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[Mr-Joker]

Well duh.

Why would he do that when the more obvious alternative is that he hoped science would find a way to cure him before he dies.

When you're told that a magical man with the power to anything, you would do anything to just to be normal for once.

I know I did before I just grew out of believing in god.

He added: "Religion believes in miracles, but these aren't compatible with science."​

What is he trying to imply with this statement, guys?

That it's impossible for a man to walk on water, split the water into two section, for a man to die and then come back to life three day later.

None of those miracles actually happened, they're just stories.

 

[Lautaro]

....but not G_d. He never gave up on him.

Hahaha how convenient, He didn't gave a shit about the rest of the people with the same disease apparently...

 

[markot]

....but not G_d. He never gave up on him.

He just gave up on the women being raped and killed by Isis?

 

[OrlanisWorks]

....but not G_d. He never gave up on him.

May I ask why you're attempting to censor yourself?

edit: thread related - I share his opinion, sorta.

 

[kingkitty]

I wish he was wrong. Gonna suck to not exist when we die. It would be nicer if there was an afterlife safety net.

 

[Orayn]

Has God ever been anything more than a metaphorical symbol and manifestation of fear, adventure, creation, beauty and death? I can't help but think any argument against is just a big old strawman in the sky.

40% of Americans are creationists, dude. TONS of people believe in a very real, literal God who interacts with humanity all the time.

 

[TacticalFox88]

Do creationists generally not realize how utterly dreadful our eyes are compared to many mammals in the animal kingdom?

 

[benzy]

Hawking said: "Before we understand science, it is natural to believe that God created the universe. But now science offers a more convincing explanation."

What's the scientific explanation for the cause of the Big Bang? How did this extremely dense and hot state come to be before it started expanding?

 

[lazer_bean]

And what do you have to support all this bullshit? faith?

That's nonsense. People don't become atheist because they are "mad with God", they become atheist because they can't believe, because their knowledge of the world has a conflict with the idea of faith.

People don't become atheists. We were all born atheists and then we become (or not) religious. In the same way people become republicans or democrats, etc...

 

[block tower]

And what do you have to support all this bullshit? faith?

That's nonsense. People don't become atheist because they are "mad with God", they become atheist because they can't believe, because their knowledge of the world has a conflict with the idea of faith.

your not at all understanding what i am saying. im saying Hawking likely was never religious to begin with, even when he was healthy. then he gets hit with the disease, and like most people who try and come to terms with a serious disease, try and pray or bargain with God for healing, even if they dont believe in a religion . so when no healing came it likely only reinforced his previous opinion that there was no God. i am NOT saying Hawking is mad at God or chooses not to believe in God because of his disease; he is likely atheist because of the lack of scientific evidence to support what the Bible says happened, along with lack of evidence-based logic for Gods existence.

 

[PseudoKirby]

Let them believe in god, they can regret it after they die when they are NOT existing.



just dont push it on me.

 

[Who]

I don't really care what Stephen Hawkings said. Does he claim to have the whole universe figured out?

How you can make such a bold claim as fact?

 

[Vol5]

Considering we're not certain what is even beyond our own universe, I don't see how anybody can categorically say either way.

Sure - But that's like saying when there's a forest with nobody around a magical unicorn appears and starts a picnic for all the other animals. Then when a human approaches they disappear back into the ether. It's daft. As is the idea of a god - which again is simply an idea that in peoples minds could be true because it can't be proven. There's literally trillions of examples that you could come up with and it's unfortunate that an idea of god is something that sticks with certain mindsets.

When something is proven scientifically, goes against the good book and your a believer, you could reach into your mind and come up with a thousand reasons why it's not applicable. I think this is the point Hawking makes - The mind is infinite, thus the idea of an all powerful god exists.

 

[NinjaFridge]

I was wondering why McGonagall stiffed me on the Hogwarts invite...

I didn't see any wheelchair ramps at Hogwarts in any of the movies or the books. He's just pissed.

His situation? He's defied all the odds and lived far longer than his doctors thought he would.

Thank God for the American Health Care system.

 

[Man]

“We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.”
― Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion

“The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.”
― Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion

More generally, as I shall repeat in Chapter 8, one of the truly bad effects of religion is that it teaches us that it is a virtue to be satisfied with not understanding.”
― Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion

“There is no such thing as a Christian child: only a child of Christian parents.”
― Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion
383 likes like

http://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/3044365-the-god-delusion

 

[KidGalactus]

In my opinion, we all have little troll people that live in our heads that control our thoughts.

