Hate Mail

For Pete's sake!  It's staring you right in the face!  Read the things that Hawking-Mlodinow say,  read Tim Radford pointing out that everything that Hawking and Mlodinow claim is pretty well in line with traditional theological claims about God.   

Contrary to the proud claim of atheists, invoking Pierre-Simon Laplace's quite arbitrarily quoted, claim to prove "God is an unnecessary hypothesis"* they are constantly reproducing God - not so-called - as a necessity to support their atheism.   What Hawking's equations are so is natural-selection to those whose professional backgrounds are more oriented to the life-sciences, so probability and random chance are a more general, mathematical manifestation of this atheist God-making.  

I will point out that one of the things all of these atheist unadmitted gods share, is that every single one of them is a God of the gaps.  That's quite different from the God of the Jewish-monotheistic tradition in any non-heretical exposition about God. 

* I'm not convinced that Laplace meant what the atheists mistranslate that remark which someone else quoted him as making to Napoleon as meaning.   As most atheists are not great readers perhaps they might want to consider this passage which is known to be an authentic statement of Laplace, from his Philosophical Essay on Probability.

 We ought then to regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its anterior state and as the cause of the one which is to follow. Given for one instant an intelligence which could comprehend all the forces by which nature is animated and the respective situation of the beings who compose it—an intelligence sufficiently vast to submit these data to analysis—it would embrace in the same formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the lightest atom; for it, nothing would be uncertain and the future, as the past, would be present to its eyes. The human mind offers, in the perfection which it has been able to give to astronomy, a feeble idea of this intelligence. Its discoveries in mechanics and geometry, added to that of universal gravity, have enabled it to comprehend in the same analytical expressions the past and future states of the system of the world. Applying the same method to some other objects of its knowledge, it has succeeded in referring to general laws observed phenomena and in foreseeing those which given circumstances ought to produce. All these efforts in the search for truth tend to lead it back continually to the vast intelligence which we have just mentioned, but from which it will always remain infinitely removed. This tendency, peculiar to the human race, is that which renders it superior to animals; and their progress in this respect distinguishes nations and ages and constitutes their true glory.

I will pass up the enormous temptation to go, at length, into what that last sentence does to the Darwinian and neo-Darwinian necessity of minimizing the distinction that their tool, Laplace, found necessary, elevating us above the animals to point out that Laplace seems to feel the need to recreate God as the origin and mover of all nature.   I will also pass up the quaintness of Laplace's conception of the astronomy of then or now as "perfection" to point out that he obviously saw it as revealing the God he did not deign to name.  

I have no such need to elevate us above animals having read that God has his own covenant with them (Genesis) and that they have their own relationship to God (Psalm 148 as given here the other day).