DAVID BIRNBAUM SUMMA METAPHYSICA
DAVID BIRNBAUM PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE
APPENDIX Z10:
“The Free Lunch?”
The estimable physicist/cosmologist Stephen Hawking posits*a that “there is no God.” His (alleged) truism is that “there is, indeed, a free lunch.” What Hawking means and articulates is that the entire universe more-or-less spontaneously popped out of nothingness.
Hawking’s reasoning, as he explicitly articulates it, is that –
(A) since when one factors-in newly-hypothesized dark energy*b (c.1998), positive and negative energy mathematically balances-out the universe, then
(B) one can (allegedly) consequently conclude that there is no God (necessary for Creation).
However, the Hawking logic is fatally flawed, as is more or less obvious.
For (A) can be true, without (B) being true.
Meaning, (B) does not necessarily flow from (A).
Summa Metaphysica (first volume 1988) along with many predecessor metaphysics formulations, some pre-dating it by thousands of years, hypothesizes*c a net-zero-balanced universe.d Some, if not the overwhelming majority, of these “net-zero” metaphysics, along with Summa Metaphysica, embrace a transcendent force and/or a Divine in the creation equation. Even if we are cumulatively hypothesized as being integral to the Divine, as per Summa.
With due respect to Hawking, not even a rock, let alone a universe, spontaneously pops-out of nothingness.
Respectfully, giggling five years old girls frolicking at the seashore on a balmy June day, tip-toeing through the foamy surf where ocean wavelets lap onto the beach, did not simply pop out of nothingness.
Respectfully.
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*a Summer 2011, see Hawking interview/feature on Wormhole Series on the Science Channel. See his inter-related book The Grand Design by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow, Bantam Books, a division of Random House, NY 2010
*b a hypothesis which started emerging in the contemporary scientific community in the past 40 years, but mainly started gaining traction since ~1998, when scientist Michael Turner (University of Chicago) coined the term.
*c see Summa Metaphysica: Volume I: God & Evil 1988: Unified Formulation
*d i.e. positive and negative energy balance-out the universe