen Hawking – The Grand Design
Bantam Press, £18.99

This book is both an eloquent exposition of modern physics and a piece of desperate, atheist propaganda.
Hawking has an enviable talent for making the frontiers of modern science accessible to the non-scientist. And yet, he still spends much of his time jumping on Richard Dawkins’ radically atheist bandwagon.
The Grand Design has hit the headlines because it is an admission by one of the world’s most respected scientists that he has changed his mind. In A Brief History of Time Hawking said, “if we discover a complete theory… then we should know the mind of God”. But throughout his latest book, he forces science and religion into conflict, in effect encouraging the devoutly religious to reject good science. Surely some mistake.
But it’s not here where Hawking has created a stir. Philosophers too are likely to be incensed. “Philosophy is dead”, he asserts on page one, before quoting liberally from Leibniz, Berkeley and Hume. In fact, much of the first half of the book deals with science’s birth as a branch of philosophy.
He goes on to describe quantum mechanics, Einstein’s theory of general relativity, and the Big Bang. These are weighty topics in the world of physics and Hawking introduces them brilliantly. But he then proceeds to extrapolate physics into metaphysics.
A recurring theme is the desire among physicists to find a unifying “theory of everything”. The most recent attempt at this is M-theory, which predicts a nearly infinite number of Universes. Hawking argues that this makes the apparent “fine-tuning” of our Universe irrelevant, removing the need for a God. The fly in the ointment though, as Hawking himself admits, is “Why M-theory?” A set of mathematical equations is just as much of a stopgap as God.
The most vocal contributors to this particular debate have always been the extremists. Hawking is now amongst them. Good science needs to be communicated much more carefully than this if it is to be well received.
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