Debra

“Why are we so worried about artificial intelligence? Surely humans are always able to pull the plug? People asked a computer, ‘Is there a God?’ And the computer said, ‘There is now,’ and fused the plug.”
― Stephen Hawking, Brief Answers to the Big Questions

“short, the ideas of the afterlife that so many billions of people in our world have inherited emerged over a long period of time as people struggled with how this world can be fair and how God or the gods can be just. Death itself cannot be the end of the story. Surely all people will receive what they deserve. But this is not what people always thought. It was a view that Jews and Christians came up with over a long period of time as they tried to explain the injustice of this world and the ultimate triumph of good over evil.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Heaven and Hell: A History of the Afterlife

“Faith is little more than the shadow cast by our hope for a better life.”
― Sam Harris, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason

“People want answers to the big questions, like why we are here. They don’t expect the answers to be easy, so they are prepared to struggle a bit. When people ask me if a God created the universe, I tell them that the question itself makes no sense. Time didn’t exist before the Big Bang so there is no time for God to make the universe in. It’s like asking for directions to the edge of the Earth—the Earth is a sphere that doesn’t have an edge, so looking for it is a futile exercise.
Do I have faith? We are each free to believe what we want, and it’s my view that the simplest explanation is that there is no God. No one created the universe and no one directs our fate. This leads me to a profound realisation: there is probably no heaven and afterlife either. I think belief in an afterlife is just wishful thinking. There is no reliable evidence for it, and it flies in the face of everything we know in science. I think that when we die we return to dust. But there’s a sense in which we live on, in our influence, and in our genes that we pass on to our children. We have this one life to appreciate the grand design of the universe, and for that I am extremely grateful.”
― Stephen Hawking, Brief Answers to the Big Questions