By Bryan Appleyard

Stephen Hawking, the world-renowned scientist, has become famous for his non-belief in God.  He is considered to be one of the most intelligent people in the scientific world.  Added to that he is severely disabled and heroic in his struggle against illness.  We publish here a surprising answer to his stand by one of his fellow scientists.  This article will not be of interest to all, but to a small number it may be a godsend.

The year I met Stephen Hawking was 1988.  I was to write a profile for a magazine to appear at the time his book, A Brief History of Time, was published.  That book was to make him globally famous.  But then he was not well-known outside scientific circles.  The big story was, of course, that here was this brilliant physicist and cosmologist whose motor neuron disease confined him to a wheelchair and forced him to speak through a computer.  His wrecked body contrasted poignantly with his star-traveling imagination.

Missing piece

And that was, indeed, the story I wrote.  Sort of.  For the truth was that I had been very disturbed by the meeting.  Something was missing from his words.  A thought process that had been lurking, almost unnoticed, at the back of my mind had suddenly leapt to the front.

A week later, I went back to Cambridge to see his wife, Jane.  She made us tea and, before I could turn on my tape recorder, she launched into what I can only describe as an attack on her husband.

Mrs. Hawking’s confession

I was shocked for two reasons.  First, Mrs. Hawking had never met me before, yet here she was, criticizing her husband to a total stranger.  Secondly, her criticism confirmed the deep unease I had felt in Hawking’s presence.  A Christian, she had become appalled by his attitude to her attitude to her faith.  She spoke of his rudeness to other believers who had been guests in their house.  She feared he had lost all perspective: he had come to believe that there was only one truth and it was physics.

In 1990, the 31-year-old marriage, broke up.  Hawking left Jane for his nurse, Elaine Mason.  Subsequently, in her autobiography, Music to Move the Stars, Jane spoke of him as an “all-powerful emperor”, a “masterly puppeteer”.

On the road to discovery

At one level, it was clear:  I had simply stumbled into all the inevitable ambiguities, bitterness and anger of a collapsing marriage.  All marriages being opaque, of this there was nothing to be said.  But at another, deeper and more specific level, I had found myself confronting what I then realized was the central issue of our time – the overweening power and confidence of science.

Completing the puzzle

What had been missing from the Hawking I met was humility.  At first I had taken this absence to be a function of his condition.  After all, if your body is wrecked and you can only speak with the aid of a computer, then a certain abruptness is more than understandable – every sentence takes so long.  Also, the computer voice was harsh and lacking in nuance.  It was hard not to hear it as his own voice and judge him accordingly.  But I carefully eliminated all such judgments and still I could find none of the humility one invariably discovers, albeit often deeply buried, in the greatest intellects.

Hawking’s predecessors

The most poignant expression of this humility came from Sir Isaac Newton, Hawking’s predecessor as Lucasian professor of Mathematics at Cambridge.  Inarguably the greatest feat of the human intellect, Newton had transformed our view of the cosmos, revolutionized mathematics and optics and put in place the model of the universe that was to survive intact until, more than 200 years later, it was modified by Max Planck and Albert Einstein.  His greatness was recognized in his own lifetime.  He was a god of science.  Indeed, he was arrogant, tetchy, over-competitive and convinced of his own genius.  But towards the end of his long life – he died at the age of 85 – a different Newton suddenly emerged, a man who, I believe, had always lain hidden behind the public face.  “I do not know what I may appear to the world,” he said, “but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, while the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”

Humbled

Newton had seen the limitations – no, more than that, the sheer incompetence – of even his own vast intellect when confronted with the mystery of the world.  All his work amounted to no more than a shell or pebble.  The “ocean of truth” was untroubled by his discoveries.

Limitations of human mind

Until meeting Hawking, I had blithely assumed that this crucial Newtonian insight was self-evident and accepted by all the thinking population.  Of course, human knowledge was partial.  Science could only ever shine a narrow beam of light into the dark depths of the material world, and it could say nothing about the immaterial world in which we live – the world created by the enigma of our consciousness.  Knowledge of this world could only be gained through philosophy and religion, art and poetry.  They may also be inadequate, but they could also be true in ways that science could never hope to be.  Who, I thought, could disagree with that?

But the thought lurking at the back of my mind was, we lived in an age in which people had begun to disagree. Or rather there were people whose minds it had never crossed that there was any truth other than science.  There was a deepening divide in the culture.  There was the ignorance of artists and writers about contemporary science, and there was the burgeoning contempt among many scientists for the wisdom of religion and philosophy.  Yet still, I thought, these intellectually unforgivable positions were a trick of the light, something seen out of the corner of my eye and not to be taken too seriously.

Truths refused

Within an hour Hawking had detonated my complacency.  He scorned philosophy.  He quoted Wittgenstein to the effect that all the problems of philosophy were simply problems of language.  I pointed out that he had misunderstood – Wittgenstein had said this to get at the deeper, entirely unscientific wells of our being.  He was, I  said, simply wrong.  “No, I’m not,” he replied, and refused to discuss the matter further.  As for religion, well, I heard about his attitude to that from his wife.

Wisdom of the proud

Furthermore, there was no “ocean of truth” for Hawking and no real sense of scientific history.  We were, he said, on the verge of a “theory of everything”, a completion of physics that would account for the history of matter. “Then,” he famously said at the end of his book, “we shall know the mind of God.”  But, I pointed out, people had always said that. Ptolemy thought he had completed astronomy, then Copernicus came along; Newton was taken to the end of physics until Einstein came along.  And so on.  All theories of everything had been superseded, why should ours be any different?  “We have better instruments,” Hawking replied.  Better?  Better was not the point.  How could we know they were good enough?  In 500 years’ time, our radio telescopes might look as crude as Galileo’s feeble optical device.  But he would have none of it.  My respect for his wisdom was slipping rapidly away.

