Stephen Hawkins Says Idea of Afterlife a "fairy tale"

I don't force my beliefs or perceptions on anyone, our very conversation is proof of that. You choose to believe whatever it is you want despite what I or anyone else is saying.

 

Yes, a blank empty canvas for God to paint the universe.

 

That's one option. But it's not the one you can actually reason to from the evidence.

 

Why, that's Mrs. Hawkins' boy-she runs the drapery store just down the road...
We're talking Hawking

 

Not if you're an Etruscan, not if you're an ape, not if you're blind, etc etc. You are arbitrarilly declaring anyone who didn't observe the sky and question naive empiricism was simply ignorance, when I can equally argue it's occam's razor. The decision to label the acceptance of an argument as either ignorance or Occam's razor is completely subjective and biased. Just like the stars revolve around the earth. SImply, there's no reason to say a conclusion is drawn either from ignorance, neglect, or Occam's Razor without a biased arbiter. The denial of this arbiter is naive.

The scientific method is social control, manipulation, and an inadequate pursuit for epistemological realization, so I am more than happy not to be called a scientist.

Because you claimed that the "people believed the earth was flat myth back then" was false, and I'm demonstrating to you that's not true, and that believe WAS in fact an exercise of Occam's Razor.

But the conjecture itself is based on evidence, it's just that you don't accept how the plausibility of a conjecture can destabilize...let's call it "establishment epistemology." And assuming we do have a binary star that disrupts the planet from every time to time, and that most stars are binary, I see no basis to accept any of these belifs about the solar system, including that mass extinctions happen ONLY every 26 million years.

I've given you the evidence, you just don't like to question your beliefs and find every excuse not too. Just by looking at the seal, by all means it looks they understood what the basic solar system looked like, and I trust that more than Germans fiddling with a 7000 year old language isolate any day of the week.

 

Well, You go get some evidence and get right back to me...

 

Gladly.

The two general competing options for "what existed before the Big Bang" are these:

1. The universe (my option).

2. God (your option).

Look out the nearest window.

Do you see anything?

Ahah!!! Evidence that universes actually exist.

Now your turn.

Give me comparable evidence for God.

 

Of course universes exist, God started the Big Bang a coupla billion years ago.

 

But you're not arguing anything to do with Occam's Razor at all. Until you can show me that the Etruscan's debated different cosmologies and came down on the wrong answer because they applied Occam's Razor you are making no argument.

I gotta tell you. You are honestly the first person I've ever spoken to that thought Occam's razor was a bad thing. I've known many who couldn't bring themselves to apply it, but never somebody who got really upset about the thing.

It's just weird.

Nonsense. Arguments are accepted every day for both those reasons and it requires no bias to be able to distinguish between them. If Occam's Razor was not applied, it is simply true that it was not applied.

Looking up and believing that the stars orbit the earth comes from direct observation, not a comparison between that and some competing theory. You can't apply Occam's razor if you have never considered more than one option.

Nonsense. The scientific method is simply and entirely a pragmatic program for incrementally approaching truth. And even given this narrow and prosaic purpose, it has established itself as the single most productive enterprise in all of human history. There is no other human endeavor that compares; not politics, not religion, not philosophy, not commerce.

It warrants our attention for one reason and one reason only; it works.

You had to go all the way back to the Etruscans? Again... who cares? They were a pre-scientific people with neither a conception of nor need to apply Occam's Razor. Again... you can't apply it if you are only considering a single option.

I have now reread that paragraph at least six times. From it I cannot tell if you are saying you believe we are a binary star star system, or you don't believe we are a binary star system or whether or not it has anything to do with mass extinctions.

And for the life of me... I cannot connect it to any discussion of an Akkadian seal that appears to show a nova in a field of stars.

Well in all fairness, since so much of the "evidence" you have given turns out to not even be true, finding "excuses" has not been an exercise requiring any great effort.

Wow... too bad they never bothered to tell anybody.

Huh?

 

Great. You concede that at least one universe exists. One point for my side. Now let's try to get one in your column.

Now... I'll ask again. Show me comparable evidence for the existence of a God.

