Stephen Hawking has passed away. RIP. He was a great scientist and a great communicator.
However, he also didn’t believe in God and thought that belief in heaven is a fairy tale for those afraid of the dark.
I have a mixed opinion of Hawking, however I do admit his skills in science and popularization were great
Your insights?
I read A Brief History of Time in my teenage years and it was what launched my fascination with science. I’ll always be thankful for that.
I hope that God will bless him. His sickness was terrible, and he must have suffered a great deal. RIP.
Edward Miller
I was very sad to hear of his passing. God clearly blessed him with more years than he deserved due to his illness. I just wished that he could have used those years in coming to know the truth. 
Whenever I feel that life is unfair or unjustly difficult I think of people like Hawking and how they overcame adversity to do so much. If we were to judge him by his scientific work alone he was an absolute treasure. To then realize that he had to do so much of his work in his head, such as the math and modeling, it really boggles the mind.
So here’s to Stephen who has crossed life’s event horizon!!
Back atcha!
Its logical to me that Hawking was an atheist. In the story of creation there is a choice that man must make. He has to decide whether to partake of the tree of life (a spiritual life) or the tree of knowledge (to depend upon your own knowledge). If Hawkings goal was to unravel the secrets of the universe, then it is logical that he probably thought he had to make the assumption that it all could be answered without the existence of a creator to set the ball in motion - he actually believed in spontaneous creation. I think there are a lot of scientists out there that think once we have all the answers we won’t need any notion of God anymore. Of course their choice is to eat from the tree of knowledge and depend upon their own understanding of the universe and life instead of a creator. It amazes me that more than 2000 years ago, before much was known about the scientific world, that the second tree in the garden of Eden was called the tree of knowledge because there is no way that the author of this passage of scripture could have known how far the pursuit of knowledge could carry a person away from God.
There are those of us who are in pursuit of spiritual truth. There are those that are in pursuit of scientific truth. But very few of us have discovered that you can pursue both and that one does not exclude the other.
I can’t agree with that notion. I think most people understand that spiritual truths, or notions about how to live one’s life in accordance with their beliefs and scientific truths can both be pursued. What people sometime have trouble accepting is that different people reach different conclusions about spiritual or religious truths and can do this in perfectly reasonable ways. So, perhaps “spiritual truth” is a bit of a misnomer. What may be the “spiritual truth” for one person may not be the same “spiritual truth” for another. We should use the term, “spiritual beliefs” instead. Hawkins clearly lead his life according to his spiritual beliefs about how one should live. Note that one needn’t subscribe to a religion to possess beliefs about how to live or how to treat others. Thus I feel it’s a bit presumptuous to suggest as Wookin does, that someone who doesn’t have the same religious beliefs as you obviously didn’t come to the correct truth. The fact is, in these matters one can’t actually know the truth of such beliefs; one can only believe they have found something true. That is a critical distinction, I think, a number of people don’t understand.
Steven Hawking was a great scientist. He, Roger Penrose, and another formulated the Big Bang Theory building on the work of others. This view of the Beginning ex nihilo is something that science and faith agree upon. Unfortunately both Penrose and Hawking backed down from ex nihilo without evidence and science has not accepted their views.
It is not for us to judge Stephen Hawking. That’s God’s responsibility. The God that Stephen Hawking rejected was the God of the Gaps. Our God is the God of the Facts. I do not feel sorry for him and I hope he did not feel sorry for himself.
He led a good life as far as I can tell. I would be glad to talk theology and physics with him in heaven.
That is a precise summary. Thanks!
I don’t think that is true. I don’t see why God couldn’t use the interaction of M-branes to produce our universe in the same way that God uses clouds to produce lightning or fusion in the Sun’s core to create heat for the Earth.
It would be difficult for a scientist to say, “Well, God did it in some mysterious and unknowable way, so I might as well close up my lab and stop doing science”.
Is it knowledge carrying people away from God, or is it the theological perspective that the discovery of natural processes disproves the existence of God?
You still do not seem to get it. Of course God could have created M-branes to produce the universe, but God did not. How do we know this? There is no evidence that the universe was created this way. There is strong evidence that God created a singularity to do this.
The problem seems to be that some scientists do not want to accept this evidence. Also everything that is physical, which includes matter, energy, time, and space, has a beginning and ending. God is not physical, which means that God has no beginning and ending. It also means that there is no place for God in science, which is okay because God is beyond science. God is the Source the universe and the Source of science. God is not the universe and is not science.
God did do it in an unknowable way, since God created something out of nothing, no matter, no energy, no space, no time. That is a fact even though that goes beyond our experience and thus our understanding, which does not mean it cannot be…
On the other hand humans do understand what a beginning is and how creativity can bring something new into the world. Babies are born every day. Inventions come into existence every day.
Creation is not an outlandish process. It is making something using one’s mind. If the universe was not created by God using God’s mind, there is no doubt that humans could not understand it using their minds. “The most unintelligible aspect of the universe is that it is intelligible.” Albert Einstein.
How does that follow when people like Newton, Faraday, Maxwell and the like also intended to unravel the mysteries of the universe while being Christians (very devout ones for the latter two)? I don’t think Hawking atheism had anything to do with his science, in fact, if I’m not mistaken, Elaine Ecklund’s researched has shown that most atheist scientists report that they came to be atheists before they started studying any formal science at all. Atheists are certainly over represented among scientists, but that doesn’t mean that they are atheists because of their science.
Where is the evidence demonstrating that God did not use M-branes to create that singularity?
As far as I know, nearly all scientists accept that our universe expanded from a singularity.
Those are a lot of claims that need evidence to back them.
Those two sentences do not match up to one another.
Then why have you been arguing that the universe did not expand from a singularity.
I haven’t been arguing against the idea that the universe expanded from a singularity. What I have been questioning is the idea that a singularity has to come from nothing.
That is what a singularity is. It is a singular event that comes from nothing.
Hawking said God is a “fairy story for those afraid of the dark.” John Lennox, another Oxford professor and mathematician, responded to him by saying “if God is a fairy story for those afraid of the dark, then atheism is a fairy story for those afraid of the light.”
A black hole has a singularity at the center of it, and it didn’t come from nothing.
“Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.” -Colossians 4:6
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