Despite the long-standing decline in church attendance and an increasing number of people who identify as "spiritual but not religious," stirring up controversy about, or defending, the existence of God remains an excellent way to sell books. The Grand Design, Stephen Hawking's new book, written with Leonard Mlodinow, is no exception. The book's passages about God, and the authors’ dispensation of the necessity of God the creator, have generated significant media attention.

Hawking is the former Lucian Chair of Mathematics at Cambridge University--a chair previously held by Isaac Newton--and a best-selling popular science author. When he speaks people tend to pay attention. His assertion, therefore, of the non-necessity of God has set off another round of the debate between atheists and believers over the existence of the deity. Most of the noise has been on the part of Hawking's critics who have responded to his assertion with both witty articles--like Clay Farris Naff's piece "Stephen Hawking to God: Your Services Are No Longer Needed; God to Hawking: You So Don't Get Who I Am"--and those of a more serious tone.

Neither side brings much new to the debate. Members of the scientific community have been declaring the non-necessity of God for hundreds of years. Hawking provides one example in his mention of the scientific determinist Pierre-Simon, marquis de Laplace. Laplace believed that, in Hawking’s words, "a complete set of laws fully determines both the future and the past." This led him to argue that there was no place for miracles or an active role for God in the universe. During a famous exchange with Napoleon, Laplace was asked about the role of God in his scientific model. He replied, "I have no need for that hypothesis."

Theologians, particularly those of the liberal tradition, have often answered such declarations with tracts suggesting that while people like Laplace may know something about science and mathematics they know little about the nature of the divine. To offer one example, portions of the German theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher's late eighteenth-century book On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers could have been written in response to The Grand Design. In his work, Schleiermacher cedes the realms of "metaphysics and morals" to others and instead argues that the basis of religion is "feeling and intuition."

Schleiermacher's argument is essentially that religion is not about what we know or even what we do. It is about what we feel. He believed the religious feeling was one of experiencing "everything individual as a part of the whole and everything limited as a representation of the infinite." In Schleiermacher's view, all people have such experiences. How an individual understands and interprets such feelings is more a reflection of cultural location and personal temperament than absolute truth. Christians understand the religious feeling as the presence of Christ. Muslims understand it as a connection to Allah. And scientific rationalists "gazing at the immense heavens above," understand it, in Hawking's words, as "wonder." Each understand the feeling differently, but all have it.

Schleiermacher's observation that religion is rooted in feeling may provide an insight into why books on religion and God continue to be best-sellers in the increasingly secular landscapes of America and Europe. Even though ever-growing numbers of people no longer participate in religious institutions, the feeling of connection that generates religion remains inherent within them. Seeking to make sense of that feeling, they continue to gravitate towards texts, other forms of media and public thinkers that explain it. Even if religious institutions continue to decline, the religion-science debate is bound to remain with us for sometime to come.

References

Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow, The Grand Design (New York: Bantam Books, 2010).

Friedrich Schleiermacher, On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers, translated and edited by Richard Crouter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988)

Clay Farris Naff, "Stephen Hawking to God: Your Services Are No Longer Needed; God to Hawking: You So Don't Get Who I Am," The Huffington Post, September 4, 2010.

Rev. Colin Bossen is the minister of the Unitarian Universalist Society of Cleveland. He keeps a blog at http://infidelity.blogsome.com.