How can Stephen Hawking say there "IS NO God" (i.e., with certainty)?

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The most-complete quote that I was able to find attributed to Hawking is the following, without buying the book:

"Do I have faith? We are each free to believe what we want, and it’s my view that the simplest explanation is that there is no God.

"No one created the universe and no one directs our fate.

"This leads me to a profound realisation: there is probably no heaven and afterlife either.

"I think belief in an afterlife is just wishful thinking. There is no reliable evidence for it, and it flies in the face of everything we know in science.

"I think that when we die we return to dust. But there’s a sense in which we live on, in our influence, and in our genes that we pass on to our children.

“We have this one life to appreciate the grand design of the universe, and for that I am extremely grateful.”
Sadly, that’s not much context to judge Hawking’s meaning. Hawking has long been, broadly, an anti-theist of some repute (whether that be agnostic or atheist), so this is hardly news.

But back to the philosophy, Hawking states specifically, “it’s my view that the simplest explanation is that there is no God”. Essentially, this is Occam’s Razor applied to the question of God’s existence. Implicit in the full quote is an element of uncertainty in Hawking’s speech. Hawking didn’t say, “there is no God”, but rather, “it is my view … that there is no God”. He is quoting only himself as the authority, not some philosophical treatise nor scientific workup.

In short, the headlines as written at Sun et alia are a tad bit more sensational than the truth here. Although, not by much.
 
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In short, the headlines as written at Sun et alia are a tad bit more sensational than the truth here. Although, not by much.
Redirect: To more directly answer the question of the OP, Hawking was not speaking with scientific certainty. Nor can he on this topic, as others have noted, and as I would imagine that Hawking himself likely realized (I make this editorial based upon his well-documented intelligence and introspection).
 
Because anybody can say anything they like.
I think his own skill at physics and his fame has gone to his head and now he thinks he can pronounce on other disciplines he knows nothing about.

Kinda like Ariana Grande spouting off about theology even though she’s a teeny-bopper pop star.

And with about as much credibility
 
Because anybody can say anything they like.
I think his own skill at physics and his fame has gone to his head and now he thinks he can pronounce on other disciplines he knows nothing about.

Kinda like Ariana Grande spouting off about theology even though she’s a teeny-bopper pop star.

And with about as much credibility
It wouldn’t be so bad if he actually provided a metaphysical argument in support of his claim. Instead he merely described the physical mechanism that caused the expansion of space-time and then acted like this was evidence against God’s existence. It’s mind boggling.
 
It wouldn’t be so bad if he actually provided a metaphysical argument in support of his claim.
Philosophy was no more his field than theology. This gives hope for people like him. Perhaps in this age invincible ignorance is more inescapable.
 
Because anybody can say anything they like.
I think his own skill at physics and his fame has gone to his head and now he thinks he can pronounce on other disciplines he knows nothing about.
He passed away a while ago, God test his soul,
 
Ya know, Dr. Hawking contributed a lot to science. We know that souls in Purgatory (if that’s where he landed), can pray for us.I wonder if his purgation is somehow to get some scientist types who fall into the same trap he did to see their trap and climb out of it.
 
God is the original and greatest scientist of all scientists.

The arrogance of some would be laughable if it wasn’t so sad.

Steven Hawking was given a fine mind then denied it was a gift. Einstein didn’t have that problem.
 
There are no “physical” proofs for God, which is what most atheists seem to want. His existence can only be argued with reason, metaphysics and such. This obviously wasn’t sufficient for Stephen, so all we can do for him now is pray for his soul.
Actually, there are. I recently read a book about how one can prove G-d exists through physics, etc., but I suppose if one is determined to not believe, even seeing G-d and conversing with him would not be enough. Many people go through periods of doubt, e.g, John of the Cross, Therese of Avila, etc. For some, including St. Teresa of Calcutta, these periods of doubt can last a lifetime. But, St. Teresa of Calcutta wanted to have a deep and abiding faith. That’s a bit different from Stephen Hawking.
 
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Ya know, Dr. Hawking contributed a lot to science. We know that souls in Purgatory (if that’s where he landed), can pray for us.I wonder if his purgation is somehow to get some scientist types who fall into the same trap he did to see their trap and climb out of it.
And if he is in purgatory, and no one knows whether he is or not, what good would it do the scientists there, if any are there?

What good would it do disbelieving scientists still here on earth? They’re sure he exists no more, and no matter where he is, he’s in no position to communicate with scientists here on earth.
 
He was an atheist and a scientist. He believed there was a scientific explanation for everything. God didn’t fit into that.
 
i think hawking became very angry & bitter at the end of his life…

i don’t think he was always a militant atheist
 
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Thom18:
There are no “physical” proofs for God, which is what most atheists seem to want. His existence can only be argued with reason, metaphysics and such. This obviously wasn’t sufficient for Stephen, so all we can do for him now is pray for his soul.
Actually, there are. I recently read a book about how one can prove G-d exists through physics, etc., but I suppose if one is determined to not believe, even seeing G-d and conversing with him would not be enough. Many people go through periods of doubt, e.g, John of the Cross, Therese of Avila, etc. For some, including St. Teresa of Calcutta, these periods of doubt can last a lifetime. But, St. Teresa of Calcutta wanted to have a deep and abiding faith. That’s a bit different from Stephen Hawking.
Scientific evidence can help make the case for our philosophical reasoning, but can’t stand alone.
 
