By JULIAN BAGGINI - THE INDEPENDENT
Added: Sat, 04 Sep 2010 08:19:05 UTC

There is no room in the universe of Hawking or most other scientists for the activist God of the Bible.

In an age when even some bishops are near atheists, "man doesn't believe in God" is hardly headline news.

Unless, it seems, that man is Professor Stephen Hawking. It seems that every subject has its authorities, and in the case of religion, physicists are the new prophets, deposing the religious leaders whose vested interests debar them from being objective observers. As for philosophy, that's dead, or so Hawking says.

Believers know that when physicists talk about God, people listen. That's why the minority of physicists who hold broadly conventional Christian views have become such important players in religion's fightback against the idea that science has pulled the rug from under their feet.

If top scientists such as John Polkinghorne and Bernard d'Espagnat believe in God, that challenges the simplistic claim that science and religion are completely incompatible. It doesn't hurt that this message is being pushed with the help of the enormous wealth of the Templeton Foundation, which funds innumerable research programmes, conferences, seminars and prizes as a kind of marriage guidance service to religion and science.

Read on

TAGGED: PHILOSOPHY, PHYSICS, RELIGION, SCIENCE, STEPHEN HAWKING