I know he was anti-religion but he wasn't the first impaired person to be like that. Sometimes these people aren't so much atheists as they are people who are angry at God.
I don’t get why it seems go be a big deal.
Let Muslims be that up in arms about a “non-beliver”.
Now it is between him and God. Hopefully it turns out for the best.
He certainly was a brilliant man, and the story of how he lived a productive life despite his ALS is inspirational. He was fortunate to have a very rare form of ALS which has a slow progression, and we are also fortunate that he lived in a time when technology allowed him to communicate with us for decades after he lost his speech faculties.
His early work on black holes and his discovery of Hawking radiation were genuine contributions. Much of his later work was actually wrong, especially when he strayed into fields outside his expertise. For example, he was one of the long time doubters in the existence of the Higgs Boson, though he finally admitted that it had been proven.
The raising of his children largely fell on his first wife and hired staff, though that is true of many high achievers in science and academia who did not have his physical limitations. It sounds like his children understood and appreciated him for what he could do, rather than what he couldn’t.
As far as his marriages, his first marriage lasted 30 years and his second marriage for a decade. He remained close to his first wife until his death. Given the obstacles they faced because of his circumstances, I think we need to judge his personal life with a healthy dose of sympathy.
As far as religion, he seems to have held a mix of views throughout his life.
In A Brief History of Time, he famously said that if his favored cosmology model were correct and time did not have a fixed beginning because time did not exist independent of space, then there was “No need for a Creator”. Christian theologians (for example, Robert Russell) have actually argued that this model is the precise belief many Christians have held since Saint Augustine.
Both of Hawkings wives were fairly devout and Hawking was even seen attending church services on a number of occasions with his second wife.
His views on religion in the last few years of his life tended towards atheism, but he was never mean or dogmatic about it. In a 2011 interview for a Discovery Channel special, he was quoted as saying: “We are each free to believe what we want and it is my view that the simplest explanation is there is no God. No one created the universe and no one directs our fate. This leads me to a profound realization. There is probably no heaven, and no afterlife either. We have this one life to appreciate the grand design of the universe, and for that, I am extremely grateful.”
He undoubtedly knows the truth now, but I will leave it to God to judge his life. I for one think the world was richer because God created this man and placed him in the world to live among us.