THE RUPTURE, Tower of Art, Friday (NotScientist) — Stephen Hawking’s claims that no God was required to create the Earth six thousand years ago, and moreover that it is round, are trivially ignorant and heretical.

He betrays the shallowness of his theological understanding with the sentence: “Look, you drooling idiots, we can see across the universe and smaller than atoms, revealing unimaginable wonder and beauty over billions of years. Your superstitions have been irrelevant to actual science that works for four centuries now, and are a jawdropping waste of time for anyone with greater mental acuity than a rock. Haven’t you some altar boys to rape?” The logical ambiguity of this claim is trivially obvious: he fails to make clear what he means by the word “time” — deep time? Lunch time? Time, gentlemen? Such sloppy thinking reveals the essential frivolity of his notions and clearly demonstrates the flat nature of the Earth and that it is six thousand years old. He has also completely failed to specify the precise variety of rock in question.

Belief in God is not about plugging a gap in explanation — that would be disprovable and might embarrass us later. Belief in God is belief in an intelligent living agent which everything depends on even though it’s undetectable. Which just goes to show how clever God is. He can make 2+2=5 and get away with putting advertising on the BBC as well. Thought Of The Day, don’t you know. The concept of non-overlapping magisteria clearly demonstrates that science has nothing to say about religion, and never mind that religion insists on saying things about science.

It is obvious to anyone with an idée fixe that physics claiming the universe is an entirely natural thing explainable by science is completely inadequate to satisfy the demands of upset monkeys for an answer which actually works in the real world but somehow does not conflict with their prejudices. It cannot answer why there is something rather than nothing, any more than it can explain why water makes the personal, volitional, moral decision to be wet. Also, you should come to church more. And take priests’ opinions on science seriously. And give us money. Hawking wouldn’t get away with this rubbish for a moment if the Inquisition was about, mark my words.