I saw this article in Yahoo last Monday and I immediately wanted to comment on it:
Renowned physicist Stephen Hawking recently explained his belief that there is no God and that humans should therefore seek to live the most valuable lives they can while on Earth.
Guardian writer Ian Sample asked Hawking if he feared death in a story published yesterday. This was his response: 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. 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.
Hawking's 1988 book "A Brief History of Time" sold 9 million copies, and in it Hawking referenced God metaphorically as the force that could fully explain the creation of the universe. But in 2010, Hawking told Diane Sawyer that "science will win" in a battle with religion "because it works."
"What could define God [is a conception of divinity] as the embodiment of the laws of nature. However, this is not what most people would think of that God," Hawking told Sawyer. "They made a human-like being with whom one can have a personal relationship. When you look at the vast size of the universe and how insignificant an accidental human life is in it, that seems most impossible."
Hawking's latest book, "The Grand Design," challenged Isaac Newton's theory that the solar system could not have been created without God. "Because there is a law such as gravity, the Universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the Universe exists, why we exist. It is not necessary to invoke God to ... set the Universe going," he writes.
Hawking was diagnosed with the degenerative Lou Gehrig's disease at the age of 21. He lost his power of speech and for decades has talked through an electronic speech synthesizer. The device has allowed him to continue his research and attain a top Cambridge research post, which was previously held by Newton. His most famous theory explains how black holes emit radiation, according to The Guardian.
So if everyone is destined to power-down like computers at the end of their lives, what should humans do to lend meaning to their experience? "We should seek the greatest value of our action," Hawking told the paper.
Unknown to a lot of people, Isaac Newton studied the Bible passionately. As a matter of fact, he devoted more time to the study of Scripture than to science. But he was an Arian (believed that God the Father and Jesus the Son did not exist together eternally) theologically and would have been considered a heretic by mainstream Christianity. Yet Newton saw God as the masterful creator whose existence could not be denied in the face of the grandeur of all creation. Nevertheless he rejected Leibniz's' thesis that God would necessarily make a perfect world which requires no intervention from the creator. He warned against using the law of Gravity to view the universe as a mere machine, like a great clock. He said, "Gravity explains the motions of the planets, but it cannot explain who set the planets in motion. God governs all things and knows all that is or can be done."
Albert Einstein on the other hand, cannot conceive of a God who rewards and punishes his creatures. Neither does he believe in an Afterlife. But he agrees with Spinoza's belief in a God who reveals Himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, as opposed to a God who concerns himself with the fate and actions of human beings. According to him the religion of the future will be a cosmic religion. That it should transcend personal God, as well as avoid dogma and theology. Covering both the natural and the spiritual, it should be based on a religious sense arising from the experience of all things natural and spiritual as a meaningful unity.
Are Physicists becoming more and more cynical as Science develops? I guess it just goes with that territory.
By design, the discipline of Science operates with the assumption that everything that exist is governed by the laws of nature (the laws that they have so far defined). For this reason, a scientific minded individual would be less inclined to believe that events can be influenced by a Supernatural Being (or defy logic).
But I believe this to be a limited perspective. Do we already know everything there is to know? Have we penetrated all the mysteries of the Universe? Is logic the limit of all Creation or is it just the limit of our (human) mind?
I am astounded by Stephen Hawking's certainty about God and the Afterlife. I think it is unbelievably arrogant to come out in public with a statement like that. I prefer Newton's and Einstein' opinions on religion, since they left some space for "humility." Einstein was known to have said, "that he does not share the crusading spirit of the atheist, whose fervor is mostly due to a painful act of liberation from the fetters of religious indoctrination received in youth."
I also agree that religion (or Spirituality in my definition) should be more cosmic. But unlike all of them, I believe in a personal God and I believe, that someday, we will eventually come close to proving this. We just have to understand that we are more that just atoms, energy and forces, there is also an Intelligence or Mind that determines which particular elements specifically combine with each other to give birth to individually unique entities. In other words, there is an intelligent order to existence that reflects a sophisticated "Mind," which confounds mere randomness (chance).
I know this, because every spiritually (mystically) inclined person, from the Buddha to your average modern day medicineman, will tell you that God exists simply because they have a personal relationship with the Divine. He (or She) is within us, as well as without. God defies logic and encompasses paradox. God is personal and impersonal at the same time.
If we box God in a humanistic frame... having a physicality of some sort and having a limited mind, we will surely get tangled in a puzzle of our own making. We should leave God to be God, unknowable, infinite, undefinable. We are all connected as One. By looking within ourselves, into that ineffable depth that defies all logic, we will discover a thread that leads back into the center of Creation, that is God.
Einstein said it best, "It is very difficult to elucidate this (cosmic religious) feeling to anyone who is entirely without it. . . The religious geniuses of all ages have been distinguished by this kind of religious feeling, which knows no dogma and no god conceived in man's image; so that there can be no church whose central teachings are based on it ... In my view, it is the most important function of art and science to awaken this feeling and keep it alive in those who are receptive to it." I guess Professor Hawkings is just entirely without it. I really feel sorry for him.
