Stephen Hawking's New Book Critiqued by Alister McGrath

This Review & Critique of Hawking's book was published on the ABC religion website:

Every shrewd publicist knows that the best way to sell a book is to generate lots of advance publicity. That's why there's been such interest in Stephen Hawking's latest work declaring that there is no need for God to light the blue touch paper of the cosmic firework.

In his latest book, The Grand Design - released in Australia today - Hawking declares, "Because there is a law such as gravity, the Universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the Universe exists, why we exist."

The "big bang" just happened spontaneously, the outcome of the laws of physics, not a cosmic designer. It's a great way to promote a book. And it's also a great way to keep the age-old debate about God going, as it raises such interesting questions. Let me explore some of these.

I used to be a scientist myself. My undergraduate degree from Oxford was in chemistry, and my first doctorate in molecular biophysics. It's widely agreed that the natural sciences are neither atheistic nor theistic. They just don't operate at that level.

They can certainly be interpreted in religious or anti-religious ways. The militant atheist Richard Dawkins uses science as a weapon in his war against religion. But others see science and religious faith as mutually illuminating.

For example, Francis Collins's book The Language of God argues that belief in God makes more sense of science than atheism. Both sides can be argued, neither has been able to prove its case, and both are entirely reasonable.

So what about Hawking's latest book? Does this move things along? I don't think so. My scientific colleagues in Oxford and London are puzzled by Hawking's bold declarations about God, mainly because they are such speculative interpretations of what is already a very speculative theory.


The rest of the article (on the ABC website) can be found HERE. It's well worth a read

Can I Trust the Bible? Isn't it full of Myths and Fairy Tales?

In talking with students at UWS and elsewhere, one of the common responses when talking about Christianity is that you can't trust the Bible as your source or authority to live by because it is full of myths and other made-up stories. Like the fairy tales of the Grimm Brothers, people say, you may be able to draw some moral from the tale, but can you really trust it?

The first thing to consider is the attitude of the Bible itself toward 'myth'. A number of passages in the Bible speak strongly against the propagation of myths. These include 1 Timothy 1:4; 1 Timothy 4:7; 2 Timothy 4:4 and Titus 1:14:

rebuke them sharply, so that they will be sound in the faith and will pay no attention to Jewish myths or to the commands of those who reject the truth.

In these passages the apostle warns his hearers of the danger of 'myths'. In contrast he urges Christian leaders to teach the truth. Nowhere in the Bible are myths spoken of positively! If myths are so strongly condemned within the Bible and the truth is held up as the standard, then it is hard to argue that the Bible is full of myths.

So if the stories of the Bible are not myths, then what are they?

To answer this question we must look more at what the Bible is, rather than what the opponents of Biblical Christianity claim it is.

Perhaps the most important issue is what the writers of the Gospels (the four accounts of Jesus' Life found at the beginning of the new Testament) thought they were writing.