Posted on 05/15/2011 7:58:19 PM PDT by Steelfish
Stephen Hawking: 'There Is No Heaven; It's A Fairy Story' In an exclusive interview with the Guardian, the cosmologist shares his thoughts on death, M-theory, human purpose and our chance existence
Sunday 15 May 2011
A belief that heaven or an afterlife awaits us is a "fairy story" for people afraid of death, Stephen Hawking has said. In a dismissal that underlines his firm rejection of religious comforts, Britain's most eminent scientist said there was nothing beyond the moment when the brain flickers for the final time.
Hawking, who was diagnosed with motor neurone disease at the age of 21, shares his thoughts on death, human purpose and our chance existence in an exclusive interview with the Guardian today.
The incurable illness was expected to kill Hawking within a few years of its symptoms arising, an outlook that turned the young scientist to Wagner, but ultimately led him to enjoy life more, he has said, despite the cloud hanging over his future.
"I have lived with the prospect of an early death for the last 49 years. I'm not afraid of death, but I'm in no hurry to die. I have so much I want to do first," he 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," he added.
Hawking's latest comments go beyond those laid out in his 2010 book, The Grand Design, in which he asserted that there is no need for a creator to explain the existence of the universe. The book provoked a backlash from some religious leaders, including the chief rabbi, Lord Sacks, who accused Hawking of committing an "elementary fallacy" of logic.
(Excerpt) Read more at guardian.co.uk ...
An all powerful omniscient God must necessarily have always existed, must currently exist and will always exist...or be “alpha and omega...the first and last” as the Bible says.
If God arose from a cause, then we must look past God and worship those forces from which He emerged.
Applying Occam’s razor to the questioned reality of God leads me to those two conclusions. It is observed generally in man that mankind has a built in impulse to worship “something” outside of himself.
Intellectuals though, often school themselves against such impulses believing that only knowledge derived by observation and inductive reasoning can lead to truth. According to such “intellectuals”, “supposed truth” based on tautologous arguments(ideas that can’t be logically proven true or false) must be viewed with benign suspicion at best...or at worst discarded by burnings of literatures and mass supressions of religious adherents, limiting their influences in the public arena if not outright killing them!
Your questions/comments are smug and impertinent. Why is it that such a large percentage of athiests seem to be so intolerant of people of faith? Agnostics at least tend admit to doubt/perplexing ambiguity about God, the universe and the genisis of life.
You, on the other hand, think that anyone who disagrees with your complete rejection of all things metaphysical is a rube.
You make debate distasteful, almost to the point that you appear to shun open debate. But then, you just don’t have a need to hear anyone else’s opinion.
So why are you here on FreeRepublic??
But none of that is particularly relevant: Planck, Einstein, and Hawking do not have any serious training in metaphysics, philosophy, or theology. As such, their opinions are no more important than yours or mine. Invoking them as authorities in these matters one way or the other is nonsensical.
Hawking's lengthy discourses on these matters is not new, and have always been cringe-inducingly silly. His arguments are childish and unsophisticated, and many of them were raised and dismissed even by the pre-Christian Greeks. Much serious philosophical work beyond that of a sophomore bull session appears to be completely unknown to Hawking. He should stay within his field and stop making a fool of himself for the sake of physics if not for the sake of theology. His criticisms advance the latter not even an Angstrom.
Same here. Neither of them claimed to know the hows and whys behind the universe-creating intelligence (God), but they knew the most important thing -- the fundamental fact of His existence.
June 11, 2006
I’ve found God, says man who cracked the genome
Steven Swinford
THE scientist who led the team that cracked the human genome is to publish a book explaining why he now believes in the existence of God and is convinced that miracles are real.
Francis Collins, the director of the US National Human Genome Research Institute, claims there is a rational basis for a creator and that scientific discoveries bring man “closer to God”.
His book, The Language of God, to be published in September, will reopen the age-old debate about the relationship between science and faith. “One of the great tragedies of our time is this impression that has been created that science and religion have to be at war,” said Collins, 56.
“I don’t see that as necessary at all and I think it is deeply disappointing that the shrill voices that occupy the extremes of this spectrum have dominated the stage for the past 20 years.”
For Collins, unravelling the human genome did not create a conflict in his mind. Instead, it allowed him to “glimpse at the workings of God”.
“When you make a breakthrough it is a moment of scientific exhilaration because you have been on this search and seem to have found it,” he said. “But it is also a moment where I at least feel closeness to the creator in the sense of having now perceived something that no human knew before but God knew all along.
“When you have for the first time in front of you this 3.1 billion-letter instruction book that conveys all kinds of information and all kinds of mystery about humankind, you can’t survey that going through page after page without a sense of awe. I can’t help but look at those pages and have a vague sense that this is giving me a glimpse of God’s mind.”
Collins joins a line of scientists whose research deepened their belief in God. Isaac Newton, whose discovery of the laws of gravity reshaped our understanding of the universe, said: “This most beautiful system could only proceed from the dominion of an intelligent and powerful being.”
Although Einstein revolutionised our thinking about time, gravity and the conversion of matter to energy, he believed the universe had a creator. “I want to know His thoughts; the rest are details,” he said. However Galileo was famously questioned by the inquisition and put on trial in 1633 for the “heresy” of claiming that the earth moved around the sun.
Among Collins’s most controversial beliefs is that of “theistic evolution”, which claims natural selection is the tool that God chose to create man. In his version of the theory, he argues that man will not evolve further.
“I see God’s hand at work through the mechanism of evolution. If God chose to create human beings in his image and decided that the mechanism of evolution was an elegant way to accomplish that goal, who are we to say that is not the way,” he says.
