Heaven is a fairy tale, says physicist Hawking

Discussion in 'Religion and Spirituality' started by Debaser82, May 16, 2011.

  1. Yes, it does seem odd.
     
    #31     May 16, 2011
  2. We have a guy trapped in a chair, wearing a diaper and can't wipe his own ass. Should be we surprised about his attitude regarding the possibility of a God? Just another one of millions who have endured a life with prayers unanswered. He's certainly entitled to his opinion, maybe more that most, but at the end of the day it's just another opinion based on theory and conjecture.
     
    #32     May 16, 2011
  3. Prayers? You mean talking to yourself at night?

    Why does god answer some prayers and not others?
     
    #33     May 16, 2011
  4. stu

    stu

    Science, like gravity, is not just another opinion.
     
    #34     May 16, 2011
  5. I'm sure Stephen asks himself the same question. I don't know either.
     
    #35     May 16, 2011
  6. No, but saying that gravity is the father of creation is. Might be, might not. And please let's not go through the whole charade of the fact that we're here proves it all over again. That is the same argument as the creationists, so let's skip the pot/kettle scenario. Nobody knows!
     
    #36     May 16, 2011
  7. Lucrum

    Lucrum

    This is the boat I'm in as well.
     
    #37     May 16, 2011
  8. You can subscribe to evolution and physics as the methods for how Life assembled stepwise into our current experience of
    it, but what about consciousness? How does that come about?
    Poof, here I am. I can buy how consciousness itself might have evolved as it seems to with various umbrella organizations and institutions having sprung from common interests forming a sort of meta consciousness but what about early on? When the big bang was still seconds into it and plasma and particles were
    "deciding" to form or not, atoms then ever more elaborate molecules did they follow Laws that just ...always were? So the consciousness we're so familiar with came from what ...most fundamentally? A better question might be, Why? I answer that question to myself by saying, there doesn't have to be a why. But consciousness is just too weird to not have something behind it.
    Like nailing down infinity, you just have to ask ...whats next?
     
    #38     May 16, 2011
  9. jem

    jem

    how many times do I have to explain to you... the fine tunings are evidence.

    but we even have evidence of the fact that life did not happen on earth by chance... ..

    Nobel Laureate Christian de Duve has called for “a rejection of improbabilities so incommensurably high that they can only be called miracles, phenomena that fall outside the scope of scientific inquiry.” DNA, RNA, proteins and other elaborate large molecules must then be set aside as participants in the origin of life. Inanimate nature provides us with a variety of mixtures of small molecules, whose behavior is governed by scientific laws, rather than by human intervention.

    Here he gives a golf-analogy:

    The analogy that comes to mind is that of a golfer, who having played a golf ball through an 18-hole course, then assumed that the ball could also play itself around the course in his absence. He had demonstrated the possibility of the event; it was only necessary to presume that some combination of natural forces (earthquakes, winds, tornadoes and floods, for example) could produce the same result, given enough time. No physical law need be broken for spontaneous RNA formation to happen, but the chances against it are so immense, that the suggestion implies that the non-living world had an innate desire to generate RNA. The majority of origin-of-life scientists who still support the RNA-first theory either accept this concept (implicitly, if not explicitly) or feel that the immensely unfavorable odds were simply overcome by good luck.

    http://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=156910

    and another nobel prize winner... showing that we do not even know how life appeared on earth...


    http://www.scientificamerican.com/p...ak-and-09-10-05


    Szostak: Absolutely! I mean what we're interested in is figuring out plausible pathways for the origin of life. It would be great to have even one complete plausible pathway, but what we find often is when we figure out how one little step might have worked, it gives us ideas, and then we end up with ultimately two or three or more different ways in which a particular step could have happened. So that makes us think the overall process might be more robust. So, you know, ultimately it would be nice, I think, if it turned out that there were multiple plausible pathways; then, of course, we might never know what really happened on the early Earth.


    finally... as donendone ... ardent athiests are not thinking.


    Caught Hitchens on 60 Minutes the other week ...


    he left open the possible existence of God, saying something to the effect of "Never say never."


    ardent atheists are idiots ... there are obviously valid criticisms of religion, but to insist "God" doesn't exist, is just stupid
     
    #39     May 16, 2011
  10. jem

    jem

     
    #40     May 16, 2011