SP-7: Regan's Take on Hawking's Comments

Stephen Hawking’s mind seems to have taken some negative turns recently. In his Discovery Channel special this past spring, he speculated that ET would be malevolent:

“If aliens ever visit us, I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn’t turn out very well for the Native Americans.”

More recently, Hawkings stated in his book The Grand Design, God/god/g-d/ had nothing to do with creation because there is no god. God. Whatever:

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.” He added: “It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the Universe going.”

(In a round about way, I can see what Hawking is getting at: it isn’t necessary to create a cartoonish, childish figurehead that we appease in order to shift responsibility away from ourselves to explain things, and I don’t think ETs are necessarily magical wondrous Space Brothers and Sisters who will give us lots of candy. Or, Jesus for that matter.)

Some die hard skeptoid atheists types might play semantic games with the following, (to them any “belief in” anything concerning spiritual matters is, at best, New Age froth, and at worst, religious zealotry)  but I don’t have a religious quibble with Mr. Hawking on this, because I’m not a Christian or religious person. I don’t believe in God as in Daddy Supreme being, don't believe the Bible is the word of a God, either directly or inspired, and so on. I do believe in what’s loosely called “Intelligent Design” which is an uneasy and dangerous label to use, since that term often invokes Christians who want to force public schools into teaching their particular brand of creationism, bring prayer into schools, or trying to get Glen Beck into the White House.

How about consciousness. When I think of “god” I think of living, intelligent, sentient, ... consciousness.

So Stephen Hawking talks about gravity and my question is, what created gravity? Who, what, how, why, ... is behind gravity, the universe, the constant flux, the stuff, this, that, ... ?  Simplistic answers deliver us a single God, and one personified to fit into our puny little human needs for control and fear based authoritarian structures.

Other spiritual systems, many of which I happily align myself with because they bring me comfort, are fun, have beautiful colorful artistic images of deities, help me focus and even, yes, manifest powerful moments in my life on various levels, aren’t as punitive and vengeful as the straight ahead Judeo/Christian/Islam triad of petty monotheistic beings misinterpreted, abused and mangled by humanity to control and kill their fellow human sisters and brothers -- and, give them permission to abuse and kill their fellow non-human sisters and brothers (animals.)

However, that’s all beside the point. Hawking hasn’t answered anything, he’s merely made a pronouncement based on his personal belief. We can argue all day about the existence of God, but first, we need to get clear on a few things; like, an agreed upon definition of what God/god is. My “god” if I call it that, which I don’t, is not  a single deity,---  unless, you want to consider that we're all “gods,” and in that sense a single deity, since we’re all sharing the single consciousness --  and is not vengeful, spiteful, arrogant, bestows grace only if you agree to believe in it (which is usually a him), is not just a “him,”  doesn’t give a damn if we pray to it or not, especially in schools and at football games, doesn't care if you're gay, bi, pan or transsexual, doesn’t ... well, you can see where I’m at.

From a human interest perspective, I’m curious about the ironic juxtaposition of Hawking's profession -- mega-intelligent universe pondering guy -- and his dark view of that very universe. ETs are going to eat us for lunch, the universe is just a gravity machine, coldly and non-mysteriously doing its mechanized thing, without consciousness.

So Hawking doesn’t believe in any kind of a God/god whether it’s a consciousness metaphysical concept, or a more traditional Christian kind of God. He can’t prove there is, he can’t prove there isn’t. Shrug. I’d like Hawking to take the next step and ask:  what created this gravity-machine? Gravity is “god,” man.

Bruceleeeowe Actualizes Discussion On Regan's Post

Recently, Regan Lee has started a interesting discussion about souls and ghosts. I won't delve much into these complicated subjects right now yet would like to present some thoughts. When we talk about origin of life in the universe, we generally assume that life is nothing but just some sort of complexity which comes from random molecular reactions governed by electromagnetic forces. Though data supports it, in some manner, but that doesn't mean it's entirely correct and absolute truth. Darwinism is most acceptable theory, no doubt but that doesn't mean we need not to search for another more acceptable theory. Accepting anything based on data and logic is science and believing in anything without analyzing it, is religion. The popular consensus is that if there is intriguing complexity, it is probably life. Is it correct? Just take a solvent(mostly with high dipole moment) and complex solute, pass it through electric arcs for a long time and what you get, would be a bunch of living molecules. Where is extreme complexity, there is life. (just visit WeirdSciences and choose the categories evolution, origin of life and extraterrestrial life and you will find a lot of speculations considering almost every logical and scientific perspective. I won't want to put them again. Hey, it's not advertisement..!)

Even a dead is as complex as living organism, yet dead is dead not alive. This is where I find our assumptions(life originated only from complexity) to be wrong. Soul could be some sort of condensed photons as recent researches show. See my article 'Quantum Theory of Photonic Matter'(based on experiments done at a university). It seems fairly reasonable to assume that life is just not a nice combination of chemical compound assembled randomly. Our organic materialistic body needs a power source which comes from soul something like a operating system which governes our body reactions, energy and security. I seldom come across folks who love to refer soul as some post of plasma based life form. Well, it's not possible. IMHO, blending soul and organic body(chemical complexity) makes anything alive. Tom has come up with excellent thoughts and I'm agree with him. Indian metaphysics has some excellent answers to such type of questions. I'll try to cover them up in my next post. And finally a correction for Tom OM SHANTIH SHANTIH.. (I apologise for my grammatical mistakes if there are any)