So there I am yesterday, preparing for my ancient Chinese philosophy tutorial (which begins next week), when I see this headline on CNN: "Stephen Hawking: God didn't create universe." I then see a similar story on the AP wire, which is then picked up by various outlets. And I am thinking to myself: so what? This understanding has been around for over two thousand years, at least if F.W. Mote, in Intellectual Foundations of China, which I was reading yesterday, is to be believed:
The genuine Chinese cosmogony is that of organismic process, meaning that all parts of the entire cosmos belong to one organic whole and that they all interact as participants in on spontaneously self-generating life process... Needham, analyzing that Chinese model, calls it, "an ordered harmony of wills without an ordainer." As he describes the organismic Chinese cosmos, it emerges to our full view as one in striking contrast to all other world conceptions known to human history. It differs from other organismic conceptions, such as classical Greek cosmologies in which a logos or demiurge or otherwise conceived master will external to creation was regarded as necessary for existence. And it contrasts still more starkly with the ancient Semitic traditions that led to subsequent Christian and Islamic conceptions of creation ex nihilo by the hand of God, or through the will of God, and all other such mechanistic, teleological, and theistic cosmologies....(15-16)
Hawking is not really saying anything new; he is saying something very old in a particular political-cultural environment. It is not the statement itself that causes the controversy, but the environment: Christians are outraged at such a frontal assault on their beliefs. But why should they even care? At base, belief should not require rational argumentation. The Christian God is a "higher power," something beyond and external to, human cognition and comprehension. So why should there be any worry when a physicist makes an assertion about creation? One either believes in an all-powerful creator God or not; the physics hardly matters....
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