What Your Atheist Professor Doesn't Know (But Should)

by Stephen Joseph Williams

So to recap, at some time adjacent to the publication of A Brief History of Time, Hawking began vacillating back and forth between public statements suggesting that the universe began to exist and that it was past-eternal. He has not consistently held that time had no beginning however; for example, in a 1996 book he co-authored with Roger Penrose called The Nature of Space and Time, he made the memorable quote, "Today virtually everyone agrees that the universe and time itself had a beginning at the Big Bang.”(16) This idea of a finite past comports with what the vast majority of scientists and philosophers believe, as there is overwhelming evidence supporting it (we’ll get more into that later). On this finite view, time, space, matter and energy suddenly came into existence, and prior to that, none of the above existed.