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# Hawking kills gods, philosophers
- URL: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/hawkings-kills-gods-philosophers/
- Published: 2010-09-08T07:09:06.000Z
- Updated: 2019-02-14T22:09:37.000Z
- Description: Rationalist humanism goes beyond scientism
- Author: Tony Curzon Price
- Tags: Cultural politics, #Migrated, culture, Science, #en, #Import 2026-04-09 17:02

Maybe it is the [desire to sell books](http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2010/sep/03/stephen-hawking-pr-help-god?ref=opendemocracy.net) that makes Stephen Hawking claim the death of God and the death of Philosophy. (If you're in the UK, you can listen Hawking make this claim [here](http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid%5F8978000/8978820.stm?ref=opendemocracy.net).) M-theory, a variant of string theory, offers many possibe values for the cosmological constants and therefore many possible shapes of universes. So when you come to ask yourself the question, "Why am I here?", here is the answer: "you are in the universe which, by the setting of its cosmological constants, makes you, the perceiver possible. If things were much different – and they could be – you would not be here to ask that question."

This is a beautiful and intricate answer to the question. My favourite telling of it is in an [article](http://74.125.155.132/scholar?q=cache:nMx1gjonlYEJ:scholar.google.com/+allintitle:+%22Why+anything%3F+Why+this%3F%22+author:parfit&hl=en&num=100&as%5Fsdt=2000&ref=opendemocracy.net) by philosopher Derek Parfitt. But I also think that the answer fails to answer the question in several important ways - it is an argument that fails *ignoratio elenchi*, as scholastics might have said: a valid conclusion that fails to address the problem it purports to solve.

There are broadly two big issues left out of Hawking's vision for the answer: first, there is no room in it for the self, for consciousness, for being. So in asking "Why am *I* here?", it conveniently forgets to answer anything about what selfhood might be. And second, most people asking that question are asking it as a prelude to another question, "What *should* I do?". And Hawking has no room in his M-theory for a world of "ought".

The two *lacunae* are closely related. The project for a life can only come out of a sense of empowered being, and that is what opens the possibility of a meaningful answer to "ought" questions. Our being and a sense of what we should do today arise from the possibility of self-production of the aspects of reality that are created out of meanings. I highly recommend the Raymond Tallis / Roger Scruton discussion of this point in this week's [Standpoint](http://www.standpointmag.co.uk/features-sept-10-staving-off-despair-roger-scruton-raymond-tallis-science-religion?page=0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,9&ref=opendemocracy.net), where Tallis writes:

*A true humanist isn't somebody who naturalises humanity and argues that we can be explained entirely in biological terms. We are profoundly mysterious and we've hardly started thinking about ourselves in a post-religious way. As a humanist, I share something which is central to religion: a feeling for the sacredness and profound mystery of human life.*