There is no god... says Hawking

[LunarRay]

I think it is better to say it doesn't have mass that is measurable by our capabilities. Also a photon is something.

Like you stated in your post; we don't know and we can prove it.

Right!... 🙂

I especially don't like a 4 dimensional look see at some black hole thingi bending space or making a dimple and the photon reacting to that... seems so... one sided...
I just don't like the idea that Newton got it wrong... gives me the itchies. How can I play billiards with that in mind...

OK.. you can call it something.. but if it goes about at its own velocity then I'm gonna get some and stuff em in my pockets and see about that twinkling thing that I can't quite touch. 😕😛

 

[woolfe9999]

Hawking is simply speculating outside the realm of his expertise. It has long been his way to attempt to prove (or, at least, prove the feasibility of) a hypothesis of spontaneous creation, which is not the way science works. His colleagues at Cambridge state as much in the OP's article. Physicists from around the world have been decrying his efforts to answer a fundamentally philosophical question by attempting to confuse science and philosophy, but the media eats it up and keeps throwing his name out there. Sure, he's made some interesting contributions to theoretical physics, but he wouldn't even make the list of the top 10 most important physicists in the last 25 years, and this crusade is exactly why. He's spent his life trying to answer a philosophical question with science.

I don't know physics very well, so I won't argue with you over your assessment of Hawking. However, with respect to the bolded language, it's worth noting which of his "Cambridge colleagues" seem to disagree with him:

But some of Hawking's Cambridge colleagues said the physicist has missed the point.

"The 'god' that Stephen Hawking is trying to debunk is not the creator God of the Abrahamic faiths who really is the ultimate explanation for why there is something rather than nothing," said Denis Alexander.

"Hawking's god is a god-of-the-gaps used to plug present gaps in our scientific knowledge.

"Science provides us with a wonderful narrative as to how [existence] may happen, but theology addresses the meaning of the narrative," said Alexander, director of The Faraday Institute for Science and Religion.

And Fraser Watts, an Anglican priest and Cambridge expert in the history of science, said that it's not the existence of the universe that proves the existence of God.

But, he said, "a creator God provides a reasonable and credible explanation of why there is a universe, and ... it is somewhat more likely that there is a God than that there is not. That view is not undermined by what Hawking has said."

- wolf

 

[speedy2]

lol. Wow, so he's the authority on everything. My computer is pretty complex. I guess all the parts were just sitting on a table. An earthquake, flood, and a couple lightning bolts happened and it magically assembled itself.

I'll think I'll try that when I make a sandwich tomorrow. Tell ya what, I'll even make it easy. I'll put the bread on the plate. Leave the lunch meat opened. We'll see how long it takes for that sandwich to be made with "chaos." lol

 

[ericlp]

http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/europe/09/02/hawking.god.universe/index.html

Unfortunately I agree with him...

Fortunately I agree with him...

Well, unlike Einstein, at least he won't get labeled as a loving christain. 🙂 That poor bastard got screwed big time on that deal.

 

[Generator]

Well I'm glad its been settled. Science won folks, time to go home and get a life while you have one.

As for God and as science improves he finds himself harder and harder to find. If the Universe spawns from nothing and needs no babysitting as Hawkings says... Where does god intervene and for what purpose. I guess I guiding hand doesn't hurt if thats what God is actually doing. But science seems to imply that God is bascially big government. The republican in your bedroom telling you how to fuck your wife.

 

[Hayabusa Rider]

I don't know physics very well, so I won't argue with you over your assessment of Hawking. However, with respect to the bolded language, it's worth noting which of his "Cambridge colleagues" seem to disagree with him:



- wolf

Why the quotes? These are not tele evangelist types preaching seven day creationism, nor are they anti science. Quite the reverse in fact but they look at topics where science, philosophy and religion intersect, and if there ever was a question which involved all three it's "Why are we here?"

 

[LunarRay]

I know why we're here.... hehehehe

We're here cuz the Earth is here... now if the Earth was there we'd be neither here nor there... Well... unless of course there is exactly like here and why'd we want being there when here is good enough.

For you all god unbeliver Science people...:

You skyence people are all alike... Ya don't know the answer to the simplest of questions and want to blame god... God knows why and he ain't telling... It is sorta one of those need to know things... IF you knew he'd have to off ya... then you'd ask why did he let such a nice person die and let that dunce of a theorist live (he don't know) who ought being a bit careful about what he says... just in case and all... I mean the downside IF you're wrong is a long long way down... so he says..

 

[Hayabusa Rider]

Fortunately I agree with him...

Well, unlike Einstein, at least he won't get labeled as a loving christain. 🙂 That poor bastard got screwed big time on that deal.

Not really but go for it. It's hard to get screwed big time by about three people. Einstein's heritage was Jewish, which if you didn't know isn't the same as Christianity although one came from the other. He said many things which were contradictory over his life because he wasn't a sterile intellect. While he was an atheist he often seriously entertained possibles apparently beyond the grasp of many lesser people today.

 

[LunarRay]

Fortunately I agree with him...

