Stephen Hawking: "There is no heaven; it's a fairy story"

But Einstein said "Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind" so there you go, two great thinkers with opposing views. Which one is right? Without evidence for or against a creator I'd have to say it's a stalemate.

Star, replace the word 'religion' by 'philosophy' and the Einstein's quote will make sense.

He used to make contradictory statements and used the word 'god' to refer to nature.

Just because it is impossible to disprove something, it does not mean that the probability for it being real and not is 50% and 50%. What has no evidence at all of its existence actually has near 0% of probability of being real.

Otherwise, this type of 'logic' would result in the absurdity of the Blue Fairy, Pinochio and any figment of imagination having also a probability of 50% of being real.

Personally I’m not really one for putting faith in any one person. Too many times, things have been proved then disproved and it takes a significant amount of arrogance to believe our generation is the first to know the truth; many generations have done that before us. Too many people have been chased by the press for their opinion without us having either the luxury of seeing their research or the opposing argument. There does however exist one resounding statement from pretty much every academic subject, “The more we learn, the more we realise how much we don’t know.” We’re still just scratching the surface.

lol scientific not academic...*laughs at self*

It is one thing to be uncertain and having contradictory data on something very complicated like all possible effects of a medicinal drug in the extremely complex and changeable system of a human body -and- another thing being uncertain about the existence of silly characters of human imagination like blue fairy, pinochio, angels and gods.

Oh dear I’ve put myself in the first name category of being talked down too lololol. It’s such a shame this old chestnut keeps cropping up. That it often means that the ones with the most vehemently held beliefs will treat their opposites with little or no respect and dismiss them as a fool. Even a sniff of religious beliefs can set it off. There is so much more to any one person than a single held belief. So many of the most influential scientific icons throughout history believed in god and are still revered gratefully and humbly because of their ground braking discoveries and they have given us all so much.

I do find it hard to place blind faith in one human being just on the strength of their word. Especially one who said he’d proved the existence of god and then said now he was going to go and try and disprove it. You’re giving us mixed messages here stephen lolol. I would have to study and understand his findings before I would say ‘yes it’s proved’. Definitely going to have a nose around the internet though, it’s fun and important to learn and discuss it with others.

I don’t believe either way. Mathematically speaking we shouldn’t even be here. My only intention was to not leave Star up there all on her tod. As less and less religious people argue the point, sadly it’s the ones who choose to not commit either way who replace them in the firing line. No one knows why we’re here, and I have my doubts that humans are intelligent enough to figure out why, and how the building blocks existed in the first place, humans are tremendously bad at figuring out how something can come from no where, but I’d love to know damn it!!!

Ok back to life and reality I have a welsh lesson to go too and a toddler to look after lol.

Now, you're the one being presumptuous. Einstein was a devote Jew and he was explicitly referring the God (the creator of the universe) when he mentioned divinity.

I'm kind of glad you mentioned that, Duddy. I even remember once even reading him say that his work brought him even closer to his religion. Good for pointing that out.