“I believe the simplest explanation is, there is no God. No one created the universe and no one directs our fate. This leads me to a profound realization that there probably is no heaven and no afterlife either. We have this one life to appreciate the grand design of the universe and for that, I am extremely grateful.”
Stephen Hawking
There is another logical alternative. The question: is life a function of biology or vice versa?
ReplyDeleteHe believes in string theory, that is going to be the biggest failure in theoretical physics.
ReplyDeleteThings are the way they are in our universe because if they weren't, we would not be here to notice.
ReplyDeleteCorina Marinescu this is the anthropic principle.
ReplyDeleteI think I'm aware of what I said Antonio Petrelli ;)
ReplyDeleteStephen is smart but I have a feeling he's no where close to enlightened. I'll go with Ramana Maharshi's view, (based upon direct experience) on death instead:
ReplyDelete"The shock of the fear of death drove my mind inwards and I said to myself mentally, without actually framing the words: ‘Now death has come; what does it mean? What is it that is dying? This body dies.’ And I at once dramatized the occurrence of death. I lay with my limbs stretched out stiff as though rigor mortis had set in and imitated a corpse so as to give greater reality to the enquiry. I held my breath and kept my lips tightly closed so that no sound could escape, so that neither the word ‘I’ or any other word could be uttered, ‘Well then,’ I said to myself, ‘this body is dead. It will be carried stiff to the burning ground and there burnt and reduced to ashes. But with the death of this body am I dead? Is the body ‘I’? It is silent and inert but I feel the full force of my personality and even the voice of the ‘I’ within me, apart from it. So I am Spirit transcending the body. The body dies but the Spirit that transcends it cannot be touched by death. This means I am the deathless Spirit.’ All this was not dull thought; it flashed through me vividly as living truth which I perceived directly, almost without thought-process. ‘I’ was something very real, the only real thing about my present state, and all the conscious activity connected with my body was centered on that ‘I’. From that moment onwards the ‘I’ or Self focused attention on itself by a powerful fascination. Fear of death had vanished once and for all. Absorption in the Self continued unbroken from that time on.
Corina Marinescu sure, but you did not give credit.
ReplyDeleteI agree totally. I accept the idea of not knowing, and the mere idea of being in a situation of research is sufficiently exhilarating.
ReplyDeleteDo not know the origin or the meaning of the universe is not a problem in itself. Not to try would be one for me. Hubert Reeves believes the idea of God as an unsatisfactory answer the complex questions posed by nature, and that the answers are in this last and only there.
Nature constituting of infinitely and small to infinitely large, the universe would it not him even infinitely small in an infinitely greater organization, etc..etc...?
Sorry for the length!
Thank you Corina.
Antonio Petrelli thanks for always taking care of me here on G+ =D
ReplyDeleteRoy Dopson those are some complex words, but I'll go with Stephen this time...because death is part of life and I cannot rely on anyone experiences.
ReplyDeleteI have my own brain to explore =)
Corina Marinescu For a different perspective, maybe explore the silence of the still mind. It's a completely new experience.
ReplyDelete..."explore the silence of the still mind.." I like that, thanks! Roy Dopson
ReplyDeleteSo he believes that the extraordinary structures of matter, the awesomeness of metabolisms and the stunning overall stability of the universe appeared by chance, like in a fairy tale ! Generatio spontanea !!!
ReplyDelete"The grand design" must have been engineered, at least mentally elaborated by someone(s) ?
+Eric Pouhier He said he believed that was the simplist explanation, he didn't give insight or reveal his own personal beliefs, you may have read a bit to much into his statement.
ReplyDeleteBoth ideas of having or not having an "Engineer" are scary.
ReplyDeleteThe threads on death are a bit off topic, however interesting, personally I ponder that our "now" reality has actually happened long ago and all that we know, feel, and believe as reality is actually information streaming from the event horizon of the feeding black hole in the center of our galaxy.
ReplyDeleteI group those who believe they have died and came back in the same subset of people that I we all call "palm readers". Not refering to re-incarnation, referring to those who believe they have vivid memories of a truth death and then come back to the same body with intact memories of the event.
The truth is in the end all that matter is what YOU believe and what your perception is of life, death, and God. What makes you feel emotionally complete.
ReplyDelete1) Belief is irrelevant. In all honesty, in any given aspect of reality, I either discover or the truth remains uncertain. Belief attempts to pretend that uncertainty is naught, which is naive. Discovery obviates uncertainty and while hypothesis assists in scientific induction, belief only distracts from what is to be discovered.
ReplyDelete2) God is a word. What does it mean? Certainly, it cannot have collective meaning as an external overlord, since everyone who attempts to define it as such has a different definition when you get to the details. Ergo, the word can only have one consistent meaning: I. So either I am my God and you yours, or else the word is ill-defined and a false concept. Logically.
3) Certainly, Universe has no outside, not even temporally -- and therefore no beginning nor end. To attempt to imagine an outside, up to and including a temporal beginning/end, of Universe, is to contradict the proper definition of Universe as all that was, is, and will be -- all of it connected. Traditional notions of time and space do not do justice to Universe -- concepts cannot bound Universe, it is non-unitarily conceptual. Pretending otherwise -- believing -- does not help. Misapprehending Universe by insisting that I know what it is and where it came from short circuits the process of discovery and leads to false concepts. Nothing is nothing and cannot -- can never have -- given rise to something.
4) Probability is ex post facto aggregate measure and is irrelevant to epistemology and hence to metaphysical consideration. Life is what it is ... certainly, heaven and afterlife are malformed, rinky-dink concepts and have no business being bruited as such in an adult epistemology.
5) I have my life, you have yours -- and as far as I can recall, I have no experience of others. Having said that, there is no evidence nor cause therefore to speculate on what occurs subsequent to the cessation of function of my biological mechanism, except as a parlor game. I will find out soon enough, and so will you. If I were to speculate, for amusement, I would at least want to hew to a logical possible, and I would start with the fact that true concepts are transitive to individual mentation with respect to special case experiences, i.e., eternal in principle independent of who arrives at them and how, and therefore, suggest eternality of the process of concept formation, if not in special case brains (truly not) then perhaps otherwise. Which is to say: my best guess for what death means is that the world ends -- for I. But it could be a pause, time being relative, and the Hindus perhaps were onto something with karma and reincarnation. We will never speak of it truly in this life, however, so we shall each have to wait and see what happens.
6) In sum, I concur with the spirit of the post, but would point out that it is not necessary to come to definite conclusions without evidence either way -- which is not a license to arbitrary speculation, but is to say, there are things worthy of discovery and available for discovery in this lifetime, and no reason to chase metaphysical wild geese in the first place. Let uncertainty be what it is unless you can discover evidence to the contrary.
Cheers.
Where do rumors start?
ReplyDelete