Stephen Hawking Is Wrong About Heaven

Stephen Hawking is a brilliant man, but his view that heaven or any kind of after-life is merely a "fairy story for people afraid of the dark" is "both sad and misinformed," writes Michael Wenham in the Guardian. He finds it odd, and insulting, that Hawking is open to all sorts of theoretical ideas about the universe, but simply dismisses "the possibility of other dimensions of existence."

Wenham, who, like Hawking, has a debilitating motor neuron disease, says his own belief in an after-life is based not on "wishful thinking" but on a "mass of data of which the most convincing, the neatest, explanation was that death is not the end of life." Wenham writes that while he does not welcome an early death, nor does he fear it: "I can't prove it of course, but on good grounds I'd stake my life on it, that beyond death will be another great adventure; but first I have to get finish this one." (More Stephen Hawking stories.)