 

What did he use, a Huck's starter?http://www.google.co.uk/imgres?imgu...age=2&ndsp=15&ved=1t:429,r:6,s:15&tx=61&ty=36

 

You do happen to realize, that the person who founded that, was a Cathloic Priest who when heard that the Pope stated that this was proof that that universe was created by god, he said that it was a real scientfic theory, and had nothing to do with Religion?

 

I'll suggest the link below exemplifies the approach many people use to 'prove' the existence of a deity. For this lesson we must ignore the reasonable definition of 'proof'.

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e9MwNm0gXd8&feature=player_embedded"]YouTube - ‪Fibonacci numbers - The Fingerprint of God‬‏[/ame]

 

Yes I am. Occam's Razor=simplest explanation is most plausible, yes? All I'm showing you is that's fallacious. It doesn't have to be a matter of scientific discourse (or any discourse) to be utilized. And yes, I despise Occam's Razor.

You can't asser that science is this sort of miracle you think it is as you can't possibly know why it is the people of ancient times believed what they did without (your words) conjecture that they were just superstitious and stupid. They could very well have seen things that you possibly couldn't have seen which that drawing very well indicates. PErhaps you might be correct in saying "of the last 2000 years," but then again I think it may have made us all stupider by convincing us to abandon the great questions of our being, such as our origins, the divine (or simply what made us rather)...Let's see all the things the great scientific method can't explain and furthermore tries to suppress. Doesn't explain how the pyramids were built, doesn't explain the star child, it doesn't account for the fact that most stars are binary in describing our solar system, doesn't explain why the Greek historians explained that a place called Atlantis existed, doesn't explain how the Mayans could possibly know as much as they did; and to be honest, these are pretty (*)(*)(*)(*) big questions that very drastically alter our history and epistemology that science ignores, and furthermore tries to suppress. And for these reasons, your use of the word "work" is subversive in that although it may give us technological advancement, does it lead to the a total understanding? I say no, not at all.

Thus, I do not know if I believe we our in a binary star system (though I believe it moreso than not on the sheer fact that most are), but I certainly reject science acting all sure of itself and rejecting opinions of the ancient when it can't even prove that their solar model is right.

And yes, it is too (*)(*)(*)(*) bad that some sort of event happened (deluge perhaps) and the knowledge was lost. And I eagerly await 2012 or perhaps and earlier date to either affirm or deny it.

 

Yes... note the last three letters of the word. Simplest. You can't have a "simplest" explanation if you only are considering only one. What would it be simpler then? And again, rather than "fallacious," Occam's Razor has proven to be a critical tool in the pursuit of truth. You yourself are a cautionary tale in the failure to use it.

And yes, that's just weird.

Well for starters, it is pretty clear I do not consider science miraculous. I have repeatedly referred to it as narrow, prosaic and pragmatic. It also just happens to work incredibly well. Would this be a good time to point out that our very conversation is taking place on a technology platform that certainly did not derive from religion? I'm pretty sure the Akkadians did not have the Internet.

But I have never accused ancient people of stupidity. They were just as smart as we are. We've just got better and more books.

And as to superstition... modern people are not a whole lot less superstitious than the cave men were.

And Julius Caesar could very well have invaded Tasmania. Just because he wrote a whole history about his invasion of Gaul, and another about the Roman Civil Wars, and just because he never wrote a single word about invading Tasmania that doesn't mean he didn't invade Tasmania.

Unless of course you have more than a mere brainstorm at the top of your vertebral column.

One is never made stupider by ruthlessly pursuing what is true and discarding what is false. And if you surrender the rigor of that pursuit to sentimental mysticism or magical thinking, you may as well stop pretending that evidence or reason is even important to you. Just abandon yourself to intuition and take your lumps. Nobody will care, because you will be too ineffectual to do much damage to what is important.

Some of these are big questions. Some are trivial. Many are simply untrue. And it is symptomatic of your worldview that you are unable to tell the difference.

There's not really a whole lot of mystery regarding how the pyramids were built.

The "star child" is the skull of a human but hydrocephalic child.

