[link to news.yahoo.com]

Renowned physicist Stephen Hawking recently explained his belief that there is no God and that humans should therefore seek to live the most valuable lives they can while on Earth.

Guardian writer Ian Sample asked Hawking if he feared death in a story published yesterday. This was his response:


I have lived with the prospect of an early death for the last 49 years. I'm not afraid of death, but I'm in no hurry to die. I have so much I want to do first. 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.

Hawking's 1988 book "A Brief History of Time" sold 9 million copies, and in it Hawking referenced God metaphorically as the force that could fully explain the creation of the universe.

But in 2010, Hawking told Diane Sawyer that "science will win" in a battle with religion "because it works."


"What could define God [is a conception of divinity] as the embodiment of the laws of nature. However, this is not what most people would think of that God," Hawking told Sawyer. "They made a human-like being with whom one can have a personal relationship. When you look at the vast size of the universe and how insignificant an accidental human life is in it, that seems most impossible."