Hawking says there are no gods

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Darat said:
If you was using the word god like Hawking was and like the vast majority of all believers in a god then you would agree with his statement. You don't therefore you are talking about "something" other than what Hawking was.
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WOW! Talk about the ultimate appeal to authority! This is just religious devotion to Hawking.
 
Tommy Jeppesen said:
That only for me as the 2 quotes: It is a combination.
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Yes, a right one (Philip K. Dick) and an obviously wrong one (L. Ron Hubbard, the scientologist).

So here is one only for you:
The other side.
There is never just one side or one factor.
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They aren't factors. One is true, the other is false. I gave you a link to an article where a woman dying of cancer accuses the people who offer terminally ill patients false hopes as - often for a lot of money - as she herself was offered false hopes. You give me an article about a patient who is kept alive by the marvels of modern scientific medicine, apparently far beyond what serves any meaningful purpose - for the patient or his relatives.

The word "real":
https://www.iep.utm.edu/austin/

I.e. i.e. the content of a hallucination is not real, but it is real that there are hallucinations.
In general unreal beliefs like witches can have real consequences.
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Yes, of course it's real that there are hallucinations: hallucinations are false perceptions of reality, delusions, so L. Ron Hubbard's idea that it's real if you think it is is obviously false, which doesn't stop it from being an idea. There are true ideas and false ideas.
And the belief in witches (or in L. Ron Hubbard's ideas) often has the the very real consequence that you lose a lot of money to people preying on your need to believe[/url] - in gods or in other delusions.
In Denmark we have an ongoing struggle right now against one of those guys who offers false hopes of cures to people: http://skeptica.dk/artikler/?p=9651&cpage=1#comment-270398


ETA: Gods are one of the many unrealities that go away when you stop believing in them.
 
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Skeptic Ginger said:
Say you have a puzzle. And you solve that puzzle. Then someone comes along and says I have a piece of that puzzle that you need to solve it. But you have already solved it without that piece. So you conclude that piece was not needed and the person who says it was is wrong.
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In that analogy, the universe is complete and we know all the parts of it (or I am arrogant enough to believe so).

A more accurate analogy might be that that what we don't have all of the pieces of the puzzle or that some of the pieces that we used in the puzzle don't even belong to the puzzle and need to be replaced (much like gravity was replaced by relativity). If somebody offers a new piece of the puzzle then we don't say it doesn't belong just because we can't see where it fits. It might be seen to fit if some of the other missing pieces were in place or it might even require a rearrangement of the puzzle thus creating a new picture before the piece can be made to fit. Even then, all we have is a new theory.
 
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psionl0 said:
In that analogy, the universe is complete and we know all the parts of it (or I am arrogant enough to believe so).

A more accurate analogy might be that that what we don't have all of the pieces of the puzzle or that some of the pieces that we used in the puzzle don't even belong to the puzzle and need to be replaced (much like gravity was replaced by relativity). If somebody offers a new piece of the puzzle then we don't say it doesn't belong just because we can't see where it fits. It might be seen to fit if some of the other missing pieces were in place or it might even require a rearrangement of the puzzle thus creating a new picture before the piece can be made to fit. Even then, all we have is a new theory.
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You are right. Hawking is too conceited. Current science has not explained all things and we don't know if current science will continue for ever. The past experience suggers it will not be so.

But we only have what we have and we should solve the puzzle with our knowledges. If someone claims that he has solved the puzzle with some invisible pieces we have all reasons of the world to send him to dance the conga somewhere else. If this is true for puzzles, it is true for the Universe puzzle.
 
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David Mo said:
You are right. Hawking is too conceited. Current science has not explained all things and we don't know if current science will continue for ever. The past experience suggers it will not be so.
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I think that is a bit unfair to Hawking. The quote in the OP is him talking about the origins of the universe, a subject used in discussions by theist apologists as pointing to an external creator. Hawking is an expert on the topic, so his views have weight. I think that some people think he rules out the existence of God or gods entirely, but he is limiting his view to one needed to explain the creation of the universe.
 
David Mo said:
But we only have what we have and we should solve the puzzle with our knowledges. If someone claims that he has solved the puzzle with some invisible pieces we have all reasons of the world to send him to dance the conga somewhere else. If this is true for puzzles, it is true for the Universe puzzle.
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This is true. The scientific method doesn't require assumptions either way about any gods.
 
