I would like to understand women?

That eminent physicist Stephen Hawking is in the news again this morning creating a flurry of headlines including "Scientists close to unravelling universe's origins", "Pope Advised Hawking Not to Study Origin of Universe", "Life on Earth Dangerous, Humans Should Colonize the Moon", and the one that I liked best, "I would like to understand women".

The single lecture Hawking gave in Hong Kong yesterday has provided a feast of headlines for the media and for bloggers. Where does one start with provocation like this?

While I empathise with Hawking in wanting to better understand women - the most supreme mystery of the universe after Godde herself - I am also drawn to this question Hawking posed in this lecture: "Does it require a creator to decree how the universe began? Or is the initial state of the universe determined by a law of science?"

The Gospel of St John begins with these words:

"In the beginning was the Word;
the Word was with God
and the Word was God."

Were I to have five minutes with Stephen Hawking my question to him would be "but, Stephen, who do you think created 'the laws of science' which might have decreed how, or when, the universe began?"

Where I am in agreement with eminent minds like Hawking or Einstein is in questioning this picture that many seem to have of a God who "created" the universe as though God were some magician mixing up some great doughy mixture in a kitchen, or like some magician going "abracadabra" with his wand and "zapping' creation into being. A more likely beginning scenario I suggest is contained in those perplexing words about "The Word" that begins John's Gospel. God created ideas, even an idea - the idea of a series of laws that would govern the whole of creation - and it was those laws that explain the origin of the temporal universe and which continue to animate its behaviours. Albert Einstein certainly had more empathy with this view of God.

I suspect Stephen Hawking does also but I'd still love to spend time with him seeing how he might respond to my question.

The war between science and religion I contend is largely a phoney war. What gets scientists mad is not religion or God per se but rather God or religion when it is interpreted as magic, superstition and irrational concepts largely geared to quelling emotional insecurity rather than actually leading us to better understand, or enter, this "Mystery" or "Word" which explains who we are, where we came from and where we are going to.

As science herself demonstrates so conclusively today, at the origin of everything there is ultimately mystery and no rational way for us to "have all the answers". This was the insight of the great theological minds, and of the poets and mystics like the author of St John's Gospel centuries, even millennia, before science itself was a concept.

What I love though is the implication behind what Hawking is reputed to have said in Hong Kong though that after he has found out what lies at the heart of the mystery of black holes he would still like to understand what lies behind the mystery of how women think. Surely the greatest genius of the Creator was not in making night and day, or matter and anti-matter, or Venus and Mars, but in his teasing intrigue by dividing creation into two genders who are each incomplete without the other.

Regards, Tom Scott

Tom Scott is the pen name of the editor of Catholica, Brian Coyne.

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