Heaven Knows, Mr. Hawking

Stephen Hawking is a heckuva lot smarter than I am. He’s certainly more educated than I am. And it’s entirely likely that he’s a lot wiser than I am, too.

He can be all that and he still knows no more about heaven than I do.

Hawking is the brilliant physicist who has written about his belief that the creation of life is no more than an accident. Recently, he made a few headlines by saying, unequivocally, that there is no heaven. He said, “I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark.”

I have two thoughts about what Hawking says.

First, how sad that he thinks of himself as nothing more than a brain. Having been gifted with so much intelligence, I can see how he could find it very appealing to believe that the brain is the surpassing part of our being, the part that defines us. No matter how smart he is, I believe he’s wrong about that.

My second thought is that the wiser one grows, the less one is certain of. My beliefs have been proven wrong too often, my insights challenged too often, my perspective shifted too often, to hold any of my ideas too dear. Facts fall out of fashion just as beliefs do. So I strive to hold my mind open to what may be revealed to me next.

I’m surprised a man as brilliant as Stephen Hawking does not do the same.

(Illustration courtesy of Salvatore Vuono)

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