Can Hawking's Godless TOE Run without Consciousness Internal and Fundamental to Penrose's Cyclic Universe?

Abstract

Hawking-Mlodinow Theory of Everything (“HAM-TOE”) requires the assumption that mathematics has within its own nature the power to ‘breath fire’ into its own equations. But one must ask what actually guarantees that just because ‘the positive energy of matter can be balanced by the negative gravitational energy’ it must follow that the universe ‘will create itself from nothing.’ Hawking was the seventeenth occupant of the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics at Cambridge University. How remarkable then that, when the full implications of the HAM-TOE model are properly drawn out, the resulting theological-metaphysical model bears an uncanny resemblance to the theological perspective of the second occupant of the Lucasian Chair, Sir Isaac Newton, who suggested that space was the ‘sensorium of God.’ The universe uses the perceiving process within the dualistic world of experience in order to explore and experience its own nature. Human beings occupy a central place in this process because they are the universe’s agents (leaving aside the issue of beings elsewhere in the universe) in the process of universal self-exploration, self-perfection and self-transcendence. This indeed is a universal process of self-discovery which modern theologians may wish to call ‘God.’