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Articles

Reading the Mind of God

Roger Caldwell asks why we are all here.

The most famous – or notorious – page of A Brief History of Time is that in which, speaking of an imminent ‘theory of everything’, Stephen Hawking claims that with its arrival we could come to know “the mind of God”. For Hawking, an agnostic, the phrase is little more than a metaphor. What he is really saying is that with the physicists’ ‘theory of everything’ the reason for the existence of the universe would be completely known, and in that case there would be no need for talk of God or theology at all. The cosmological God, the Creator of Heaven and Earth, would have been dissolved in the physicists’ equations.

We have yet to achieve this ‘theory of everything’.

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