Miscreation
How intelligent design misreads Hawking, and mathematics
Anyone who has ever switched on American cable television or its modern digital equivalents, will recognize this particular kind of interview in which everything is just so carefully placed. The host nods with rehearsed seriousness; the guest speaks in cadences calibrated to suggest profundity without ever quite breaking the surface of an idea. A clip from a glossy documentary is introduced; an audience is primed. On this occasion, the guest was Dr. Stephen C. Meyer, founder of the Center for Science and Culture at the Discovery Institute and author of Return of the God Hypothesis, the setting was a YouTube production promoting his new film, The Story of Everything. In the course of their amiable conversation, the host asked about the late Stephen Hawking, who had the nerve to insist that the laws of physics might suffice to explain the origin of the universe without recourse to a divine agent. The reply contained a sentence that, to a listener not already disposed to nod along, might have seemed rather extraordinary: “I think Hawking’s own work in every way pointed to a creation event and he spent a lot of the rest of his life trying to find a way around that.”
That remark, in all its unruffled confidence, provides a perfectly condensed specimen of the intelligent-design strategy at its most sophisticated. It borrows the prestige of a towering scientific figure, recasts his theoretical labour as a prolonged exercise in metaphysical evasion and then volunteers that even the attempted evasion ends up implying precisely what it was supposedly designed to avoid. The result is a kind of rhetorical perpetual-motion machine: the science points to God and the scientist who denies it only proves the point by his attempts to escape. In what follows, I want to disentangle the several layers of misunderstanding, philosophical slippage and strategic equivocation that make such a pronouncement possible, with the Hawking remark serving as our central exhibit. This exercise was initially drafted as a corrective to one man’s misuse of another man’s legacy but it developed into a case study in how the intelligent-design movement, as their pope represents it, functions when it engages the physical sciences, and, more particularly, in how it subtly and persistently conflates the concept of a beginning with the concept of a creation.
My own disciplinary home lies at the intersection of mathematics and philosophy, specifically in the tradition of mathematical intuitionism, where questions about the nature of mathematical existence, the activity of the mind and the status of abstract objects are treated with an exacting care that is too often absent from popular apologetics. This might be the very reason that I find the argument advanced here about mathematics and the origin of the universe fascinating and deeply flawed at the same time and it is to that argument that we shall have to turn after we have attended to Hawking himself. If the short essay that follows occasionally adopts a tone of dry amusement, that is not because its subject is unserious, on the contrary, the cultural traction of intelligent design is considerable, but because a certain lightness of touch sometimes best illuminates the sheer audacity of an intellectual misstep.
Before examining the Hawking claim in detail, it is worth sketching, with as much charity as can be mustered, the broader framework within which the ID movement operates. Intelligent design, as Meyer presents it, is not the old creationism of a literal six-day Genesis, though it shares a family resemblance. Meyer insists that it is a scientific inference from empirical data, not an argument from scripture. The central thesis is that certain features of the natural world, above all the information-bearing properties of DNA and the exquisitely precise fine-tuning of the physical constants that permit life, are better explained by an intelligent cause than by undirected material processes. Living cells, he tells us, contain digital code, miniature machinery and information-processing systems of staggering sophistication; Bill Gates, he recalls, has said that DNA is like a software program, only far more complex than any we have ever created. From this, Meyer concludes that “the information in DNA points to a kind of master programmer for life.” In cosmology, the argument takes a related shape: the observed expansion of the universe, when run backwards, implies a finite past boundary, a cosmic beginning; this, Meyer contends, amounts to a “creation event,” and the subsequent fine-tuning of the laws of physics that followed that event only strengthens the case for a designing intelligence that transcends the universe itself.
What is crucial to notice, even at this preliminary stage, is the rhetorical pendulum that swings between two distinct registers. When Meyer is challenged on the scientific status of his claims, he tends to retreat into the language of worldview comparison, speaking of intelligent design as a “metaphysical system” or an “explanatory framework” that competes on an equal footing with naturalism. Yet when he is speaking to a sympathetic audience, the same claims are presented as robust scientific inferences, supported by empirical discoveries in biology and cosmology. The host of the interview, quite obviously a sympathetic interlocutor, introduces the film by saying it “explores whether modern discoveries in things like cosmology, physics, chemistry and molecular biology point to a purely undirected evolutionary process or to evidence of intelligent design. It engages science directly rather than arguing from theology.” The word “directly” is doing a great deal of work here and whether the work is honest is precisely the question.
With this framing in place, we can return to Stephen Hawking. In the late 1960’s, Hawking and Roger Penrose, building on the general theory of relativity, proved a series of singularity theorems that showed, under quite general conditions, that if we trace the expanding universe backwards in time, we inevitably arrive at a point where spacetime curvature becomes infinite and the known laws of physics break down. This was a profound result and for a time it was widely interpreted, by some physicists, by many theologians and by the popular press, as scientific confirmation that the universe had a temporal beginning. Hawking himself, in A Brief History of Time, wrote that “the universe began with a singularity,” and even allowed himself a metaphor about the role of a creator, though with a characteristic twist. But to move from “the equations of classical general relativity break down at a past boundary” to “therefore there was a creation event requiring a creator” makes a leap of category that no amount of scientific data alone can license. A physical beginning is a limit point for a theory; a creation event is a metaphysical claim about the dependence of all being on a transcendent agent. The singularity theorems are entirely silent on the question of why there is something rather than nothing and equally silent on whether the boundary they identify represents an absolute ontological origination or merely the edge of our current theoretical understanding. The description of Hawking’s work as having “pointed to a creation event” collapses this distinction from the start, as if the word “creation” were the natural and inevitable gloss on a mathematical singularity, when in fact it is a theological interpretation that stands in need of separate justification.
If we wanted a linguistic precedent for such a conflation, we might turn to the habits of Victorian natural theology, which saw the hand of the Almighty in every adaptation of beak and claw. But Hawkings’s own intellectual trajectory, far from endorsing this conflation, was characterised by a persistent effort to see whether the boundary implied by classical relativity could be understood without invoking a supernatural cause, not, as our ID proponent would have it, because he was “trying to find a way around” a conclusion he found theologically unpalatable, but because it is the ordinary business of theoretical physics to seek theories that do not break down under extreme conditions. A realist about scientific explanation does not, upon encountering a singularity, simply shrug and announce that God must have done it; she asks whether a more fundamental theory that incorporates quantum mechanics, perhaps, might smooth away the pathological point and replace it with a coherent physical description. That is precisely what Hawking, in collaboration with James Hartle, attempted with the no-boundary proposal. In their model, the universe is finite in past extent but has no singular boundary; the temporal dimension, when traced backwards, becomes Euclidean and “curves” into a fourth spatial dimension, so that asking what happened before the Big Bang becomes as meaningless as asking what is north of the North Pole. Whether the no-boundary proposal is ultimately correct is a matter of ongoing debate among cosmologists; what is not in serious dispute is that it was a genuine scientific proposal, motivated by the desire to obtain a consistent quantum description of the early universe, not a piece of special pleading designed to dodge the Almighty.
Meyer’s characterisation of Hawking’s later work as a sustained evasion is more than merely ungenerous; it is a fundamental misreading of scientific practice that recasts the normal process of theoretical development as a psychological drama of denial. It would be a curious physicist indeed who, upon discovering that her equations break down at a certain point, did not attempt to find a deeper framework in which the breakdown is resolved. If anything, the theistic apologist should welcome such efforts, as without them we would be stuck with a singularity that neither science nor theology can properly handle. Yet Meyer’s narrative requires the opposite: he needs Hawking to be fleeing from the truth, because only then can the subsequent argument, that even his attempted escape route leads back to God, appear as an ironic vindication rather than a non sequitur.
That subsequent argument is where Meyer’s thinking takes what I can only describe as a philosophically recreational turn and it is here that my own disciplinary interests become especially relevant. In the interview and at greater length in his book, Meyer contends that quantum cosmology, as developed by Hawking and others, attempts to explain the origin of the universe by invoking a “prior mathematical state” called a universal wave function. “The crazy thing,” Meyer says, “or the very interesting thing is that you get matter, space, time and energy coming out of pure math.” And then, with the air of someone delivering a clinching point, he adds that “math is conceptual and concepts exist in minds.” The conclusion he draws is that to derive the physical universe from a mathematical structure is, in effect, to derive it from a pre-existing mind, and thus, even Hawking’s no-boundary cosmos requires a transcendent intelligence.
There is, I must confess, a certain superficial cleverness to this move and it has the advantage of sounding like an argument to anyone who has never spent much time thinking about the ontological status of mathematical objects. But on closer inspection, it dissolves into a muddle of equivocations and undefended philosophical premises. To begin with, the claim that “math is conceptual” is not a statement of scientific fact; it is a highly contested metaphysical position, just one among several in the philosophy of mathematics and it is by no means the consensus view among either mathematicians or physicists. Many mathematicians and philosophers hold some version of mathematical realism, according to which mathematical structures exist independently of any mind, human or divine. In that view, the wave function of quantum cosmology is a description of a mind-independent reality, not a thought in a cosmic intellect. Others, including the intuitionist tradition to which I am temperamentally closest, do indeed regard mathematical objects as mental constructions, but the relevant mind is the human mind, engaged in a particular kind of constructive activity constrained by the forms of intuition. To leap from “mathematical concepts are mental” to “therefore the mathematical structure that underlies the universe requires a transcendent Mind” commits a breathtaking non sequitur, similar to arguing that because the laws of tennis are conceptual and exist in minds, the universe itself must have been served into existence by a cosmic umpire.
In Brouwerian intuitionism, mathematics is a free creation of the human intellect, grounded in the primordial intuition of time as a succession of moments. The subject is autonomous; it owes no debt to a platonic heaven, still less to a divine intellect. Invoking a transcendent mind as the necessary ground of mathematical reality misunderstands the nature of the constructive act. But even if we were to grant, for the sake of argument, that mathematical structures require a mind of some sort, the move from “a mind” to “the God of classical theism” adds a staggering amount of theological luggage that the argument does not even attempt to justify. A generic intelligence that underwrites the existence of mathematical truths is a very different proposition from a personal deity who fine-tunes physical constants and designs biochemical machinery. Meyer himself, earlier in the interview, scoffs at the idea of a space alien explaining the origin of the universe in which it resides, on the grounds that such an alien would itself be part of the universe. Yet his argument from mathematics suffers from a precisely analogous problem: if the universal wave function requires a mind in which to subsist, why does that mind not itself require a further explanatory ground? The infinite regress is not halted by capitalising the word “Mind.”
Part of the trickery lies in Meyer’s ambiguous use of the phrase “pure math.” When a physicist says that the universe emerges from “pure math,” she is speaking metaphorically or at least with an eye on the fact that the laws of physics are expressed in the language of mathematical and that, at the Planck scale, the distinction between “physical stuff” and “mathematical structure” becomes blurry. She is not claiming that the universe is literally made of concepts, any more than a cartographer who describes the shape of the coastline as a fractal curve is claiming that cliffs and beaches are abstract geometrical objects. The mathematical apparatus is a human tool for the representation of our physical reality; its extraordinary effectiveness, a subject of perennial wonder from Eugene Wigner to the present day, is a deep philosophical puzzle, but it does not license the inference that the world is a thought in a cosmic calculator. Meyer’s argument requires that we conflate the representational function of mathematics with the ontological nature of the thing represented and then reify that confusion into a designing intelligence.
What makes all of this especially interesting, from a rhetorical point of view, is the way Meyer positions the argument when challenged on its pedagogical or constitutional implications. In the interview, the host asks whether “that scientific theory of theism” could ever be taught as fact in American public schools. Meyer’s response is notably careful: “What I would rather assert than theism as a scientific fact, I think it provides an explanatory framework for scientific facts that we’ve discovered.” He goes on to suggest that the real question is “which world view or metaphysical system provides the better explanation,” and that there is no reason students should not be allowed to weigh the competing ideas in what he calls “the great conversation.” This is a significant toning down of the rhetoric that precedes it. When speaking to a friendly audience, intelligent design is presented as a direct inference from the data, the information in DNA points to a master programmer, the cosmic beginning points to a creation event, the mathematical character of physical law points to a transcendent mind. But when the institutional consequences are broached, the framework shifts to worldview comparison, metaphysical preference and “conversation.”
The reason for this double register is not hard to discern. Courts in the United States have repeatedly ruled that intelligent design is not science but a form of religious apologetics and therefore cannot be taught in public school science classes. Meyer, a veteran of these battles, knows that to claim intelligent design as science in a legal or policy context risks a swift defeat. Yet the marketing of the movement requires the aura of scientific respectability. The solution is to maintain an ambiguity: to speak in the indicative mood about design when addressing the already persuaded and to retreat into the subjunctive of “alternative frameworks” when standing before the sceptic or the judge. The Hawking remark, from this perspective, serves as a perfect piece of double-coded address. To the faithful, it says: even the great atheist Hawking confirmed that the universe had a beginning and his subsequent attempts to wriggle out of the implication only prove that atheism is a desperate enterprise. To the critical listener, the remark is defended by the plausible deniability of its framing, it is, after all, only a “view” about what Hawking’s work “pointed to,” and Meyer is careful not to claim that Hawking himself believed in a creator.
The deeper philosophical issue, however, is not the social strategy but the underlying assumption about explanation itself. Intelligent design, as Meyer presents it, proceeds by identifying features of the natural world that are said to resist explanation in terms of unguided material causes, digital code in DNA, fine-tuned constants, the origin of the universe, and then positing intelligence as a better explanation. But this pattern of reasoning, which philosophers of science call inference to the best explanation, only works if the posited explanatory entity is itself well-defined and does not simply relocate the problem under a new label. A designing intelligence that can produce digital code in DNA must itself possess the very properties it is invoked to explain, specified complexity, information-bearing capacity, goal-directed organisation. To say that the presence of information in the cell points to a “master programmer” raises the question of where the programmer’s information comes from. If the answer is that the programmer is a transcendent, necessarily existent being whose intelligence is self-explanatory, then the argument has ceased to be an empirical inference and has become a piece of philosophical theology, dependent on a thick set of metaphysical commitments that are nowhere defended by an appeal to biology or cosmology alone.
Meyer’s handling of Hawking’s cosmology displays this same pattern. He takes a perfectly legitimate scientific question, why does the universe have the particular mathematical structure it does?, and converts it into an argument by fiat: because mathematics exists only in minds, the mathematical structure of the universe must be the product of a mind. But this is not an explanation; it is a redescription that satisfies a certain intellectual appetite while halting further inquiry. A true explanation would need to show how the posited mind interfaces with the physical world, under what constraints it operates, why it chose these laws rather than others and how we could in principle test the hypothesis against alternatives. Meyer offers none of this. Instead, he presents the existence of a designing intelligence as if it were a natural terminus of scientific reasoning, while simultaneously insulating it from the usual demands of scientific testability by classifying it as a “metaphysical system.”
If we were to look for a philosophical antecedent to this kind of move, we might find it in the transcendental arguments of post-Kantian idealism, where the conditions of possibility for experience are invoked to establish the necessity of a particular conceptual scheme. But whereas a transcendental argument typically proceeds with a rigorous attention to the logical structure of its premises, Meyer’s argument relies on a looseness of terminology that a truly critical philosophy would be the first to reject. The “beginning” of the universe in the Hawking-Penrose theorems is a limit of a physical theory; it is not an event in time, as time itself is part of what breaks down. The “creation event” of which Meyer speaks is not something that physics has discovered; it is an interpretation that places the boundary of physics within a theological narrative that predates the discovery by millennia. And the “mind” that allegedly underwrites the mathematical structure of the universe is a cipher, a placeholder whose only real content is the negation of materialist explanation.
What, then, are we to make of the fact that intelligent design commands a substantial audience, that its films open in cinemas, that its proponents appear on widely viewed programmes to speak with an air of urbane reasonableness? The question is partly sociological, and I am not a sociologist. But since my professional life is spent navigating the borderland between mathematics and philosophy, I suspect that part of the appeal lies in a genuine hunger for meaning that a purely materialistic worldview, at least in its popular formulations, is not well equipped to satisfy. The wonder that the universe is mathematically intelligible, that a few equations can describe the behaviour of galaxies and quarks alike, is a wonder that does not simply go away when we have understood the equations. Hawking himself, for all his secularism, was not immune to this wonder and his writings are display a sense of awe that is not far removed from the religious feeling he officially disclaimed. Intelligent design taps into this reservoir of awe and provides a ready-made interpretation that places human beings back at the centre of the cosmic drama, as the intended products of a designing intelligence. The interpretation may be logically flawed, but its psychological resonance is considerable.
The philosopher and of the philosophically minded mathematician must now insist that it does not absolve us of intellectual honesty. The (false) claim that Hawking’s work pointed to a creation event imposes a theological category on a physical result without doing the work of showing that the category fits. To say that Hawking spent the rest of his life trying to find a way around that substitutes a cheap psychology for the history of science. And to claim that even his evasion led back to a transcendent mind performs a conjuring trick with the very mathematics that Hawking wielded with such precision.
In my own intuitionist leanings, I am often reminded that the act of mathematical construction is a process that unfolds in time, that mathematics is not a static landscape of eternal truths but an activity of the human mind. This perspective, which is sometimes accused of making mathematics too human, actually provides a healthy antidote to the temptation to deify our own conceptual creations. When we discover a beautiful mathematical structure that seems to describe the universe, the intuitionist, or the critical realist for that matter, is free to marvel at the correspondence without thereby positing a divine mathematician. The mystery of the applicability of mathematics is real and profound, but it is a mystery we can explore without solving it by terminological fiat.
At the end of the day, Meyer’s treatment of Hawking reveals less about the cosmos than about the mechanics of a certain kind of apologetics. It borrows a great scientist’s halo, then uses it to illuminate a conclusion the scientist himself would have vigorously rejected. It takes a theoretical achievement driven by curiosity and intellectual integrity and recasts it as a grudging concession to theological pressure. It even does so in a language that sounds enough like science to pass muster with an audience that has not been equipped to distinguish a singularity from a creation.
The epilogue to this story is not, I think, a triumphant refutation followed by a tidy moral. It is a lingering unease, a sense that the public conversation about science and religion has been conducted on terms that do neither side justice. Hawking’s life was a testament to the power of the human mind to reach beyond its immediate circumstances, to ask the deepest questions about space, time and existence and to refuse the easy consolations of the supernatural. To appropriate that life for an argument that would have struck him as philosophically retrograde is, at a minimum, an irony that deserves to be noted with the appropriate measure of dry, cantabrigian regret. The universe, as Hawking never tired of observing, is remarkable enough without our having to invent a master programmer to explain it. Whether we regard that remarkability as a sign of something transcendent or as a self-contained fact, the one thing it is not is a licence to treat the words of the dead as a ventriloquist’s dummy for the metaphysical commitments of a divine agenda. And that is what I will leave here as the real bottom line.