Perilous Perspective!

"last thing I remember, I was running for the door,
 I had to find the passage back to the place I was before,
'relax', said the watchman, 'we are programmed to receive,
you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave'".

The Eagles - Hotel California.

I live close to some nationally preserved moorland, and we have just had a weekend where one of those rare phenomena - snowfall - has occurred. The view today has been quite stunning in some gorgeous sunlight, but when I went to work today, even though I was a good thirty minutes closer to the moor after my walk, I had entirely lost the view.

Science lost Stephen Hawking this past week, a man whose work has and will continue to cause much discussion and debate about the nature of existence. In an interview for ABC news, he once stated his well-known opinion concerning where his studies had lead him:
“One can’t prove that God doesn’t exist. But science makes God unnecessary. … The laws of physics can explain the universe without the need for a creator.”

It's a strange statement, especially in the light of what had happened on his 70th birthday, in 2012.
Here's what unfolded.

A fellow scientist, Alexander Valinkin and his associates, who had been discovering some fascinating data since 2003, proved that an expanding universe is not previously eternal. In other words, this work offered a proof that the universe we exist within had a beginning.

Philosophically, it provides support and weight to cosmological arguments regarding our being here is with intent.

Scientifically, it means we do not live in a universe of infinite regress, but one which came into existence at a fixed point.

Theologically, it lends credence to the biblical account regarding not only the work of creation itself, but regarding the nature and intent of the one behind this.

It means that Hawking's was wrong.

Professor Hawking's once argued that his understanding of physics and cosmology lead him to conclude there was no higher purpose beyond the material universe itself. it's regretful, at least publicly, that Professor Hawking's never expressed the manner of conclusion provided by one of his famous predecessors:

"I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me".

Sir Issac Newton.