Quote:
|
Originally Posted by archetypal fool
Hawking...No one's sure about. From what I've heard, and the things he says, and what his ex-wife says about him, it's implied that he's an agnostic, leaning slightly towards atheism.
|
I might concede Einstein - I was admittedly short on time when I posted that and used his references to God in his writing as a basis for the premise that he held to a religion. Hawking has publicly claimed an affiliation with Christianity (not specifying a denomination) and also stated that he doesn't see any irreconcilable contradictions between his work and religious faith. He may have changed his mind on that in recent years (I haven't read any of his writings more recent than mid-nineties, and I should imagine that a scientists belief structure would be more fluid than most due to the nature of their work and the necessary thought processes that go into it), but as of what I last heard he was a marginal deist.
And all of that is really beside the point, which is that there's absolutely nothing that prevents a scientist from having a deistic worldview. The fact that most of them don't is simply a by-product of the hyper-rational thinking required to succeed in any scientific field.