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MARCO WERMAN: British physicist Stephen Hawking was the subject of some interesting news headlines today. As in, “Hawking says God not necessary for creation.” The headlines were generated by just-published excerpts from a new book. It’s called The Grand Design and was co-authored by Hawking and Caltech scientist Leonard Mlodinow. This “no God necessary” idea is likely to sell a bunch of books. But the theory is much more interesting than that, reports The World’s Alex Gallafent.

ALEX GALLAFENT:  Stephen Hawking has always believed that we live in a universe governed by rational laws. Discovering and understanding those laws, he’s long argued, would give us the tools to confront questions such as, how did the universe begin? Where is it going? And how, or will, it end?

STEPHEN HAWKING:  If we find the answers to these questions we really shall know the mind of God.

GALLAFENT: That’s Hawking’s poetic side. Knowing “The Mind of God” was a construction he used at the very end of his 1988 bestseller, A Brief History of Time. The ambiguity of the phrase made room for God in science. But God’s always been there, says Christopher Potter.

CHRISTOPHER POTTER: God is always popping back into the question because that’s what you’re trying to come up with. A description ultimately that doesn’t include God.

GALLAFENT: Potter is the author of You Are Here: A Portable History of the Universe. For him, Stephen Hawking’s new book isn’t so much about getting rid of God as it is about asserting a wholly scientific explanation for the universe. The new theory involves a redefinition of time. We already have a working model for the beginning of the universe, the big bang.

HAWKING: The initial size may have been a millimeter divided by ten billion billion billion, or even smaller.

POTTER: And that takes the universe back to a sort of quantum-sized object, 13.7 billion years ago, to something that was actually pure energy.

GALLAFENT: And so the story of our universe is that incredibly small quantum-sized bit of pure energy evolving into particles and fields and elements and life.

POTTER: But then we have the question of well where did the quantum energy come from? And so we keep trying to tell the story in time.

GALLAFENT:  In other words, what came before the big bang? Stephen Hawking now says that we’re making a mistake by trying to explain things in terms of time because in that earliest quantum state there was no time. Instead, he writes, a process of spontaneous creation derived from the laws of physics is responsible. There is precedent for that kind of idea. Quantum physics describes indeterminate elementary particles that pop in and out of existence at random.

HAWKING: Einstein was very unhappy about this apparent randomness in nature. His views were summed up in his famous phrase “God Does Not Play Dice.” Not only does God definitely play dice but he sometimes confuses us by throwing them where they can’t be seen.

GALLAFENT: That was Hawking a few years ago. Now he says that idea of spontaneous creation can describe the emergence of the entire universe.

RODNEY HOLDER: To say that the universe spontaneously created itself out of nothing? This seems self contradictory.

GALLAFENT: Rodney Holder is at the Faraday Institute for Science and Religion at Cambridge University.

HOLDER: When physicists talk in this way they generally mean not nothing but a something, something like a spacetime with quantum fields acting on it, something like that.

GALLAFENT: In his new book Hawking does refer to a something. That’s string theory. Cosmologists’ best attempt so far to unify the elegant spacetime theories of Einstein with the chaotic descriptions of quantum theory. Author Christopher Potter says Hawking uses string theory to reconsider the shape of the big bang, when the universe was that tiny quantum-sized bit of pure energy.

POTTER: In a way what he’s saying is that when the universe is that dense and that much of a quantum object, time has actually become a dimension of space.

GALLAFENT:  So to recap, according to Hawking, the universe doesn’t “begin” as we understand things to “begin.” And there is no time until after the universe has come into being.

POTTER: I mean it’s a sort of mindblowing idea.

GALLAFENT: So if we can imagine the universe beginning outside of time, then the idea of a first cause becomes meaningless. But that doesn’t necessarily do away with God, says Richard Holder in Cambridge. He’s an astrophysicist and an ordained Anglican minister.

RICHARD HOLDER: Theologians don’t really have any particular vested interest in a single moment equals nought when God set it going and then just sat back. No, in Christian theology God is continuously creating at every moment.

GALLAFENT: Indeed, on that account the universe is dependent on the continuing creative action of God moment by moment. And Christian theology has long thought of God as existing outside of human time. But Richard Holder’s broader concern is that Stephen Hawking doesn’t address questions about a meaningful universe.

HOLDER: Why there is something rather than nothing? Why there is a universe at all?

GALLAFENT: Some have suggested that Hawking’s new book forces people to choose between reason and religion. That might be good for book sales in a polarized culture such as ours. But don’t worry. A complete understanding of the universe remains as elusive as ever. Elementary particles come in many flavors. So can reasoned beliefs. For The World, I’m Alex Gallafent.

