Stephen Hawking's Stand.

[chaowdur]

Recently Stephen Hawking has made a statement of the universe not needing God as the creator. (You can find it all over the internet) The media, athiest and agnostics are going crazy!~
If you know of William Lane Craig, this is one of his main arguments (how something can come from nothing). I don't know much about this subject but didn't the Big Bang create space and time to put laws like gravity into effect (God created the Big Bang) ?

What are your views on Hawking's points...?

 

[laconicstudent]

Recently Stephen Hawking has made a statement of the universe not needing God as the creator. (You can find it all over the internet) The media, athiest and agnostics are going crazy!~

Why are they going crazy because one famous physicist said something that they already believe? I really don't understand why this would be an issue.

 

[Yeznik]

Stephan Hawking is not a person who is educated and/or studied religion and theology. So that gives him zero credibility outside of his person opinion in regards to religious matters. To take Hawking's advice in Religion is like taking medical advice from a painter regarding how to remove a brain tumor.



Secondly, it is scientifically impossible from something to come from nothing regardless of Hawking ideas and there is no scientific proof besides his far-fetched theories. He may be an excellent physicist but that is all he is limited too in the area of expertise.

 

[wayseer]

Hawking is a scientist who, like Dawkins, is locked into one particular ontological position that constrains any experience outside of the science 'system' as illegitimate.

Many Christians are also locked into a similar 'system' that they cannot see over the theological parapet of their own ontological position.

 

[DonnyT]

There is no evidence of God and there never will be any evidence of God. If God wanted us to believe through evidence He would have just shown himself to all of us so we could see Him with our own eyes. Instead He chooses for us to believe through faith. Also, science cannot quantify God because you cannot use the natural to measure the supernatural.

 

[Mr Dave]

What are your views on Hawking's points...?

I think (like Dawkins) he's pushed what he knows into a realm where it doesn't fit. All that science shows is that one interpretation of how things came to be is wrong, it does not mean that God does not exist. The maths and science shows that the universe was able to develop on its own, this doesn't mean it did so. It just pushes the 'who caused the cause' thing back another stage.

P.s. don't misconstrue this to think that I believe in ID, OEC, YEC etc. (that God may have been closely fiddling all the way along the line). I believe He brought the things to being so that they could develop as the maths and science shows us that they did.

 

[Mr Dave]

In The Times today, http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/science/physics/article2712324.ece

Hawking: Archbishop Leads Religious Response​

Religious leaders united yesterday in a fightback against Stephen Hawking’s assertion that science leaves no role for God in the creation of the Universe.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, dismissed the conclusions of Britain’s most eminent scientist, telling The Times: “Belief in God is not about plugging a gap in explaining how one thing relates to another within the Universe. It is the belief that there is an intelligent, living agent on whose activity everything ultimately depends for its existence.

“Physics on its own will not settle the question of why there is something rather than nothing.”

Dr Williams’ response was bolstered by similarly staunch rebuttals from the Chief Rabbi, Lord Sacks, the leader of the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales, and one of Britain’s most senior imams.

In a fierce response, Lord Sacks writes today: “Science is about explanation. Religion is about interpretation ... The Bible simply isn’t interested in how the Universe came into being.”

The debate was ignited by an extract of Professor Hawking’s forthcoming book that appeared exclusively yesterday in The Times’ science magazine Eureka. He concluded that far from being an incomprehensible event that could only be accounted for by a leap of faith, the Big Bang was an inevitable consequence of the laws of physics.

“It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the Universe going,” he wrote.

His words triggered a debate yesterday between scientists and people of faith across the world, and became one of the main talking points online.

The Roman Catholic Archbishop of Westminster, Vincent Nichols, who will argue the case for religion in The Times next week, said: “I would totally endorse what the Chief Rabbi said so eloquently about the relationship between religion and science.”

Ibrahim Mogra, a leading imam and Muslim Council of Britain committee chairman, said: “If we look at the Universe and all that has been created, it indicates that somebody has been here to bring it into existence. That somebody is the almighty creator.”

 

[MamaZ]

He is looking at all of Gods creation and how it works I suppose and believes men can do this without God?

 

[christianmomof3]

Stephen Hawking's Stand.
Recently Stephen Hawking has made a statement of the universe not needing God as the creator. (You can find it all over the internet) The media, athiest and agnostics are going crazy!~
What are your views on Hawking's points...?

