Science of the Spirit

Hawking Claims Heaven Is A 'Fairy Story'

redOrbit
Mon, 16 May 2011 11:20 UTC

British scientist Stephen Hawking reaffirmed his atheist views during an interview with The Guardian published on Monday.

Hawking said he believes heaven is a "fairy story" for people who are afraid of the dark.

He told The Guardian that his views were partly influenced by his battle with motor neuron disease.

"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," he told the newspaper.

"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."

His stance on religion has hardened significantly in the last century since the publication of its 1988 international best-seller A Brief History of Time.

In this book he suggested the idea of a divine being was not necessarily incompatible with a scientific understanding of the Universe.

However, as he has gotten older Hawking decided when writing The Grand Design that a deity no longer had any place in theories on the creation of the universe.

Hawking has been suffering from motor neuron disease since the age of 21, which has left him disabled and dependent on a voice synthesizer.

The 69-year-old fell seriously ill after a lecture tour in the U.S. in 2009 and was taken to Addenbrookes hospital in an episode that sparked grave concerns for his health.

"Science predicts that many different kinds of universe will be spontaneously created out of nothing. It is a matter of chance which we are in," he said.

Hawking is due to speak at the Google Zeitgeist meeting in London, in which he will address the question: "Why are we here?"

Reader Comments

Hugh Mann · 2011-05-16T19:40:38Z

Imagine

Imagine there's no Heaven
It's easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people
Living for today...

John Lennon

gdpetti · 2011-05-17T12:43:42Z

Hmmm.

Is he merely defining his own reality and assuming it is the same for everyone else? Of course, as usual, definitions are a problem, in that how one defines 'heaven', 'fairy', and the always suspect 'God' presents us with an equation for the meaning of life with variables so few of us can agree on, so why should be agree on its result?

danbe69 · 2011-05-17T13:00:23Z

Order and Balance.

The new Agnostic try to tell us that creation is the result of Chance. That everything on earth is merely the result of coincidence
but as has been demonstrated over and over again, the idea that planet earth as we know it came into being through Chance is so stronomically outrageous, that the very belief in evolution without God requires a faith-like assent and fundamentalist adherence., let alone the fundamentalist faith required to hold that the proteins, chemical elements, and DNA needed to create a living cell existed and mutated over millions of years and then eventually combined at the exact same time with the exact necessary atmospheric conditions.

If the earth were not planned by a Creator, and was merely the result of chance though mathematically an impossibility, that does not explain the incredible order, balance, and beauty of creation. .

The earth is "placed" such that its surface can maintain a revolving temperature that is neither too hot or too cold in the central continents, yet varying enough to produce a wide diversity of vegetation. The very tilt of the earth is so precise that were it off by a degree, all of creation would be in chaos.

Say that the universe was created by Chance capitalized to denote atheism’s religious belief in the "god of chance" and that life on earth could have come about by some improbable but not impossible combination of events. That does not mean that beauty would have to be its end result. The earth could have been a greyish flatland or jagged peaks of muddy brown. But instead, we see the incredible diversity of color throughout creation.
.

Topher · 2011-05-20T05:02:44Z

When you take into consideration the proven size of this universe and the uncountable number of galaxies, which host billions of suns where some contain planets themselves, the idea of earth existing as a fluke becomes less of a fluke and more of an inevitability.
You're also mistaken to think that the universe now, is the same universe that has always been.
We now know that generations of stars living and dying over 14 billion years have been transforming the basic element of hydrogen, into the array of elements that make up everything we know to be real.

Similar situation with our planet, which has been growing and changing for the last 4 billion years, changing from a ball of molten rock made from the dust leftover from the formation of the star we orbit.
With the introduction of water (medium of transport for molecules) that fell to our world from the outer regions of our solar system and the warmth (energy) provided by our sun and moon, out planet became capable of playing a host to self replicating molecules, which have improved upon themselves over generations of competition, in a process that created the distant ancestors from which we evolved from and our distant dna sharing plant cousins which have taken the energy from the sun, to power the process of turning carbon and other poisonous gases in our atmosphere, into the breathable atmosphere that allows us to thrive on this bubble of life we call earth.

