The title of the blog post over at Burke’s Corner (from whence the following quote is drawn) — “Science, philosophy and humility - Hawking rejects all three” — is really pretty terrific, as is the blog post itself.

For example:

In his failure to exercise modesty in his pursuit of scientific knowledge, Hawking makes a particularly startling claim - that “philosophy is dead”. From Plato and Aristotle to Maimonides and Aquinas to Kant and Hegel, Hawking dismisses how the human mind across cultures and millennia has reflected on transcendence and humanity’s place in a vast universe. Hawking’s lack of humility before this endeavour is staggering. In her Absence of Mind, Marilynne Robinson rightly states that this approach to science excludes “the whole enterprise of metaphysical thought”, despite metaphysical reflection being a defining characteristic of the human experience.

The reductionism that Hawking seems to exhibit is pretty staggering, given his formidable brain power. As Burke’s Corner rightly points out:

The media’s frenzy over Stephen Hawking’s forthcoming book is an unfortunately predictable episode in the phony war between science and faith. Phony, because the discourse of science explores different questions to the discourse of faith. It is this which Hawking has failed to recognise, as Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks has highlighted:

There is a difference between science and religion. Science is about explanation. Religion is about interpretation. The Bible simply isn’t interested in how the universe came into being … But there is more to wisdom than science. It cannot tell us why we are here or how we should live. Science masquerading as religion is as unseemly as religion masquerading as science.

Nicely put. To reduce the entirety of human experience to only those things that Hawking can observe doesn’t tell us much about what we ought to do or why, questions that I find incredibly interesting and worthy of in-depth discussion.

[Via]