After Stephen Hawking published The Grand Design, media all over the world were declaring, “Hawking says universe not created by God,” “Stephen Hawking says physics leaves no room for God,” and so on. The book became a best-seller, immediately assigned in both physics and philosophy classes. What then, is Hawking’s thesis? How did the universe come about? He writes:
"Because there is a law of gravity, the universe can and will create itself out of nothing."
This is the thesis of the world’s most renowned physicist’s most important work. It contains three glaring inconsistencies that can be determined by anyone cognizant of two basic laws of logic. These two rules are:
The Law of Identity - that things are what they are. Branching from this, the terms we use must have clear definitions.
The Law of Non-Contradiction - Two opposite statements cannot both be true in the same sense at the same time.
The errors in the statement are:
1 The end of the statement asserts that there was nothing, but the beginning of the statement establishes that there was a law of gravity.
2 He asserts that the universe created itself. For anything to create itself it must—at least for an instant—exist and not exist at the same time.
3 He asserts that there always was a law of gravity. Laws, however, are the result of repeated observations of physical entities. For a law of gravity to exist, there must exist at least two objects and a sense of time in which the movement of these objects could be discerned.
Logicians and philosophers, such as John Lennox, cringed at the blatancy of the errors in this thesis. Logically contradictory things, such as universes that are there and not there simultaneously are not real and do not exist. In constrast, the conclusion of a sound syllogism, must be true.
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