Maybe you could put down that good book written by a select group of bronze age brutes and try picking up a non-fiction book which contains the physically tested knowledge, proved and agreed to by all learned men and women from around the planet, because without such books and knowledge, we would still be those bronze age speculators, fighting over who's god is the greatest, which is not much different to today I suppose.

Third_Density_Learner · 2011-05-19T03:15:46Z

Typical response from a materialist

The word "heaven" in this context stands in for the non-material, non-local, conscious and intelligent part of the universe. Hawking denies it as his world view cannot possibly conceive of, and therefore accommodate, any such thing, because to do so would completely undermine all of the concepts he has developed during his life -- concepts which have been proven fundamentally wrong by the extraordinary experiments of various REAL scientists around the world. Of Hawking's ego plays a massive role in such denial.

carbie · 2011-05-19T21:09:08Z

pretty clever

talk about cover your bases!! so he dies and doesn't come back and is never seen again, his supporters say 'Gee!! he must have been right!'
and how is anyone going to prove catergorically that he is wrong whilst still alive
He totally discounts the belief, faith or basic human intuition of countless millions that we are here and will be around for a lot longer than 3 score years and 10 in one form or another

May your God go with you

CuresRiches · 2011-05-26T12:41:43Z

Remember Mads' Hawks and Doves

Not so even Stephen.
The Hawks have the their God is going to win and the there is no such thing as spirit.
The ones that think they're going to win with the spirit channel secret society are competing to be one of a 100 million channels that survive. Some of us [Link]think that one in a hundred million is a suckers effort. Silvio Berlusconi is the biggest SUCK.

danbe69 · 2011-05-26T14:35:03Z

A First Mover exists.

4 TOPHER no thanks for the patronizing.

The odds of this, says Hahn and Wiker, is about the same as throwing a deck of cards in the air in the middle of a hurricane, and all of them landing as a four-story card house, where each story is made up of a "complete suite of cards"? Atheist Richard Dawkins’ believes that, given enough time, anything is possible. But that is a confusion of improbability with impossibility. At some point in the past, the entire universe would have been a single point. This point, later called the big bang, was the beginning of the universe as we understand it today,

Then you are familar that a object at rest tends to stay at rest and an object in motion tends to stay in motion with the same speed and in the same direction unless acted upon by an outside force, Unless there is a first mover , there can be no motions. To take away the actual is to take away the potential. (Hence, which came first for Aristotle, the chicken or the egg?)

The book you label from the Bronze age, The book of Genesis, that was written thousands of years ago, places man as steward over creation. How can this be when lions and bears and other predators are more powerful?
Further the writers mention of a initiative of a beginning how can this be with out Test Technolgy? Today modern physics the discovery of the three possible types of expanding universes are called open, flat, and closed universes. If the universe were open, it would expand forever..

There are no partially moral monkeys, there is one unique spiritual intellectual order within man that was given.
And yet, man has indeed become lord of creation with the power to make all things work to the good… or as we see all around us, to man’s own peril.

Not these grannies!!! [Link]

Michael L

Can't wait to see that happen... "People are determined to be respected." ... speaking of which, less food would do wonders though!!

LindaMay

Did anyone else notice the reference to 9-11? Big Ben's hands were at 9:00, and it bonged eleven times? I wonder if BB can be hacked these days? I...

globalgrrl

So it was them? Darn those Ruskies with Punjabi accents who tried to scam me last year. You have to hand it to them Ruskies for imitating foreign...

Demore

Are there any British grannies left, after the Great Midazolam Attack during the plandemic ?

codis

Science of the Spirit

Hawking Claims Heaven Is A 'Fairy Story'

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