HAWKING;THERE IS NO GOD

http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_thelookout/20110516/us_yblog_thelookout/stephen-hawking-says-afterlife-is-a-fairy-story

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/09/02/stephen-hawking-god-not-n_n_703179.html
Renowned physicist Stephen Hawking recently explained his belief that there is no God and that humans should therefore seek to live the most valuable lives they can while on Earth.
Guardian writer Ian Sample asked Hawking if he feared death in a story published yesterday. This was his response:
I have lived with the prospect of an early death for the last 49 years. I'm not afraid of death, but I'm in no hurry to die. I have so much I want to do first. 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.
Hawking's 1988 book "A Brief History of Time" sold 9 million copies, and in it Hawking referenced God metaphorically as the force that could fully explain the creation of the universe.
But in 2010, Hawking told Diane Sawyer that "science will win" in a battle with religion "because it works."
"What could define God [is a conception of divinity] as the embodiment of the laws of nature. However, this is not what most people would think of that God," Hawking told Sawyer. "They made a human-like being with whom one can have a personal relationship. When you look at the vast size of the universe and how insignificant an accidental human life is in it, that seems most impossible."
Hawking's latest book, "The Grand Design," challenged Isaac Newton's theory that the solar system could not have been created without God. "Because there is a law such as gravity, the Universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the Universe exists, why we exist. It is not necessary to invoke God to ... set the Universe going," he writes.
Hawking was diagnosed with the degenerative Lou Gehrig's disease at the age of 21. He lost his power of speech and for decades has talked through an electronic speech synthesizer. The device has allowed him to continue his research and attain a top Cambridge research post, which was previously held by Newton. His most famous theory explains how black holes emit radiation, according to The Guardian.
So if everyone is destined to power-down like computers at the end of their lives, what should humans do to lend meaning to their experience?
"We should seek the greatest value of our action," Hawking told the paper.
(Hawking in China in 2006: Elizabeth Dalziel/AP
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LONDON — Did creation need a creator?
British physicist and mathematician Stephen Hawking says no, arguing in his new book that there need not be a God behind the creation of the universe.
The concept is explored in "The Grand Design," excerpts of which were printed in the British newspaper The Times on Thursday. The book, written with fellow physicist Leonard Mlodinow, is scheduled to be published by Bantam Press on Sept. 9.
"The Grand Design," which the publishers call Hawking's first major work in nearly a decade, challenges Isaac Newton's theory God must have been involved in creation because our solar system couldn't have come out of chaos simply through nature.
But Hawking says it isn't that simple. To understand the universe, it's necessary to know both how and why it behaves the way it does, calling the pursuit "the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything."
"We shall attempt to answer it in this book," he wrote. "Unlike the answer given in 'The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy,' ours won't be simply '42.'"
The number 42 is the deliberately absurd answer to the "Ultimate Question" chosen by sci-fi author Douglas Adams.
Hawking, who is renowned for his work on black holes, said the 1992 discovery of another planet orbiting a star other than the sun makes "the coincidences of our planetary conditions ... far less remarkable and far less compelling as evidence that the Earth was carefully designed just to please us human beings."
In his best-selling 1988 book "A Brief History of Time," Hawking appeared to accept the possibility of a creator, saying the discovery of a complete theory would "be the ultimate triumph of human reason – for then we should know the mind of God."