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AlanFromWichita
Guest
I also feel sorry for him, and I’m very impressed at what he has been able to accomplish. I can’t even imagine living under his circumstances.I think hes a very bitter man - after all he has ALS and can only move his eyes and relies heavily on others just to exist - I feel sorry for him - and wonder how I would feel or any of you would feel in the same position.
Hes a very intelligent man but his ALS plays on his faith as it would in most people.
That said, though, he knows very well he is in a position of authority and is listened to all over the world. He is sitting in the same position as Isaac Newton did. He knows that many people consider his word as gospel. I think he is intelligent enough that he should know the difference between science and faith. If he doesn’t, then with all of his intelligence he still has a thinking problem.
One of the things I try to do personally, and it served me well in my engineering career, is to always be aware of what I don’t know, and when I was just speculating, giving my personal opinion, or quoting someone else I hadn’t checked up on for myself, I was very clear about it. When I signed off on a design on which lives depend, I was very clear under what conditions the design would work. Of course, even when engineers do that, they are sometimes ignored or silenced by fools, such as the murderers (IMO) that ordered the Space Shuttle Challenger to launch despite protests from the engineers that it was too cold for the O-ring. (I have personal feelings about that, especially after I read the Risk Assessments that were in place for the O-ring, before the shuttle was even built.)
In Hawking’s case, if he were to say, “my personal belief is this,” then I wouldn’t have a problem with it. Maybe he does say that; I haven’t read much of his work myself. But if he says that science says this and that means there is no God, then I really think he should know better than that or it calls the rest of his work into question.
To the comments of another poster about how it all began, that is beyond my grasp. I agree it makes no sense to say there was nothing and then it exploded. And if it were all energy, where did the energy come from? For that matter, an eternal God is also beyond my grasp. I can think of an “infinite” future, but not an infinite past. I’m too hung up on cause/effect to grasp those concepts. We have relativity that reconciles mass v energy, but as far as I know there is no theory even being considered that reconciles something with nothing.
Alan