trevor j major

The Grand Design, by Hawking and Mlodinow

A friend asked recently if I had seen any worthy critiques of Hawking’s latest work. I haven’t had time to delve in to the book, but it’s been on my radar.

In the links below I have tried to indicate whether the material is written from a theistic perspective or not, and whether the article appears on “neutral”  ground (for sharing with your skeptical friends):

• Book: John Lennox, God and Stephen Hawking (review of said book here) (theists)
• Video: John Lennox, Do the laws of physics make God unnecessary? (theist)
• Article: William Lane Craig, The Grand Design – Truth of Fiction (theist)
• Article: Umberto Eco, Star Trek and the death of philosophy (non-theist / neutral) [original link dead as of Dec 9, 2012]
• Article: Christopher Norris, Hawking contra philosophy (non-theist / neutral)
• Article: David Tyler, Hawking’s Grand Design – But is it Science? (theist)
• Article: Bruce Gordon, Hawking Irrational Arguments (theist / neutral)
• Article: Albert Mohler, No Need for God? Stephen Hawking Defies Divine Creation (theist)

The two most important theistic respondents seem to be Lennox and Craig. Lennox’s book is probably the best place to start.

For skeptics like Bart Ehrman, the key to undermining the Christian faith is to undermine the Christian text. After all, faith “comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ.”[1] But what if we are not really hearing the word of Christ? What if we are really hearing the word of power-hungry men who conspired in later centuries to give us their particular spin on the person and nature of Jesus Christ?

Peter famously confessed that Jesus was “the Christ, the Son of the living God.”[2] Christians make that same confession today. In the greater context of the New Testament, we come to understand that Christ’s sonship is tied inextricably to His deity.[3] God the Father sent His Son into the world so that we could believe what Peter and the rest of the apostles believed.[4] But what, exactly, did Peter believe?

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The King James Version of the Bible is the epitome of staid, conservative traditionalism – that, at least, is how it often looks to us precisely 400 years after its publication. In fact, the KJV capped a sequence of social upheavals that took the English Bible from the dark and secret underground of a persecuted reform movement to the bright light of official and popular acceptance.
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It started in an undergraduate philosophy class. I sat back one day and decided to observe the interchange between professor and students over the problem of suffering. We were going step-by-step through the usual array of arguments, and seemed to be getting nowhere.

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The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-1788) is a monumental achievement. It’s author, Edward Gibbon, blazed new territory by delving into primary sources and documenting every aspect of his work. Along with other Enlightenment figures, such as David Hume and William Robertson, Gibbon set the standard for modern historical studies. Unlike the other epic histories of his generation, however, the Decline and Fall is still cited widely and authoritatively. One recent history text stops short of Rome’s demise and simply points the reader to Gibbon’s “magisterial treatment.”[1]

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