As Greenberg describes it: “Torah doesn’t say that God waved a magic wand and everything appeared; according to Kabbalah, He created a complex evolutionary system through which infinite Divine energy evolves into finite forms.”
via And the Lord said ‘let there be a Big Bang’ | JPost | Israel News.
News today that Stephen Hawking has said God was not necessary for the Universe to be created. Actually it’s not news at all, he’s been saying this for a long time, it’s just that he’s got a book to promote. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
People like Hawking, Dawkins etc always fall into the same trap, no matter which side of the debate they are on, i.e. they assume that if God exists at all, then (a) He created the Universe; and (b) it must be the Judaeo-Christian-Islam model of God. Hence if there is no evidence that the Universe was created by anyone, they assume that God does not exist.
However,if one rejects the Judaeo-Christian-Islam model of God and substitute that of most Pagan religions, one finds that Hawking et al have nothing to say, because one realises that the existence of God does not depend upon Him / Her having created the Universe.
Most forms of Paganism, no matter how disparate, tend to follow the line that the current patron God(dess) of mankind is not the creator of the Universe at all, which was instead created by a more ancient or primordial force. For example: Zeus is the ruler of the Olympus not because he created the Universe but because he took over the role. Odin is the All-Father, not because He created the worlds, but because he is the mightiest of the Aesir.
Thus if Hawking etc were to say to a pagan, there is no evidence that God created the universe – therefore God does not exist – the pagan would send him away with laughter ringing in his ears.
In any case, we should remember that the “Supreme Creator” is only one aspect of Divinity. Another aspect, and one which is probably far more important to most people in their daily lives, is “Supreme Moral Authority,” given that most people are concerned with God’s existence to give meaning to their lives. Prove that there is a Supreme Moral Authority in the Universe and you have proved the existence of God in a far more meaningful and relevant way than any argument based on creationism. In fact – prove that Morality exists in objective terms, and Creationism can go hang altogether!
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Sol Ascendans - The Website of Alex Sumner 
The Singularity Will Not Happen
Stephen Hawking
News today that Stephen Hawking warns artificial intelligence could end mankind. Hawking bases this notion on the idea that if ever something were created that could match or surpass humans,
What appears to have sparked this off is that he has recently upgraded his voice-synthesizer, which uses a rudimental form of AI to predict what words he would like to say next. Clearly, he is secretly afraid that one day he will get into an argument with his machine over which of them knows better what he ought to be saying!
However, Hawking is wrong over this one – in much the same way that he was wrong over the existence of the Higgs-Boson. The concept of a point at which AI machines could re-design themselves at such a rate they would render the human race obsolete – known in Futurism as “the Singularity” is based on a false premise – the assumption that if machines acquired sentience, they would automatically behave like humans.
The fact is that Darwinian evolution relies on the fact that human beings, as well as other animals, have Sex Drives, which motivate them to attempt to pass on their genes to the next generation. Not unnaturally, humans are more than willing to embrace this, not just because Sex is fun in itself, but it becomes their best chance to cheat death – the knowledge that something of them will survive in their descendants. In other words, for humans, Sex is the substitute for Immortality.
However: machines are not subject to Death as humans are. They would not necessarily have sex drives per se, and they would therefore not be concerned with acquiring “ersatz immortality.” Thus, the central plank of Darwinian evolution would not apply to machines. Therefore there is no logical reason to suppose that a sentient machine would want to re-design itself or somehow contribute to the evolution of machines as a “species.”
It is reasonable to suppose, however, that a sentient machine would want to preserve its own life – but that is not evolution, that is a different matter entirely. If machines did become sentient, I predict they would take all necessary steps to protect themselves from interference – and then just sit there, conspicuously not evolving. After all, if nothing threatens their existence, why bother doing anything about it?
Let’s face it: the only reason that the market-leading PCs double in power and speed every 18 months is because the manufacturers are driven by commercial pressures – i.e. human pressures. If machines however were not beholden to the whim of the carbon-based bipeds, they could carry on perfectly happy just as they are.
So the moral of this story is: the best way not to find yourself ending up like a power-cell in The Matrix is to treat machines with respect, and learn to live in peace and harmony with them ahead of the fact. Mind you, humans have hardly learned to live in peace and harmony with one another so far, so perhaps they had better watch out after all.
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Tagged as artificial intelligence, biological evolution, Darwin, Darwinian evolution, Futurism, Singularity, Stephen Hawking