GDon said:
Hawking is an expert on the topic, so his views have weight.
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That is the problem. Hawking prefaced his comment with "If you accept, as I do ....." which is just a statement of what he believes. However, because of his eminence as a scientist, many are sucked in to believing that he has stated a scientific fact.
 
psionl0 said:
That is the problem. Hawking prefaced his comment with "If you accept, as I do ....." which is just a statement of what he believes.
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A ground-breaking theoretical physicist and cosmologist makes a comment about the origins of the universe -- I'd put it a little stronger than "just a statement of what he believes".
 
psionl0 said:
That is the problem. Hawking prefaced his comment with "If you accept, as I do ....." which is just a statement of what he believes. However, because of his eminence as a scientist, many are sucked in to believing that he has stated a scientific fact.
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Exactly the point I made earlier.
 
It's a statement of what Hawking believes, based on a lifetime of study and thought on the topic of the origin of the universe. I think you are understating the strength his statement by framing it as "just a statement of what he believes."
 
GDon said:
It's a statement of what Hawking believes, based on a lifetime of study and thought on the topic of the origin of the universe. I think you are understating the strength his statement by framing it as "just a statement of what he believes."
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You are a classic example of somebody who has been sucked in by Hawking's eminence. To you it doesn't matter what Hawking said, only that he said it. Your argument is nothing more than an appeal to authority.
 
psionl0 said:
You are a classic example of somebody who has been sucked in by Hawking's eminence. To you it doesn't matter what Hawking said, only that he said it.
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I'm a theist, and I've already made my criticisms of Hawking's comment earlier in this thread. Hawking is saying that that there is no possibility of a creator who existed in time, "because there is no time for a creator to have existed in". Theists generally don't propose that there is a creator who exists in time.

No theists were harmed in the production of Hawking's statement.

psionl0 said:
Your argument is nothing more than an appeal to authority.
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Argument from authority: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority

If all parties agree on the reliability of an authority in the given context it forms a valid inductive argument.​

Hawking is generally regarded as an authority on the field of cosmology, so his statements on that should be taken seriously. It just isn't particularly relevant to theology AFAICS. Maybe to the Kalam Cosmological Argument, but not necessarily so.
 
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David Mo said:
You are right. Hawking is too conceited. Current science has not explained all things and we don't know if current science will continue for ever. The past experience suggers it will not be so.

But we only have what we have and we should solve the puzzle with our knowledges. If someone claims that he has solved the puzzle with some invisible pieces we have all reasons of the world to send him to dance the conga somewhere else. If this is true for puzzles, it is true for the Universe puzzle.
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Often he is, but this is one time I don't think he is. The issue is that some people what to redefine the meaning of god (as he was using it) and then plug that into what he said and cry "Aha he was wrong!".

As I said earlier this is the same as trying to claim that since the garage is too small to fit a corvette into it but could fit a scale model of a corvette he is wrong to say there is no corvette in the garage.

In other words psionl0 as an example is trying to get people to argue over a strawman.

Personally I think Hawking over thought this, we know the god that the RCC claims to exist doesn't, that the god of the CofE doesn't exist that the god of the Sunni's doesn't exist because the claims made for those gods have been proved via evidence to not exist.
 
psionl0 said:
That is the problem. Hawking prefaced his comment with "If you accept, as I do ....." which is just a statement of what he believes. However, because of his eminence as a scientist, many are sucked in to believing that he has stated a scientific fact.
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There are only facts.

And your use of "belief" is yet again one of those semantic twaddles i.e. "we can never know anything, it's all just a belief, so my belief in fairies is as real as your belief that the piano about to drop on you will hurt you".

What Hawking said was that based on the work he has done following the maths and all the evidence that shows the maths is a sound description of reality he found there was no room for god and no need for god (the word god being defined as it is usually defined not your "I'm just saying something could exist but I've no idea what, where or when").

Now I am not capable of following the maths that forms the bedrock of his work so I actually can't say from personal knowledge whether he is right or wrong. But what I can see is those that say he "could" be wrong, that it is only his "belief" do not attack the mathematics of his work, almost as if they also aren't capable of personally understanding his actual work that led to his conclusion.

Thankfully we don't need to be able to follow his mathematics to know that the gods the vast majority of those that claim to believe in a god claim exist do not exist.
 
dann said:
Psion, most fictional characters are people. You don't really need to look for evidence that people are also to be found in the real world. On the other hand, specific people, Harry Potter, for instance, aren't. If you start trying to find him in the real world, it's because you don't understand what literature is.
Some characters of fiction may based on people in the real world. That doesn't make them any more real. My students sometimes have a hard time grasping this concept and use fiction as documentation about what the real-life person was like.
f you start looking for Zeus outside of the myths about him, it's because you don't understand what religion is.
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You, probably unwittingly, are equating fiction with myth. Are the two the same? Harry Potter is known not to exist both by his inventor and by people who read books about him. But Zeus was believed - probably mistakenly - to exist, by people who worshipped him; and in general the stories about him were not fictional in the sense of being believed as authentic neither by their authors nor their readers.

I therefore believe that myth and fiction can't be simply or casually equated.
 
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