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Professor Stephen Hawking quotes On God and Religion This page features some science related reservations about

religion and religiously based explanations of existence attributed to Professor Stephen Hawking.

"As we shall see, the concept of time has no meaning before the beginning of the universe. This was first pointed out by St. Augustine. When asked: What did God do before he created the universe? Augustine didn't reply: He was preparing Hell for people who asked such questions. Instead, he said that time was a property of the universe that God created, and that time did not exist before the beginning of the universe." Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time (New York: Bantam, 1988), p. 8

"One can imagine that God created the universe at literally any time in the past. On the other hand, if the universe is expanding, there may be physical reasons why there had to be a beginning. One could imagine that God created the universe at the instant of the big bang, or even afterwards in just such a way as to make it look as though there had been a big bang, but it would be meaningless to suppose that it was created before the big bang. An expanding universe does not preclude a creator, but it does place limits on when he might have carried out his job!" A Brief History of Time (New York: Bantam, 1988), pp. 8-9.

"With the success of scientific theories in describing events, most people have come to believe that God allows the universe to evolve according to a set of laws and does not intervene in the universe to break these laws. However, the laws do not tell us what the universe should have looked like when it started -- it would still be up to God to wind up the clockwork and choose how to start it off. So long as the universe had a beginning, we could suppose it had a creator. But if the universe is really completely selfcontained, having no boundary or edge, it would have neither beginning nor end: it would simply be. What place, then, for a creator?" A Brief History of Time (New York: Bantam, 1988), p. 140-41.

"However, if we discover a complete theory, it should in time be understandable by everyone, not just by a few scientists. Then we shall all, philosophers, scientists and just ordinary people, be able to take part in the discussion of the question of why it is that we and the universe exist. If we find the answer to that, it would be the ultimate triumph of human

reason -- for then we should know the mind of God." A Brief History of Time - (page 193 - actually the concluding paragraph!) In a later work Black Holes and Baby Universes and other Essays, 1993 Stephen Hawking revealed that A Brief History of Time remained on the bestseller list of The New York Times for fifty-three weeks, that as of February 1993 it had been on The Sunday Times best seller list for 205 weeks, and that translations into 33 languages other than English had already been published. Also in Black Holes and Baby Universes, Hawking goes so far as to attribute a marked increase in sales to this - discovery of a complete theory of everything - means - knowing the mind of God - quotation which was probably from his point a view nothing more than a metaphor indicative of an understanding of the universe which was complete and objective. "In the proof stage I nearly cut the last sentence in the book... Had I done so, the sales might have been halved." As sales of A Brief History of Time currently stand at over nine million copies Prof. Hawkings decision not to edit out that sentence may have had notable consequences.

"What I have done is to show that it is possible for the way the universe began to be determined by the laws of science. In that case, it would not be necessary to appeal to God to decide how the universe began. This doesn't prove that there is no God, only that God is not necessary." Der Spiegel (17 October 1988)

In October 2001 an article appeared in the London-based Telegraph newspaper wherein Prof. Hawking was represented as being interviewed "about life, the universe and everything". In this article the Prof. was asked the following:You use God as a metaphor for the laws of nature but, from what I remember, you are not religious in any way. Is this still the case? And Prof. Hawkings reply was:- "If you believe in science, like I do, you believe that there are certain laws that are always obeyed. If you like, you can say the laws are the work of God, but that is more a definition of God than a proof of his existence."

In June of 2010 Channel 4 aired a series themed as "Genius of Britain" where, according to Stephen Hawking, several British figures prominent in scientific fields sought to tell the stories of the British scientists who changed the world, and to put science back on the map. During the recording of this series Professor Hawking was asked whether he thought God existed. Hawkings reply, which like most of his statements had to be painstakingly pre-prepared and installed for playback through his voice synthesiser, was as follows:"The question is: is the way the universe began chosen by God for reasons we can't understand, or was it determined by a law of science? I believe the second. If you like, you can call the laws of science 'God', but it wouldn't be a personal God that you could meet, and ask questions."

In his latest work - The Grand Design - co-authored with Leonard Mlodinow and published on 9th September, 2010, (just a week before a Papal visit to Britain), Stephen Hawking again expressed views which challenge traditions of faith in God and Religion. From the last three of these quotes it will be seen that well before the onset of the furore surrounding his, and Leonard Mlodinow's, new book Stephen Hawking was a committed believer in science-based, rather than faith-based, explanations of existence. Stephen Hawking's new book The Grand Design Some Human Mysteries "You will hear things like, "Science doesn't know everything." Well, of course science doesn't know everything. But, because science doesn't know everything, it doesn't mean that science knows nothing. Science knows enough for us to be watched by a few million people now on television, for these lights to be working, for quite extraordinary miracles to have taken place in terms of the harnessing of the physical world and our dim approaches towards understanding it. And as Wittgenstein quite rightly said, "When we understand every single secret of the universe, there will still be left the eternal mystery of the human heart." Stephen Fry quoting Wittgenstein during a Room 101 TV program

You can find key insights here at Age-of-the-Sage, (from the Great Faiths, Plato, Socrates, Pythagoras, and Shakespeare!!!), that give convincing support to this view of Human Nature!!! Believe it or not even SCIENCE seems to agree with this view!!! "...man is a bundle of relations, a knot of roots, whose flower and fruitage is the world..." Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Whatever concept one may hold, from a metaphysical point of view, concerning the freedom of the will, certainly its appearances, which are human actions, like every other natural event, are determined by universal laws. However obscure their causes, history, which is concerned with narrating these appearances, permits us to hope that if we attend to the play of freedom of the human will in the large, we may be able to discern a regular movement in it, and that what seems complex and chaotic in the single individual may be seen from the standpoint of the human race as a whole to be a steady and progressive though slow evolution of its original endowment." Immanuel Kant Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View (1784)

Or to quote Emerson, from his famous Essay ~ History more fully:"In old Rome the public roads beginning at the Forum proceeded north, south, east, west, to the centre of every province of the empire, making each market-town of Persia, Spain, and Britain pervious to the soldiers of the capital: so out of the human heart go, as it were, highways to the heart of every object in nature, to reduce it under the dominion of man. A man is a bundle of relations, a knot of roots, whose flower and fruitage is the world. His faculties refer to natures out of him, and predict the world he is to inhabit, as the fins of the fish foreshow that water exists, or the wings of an eagle in the egg presuppose air. He cannot live without a world."

"There is one mind common to all individual men.... ....Of the works of this mind history is the record. Man is explicable by nothing less than all his history. All the facts of history pre-exist as laws. Each law in turn is made by circumstances predominant. The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn, and Egypt, Greece, Rome, Gaul, Britain, America, lie folded already in the first man. Epoch after epoch, camp, kingdom, empire, republic, democracy, are merely the application of this manifold spirit to the manifold world." From Ralph Waldo Emerson's Essay ~ History

"What lies behind you and what lies in front of you, pales in comparison to what lies inside of you." Ralph Waldo Emerson

Man's Divided ~ Multi-faceted ~ Nature?

"Mankind are so much the same, in all times and places, that history informs us of nothing new or strange in this particular. Its chief use is only to discover the constant and universal principles of human nature." David Hume We have prepared some fairly meaty, but hopefully entertaining, pages about a most informative episode in European History in the spirit of attempting to learn worthwhile lessons of history about The Human Condition!!! The European Revolutions of 1848

A brief resume of some poetry quotations that may even qualify as being " Central Poetry Insights " is set out in the following scrollable panel:-

A brief resume of some spiritual quotations that may even qualify as being " Central Spiritual Insights " is set out in the following scrollable panel:-

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