Religions are a con-artists dream! You can promise people what you never have to give them, take money from them for doing it, gain a certain 'respect' in the community and get a legal tax deduction all at the same time!
What better con is there than promising people something "after they die!"
Any confusion over Stephen Hawking's viewpoint about God should be dispelled by the new book, "The Grand Design," which concludes that the universe came into being without the aid of a divine creator.
The book, co-authored by physicist Leonard Mlodinow of Caltech in Pasadena, presents the argument that the universe arose naturally and inevitably: "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," the authors write, according to reports by the
Times of London. "It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the Universe going,"
An earlier book by Hawking, the bestselling "A Brief History of Time" ended with the sentence: "If we discover a complete theory, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason -- for then we should know the mind of God." This sentence has been cited over and over again by theists who use the quote from the famous physicist to bolster their arguments against atheism. However, Hawking says that he had misgivings about including that particular sentence in the book. His publisher's insisted on it in hopes of increasing sales. But as Roger Highfield
writes, in New Scientist, Hawking's use of the phrase "the mind of God" was a metaphor for the laws of nature, and as such does not conflict with Hawking's latest statement.
The misinterpretation of Hawking's viewpoint stemming from that metaphor illustrates the problem created by scientists who clothe their findings in divine dress. This language leaves the wrong impression of rational underpinnings of science and undermines an atheistic interpretation of the universe --- an attitude that many of them share. One famous example was Einstein's famous epithet --- "God does not play dice with the universe" which has commonly been construed as evidence that the scientist was a believer. However, when Einstein was asked whether he believed in God, he replied that he believed in Spinoza's God. For the philosopher, God was synonymous with nature and not something outside of it.
The new Hawking book rebuts the claim that the universe was fine-tuned explicitly to generate the conditions for the existence of human beings --- the contention of Isaac Newton and of today's exponents of Intelligent Design, who argue that the complexity of the cosmos could not have arisen by chance.
The discovery of a planet orbiting a star other than the sun, the book says, 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."
In addition to other planets there may also be other universes, each with its own blend of physical conditions. In this scenario, our universe is but one of many. We exist because we are in the universe that allows human life.
Hawking's views arise from M-theory, a form of string theory, which he expects will lead to a theoretical framework integrating gravity with quantum theory and explaining the underlying nature of everything.
"According to M-theory, ours is not the only universe," Hawking writes. "Instead M-theory predicts that a great many universes were created out of nothing. Their creation does not require the intervention of some supernatural being or god."
In a Times' analysis, Ruth Gledhill says he believes that science and religion are irreconcilable. Hawking is quoted as saying: "There is a fundamental difference between religion, which is based on authority, [and] science, which is based on observation and reason. Science will win because it works."