Stephen Hawkins Says Idea of Afterlife a "fairy tale"

I prefer to call it 'delusion'.

 

The thing about wagers is that you bet on the most probable outcome. Since the scientific method has long been proven to work and has precedents, whereas the god method never has, why would you be surprised at people betting against a god?

 

If they are right, and there is no God, then no harm no foul for believers and non-believers alike, but if they are wrong, and God does exist, which side of the issue would you like to be on?

 

That is because that is how you relate to it. I hope for your sake one day you come out of that state of mind, but free will allows for evil to paint a more appealing picture on this earth.

 

Amen to that!!!

 

I tend to disagree with this point. Not to try and split hair on this but some bad things are definitely more tempting, but when thought through to conclusion then I believe good will always triumph, and you would think that some of these so called intelligent academics would know that.

 

I'm not going to spend my life worrying about 'what ifs'. We don't know if god, aliens, flying spaghetti monsters or whatever exist, and I don't need the crutch of 'faith' in order to guarantee I don't burn in hell forever.
If you can offer me some evidence of a god-any god of the many thousands will do-you'd be surprised how quickly I can change my mind.
In the meantime I'll stick with Arthur C. Clarke-his books are more entertaining.

 

And that is most certainly your choice, and I will not fault you for it, and you are correct in your statement about god, aliens and flying spaghetti monsters. That is what I have been saying all along. And even if you don't or have never had faith is still not a guarantee that you will burn in hell forever, assuming God and Hell exist. But to your first statement, about "what ifs", isn't that what man has always done, not just with faith or God, but with everything in life, isn't that why man is questioning his very existence?

I am not asking nor do I care what you believe. It is up to each individual to determine that. It's individuals who choose to mock or demonize others beliefs, (both believers and non-believers), because they believe theirs to be the only correct one, they are the ones that I take issue with.

 

See... and that claim is the one that deserves most vigorous challenge. The whole "no harm no foul" assertion. It might be true of Buddhism. It might be true of Judaism. It might be true of Zoroastrianism.

But it is not true of the two largest religions on the planet, the mother/daughter faiths of Christianity and Islam. These religions are not merely exclusive monotheisms that automatically declare infidels to be so evil that they are worthy of eternal punishment in a lake of fire, they are also imperialistic faiths "commissioned" by their God to conquer the entire world. The fundamental and native intolerance of those religions demands active vigilance from those who do not share them... especially in contexts where they are the monolithic majority such as in the the US and Iran.

"Evangelical atheists" merely fight fire with fire and not because they are pyromaniacs, but because of a desire to avoid being burned as our philosophic ancestors so often were. As Americans we are fortunate (in comparison to Iranians) only in that first our nation was founded by heretics with first hand experience of Christian intolerance, and second that modern Christians are much worse Christians than Muslims are Muslims.

As Nietzsche wrote, "It is not their love for men but the impotence of their love for men which hinders the Christians of today from burning us."

 

From your perspective, I can only assume that too must God's fault.

 

Well I don't speak for all religions, I only speak for myself, and in the most general sense of the term God, all of the religions believe him/her to be good and fair, as far as the differences, well that is another discussion entirely.

 

Not the Abrahamic one.

 

Why do you and others mix religion with stem cell research? Or birth control? Or abortion?

 

What Billy Graham does is walk around government demanding religious beliefs, actually HIS religious beliefs, be forced into government policy for the general public...

 

Do you believe Hawking is intelligent?

"Stephen then went on to Cambridge to do research in Cosmology, there being no one working in that area in Oxford at the time. His supervisor was Denis Sciama, although he had hoped to get Fred Hoyle who was working in Cambridge. After gaining his Ph.D. he became first a Research Fellow and later on a Professorial Fellow at Gonville and Caius College. After leaving the Institute of Astronomy in 1973, Stephen came to the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics in 1979, and held the post of Lucasian Professor of Mathematics from 1979 until 2009. The chair was founded in 1663 with money left in the will of the Reverend Henry Lucas who had been the Member of Parliament for the University. It was first held by Isaac Barrow and then in 1669 by Isaac Newton. He is currently the Director of Research at the Centre for Theoretical Cosmology, at DAMTP in Cambridge.

Stephen Hawking has worked on the basic laws which govern the universe. With Roger Penrose he showed that Einstein's General Theory of Relativity implied space and time would have a beginning in the Big Bang and an end in black holes. These results indicated that it was necessary to unify General Relativity with Quantum Theory, the other great Scientific development of the first half of the 20th Century. One consequence of such a unification that he discovered was that black holes should not be completely black, but rather should emit radiation and eventually evaporate and disappear. Another conjecture is that the universe has no edge or boundary in imaginary time. This would imply that the way the universe began was completely determined by the laws of science."

 

Exactly...what if someone is wrong about the existence of a deity...what harm can be done?

And just to help me a bit...which of the myriad deities that various religious groups worship, are 100% correct about everything? Which one is the all-knowing...all-seeing deity? Is the Christian deity more relevant than the Mormon deity? Or the Muslim deity? I need some help on this...

 

That is an unfounded opinion that is baseless!

 

If God does exist, then everyone who believes has a plan that they will get to heaven. Is there 1 way to get there or are there many ways? What are they? What % do you think would end up there?

 

If three people are sitting on the edge of a 3 foot diameter hole and they cannot see the bottom of this hole, how do you explain why one of the people will try to measure the depth of the hole, drop probes to learn what's going on down there, and when they have some data they share this data and then proclaim there's more to learn. While the second person simply proclaims there are purple people eaters down there. And the third person proclaims there are pink people eaters down there...

 

Entropy rules the cosmos...

 

Hawking is a fairytale.

 

Well...to be fair here there are lots of people who are very intelligent, scientific if you wish, who believe in a deity or higher power. I see nothing wrong with this as long as their beliefs are kept to themselves instead of trying to force them on others. If some people prefer to follow religious beliefs...this is fine with me and does not make them anything less than others. However, if they wish to go into a public venue like this thread and debate their beliefs, then obviously the debate must move to things like evidence and data instead of myths...