World famous cosmologist and physicist Stephen Hawking declared \u201cthere is no heaven\u201d.\u00a0 Whether he is correct or not is not something anyone can know for sure.\u00a0 We can believe as we choose, but we cannot \u201cknow\u201d as a matter of fact, either way.<\/p>\n
Having made that claim, I will probably annoy both some of those who are believers and some who are not.\u00a0 The believers may object to my distinction between knowledge and belief.\u00a0 The non-believers may object to my assertion that they cannot know if in fact they are correct.\u00a0 Sorry, but that just that way it is.<\/p>\n
To be sure, there is no scientific, fact-based, evidence for the existence of heaven.\u00a0 The inability to know that something exists however is NOT evidence that it does not exist.\u00a0 It simply reason, for those who limit there understanding of the world to purely rational and scientific ways of knowing, to explain why they do not believe in the existence of heaven.<\/p>\n
On the other hand, those who believe in heaven would do well to admit that theirs is in fact a belief, a knowledge that comes from sources other than the rational and scientific worlds.\u00a0 Ironically the discomfort with admitting this, as is often the case with believers, evidenced by their claims that there \u201creally is\u201d such evidence, is that their obsession with \u201cproving\u201d the existence of heaven simply suggests that they believe more in scientific rationality than they do in their own professed faith.<\/p>\n
Personally, I am agnostic about the whole \u201cheaven thing\u201d, or perhaps cautiously believing, would be a better way to describe what I believe.\u00a0 It just seems narrow-minded to me to declare that the years we spend here are all that there is.\u00a0 It also seems arrogant to assume that a relatively new and still un-testable belief, the idea that this is all that there is, is definitely correct.\u00a0 But that\u2019s me.<\/p>\n
What do you say?\u00a0 Is Stephen Hawking correct?\u00a0 Is there really no heaven?\u00a0 Let the conversation begin!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
World famous cosmologist and physicist Stephen Hawking declared \u201cthere is no heaven\u201d.\u00a0 Whether he is correct or not is not something anyone can know for sure.\u00a0 We can believe as we choose, but we cannot \u201cknow\u201d as a matter of fact, either way. Having made that claim, I will probably annoy both some of those…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":133,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,3,4,6],"tags":[63,65,64,62,17,66,61],"class_list":["post-857","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","category-pop-culture","category-religion","category-spirituality","tag-afterlife","tag-belief-in-heaven","tag-belief-in-the-afterlife","tag-heaven","tag-judaism-2","tag-science-and-religion","tag-stephen-hawking"],"yoast_head":"\n