Thinking About God

Prof. Stephen Hawking

In June 2010, ABC journalist Diane Sawyer interviewed the renowned physicist, Stephen Hawking.  In the course of the interview, the question of God came up, and Hawking told Sawyer that,

"'What could define God [is thinking of God] as the embodiment of the laws of nature. However, this is not what most people would think of as God,' Hawking told Sawyer. 'They made a human-like being with whom one can have a personal relationship. When you look at the vast size of the universe and how insignificant an accidental human life is in it, that seems most impossible.'"

He's right.  Given the almost limitless size of the universe, a human-like God who is a person in the sense that we usually understand personhood is impossible.  In biblical times, when the Earth was believed to be flat, covered by a dome from which the celestial bodies hung, and encompassed by vast oceans below and above, it was quite possible to believe that a "human-like person" could create the universe and rule it from heaven.  Hawking is correct in saying that kind of a God seems not possible.

Biblical view of the Universe

This being the case, some conclude that there is no God.  Some conclude that there may be a "god-principle," but there is no personal God. Tens of millions of believers of various religions, meanwhile, maintain their firm belief in a personal God.  Effectively, they still live in the tiny universe of ancient times.  They know that universe doesn't exist, but they have not adjusted their thinking about God.  When atheist scientists ridicule the notion of God, it is this old-fashioned God they find so amusing and impossible.

There is another way to think about God and the universe, however, using both modern cosmology and traditional theology as if they are the two lenses of a pair of glasses.  Together they bring God into a single focus as being at one and the same time Beyond all of our conceptions of what God might be and yet Present in ways we can experience personally.  On the one hand, it is reasonable to think that Something existed before the universe and caused it to happen—created it.  That Something, logically, is God.  On the other hand, as people of faith we know that there is also Something greater than us that still touches us in ways that can be deeply moving and personal.  We know that prayers are answered.  We know that people of all cultures have mystical experiences.  We know that there are aspects of life that cannot be explained by mechanistic evolutionary theory.  That experientially present Something is God.

When we look through the twin lenses of science and faith, then, we see God who is both Beyond and Present, both transcendently universal and profoundly personal.  Amen.