Letter: Ungodly science

Regarding Stephen Hawking's latest pearl cast before us swine (your report, 3 September and Letters, 6 September), he is quite entitled to believe (and may be right) that the laws of physics can ultimately describe how the Big Bang, and everything thereafter, happened. However, he destroys his intellectual credibility by having the arrogance to think and preach that this has anything to do with disproving the existence of God.

Likewise Richard Dawkins's passionate preaching of atheism because Darwinian natural selection describes evolution well. Both display ignorance of what science is and is not.

Science is about, and only about, the testing of negatable hypotheses, and can never say anything about beliefs such as in God's existence. Nor in, say, a belief that the universe began at the instant you started reading this, looking as if it began with a Big Bang 14 billion years ago and with all your life memories in place.

Secondly, the laws of physics may perfectly "explain" everything about our universe, but they cannot explain any aspect of themselves – why they are (were) as they are when they "caused" the Big Bang – any more than invoking God as explaining the universe does more than regress the question back one step to how to explain God.

Failure to grasp or admit these two simple logical points concerning belief and causality are widespread among atheist preachers, though they have been widely recognised by philosophers, theologians and open-minded scientists throughout history.

They also seem perfectly clear to most of the school kids and public with whom I regularly talk about science. So it is to me gobsmacking that Hawking should come out with such stuff and that the media should make so much of it.

(Prof) J C Brown

Astronomer Royal for Scotland

University of Glasgow