NightHawk112005 said:
Hawking doesn't know, nor does anyone know for sure. It's why it's called faith. You either believe it or you don't.
No, he doesn't know for sure what happens after you die, as you point out. And that is the place he goes wrong. It's how definitively he states that those who believe in an afterlife believe in a fairy tale.
But based on what we do actually know, his version is far more likely -- or likely closer to reality -- than any evangelical version you can throw at me.
I'll explain.
The problem with "faith" is it is as unscientific (and scientific isn't a bad thing, it's a method for investigating hypotheses) as you can get.
This is going to reflexively get some people angry, but another way to put faith is "unsupported belief."
Human history should have taught us that we have had some crazy-ass unsupported beliefs, or put another way, humans have a penchant for having faith in untrue things. They don't seem untrue at the time. It isn't till much later that future generations are asking, "What the heck were they thinking?"
For example, the world was once flat. Life could arise from spontaneous generation -- without being formed through a seed or an egg or other means of reproduction. The earth was the center of the universe. There were witches in Salem. You can go on and on and on.
I might have faith that the world is going to come to an end on May 21, to draft off another thread. You might tell me I am crazy. If my response is, "It's why it's called faith. You either believe it or you don't," it doesn't magically give credence to the idea.
It seems much more likely that May 21 is going to come and go without the world coming to an end, because every day in my experience has come and gone without the world coming to an end. Everyone else's experience has been the same. All we are doing is applying the things we do know to a supposition and making an educated guess about whether the supposition is likely true.
That is what Hawking has done. He has evaluated this belief that there is an afterlife, and he has come up with something like this: This idea of an afterlife has people with "faith" projecting themselves into a simulation of some sort in which they are still themselves and they are conscious of their surroundings.
But what we ACTUALLY DO know is that it's our working brains that make us conscious of our surroundings.
And when you die, your brain ceases to work.
That is why he thinks when we die it's much more likely similar to a computer that has stopped working when its components fail. It's simply the end.
Based on what we actually know, that is a far more likely scenario than whatever unsupported religious belief you want to put forth.
As to why people have faith?
Whether it was a belief that the world was flat or the belief that there were witches making bad things happen, faith is often borne from fear of the unknown. And that has a powerful psychological component to it. That is why reasonably intelligent people will still believe things that fly in the face of our accumulated knowledge and brush off challenges to their belief with the line about faith being something you believe or you don't.
It doesn't give any credence to their ideas, though. It just allows them to avoid evaluating their belief in the framework of the things they actually know to be true, and thus allows them to cling to something they find comforting, rather than the thing they'd have to guess is more likely, but less comforting.