“Scientifically, the forces of evolution by natural selection have been profoundly affected for humankind by the changes in culture and environment and the expansion of the human species to 6 billion members. So what you see is pretty much what you get.”
Collins was an atheist until the age of 27, when as a young doctor he was impressed by the strength that faith gave to some of his most critical patients.
“They had terrible diseases from which they were probably not going to escape, and yet instead of railing at God they seemed to lean on their faith as a source of great comfort and reassurance,” he said. “That was interesting, puzzling and unsettling.”
He decided to visit a Methodist minister and was given a copy of C S Lewis’s Mere Christianity, which argues that God is a rational possibility. The book transformed his life. “It was an argument I was not prepared to hear,” he said. “I was very happy with the idea that God didn’t exist, and had no interest in me. And yet at the same time, I could not turn away.”
His epiphany came when he went hiking through the Cascade Mountains in Washington state. He said: “It was a beautiful afternoon and suddenly the remarkable beauty of creation around me was so overwhelming, I felt, ‘I cannot resist this another moment’.”
Collins believes that science cannot be used to refute the existence of God because it is confined to the “natural” world. In this light he believes miracles are a real possibility. “If one is willing to accept the existence of God or some supernatural force outside nature then it is not a logical problem to admit that, occasionally, a supernatural force might stage an invasion,” he says.
Brilliant yet brainwashed by an atheist system. Pray for his salvation.
God Bless Our Troops
I am very sad for Mr. Hawking. When the Christ rose from the
dead even his disciples had trouble believing it. But they
eventually did after seeing him long enough back in the flesh.
And He spoke about the reality of heaven. Plus he had the
ability to make nature conform to his own will....
Please Mr.Hawking do not be afraid to believe in Christ and
in his promise of eternal life to all those who repent and
put their full trust in Him.
Very few people will think you’re afraid of the dark if
you place your faith in the Christ.
He’s also dissing fairy tales, which he probably has no understanding of.
By Louise Von Franz:
Animus and Anima in Fairy Tales ISBN 1-894574-01-X
Archetypal Patterns in Fairy Tales ISBN 0-919123-77-5
Feminine in Fairy Tales ISBN 1-57062-609-X
Individuation in Fairy Tales ISBN 1-57062-613-8
Interpretation of Fairytales
He has his weak moments as he gets older and the media jumps on it to demoralize the rest, as usual. He has suffered many times bouts of depression, and the media loves it.
I have had a life after death experience, and, let me tell you, or brain is what slows us down. It is primitive and cannot process things but in very limited ways. Once you go on the other side and this burden of maintaining it for daily control purposes goes out, every thing is crystal clear, without any friction. The pictures might be deplorable depending on where you go, but the clarity of it all is simply amazing. All dullness in the head goes away and no pain what so ever, no delirium or tiredness, all your fever pain, poof! gone...
Now, no one has to believe it, but let me say something about the certainty that the depression of Stephen Hawking talks about: certainty of death or of anything is death itself, it is of the domain of palm readers who want to dispose of your life as you organize it, paying them for helping them to dispose of it for others and themselves. It is the oldest gypsi trick of the trade of invading, squatting and destroying someone’s faith for bets and certainty in self arrogance.
Tend the other cheek, challenge them to hold nothing sacred as life, and they forget there is Heaven, Hell, the Bible, a permanent talk with God and what not...
I am ready to test Stephen on this any time of the day, if testing God on his own fault with my own life is what he wants to experiment on... tsk tsk tsk.
I was hoping that nobody would respond to this jerk, but alas, two did.
Atheists are so obsessed about the rejection of God, it makes one wonders what eats them...
Sorry...lost my head...
Poor, poor Stephen Hawking. His soul is crippled worse than his body. Could it be he rejects God because he suffers in his body and blames Him for it? Just a theory but so is his ‘life ends at death’ postulation as well. Prove it....Its such a stretch to believe in the study of the universe but not in the Creator of it. Just wow.....
What really annoys me about people like hawking is that he has the arrogance to say that he knows for sure without a doubt what happens after you die. He can’t prove anything he says. If he was a real scientist he would look at the situation objectively and admit that heaven and afterlife can’t be disproved.
Sure is.
Buy the cripple’s incomprehensible to laymen books as so many have and never managed to read beyond page ten. It’ll make you feel so good about yourself!
I’m not claiming to be an expert or anything, but I would say its a hobby of mine to keep up with and research, in what small capacity I can, quantum mechanics. Albert Eisenstein held the theory that everything can be explained and that it was possible to unite the laws that govern large objects with those that govern on the quantum level. He believed in god and believed that god intended for us to figure out how he created everything. He worked on it until his death but was never able to develop a unifying theory.
Most of the establishment started to consider him a relic for having the concept of a creator because, on the quantum level it appears everything is governed by probability which makes it impossible to have a solid law that govern the way sub atomic particles act. For instance, an electron can be on one place at one moment, then gone, then in two places at once, so on and so forth.
However, I find it amusing that one hand they claim that there are dimensions beyond the three of space and one of time that we exist in, that we simply cannot perceive of and on the other hand that subatomic particles seem to act in a random manner that is unpredictable. Wouldn’t it stand to reason, especially for a genius, that perhaps we just cant see/perceive enough of whats going on to be able to predict the way subatomic particles act? Not very ‘genius like’ to make assumptions, in my humble opinion. As a matter of a fact, I find that his “belief” in global warming just proves his “theories” are politically motivated. Just my 2 cents.
That’s OK. I can understand why you wanted to address this, this “thing.” And you asked the right questions.
My bet is that it’s a college drop-out typing away in his mother’s basement.
For all of the man’s brilliance I feel sorry for him - not because of his physical state but because of his spiritual one. All that thinking produced the equivalent of spiritual lead not gold!
Mel
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