YOU CAN SEE THEM TOO!?

 

[WillyFive]

What's the scientific explanation for the cause of the Big Bang? How did this extremely dense and hot state come to be before it started expanding?

When scientists are able to study that, they will. But right now, thanks to studying the universe around us, how it moves and expands, we can understand that the Big Bang or something similar to that existing is a very likely thing; even if we are not yet able to study it beyond that.

 

[markot]

Do you have proof non religious people bargin with god when they get sick? Or is this the 'no atheists in foxholes' crap.

 

[Lautaro]

People don't become atheists. We were all born atheists and then we become (or not) religious. In the same way people become republicans or democrats, etc...

Oh come on, you know what I'm trying to say.

your not at all understanding what i am saying. im saying Hawking likely was never religious to begin with, even when he was healthy. then he gets hit with the disease, and like most people who try and come to terms with a serious disease, try and pray or bargain with God for healing. so when no healing came it likely only reinforced his previous opinion that there was no God.

And I'm telling you that's bullshit and you have nothing to support it but you keep repeating it.

 

[Lionel Mandrake]

What is Stephen Hawking's stance on the existence of Dean Cain?

 

[El Topo]

Well, that's not a fact. That's more of an interpretation of what miracles are.

It's not really interpretation, it just depends on what definitions you use/refer to, both regarding science and miracle. I assumed due to the context that in this case miracle is used in the "divine intervention" sense, an event that fundamentally defies science. Thus it is by definition incompatible with science.

To those of faith in the scientific community I've talked to, most of them describe miracles as something that is scientifically possible, but mostly implausible because it's so unlikely to happen.

Well, the word is also more commonly used to describe statistically unlikely or improbable events that do not (fundamentally) contradict science. I'm pretty sure he's not referring to something like the Miracle of Bern though.

What miracles are unexplainable by science out of interest?

Going by the "divine intervention" definition all of them.

 

[Orayn]

People don't become atheists. We were all born atheists and then we become (or not) religious. In the same way people become republicans or democrats, etc...

To be fair, we're also born with a knack for applying humanlike agency to nonhuman things, which makes religion seem like a very intuitive explanation for a lot of stuff.

Then again... "For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong."

 

[Cloud Strife]

Well, that's not a fact. That's more of an interpretation of what miracles are. To those of faith in the scientific community I've talked to, most of them describe miracles as something that is scientifically possible, but mostly implausible because it's so unlikely to happen.

Yes, and people of both minds DO exist. From what I understand from that view, science is like a puzzle that may or may not depending on human progression will lead to a greater understanding of divinity. Miracles are not magical waves of a wand, but simply phenomena or happenings that can be partially explained (stuff like the flood or turning shit into other shit) and potentially eventually explained.

Then you get into discrepancies between what the Bible, or any religious text, says in regards to describing miracles and how they might occur in reality. Obviously they don't give us much in the vein of rationally scientific jargon.

Imo if God or some deity DID exist, they'd probably know the science behind the shit that they made, but obviously you wouldn't get that from a literal reading of text.

 

[frankie_baby]

Stephen hawking is right, anyone that disagrees with Stephen hawking is wrong

FACT

 

[BocoDragon]

your not at all understanding what i am saying. im saying Hawking likely was never religious to begin with, even when he was healthy. then he gets hit with the disease, and like most people who try and come to terms with a serious disease, try and pray or bargain with God for healing. so when no healing came it likely only reinforced his previous opinion that there was no God. i am NOT saying Hawking is mad at God or chooses not to believe in God because of his disease; he is likely atheist because of the lack of scientific evidence to support what the Bible says happened, along with lack of evidence-based logic for Gods existence.

I'd say the fact that he had a disease is not even necessary to account for his atheism.

He's a diehard scientist. Disregarding all non-measurable concepts as non-existent is kind of what they do. You don't have to be an atheist to be a scientist, but thinking in that way often lends itself to becoming one.

 

[Gamerloid]

Really don't like his "which there isn't" comment. Said it like an absolute. I don't see how he got an article on this. Who cares that he believes in nothing.

Recognizing that the universe is the result of scientifically observable phenomena doesn't mean there isn't a god. I don't have any particular stance on the matter but I realize disproving God is just as hard as proving it.

That's the exactly meaning of the Devil's Proof. It can't be proven nor disproven.