He argue that you could have something out of nothing. How? He explains that particles which require positive energy to be created could comes out of nowhere. The negative energy related to gravitational filed cancels out the positive energy so you could have universes with net zero of energy.
 
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He claims matter and energy, space and time can automatically pop into existence spontaneously out of a void without any external cause. This is how he claims the universe does not need an external cause. He is basing his claim strictly (as far as I know) on his scientific conclusions. He was a great scientist but science alone cannot prove that God does not exist.
Strictly speaking, science can’t prove that Thor doesn’t exist. But what it can do is eliminate the need FOR Thor as an explanation for thunder and lightning. And this is what I think Hawking was talking about. In his view, and he’s actually mentioned it in writings dating back at least a quarter of a century, is a sort of thought experiment (it’s not really even a hypothesis, so strictly speaking it isn’t science as such) whereby the Universe came about through some primordial quantum fluctuation, producing all the energy and matter in the Universe. The way I’ve heard this idea explained is that the sum total of energy and matter in the Universe may in fact equal 0 (that is, there’s enough positives and negatives, however that’s defined in any particular physical system) that when you add it all together, the total energy is 0.

I’m not going to declare that that is a verifiable, or even empirically supportable claim. I can’t even envision how you would test it. Like most things from the earliest moments of the Universe, there are simply limits on how deep we can peer. Maybe in some distant time in the future? Hard to say.

But if the idea has any merit at all (and I’m not saying it does or doesn’t), then, like Thor as the source of thunder and lightning, one could be justified in asking “what is the need for this deity?”
 
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kkerwin1:
In short, the headlines as written at Sun et alia are a tad bit more sensational than the truth here. Although, not by much.
Redirect: To more directly answer the question of the OP, Hawking was not speaking with scientific certainty. Nor can he on this topic, as others have noted, and as I would imagine that Hawking himself likely realized (I make this editorial based upon his well-documented intelligence and introspection).
Having read a number of Hawking’s essays over the years, his views on God could be pretty briefly summed up as:
  1. If there is a God, He was very heavily constrained in the kind of Universe he could create, since any significant changes in parameters like the fine structure constants would lead to dead and sterile universes incapable of any complex structures (including life).
  2. Asking questions like “what came before the universe?” is like asking “what’s north of the North Pole?” Since, in Big Bang cosmology, four dimensional space-time came into existence at the point of singularity, a strict reading of physics would posit that there was no “before”, that the very concept is rather meaningless.
  3. Aside from point 2, there are concepts like baby universes (perhaps black holes represent a way in which a new universe can be produced by an existing one), and these concepts of bubble universes being birthed by pre-existing universes could explain how our universe came to be.
  4. Another possibility (which is alluded to in his final piece), the Universe was simply the product of a quantum fluctuation, with positive energy producing all the subatomic particles that make up matter, but with an equal amount of negative energy, so the net energy in the entire system is 0. In effect, the universe as we know it is the product of a system in a state of non-equilibrium, with the actual rest state being 0, or nothing.
 
He claims matter and energy, space and time
With this, he was right on the edge of understanding what the church means by “God”. Too bad Bishop Barron never got to chat with him.
 
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Zach:
He claims matter and energy, space and time
With this, he was right on the edge of understanding what the church means by “God”. Too bad Bishop Barron never got to chat with him.
I think Hawking understood the concept well enough. His point is that, at least in his view, the Universe didn’t require any kind of Prime Mover at all (whether that be the personal God of the Judeao-Christian tradition, or the more distant entity of the Deists). If we follow through on Hawking’s final thought experiment, and the Universe was the product of some sort of primordial quantum fluctuation, and the actual rest state of the universe is an energy level of 0, then where exactly does any sort of creator come into the picture?
 
Hey folks, look out for my new book coming out soon, “There is no Stephen Hawking”
 
Greetings, my friend. I doubt I can give much justice to this topic any more than I have with that brief interjection previously. I would take some issue with the rest state of the universe being a zero, but I don’t say that dogmatically as this goes far beyond what I have studied in both science and theology. What I can do is reiterate a few things I’ve picked up along the way that have clarified things at my own level of understanding.

God is not a being or even a supreme being. This is repeatedly stated by Barron and others within the Church. God can only be thought of, from our limited material perspective, as all of being. God cannot be located spatially, defined by our intellect except with metaphor, or defined as a human-like superman sitting on a throne and who carries a very big stick. In my experience, it is these images which people reject when they say there is no God, and I have no argument with them. The cast of Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens are right when they argue against this idea of God. And I believe it is also this image which Stephen Hawking rejected.

Busy day here and lunch is calling my name. I hope this adds something to the conversation. 🙂
 
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