Stephen Hawking Quotes
All that my work has shown is that you don't have to say that the way the universe began was the personal whim of God.
Hawking, Stephen. Interview by Nick Ross. Master of the Universe, BBC Television, 1989.
His concept of the devine however was quite different and much more abstract than the Rabbis, Priests and Imams of the time. Albert Einstein, was a religious Jew, but his view of God was that of Spinoza (See Quotation 631763) who had been excommunicated by the Jews. Spinoza’s ideas were considered so radical and dangerous that he was the only man in history who was excommunicated by the Catholics, the Jews and the Muslims. Spinoza did not believe in a kins of anthropromorphic God who fabricated the earth and the stars. He saw God in the devine nature of the earth and the heavens and the mathematical rules that govern everything. It was this abstraction that was Spinoza's God which made sense to Einstein. Got was in the order, physical laws and mathematics of the universe. Modern scientists who are religious have no difficulty with the probablsitic nature of much of the physics that governs the univrese. It was God who created or more abstractly, was the mathematical and physical laws that in turn allowed the universe to be created from nothing.
This quotation is noteworthy because although there are some scientists who are sympathetic to the religious fundamentalist view of the origin of the universe, they are almost always second class scientists. In this case, the scientist is a first class scientist, a Nobel Prize winner in Chemistry. So his quotation has more weight than of most others and is used more often by many fundamentalists who support the Biblical Genesis version of creation rather than the Big Bang scientific explanations and evolution. There are however many great scientists who also are people of faith in a God. They may be religious, but like most religious Americans, interpret the Bible metaphorically and symbolically rather than literally as the fundamentalists do.
Diversarum Hereseon Liber. This compendium of heresies would be funny but for the fact that people lived and died according to their “acceptance” of some of these absurdities.
The layman assumes that for every action there must be a reaction, and every action in turn most have had a previous causing action. This is classic Newtonian Physics and was believed by almost all scientists until the latter part of the 20th century when Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, the Big Bang and other important scientific ideas permeated beyond just a few elite scientists. Today, there are a number of demonstrations of how the universe came to be where there is no first cause or prime mover. See Hawking’s quote relating to this point—{633342}.
Stephen William Hawking CH CBE FRS FRSA was an English theoretical physicist, cosmologist, and author who was director of research at the Centre for Theoretical Cosmology at the University of Cambridge at the time of his death. He was the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge between 1979 and 2009.
