Don't fall for it...

Mark Shea on St. Stephen Hawking and the Really True Story of How Catholics are Forbidden to Study Creation...as if Catholics haven't been studying Creation for 2,000 years.

I like this bit:

It’s the sort of thing only believed and circulated by members of the English Chattering Class (and, of course, by Americans who feel an instinctive sense of inferiority both to the English and to guys in lab coats). And since it is common knowledge that the Catholic Church hates and fears science, such a claim doesn’t need to be verified since we’re all, you know, on the same page here. I mean just look at the way the Church has always persecuted scientists such as Galileo and… well, oh, you know everyone!

In related English Secular Upper Class News, Hawking concluded his presentation with a Q&A session, and the the last question he answered earned one of the night’s biggest laughs.

“We’re in an era where we can control machines with our thoughts,” began the questioner, so besides Hawking’s motorized wheelchair, what else would he like to use that for?

“What I’d really like to control is not machines, but people,” the professor responded.

Pseudo-Knowledge Alert.


Did you know that John Paul II warned scientists not to study the "Big Bang" because it was "holy"?

It must be true because Steven Hawking uses that statement as a regular "laugh line" in his talks.

In another observation of modern religion, Hawking noted that in the 1980s, around the time he released a paper discussing the moment the universe was born, Pope John Paul II admonished the scientific establishment against studying the moment of creation, as it was holy.

“I was glad not to be thrown into an inquisition,” Hawking joked.

Har, har, har...Catholics and the Inquistion...that's a knee slapper every time.

The problem is that John Paul II never said it.

Here's one site that links to the putative speech, which contains nothing of the sort.

And - mirabile dictu! - here is an atheist who came up with the same conclusion.

And, then, there is the obvious problem that the person who formulated Big Bang cosmology, aka "the Father of the Big Bang" - Father Georges LeMaitre - was a Catholic priest.

Oh, and the Vatican has an observatory.

But we should expect this story to become iconic.

*sigh*

Good at physics, lousy at metaphysics, completely  incompetent at the history of philosphy.

Intelligence in one technical area does not eo ipso make one intelligent about other areas.

N.T. Wright on Stephen Hawkings:

It’s depressing to see Stephen Hawking, one of the most brilliant minds in his field, trying to speak as an expert on things he sadly seems to know rather less about than many averagely intelligent Christians. Of course there are people who think of ‘heaven’ as a kind of pie-in-the-sky dream of an afterlife to make the thought of dying less awful. No doubt that’s a problem as old as the human race. But in the Bible ‘heaven’ isn’t ‘the place where people go when they die.’ In the Bible heaven is God’s space while earth (or, if you like, ‘the cosmos’ or ‘creation’) is our space. And the Bible makes it clear that the two overlap and interlock. For the ancient Jews, the place where this happened was the temple; for the Christians, the place where this happened was Jesus himself, and then, astonishingly, the persons of Christians because they, too, were ‘temples’ of God’s own spirit.


Hawking is working with a very low-grade and sub-biblical view of ‘going to heaven.’ Of course, if faced with the fully Christian two-stage view of what happens after death -- first, a time ‘with Christ’ in ‘heaven’ or ‘paradise,’and then, when God renews the whole creation, bodily resurrection -- he would no doubt dismiss that as incredible. But I wonder if he has ever even stopped to look properly, with his high-octane intellect, at the evidence for Jesus and the resurrection? I doubt it -- most people in England haven’t. Until he has, his opinion about all this is worth about the same as mine on nuclear physics, i.e. not much.

As for the creation being self-caused: I wonder if he realises that he is simply repeating a version of ancient Epicureanism? i.e. the gods are out of the picture, a long way away, so the world/human life/etc has to get on under its own steam. This is hardly a ‘conclusion’ from his study of the evidence; it’s simply a well known worldview shared by most post-Enlightenment westerners. It is the worldview which enables secular democracy to consider itself an absolute, despite its numerous and rather obvious failings right now. The depressing thing is that Hawking doesn’t seem to realize this and so hasn’t even stopped to think that there might be quite sophisticated critiques of Epicureanism, ancient and modern, which he should work through. Not least the Christian one, which again focusses on Jesus.

Of course, the old set-up of the ‘science and religion’ debate was itself deeply influenced by this same worldview, and needs realigning. In fact, the ancient Christians would have been shocked to see their worldview labelled as a ‘religion.’ It was a philosophy, a politics, a culture, a vocation... the category of ‘religion’ is part of the problem, not part of the solution.

Schooling Stephen Hawkings.

The man may know physics, but hasn't a clue about metaphysics.

Concerning Hawkings' "the mind is a just a computer" claim, Mike Flynn drops the Thomistic hammer in this post:

Briefly thus: the intellect knows by grasping the form or essence of a thing. If things did not have forms, science would have nothing to consider. You cannot have a science of this fork on my desk, which is a concrete particular; but one may have a science of forks, an abstract generality. You cannot have a physics of this particle or of that particle; but you can have particle physics. Now for matter to take on a form is just to be that thing. Matter that takes on the form of a cat just is a cat. But to know something is to take on its form. When I see a cat, I know that cat. The form of that cat is in the cat, and also in my mind. If my mind were matter, then some part of the mind would just be a cat. But this is absurd (I hear you say). Well, certainly, and that is why the mind cannot be material.(*) And in particular, it cannot be brain.


In particular, there are peculiar cases of people who lack virtually their entire brain and still live a normal life. They have minds, but not brains. Weird.

This does not mean there is no relationship. A human substance is a composite of matter and form, of body and soul (or body and mind, to use modern lingo). Thus, the condition of one affects the other in various ways. That is not at issue. The soul is the substantive form of the body, that is, its shape/functioning. It is what makes a living thing alive. It is not a separate substance somehow inhabiting the same space as the body any more than a sphere somehow inhabits the same space as a basketball.

Now any power dependent on a physical organ cannot survive the corruption of that organ. So, when the ear is destroyed, we no longer hear; when the eye is destroyed, we no longer see. But if intellection is not material, it cannot pass away due to the corruption of any material thing. Therefore, it is not unreasonable to suppose on the basis of experience and logic that at least some portion of a rational soul exists after death. Regardless of whether one is afraid of the dark or not.

The intellect reflects upon perceptions, and these come through sensation. "Nothing is in the mind that was not first in the senses." So with the decay of the body comes the decay of sensation, perception, memory, and the like. These are also part of the soul and, in the case of animals and plants, the whole soul. But the substance that is me, or you, or Great-aunt Matilda is a body and soul. This is why the Christian creed emphasizes "the resurrection of the body," that the soul be reunited with matter (not necessarily the self-same atoms.)

An argument can also be made for the existence of the disembodied intellect and volition, the rational part of the soul. Since it is immaterial and time is the measure of change in material being, it would have to exist in an eternal sense, rather than a time-bound sense. (Remember, "eternity" is a lack of time due to a lack of materiality; it is not "a really really long time.")

(*) Another way. An organ must lack the thing it apprehends. An ear apprehends sound; so the ear itself must lack sound. If the ear were making sounds itself, we would be unable to hear things. Cf. tinnitus. The eye apprehends light (photons bouncing off surfaces, say); but if the eye produced light of itself, it would be unable to apprehend light. So, if the mind's proper object is to apprehend the material world, it cannot be material itself.

Scientist Roger Penrose Criticizes Stephen Hawkings' Recent Book.

"M-Theory" isn't a theory.

Here is the site.

Here is the video.