It's Turtles All The Way Down, Stephen Hawking.

British theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking is coming out with a new book called The Grand Design, co-authored with Leonard Mlodinow. In this book, Hawking puts forth the notion that God did not create the universe and the "Big Bang" was an inevitable consequence of the laws of physics.

 

I've been mulling over this one for the last couple of days. Most of the physicists I know (and I know a few, since my grad school office was located quite near to the Van Allen physics labs where they make some pretty schmancy stuff to go into space) believe in God. Why? Because ultimately, there's always an unanswerable question looming out there: no matter what you're able to explain with mathematics and physics, no matter what you can comprehend, there's always something bigger, something outside that universe.

Let's say you understand our universe (ha ha), let's even say you understand the Big Bang (bigger ha ha). Taking that assumption, what caused it all? What created it? And let's say you come up with an answer to that question, and the answer is...I don't know...whatever...a giant turtle (we'll use that, because I once heard that some ancient culture or another believed that the world was balanced on the back of a giant turtle, and I think it's funny).

 

So say you decide that a giant turtle created the universe. Well, what created that giant turtle? Let's say you come up with an answer to that question - a bigger turtle created that giant turtle, of course. Well, what created that turtle? The thing is, those questions never really end. They extend into infinity, because there's always the question of what created the biggest thing you can possibly comprehend.

This is the dilemma that has always tripped me up with my belief in God and my personal faith (and please, don't try to convert me or start a religious debate- I'm neither interested nor truly equipped to argue on this topic- I just know that philosophy and science often get in the way of my faith, but I still  sort of believe in God anyway, somehow, even though my concept of God might be different from yours). The truth is, I can't comprehend of anything that's so big that there's nothing bigger, or so big that it wasn't created from...something. 

 

Maybe my brain's too puny to figure this one out. I'm sure Stephen Hawking's massive brain can conceive of things I can't even fathom. And maybe he can understand nothingness, which is a concept I can't really wrap my brain around.

 

But ultimately, for me, it's a lot like the last scenes in the Men in Black movies, where Tommy Lee Jones shows Will Smith how infinitesimally small we really are, whether it's that Earth is actually the marble in a giant alien's game of jacks or we're just the wee locker people in a much, much larger universe. I always think, "Okay, so if there is a God, who created God?" And I always end up going back to the same old answer: it's turtles all the way down.