Stephen Hawking In A Christian's Perspective

Stephen Hawking died yesterday at the age of 76. He was not an ordinary human being. He was not even a mere intellectual. He was beyond exceptional and extraordinary. Hawking was the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge for 30 years, a position that was once held by none other than Sir Isaac Newton.

Hawking was exceptional and extraordinary more so because of his outlook on life, rather than his academic excellence. His life should inspire anyone facing adversities to live their life to the best of their abilities, despite their pain and suffering. Stephen Hawking was an epitome of a warrior, who after losing life's basic, abundant and precious pleasures at an early age of 21, still lived to achieve greatness, despite not believing in God.

He fought valiantly against a dreaded disease. He refused to succumb to the disease that had already deprived him of enjoying life to its fullest.

"Hawking, perhaps the world's most famous scientist, was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), more commonly known as Lou Gehrig's disease, at age 21. That disease usually leads to death within three years of diagnosis, making Hawking's almost half-century experience with ALS all the more amazing.

Add to this the remarkable productivity of Hawking's work as a scientist and public intellectual. Confined to a wheelchair most of those years, he has been dependent upon a breathing tube for years now. No longer able to speak, he has communicated for several years through a special computer device that allows him to choose words as the machine follows his cues. Most recently, those cues are communicated only through voluntary twitches of his cheek. It can take him up to ten minutes to compose a single sentence.

This has not kept him from writing or co-authoring several best-selling books, including his most famous work, A Brief History of Time. That book has sold over 10 million copies worldwide...," says Albert Mohler Jr. - the President of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.1

At his 75th birthday celebration, Stephen Hawking's poignant speech, wherein he recollected the onset of his disease and his response to it, moved his audience to tears. He said, "I fell over and had great difficulty getting up. At first I became depressed. I seemed to be getting worse very rapidly. There didn't seem any point working on my PhD because I didn't know I would live long enough to finish it. But then the condition developed more slowly and I began to make progress in my work... After my expectations had been reduced to zero, every new day became a bonus and I began to appreciate everything I did have. While there is life, there is hope...Our picture of the universe has changed a lot in the last 50 years and I am happy if I have made a small contribution..."2

Sadly, Hawking did not believe in God. However, at a recent lecture in Cambridge, he spoke about theGod factor – a form of intelligence that was actually behind the creation of the universe, "Presenting himself before students at the University of Cambridge, the world-famous scientist declared that his years of research on the creation of the cosmos have led him to isolate a strange scientific factor which he says is in many ways contrary to the universal laws of physics.

This strange phenomenon which he names the God factor, would be at the origin of the creation process and would have played a great role in determining the actual form of the Universe." (Emphasis Mine).3

Stephen Hawking's view on the nature of human consciousness and the universe changed drastically when his brother, who was clinically dead for 43 minutes after a heart attack, had a near-death experience. Hawking said, "My brother has always been a role model for me. His rational, cunning and no non-sense mind has shaped my personality into the person I am today and has led me into the study of the fascinating world of physics. But since his accident last October, he has come back a changed man" he recalled.