Stephen Hawking and God

        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!