 

[Who]

When scientists are able to study that, they will. But right now, thanks to studying the universe around us, how it moves and expands, we can understand that the Big Bang existing is a very likely thing.

I agree the Big Bang happened. I disagree that the Big Bang somehow disproves a higher power. Evolution and life is absolutely incredible. There has to be, in my opinion, an intelligent design behind it.

 

[CornBurrito]

I love when religious people have to fall back on "well you can't disprove it!"

Sure as fuck doesn't stop religious people from thinking other religions are false. I know a ton who outright mock the beliefs of Scientology which have just as much evidence and are equally impossible to disprove.

I agree the Big Bang happened. I disagree that the Big Bang somehow disproves a higher power. Evolution and life is absolutely incredible. There has to be, in my opinion, an intelligent design behind it.

Except current evidence shows how these things could occur without an intelligent designer.

 

[NullPointer]

What's the scientific explanation for the cause of the Big Bang? How did this extremely dense and hot state come to be before it started expanding?

I'm going to guess there are somewhat more convincing scientific models for those initial conditions than there are for what created God - though both may share some of the glory if it does turn out that something really can come from nothing. Unless of course God was never created in which case we could say the same for our cosmos, with the Big Bang being the natural result of a cyclical Big Crunch.

 

[iMax]

Of course there is: who created the simulation we all live in.

Stephen Hawking.

 

[njean777]

I see this is an atheist circle jerk, read Nietzsche if you want a better arguement then any of these new atheists are spewing out. Other then that science shouldnt concern themselves with is there or isn't there a god.

 

[Massive Duck. C.M.]

Oh come on, you know what I'm trying to say.



And I'm telling you that's bullshit and you have nothing to support it but you keep repeating it.

You need to calm down and read what you quote

He's not saying that's his position, he's trying to explain that others would might say Hawking doesn't believe in God because of bitterness over his condition

 

[BocoDragon]

“We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.”
― Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion

“The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.”
― Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion

More generally, as I shall repeat in Chapter 8, one of the truly bad effects of religion is that it teaches us that it is a virtue to be satisfied with not understanding.”
― Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion

“There is no such thing as a Christian child: only a child of Christian parents.”
― Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion
383 likes like

http://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/3044365-the-god-delusion

I love it when people dump scripture into a thread.

 

[jackal27]

Thanks for letting me know Stephen. Glad you figured it out for us.

 

[Who]

Einstein disagreed.

Einstein > Hawkings

 

[Colonel Mustard]

Let them believe in god, they can regret it after they die when they are NOT existing.



just dont push it on me.

Until then, they can continue to shit all over the rights of others and/or kill people depending on the flavor of bullshit you choose.

This shit needs stomped out.

 

[Tesseract]

what is the source of source ~ danny devito

 

[kswiston]

Why would you have a grudge against something you don't think exists? Like an Atheist who by definition doesn't believe in any gods holds the nonexistent thing accountable for his or her problems?

All Atheists are really believers who hate god due to a personal grudge. Haven't you seen God's Not Dead?

Einstein disagreed.

Einstein > Hawkings

That's actually a myth. Einstein didn't believe in god either.

 

[CornBurrito]

Einstein disagreed.

Einstein > Hawkings

No he didn't.

And the belief that life is so amazing that there has to be an intelligent designer is dumb. life would be 100000x more amazing if it came about through completely mindless natural laws.

 

[iMax]

Sure - But that's like saying when there's a forest with nobody around a magical unicorn appears and starts a picnic for all the other animals. Then when a human approaches they disappear back into the ether. It's daft. As is the idea of a god - which again is simply an idea that in peoples minds could be true because it can't be proven. There's literally trillions of examples that you could come up with and it's unfortunate that an idea of god is something that sticks with certain mindsets.

When something is proven scientifically, goes against the good book and your a believer, you could reach into your mind and come up with a thousand reasons why it's not applicable. I think this is the point Hawking makes - The mind is infinite, thus the idea of an all powerful god exists.

Sure, it sounds daft to us. But what are we basing this on? Our personal experiences? How would we know any better?

Stretched analogy coming right up here... but it's like saying just because dogs aren't aware of the stock exchange, doesn't mean it's not real. It's very arrogant to dismiss something as 'daft' just because it contradicts our limited view on our surroundings.

 

[PseudoKirby]

Until then, they can continue to shit all over the rights of others and/or kill people depending on the flavor of bullshit you choose.

This shit needs stomped out.

