World-famous theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking says flat-out that he doesn't believe in God, but he does believe that space travel offers the best hope for our species' immortality.
Those pronouncements came during the buildup to this week's Starmus Festival at Tenerife in the Canary Islands, where Hawking and other scientific luminaries have gathered for rounds of talks, tours and elbow-rubbing.
The Spanish newspaper El Mundo engineered an exclusive interview with Hawking, and headlined its report with his views on the origins of the universe.
In the past, there's been a tiny bit of ambiguity: In "A Brief History of Time," Hawking writes that the discovery of a unifying set of scientific principles known as the theory of everything would enable scientists to "know the mind of God." But in a follow-up book about the quest for the theory of everything, titled "The Grand Design," Hawking said the mechanism behind the origin of the universe was becoming so well known that God was no longer necessary.
El Mundo's Pablo Jauregui asked about those two references to God in one of the questions he prepared for Hawking to answer, and here's the scientist's response:
"Before we understand science, it is natural to believe that God created the universe. But now science offers a more convincing explanation. What I meant by 'we would know the mind of God' is, we would know everything that God would know, if there were a God, which there isn't. I'm an atheist."
Hawking addressed the issue more delicately several years ago when he told Reuters that he was "not religious in the normal sense," and said "God does not intervene to break the laws" that He decreed. Since then, however, there's been a lot more theorizing devoted to the origin of the universe. Hawking now believes that an approach known as M-theory will eventually reveal the grand design of the cosmos.
"In my opinion, there is no aspect of reality beyond the reach of the human mind," Hawking told El Mundo.
That's not surprising tbh. Science basically disproves the possibility of an existence of a god, so if you believe in science you wouldn't believe in god, it just makes sense.
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