Title Author Date

Heroes Gaudia, Gil Feb 19, 2005

I wondered (while reading your interesting section "Science and Religion")why those two most popular icons of science, Stephen W. Hawking and Stephen Jay Gould have managed to escape criticism for their notorious linkage of science and religion. Hawking for his admitted grovelling before the Pope as described in his best-seller "A Brief History of Time" and Gould for his absurd concept of Non-Overlapping Magisteria (NOMA). These two scientists, when speaking about cosmology and evolution, have never said or written unequivocally, “I don’t believe in God”, because, in my opinion, it is so threatening to admit in public that one rejects the supernatural theistic line, that they either avoided the subject or they played word games which leaves open the possibility that they are believers. Biologist Stephan Jay Gould’s game (when he was alive)was NOMA, (non-overlapping magesteria), by which he avoided and blurred the entire issue, claiming there were two separate domains, the domain of science and the domain of religion, and neither had the right to enter the other. Gould's ridiculous metaphor was, " . . . we get the age of rocks, and religion retains the rock of ages; we study how the heavens go, and they determine how to go to heaven."
World-reknownwed cosmologist Stephen Hawking, to my knowledge, has never made an open statement of disbelief. In his best-selling book “A Brief History of Time” he makes numerous references to God, and in one ridiculous sentence he says if we could unravel the mystery of the Big Bang, “then we would know the mind of God.” In that same work he describes a meeting of scientists, including himself, at the Vatican, in which the Pope told them that it was all right for astronomers to study the origins of the universe back as far as the Big Bang, but not to attempt to understand what went on at that moment, or before it, because that was the domain of religion and not science. Instead of criticising the Pope’s admonition,(perhaps not to his face)Hawking jokingly demurs something about not wanting the Pope to get God mad at him. When I asked him via e-mail why he makes constant references to God, his graduate assistant responded (after repeated proddings by me for over a month), “When Professor Hawking uses the word ‘God’ he refers to the natural laws of the universe.” Why not call a natural law a natural law?
Have any of your readers any comments--even corrections--to this criticism of mine?

Gil Gaudia, Ph.D.

Title Author Date

Heroes TalkReason , Feb 21, 2005

Dr. Gaudia:

Thank you for your letter. You wonder why Talk Reason has not posted essays critical of Steve Jay Gould's thesis of Non-Overapping Magisteria and Stephen Hawking's use of the term God. Regarding Gould, you apparently have
not noticed that there is on Talk Reason an essay by Mark Perakh, titled Incompatible Magisteria, which addresses Gould's thesis. As to Hawking, it seems rather
obvious from his writing that he is not a believer in a supernatural god but
only uses this term as a substitute for the apparent order in nature which
seems to be structured according to certain laws. We see no reason to argue
against his metaphoric usage of certain terms and, moreover, there is nothing in common between such a brilliant scientist and science writer as Hawking and those often semi-literate propagandists for the alleged compatibility of the Bible with science who are subject of critique in Talk Reason section you refer to.

Best wishes,

Talk Reason