Stephen Hawking, the renowned British
physicist, died in Cambridge on Tuesday, March 13, 2018, at the age of 76. He
was diagnosed with ALS at 21, and for many years had been confined to a
self-propelled wheelchair, and in recent years, to talking by way of a voice
synthesizer.
His body
was severely distorted by the disease, and his life must have been agony but he
struggled on to the last. An online article by Newsweek quoted him as saying, “However bad life may seem, there is
always something you can do, and succeed at. While there’s life, there is
hope.”
The magazine listed sixteen of his most
famous quotes and titled them “inspirational”. How they came to this adjective
is a puzzle to me because #13 is, “I
believe the simplest explanation is, there is no God. No one created the
universe and no one directs our fate. This leads me to a profound realization
that there probably is no heaven and no afterlife either. We have this one life
to appreciate the grand design of the universe and for that, I am extremely
grateful.”
Notice the word “probably” in there.
This means that Hawking, as an intelligent man, must have gone through all the
alternatives and concluded that the probability of no God and no afterlife was,
say, 95%, or even 99%. He then lived his life based on that huge majority value
of 99%. But as a wise man, he should have covered himself for the other 1%. This
is Pascal’s Wager all over again. What about that 1%? Hawking admitted that he
couldn’t prove or disprove God, but he also mentioned an afterlife. What branch
of mankind’s knowledge has the most to say about an afterlife? Only Christianity.
And how is that afterlife confirmed? By the resurrection of Jesus—He triumphed
over death and showed Himself alive to hundreds of witnesses—no one has to base
their eternal well-being on probabilities
ever again!
