Stephen Hawking: Heaven is a 'Fairy Story

Earlier this year, controversial pastor Rob Bell insinuated there was no physical place known as Hell. Now, prominent physicist Stephen Hawking says there is no Heaven, calling it a "fairy story."

"I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail," he told Britain's The Guardian in an exclusive interview. "There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark."

The Guardian details more of the interview:

In the interview, Hawking rejected the notion of life beyond death and emphasised the need to fulfil our potential on Earth by making good use of our lives. In answer to a question on how we should live, he said, simply: "We should seek the greatest value of our action."

In answering another, he wrote of the beauty of science, such as the exquisite double helix of DNA in biology, or the fundamental equations of physics.

Hawking responded to questions posed by the Guardian and a reader in advance of a lecture tomorrow at the Google Zeitgeist meeting in London, in which he will address the question: "Why are we here?"

In the talk, he will argue that tiny quantum fluctuations in the very early universe became the seeds from which galaxies, stars, and ultimately human life emerged. "Science predicts that many different kinds of universe will be spontaneously created out of nothing. It is a matter of chance which we are in," he said.

Read the full interview here.

(via Gawker)