If Hawking had been around at the same time as Newton, whose Lucasian chair he occupied at Cambridge, he would have been a priest! Taking Holy Orders was mandatory for Cambridge graduates at the time, though Newton managed to wangle his way out of it. As for the religious funeral, it seems to have been Hawking's children who decided: "
Our father’s life and work meant many things to many people, both religious and non-religious; so the service will be both inclusive and traditional, reflecting the breadth and diversity of his life."
What I find more intriguing is why people care about the views of someone like Hawking on religion. I suppose it's because 1) he's famous, and 2) he made a few remarks about god in order to sell books. I wouldn't consider that Hawking is more qualified than the next man to talk about ultimate origins. In fact, he seems to have made some rather elementary philosophical mistakes. In
A Brief History of Time, he wrote:
“Even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe? The usual approach of science of constructing a mathematical model cannot answer the questions of why there should be a universe for the model to describe. Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing?”
What he is talking about here is the philosophical problem whereby science can never -- even in principal -- explain why the universe operates according to any rules at all, let alone particular ones. No matter how many layers of the onion you peel back there will always be more. Even speculative multiverse theories which allow for different laws in different universes must encode additional rules according to which the particular physical constants evolve.
But then twelve years later in
The Grand Design, he writes:
“Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist. It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going."
In the interim he seems to have forgotten his own point, that this singularly fails to explain why or how "
there is a law such as gravity". In fact, it makes things worse, because it seems to suggest that the laws exist independently of the things they govern. We have the prospect of some sort of Platonic world of
ideal forms (the laws), with the physical world as an afterthought or at best a kind of hylomorphic unity.
In the preface to
A Brief History Hawking says his publisher told him that every equation he included would reduce book sales. That's probably what made it a disappointing book, as it seemed (to me anyway) very lightweight for such an accomplished scientist. But then Hawking must have intuited that mentions of god would boost sales, as he is so often quoted on them.
Two hundred and forty years ago, another funeral fired the public imagination. Speculation was rife about whether the philosopher David Hume might have renounced his atheism on his deathbed. (In fact Hume never claimed to be an outright atheist, and showed deist leanings). His musings on the relationship of science and philosophy are arguably far more insightful than anything Hawking came up with. One facet of his epistemological framework is about
the problem of induction. By this he challenged the validity of any scientific argument from the particular to the more general.
Hume's problem of induction is similar in a way to Hawking's question about "
what breathes fire into the equations". Why should there be any laws at all? The assumption that there
are is what drives science, indeed what makes it possible in the first place. But science cannot give us any idea why this should be so. A famous Einstein quote mirrors this conundrum of Hume and Hawking:
“The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible”