Don’t be fooled by wise men

It’s amazing how nonsensical really smart people can be.

Famed physicist Stephen Hawking in his final book Brief Answers to the Big Questions, released posthumously last week, claims unequivocally, “There is no God. No one directs the universe.” And in the same book, referring to aliens, ”There are forms of intelligent life out there.”

Hmmm. Anyone else discern a lack of consistency and intellectual integrity here?

There is no objective evidence for extra-terrestrials. The SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) enterprise has come up empty-handed despite millions of dollars and countless hours spent actively seeking what scientists have never seen yet believe exists. But despite the lack of evidence, Hawking confidently asserts that ETs are very real indeed.

Conversely, there is SO much evidence for the existence of God…the fact that anything at all exists, evidence that the universe had a beginning, the incredibly precise fine-tuning of the universe, the existence of objective morals and duties, the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth…to name a few. But BECAUSE we haven’t seen him, Hawking concludes that he definitely does not exist.

I wonder how many people believe everything really smart scientists say, just because they’re the “wise men” of our generation. As if we could climb to the pinnacle where they reside and ask ‘What is the meaning of life?’ and they could tell us. Stephen Hawking may have been brilliant in his comprehension of the physical, but “There is no God” is a metaphysical claim, and his superior scientific intellect did not give him meta-scientific supremacy.

The saying is apt that you can be too smart for your own good. For many, superior intelligence naturally begets an attitude of self-importance, crowding out and ultimately displacing the importance of a supremely superior intelligence. I’m convinced that pride, not smarts, is primarily why the majority of scientists don’t acknowledge God. Atheists smugly cite the statistics as evidence that the smart money is on atheism because most of the smartest men and women don’t believe God exists. But I think that conclusion presumes an objectivity on the part of scientists akin to computer technology, as if the output (their atheistic worldview) is solely the product of objective input (their knowledge of the material world), when in fact scientists are human beings with subjective desires, goals, fears, and feelings which can seriously reconfigure the task of determining truth.

But they’re able to grasp particle physics, or molecular biology, or quantum mechanics, so they must be wise about everything, the average person is led to believe. Yet the common person with common sense unblinded by pride is often smarter about things that really matter. Like the child in The Emperor’s New Clothes, we can see what the “enlightened” ones have been fooled into denying. Unhindered by the allure of being the wise sage with all the answers, we can see clearly the obvious illogic of concepts like, “The universe created itself.”

“God” is the briefest answer to the biggest questions, but it seems that a certain measure of humility is necessary to recognize it. When you do, however, you gain access to the true source of all wisdom and knowledge, who by comparison “has made foolish the wisdom of the world.”  Including that of Stephen Hawking.