I just read Stephen Hawking's new book, The Grand Design over the weekend. I was excited to read it but I have to say that I was thoroughly disappointed. I loved The Universe in a Nutshell. I also loved Mlodinow's The Drunkards Walk. This book was supposed to explain M-Theory but it only alluded to it. I can sum up this short book as the following: Anyone who believes in God is stupid, we don't need to invoke God to explain the origin of the universe, I'd love to explain M-theory to you but you are probably a bible believing christian who believes that God literally stopped the sun for Joshua to give him an extra day in battle so you probably wouldn't understand.
My primary interest is in biology and I don't know a lot about physics. I'd love to learn but Hawking's and Mlodinow's condescending attitudes were no help.
Why the attitude? I believe that the answer is simple. Biology has a real scientific answer for the apparent design in nature. As Robert Wright points out in his brilliant book The Evolution of God, Paley was not wrong when he made his argument from design. He noticed that much like a watch has a watchmaker, life must have had a designer. It turns out that he was right. Living organisms, unlike rocks or other minerals were designed and this design may even point to a higher purpose. The designer was natural selection. Natural selection explains the apparent design we see in the natural world.
The world of physics has no equivalent. Hawking and Mlodinow present nothing equivalent to natural selection in their new book. The only way they can explain our universe that is fine tuned for human life, is to appeal to the idea that 10 to the 500th power universes (all unobservable) must somehow exist and we find ourselves in this one because it is the only one in which beings like us could evolve. This is an interesting idea, but it is just an idea. I can't believe that they started the book with "Philosophy is dead" and then, instead of laying out the science, they philosophized about how the universe did not need a creator. Maybe they are right, I don't know. But, their question is not a scientific question but a philosophical one. Natural selection explains the apparent design we see in life on earth. But, from what I got from this book M-Theory does no such thing for the universe itself. It doesn't matter how much Hawking and Mlodinow wish it were otherwise.
