Stephen Hawking and God

Perhaps you’ve read that Stephen Hawking claims in a new book that God is not needed to explain the existence of the universe. If you haven’t, here’s a link to an article on the subject. http://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/wireStory?id=11542570. (It’s curious that the story is in the entertainment section of ABC’s website...)

From the article, it’s unclear what Hawking’s real view is. He says in his book, “Because there is a law such as gravity, the Universe can and will create itself from nothing.” I’m no physicist, but the notion of a universe literally creating itself out of nothing—with or without the help of gravity—seems absurd. Gravity can act on stuff that is already there, but is Hawking claiming that gravity can create stuff ex nihilo, initiate a Big Bang, and generate a universe? I find that hard to believe—not just that it’s true, but that Hawking thinks it is.

Maybe when Hawking says that God isn’t needed to explain the existence of the universe, he means that gravity will inevitably take “stuff” (whatever there is in the chaos prior to the Big Bang) and create a universe with it. But if that’s right, we still need to explain the existence of the stuff that gravity acts on (to say nothing for the existence of gravity itself). A sensible explanation is that God created the stuff, and is in that sense needed to explain the universe—even if gravity, rather than God, set off the Big Bang.

What is Hawking’s real view on this? Perhaps his book will clear it up. Suffice it to say that to the classic question in metaphysics—Why is there something rather than nothing?—I think God provides a better answer than gravity.

Philosophy of Humor

I’d never want to write a book on philosophy of humor, partly because I fear that analyzing humor too much could take all the fun out of it. But for me, the best comedy is unpredictable. I hate lazy humor. This is why I don’t like most sit-coms, and why I’d always pick Conan O’Brien over Jay Leno. Leno’s a gifted stand-up comedian, but the jokes in his monologue are usually the sort of generic riffing on the day’s events that any writer could come up with. O’Brien is not like that so much—he has bursts of creativity that I’ve never seen from Leno. You can see this in O’Brien’s twitter feed. After he lost the Tonight Show, O’Brien opened a twitter account and now tweets once a day. Not every tweet is a gem, but one from August 28 made me laugh out loud. Here’s what he said.

I may be jumping into this whole Muslim controversy a little late, but really? He's going to call himself Kareem Abdul Jabbar?


No doubt after the first sentence you thought he was going to make a statement about the proposed Islamic center near Ground Zero in New York City. But O’Brien takes it in a different direction by jumping instead (“a little late”) into the 1971 controversy that surrounded basketball star Lew Alcindor’s conversion to Islam and subsequent name change. O’Brien is a bright guy. If you need a laugh, I’d recommend looking at his twitter page: http://twitter.com/ConanObrien.

Welcome back to Bethel Philosophy

Greetings and welcome to a new school year for the Bethel University Philosophy Blog. This year we'll be posting regularly about stuff that interests us, whether directly related to philosophy or not. (Though we'll post about it philosophically either way.) Have a great school year, everyone!

let the children play

What makes sense of regret? Obviously, there are the moral kinds of reasons, but that’s not what I have in mind. I can’t speak for anyone else, but when I end up regretting past actions, I do so believing that things could have been different than they in fact were. I could have made a different choice, imagining an alternate version of myself with slightly to vastly different desires, temperament, and beliefs at the crucial moment of decision.

This ability to reason or, at the very least, to imagine alternate scenarios – states of affairs that are in fact false but might have been true – is a really awesome and important ability (often called “counterfactual reasoning”). For instance, I imagine an alternate version of myself from this morning, and that version of myself has breakfast (when in fact it’s false that I actually had breakfast this morning).

I don’t think it’s unique to human species. There’s empirical evidence that many animals engage in behavior that is best explained with a theory of mind that attributes some similar power to them. In humans, however, the ability is deployed at higher levels of sophistication and placement within a social ecology.

Take little children, for example, who play make-believe. They imagine themselves not merely as alternate versions of themselves but as utterly different kinds of things, human and otherwise. My friend’s son plays make-believe, pretending to be a king or an animal or a fire truck or a school teacher or a... This complex cognitive behavior is actually practice for adult moral sensibility. It is a rudimentary form of the combination between counterfactual imagination and empathy. The dual abilities to imagine oneself in “another’s shoes,” so to speak, and to be able to see alternate possibilities of behavior and consequences retrospectively into the past (i.e., regret) and into the future (i.e., choice) form the raw materials of moral agency. Hence when children are whiling away hours and hours of pure, unbridled play, they are actually constructing the cognitive and conative structures that undergird high-functioning ethical character.

When I regret an action, especially one where the action affects someone other than myself, I perceive in my mind’s eye at least two things: (a) how things could have turned out differently and (b) what it’s like to be the other who suffers because of my poor decision. While these components are built into us by evolutionary mechanisms, they are also nurtured by things as innocent, simple, and vital as pure play.

These components are also the root structures that allow for us to be so good at deception and manipulation.

Two sides of a coin...

ode to Alexander Calder

I attended a lecture by one of my colleagues (an art historian), and I was treated to a discussion of the lovely work by the American artist Alexander Calder (1898-1976).



The second work is titled “Two Systems.”

I think that all of us will recognize this as a mobile.

The mobile has become so common that it’s a cliché hanging over practically every crib in America.

Alexander Calder, the inventor of the mobile, had a deeper vision articulated in the form of the mobile.

The mobile is a representation of reality. The visual image implicates little bits and pieces moving in a playful dance. While everything is carefully balanced, there is a play and fluidity of suspension. Nothing is static; everything is moving.

The very artifact is altered with each spectator, since different bodies will cause the ambient air to brush the mobile into different morphologies, resulting in analogically different morphologies of meaning – quite independent of the artist’s intention. Existence vividly precedes essence.

It’s the perfect collision of surrealism and existentialism.