Articles
The Worship of Intellect
As most know by now, Stephen Hawking passed away on March 14, 2018. Hawking “received thirteen honorary degrees. He was awarded CBE (1982), Companion of Honour (1989) and the Presidential Medal of Freedom (2009). He was the recipient of many awards, medals and prizes, most notably the Fundamental Physics prize (2013), Copley Medal (2006) and the Wolf Foundation prize (1988). He was a Fellow the Royal Society and a member of the US National Academy of Sciences …” (hawking.org.uk).
Another glowing tribute: “The Face of Science has died … Hawking was an extraordinary generator of knowledge, arguably contributing more to our understanding of the early Universe and the behavior of black holes than any other scientist since Einstein” (Los Angeles Review of Books blog, 3/25/18).
Tributes praising Hawking for his brilliance are abundant. But his first wife of 35 years, Jane, with whom Hawking had three children, had a bit of a different take on his intellectual prowess. “London Sunday Times reporter Bryan Appleyard interviewed the Hawkings in 1988, and anyone reading Jane’s candid comments about Stephen’s philosophy could have guessed that trouble was brewing.
“‘There’s one aspect of [Stephen’s] thought that I find increasingly upsetting and difficult to live with … It’s the feeling that, because everything is reduced to a rational, mathematical formula, that must be the truth. There doesn’t seem to be room in the minds of people who are working on these things for other sorts of inspiration.’
“Jane Hawking’s opinion … is extremely perceptive. Hawking, like other scientific metaphysicians … has an evident need to wrap reality up into a package that can be fully understood by the kind of logic that his science can employ. Whatever cannot be understood that way is pushed out of reality – however important it may be to the business of living. Who is better qualified to criticize a man’s simplistic rationalism and hubris than his wife?” (Phillip Johnson, Reason in the Balance 225).
Naturalists set up a straw man when they say that believers are anti-science but then drive cars, use medications, run the A/C, etc. This is a dishonest attempt to caricature Christians as self-contradicting simpletons. Let me be clear: Christians are not anti-intellectual or anti-science. On the contrary, intellectual capacity reflects the divine image within man. God endowed us with the rational ability to manipulate His creation for our benefit.
What Christians criticize is using intellect to prejudice the debate, squelch dissent via legislation, intimidate and/or censure those who disagree, and present Darwinism as fact when its primary mechanism – undirected mutation coupled with natural selection – cannot be scientifically sustained. It is intellectual dishonesty that we find offensive.
It is the fool, not the wise or educated, who “who has said in his heart, ‘There is no God’” (Ps 14:1). Hawking’s intellectual forebears “did not glorify Him as God, nor were thankful, but became futile in their thoughts, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Professing to be wise, they became fools, and changed the glory of the corruptible God into an image made like corruptible man …” (Rom 1:21-22).
Paul taunts the secular intellectual: “Where is the wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the disputer of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of this world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world through wisdom did not know God, it pleased God through the foolishness of the message preached to save those who believe” (1 Cor 1:20-21).
Because of intellectual arrogance Paul further noted: “But God has chosen the foolish things of the world to put to shame the wise, and … the weak things of the world to put to shame the things which are mighty … and the things which are despised God has chosen … that no flesh should glory in His presence” (1 Cor 1:27-29).
Hawking believed that everything in the universe – the great physical forces, the chemical interactions that sustain life, the structure and energy of atoms, the function of the mind – is explainable by mathematical calculations. He popularized the phrase “the theory of everything,” “a hypothetical single, all-encompassing, coherent theoretical framework of physics that fully explains and links together all physical aspects of the universe” (Wikipedia). This wild goose may be chased but never caught, for the One who sustains all things is Christ: “in Him all things consist” (Col 1:17).
In Hawking’s own words: “The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge” (LARB blog, 3/25/18). Who is more affected by the illusion of knowledge than the intellect who thinks that the cosmos is self-created and life-producing with no intelligent guidance? The secularist uses his mind to deny the Ultimate Intellect who designed a world so as to be intellectually understood. And those who worship intellect won’t praise any intelligence that recognizes the Ultimate Intellect.
Jane Hawking sadly noted to Appleyard: “Her role was no longer to care for a sick man but ‘simply to tell him he is not God’” (ibid).
