I think this article is going to raise a little Hell. For most of my life I believed that the really deep thinkers, Like Albert Einstein came to accept the existence of God. Now, Stephen Hawking, the Big Brain in the broken body, changes his position on the matter.
I myself am with Einstein, but Hawking claims to have it figured out. He even has a new book out...ah ha ! "The Game's Afoot Sherlock", does he really believe it or is it just a publicity stunt to sell copies. Stephen, obviously, is a really smart guy, his theories about Black Holes, Time and the Universe have astounded us all. I hadn't the slightest suspicion that he was a Marketing genius as well.
Good luck on the book Stephen...
I have included a copy of the article. Make up your own minds about this one.
God did not create the universe, says Hawking
REUTERS Sept 2 2010
By Michael Holden – Thu Sep 2, 9:08 am ET
AFP/File – God no longer has any place in theories on the creation of the Universe due to a series of developments …
LONDON (Reuters) – God did not create the universe and the "Big Bang" was an inevitable consequence of the laws of physics, the eminent British theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking argues in a new book.
In "The Grand Design," co-authored with U.S. physicist Leonard Mlodinow, Hawking says a new series of theories made a creator of the universe redundant, according to the Times newspaper which published extracts on Thursday.
"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," Hawking writes.
"It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going."
Hawking, 68, who won global recognition with his 1988 book "A Brief History of Time," an account of the origins of the universe, is renowned for his work on black holes, cosmology and quantum gravity.
Since 1974, the scientist has worked on marrying the two cornerstones of modern physics -- Albert Einstein's General Theory of Relativity, which concerns gravity and large-scale phenomena, and quantum theory, which covers subatomic particles.
His latest comments suggest he has broken away from previous views he has expressed on religion. Previously, he wrote that the laws of physics meant it was simply not necessary to believe that God had intervened in the Big Bang.
He wrote in A Brief History ... "If we discover a complete theory, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason -- for then we should know the mind of God."
In his latest book, he said the 1992 discovery of a planet orbiting another star other than the Sun helped deconstruct the view of the father of physics Isaac Newton that the universe could not have arisen out of chaos but was created by God.
"That makes the coincidences of our planetary conditions -- the single Sun, the lucky combination of Earth-Sun distance and solar mass, far less remarkable, and far less compelling evidence that the Earth was carefully designed just to please us human beings," he writes.
Hawking, who is only able to speak through a computer-generated voice synthesizer, has a neuro muscular dystrophy that has progressed over the years and left him almost completely paralyzed.
He began suffering the disease in his early 20s but went on to establish himself as one of the world's leading scientific authorities, and has also made guest appearances in "Star Trek" and the cartoons "Futurama" and "The Simpsons."
Last year he announced he was stepping down as Cambridge University's Lucasian Professor of Mathematics, a position once held by Newton and one he had held since 1979.
“The Grand Design" is due to go on sale next week.
(Editing by Steve Addison)
You're wrong about Albert Einstein too.
ReplyDelete"The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weakness, the Bible a collection of honorable, but still purely primitive, legends which are nevertheless pretty childish." Einstein, 1954
http://www.lettersofnote.com/2009/10/word-god-is-product-of-human-weakness.html
Einstein wrote many paragraphs devoted to the mystical and the infinite. True, he was not a man that you would find in any church, but his writings indicate that he was deeply spiritual.
ReplyDelete“I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with fates and actions of human beings.”
“In view of such harmony in the cosmos which I, with my limited human mind, am able to recognize, there are yet people who say there is no God. But what really makes me angry is that they quote me for the support of such views.”
Obviously there is a little more to it, but using the term 'God' as a metaphor for the structure of the naturally occurring universe is a long way from 'accepting the existence of God'. The vast majority of folk reading this would probably assume a very different meaning of the word, judging from the way they misinterpreted the final sentence from Hawking's earlier work 'A Brief History of Time'.
ReplyDeleteI have this quote in a list of Einstein's. I admit I pulled it from the internet a while ago. I have several books by Al and it is not in them. But it sounds like him.
ReplyDelete"How can anyone observe the universe and deny the existence of God? I could not be an atheist even if I tried. Only someone who was willingly blind would deny that there is a Divine Creator Who constructed the universe."