Did God Create the Universe?

I watched this episode of Curiosity hosted by Stephen Hawking, recently, on the topic of "Did God Create the Universe?". I made some notes on the episode and will summarise them here. I will also end with some counter responses to this episode that have been made by the website creation.com - the reason why I'm including both for and against arguments on this topic is to highlight the point that debating this age-old question is futile and very subjective to individual belief.

Full episode: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gLkf78_rcu4

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Summary - Did God Create the Universe? Season 1 Episode 1 of Curiosity:

The episode begins by presenting a selection of belief systems throughout history that have been made redundant by scientific progress. Hawking starts by describing how the Vikings of Norse Mythology assigned a different deity for phenomenons of nature they could not explain. For example, Thor was the god of lightning, Aegir the god of sea, and Skoll - was a wolf god who allegedly ate the Sun to cause what is now known as the solar eclipse. The Vikings would try to scare Skoll away with their waving swords and when the sky returned to normal, they believed their actions had worked.

It was Aristarchus of Samos, Greece, in 300BC who began to study the sky and draw geometrical diagrams to assist his observations. He suggested that the eclipse is not a divine occurrence, and was merely due to the Earth casting a shadow over the moon. He rationalised that the stars were not cracks in the floor of heaven as his peers believed, but were of the same nature as our Sun. Aristarchus also supported the heliocentric model.

Hawking then proceeds to Galileo Galilei's story from 1609. Galileo constructed a telescope and observed that the moons of Jupiter were orbiting the planet - hence proving that not all entities in space revolves the Earth. Galileo was under house arrest for 9 years for his groundbreaking discovery and was made to renounce his heresy by the Church.

Aristarchus' calculations from 3rd century
Source: Wikipedia.org

Those who studied the nature of the Universe were often dubbed as heretics and the Church was threatened by their ideas and rationality. Ultimately a solution to this threat was proposed by the religious-minded: the laws of nature are governed/owned by God, and He may break them if he so wished. However, Hawking stresses that there is a distinct difference between arbitrary made-made laws that continuously adjust and readjust to accommodate progress in society, and the absoluteness of nature's laws. From the above stories it is apparent that over time scientific knowledge has gradually eliminated the need for religion, and ultimately God.

So, how did the Universe originate?

Hawkings explains that there are three fundamental ingredients required for the formation of our universe.

1. Matter/Mass - i.e. dust, ice, rocks, gas, liquids, etc
2. Energy - this drives the processes and masses within the universe
3. Space

In the 1900s, Albert Einstein theorised that mass is equivalent to energy by his famous equation E=mc2. This reduced the above ingredients list to only two items: mass/energy and space. Now, when the big bang occurred, it produced enormous amounts of positive energy. But this positive energy is countered by an unseen negative energy which is stored in space. To illustrate, Hawking asks his audience to imagine a man who decides to build a hill from soil. He digs up the ground and produces a mound of dirt, but in the process, also creates a depression in the ground where he has dug. This is the nature of positive and negative energy. These energies cancel one another out, implying that there was nothing at the start of our universe. However, even if on a macroscopic level it may seem like the universe was created from nothing, at a quantum level, traditional physics breaks down completely, and particles appear (and disappear) from nothing all the time. I'm not quite sure how this works - but Briane Greene's documentary The Elegant Universe may give you some idea.

Hawking states that the Universe was once a minuscule black hole smaller than a proton, which warped space-time to such a degree that time was at a standstill, and therefore did not exist at all. I'm not a physicist/astronomer so I will try to explain to the best of my knowledge how a black hole works. A black hole is basically a very big (usually dead) star which has collapsed under it's own gravitation to form a kind of funnel, or a deformed region of space-time from which even light cannot escape. If light enters a blackhole, it is slowed down, and hence, time itself from an outside observer appears to slow down. This effect is known as gravitational time dilation. 

So if time did not exist prior to the big bang, then a God/Creator was unlikely to be present before the bang to have caused it. On this premise, and along with the history of science-religion conflict in which science consistently won out, Hawking justifies the non-existence of God.

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Creation.com posited that the above argument made by Hawking can be negated by two simple counter-points in relation to the positive-negative energy analogy provided by Hawking. They say:

1. The formation of the hill needed a cause - i.e. the man with the shovel
2. This 'cause', i.e. the man, existed before he built the hill

They also argue that:

• The universe could not have created itself because until it existed, it was not in a position to create itself
• According to critics of the big bang - scientists Alex Williams and John Hartnett (both Australian) - believe that the universe could not have materialised by a quantum fluctuations alone as the laws of quantum physics were not established prior to the bang. 
• They also state that the life-time of quantum events are inversely proportional to their mass, and therefore the lifetime of our universe should be less that 10^-103 seconds (i.e., incomprehensibly short). 
• Furthermore, particles today appear within space. Before the big bang, there was no space/vacuum for particles to appear in.
• Some of the competing theories presented in a Curiosity episode on Parallel Universes also debunk Hawking's stance as one claims that when a blackhole swallows a star, it ejects it out the other end - and this is how our Universe could have been born. This implies that time before the big bang did exist.

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What's my opinion on all of this? I think that the question of God's existence is beyond us. The problem with religion is NOT spirituality, or the belief in some great and mysterious omnipresent power/force. The problems with religion lie within the superstitions, traditions and separatist mindsets that cause divide within communities and breed intolerance and dislike towards people of another faith/caste/gender/race/sexual orientation/social status/etc.

I remember watching a debate between Hassanain Rajabali (a Shia Muslim) and Dan Barker (an atheist) in which Rajabali argues that to dismiss the existence of God through science is irrational as God cannot be compartmentalised by time/space or any other relative dimension. I doubt one's belief in God can be swayed by insisting that time did not precede the big bang, as most would say God is not restricted by time or the laws of our present universe, but sits outside it all. (Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9c5-vVwJ2eQ)

If believing in God gives purpose to one's life, then so be it. As long as it is not imposed on others, I am happy to simply not comment on their personal belief.