Physicist/Cosmologist Stephen Hawking is at it again. It seems ever so often he denounces God or anything to do with an afterlife. This time he says that there is no heaven or afterlife and that it is a “fairy story.”
He will be giving a talk at the Google Zeitgeist meeting in London, in which he will address the question: "Why are we here?"
The article in the Guardian states he will argue that tiny quantum fluctuations in the very early universe became the seeds from which galaxies, stars, and ultimately human life emerged. He is quoted as saying, "Science predicts that many different kinds of universe will be spontaneously created out of nothing. It is a matter of chance which we are in."
He also states. “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.”
Sure doesn’t seem like chance or nothing in my opinion. Life is complex and beautiful, and yes, full of mystery and magic. I would have thought as he aged his views of life and death would have broadened. He made a comment of people being afraid of death. It appears those who do believe in an afterlife and believe that consciousness and love lives on after death of the physical body tend to have less fear and even a sense of comfort. And those who believe in God hold the universe and life more sacred than those who do not.
I feel bad for him that he has not found a sense of connection to a higher Universal power. I wrote a previous blog several months ago about his comments then, and in that I quoted what my husband, Don Pendleton wrote nearly 20 years ago about Hawking, in his book, A Search for Meaning From the Surface of a Small Planet:
"Why do I worry for Stephen Hawking? I suppose it is a fear that I have misinterpreted his moving forces, and that what I have characterized above as "unemotional scientific detachment" is in fact an almost passionate desire to live in an alternative universe without God. If that be true, to whatever degree, then his inner world will almost certainly be at cross purposes to his work in the outer." ~Don Pendleton, A Search for Meaning From the Surface of a Small Planet.
Read more of what Don wrote in regards to Stephen Hawking: An excerpt from A Search for Meaning From the Surface of a Small Planet
Read the Guardian Hawking Interview
He will be giving a talk at the Google Zeitgeist meeting in London, in which he will address the question: "Why are we here?"
The article in the Guardian states he will argue that tiny quantum fluctuations in the very early universe became the seeds from which galaxies, stars, and ultimately human life emerged. He is quoted as saying, "Science predicts that many different kinds of universe will be spontaneously created out of nothing. It is a matter of chance which we are in."
He also states. “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.”
Sure doesn’t seem like chance or nothing in my opinion. Life is complex and beautiful, and yes, full of mystery and magic. I would have thought as he aged his views of life and death would have broadened. He made a comment of people being afraid of death. It appears those who do believe in an afterlife and believe that consciousness and love lives on after death of the physical body tend to have less fear and even a sense of comfort. And those who believe in God hold the universe and life more sacred than those who do not.
I feel bad for him that he has not found a sense of connection to a higher Universal power. I wrote a previous blog several months ago about his comments then, and in that I quoted what my husband, Don Pendleton wrote nearly 20 years ago about Hawking, in his book, A Search for Meaning From the Surface of a Small Planet:
"Why do I worry for Stephen Hawking? I suppose it is a fear that I have misinterpreted his moving forces, and that what I have characterized above as "unemotional scientific detachment" is in fact an almost passionate desire to live in an alternative universe without God. If that be true, to whatever degree, then his inner world will almost certainly be at cross purposes to his work in the outer." ~Don Pendleton, A Search for Meaning From the Surface of a Small Planet.
Read more of what Don wrote in regards to Stephen Hawking: An excerpt from A Search for Meaning From the Surface of a Small Planet
Read the Guardian Hawking Interview
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Linda
2 comments:
As a physics geek, I have a huge amount of respect for Stephen Hawking the physicist. As a person, I have a huge amount of respect for Stephen Hawking the man, for all that he accomplished in spite of (or perhaps because of) his disability.
But I have to respectfully disagree with his theories about God and the afterlife.
Hawking is a theoretical physicist; I'm an experimental physicist. Those are two vastly different mindsets. As an experimentalist, I depend on evidence and data - what I see always overrules and drives what I think (in essence, evidence trumps theory). Theoretical physicists operate the other way around. Hawking has a brilliant mind, but his analytical brain has overruled his eyes and ears, and he's blinded by his own intelligence. Maybe someday he'll learn to see.
I've seen all the evidence I need, and Stephen Hawking is wrong. "Dead" wrong.
Bless his heart, so many think like Mr Hawkins. Each to their own though right?
I know for me I have experienced too much to think that this body is all there is, that all dies when it does....
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