Hawking suffered from a sad and destructive disease called ALS, which left him as he is most known today, shriveled and contorted in a wheelchair, unable even to speak without the aid of a computer. But this was not his greatest handicap. He suffered most from darkness – real, pervasive, intellectual (and so emotional) darkness. In other words, he was spiritually blind! No other thing can account for the perpetual nonsense that leaked from his mouth. No other thing can account for the chronic foolishness that characterized his “scientific findings”. He not only believed there was no God, he positively labored to prove that the God of the Bible was not even a legitimate consideration.

Sure, he was a “smart” man, as natural born technical gifts go. To be sure he was a mathematical and theoretical whiz. He was likely much “smarter”, as higher technical learning goes, than I will ever be. But it is the common folly of the world – No! It is the common folly of the Church – to mistake such technical abilities for true understanding. All knowledge (all information, if you will) is God’s knowledge (see Col. 2:3) just as all the tools in my father’s shop are my father’s tools. But my father is not my father simply because I use his tools. I may use his tools often enough to wear them out and still know nothing of the mind and heart of the man who is my father! Hawking’s life proves again the truth of the Scripture about lost men that, “Because that, when they knew God, they glorified Him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools.” (Rom. 1:21-22)Having “known” God in the experience of His creation, he never knew God in a personal relationship and so grew in foolishness even as he diminished in stature.

But he is still heralded as a genius! Take these gems as examples. They are found in an amusing article published by USA Today, and re-appearing on MSN technology news, 3/14/08, entitled “Stephen Hawking: His Most Memorable Quotations”. Said Mr. Hawking, “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.” What deadly foolishness is this! While he is said to have “proven” so much, in fact the great physicist can only say, I believe there is no God. Please note, he never proved there is no God. Your basic Logic book will remind you that “I believe” is only self-report and neither proves nor disproves anything.

Rather, Hawking only proved how far a man will go in his unwillingness to believe the Bible. But his choice of words are perhaps telling and chilling, as well. Having arrived at his conclusion, without sufficient evidence, I might add, which is very unscientific, he then says he doubts the existence of heaven and an afterlife? But why did he avoid the word hell? Surely in the English religious language the standard couplet is “heaven and hell”, and if he wished to speak to the falsity of the basic claims of Christianity (as he often did) why not address the claims as they are stated? One can only wonder if the thought of a place possibly existing for unbelievers like himself ever troubled him.Notice he said, “there probably is no” such thing? For all his intelligence, he was a poor gambler.

Then demonstrating that he was, in the final say, a shabby scientist and a worse logician, he said,“For millions of years, mankind lived just like the animals. Then something happened which unleashed the power of our imagination. We learned to talk and we learned to listen.”

Aside from the fact that his kind of science must be guilty of begging the question, just as they accuse Christians of doing, when he assumes the truth of a statement about millions of years of human activity – a thing never proven but only believed – what possible explanation could this great scientist give for the existence of the imagination! What a mysterious and complicated and seemingly unbounded immaterial thing! “Something happened?” Is this the best he can do?

But notice he didn’t say something happened and the imagination came into existence. What’s possibly more bizarre is that he said something happened and unleashed the power of an imagination that apparently already existed! What? Keep in mind, this is the man who concluded, using the same reasoning “skills”, that God doesn’t exist. Have people really been listening, I wonder?

And then this sad observation from the same quote above, “Mankind’s greatest achievements have come about by talking.” Dear, Mr. Hawking, you were not very far from the truth. Throughout the ages, men and women have gone about talking about the God of the Bible and about His Christ. For ages they have gone about telling of a God who himself did the most extraordinary thing and talked to mankind! In your lifetime, you heard much of it. As a Cambridge man, you lived where many great servants of this God studied and taught and lived. Mr. Hawking, God talked to you in His Bible. But you just wouldn’t listen.

You said, “Speech has allowed … human beings to work together to build the impossible.” It is true, but still saddest of all that you never learned how the speech of God enabled the seemingly impossible, as well. For it is by His speech, His Word, that He translates a soul from darkness to light, from death to life, from a clouded understanding to the sunshine of truth. I cannot say, rest in peace. For the Judge whom you have now met, has already declared, “There is no peace … to the wicked.” (Is. 57:21) But what can I tell you about this that you don’t presently know?

While the world heralds the great scientist Stephen Hawking, we are sad. Sad that he died in darkness. Sad that his foolishness continues to put so many others in danger of dying in darkness. How sad to have peered a lifetime into the canvas of the universe and failed to see the Master’s face – to have for so long run the codes of the universe through the fingers of a gifted mind and failed to feel the presence of the King! But now Stephen Hawking is dead. And the real irony is that people are still talking … about God.