Atheist Stephen Hawking met his Maker on Wednesday, March 14, at age 76. One imagines that the meeting didn’t go well for him.
For most of Hawking’s life here on Earth, he denied the existence of God, declaring himself an atheist and claiming, “There is no Heaven or afterlife.… That is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark.” He famously declared:
Before we understand science, it is natural to believe that God created the universe. But now science offers a more convincing explanation. What I meant by “we would know the mind of God” is, we would know everything that God would know, if there were a God, which there isn’t. I’m an atheist.
The world loved him. They felt sorry for his near lifelong battle with ALS — Lou Gehrig’s disease — which kept him confined to a wheelchair. They suffered even more when learning that, following a tracheotomy, he lost the ability to speak. When he wrote A Brief History of Time in 1988, nine million people bought a copy. The book remained on the British Sunday Times’ best-seller list for an astonishing and record-breaking 237 consecutive weeks. When he thought up his theory of Hawking Radiation — how black holes emit radiation — no one cared that his theory couldn’t be proven or that his radiation was never observed. His Facebook page had more than four million followers.
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He supported the idea that the universe spontaneously erupted from absolutely nothing other than the laws of physics (where these laws of physics came from he didn’t say), even though that belief violates a basic rule of logic: Something cannot come from nothing. He called it “spontaneous creation,” and the world loved him for relieving them of the burden of believing that God, in His infinite wisdom and for His eternal glory, created the universe according to His own will and purpose. Hawking’s hawkings allowed them to wallow in their own pride, thinking they owed nothing to any Creator and were therefore responsible only to themselves.
The world celebrated him every chance it got. President Obama awarded Hawking the Presidential Medal of Freedom (for which the president will have to answer in his own time). He was an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. In 2002, he was ranked number 25 in the BBC poll of the 100 Greatest Britons.
Hawking claimed that science proved that God didn’t and doesn’t exist:
Many people would like us to use these coincidences [the fine-tuning of the universe] as evidence of the work of God. The idea that the universe was designed to accommodate mankind appears in theologies and mythologies dating from thousands of years ago. In Western culture the Old Testament contains the idea of providential design, but the traditional Christian viewpoint was also greatly influenced by Aristotle, who believed “in an intelligent natural world that functions according to some deliberate design.”
That is not the answer of modern science. As recent advances in cosmology suggest, the laws of gravity and quantum theory allow universes to appear spontaneously from nothing.
However, even Hawking noted the incredible coincidences that had to have happened to allow life to occur in our universe, or any universe — odds of many trillions to one — but to counter the coincidences, Hawking merely postulated that there are many trillions of universes, so one of them was bound to hold life. But cosmology has not produced one iota of evidence proving a multi-verse.
Still he received accolades. Even NASA (the National Aeronautics and Space Administration) expressed itself at Hawking’s passing:
Remembering Stephen Hawking, a renowned physicist and ambassador of science. His theories unlocked a universe of possibilities that we and the world are exploring. May you keep flying like superman in microgravity.
All of which, according to the former president and chancellor of Boston University, is preposterous. Said John Silber, “The gospel preached during every television show is ‘You only go around once in life, so get all the gusto you can.’ It is a statement about theology; it is a statement about beer. It’s lousy beer and even worse theology.”
That is what Spike Psarris found while working for NASA as an engineer: “I went into that career as an atheist and committed evolutionist,” he said. “By the time I left I had become a creationist and a Christian.… I became a creationist because of overwhelming evidence against secular origins models, and supporting the truth of the Bible.”
Psarris now speaks widely about that overwhelming evidence through public presentations and videos available at CreationAstronomy.com. They include hour-long presentations on Our Created Solar System, Our Created Stars and Galaxies, and Our Created Universe. They cover just some of the nonsense, falsehoods, errors, and inventions of phony and illogical explanations Hawking and others have used to explain away the huge gaps in evolutionary cosmology.
Hawking now has all eternity to mourn the errors in his logic and false assumptions that influenced so many millions during his time here on Earth.
Photo of Stephen Hawking: John Cairns via Wikimedia
An Ivy League graduate and former investment advisor, Bob is a regular contributor to The New American magazine and blogs frequently at LightFromTheRight.com, primarily on economics and politics. He can be reached at [email protected].
