Is Hawking Right on No-Heaven?

Mark Shea, take it away!  Excerpts:

...Now here’s the deal, kidz. When the subject is physics, Hawking is your man. He has forgotten more physics than most of us will ever know. But, if the subject is, say, how to costume the cast of “The Wiz,” or which sort of pipe to use to re-plumb your house, or how to deal with that drunken, swiving man of yours, or hot air ballooning, or, dare I say it, whether or not Heaven exists, Hawking has no more competence to speak than the veriest lush at the local bar (and sometimes even less if the lush happens to have training and experience in theatre costume design, plumbing, family therapy, hot air ballooning or philosophy and theology).

Indeed, even within the scientific community, Hawking is an ignoramus outside his extremely specialized field of physics. When he starts gassing on about how the mind is nothing more than the epiphenomenon of a computer made out of meat he is giving you, not science, but his reductionist materialist faith. And it is a faith that has been running aground for years now on the simple fact that we are no closer to creating artificial intelligence with a computer than we were when the quest began. The problem is that the faith that mind is nothing more than a function of matter and energy keeps running into hard scientific reality which keep showing it is not. Some of the best brain researchers (some of them atheists) are, in fact, beginning to reluctantly turn to St. Thomas’ philosophy and to carry on conversation with Dominicans because, well, their philosophy leaves room for ideas and concepts that the crude materialist reductionism of a Hawking does not.

As to the rest of the tommyrot he spouts, I’ll let the inimitable Michael Flynn do the autopsy...

For more on the difference between the mathematical mind and the "intuitive" mind, see here.  For an answer to Hawking's metaphysical claims, see Father Spitzer.

Amd for evidence that heaven exists: