Deep Friday

Go on - who does this remind you of? Oh darn that html!

(exclamation marks in tribute to TB's memoirs).

So does God exist? As I said yesterday, as usual this has polarised the nutters - er web commenters - out there, into those who cannot follow an argument and those who will not follow an argument. I think that the most measured response to this is that Physics simply cannot talk about God and Religion similarly cannot talk about Physics. Hawking made a mistake the first time by evoking God as an explanation for what we cannot know about and at the time it was generally thought that the other side of the Big Bang was unknowable - I think he just used the G-word to cover what he thought was unreachable. By now removing his idea of God from the process that defines the physical world he has just inflamed both sides. In reality I suspect that this whole thing has been brought up and magnified by the publishers of the new book just to raise its profile.

Oh go on - what I really mean is that "knowing the mind of God" is over portentous tosh that deserves to be in Pseuds' Corner. On the other hand, there isn't anything in our experience of reality which is larger or more significant than The Big Bang - physics does its best to describe the event and I suppose that you could say it is accepted by a lot of clever people as the starting point (literally a point) of all this universe. So maybe such a significant event deserves correspondingly significant language to describe it - it's just that God is the wrong word to use - it brings in too much of the wrong part of humanity for describing physical things. I apologise if this is a truism but God is the leader of the Spiritual Side not the head of a team of research scientists. Using the proper terms in the field will result in a much better understanding of the situation even if it does remove some of the romance. Tough I say!