It’s my view that the simplest explanation is that there is no God. No one created the universe and no one directs our fate. This leads me to a profound realisation: there is probably no heaven and afterlife either. I think belief in an afterlife is just wishful thinking. There is no reliable evidence for it, and it flies in the face of everything we know in science. I think that when we die we return to dust. But there’s a sense in which we live on, in our influence, and in our genes that we pass on to our children. We have this one life to appreciate the grand design of the universe, and for that I am extremely grateful.
Hawking also explains himself in his last book of questions and answers, which can be seen in this excellent write up by Maria Popova of Brain Pickings.
I think of galaxies as more of a collection of celestial objects. Perhaps at some point in the distant future, all those bodies making up a galaxy may be absorbed into super-massive black holes.
It's denominations all the way down. Even official denominations (think Anglican, Catholic etc) have strong factions, and factions within factions. The evangelicals that support Trump hate...
I fed ChatGPT some ideas and asked it to word it all for me. I took a joke I have posted here a few times before, but I find it very revealing. It never personally made me laugh at all, in fact. It...
Ah yes, hydrostatic equilibrium, one of the necessary conditions for a smallish celestial object to qualify as a planet. But a planet has to get over a higher hurdle, that of clearing its orbit of...
There is another reality that is not as offensive as lying for Jesus, but which also causes damage. There are clergy who decline to enlighten the folks in their congregations about the...
When sacrificing goats doesn't work, it obviously means you didn't sacrifice enough goats. Who knew that when Jesus said "Take no thought for the morrow" he actually meant...
But they are really saying "dignifies us through make-work." Which they cannot truly believe. Consider a potential near-term future for humans: AI becomes smart enough to do all the real...