That’s it then….This is the end….Professor Stephen Hawking has spoken and Rupert Murdoch has broadcast it. God is dead.

Or as Richard Dawkins says about Hawkins latest theory – “it finishes off God. Darwin kicked him out of biology, but physics remained more uncertain. Hawking is now administering the coup de grace”

I resign…I renounce my faith….What a relief….now I don’t have to bother about the question of suffering, meaning, purpose (which Dawkins considers a silly question anyway – mainly because he cannot answer it). I don’t have to put up with the church and all the hard questions….I come into the light of the brave new world of the new atheist materialism….Hallelujah – except there is no Jah to Hallelu….

But wait a minute….surely before I take such a leap of faith on the basis of a headline and the authority of our secular high priests I should do what they are always telling me to do? Examine the evidence. Test it. If it is not empirically verifiable then I should not believe it on faith. So let’s just do that. Let’s examine some of the claims. These quotes are all from Hawking’s article in The Times or its magazine Eureka on Thursday the 2nd of September 2010.

1) “Philosophy is dead ….scientists have become the bearers of the torch of discovery in our quest for knowledge”.

What’s wrong with that statement? Firstly it is incredibly arrogant. Secondly it itself is a philosophical statement. And thirdly and most damningly it is completely unverifiable. Of course it is a clever move by Hawking. Philosophy is about thinking, logic and reason and Professor Hawking is about to ask us to believe things that are illogical, unreasonable and for which we have to suspend our judgment. Better get it out the way first….

2) “The Universe created itself out of nothing” “Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the Universe exists, why we exist. It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the Universe going”.

This is an incredible statement. Just stop and think for a moment….How can something create which does not exist? He is saying that that which does not exist creates itself into existence! If there is a blue touch paper that needs lighting – who put the blue touch paper there? Who lit it? If there are laws of gravity then where did they come from? Did the laws of gravity exist before there was anything? Can you say there was nothing except the laws of gravity?

3) “Because there is a law such as gravity, the Universe can and will create itself from nothing”.

This is very similar but shows a classical lack of logic and reasoning. Why? Because, as my good friend, Professor John Lennox points out in today’s Daily Mail “Laws themselves do not create anything, they are merely a description of what happens under certain conditions”. He gives the example of Isaac Newton’s laws of motion. You can take a billiard ball and a cue…but the laws do not make the ball move. That can only be done by people using the cue and the actions of their own arms. Hawking is confusing law with agency….

4) “According to Feynman, a system has not just one history but every possible history”

This is multiverse theory and it is a theory on which Professor Hawking bases everything. Richard Feynmann was one of the inventors of the atomic bomb (one of the glories of modern technoscience) – he also invented this multi-verse idea. Hawking and others, especially Edward Witten, have now developed it, together with quantum mechanics, into what they call M-theory, which they argue could be the ‘theory of everything’. However beautiful as all this is as a mathematical construct, let us look at it in scientific terms.

Firstly M-theory is not a proper scientific theory because it is untestable experimentally (why Richard Dawkins chooses to ignore this is to say the least interesting). It is not Master theory but myth theory.

Secondly M-theory leads to ridiculous conclusions which frankly make the miracles of the Bible look easy. For example if you accept the view that a system has not just one history but every possible history then right now there is another universe where Stephen Hawking is an American evangelist preaching the Gospel, and Richard Dawkins is Pope!

Remember the story of the Emperor’s New clothes? Where those who wanted to be seen as intelligent ‘saw’ the non-existent clothes. Professor Hawking is saying that if you are intelligent, if you have understanding, then you will read The Times, renounce empirical science (Hawking calls the empirical classical view of physics as ‘a naïve view of reality”), embrace the new unverifiable theory, go ‘wow’ and announce that God is dead.

And lo and behold, the sheep follow. After all no-one wants to be thought of as unintelligent. You will then look upon everyone who does not recognize this as de facto stupid. So we now have the position where the intelligentsia in Britain are pronouncing that they have given up on empirical science (after years of unfairly accusing Christians of having done so) for an untestable, improvable theory of nothingness.

Let me remind you….it is a theory which says that a non-existent universe managed to create itself, and not only so but there are an infinite number of universes, one of which you inhabit as a combination of President Obama, Mother Teresa and Bono!

Why are people so willing to grasp on to this irrational delusion? Hawking explains his own motivation. “Just as Darwin and Wallace explained how the apparently miraculous design of living forms could appear without intervention by a supreme being, the multiverse concept can explain the fine-tuning of physical law without the need for a benevolent creator who made the Universe for our benefit.” It is the supreme example of ABGism. Anything but God ism. No wonder it is so heartily endorsed by Richard Dawkins who responded “I know nothing of the details of physics, but I had always assumed the same thing”.

Brilliant. What Professor Dawkins is saying is that although he is ignorant of the subject he is glad that Professor Hawking agrees with him. The definition of a closed mind is one which declares – ‘my mind is made up. Don’t confuse me with the facts”.

Hawking also betrays his motivation when he declares that “this makes us in a sense the lords of creation”. What is going on here is the age old problem of mankind…we are trying to usurp our Creator and we will go to any lengths to do so. We would sooner believe in alternate universes where we exist with green moustaches than believe that there is an Almighty God who can raise his son from the dead, and who even more frighteningly, will raise us.

By the way none of this is news….the bible speaks of it long ago…”For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened..although they claimed to be wise they became fools..” Romans 1:21-22.

A journalist phoned yesterday and asked why do you care? Do you feel threatened? No. I care because of the consequences. Hawking says that his theory works. No it does not. When we go the route of pathetically trying to shut God out of his universe, God gives us what we want. He gives us over to ourselves – and we really screw things up. Human beings become ‘senseless, faithless, heartless, ruthless’. The empirical evidence for that is all around us.

Let me give you another theory that does work. “It would be very difficult to explain why the universe should have begun in just this way, except as the act of a God who intended to create beings like us” (Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time).

Well, instead of making things really difficult and wandering down a bypath into irrational nonsense and moral and social confusion, why not accept the evidence and accept that God did create the Universe and us. That you and I are fearfully and wonderfully made, that things have gone wrong, that we need redemption, restoration, renewal and re-creation and that this cannot come about by our own efforts, but through what he has done through his son Jesus Christ?

You think that is just blind faith? No. You can taste and see that God is good. Seek Jesus and you will find him. Or you can sit reading The Times, and wait for your own personal universe to pop up.

*’Haverings’ – Merriam-Webster says: “British colq. for ‘Hem and Haw’”, but Pastor Robertson assures us it is Scottish for ‘talking nonsense’

David Robertson is a minister in the Free Church of Scotland. He is currently serving as the pastor of St. Peter’s Church, Dundee (a pulpit once filled by Robert Murray M’Cheyne. He serves as editor for the Free Church of Scotland Monthly magazine, as well as being chaplain to international students for the University of Dundee Football Club. This article first appeared on his blog,http://www.stpeters-dundee.org.uk/davidblog, and is reprinted with his permission.