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Professor Stephen Hawking quotes
On God and Religion

This page features some scientifically related reservations about religion and religiously based explanations of existence attributed to Professor Stephen Hawking - including some quotes from his latest work - The Grand Design. This book, published in September, 2010, by Bantam Press, is being flagged by the publishers as Hawking's first major work in nearly a decade.     We hope that you will consider these quotations and quotes from Professor Stephen Hawking that implicitly or explicitly tend to cast doubt upon traditional views about God, Religion, Faith and Religious Beliefs.     "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 self-contained, 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 : "In the proof stage I nearly cut the last sentence in the book... Had I done so, the sales might have been halved." "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 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 many of his statements had to be painstakingly pre-prepared and installed for playback into his voice synthesiser, included this statement:- "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." Professor Stephen Hawking's new book The Grand Design - (with co-author Leonard Mlodinow) 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 expresses views which challenge traditions of faith in God and Religion. In this work Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow set out to answer the question "Did the Universe need a Creator"? This question Stephen Hawking, parodying Douglas Adams' cult science fiction romp, "The Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy" sees as being related to the pursuit of "the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything" and, on a more serious vein, sees as being closely associated with an assertion by Sir Isaac Newton that the universe could not have arisen out of chaos due to the mere laws of Nature, but must have been created by God. Sir Isaac Newton held that "Gravity explains the motions of the planets, but it cannot explain who set the planets in motion." The authors set out to contest Sir Isaac Newton's assertion that the universe could not have arisen out of chaos due to the mere laws of Nature! They cite the discovery, in 1992, of a so-called exo-planet - a planet orbiting another sun than "our own", as being the first blow to Newton's belief that the universe could not have risen from chaos. "That makes the coincidences of our planetary conditions - the single Sun, the lucky combination of earth-sun distance and solar mass - far less remarkable, and far less compelling as evidence that the earth was carefully designed just to please us human beings. Not just other planets like the Earth, other universes may exist." Other relevant quotations on this theme from - The Grand Design - include:- "Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the Universe exists, why we exist." "It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the Universe going." ("to light the blue touch paper" is an anglicism to do with the custom of lighting fire-works in the garden).

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"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

Some Human Mysteries

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

Please recommend this page to any of your friends who might be interested!!!

"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

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