Stephen Hawking Nails It

[Angrboda]

Hawking may indeed be an unprecedented light to physics, but cognitive science, philosophy and neurology are outside his domain. I may agree with his point of view but that doesn't mean I condone using him as a theological hammer. Many here would likely be the first to object if a theistic scientist, say Paul Davies, started spinning scientific wool around his chosen theology. If a scientist wants to wax poetic I have no great beef other than that we keep in mind that waxing poetic isn't their bailiwick.

That being said, it brings up a point I have wondered about. It may be several hundred years in the future, but I think the smart money is on us eventually proving that the mind is nothing more than a machine -- a highly evolved, incredibly sophisticated machine, but a machine nonetheless. Unfortunately for theists, they've created their god in man's image: creating, designing, caring, awareness -- all these are signature traits of an intelligent mind. If God is just a 'big man' then proving that we are nothing more than machines relegates God to nothing more than a clockwork orange, just like we are.

End of an era. Dim the lights.

(Some in the theist community may already be outpacing such concerns, such as Paul Tillich and his "God as the ground of being" [an argument likened to a smothering bear hug]. I don't know of any other theist with as elusive or indefatigable an idea as his, but I haven't had time to examine either Swinburne or Plantinga for corollary developments, and I'm ignorant of anyone else in the field worth looking at.)