On the Origin of Physics

This past week I read an article how Stephen Hawking, the noted physicist, published a book called "The Grand Design" and in it, he says that physics can explain the creation of the universe rather than attributing it to God.  As I read the article, I had to laugh.

"The creation of the universe can be explained by physics?  Y' think?!!!" was my response.

Seriously though, it really grieves me that for being such a smart man, Hawking lacks wisdom and is quite unable to see the forest through the trees.  He thinks that faith and science are incompatible ideologies when in essence, science is simply the empirical study of the world in which we live.  It can inform us of the "how" but not of the "why".  Physics are the "how", not the "why".

The existence of physical laws, particularly gravity that Hawking relies heavily upon in his assertions, is not an end in and of itself as Hawking seems to think.  His premise is that these can and do exist in a self-substantive way .  While Hawking is an atheist and refuses to credit God, he does indeed worship something and the object of his worship is physics. 

Logically, the existence of the scientific laws is just as problematic as the existence of the world. They are part of the world; scientific models of how things work.  The "why" of the existence of physics is the same as that of the universe.  Their order and reason is only suggestive of the order and reason of the One who made them.  It should come as absolutely no surprise that the world was created through physics which is an order than comes from the character of our Creator.  God did not simply "poof" our world into being; He made in a way consistent with Himself and the laws of science which He created.  The mere vastness of the world is evidence of the depth beyond comprehension of His character.  God does not need any type of unexplained magic to create; to think otherwise is a denial of the greatness of His character.  While God does have the power to bend his instituted laws resulting in miraculous events, the truly amazing thing is that these laws exist and such order reigns just as God reigns over them.  Hence, God is not incompatible with science, logic, or reason.

The tragedy of the situation is that Hawking succumbs to the temptation to worship the creation instead of the Creator and fails to see God for how simply big He is.