I thinks thats covered in the "dont push it on me" part of my statement.

 

[Who]

I love when religious people have to fall back on "well you can't disprove it!"

Sure as fuck doesn't stop religious people from thinking other religions are false. I know a ton who outright mock the beliefs of Scientology which have just as much evidence and are equally impossible to disprove.



Except current evidence shows how these things could occur without an intelligent designer.

Link to current evidence? Because the recent discoveries in Quantam Physics tell me there is much yet to be discovered about our reality, our existence, and our consciousness.

 

[Robbit]

Does he know if he's dying very soon?

 

[jl4855]

aw poor stephen.

 

[jonezer4]

Recognizing that the universe is the result of scientifically observable phenomena doesn't mean there isn't a god.

This encapsulates my belief. Just because God didn't physically make man out of dust with magic, doesn't mean some higher power didn't formulate a set of principles (science) that ultimately led to man's existence.

I just can't wrap my head around essentially saying science killed God as if the two are mutually exclusive and not perhaps very intimately intertwined.

For a long time theists thought there was a God that "physically" created Earth and we were the center of the universe. That was disproven by the Big Bang Theory.

Then theists believed that the Big Bang was started by God, with a lot of finely tuned variables that allowed for the existence of life. That was eventually disproven by the idea of a multiverse, in which infinite universes are spawned and we are a fortunate member of a small minority. Currently, I think most atheists argue this leaves no place for God.

But who/what created the multiverse? How did this cycle of infinite universes, some of which capable of spawning life, begin? It's a never ending cycle really where we just keep going back farther and farther and realizing at each step of the way, there is no need for a mystical omnipotent being to have heavy-handedly intruded. But once you reach the singularity where some type of system manifested, I feel like that's where a God, if there is one, would most logically come into play.

Thinking of God as a guy on a cloud that physically makes stuff is such a primitive, human way of thinking. As we learn more and more through science, I personally start to see it as a path to an entity, or God if you will, that set forth a number of principles that allowed for varied, perhaps infinite levels of existence that we are only slowly beginning to understand.

 

[NinjaFridge]

I just bit my own tongue. What kind of God would allow that kind of design flaw?

 

[CrazyDude]

Einstein disagreed.

Einstein > Hawkings

I read a great deal in the last days of your book, and thank you very much for sending it to me. What especially struck me about it was this. With regard to the factual attitude to life and to the human community we have a great deal in common.

... The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honorable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this. These subtilised interpretations are highly manifold according to their nature and have almost nothing to do with the original text. For me the Jewish religion like all other religions is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions. And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong and with whose mentality I have a deep affinity have no different quality for me than all other people. As far as my experience goes, they are also no better than other human groups, although they are protected from the worst cancers by a lack of power. Otherwise I cannot see anything 'chosen' about them.

In general I find it painful that you claim a privileged position and try to defend it by two walls of pride, an external one as a man and an internal one as a Jew. As a man you claim, so to speak, a dispensation from causality otherwise accepted, as a Jew the privilege of monotheism. But a limited causality is no longer a causality at all, as our wonderful Spinoza recognized with all incision, probably as the first one. And the animistic interpretations of the religions of nature are in principle not annulled by monopolization. With such walls we can only attain a certain self-deception, but our moral efforts are not furthered by them. On the contrary.

Now that I have quite openly stated our differences in intellectual convictions it is still clear to me that we are quite close to each other in essential things, i.e; in our evaluations of human behavior. What separates us are only intellectual 'props' and 'rationalization' in Freud's language. Therefore I think that we would understand each other quite well if we talked about concrete things.

With friendly thanks and best wishes,
Yours, A. Einstein

http://neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=494723

 

[Tesseract]

we've never observed an electron, but we know they exist

too spooky

 

[kswiston]

Link to current evidence? Because the recent discoveries in Quantam Physics tell me there is much yet to be discovered about our reality, our existence, and our consciousness.

Not being able to explain something right now doesn't mean that we won't be able to explain it in the future, or because God did it. That's a God of the gaps argument.

 

[Moosichu]

I agree the Big Bang happened. I disagree that the Big Bang somehow disproves a higher power. Evolution and life is absolutely incredible. There has to be, in my opinion, an intelligent design behind it.

This intelligent being sounds even more incredible. The ability to create all the complexities of the Universe and life from nothing. There has to be intelligent design behind this incredible being....

The designer of the being sounds even more incredible etc.