Let's raise a glass to Stephen Hawking, everyone!

[SolidGoldBrass]

I have admired him for ages anyway but he's just gone even further up in my estimation for not being afraid to point out once and for all the absurdity of belief in gods.

And may it settle all the silly imaginary-friend followers whose last ditch argument is 'Clever people than you rotten rationalists believe in my imaginary friend, so ner!'. Oh go on, just try to argue that you're smarter then Stephen Hawking...

I am raising several bottles simultaneously.

With you on everything!

He is amazing and so wise

I thought when I read the thread title he had popped his clogs!

Yes, you do wonder how much prove people need.

I really dislike the sneering tone of the first post.

Totally agree. Holding up my chocolate sundae and waving spoon. I feel so pleased that Stephen Hawking is on my side and blow raspberries to everyone else (including DSis who is completely on the other side of the argument)

Reminds me of this FB status which I nicked from a friend and reposted this morning.

Religion is like a penis.
It's ok to have one.
It's good to be proud of it.
It's great to have fun with it.
But please don't whip it out in public and start waving it around,
And PLEASE don't try to shove it down my children's throats.

Plus why are you so bothered what other people believe? They don't owe it to you to believe or not to believe in anything.

It's none of your business unless they start a war about it or something.

Militant atheism. It's the new black dontcha know.

He's actually quite a spiritual man when you hear him talk about the wonders of the universe. Not everyone's God looks the same.

Like your post maybe.

I don't believe in god, but why should my opinion matter more than someone's who does? Lots of highly intelligent people do, lots don't. Tis no-one else's business really.

Hawking is a string theorist,an M-theorist. It is a load of nonsense.
www.slate.com/id/2149598/

He is the poster boy, which is why he is always given the limelight. Take what he says with a large pinch of salt. He used to believe in God

"Prof Hawking had previously appeared to accept the role of God in the creation of the universe, writing in A Brief History Of Time in 1988: 'If we discover a complete theory, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason - for then we should know the mind of God.'"

but now the poster boy has changed his views.
He also believes the following :

"And in an extraordinary series of assertions, he said Earth might be at risk from what he imagines to be 'massive ships' which could try to colonise our planet and plunder our resources.

Professor Hawking said: 'We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn?t want to meet.

'I imagine they might exist in massive ships, having used up all the resources from their home planet.

'Such advanced aliens would perhaps become nomads, looking to conquer and colonise whatever planets they can reach.'

It would be 'too risky' to attempt to make contact with alien races, he concluded."

He said that our only chance for long-term survival is to move away from Earth and begin to inhabit far-flung planets.
In an interview with the website Big Think, Professor Hawking said he was an optimist but the next few hundred years had to be negotiated carefully if humans were to survive."

He seems to be another one of these poster boys who believe we're doomed, just like Pike in Dad's Army and Gordon Brown who sells us that global warming will destroy the planet and "we only have fifty days to save the planet". The doom sayers get air time for a reason; they are poster boys.

I don't think that Stephen Hawking pointed out the absurdity of anything.

What I read that he said was: "It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going."

He is saying that there doesn't HAVE to have been a God for the Universe to have "unfolded" as it did. He was responding to Newton's claim that the Universe was so complicated that there had to be a God.

So he hasn't said that there isn't a God or that belief is absurd.

The statement still allows that a God COULD have created the Universe.

massive ships theory is no less ridiculous than the bible

forget the Bible (i.e. the Old Testament), look at the New Testament, the teachings of Christ, not the earlier Old Testament. But forget about the New testament too. Proof of God is not in th New Testament either. Proof of a creator is in the beauty of our universe, as Newton said. It is not a chance aberration and a mere accident as the long line of influential poster boys want you to believe, for their own very special reasons. They also want you to believe that humanity is doomed and that humanity is destroying the planet, for exactly the same special reasons.

"It is not a chance aberration and a mere accident as the long line of influential poster boys want you to believe, for their own very special reasons."

But it COULD have been a "chance aberration and mere accident", and that's all that Hawking is saying.

Belief and faith than become a matter of choice rather than something that is proved.

After all as someone far wiser than I said proof denies faith.

Again Hawking is not saying that there isn't a God, he's a good scientist and knows that science really can't say anything about God.

Meh. I don't believe in God because I am forced to out of some lack of understanding of science and how it can explain how the universe works. I believe in God because I think he/she/it is the answer to a whole different question.

Like I can believe that something is a piece of paper with marks on it made of ink, but also believe it is a beautiful poem. The universe can be both at once - totally explicable by science, and yet still containing something else.

The fact that Hawkins can show how it happened, and hpw God is not required by the process, makes absolutely no difference to me. Though I find it scientifically interesting.

but there is an agenda to use Hawkings as a poster boy to get people to believe the wrong thing on purpose. They are hooting and clapping their hands and giving him maximum publicity, hoping to fool many more suckers.

"but there is an agenda to use Hawkings as a poster boy to get people to believe the wrong thing on purpose."

I don't know if there is, but it's simple enough to reply that that's not what Hawking has said.

Hawking has said that there is a scientific explanation that doesn't require divine intervention and that then leaves faith and belief to be as AMumInScotland describes.

I think the problem is that the media generally doesn't understand either science or religion, but knows that stirring up yet another headline about how "Science Disproves God" will sell papers to both people who think "Yes! Great stuff!" and also those who think "Nonsense!"

Claig -

Massive ships theory is considerably less ridiculous than the bible.

There are a hundred billion galaxies, each containing hundreds of millions of stars.

As Hawking said at the time 'to my mathematical brain the numbers alone make the possibility of aliens perfectly rational'.

Of course, you have taken his comments out of context to make them appear more foolish.

claig - I had never heard that quote before:

"Prof Hawking had previously appeared to accept the role of God in the creation of the universe, writing in A Brief History Of Time in 1988: 'If we discover a complete theory, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason - for then we should know the mind of God.'"

That is what I believe. I think he was right the first time. I am a biochemist by training and looking down a microscope or unravelling the complexity of DNA I came to believe and realise that only a 'God Figure' could have created the beautiful simple rules that drive our infinitely complex Universe.

You dont have to believe in a set of aliens or imaginery friends to believe that there is a higher power beyond all our understanding. The job of a scientist is to discover and reveal the majesty of that power.

you may be right, that they are deliberately misinterpreting what Hawkings has said. But it is being given the spin that Hawkins says there is no God. Channel 4 News expectedly devoted time to it yesterday. Hawkings seems to be saying that it is spontaneous creation, something out of nothing. But there is no proof for this at all, and many scientists disagree with him. But you won't hear about these scientists on Channel 4 News or anywhere else, because the doom sayers don't want you to know. So the beauty of nature and teh similarity between mammals and the ciiperation of bees and ants is all just a random result of a spontaneous creation without any mind who has created order. That is far more improbable than agreeing with Newton that there os a mind and an intelligence and an order behind the beauties and similarities that we see, and that it isn't just a random spontaneous combustion out of chaos and nothingness.

"The Archbishop of Canterbury has led a religious backlash after Britain's most famous scientist declared God redundant."

The spin they want you to believe is that God is redundant, and they know very well why they want you to believe that. They don't even believe that themselves, but they want you to.

And I think you overstate the secret agenda to promote Hawkings's comments to 'get people to believe the wrong thing on purpose'.

The debate was ignited by an extract from his forthcoming book, appearing exclusively in the Times' science magazine.

Today, the Times devotes five pages to the fierce response from religious leaders, including the front page.

I think that's called debate.