By Agencies
There is no God — that’s the conclusion of renown physicist Stephen Hawking, whose final book was published Tuesday.
The book, which was completed by his family after his death, presents answers to the questions that Hawking said he received most during his time on Earth.
Other bombshells the British scientist left his readers with include the belief that alien life is out there, artificial intelligence could outsmart humans and time travel can’t be ruled out.
Hawking, considered one of the most brilliant scientists of his generation, died in March at the age of 76.
And in excerpts shared by Yahoo! Hawking said the simplest explanation for whether God exists is that there is “no God.”
“We are each free to believe what we want, and it’s my view that the simplest explanation is that there is no God,” Hawking argues in the book.
“No one created the universe and no one directs our fate. This leads me to a profound realization: there is probably no Heaven and afterlife either. I think belief in the 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 is a sense we live on, in our influence, and in the genes we pass to our children,” he notes.
“For centuries, it was believed that disabled people like me were living under a curse that was inflicted by God,” he adds. “I prefer to think that everything can be explained another way, by the laws of nature.”
Hawking suffered from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), a neurodegenerative disorder also known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease, for most of his adult life.
The scientist died while still working on the book, which his family and colleagues finished with the help of his vast personal archives.
‘Increasingly looking inward’
While Hawking spoke of his lack of belief in God during his life, several of his other answers are more surprising.
“There are forms of intelligent life out there,” he writes. “We need to be wary of answering back until we have developed a bit further.”
And he leaves open the possibility of other phenomena.
“Travel back in time can’t be ruled out according to our present understanding,” he says. He also predicts that “within the next hundred years we will be able to travel to anywhere in the Solar System.”
“He realized that people specifically wanted his answers to these questions,” the scientist’s daughter, Lucy Hawking, who helped complete the book, told CNN.
Attempting to answer the question “How do we shape the future?” in the book’s final chapter, the scientist writes: “Remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet.”