Well, unlike Einstein, at least he won't get labeled as a loving christain. 🙂 That poor bastard got screwed big time on that deal.

Yeah But!

It ain't us gonna do the evaluation if he is Labeled other than a loving Christian. Since living is such a short event for us humans it seems prudent and even really really smart to secure the long term aspect of existence just in case... It seems quite arrogant to take the short term view but then again... That is science... Can't affirm no miracles...

Besides, Einestein was a tad smarter than the average bear... he probably held on to the higher power bit even unto the end... me thinks.

 

[Siddhartha]

Who the hell cares? Seriously. Do people sit around on their unemployed asses all day and ponder religious issues?

What he wrote challenges the beliefs of some people. Some people can get really cranky about that sort of thing.

 

[dmcowen674]

Who the hell cares? Seriously.

Do people sit around on their unemployed asses all day and ponder religious issues?

With no jobs to be had what else do you expect them to do?

 

[ShawnD1]

With no jobs to be had what else do you expect them to do?

I heard sex is fun.

 

[Tab]

Physicists from around the world have been decrying his efforts to answer a fundamentally philosophical question by attempting to confuse science and philosophy

How matter, the earth, dirt, iron and whatever else came to be is not a philosophical question.

 

[Genx87]

The thread title reminds me of bishop Bickering in Caddyshack after he got struck with lightning lol

 

[Doc Savage Fan]

I'm glad we finally got that settled. 😵

 

[Jaskalas]

But scientists don't pretend to know the answer to every "why". Religious scholars do.

You missed the point. "God created it". "Who created god?".

End of story. The explanations below the highest level are irrelevant, for there's always the unexplainable origin of everything. Throwing in extra dimensions to "everything" says absolutely nothing of the origin.

 

[Anarchist420]

But then why do Africans and Asians come from monkeys while Europeans come from neanderthals?

One thing that makes me think that there is a god is wondering about what happens when people die.

myself, I'm half-atheist and half-deist.

 

[LunarRay]

The thread title reminds me of bishop Bickering in Caddyshack after he got struck with lightning lol

I figure God had nothing to do with Bickering's 'hole in one'. Some, however, don't give Bickering the potential to achieve that feat and thereby affirm a miracle... I don't!
If God is God then I don't think he's too interested in what goes on amonst us 'Free Willers'... He probably looked at the conclusion of our existence and shook his head in amazement....
I mean... it is really kind of silly to accept on the one hand the Parting of the Red Sea and on the other The Holocaust as both being a product of the same God... I can't wait to find out what this "He so loved us that he created Hell.... along with Heaven" is all about.
It is far easier to simply accept a Supreme Being and what we can't begin to 'prove' assign to his portfolio. The soul is an intangible something akin to a photon... it is what it is... and don't obey Newton or Galileo or in the case of the Soul... God!

 

[CycloWizard]

I don't know physics very well, so I won't argue with you over your assessment of Hawking. However, with respect to the bolded language, it's worth noting which of his "Cambridge colleagues" seem to disagree with him:

- wolf

This would be a bit confusing even to most scientists, unless they've spent time at Oxford or Cambridge. Oxford and Cambridge are organized in a fundamentally different way than other universities (at least other English speaking universities) due to their organization as colleges which incorporate faculty from many different disciplines. This is a tradition carried over from their days as monasteries and gives them a very interesting feel today, and it also gives rise to a lot of "interdisciplinary" organizations like this center, which is likely comprised of members with DPhils in physics, chemistry, theology, philosophy, and who knows what else.

 

[LunarRay]

I heard sex is fun.

Proof that not only does God exist but that he's a sense of humor! He didn't mention any Mrs God so I figure if he had a hand in it at all it was to insure we humans along with the rest of life had necessity to employ all manner of Psycho babble professionals... I wonder, however, are the Oaks lawyers or are they Pharmacologists? I'm pretty sure they ain't Baptists!

 

[brandonb]

There is a God... Says brandonb.

Ok. Now the scales are balanced.

God's image is not man. I don't know why people keep confusing this. God's image is love. Men already existed on this planet before God put love into man. If you read Genesis, when Cain killed Abel (the 2 sons of Adam and Eve), he left the land and hung out with other people.

13 Cain said to the LORD, "My punishment is more than I can bear. 14 Today you are driving me from the land, and I will be hidden from your presence; I will be a restless wanderer on the earth, and whoever finds me will kill me."

15 But the LORD said to him, "Not so [e] ; if anyone kills Cain, he will suffer vengeance seven times over." Then the LORD put a mark on Cain so that no one who found him would kill him. 16 So Cain went out from the LORD's presence and lived in the land of Nod, [f] east of Eden.

17 Cain lay with his wife, and she became pregnant and gave birth to Enoch.

Doesn't that make it clear that if Adam and Eve were the first people on this planet, how when they only had 2 sons, did Cain lay with a wife? The bible goes on and on about how God's image is love.

Lucifer (Satan) wanted more power, me me me. He was selfish and was cast away from God.

Adam and Eve were pure until they were tempted by the selfish snake, and brought Adam and Eve out of a position of pure love. They were no longer in God's image. This is called the original sin.

