My confusion would be, where does he get the notion that #1 is true?
Religion gets an exception because people are expected to fake respect towards religion. And because of the reasonable fear of assault; especially for a guy who can’t even run away
As I said upthread, he was basically lying out of fear at the time, and has admitted to always being an atheist.
He also made the mistake of using the (common among physicists at least since Einstein) metaphor of ‘the mind of god’ when referring to the equations of a hypothetical fundamental theory.
Psst, look to the bottom of the page:
All scientists bring personal biases to the table, and they’re all ultimately rendered irrelevent by the scientific method.
In the long run, the only important question - regardless of his beliefs or motives - is centered on the quality of his science. On this count, he seems to have acquitted himself pretty darn well.
Wow. That is the most humiliating whoosh I have ever felt. I even saw that the title was ‘Disinformation’ and I even READ THE ARTICLE and at no point did my satire meter ping. Sigh. I just aint got no bizness lookin’ at no Stephen Hawking links no how.
I protest once again at your foolish insistence at calling the deity he.
There is no God but Athena, and Buffy Summers is her prophet.
Really?? People were going to assault SH if he came out against religion? He has a reasonable fear of assault???
You (and Hawking) must live in very interesting part of the world where a famous world-famous crippled scientist has that fear. Do you live in Mecca and it is Hajj?
Reading the exact quotations of Hawking, it still reads like he hasn’t disproven the existence of God. Merely that it is his assertion that God is not neccessary for the creation of the universe out of nothing.
Still, he hasn’t expained the mechanism for the spontaneous existence of matter and energy other than some reference to gravity which as I understand it is a function of mass.
That claim may be over the top (and remember that Hawking lives in the U.K., not next to Fred Phelps), but the overall gist of what Der Trihs is saying is right, IMHO.
I was once invited to talk at a Christian school and asked by a 10 year old about whether I’m a Christian–I gave a “politician’s answer” and made it sound like I was a Christian without saying as much. (I was invited to talk about disability, not religion, by someone whose children go there and didn’t want to put them in an awkward situation.) It wasn’t one of my proudest moments, but I was put on the spot and gave a “safe” answer just from instinct.
It’s sad but true that there are often social reasons for not declaring your atheism publicly even if you’re quite open in private.
Sorry, the gist was “assault”. If you go to a Christian school to give a lecture you have the clear idea that openly declaring your atheism will not get you many more invites, but you don’t get the idea of bullet-proof vests and smoke genades to run for your life. There are moments in social interaction when being open about something may not be the polite or right thing to do, but it’s a looooong way to “fear of assault”.
He also said “people are expected to fake respect towards religion” as well. The more general point is that, scientist or not, you’re going to experience pressure to conform and/or not rock the boat.
Sure, as we are expected to fake respect to a zillion other things (I’m not denying that religion is special in this category of faked respect), he clearly said that SH did it because he didn’t want to be assaulted.
Don’t feel too bad; I’d read that site previously, and managed to skip over the disclaimer as well. I just thought that really nobody would earnestly photoshop corny novelty devil horns on Stephen Hawking, so I took a closer look…