Whose Design? Physical, Philosophical and Theological Questions Regarding Hawking and Mlodinow’s Grand Design

Abstract

Stephen Hawking and Leonard Molodinow’s (HM) The Grand Design1 faces some of the big questions of the human thought: “Why is there something rather than nothing? Why do we exist? Why this particular set of laws and not some other?” (p. 10, p. 171). Their answer is rooted in the concepts of “scientific determinism” (p. 30, p. 34) and “model-dependent realism” (p. 7). According to this epistemological view, “our perception—and hence the observations upon which our theories are based—is not direct, but rather is shaped by a kind of lens, the interpretive structure of our human brains” (p. 46), so “a well-constructed model creates a reality of its own” (p. 172). This background helps to understand some of the most controversial assertions of the book. In physics, scientists may prefer one model from another when the former explains more experiments and does it better.