I found the title interesting.
Stephen Hawking cannot stand anymore.
The further his disease has progressed, the more of his stand he has lost.
Now, he has no stand at all.
His theory of the universe not needing God is just his theory.
We should pray for him.

 

[Mr Dave]

Chief Rabbi, Lord Jonathan Sacks has his own article on this as well as that bit I quoted earlier. http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/opinion/columnists/article2711505.ece

(Again, in case you can't view it, I'll copy it)

Even great science tells us nothing about God​

Stephen Hawking is wrong about the existence of God. He has simply refuted his own earlier mistaken theology.

What would we do for entertainment without scientists telling us, with breathless excitement, that “God did not create the Universe”, as if they were the first to discover this astonishing proposition? Stephen Hawking is the latest, but certainly not the first. When Napoleon asked Laplace, two hundred years ago, where was God in his scientific system, the mathematician replied, Je n’ai pas besoin de cette hypothèse. “I do not need God to explain the Universe.” We never did. That is what scientists do not understand.

There is a difference between science and religion. Science is about explanation. Religion is about interpretation. Science takes things apart to see how they work. Religion puts things together to see what they mean. They are different intellectual enterprises. They even occupy different hemispheres of the brain. Science — linear, atomistic, analytical — is a typical left-brain activity. Religion — integrative, holistic, relational — is supremely a work of the right brain.

It is important for us to understand the misinterpretation Professor Hawking has made, because the mutual hostility between religion and science is one of the curses of our age, and is damaging to religion and science in equal measure.

The best way of approaching it is through the autobiography of Charles Darwin. Darwin tells us that as a young man he had been impressed with the case for God as set out by William Paley in his Natural Theology of 1802. Paley updated the classic “argument from design” to the state of scientific knowledge as it existed in his day.

Find a stone on a heath, says Paley, and you won’t ask who designed it. It doesn’t look as if it was designed. But find a watch and you will think differently. A watch looks as if it was designed. Therefore it had a designer. The Universe looks more like a watch than a stone. It is intricate, interlocking, complex. Therefore, it too had a designer, whose name is God.

Darwin, in a simple yet world-transforming idea, showed how the appearance of design does not require a designer at all. It can emerge over a long period of time by, as we would put it today, an iterated process of genetic mutation and natural selection. So the Universe is not like a watch, or if it is, the watchmaker was blind. QED.

But whoever thought the Universe was like a watch in the first place? The scientists and philosophers of the 17th and 18th centuries: Newton, Leibniz, Laplace, Auguste Comte. What was wrong about Paley’s argument was not the theology but the science on which it was based. Good science refutes bad science. It tells us nothing at all about God.

Professor Hawking has done something very similar, except that this time he plays both parts. He is both Paley and Darwin and, with great legerdemain and panache, Hawking II, the good scientist, has brilliantly refuted Hawking I, the poor theologian.

Hawking I was the person who wrote, at the end of A Brief History of Time, that if we found science’s holy grail, a theory-of-everything, we would know “why it is that we and the Universe exist”. We would “know the mind of God”.
This is so elementary a fallacy that it is hard to believe that Professor Hawking meant it. We would know how we and the Universe came into being — not why. Nor, in any but the most trivial sense, would we “know the mind of God”. The Bible is relatively uninterested in how the Universe came into being. It devotes a mere 34 verses to the subject. It takes 15 times as much space to describe how the Israelites constructed a sanctuary in the desert.

The Bible is not proto-science, pseudo-science or myth masquerading as science. It is interested in other questions entirely. Who are we? Why are we here? How then shall we live? It is to answer those questions, not scientific ones, that we seek to know the mind of God.

Hawking II has now refuted Hawking I. The Universe, according to the new theory, created itself. (This reminds me of a joke I heard as an undergraduate about a smug business tycoon: “He is a self-made man, thereby relieving God of a grave responsibility.”) Should you reply that the Universe must be astonishingly intelligent to have fine-tuned itself so precisely for the emergence of stars, planets, life and us, all of which are massively improbable, then the answer is that there is an infinity of universes in which all the possibilities and permutations are played out. We struck lucky. We found the universe that contained us.

I first heard this theory from that brilliant and wise scientist, Lord Rees of Ludlow, President of the Royal Society. He too, as he explains in his book Just Six Numbers, was puzzled by the precision of the six mathematical constants that define the shape of the Universe. So unlikely is it that the Universe just happened by chance to fit those parameters that he, too, was forced to suggest the parallel universes hypothesis. If you hold an infinity of lottery tickets, one of them is going to win.

