“Growing Pains” actor turned Christian film star Kirk Cameron is taking issue with comments famed physicist Stephen Hawking made about the existence of heaven. “There is no heaven or afterlife for broken-down computers,” Hawking said of the human brain to the Guardian newspaper Monday. “That is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark.”
I don’t believe in God, but I understand and respect that most Americans do. I do believe in science…but I can’t fathom evangelical Christians who use their faith to disrespect and negate demonstrable, measurable, empirical truth. What makes it even worse is when someone like Kirk Cameron, not exactly renowned for his intellectual elasticity, decides to condescend to Stephen Hawking. That he, intellectually speaking, couldn’t hold Hawking’s jock seems lost on Cameron.
It’s one thing to disagree and chose your faith over science. It’s quite another for Cameron to look down his nose at a man who’s likely forgotten more than Cameron will ever know…and reveal yourself to be a bigger fool than most anyone had suspected.
Beauty may be skin deep, but stupid and condescending goes straight to the bone.
Cameron, a Christian evangelist who heads the online ministry, Way of the Master, responded on his Facebook page Wednesday, writing that “to say anything negative about Stephen Hawking is like bullying a blind man. He has an unfair disadvantage, and that gives him a free pass on some of his absurd ideas.” Hawking suffers from a motor neurone disease that has left him totally paralyzed.
“Professor Hawking is heralded as ‘the genius of Britain,’ yet he believes in the scientific impossibility that nothing created everything and that life sprang from non-life,” the actor continued.
Cameron believes in an imaginary Social Conservative deity who hates gays and lesbians and votes Republican. I’m not sure that, logically speaking, Cameron has a leg to stand on. His argument is like saying that he’s a TV star because of his role on “Growing Pains” half a lifetime ago. Sir Laurence Olivier he’s not, knowhutimean?
Even sillier is that Cameron for some reason feels it appropriate to drag the late John Lennon into his “argument:”
“(Hawking) says he knows there is no Heaven. John Lennon wasn’t sure. He said to pretend there’s no Heaven. That’s easy if you try. Then he said he hoped that someday we would join him. Such wishful thinking reveals John and Stephen’s religious beliefs, not good science.”
Uh…OK. I’m not sure what that mental break represents, but I’m sure in his mind Cameron is thinking “Check!” and “Mate!” Perhaps before he thinks he has the intellectual gravitas to challenge Hawking on his own turf, Cameron might want to brush up on the definition of “good science.” “God said it, I believe it, that settles it” isn’t an attitude that anyone with a functional intellect would think of referring to as “scientific.”
Look, I don’t agree with anything Cameron believes in or stands for…and I suspect he’d say the same about me. That said, I don’t think it’s too much to expect that anyone arguing that faith trumps science would use something other than the rhetorical equivalent of “Because….” Faith is a wonderful thing, but when it’s substituted for ignorance in the service of an illogical anti-science worldview, it ceases to be faith and it becomes intellectual tyranny.
It’s not God I’m worried about; it’s his fan club I that scares me, because they’d sooner turn American into an theocracy and idiocracy with no basis in truth or empirical reality.
“God said it, I believe it, that settles it” should be sufficient to scare the Hell out of any rational, thinking American.
