Berwick Thought for the Week article: The universe is a miracle

Take Stephen Hawking, for example. He famously said: “I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark.”

So no ambivalence there…. no heaven and, by implication, no God.

But then he also famously said: “If the rate of expansion one second after the Big Bang had been smaller by even one part in a hundred thousand million million, it would have recollapsed before it reached its present size. On the other hand, if it had been greater by a part in a million, the universe would have expanded too rapidly for stars and planets to form.”

Now, notwithstanding the present debate as to the occurrence of the Big Bang (apparently, according to Professor Richard Lieu of the University of Alabama, the universe came about as a result of a series of rapid bursts of energy, known as temporal singularities, and the reason this theory is so exciting is that it does away with the need for dark energy and dark matter…. yes really it does), it still leaves unanswered the questions as to how and why the universe – and everything in it – came about in the first place.

Which brings me onto Albert Einstein, who insightfully observed “there are only two ways to live your life; one is as though nothing is a miracle, the other is as though everything is a miracle.”

Now, I simply cannot accept that a universe which is governed by a myriad of immutable physical laws came about purely by chance, that order randomly came about from chaos.

That being the case, I am left with the conclusion that the universe is in fact a miracle. And we know who is responsible for miracles don’t we…

David Harper is a Berwick resident who runs his own planning, property and environmental consultancy. When he’s not working or spending time with his wife, Colette, and their two boys and their families, he can be found restoring old cars and motorbikes.