Tag Archives: Stephen Hawking

More on Hawking and Science and Religion

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N.T. Wright v. Hawking: In the Washingon Post. Wright points out that the view of heaven Hawking rejects is neither biblical nor is it particularly Christian. Wright calls his view “low-grade and sub-biblical.”

From an interview with Rolf-Dieter Heuer, the director of the European Organization for Nuclear Research and oversees the vast CERN laboratories in Switzerland.

We separate knowledge from belief. Particle physics is asking the question of how did things develop? Religion or philosophy ask about why things develop. But the boundary between the two is very interesting. I call it the interface of knowledge. People start asking questions like “if there was a Big Bang, why was it there?” For us physicists, time begins with the Big Bang. But the question remains whether anything existed before that moment. And was there something even before the thing that was before the Big Bang? Those are questions where knowledge becomes exhausted and belief starts to become important.

And:

But the more we investigate the early universe, the more people are trying to connect science to philosophy. That is a good thing. Since we are struggling with the limits of knowledge, maybe philosophy or theology struggle also with our research. I think it is important that we open a constructive dialogue.

Stephen Hawking says heaven is a fairy tale–why is anyone surprised?

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Perhaps the only thing more surprising than his rejection of heaven is that it continues to get press. More interesting is why someone who is obviously brilliant lacks the imagination to explore the human quest for meaning and purpose.

Hawking:

“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,”

Rabbi Brad Hirschfield’s response in Huffington Post seems to emphasize that it is impolite for someone to denigrate another’s beliefs; although he also makes the distinction between knowledge and belief.

Mark Vernon reports on a rather more interesting exchange between Rowan Williams and A.C. Grayling. The atheist and the ABC agreed on a great deal in their debate:

  • – that an engagement with life begins with wonder;
  • – that there is a natural law which reveals a minimal amount required for our flourishing;
  • – that happiness is not a feeling but has to do with entering deeply into the relationships that surround us;
  • – that the passions need educating, not least passions like anger;
  • – that the stoic aim of becoming attuned with life is key – even or especially when it demands of us a noble response to suffering.
  • Grayling was even content to use a word that comes naturally to Williams, spirituality, when spirituality has to do with the remarkable sense that we owe something of ourselves to life because of all life has given us.

But there were differences. Apparently someone asked about love:

Williams was at last on territory he would have chosen. Religion is not like obeying a code of conduct that governs the relationships between a high god and subservient human beings, he explained. Rather, it is about coming to see yourself in a radically fresh way, as a result of seeing yourself as made in the image of God. We are all alienated from this truth, but can be brought back to it, he continued, explaining he’d witnessed as much just the other day in a prison, when a man who had committed terrible crimes had come to a moment of repentance and had been surprised at seeing ‘me as me’ for the first time.

Here’s Vernon’s account of Grayling’s response:

Grayling responded that the ancient injunction to know thyself is certainly vital, and that caring for even the most violent of our fellows in prisons is a profoundly hopeful mark of the humanity of our civilisation. Absolutely. But that didn’t quite seem to capture the hope of being drawn by love back to love which came through in Williams’ answer.