{"id":1200,"date":"2014-09-22T14:00:04","date_gmt":"2014-09-22T19:00:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/avant-garde\/?p=1200"},"modified":"2014-09-21T20:07:14","modified_gmt":"2014-09-22T01:07:14","slug":"stephen-hawking","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/avant-garde\/2014\/09\/stephen-hawking\/","title":{"rendered":"Stephen Hawking is an atheist"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/p>\n

After much speculation and confusion due to his previous statements<\/a>, Stephen Hawking<\/strong> finally came out of the closet and embraced his atheism publicly, in an interview for the Spanish newspaper El Mundo<\/a><\/em>:<\/p>\n

In my second question, I ask him to clarify his stance on God and religion<\/strong>, which has generated an intense debate among his readers. On one hand, at the end of A Brief History of Time<\/em><\/a>, he wrote that if someday we reached that ‘Theory of Everything’, we would know “the mind of God”. But afterwards, in his controversial book The Grand Design<\/a><\/em>, he said that the universe can be created “out of nothing, out of nowhere”, and that the idea of \u200b\u200bGod is “not necessary” to explain its origin. I ask him, given this apparent contradiction, if he changed his mind in this field, and if he considers himself an agnostic or atheist.<\/p>\n

His resounding answer is very clear that although many have come to describe Hawking being alive as “a miracle”, half a century after being diagnosed with a disease which its life expectancy is usually a couple of years, the astrophysicist rejects all religious beliefs<\/strong>: “in the past, before we understood the science it was logical to believe that God created the universe. But now science offers a more convincing explanation. What I meant when I said we would know ‘the mind of God’ was that we would understand everything God would be able to understand if it existed. But there is no God. I am an atheist<\/strong>. Religion believes in miracles, but they are not compatible with science”.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Welcome to the rational side, Dr. Hawking \u2014 we’ve been waiting you for a while.<\/p>\n

(hat tip Juli\u00e1n Fernandez<\/b> | Image: Chris Boland<\/a> via photopin<\/a> cc<\/a>)<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

After much speculation and confusion due to his previous statements, Stephen Hawking finally came out of the closet and embraced…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[91],"tags":[382,342],"class_list":["post-1200","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-atheism","tag-atheism","tag-stephen-hawking"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/avant-garde\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1200","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/avant-garde\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/avant-garde\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/avant-garde\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/26"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/avant-garde\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1200"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/avant-garde\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1200\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/avant-garde\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1200"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/avant-garde\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1200"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/avant-garde\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1200"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}