Hawking ditches God (The atheist delusion)

by xeno6696 @, Sonoran Desert, Wednesday, September 08, 2010, 04:37 (4950 days ago) @ David Turell

To save writing this all out twice I give a link to my article in Hastings Humanists:
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> > > http://hastingshumanists.blogspot.com/2010/09/hawking-ditches-god.html
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> > > You can't now read the Times on line without paying a fee.
> > > 
> > > The Guardian has a lot of comment on the same subject.
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> > Very nice web design, by the way! 
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> > As for the content on the blogpost, it's kind of... well I've heard Hawking talk before that he has referred to God only as the initial creation event, and not at all as a physical/metaphysical entity. So it's kinda misleading to say he's "ditched God." In my eyes that ship has well sailed. 
> > 
> > I really must say again though, well done on the site!
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> 
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> I never thought Hawkings literally meant 'the mind of god'. He is like Einstein I think. I must second the 'well done'. Thanks for showing us the site. well worth following. By the way, Maimonides used only the first six verses to describe the Big Bang Theory about 900 years ago. Rabbi Sachs refers to all 36 verses for origin and I don't know why. Genesis really included origin and subsequest events.-A couple of Hawking Quotes:-"...At the end of the conference the participants were granted an audience with the pope. He told us that it was all right to study the evolution of the universe after the big bang, but we should not inquire into the big bang itself because that was the moment of Creation and therefore the work of God. I was glad then that he didn't know the subject of the talk I had just given at the conference -- the possibility that space- time was finite but had no boundary, which means that it had no beginning, no moment of Creation. I had no desire to share the fate of Galileo, with whom I feel a strong sense of identity, partly because of the coincidence of having been born exactly 300 years after his death! [Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time (New York: Bantam, 1988), pp. 115-16.]"-I get the feeling here that here that he's definitely not a theist of any description...-Or: [emphasis added]-"The quantum theory of gravity has opened up a new possibility, in which there would be no boundary to space-time and so there would be no need to specify the behavior at the boundary. There would be no singularities at which the laws of science broke down and no edge of space-time at which one would have to appeal to God or some new law to set the boundary conditions for space-time. One could say: 'The boundary condition of the universe is that it has no boundary.' The universe would be completely self-contained and not affected by anything outside itself. It would neither be created nor destroyed. It would just BE. [Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time (New York: Bantam, 1988), p. 136.]"-And finally:-"...The idea that space and time may form a closed surface without boundary also has profound implications for the role of God in the affairs of the universe. With the success of scientific theories in describing events, most people have come to believe that God allows the universe to evolve according to a set of laws and does not intervene in the universe to break these laws. However, the laws do not tell us what the universe should have looked like when it started -- it would still be up to God to wind up the clockwork and choose how to start it off. So long as the universe had a beginning, we could suppose it had a creator. But if the universe is really completely self-contained, having no boundary or edge, it would have neither beginning nor end: it would simply be. What place, then, for a creator? [Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time (New York: Bantam, 1988), p. 140-41.]"

--
\"Why is it, Master, that ascetics fight with ascetics?\"

\"It is, brahmin, because of attachment to views, adherence to views, fixation on views, addiction to views, obsession with views, holding firmly to views that ascetics fight with ascetics.\"


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