Stephen Hawking can imagine there’s no heaven

So Stephen Hawking can imagine there’s no heaven. I have it on good authority that such imagining is “easy if you try.” It might be a little harder to imagine that while the physical world is accessible to physical instruments, the non-physical world is trickier. To imagine what can never be seen requires, dare I say it, a different sort of imagination? The kind that does not believe it has caught all of reality in its limited net?

One of the remarkable realities of scientific progress is that in every age its commonplaces have proven to be false in the eyes of later generations. We cannot possibly know which platitude of science will seem as silly now as phlogiston does today. Yet some scientists proclaim with thunderous certainty equal to the most blinkered religionist what is or is not true based on nothing more developed than distaste. Richard Dawkins does not like religion, so it cannot be true. Stephen Hawking has an aversion to theology, so theology is merely wish fulfillment. The careful parsing of possibilities that is so integral to science itself suddenly disappears when the issue is faith. Recently in a debate I had with Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens it became clear that the only truly unscientific approach is to repudiate the very possibility that human beings live on. To deny for its own sake -- now that’s dogma.

Can science and religion coexist? Of course they can if each side is willing to practice a little epistemological humility. Science is a tool for discovering truths about physical reality. As our most powerful tool, it is a natural -- though mistaken -- leap of logic to suppose that the things to which this tool applies are the only things that really exist. Since science cannot investigate an afterlife, there must not be one. Since Yuri Gagarin returning from his orbit around the earth proudly announced that he did not see God, there must not be one. The self-evident silliness of this premise does not seem to shake it loose in the minds of the true non-believers.

Are many believers also incapable of self-doubt? Without question. It is just more piquant to hear the apostles of doubt and reason and evidence pound the university lectern like a fire and brimstone preacher and cast all careful empirical weighing out the window when religious claims are concerned.

Stephen Hawking is an estimable scientist and no doubt an admirable man but he has no more competence to pronounce on heaven than any other thoughtful adult. Galileo made the distinction centuries ago that faith was about how to go to heaven and not about how the heavens go. I fully acknowledge Hawking’s expertise in the second half of that sentence. In the first -- which we may think of as how to live as sacred life, a life in service to something greater than oneself, a life in which the non-physical is as real as the flesh in which we are encased , or even more real -- when it comes to that, I would not choose Stephen Hawking as my guide. Master scientist though he may be, I’ll turn to a still higher authority.

David Wolpe  | May 16, 2011 4:54 PM