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1 Cor 2:9 But, as it is written, “What no eye has seen, nor ear
heard, nor the heart of man imagined, what God has prepared for those who love
him”— 10 these things God has revealed to us through the Spirit. For the
Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God.
I
write today with love for the lost, sorrow for the influence that unbelievers
have on others, and a renewed desire to share the good news of Christ with all.
May we who believe teach and offer hope to our dying world. May we speak the
truth in love.
Stephen
Hawking, the brilliant world-famous physicist who died March 15, 2018, never
accepted the simple truth, “In the beginning God.” Note what he preached
instead, with great certainty and confidence. What follows are excerpts from a
BreakPoint post, then two posts taken directly from Fox News.
Stephen Hawking and the Limits of our Knowledge (BreakPoint)
Hawking’s book, A Brief History of Time, became
a global hit, selling more than 10 million copies. He made regular
appearances on television, including hit shows like “The Big Bang Theory” and
(in animated form) “The Simpsons.” The film about his life, “The Theory of
Everything,” did more than $100-million at the box office and produced five
Academy Award nominations and one win.
Stephen
Hawking didn’t stay in his lane. He was a scientist, but in each of his books
and nearly all of his media appearances, he ventured into philosophy, masking
metaphysical observations and proclamations in language of scientific
certainty.
Hawking
regularly opined on what are known as the “ultimate questions,” such
as “Where did everything come from?” “Why are we here?” “What’s the
meaning of life?” “Who are we as human beings?” and “What is our ultimate
destiny?”
He
said:
“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.”
“There
is no heaven or afterlife… that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark.”
“The
scientific account is complete. Theology is unnecessary.”
Stephen Hawking says he knows what
happened before the dawn of time (Fox News)
It’s
the biggest question in the universe. What happened before the Big Bang? Now
world-famous physicist Stephen Hawking says he has an answer.
“The
boundary condition of the universe ... is that it has no boundary,” Hawking
tells the National Geographic’s Star Talk show this weekend.
In
other words, there is no time before time began as time was always there.
It
was just different.
He
tells physicist Neil deGrasse Tyson that amid the almost infinitely small
quantum foam of the singularity before the Big Bang, time existed in a ‘bent’”
state.
It
was distorted along another dimension — always getting fractionally closer to,
but never becoming, nothing.
So
there never was a Big Bang that created something from nothing.
It’s
just looks that way from our point of perspective.
“All
the evidence seems to indicate, that the universe has not existed forever, but
that it had a beginning, about 15 billion years ago,” Hawking
says in one of his lectures.
“There
must have been a beginning. Otherwise, the universe would be in a state of
complete disorder by now, and everything would be at the same temperature. In
an infinite and everlasting universe, every line of sight would end on the
surface of a star. This would mean that the night sky would have been as bright
as the surface of the Sun. The only way of avoiding this problem would be if,
for some reason, the stars did not shine before a certain time.”
But
things were different at the Big Bang.
“The
density would have been infinite,” Hawking says.
“It
would have been what is called, a singularity. At a singularity, all the laws
of physics would have broken down. This means that the state of the universe,
after the Big Bang, will not depend on anything that may have happened before,
because the deterministic laws that govern the universe will break down in the
Big Bang.”
This
has long posed a serious problem for physics, he says.
“Since
events before the Big Bang have no observational consequences, one may as well
cut them out of the theory, and say that time began at the Big Bang. Events
before the Big Bang, are simply not defined, because there’s no way one could
measure what happened at them.”
But
there are ways to figure out what came before, he says.
“Quantum
theory introduces a new idea, that of imaginary time. Imaginary time may sound
like science fiction, and it has been brought into Doctor Who. But
nevertheless, it is a genuine scientific concept. One can picture it in the
following way. One can think of ordinary, real, time as a horizontal line. On
the left, one has the past, and on the right, the future. But there’s another
kind of time in the vertical direction. This is called imaginary time, because
it is not the kind of time we normally experience. But in a sense, it is just
as real as what we call real time.”
This
has enormous implications when it comes to the Big Bang.
“James
Hartle of the University of California Santa Barbara, and I have proposed that
space and imaginary time together, are indeed finite in extent, but without
boundary. They would be like the surface of the Earth, but with two more
dimensions. The surface of the Earth is finite in extent, but it doesn’t have
any boundaries or edges. I have been around the world, and I didn’t fall off. “
There’s
no raw physics that supports his idea. Yet.
But
Hawking’s insight has proven right before.
What
we do know is that when it comes to the Big Bang — and black holes — our
understanding of physics breaks down.
The
only certainty about the infinitesimally small quantum building blocks of our
universe is that they are uncertain. Simply observing them can cause them to
change. They can be in two places — or two states — at once.
They
seem to be a physical embodiment of probability and potential: elements of
reality that haven’t quite yet decided what they’re going to do.
While
it dictates our lives, we still don’t know what time is. Or exactly where it
comes from.
We
know how it works. We know its effects.
It’s
like gravity.
It
doesn’t entirely seem to fit in the ‘big’ world of the physics we experience,
nor the ‘weird’ world of the subatomic.
But,
like the strange behavior of quantum physics, perhaps time has a lot more left
to tell.
Quotations from Stephen Hawking (Fox
News)
LONDON
– Physicist and author Stephen Hawking possessed an uncanny ability to
come up with memorable phrases and sayings that summed up his world view. Here
is a short selection of his many famous observations:
—
“We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average
star. But we can understand the universe. That makes us something very special.”
—
“Life would be tragic if it weren’t funny.”
—
“The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of
knowledge.”
—
“For millions of years, mankind lived just like the animals. Then something
happened which unleashed the power of our imagination. We learned to talk and
we learned to listen. Speech has allowed the communication of ideas, enabling
human beings to work together to build the impossible. Mankind’s greatest
achievements have come about by talking, and its greatest failures by not
talking. It doesn’t have to be like this. Our greatest hopes could become
reality in the future. With the technology at our disposal, the possibilities
are unbounded. All we need to do is make sure we keep talking.”
—
“My goal is simple. It is a complete understanding of the universe, why it is
as it is and why it exists at all.”
—
“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.”
—
“Although I cannot move and I have to speak through a computer, in my mind I am
free.”
—
“If aliens ever visit us, I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher
Columbus first landed in America, which didn’t turn out very well for the
Native Americans.”
—
“We are in danger of destroying ourselves by our greed and stupidity. We cannot
remain looking inwards at ourselves on a small and increasingly polluted and
overcrowded planet.”
—
“My disabilities have not been a significant handicap in my field, which is
theoretical physics. Indeed, they have helped me in a way by shielding me from
lecturing and administrative work that I would otherwise have been involved in.
I have managed, however, only because of the large amount of help I have
received from my wife, children, colleagues and students. I find that people in
general are very ready to help, but you should encourage them to feel that
their efforts to aid you are worthwhile by doing as well as you possibly can.”
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