That is true, but not elegant. The principle of Occam’s razor says don’t multiply unnecessary entities. Given a choice between a single intelligent creator and an infinity of self-creating universes, the former wins hands down.
But let us hail a scientific genius. Professor Hawking is one of the truly great minds of our time. Two thousand years ago the rabbis coined a blessing — you can find it in any Jewish prayer book — on seeing a great scientist, regardless of his or her religious beliefs. That seems to me the right attitude of religion to science: admiration and thankfulness.

But there is more to wisdom than science. It cannot tell us why we are here or how we should live. Science masquerading as religion is as unseemly as religion masquerading as science. I will continue to believe that God who created one or an infinity of universes in love and forgiveness continues to ask us to create, to love and to forgive.

Lord Sacks is the Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth

 

[callmeMurph]

I found this article helpful when reading about what Hawking said...sounds to me like the media is going a little overboard.

Cosmic Log - Hawking says God's not needed. So?

"Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing," Hawking and his co-author, Caltech physicist Leonard Mlodinow, write in "The Grand Design," which is due to be issued next week. "Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist. It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going."

...

Does Hawking's view mean that modern physics "leaves no place for God in the creation of the universe," as the Times suggests, or that "God did not create the universe," as The Guardian claims? Not unless you need a "God of the Gaps" to step into science's place. A more sophisticated view would hold that physics (and evolutionary biology, to cite another example) are the not-always-mysterious ways in which God routinely works. In fact, Soren Kierkegaard would say that God's workings have to be transparent — and I tend to side with Soren.

 

[LBP]

As theologian Paul Tillich stated, the religious question is "Why is there anything; why is there not nothing at all?" When it comes to answering this question, Stephen Hawking, Richard Dawkins, William Lane Craig, Billy Graham and the Pope have no more to tell us than does my cat Pooky. Anyone who doesn't understand this, or who continues to get caught up in the "debate" between those who deny the existence of God and those who defend the existence of God, just doesn't get it.

 

[bbbbbbb]

Why anyone takes Steven Hawking seriously in matters of religion is quite bewildering to myself. I certainly do not. I am grateful that my faith is based not on the revelation of Truth through Steven Hawking but upon the revelation of God in Jesus Christ.

 

[bling]

Steven has been shown to be wrong other times even in his science. He had stated earlier that "man had a purpose" and that created a fus.

 

[Etsi]

Recently Stephen Hawking has made a statement of the universe not needing God as the creator. (You can find it all over the internet) The media, athiest and agnostics are going crazy!~
If you know of William Lane Craig, this is one of his main arguments (how something can come from nothing). I don't know much about this subject but didn't the Big Bang create space and time to put laws like gravity into effect (God created the Big Bang) ?

What are your views on Hawking's points...?

I like Stephen Hawking. He's a great man, that has been gifted with overcoming great obstacles, and a great mind for math and space. However, he's still a man and still limited as we all are...and just as full of pride and arrogance. One day he will meet the Creator just as the rest of us mere humans will.

 

[BrotherBob]

1 Corinthians 3:19-20 "For the wisdom of this world is foolishness before God, For it is written, "He is the one who catches the wise in their craftiness;" and again, "The Lord knows the reasoning of the wise, that they are useless."

1 Corinthians 1:18 "For the word of the cross is to those who are perishing foolishness, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God."

 

[Mr Dave]

 

[Montalban]

There is no evidence of God and there never will be any evidence of God. If God wanted us to believe through evidence He would have just shown himself to all of us so we could see Him with our own eyes. Instead He chooses for us to believe through faith. Also, science cannot quantify God because you cannot use the natural to measure the supernatural.

I note that you give yourself a Christian faith icon. To me it seems odd then that you would be talking about a lack of evidence of God.

You mistake the concept "There is no evidence for God" with "There is no scientific evidence for God"

Your statement about if God wanted us to believe - he does, and he did send His Son.

 

[Montalban]

As theologian Paul Tillich stated, the religious question is "Why is there anything; why is there not nothing at all?" When it comes to answering this question, Stephen Hawking, Richard Dawkins, William Lane Craig, Billy Graham and the Pope have no more to tell us than does my cat Pooky. Anyone who doesn't understand this, or who continues to get caught up in the "debate" between those who deny the existence of God and those who defend the existence of God, just doesn't get it.

Your cat Pooky says otherwise!

 

[daydreamergurl15]

Stephen Hawkins didn't die for my sins, therefore I don't care what Hawkins said.