Where did heaven go?

With all that’s going on in the world, it’s sometimes hard to keep up with all the news that we need to be aware of. Important stories can slip through the cracks if we aren’t careful, and I consider it my duty to bring some of those stories to your attention. For example, did you hear that a leading scientist announced this week that heaven does not exist?

Renowned physicist Stephen Hawking made that proclamation in a recent interview with the British newspaper The Guardian. But it was not exactly front page news here in America, what with randy politicians grabbing all the headlines fathering illegitimate children and chasing hotel maids around their rooms. Still it seems to me that we ought to take a moment to consider what brought one of the great intellects of our time to this startling conclusion.

Unfortunately, I can’t tell you much about that, as Hawking didn’t present any data to back up his assertion. He merely stated his opinion that once our neurons stop firing it is a lot like a computer that gets shut down – we merely stop functioning. He refers to a belief in the afterlife as a “fairy story for people afraid of the dark.”

I probably shouldn’t be surprised that Hawking’s announcement didn’t receive much attention here in the US. After all, we are a very religious country, and it would take a good deal more than the proclamation of a physicist to persuade most of us to abandon our belief in God and heaven.

A Pew survey in 2007 revealed that 92% of Americans believe in God and 74% believe in heaven. In England, where Hawking makes his home, it’s a very different story. A 2010 survey there revealed that only 17% of the British population considers religion to be a very important part of their lives.

Plus, most Americans are not physicists. People who make their living as pure scientists are not likely to be packing the pews on Sundays. A 1998 survey of members of the National Academy of Sciences showed that 72% of its membership identified themselves as atheists and 28% as agnostics.

I think most Americans are aware of the fact that scientists like Hawking tend to be irreligious, and they seem to scarcely take notice when people like him mock their beliefs. But I wonder if deep down some of us find it a little troubling that the majority of the people who spend their lives studying the nature of the universe claim to see no convincing evidence that our belief in God and an afterlife have any basis in objective reality.

Maybe that is troubling to some people, but it shouldn’t come as a surprise. Most believers see both God and our immortal souls as purely spiritual things that exist completely outside the material world. They occupy a space that is beyond the reach of our five senses, and thus beyond the reach of science and the men and women who practice it.

A scientist can only speak intelligently about those things that can be observed, measured, and tested. Science can tell us nothing about God or heaven because those are not things we can see through our telescopes or microscopes. Hawking’s position is perfectly reasonable if you believe (as I’m sure he does) that either nothing exists beyond the material world or that, if something does, there is no way we can know anything about such things since we cannot see, hear, taste, smell, or touch them.

To the proverbial man of science his outlook is perfectly reasonable. To a man of faith it is a sad, stunted view of reality that ignores the things that truly matter. I think that is why the chasm between science and faith seems to be so hard to bridge.

It’s also might be why Stephen Hawking decided to make his home in secular place like England instead of in America.