Throughout history, certain individuals have shaped the trajectory of ideas and culture—sometimes for better, often for worse. The architects of much progressive thinking today continue to influence us, even as their names fade from memory. Among them is Stephen Hawking.
Hawking, a prominent physicist, has been described by some as an agnostic naturalist and by others as a functional atheist. One thing is clear: he believed philosophy was outdated and theology was wishful thinking. But those claims aren’t science: they’re more like scientism, a narrow-minded belief that assumes whatever science can’t physically analyze isn’t real knowledge.
Like Einstein before him, Hawking chased the dream of discovering a “theory of everything.” Einstein sought it through the unification of gravity and electromagnetism; Hawking pursued it through quantum physics. There’s something Tower-of-Babel-like about these ambitions, but I digress.
Unfortunately, investigators like Hawking deliberately exclude some of the most important evidence of all: consciousness, morality, love, beauty, purpose, and the possibility of realities beyond space, time, and matter. These aren’t minor details. Yet they assume that if something can’t be measured, tested, or physically observed, then it must be opinion, fantasy, mythology, or superstition. But that assumption “poisons the well” of serious inquiry before the investigation even begins.
This isn’t a small matter. How many thousands—perhaps millions—of young people have gone off to college with faith in God, only to return home agnostic or atheist after being fed a steady diet of godless nonsense disguised as science?
Ask a proponent of scientism: How do you measure justice? Can you run a lab test on love? Can you reduce a work of art to a chemical formula? Of course not. Yet no one honestly doubts that justice, love, and beauty are real. We grasp them through experience, reason, conscience, reflection, faith, and prayer—not microscopes and telescopes.
Science is a powerful tool. It can tell us how fast light travels, how stars are born, and how cells divide. But it cannot tell us why the universe exists. It cannot explain why cruelty is wrong or why a sunset stirs something in the soul. And it certainly cannot tell us what gives human beings dignity and inalienable rights.
Here’s the irony: the very drive to discover a “theory of everything” rests on the conviction that the universe is orderly, intelligible, and meaningful. But these aren’t scientific conclusions—they’re philosophical assumptions that scientists begin with. In other words, science stands on truths that science itself cannot prove.
Philosophers and theologians have long argued that the universe is intelligible because it was intentionally created to be so; that human dignity exists because we are more than bundles of atoms; and that meaning, purpose, and moral truth are not human constructs but glimpses of the transcendent immaterial reality we call God. This is where philosophy, divine revelation, and theology complete the task science begins but cannot finish on its own.
Of course, not every philosophical or theological claim is true. Such claims must be examined and tested—though in different kinds of laboratories. So the next time someone insists that “science is the only reliable path to truth,” ask for the scientific evidence that supports such a bizarre notion. Just be ready for a serving of well-seasoned baloney.
So when it comes to a “theory of everything,” don’t underestimate that pious old church lady (or gentleman). They may be closer to it than Stephen Hawking ever was.
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