Hawking Turns Bird-Brained

by Homeless T

Stephen Hawking displays a paucity of imagination in his book-plugging Guardian interview of May, 2011 as he dismisses the notion of a personal God (one attendant to individual needs and supplications) as improbable in light of the volume of petitions, prayers, and personal reflections made unto the various divine agencies nominated by man.  
Further, Hawking characterizes God as "unnecessary" to creation of the universe.  Ouch.  Maybe the incomprehensible in non-semantic reality doesn't attend to Stephen's crowded universe either. 

If there ain't no divinity, what the hell shaped your ends, Stevie?

I won't say that Hawking's opinion is wrong-headed or even radical.  On the contrary, it is deceptively logical, well-articulated, and a hypothesis that grows ever-more ethically comfortable over time for the jaded among us who have come to view their lives as sui generis projects, and their successes as the products of personal philosophies, innate superiority, and smarter social cultures.  Their own ego-driven industriousness provides sufficient explanation for their earthly laurels and material accumulations.  So they believe.  With nothing to contradict their view, it becomes a persistent habit of mind.  This is why so many among the well-to-do become such colossal bores--they see nothing beyond their own worldview, and thus their existences become a self-reflecting panorama.

Hawking's floccinaucinihilipilification--or dismissal as worthless, of any power beyond the fanciful unifield theory peddled in his new book--is easy to assume.  As the son of an atheist, I was so indoctrinated, and long cleaved to a godless universe myself.  As a sassy youngster, I made light of scriptural expressions.  As an adult, I pitied the pious as deluded.  To do so was less intellectually embarrassing than subscribing to their dogma and struggling to answer questions like

• How could God attend to the prayers of so many individuals?  What about the rest of creation?  Do mosquitoes have a divinity that watches over them?
• Why would God abide the horrors that human beings inflict on one another?  Or on other species? 
• Why (in the Christian religion) would He sanction the torture and execution of His own son?
• How did He happen to choose an obscure band of desert nomads to become his chosen people?  
• Why would God create man alone in His image, and not the rest of the creatures--say, the octopus?    

The limits of logic by analogy taught me that a godless universe is a state of affairs that no man has the facts to impose, and only a fool would bother to contend.  Even though theological education has always seemed to me like one dog teaching another how to drive an automobile, I still wouldn't dare condemn it, or even try to explicate the why or wherefore of our unknowable, infinitely complex universe.  Consequently I believe that popular religions are dreamt-up, marketed, and led by charlatans--a belief I generally keep to myself, especially since I aspire to found the world's saving belief.  However, Hawking's absolute stance on a universe devoid of any divinity warrants an answer.

I cannot deny the existence of a higher power, even if my words will not represent it because I haven't any inkling of its nature.  I immediately declared myself an agnostic when I learned the word, but recently I have begun to suspect that there may be a personal God after all--beyond realms of religion, shamanism, unifield theory, or coincidental miracles (such as Hawking's sale of a half-million books on the subject of Physics).  As one playwright put it, "there's a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will.”  

That divinity would seem to have shaped an admirable niche for you, Steven--thus my disappointment in your latest remarks on the subject.  In any case, Hawking-the-theoclast, hear the dusty epiphany of one no longer so certain about declaring the certainty of nothing:

An Remarkable Coincidence: November 19, 2007

The District Court let me out of jail on personal recognizance the morning after my arrest for domestic abuse, yet they provided no transportation for me to get back home.  I had no car, having days before sold it and given the money to my new house-mate/enamorada so she could make her car payment.  I couldn't risk trying to thumb a ride , because hitchhiking is against the law in this state; and the hicks and pricks of this state would sooner report a hitchhiker to the sheriff than give him a ride, so I had to hoof the twenty-one miles back to the house recently rented for us--one very close to my fiance's parents, so she and her children could ease into family life with new stepdad--me--without too great a shock.  That dream of a new family was on hold now, along with everything else.

A spanking new no-contact order prevented me from calling my love for a ride, or even passing a message to her.  I had been charged with domestic assault against her.  She had been in the midst of moving her things back to her parents' house (for the third time in 10 days) when we had our spat.  Quite accidentally, I  fractured her pinky finger as I tried to pry the house-key loose from the key chain that she had interwoven among her fingers.  The next four years would enlighten me as to her pathology, but then I was still in the dark about what I was up against, and greatly anguished over the sudden turn of events.

So I walked along that long, dusty rural highway feeling low indeed.

 Twenty-one miles was a long journey on foot, so I had plenty of time to mull things over.  After about 6 or 7 miles, I found myself ranting aloud to the universe, to this improbable omnipotence called 'God'.  Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ was on my mind.  I had seen it several days earlier, and its ghastly imagery was somehow mixing itself up with my own betrayed domesticity.  It disturbed me that torture and crucifixion would be heaped upon Christ by the leave of his father-god; it disturbed me that this was my woman's favorite movie, and it puzzled me why she had chosen for us the house where her last fiance went insane, and why she was calling my by his name in many slips of the lip.  Rotten treachery all around, I felt.

Although I had quit drinking by praying to the Virgin Mary in 1980, even that seemed a mere coincidence now--for here was I, not a bad man, but nonetheless being sued for divorce by my first, vengeful wife; and arrested and accused of assault on my new fiance.  I might add that lately I had lost my job, my car, my home, my few friends, my children, and even my wardrobe.  So on I trod down that friendless shoulder, feeling that I had been spit out of life, like a bad taste in the mouth.

The improbability of any personal god was on my mind, too, Steven; and like yourself, I was haranguing aloud about the naivete of those who so believe--albeit, haranguing into an empty sky, where presumably divine providence dwells--when a pick-up trucked pulled up beside me.  "You look like you need a ride," the driver said.  Of course, I did.  The man driving the truck had also spent time in the same county jail on the same charge, years earlier, and he confessed that he really had assaulted his wife, so he couldn't plead innocence.  And although he had long detested Bible-thumpers, he found peace of mind through reflections and prayer, which he recommended.  I didn't have to go to church, spout dogma, or affiliate with a religion, he said.  All I had to do was restrain the skeptical impulse within, and open myself to the possibility

And so I have done, ever watchful.  In the time that has passed since that day I have learned that there are far more tears shed over answered prayers than those that go unattended--so be careful for what you pray, because they may be heard after all, by some angel more attentive than you care to acknowledge.

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