It's highly unlikely that Hawkings' opinion about the non-existence of an afterlife will have an effect on anyone, other than to ruffle the feathers of religionists who believe that he is wrong and to prompt non-believers to say "aha! I must be right!"
Net effect, 0 (beyond of course all the electrons moving around these intarwebz to convey the opinions of both sides).
Sure, you could say he's arguing from authority about a subject in which he may not be acknowledged as an expert, but the very fact that he is not acknowledged as such by those who believe differently means that he's not going to change their minds.
No Pope, no high priestess, no imam, no rabbi is going to suddenly say, "Well, now that you put it like that, Stephen, I can see that you're right. Thanks for clearing that up. Now I can get on with my finite life."
I do think you draw an incorrect contrast between science and religion. The goal of science is (ideally) to understand the world and the universe around us. The goal of religion (in my opinion based upon observation of how it tends to work, and of course my data set is biased toward organized religion because it is the most vocal) seems to be to provide comfort despite a lack of understanding - and in many cases insists that there must be a limit to what we understand (often using violence toward that end).
Where science says, "I don't know, let me try to sort it out," religion says, "have faith, you cannot know, but faith brings conviction, and conviction means you can say that you know what you do not know and that's the truth."
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dancing_serpent
(no subject)
Date: 2011-05-17 07:17 pm (UTC)Net effect, 0 (beyond of course all the electrons moving around these intarwebz to convey the opinions of both sides).
Sure, you could say he's arguing from authority about a subject in which he may not be acknowledged as an expert, but the very fact that he is not acknowledged as such by those who believe differently means that he's not going to change their minds.
No Pope, no high priestess, no imam, no rabbi is going to suddenly say, "Well, now that you put it like that, Stephen, I can see that you're right. Thanks for clearing that up. Now I can get on with my finite life."
I do think you draw an incorrect contrast between science and religion. The goal of science is (ideally) to understand the world and the universe around us. The goal of religion (in my opinion based upon observation of how it tends to work, and of course my data set is biased toward organized religion because it is the most vocal) seems to be to provide comfort despite a lack of understanding - and in many cases insists that there must be a limit to what we understand (often using violence toward that end).
Where science says, "I don't know, let me try to sort it out," religion says, "have faith, you cannot know, but faith brings conviction, and conviction means you can say that you know what you do not know and that's the truth."