One of the headlines today is that of the death of Dr. Stephen Hawking. Dr. Hawking was one of the greatest thinkers of our time, especially in the realms of cosmology and quantum physics. Dr. Hawking taught for many years at Cambridge University. He specialized in the study of black holes. While a graduate student at Cambridge, he was diagnosed with ALS, better known as Lou Gehrig's Disease. His doctors gave him two years to live, yet he lived with the disease for 55 years. When asked how he coped with his disease after the diagnosis, Hawking said, "Remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see and about what makes the universe exist. Be curious. And however difficult life may seem, there is always something you can do, and succeed at. It matters that you don't just give up." Well, Stephen Hawking did not give up.
Dr. Hawking was not a believer in God. He once said, "There is probably no heaven, and no afterlife either. We have this one life to appreciate the grand design of the universe, and for that, I am extremely grateful." (www.aol.com/article/news/2018/03/14/stephen-hawking-dead-famed-scientist-dies-at-76).
In one of his last interviews before his death, Dr. Hawking stated that he had discovered what happened before the dawn of time. (www.foxnews.com/science/2918/03/05/stephen-hawking-says-knows-what-happened-before-dawn-time). Allow me to quote briefly from this article, as I found it fascinating. "'The boundary condition of the universe...is that it has no boundary,' Hawking tells the National Geographic's Star Talk show this weekend. In other words, there is no time before time began as time was always there. It was just different. He tells physicist Neil deGrasse Tyson that amid the almost infinitely small quantum foam of the singularity before the Big Bang, time existed in a 'bent' state. It was distorted along another dimension - always getting fractionally closer to, but never becoming, nothing. So there never was a Big Bang that created something from nothing. It just looks that way from our point of perspective."
So, how did Dr. Hawking discover this 'different form of time?' "Quantum theory introduces a new idea, that of imaginary time. Imaginary time may sound like science fiction, and it has been brought into Doctor Who. But nevertheless, it is a genuine scientific concept. One can picture it in the following way. One can think of ordinary, real, time as a horizontal line. On the left, one has the past, and on the right, the future. But there's another kind of time in the vertical dimension. This is called imaginary time, because it is not the kind of time we normally experience. But in a sense, it is just as real as what we call real time."
So, according to the late Dr. Hawking, there has always been time, but just of the imaginary type. So, there really could not have been "a beginning." That seems to make the very first statement in the Bible to be false. Genesis 1:1 states, "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." This verse seems to strongly indicate that, at some moment in eternity past - before there was time - God created the universe and the world around us. There was a moment when we can say, "This is when it all began." Some will say that that moment is known as "the Big-Bang." But, that theory is fraught with problems and questions: Where did the materials come from that will explode and become the universe and our world? Where did the energy come from that caused the explosion? Who or what caused the explosion to occur? The better alternative, it seems to me, is to believe what the Bible states so confidently: That God caused everything to come into being at a moment known as "the beginning." This is very straight-forward and answers those questions raised by "the Big Bang" theory.
But, of course, Dr. Hawking could not travel the Genesis 1:1 pathway because he denied the existence of God. And so he has to create a concept known as imaginary time. How can one prove the existence of imaginary time? How can one observe imaginary time? What are the laws that govern imaginary time? How does imaginary time differ from our real time? It seems that, because Dr. Hawking has denied the existence of God, that he has to create some type of hypothesis - even if his hypothesis does not seem to have logic.
Dr. Hawking was a man of strong resolve; how else can one explain living with ALS for over fifty years. Dr. Hawking was a man with a keen intellect which he used to advance the field of quantum physics and cosmology. But, Dr. Hawking was a man who lacked any relationship with the living, holy, amazing God. When he passed away yesterday, Dr. Hawking came to realize that, although he knew many things, he had failed to know one thing that would have changed his life - he had failed to know the Lord Jesus. I believe Dr. Hawking illustrates those words of Jesus: "What good is it for a man to gain the whole world, and yet lose or forfeit his very self?" (Luke 9:25).
What a contrast between Billy Graham and Stephen Hawking. Both men influenced a generation. Both men sought to help men to understand the world around them. Yet, Billy Graham did something that Dr. Hawking could not do - he shared with people that the only way they could understand the world around them was to understand their need for a relationship with a holy God through His Son, Jesus Christ. One will hear those amazing words - "Well done, good and faithful servant, enter into the joys of your Lord", while the other will hear those words of judgment - "Depart from Me, for a never knew you." How do you want to be greeted by our Savior?
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