Also, I began to fear him.  The illusion – for that is what it is – of complete knowledge has always been dangerous, producing monstrous simplifications of human life, like communism, that result in disaster.  Maybe a theory of everything in Physics may seem a harmless thing compared with Marxism, but I could tell from Hawking’s views on religion and philosophy that he did not see it that way.  He thought physics invalidated these other disciplines.

Megalomania

Over the next decade this absurd, intellectually trivial idea was to become a mainstream ideology.  I saw high-profile scientists making increasingly extravagant claims for the power of their subject.  Edward O Wilson said evolutionary theory would provide a new unifying myth, a scientific religion, for humanity.  Lewis Wolpert poured contempt on philosophy.  Richard Dawkins trashed religion.  And the Nobel-prize-winning physicist Steven Weinberg said, absurdly, that once we had the theory of everything, people would stop reading their horoscopes. Plainly, scientists – at least the ones with access to the microphone – no longer believed in the limitations of science.  They believed that it would, and should, rule the world. In more civilized times, this was called megalomania.

Hawking not only had much to do with the intellectual content of this idea, but also with its marketing.  A Brief History of Time was so successful that it resulted in a massive wave of popular science books, all of them sold to publishers and readers on the basis of their wild claims for the competence of contemporary science and almost none of them displaying a trace of humility.

Revolution of principles

All too feebly, I struck back with two books – Understanding the Present and Brave New Worlds. The virulent hostility of scientists to the first horrified me, but at least convinced me that I had correctly identified a new and savage tolerance.  “I despise you,” was all the Oxford chemist Peter Atkins, author of the phenomenally scientistic tract, would say.  I had never before, in any field, encountered people who could despise me on the basis of an opinion with which they disagreed.  I was not alone.  There was a handful of co-conspirators, Adam Curtis made a brilliant TV series, Pandora’s Box, in which he exposed the limitations and dangers of the scientific mindset.  The philosopher Mary Midgley analyzed the deep irrationality of these new scientistic thinkers.  But as we privately acknowledged to each other, we were swimming against the tide of contemporary thought and, unlike our enemies, we agreed on no grand strategy.  We were a ragged platoon facing a panzer division.

But if winning seemed impossible, losing was unthinkable.  The more I considered this confrontation, the more I saw it as a life-and-death struggle.  It was not simply a case of opposing ideas about the nature of science, it was a clash of world views that potentially affected all aspects of society.  Or, more exactly, it was a clash between one highly reductive and nihilistic world view, scientism, and an expansive, tolerant, accepting understanding of human limitations.  Our platoon did not have a world view as such:  we were simply incredulous that great mistakes of the past had resurfaced, unchanged, in the present.

Consider humanity

Through the 1990s I became aware that the meeting with Hawking had changed my life.  In a direct sense, I did subsequently write about my views of his impact and received, in response, angry letters from his family.  But indirectly, I saw the meeting had forced me to confront what I really believed, not just about science, but about life and human affairs. The reductive posture, I now understood, was a deeply damaging ideology.  If you persistently tell people it’s all just physics or biology, they will begin to believe you and act in inhuman and stupid ways.

I am aware that scientists as a whole did not think like this.  I have had many discussions with decent scientists who are dismayed by the hard scientism of the people who have come to represent their calling.  In that sense, this wave of scientism can be restricted to a few celebrity scientists.  But in practice it was these people who were the persuaders, reinforcing a world view that reappears in various forms throughout the rhetoric of our time.

I take some consolation from the fact that, since I published Understanding the Present in 1992, the climate has changed slightly.  People are readier to question science and less ready to accept the authority of its grandest figures.  Thanks to general problems like the uncertainties of the environment and specific ones like BSE, we have come to see its limited nature.  And, in physics, the theory of everything has proved more elusive than Hawking expected.  Perhaps, slowly, science is returning to its proper place in the scheme of things.

And that place is a distinguished one.  Science is a moving and profound human project.  It is one of the ways in which we celebrate our intellectual and imaginative capacity to escape from the bonds of our mortality and limitations of our bodies.  My first response to the sight of Hawking in his wheelchair was exhilaration.  This broken body sustained a mind that was able to grapple with the outer reaches of the known.  And he did this in spite of handicaps that would have ruined less courageous men – myself, I am sure, included.  The greatness of his life is beyond dispute.  His thought, however, and the attitudes that inspire it, have proved pernicious.  Of the quality of his physics I am unqualified to speak, though I know his importance in this field has yet to be fully established.  But as an emblem of hard scientism, he’s been the figurehead of a movement that I believe has promoted contempt for human, and humane, wisdom.

In fact, writing those words, I now see that I, too, have made a basic, obvious mistake.  I have chosen the wrong subject for my Brief Encounter.  Certainly, it was Stephen Hawking who started me on the train of thought that was to dominate the next 13 years, and probably the rest, of my life.  But it was Jane Hawking who gave me the resolve to see the argument through.  As she laid out the tea things and spoke quietly of her husband, I felt a shudder of realization that I am more than physics.  My idea was just a smoother pebble or a prettier shell, and it was as nothing next to that ocean of truth which is ours and infinite.  But it was true.