The Column with Dr Rod Garner Easter and the search for meaning in the universe
AT THE time of his recent death, Prof Stephen Hawking had become known to millions – chiefly through his book A Brief History Of Time and his courageous struggle against a disease that left him with a formidable brain locked in a wasted body. The book baffled many with its mathematical approach to understanding the universe. But many more remember its aim: to produce a theory of everything that would ultimately enable us to know “the mind of God”. The nod to the Almighty was a little odd, given that it came from a declared atheist who , according to his first wife, had real issues with religion.
The question that animated him – his “simple goal” as he once expressed it – was why the universe is as it is, why in fact it exists at all.
From a purely scientific perspective the question was and is unsolvable, at least at this stage of our evolution as a “meaning seeking” species, a term first used by the Greek philosopher Aristotle more than 2,500 years ago.
For all our exploration of space, most of its dark matter and energy remains concealed from us, making “a theory of everything” impossible by definition.
The disquieting truth is that we know far less than we once thought about all the stuff that makes up the universe and that what we do know is always open to revision in the light of new scientific discoveries. Nothing is finally settled in our cosmic quest and the search goes on because we are human. We are hard wired to need more than monkey nuts and EastEnders and the sky at night speaks to our sense of awe and mystery that neither soaps nor equations can satisfy.
Religious thinkers have long pondered this mystery and acknowledged the need for humility as we gaze on the stars that seem to go for ever.
Better minds than ours have been dazzled by the fact that the universe exists at all when, strictly speaking, there is no logical or rational need for it to do so.
Why something, rather than nothing, is not a silly or futile question. In our more reflective moments we do ask why this something, with its dependable scientific laws has proved so mathematically elegant and so fantastically conducive to our human flourishing on Earth.
A shrug of the shoulders or the crass assertion that it has always been there – “end of, get over it” – is no explanation at all.
It fails to do justice to the breathtaking facts as we have them concerning both our long evolution and the exquisitely precise conditions that made the emergence of life possible.
Prof Hawking’s simple goal was at one level a religious quest. The why of things cannot be answered by science alone. We also need the wider wisdom of poets, philosophers and theologians if we are to seek a meaning behind life’s deepest mysteries.
This Easter weekend two billion Christians around the globe (actually a tiny globe in the cosmic scheme of things but that’s okay) will remember and celebrate the death and resurrection of Jesus.
Sceptical minds struggle to comprehend this claim; others dismiss it as nonsense or wishful thinking.
I take a different view. If the universe is not devoid of purpose but instead the work of a loving power and intelligence that is mindful of human lives and ends, it is not beyond such a creator to overcome the evil and suffering of Good Friday by raising his only son on the third day.
In other words the righteous force that makes possible endless worlds in the immensities of space is also able through the raising of Jesus to deal with the shadow of death that frames every life.
It’s a big claim of course, but set against the equally improbable emergence of time and space and a universe of baffling beauty that reflects “the mind of God”, it can also be accepted as an article of faith.
A resounding “yes” to a God who is for us, not against us; who in the resurrection of Jesus declares that love, not death has the last word.