Most stars are not binary.

Atlantis is merely a garbled account of an ordinary volcanic eruption.

You still haven't shown as anything unusual about what the Mayans believed. But I have to point out that the Mayans still exist yet without their civilization, so whatever they knew can't have been very helpful.

The only thing that paragraph has accomplished is to put as fine a point as possible on your personal susceptibility for pseudoscience.

I have never claimed that science provided a "total understanding." Science is about answering the question "how," not the question "why."

It's not science's fault that the most likely answer to the question "why" is "because."

There is no such thing as proof. There is only greater or lesser confidence. At the extreme end of lesser confidence is the "no good reason in hell to believe" rating.

Most of your beliefs fall neatly into that category.

That's one possibility. But Occam's Razor would lead us to conclude that nothing was lost... it was never actually "known" in the first place.

I know you hate that. But that's why you believe the stuff you do.

 

Watch the Science channel right now on this subject

 

Steven Hawking is only talking about the limitations of man and our ability to comprehend the wondrous creation of God.

 

That's not how science works dude, sorry. We have evidence that people have brains. There is no scientific evidence to support the existence of God or the afterlife. It's entirely faith based.

Hawking is an idiot. There may come a day in the future when science can conclusively prove what happens to conciousness after death. And it may not just be nothing as he claims to know.

 

Collect all the imaginable data/medical statistics, etc. on a living person. After they die, run all the identical tests again to collect new data. After you have finished this process, compare the living data to the dead data, and let me know what you have found??

Or if you wish, within a living person, just collect the data of their 'faith' or 'spirit' or 'whatever' it is that supposedly can lead to an afterlife. IF there is some magical afterlife, some aspect of a human continues to another dimension, then you should be able to access that 'whatever' while they are alive.

If you can't identify and quantify this 'whatever' while they are alive, how can you possibly believe it miraculously appears after they are dead?

And finally, there are about 300 recognized religions in the world, many with conflicting beliefs, diametrically opposed in ideals, etc.; How is it possible that all of these different 'beliefs' can claim to hold the knowledge to everything from the beginning to an afterlife? Who is the jury which decides one religion is correct and the other couple of hundred are meaningless?

 

Because for some people they are better off with religion then they were without. They have given up addictions and bad habits. They have changed there attitude towards there family and become more loving and patient. They have hope where they couldn't find any before. Religion is very important to a lot of people and despite what so many people post on this forum they're not all hypocritical-war mongering-money grubbing-racist proselytes. Religion has improved there life without having to pay for pills or a psychiatrist. Why is it so horrible that they believe in something like that? Whether god exists or not shouldn't matter when there lifestyle has actually improved since they have taken up which ever faith that they have.

Personally I don't care if we came from god, the big bang, evolution, or was created in some alien science lab on Calzone 52. And there's nothing wrong with accepting that all life was created by evolution and physics. What you believe doesn't effect me in one or another. However I think there are times when science can't come up with an answer that they dismiss it as impossible because it doesn't add up to they know as facts. I just think that people haven't found the proper way to study or observe those kinds of things yet is all. And I think there are times when religion doesn't take the time to figure out why certain things happen and take credit for normal everyday happenstance. Neither system is perfect but it impacts people differently.

 

I guess he'll find out some day whether it was a "fairy tale" or not - there are no atheists in hell or in foxholes!

 

Actually... there are atheists in foxholes.

And... there are probably no theists in hell either.

 

This dude is so horrible. He is a biologist with a purpose to deface God and Religion. He has given all kinds of false prophet crap dealing with evolution that people just "believe". He's like the Athiest Messiah!!! His religion is evolution and people are sucking it up by the thousands - not reading - just believing because they don't want to believe in Religion.

Any intelligent man would state that "in my own belief, I look at Heaven as a fairytale"... But, not him because he has a purpose!! A nonprofessional purpose! A biologist should not be mixing Religion with Biological Science! EVER!!!!

 

"What existed before the Big Bang" is a meaningless question as "time", like the the other 3 dimensions did not exist "before" the BB. According to theory, the BB created (space-)time.