Paul Poulton comments on Stephen Hawking's latest book

Paul Poulton

You may have noticed Professor Stephen Hawking has a new book out. Newspapers have been keen to quote excerpts from it, the Times gave front page coverage to his theories, "Hawking: God did not create universe". While The Star went for, "Bang goes God, says Hawking". I like the professor and have always been keen to listen to what he has to say with his robotic voice. In his new publication, The Grand Design, he states that because we have found planets in other parts of the universe it changes things, the book says, "That makes the coincidences of our planetary conditions - the single sun, the lucky combination of Earth-sun distance and solar mass - far less remarkable, and far less compelling as evidence that the Earth was carefully designed just to please us human beings."

I believe that God made the universe; it has always been a little bit surprising to me that there are some people who don't. Not that I'm clever and they are not, because I know it's often the other way round, but I don't hold my faith that God made the cosmos because of planetary coincidences, my faith doesn't come to me from that route. So appealing to "less compelling evidence" doesn't make any difference to me. I have faith in Jesus because he said he is the light of the world and I believe him. However, I do love to listen to scientists like Hawking because they are discovering the wonders of what God has made even though some are reluctant to give credit to God.

Strange as it may seem to Stephen Hawking I do think that the universe was carefully designed for us human beings. I have spoken to people about this and the problem that some of my friends have is, how can this massive universe be designed just for this tiny planet called earth? Why is the universe so big? It has to be agreed that the universe is big, estimations of exactly how big are hard to calculate, and don't forget it's expanding as we speak. The observable universe is thought to be about 14 billion light years in size from our viewpoint, that's pretty big. So how can something so big, be designed for us here on this little planet which orbits an average size star in an average size galaxy?

Some structures have to be precise and strong, so when we build them we have to have large foundations in order for them to stay stable. You may have seen a TV transmitter standing tall on the skyline. It has ropes to help it stay upright; they themselves are secured into blocks of cement which in turn are housed in stable ground, which may be surrounded by reinforced piles that have been driven into the ground. Can you see what is happening? In order for the mast to stay in position other parts must be in positions that are further away from the mast itself. The universe is held together by gravity, it's one of the four fundamental forces in the universe. We all feel the effect of atoms attracting each other, no one is quite sure why they attract each other, not even Stephen Hawking, but we know they do; the bigger the mass of atoms the bigger the attraction. We stay on earth because gravity is attracting us to the earth's surface. The sun is also attracting us but because we are further away from the sun and its gravitational pull is weaker we don't get drawn towards it. But the planet we are standing on is drawn towards it, our planet is held in orbit because it travels around the sun. Similar to you swinging a rope with a weight attached to the end of it round and round your body, if you let it go it would shoot off in a straight line, but the rope is keeping it close to you. The moon also has a gravitational pull on earth which causes the tides to move. The bigger the mass of atoms the greater the gravitational pull. The gravitational pull of dense objects in the universe can even stop light escaping from them.

So how far does gravity from an object reach?

Gravity is described by imagining a cannonball on a trampoline, (e.g. imagine that our sun is the cannonball and the elastic sheet is the rest of the universe), it weighs heavily upon the trampoline's elastic sheet and causes a dent in the middle of the trampoline. The rest of the elastic sheet is also altered slightly. At the centre of the sheet it is curved quite dramatically but the further away from the centre you get, the sheet is less and less affected by the cannonball. But no matter how far you get from the centre where the dent is greatest you never quite get back to the position where the sheet was without the ball sitting on it. There are equations which will give you the figures in black and white if you want them. "F = G then M1 and M2 over R2" is one of them. That's Force of Gravity equals the Gravitational Constant, (6.7428x10-11 ) M1 and M2 are Mass 1 (our sun) and Mass 2 (another star, say 156 billion light years away), R2 is the distant between M1 and M2's centres of gravity.

If you can do the sum you will notice the value is not 0, gravity extends across the universe, because it never reaches zero. So, like the TV mast which needs a series of interacting foundations the solar system is influenced by the pull of our galaxy, which in turn is affected by the pull of other galaxies which are influenced by yet other galaxies, and so on. We don't know exactly how big the universe has to be in order to keep this tiny bit of it stable enough to house the wonders of our planet, but we do know we feel the influence of all matter in the universe, so therefore it's important that it's there and if some of it were removed then in some way, however small, it would make a difference here in our neck of the universal woods. So in that respect the whole universe is made for this tiny planet. The Psalms tell us that "He set the earth on its foundations; it can never be moved." It's quite mind boggling just how far those foundations reach.

We can look at this another way, take a guitar string that is making a musical note, as it vibrates we hear one note but underneath that one note there are other notes because the string not only vibrates from end to end but also in halves and thirds and quarters and fifths and so on. Each vibration produces a note that is different from the main note, we can't hear them unless we stop the main vibration, then we suddenly realise that the main note is not the only note, there are other quieter notes all having their effect on the main note. Each smaller note is important in making the rich quality of the main note what it is. In a similar way every part of the universe is important in making the bit we live in what it is even though its influence on us is small.

This illustration of the guitar string is particularly apt for me as a musician and also for scientists who have been looking at String Theory for sometime. String theory points out that particles in the universe are oscillating lines, i.e. strings. Proverbs 25:2 states "It's the glory of God to conceal a matter and the glory of kings to search it out." We may not always get it right but the more we search the matter of the universe out the more we see the glory of God.