Stephen Hawking died yesterday at the age of 76. He was not an ordinary human being. He was not even a mere intellectual. He was beyond exceptional and extraordinary. Hawking was the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge for 30 years, a position that was once held by none other than Sir Isaac Newton.
Hawking was exceptional and extraordinary more so because of his outlook on life, rather than his academic excellence. His life should inspire anyone facing adversities to live their life to the best of their abilities, despite their pain and suffering. Stephen Hawking was an epitome of a warrior, who after losing life’s basic, abundant and precious pleasures at an early age of 21, still lived to achieve greatness, despite not believing in God.
He fought valiantly against a dreaded disease. He refused to succumb to the disease that had already deprived him of enjoying life to its fullest.
“Hawking, perhaps the world’s most famous scientist, was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), more commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, at age 21. That disease usually leads to death within three years of diagnosis, making Hawking’s almost half-century experience with ALS all the more amazing.
Add to this the remarkable productivity of Hawking’s work as a scientist and public intellectual. Confined to a wheelchair most of those years, he has been dependent upon a breathing tube for years now. No longer able to speak, he has communicated for several years through a special computer device that allows him to choose words as the machine follows his cues. Most recently, those cues are communicated only through voluntary twitches of his cheek. It can take him up to ten minutes to compose a single sentence.
This has not kept him from writing or co-authoring several best-selling books, including his most famous work, A Brief History of Time. That book has sold over 10 million copies worldwide…,” says Albert Mohler Jr. - the President of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.1
At his 75th birthday celebration, Stephen Hawking’s poignant speech, wherein he recollected the onset of his disease and his response to it, moved his audience to tears. He said, “I fell over and had great difficulty getting up. At first I became depressed. I seemed to be getting worse very rapidly. There didn't seem any point working on my PhD because I didn't know I would live long enough to finish it. But then the condition developed more slowly and I began to make progress in my work… After my expectations had been reduced to zero, every new day became a bonus and I began to appreciate everything I did have. While there is life, there is hope…Our picture of the universe has changed a lot in the last 50 years and I am happy if I have made a small contribution…”2
Sadly, Hawking did not believe in God. However, at a recent lecture in Cambridge, he spoke about the God factor – a form of intelligence that was actually behind the creation of the universe, “Presenting himself before students at the University of Cambridge, the world-famous scientist declared that his years of research on the creation of the cosmos have led him to isolate a strange scientific factor which he says is in many ways contrary to the universal laws of physics.
This strange phenomenon which he names the God factor, would be at the origin of the creation process and would have played a great role in determining the actual form of the Universe.” (Emphasis Mine).3
Stephen Hawking’s view on the nature of human consciousness and the universe changed drastically when his brother, who was clinically dead for 43 minutes after a heart attack, had a near-death experience. Hawking said, “My brother has always been a role model for me. His rational, cunning and no non-sense mind has shaped my personality into the person I am today and has led me into the study of the fascinating world of physics. But since his accident last October, he has come back a changed man” he recalled.
“He has told me of the existence of a sentient being, of another world we mortals are unaware of, he has told me of God…Modern science relies on the perception that consciousness lies within the human brain, but what my brother experienced during his clinical death, I cannot explain. Does consciousness lie outside of the human body? Is the human brain just a receptor, capable of receiving the “consciousness wave” as AM/FM radios receive radio waves? These are questions modern science has not yet answered and could redefine our view of the Universe and modern physics completely.” (Emphasis Mine).4
Who knows Stephen Hawking better than his own mother? Yet she did not believe everything that Hawking said.
Hawking’s mother Isobel Hawking (1915-2013) said, “Not all the things Stephen says probably are to be taken as gospel truth. He’s a searcher, he is looking for things. And if sometimes he may talk nonsense, well, don’t we all? The point is, people must think, they must go on thinking, they must try to extend the boundaries of knowledge; yet they don’t sometimes even know where to start. You don’t know where the boundaries are, do you?”5
If you allow Stephen Hawking’s words to move you away from God, then do not blame Hawking, but blame yourself. Just as how God allowed Hawking to exist, HE has also sustained the existence of many sincere Christian scientists who have debunked everything that Hawking had said. So take time to read, understand and assimilate what these Christian scientists have to say.
Why can’t Hawking’s life inspire us to greater heights? Although he did not believe in God, he did not succumb to the evil of the disease that he was suffering from. He still lived his life to the best of his abilities.
If Hawking can live his life to its fullest despite not believing in God, how much more can we, who believe in God and receive HIS sustaining power and grace, live our lives for the sake of HIS glory and HIS glory alone? Think about this.
It was God who created Hawking. It was God who sustained him with the much needed advanced technology to aid him in his pursuit of academic excellence. If God was so merciful and compassionate with one of his creations, and if God did not judge him and pour his wrath and scorn upon Hawking while he was on earth, why should Christians condemn Hawking to hell?
Sadly, Hawking may not have believed in God. But this is only as far as the media outlets inform us.
This does not offer us the latitude to deem him an atheist. Who knows what happened in the last days and hours before his death? He may have well offered his life to the Lord Jesus. As long as we are unaware of his eternal destiny, let us avoid making him an inmate of hell.
I recollect Hawking’s words, “...Remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Be curious and however difficult life may seem, there is always something you can do and succeed at.”6
When we look up at the stars, we look to God - the one who created the stars. When we think about life and its amazing complexities, we need to think like a child.
The Lord Jesus said, “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” (Matthew 18: 3, NIV). William Maillis, an 11-year old child genius, who has already enrolled at the Carnegie Mellon University, is out to disprove Hawking, ““I want to be an astrophysicist so that I can prove to the scientific world that God does exist,” William said in a recent interview with Hellenic College Holy Cross.
When asked why he felt the need to prove it to scientists, his answer was even more profound: “Well because there’s these atheists that try to say that there is no God, when in reality it takes more faith to believe that there’s no God than it does to believe that there is a God… Because it makes more sense that something created the universe than that the universe created itself. It takes more faith to say the universe created itself than to say something other created the universe because that is more logical.”7
If you are suffering, turn to the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved. Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, if you desire to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. Repent of your sins and surrender your life to the Triune God.
When we are with the Triune God, we are more than conquerors, “For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (Romans 8: 38-39, NIV)
Endnotes:
1https://www.christianity.com/blogs/al-mohler/breathes-fire-into-equations-stephen-hawking-at-70.html
2https://www.mirror.co.uk/science/stephen-hawking-speech-cambridge-university-10728278
3http://worldnewsdailyreport.com/stephen-hawkins-admits-intelligent-design-is-highly-probable/
4Ibid.
5https://www.christianity.com/blogs/al-mohler/breathes-fire-into-equations-stephen-hawking-at-70.html
6https://www.mirror.co.uk/science/stephen-hawking-speech-cambridge-university-10728278
7https://faithit.com/11-year-old-genius-prove-stephen-hawking-wrong-death-god-exist/
Websites last accessed on 15th March 2018.
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