Abstract
In a book I reviewed for the December 1996 issue of this journal, the Rev. Dr. David Wilkinson claimed that philosopher William Craig was wrong to label Cambridge physicist Stephen Hawking an anti-realist because of his use of "imaginary time". (See Craig's incisive critique of A Brief History of Time in his Theism, Atheism, and Big Bang Cosmology [Oxford]). Says Wilkinson, It is wrong to write off Hawking as just an idealist or having just an instrumentalist view of his theory. He is using a mathematical technique in order to describe the real Universe (p. 156). However, this recent book by Hawking and Roger Penrose, a professor of mathematics at the University of Oxford, contradicts Wilkinson's assertion and vindicates Craig: Hawking, in fact, does not believe in a real Universe, and he is an instrumentalist in the idealist camp!