(December 19, 2015 at 11:41 am)robvalue Wrote: She said something to the effect that for Stephen[Hawking's]'s ideas to be true, "god needs to die". It made me realize that far from being powerful, god is like a precious fragile doll people carry around.
It also reminded me of this anecdote for some reason:
Quote:[..]at a reception in Josephine Bonaparte’s rose garden, at the Chateau de Malmaison, in 1802, [...] Napoleon, then emperor of France, was trying to engineer a rapprochement with the papacy, and so the religious probings ensued:
Napoleon: “Who is the author of all this?”
Laplace: “A chain of natural causes would account for the construction and preservation of the celestial system.”
Napoleon: “Newton spoke of God in his book. I have perused yours but failed to find his name even once. Why?”
Laplace: “I have no need of that hypothesis”
Laplace: “The true object of the physical sciences is not the search for primary causes [i.e. God] but the search for laws according to which phenomenon are produced.”
Source: http://www.eoht.info/page/Napoleon+Laplace+anecdote
