Stephen Hawking was one of the greatest minds on earth. After dying at the age 76, as fellow physicist Neil deGrasse Tyson said, “his passing has left an intellectual vacuum in his wake.”
There was one point where religious advocates tried to use a quote from A Brief History Of Time to suggest his belief in God: “It would be the ultimate triumph of human reason – for then we should know the mind of God.” However, if it wasn’t clear to people that he was an atheist, in his 2010 book The Grand Design he clarified that it was a metaphorical comment. He later told El Mundo in no uncertain terms: “What I meant by ‘we would know the mind of God’ is, we would know everything that God would know, if there were a God. Which there isn’t. I’m an atheist.”
- Quartz
