God…the answer to a question no one is asking?

If you’ve ever wondered whether ‘god’ is an idea we invented to make ourselves feel better about death…you’re not alone. Stephen Hawking (Nobel Prize winning physicist) once said “I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers. That is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark.”

This makes sense. We lie to ourselves all the time when we don’t want to face reality so why not with God? So maybe Hawking is right. Maybe ‘god’ and religion is just for people who aren’t grown up enough to accept the fact that our lives don’t matter any more than a computer.

But if it were true that ‘god’ was something we invented to make ourselves feel better about death we would have to ask another question…why did we need to feel better about death? Animals don’t seem to care. Computers don’t care. Why do we care? If there is no god and no meaning or purpose to life, why would we ever need feel better about that? God would be the answer to a question no one was asking.

Just as C.S. Lewis writes “If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning”.

Hawking says there’s no afterlife for broken down computers…but if you’re computer asked you repeatedly not to turn it off and destroy it, you’d at least want to ask the question: “who programmed it to do that?”.