Without taking anything away from Stephen Hawking's genius, I still feel the need to express my objections to his refutation of God on the basis of Science; yes 'Science' with an upper case S. I haven't been able to access the talk audio/video online and hence can only depend on media reports. Will be grateful if anyone can share a link of the lecture but it seems to me from the reportage that it's a classic symptom of Scientism that Hawking's argument underlines.
We don't need God because Science is God; it can explain everything. This isn't atheism but only a displaced religious discourse. It's simply a substitution of one metanarrative with another. The signifier God here isn't eschewed by any means but only replaced by Science with an upper case S. This is what Lacan called Science as Fantasy and Agamben, a 'signature' which doesn't produce a new concept but simply overflows the semantic field of its previous conceptual space.
Science has unfortunately become our Religion today and it's important to see through this fantasy and articulate that science isn't THE discourse but only one of the many discourses with a 'truth'-claim.
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