Kuruvila Pandikat SJ

The sudden news of the death of Stephen Hawking, the world- renowned cosmology on March 14, 2018 has shocked both scientists and believers all over the world. “He was a great scientist and an extraordinary man whose work and legacy will live on for many years. His courage and persistence with his brilliance and humour inspired people across the world.

His “intuition and wicked sense of humour that marked him out as much as the broken body and synthetic voice that came to symbolise the unbounded possibilities of the human mind,” reports the Guardian.

When he was diagnosed with motor neurone disease in 1963 at the age of 21, doctors expected him to live for only two more years. But Hawking had a form of the disease that progressed more slowly than usual. He survived for more than half a century and long enough for his disability to define him. His popularity would surely have been diminished without it.

“Those who live in the shadow of death are often those who live most.” Notes Guardian. For Hawking, the early diagnosis of his terminal disease, and witnessing the death from leukaemia of a boy he knew in hospital, ignited a fresh sense of purpose. “Although there was a cloud hanging over my future, I found, to my surprise, that I was enjoying life in the present more than before. I began to make progress with my research,” he once said. Embarking on his career in earnest, he declared: “My goal is simple. It is a complete understanding of the universe, why it is as it is and why it exists at all.” In other words, to know the mind of God.

Therefore, though he did not believe in God, he brought in God often in his books. Hawking could be provocative, even antagonistic. He would often refer to knowing the “mind of God,” without actually believing in Him. “What I meant by ‘we would know the mind of God’ is, we would know everything that God would know, if there were a God, which there isn’t. I’m an atheist,” he clarified.

Some of his most outspoken comments offended the religious. In his 2010 book, Grand Design, he declared that God was not needed to set the universe going, and in an interview with the Guardian a year later, dismissed the comforts of religious belief. He said: “Before we understand science, it is natural to believe that God created the universe. But now science offers a more convincing explanation.”

He added: “I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken-down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark.”

“I have lived with the prospect of an early death for the last 49 years. I’m not afraid of death, but I’m in no hurry to die. I have so much I want to do first,” he said.

In 2012, scientists gathered in Cambridge to celebrate the cosmologist’s 70th birthday. Too ill to attend, he sent a recorded message entitled A Brief History of Mine, he pleaded for the continued exploration of space “for the future of humanity.” He later joined Tesla’s Elon Musk and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak to warn against an artificial intelligence military arms race, and called for a ban on autonomous weapons. A theme, Pope Francis will fully endorse.

There was a cordial between the Pope, who holds that God’s mercy is infinite, and a scientist who rejects the existence of God due to the infinity of the Universe, in Rome on Nov. 28, 2016. Though they have completely opposite stances regarding the idea of God, the meeting between the Pope (religion open to science) and Hawking (science open to the Divine), both were fascinated by the infinity of mercy or space!