Stephen Hawking’s last book, Brief Answers to the Big Questions, has just been published posthumously. We are not surprised to hear of his “profound realisation” that there is no afterlife or supreme being.
It would appear that Hawking arrives at his negative conclusion primarily because of the lack of empirical evidence rather than negative argument. In this he reflects “Hume’s fork”, the argument advanced by the philosopher David Hume in the 1730s: “If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics for instance; let us ask: Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number?
