Stephen Hawking: Does God Exist

Now we're black on track

I love hawking and by no means am religious in any way, but if there was no time for god to create the universe, how was there time for the "original black hole" to exist?

there wasn't time, that was his point....

threads for when i can watch

perhaps I stated that poorly.

He says that time didn't exist, and therefore a "god" wouldn't have had time to create the universe. If something wouldn't have had the time to create it, how could anything begin the universe?

disclaimer: I support his theories and watch almost all of these documentaries. I am not religious and I don't think there is even a god. However some of  these theories seem to be largely conjecture, and I am questioning them just as I would question anything else, just like any smart human should.

I don't think anyone can answer that question. That's probably where theories of more dimensions come in, such as String theory.

I do think that Hawking just accepted the fact that when time began, that was what there was, and you can only go from there.

My question is this:

Could the matter of the big bang, the black hole, be just a black hole like ones of today? Could there have been a previous universe before ours? Or is our universe part of another?

i agree. this is more of a "we know this much happened, and at this point we just don't have the ability to say why, but this makes the most sense"

Your questions:

1. I'm not so sure it is possible for there to be a star so massive that when it collapsed in on itself, it could super-duper nova into a universe. Would a star that big be able to work? The numbers would b crazy and I just don't know.

2. It is possible that the gravity in a previous universe overcame its expansion and it all compacted into one point in space. The interesting thing about that is, it will not happen to our universe. We have discovered that the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate too fast for gravity to overcome, and instead of having a "big crush," we will have a "big rip" at the end.

3. This one is very interesting to ponder. Could are universe just be an enormous area of space where matter exists in bulk, like a "galaxy"? Could our universe just be one of many in an unbelievably large space? Could the other universes be so far away that light from them still hasn't reached us in our 14 billion years? There are many other parts to this, but it is very interesting.

could our universe be in fact, just a single cell in one gigantic living organism?

His explanation is just as much of a blind stab at explaining things as the religious viewpoint. Either way, there's no exact way to know. No one, at least in our generations, will be 100% sure on what shit went down the day everything was created. Overall, who cares how we came into existence, we're here now so why not make the best of it while we can?

Amazing

In my opinion, there isn't much of a reason to believe in religion rather than science. Unless your faith is simply a way to appease your mind and simplify your life, in which case I understand, logically it's hard to justify a belief in religion. I have a friend who's religious and whenever something resembling a "miracle" occurs he asks me if I still don't believe in God. It's astonishing to me that religious people cite supposed miracles as a justification for the validity of their beliefs, while a person who sides with science can simply open a textbook or watch a 45 minute Steven Hawking documentary to support their ideas with facts. At this point in the world, religion provides an explanation for things that science still fails to understand. However, science has been disproving religion as long the two have existed, and I'm fully confident that given time, scientists are capable of providing justification for all of the world's questions, and until science falters I will continue to discount religion within my own life.