The tragic death of a brilliant fool

Posted

Professed atheist Stephen Hawking, who was called “Einstein” by his classmates as a schoolboy, is dead.

Recognized as one of the world’s most brilliant men, Hawking recently served as the Dennis Stanton Avery and Sally Tsui Wong-Avery Director of Research at the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics and Founder of the Centre for Theoretical Cosmology at the University of Cambridge in England.

Hawking is also the former Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge, the chair held by Isaac Newton in 1663. He was awarded over a dozen honorary degrees and was awarded the Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 1982.

Hawking was a prolific author, but is perhaps best known for his masterpiece A Brief History of Time – one of his most recognized works and one of the bestselling books (internationally) of the twentieth century.

According to his website Hawking contracted motor neurone disease (ALS) in 1963 when he was 21 years old and was given two years to live. He lived for 50 additional years, dying today, March 14.

Even though Hawking had a brilliant mind, and even though physicist Neil deGrasse Tyson exclaimed, “His passing has left an intellectual vacuum in his wake,” he was outspoken about his atheism.

Hawking has stated, “We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star.”

Yet, at the same time the former Cambridge professor violated all the unspoken rules of atheism in his book The Grand Design. There, he wrote, “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.”

By writing this, Hawking comes amazingly close to the truth of Genesis 1:1, where the Bible says, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” The Hebrew word for “created” is bara, which refers to supernatural creation ex nihilo (Latin for “out of nothing”).

Yet at the same time, Hawking stated, “We are each free to believe what we want, and it’s my view that the simplest explanation is: there is no god. No one created our universe, and no one directs our fate. This leads me to a profound realization; there is probably no heaven, and no afterlife either.”

More recently, Hawking said, “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.”

Stephen Hawking was a brilliant, courageous, and famous man who influenced millions of people and it is unfortunate that amidst all his brilliance he failed to grasp the most important thing – the existence of God. Only a fool says there is no God (Psalm 14:1).

Ray Comfort, president of www.livingwaters.com, has commented, “This generation is having an atheist revival, because they have been fed the lie that atheism is intelligent when it’s obviously not.

“The more a nation gets into darkness, the more it’s going to hate the light. The more it’s going to run from the light. And we have a generation of people who have given themselves to darkness, and they’ve embraced atheism, because it gets them away from moral responsibility to God.”

C.S. Lewis, who was on the faculty of Oxford University (only 100 miles from Hawking’s Cambridge), took the opposite approach when he said, “Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you get neither.”

Ultimately, mankind is face with a “trilemma.” God’s Son, Jesus Christ either (1) deceived mankind by conscious fraud, (2) He was Himself deluded and self-deceived, or (3) He was exactly who He claimed to be, the Son of God, the express image of the invisible God, and the Savior of the world.

C.S. Lewis summed it up by saying, “Jesus is either a lunatic, a liar, or Lord of all.” I am willing to acknowledge Hawking’s brilliant mind, but I embrace Lewis’ sensible, logical, and biblical approach to life’s most important question: Who is Jesus Christ?

I am confident that upon his death Hawking faced reality and suddenly agreed with Lewis. Death is the great common denominator.

Consequently, after death everyone recognizes the existence of God and the mission of His Son, and we know that one day every knee will bow and every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord. Unfortunately, those who only acknowledge Christ as Lord after death will not do it in joy, but in judgment.

death, fame, judgement, science