Now put 2 + 2 together.

There is a scale.

Love |-----------------------------------| Selfishness.

Those are polar opposites, but everybody is on this scale somewhere. To be with love, you are in God's image. Catholics believe this, they believe people who are not Christians who are full of love go to Purgatory and they are judged based on that scale. Catholics don't believe people who don't go to church or are christians are damned. It's more important to be loving, and that's all that matters.

God also gave us a conscience, or a spiritual side of our persona. As loving as he is, he gave us freedom, which allows us to fail, for him to say "You will follow me, or be with me" would be a selfish act on his part, and he would not be pure love. We need our spiritual side. Without it, we'd just be a bunch of barbarians or animals.

The laws of physics, and our existance with time and space make our universe impossible. Time in linear. It had to have a start. Matter can't create itself from nothing. It's against the laws. Our own laws make our universe impossible. It's a paradox. The only explanation is the laws in which we have are not the same laws which created this universe. Who or what can change the laws? Something way more than us and our universe combined... I call that God. I don't think God is a person, or a man, or a flying spaghetti monster. I call it something greater than our universe, and it's an entity.

"Who created God?" is a meaningless question. You are using our laws (of time) to answer a question which does not apply to our universe. We are already way past our scope and our comprehension, I believe humans will never be able to comprehend.

 

[nobodyknows]

To believe or not to believe, that is the question.

Are we just a chemical reaction or is there something more to us? What happens to our personality that was shaped and formed by a lifetime of experiences when we die? Do we not have a spark in us that leaves our body when we die? What happens to it? Don't the laws of physics say that energy can neither be created or destroyed?

I for one believe I'm more then just some random chemical reaction. I don't subscribe to any particular religion, but I do believe in a higher power.

 

[LumbergTech]

To believe or not to believe, that is the question.

Are we just a chemical reaction or is there something more to us? What happens to our personality that was shaped and formed by a lifetime of experiences when we die? Do we not have a spark in us that leaves our body when we die? What happens to it? Don't the laws of physics say that energy can neither be created or destroyed?

I for one believe I'm more then just some random chemical reaction. I don't subscribe to any particular religion, but I do believe in a higher power.

meaning is subjective

we make our own

if you choose to subscribe to a collective meaning created by multiple people thats fine with me...but it doesn't necessarily mean its the truth ..its just what you want to do with your life

(not you specifically, just people in general)

i personally dont believe there is a "conscious being" who set things in motion

i wont pretend to understand how something can come from nothing, but if there is a god it would still have to come from somewhere by the logic of the "design/designer" people

there would have to be an infinite line of creators and it would still not explain the beginning because the concept of beginning may not even make sense in terms of trying to explain how anything "exists"

 

[brencat]

To each answer comes the question "why?". It is an endless loop for origin. It is far beyond our understanding, Hawking included.

The central tenet to the Christian faith is that you have to accept that "God always was." When trying to answer who or what created the universe, people make the mistake of saying "but what created God?" as the reason for their confusion of origin. Sure it's a legitimate question and a rational one too. But if you are going to accept religion at all and the concept of God, then you have to start with God as divine, not first created by anything.

 

[shira]

Hawking is simply speculating outside the realm of his expertise. It has long been his way to attempt to prove (or, at least, prove the feasibility of) a hypothesis of spontaneous creation, which is not the way science works. His colleagues at Cambridge state as much in the OP's article. Physicists from around the world have been decrying his efforts to answer a fundamentally philosophical question by attempting to confuse science and philosophy, but the media eats it up and keeps throwing his name out there. Sure, he's made some interesting contributions to theoretical physics, but he wouldn't even make the list of the top 10 most important physicists in the last 25 years, and this crusade is exactly why. He's spent his life trying to answer a philosophical question with science.

As for those of you who disagree that this is a fundamentally philosophical question, that was addressed previously in this thread.

You continue to point to your old posts as though they're holy text, when in fact they're drivel. Oh, gee, you present two postulates for creation - a big bang versus a devious God who mimics every detail of a big bang - and challenge us to "disprove" either. Which compels us to believe what, exactly? That the two philosophical choices - a Godless creation versus a Godful one - have equal weight?

Sorry, you fail. To see why, imagine your argument used in a court of law:

Hypothesis A: The accused's fingerprints are on the knife; the victim's blood matches the blood on the knife. The victim's mortal wounds are completely consistent with the blade of the knife. Eywitnesses place the accused at the murder scene at the estimated time of the murder. And the accused was seen by five witnesses yelling at the victim just minutes before the estimate time of the murder, and they testify that they heard the accused swear he would kill the victim. Clearly, the accused committed the murder.

Hypothesis B: All of the so-called evidence was planted by God to fool us into believing that the accused - who is totally innocent - committed the crime.

I challenge you to "disprove" either of the above theories of the murder. Since - according to you - both "theories" are equally credible from a "philosophical" point of view, we must acquit the accused, right?

There's a difference between scientific rigor and lazy-ass thinking. You're an intellecutual void who thinks he's hot shit. But then, what could one possibly expect from one who believes in a universe run by a magical, invisible superbeing?