‘Hawking made it hard to be religious’
We can’t pretend science isn’t real, says archbishop
IT is not easy to be religious after the discoveries of scientist Stephen Hawking, the congregation at Christ Church Cathedral heard at an Easter Sunday service yesterday.
The Rev Dr Michael Jackson, Church of Ireland Archbishop of Dublin, said that ‘religious people in the post-Hawking era cannot pretend that science does not exist’, even if they want to view the world through theology.
Archbishop Jackson addressed his congregation yesterday morning, one day after Professor Hawking’s funeral service at a church in Cambridgeshire, eastern England.
‘Since 2010 Hawking held that, given the laws of physics, nature drags itself into existence and there is no need for a creator. In expounding this argument, he effectively seems to hold that religious people think of the universe Service: Archbishop Jackson as being like a model railway track and God as setting the train going,’ Rev Jackson said.
For Christians, ‘creation out of nothing is not about setting procedures and processes in motion; it is to assert that God is at work at all moments’, he said.
Rev Jackson added: ‘I am not asking supporters of Hawking to agree with me; nor am I suggesting an easy eliding [merging] of what he teaches and what Christian faith teaches. That would be to do him an injustice when he has no right of reply. What I am saying is that for a person of faith, the cosmology of Hawking asks more, not less, of us as people of faith in relation to three fundamental questions coming directly out of Easter: who is my neighbour? What is my community? Who will call my name?’
He continued: ‘The resolution of these on Easter Day is not his problem; it is ours.
‘Hawking challenges us to set aside the rhetoric of denial... which still ricochets so noisily through Irish life today. The courage of Hawking to shed light in dark holes and to journey fearlessly into and through knowledge is an inspiration of the human spirit.
‘People of faith cannot escape, nor should we want to escape, the expansion of perspective on the cosmos that [Prof. Hawking] has given us.
‘It is for us to grapple with his wisdom and to set it alongside the verse from Scripture where our exploration of humanity began not so long ago on Christmas Day.’
Prof. Hawking, 76, died peacefully in his home in Cambridge on March 14. He had been diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis in his 20s.
Prof. Hawking’s funeral took place on Saturday in University Church of St Mary’s the Great in Cambridge. Hundreds of wellwishers lined the streets paying respects to the world-renowned scientist.
At the funeral service, actor Eddie Redmayne, 36, read from Ecclesiastes 3.1-11.
The screen star befriended the late physicist while making the 2014 film The Theory of Everything, in which Redmayne starred as Hawking, and for which he won his first and only Academy Award.
‘We must grapple with his wisdom’