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This week’s pod is entirely given over to a conversation I had with Sue Westrum. It includes two astounding pieces of archive tape recorded in New Guinea by her husband Peter. The first is the Westrums’ first meeting with the Berik people who lived essentially in the jungle, in several villages a few dozen miles upriver of a modern Indonesian port town. The second recording is of Berik singing and drumming: one night a large number of them gathered unnanounced outside the Westrums’ makeshift home, and they just started playing and chanting. In both cases, the Westrums weren’t sure how to respond, though they sensed that these were friendly gestures.

Over time, the Westrums learned the Berik language. They also began teaching some of the Berik about the Bible, with a view to selecting some of the best students to help them translate it into Berik. The Westrums — and Wycliffe Bible Translators — insist that they are not Christian missionaries, that their role as translators is different. And in some cases the roles can be kept separate. But perhaps not in this case. The Berik had animist beliefs and had been barely been exposed to other religions. It’s difficult to imagine how language classes focused on the Bible would not sometimes morph into Bible study and discussions of belief. Certainly, during the time that the Westrums lived among them, many Berik converted to Christianity.

There are so many aspects of Berik language and culture that are different from American English that the process of translating the Bible was painstakingly slow. One small example: for the Berik, the emotional center of a person is his gut — something between the heart and the soul in western thinking. The Wycliffe method is to translate words, ideas and messages in ways that speak to the target audience. But there are, presumably, doctrinal limits as to how far a translator of the Bible can stray. (True, this hasn’t stopped some Bible translators in the past from veering radically and quite imaginatively from the original).

Eventually, the Bible was translated into Berik– the very first book (aside from education and nutrition booklets) to be published in what had been an oral language: a cause for celebration among those who wish to spread Christianity, but far from that among those who argue against such cultural and linguistic intervention in fragile indigenous societies. I barely get into this debate in this particular podcast, but I feel duty-bound to do so at some point in the future.
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You might expect arguments over street names in Israel/the occupied territories and South Africa: these are places with profoundly traumatic recent histories. But wherever there are streets — or other things to name — there are heated debates over what to call them. Why, some ask, name a new federal government building after Ronald Reagan, a small-government president whose administration tried to prevent such statist expansionism?

Also in this podcast, a conversation with Bob Creson, President and CEO of what appears to be the world’s largest Bible translation organization, Wycliffe Bible Translators USA. According to Wycliffe, about two hundred million people lack access to the Bible in their native tongue. So, with the help of technology and donations, Wycliffe has set itself a deadline: it aims to have at least started translating the Bible into every language by 2025. Nearly all the languages that Wycliffe is currently working on are oral languages only: Wycliffe’s field translators must first design a writing system for any of these languages before committing a translation to paper. So in those cases, the Bible will likely be the first book to appear in that language, and that culture. The act of introducing the written word and an outside religion to a group of people who hitherto knew neither is, depending on how you look at it, freighted with promise or fraught with peril. More on this in future podcasts.

Wycliffe, by the way, is named after 14th century theologian John Wycliffe, who translated parts of the Bible from Latin into Middle English.

Finally, language journalist Michael Erard makes the case for using only artisanal, locally grown and sustainably packaged words. His satirical essay first appeared in web magazine The Morning News. Download MP3

As promised, this week’s Technology Podcast is devoid of any news, or non-news as the case may be, related to Michael Jackson. Instead, WTP 250 has a heavenly host of stories we hope you’ll find intriguing. At right is a picture of a page from one of the oldest Christian bibles in the world. It’s called the Codex Sinaiticus, and it was written in the 4th century AD. After it was found in a monestary in the Sinai, it’s various pages and fragments were scattered to collections across the world. Now, those fragments and pages have been reunited online. We’ll hear an interview with the British Library’s Head of Collection Care, Helen Shenton. The British Library is one of the partner institutions involved in putting the Codex online. We’ll also have updates on two stories we’ve been following closely in recent weeks. First, the violence in post-election Iran continues, and technology continues to play a critical role. Reporter Cyrus Farivar will update us on the global geeks who are trying to keep the information flowing into and out of the country. We follow that with a look at the violence that has flared in western China, and assess the ways and means that the Chinese government is using to control the way that violence is portrayed. We speak with Xiao Qiang, founder and co-editor of the China Digitial Times. And then we end the podcast with a lovely little story of musical collaboration. The members of Hal and the Big 5 have never actually jammed together. Instead, they’ve traded music tracks in cyberspace, and then mixed it all together. Too cool.

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