"The Grand Design" book by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow is less than two months away from being 5-years-old.
This book deals with the beginning of time itself, states fascinating facts about religion and science, while presenting the three big questions; 'Why is there something rather than nothing'? 'Why do we exist'? 'Why this particular set of laws and not some other'?
To find out definitively if there is a God or Gods, The Master Theory must be solved. More on the M-theory in just a moment. Was the universe and human kind designed by a benevolent creator or does science offer another explanation? In the 1600s a person named Rene' Descartes believed God set the world in motion, then left it entirely alone. That's not an unreasonable explanation. After all, evil is as old as the human race itself, yet Christians claim there will one day be no evil. How many more 1000s of years do we have to put up with the Christian answer;
"God works in mysterious ways."
As we all know, the world is both kind and cruel, yet many religions claim it will only be kind some day.
Hungry child in the dessert and the flies that cloud her eyes, I get this feeling...why are little ones born only to suffer? Powerful lyrics by the drummer and word bearer for Rush, Neil Peart. It's things like this happening forever that have turned me away from God.
The ignorance of nature led the ancients to invent Gods to lords. These words come from "The Grand Design." People of the world still believed the Earth was flat when the Bible was first written. The U.S. constitution prohibits religious teaching in school, it's called 'intelligent design.'
Perhaps the human race exists by an intricate plan of science, God(s) or a total random act of God(s) or the Big Bang Theory. The M-theory if figured out will provide all the answers. "The Grand Design" states that the M-theory is the ultimate theory of everything. It's a whole family of different theories. It's the only theory that has all the properties we think the final theory ought to have Hawking or Mlodinow said. The M may also stand for Miracle or Mystery. The M-theory is indeed the ultimate mathematical equation. Mathematical machinery is one aspect of figuring out the universe Albert Einstein said.
Although Hawking like myself does not believe in God, Hawking makes a strong case for the Almighty, Bumba, Odin, Zeus, Gaia, Allah, Muhammad, Zoroaster, The Maker and the many other infinite names for our loving / wrathful Watchmaker. If we (humans) started out as infants we would not be here, hence Bumba, my favorite name for God had to create adult males and females. Ah, the timeless question; Which came first, the chicken or the egg? There is known documentation that humans have been arguing over science and religion for more than 3,000 years. Also, people have existed for about a 190,000 years, yet there is only about 7,000 years of recorded history.
Regardless of whether you believe in a bombastic creator or science, one thing is certain. As we all know from our reading, the human race is the only one in the "Goldilocks Zone," aka the "Habitable Zone," a zone in which planetary temperatures are 'just right' for our existence. Earth being the third planet from the sun has the ideal obit of the sun. Life is indeed in 3's; Man, woman, child, birth, life, death, pitcher, hitter, catcher...
Touching on every aspect of "The Grand Design" would require way too many words, but it's indeed a fascinating book and not just because what is written in it, but how it spurns the imagination and quest for infinite knowledge.
