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Creation in a Closed Universe Or, Have Physicists Disproved the Existence of God?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

Robin Le Poidevin
Robin Le Poidevin
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, University of Leeds
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Extract

Could a theory concerning the temporal structure of the universe have any implications for the possibility of a creator? A recent remark by Stephen Hawking suggests that it could. In A Brief History of Time, Hawking writes:

The idea that space and time may form a closed surface without boundary … has profound implications for the role of God in the affairs of the universe… So long as the universe had a beginning, we could suppose it had a creator. But if the universe is really completely self-contained, having no boundary or edge, it would have neither beginning nor end: it would simply be. What place, then, for a creator?

Type
Research Article
Information
Religious Studies , Volume 27 , Issue 1 , March 1991 , pp. 39 - 48
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1991

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References

1 Hawking, S. W., A Brief History of Time (New York: Bantam Press, 1988), pp. 140–1.Google Scholar

2 See, e.g., van Fraassen, B., An Introduction to the Philosophy of Time and Space, 2nd edn. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), pp. 68–9Google Scholar; and Newton-Smith, W. H., The Structure of Time (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980), pp. 59–60.Google Scholar

3 Newton-Smith, , op. cit. pp. 55, 82 and passim.Google Scholar

4 See, e.g., Weingard, R., ‘Space-Time and Direction of Time’, Nous, xi (1977), 119–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar, who defines direction in terms of orientability.

5 Hawking, , op. cit. p. 136.Google Scholar

6 Ibid.

7 Swinburne, R., The Existence of God (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979).Google Scholar

8 The principle invoked here is that, if p is a necessary condition for q, q is a sufficient condition for p. The inference has exceptions in those cases where p is only a necessary condition giaen the background conditions. But when we are dealing with total states of the universe, there are no background conditions to consider.

9 Peacocke, A. R., Creation and the World of Science (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), pp. 77–8.Google Scholar

10 It might be thought that causal relations must be symmetrical in the closed universe, the hypothesis, therefore violating another deeply entrenched assumption concerning causality. But in fact this is not so: an account of causal asymmetry is possible for a closed universe. For details of such an account, see my Change, Cause and Contradiction (Macmillan, 1990), ch. 7.Google Scholar