Thomas Aquinas Over Stephen Hawking - Mark Rhoads, Loyola Man Sets Things Right!

Stephen Hawking is smart. He was on The Simpsons. The celebrated British physicist and author Big Banged the argument that God is irrelevant.

Illinois Review's Mark Rhoads did not issue a Fatwah, but offered common sense and a sober nod to the greatest metaphysician of all time - St. Thomas Aquinas.

You see metaphysics* has trumped physics, from the time that Aristotle was a sophomore.

By Mark Rhoads

Steve Hawking vs. Tom Aquinas

There's little doubt that Cambridge Math Professor Stephen Hawking is one of the most prominent theoretical physicists of the last 75 years. But that distinction does not guarantee his infallibility as a philsopher or even gurantee that he always shows common sense. In his new book on Grand Design, Hawking's co-author Leonard Mlodinow is careful to say their book does not claim that God does not exist, but only that God is "not necessary" to explain creation. As Seth Meyers and Amy Poehler on Saturday Night Live Weekend Update might say, Really? Really Mr. Mlodinow?

Hawking rejects the answer of Saint Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) who said that God was the Creator or in Latin the Prima Causa or first cause who was the unmoved mover or uncaused cause of other events in the chain of creation and evolution. Hawking explained to that great deep thinker Larry King of all people that "gravity" is the first cause." Really? Gravity just always existed even in the void? Gravity is not nothing and yet Hawking agrees the universe came from nothing. Does Hawking think that "gravity" or "quantum physics" is the Creator responsible for what Hawking calls "spontaneous creation?" No, not exactly, but he points in that direction. In his field, Hawking is brilliant. But like all scientists who face the mystery of creation, he must wander far outside his field with dubious results.

AMDG, Mark!

*

Metaphysics is a branch of philosophy concerned with explaining the fundamental nature of being and the world although it is not easily defined. Someone who studies metaphysics would be called either a metaphysicist[3] or a metaphysician.

The word derives from the Greek words μετά (metá) (meaning "beyond" or "after") and φυσικά (physiká) (meaning "physical"), "physical" referring to those works on matter by Aristotle in antiquity. The prefix meta- ("beyond") was attached to the chapters in Aristotle's work that followed after the chapters on "physics," in posthumously edited collections. Aristotle himself did not call these works Metaphysics. Aristotle called some of the subjects treated there "first philosophy