{"id":41649,"date":"2015-01-12T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2015-01-12T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.christianitytoday.com\/pastors\/preaching\/sermon-illustrations\/film-about-stephen-hawking-is-god-haunted\/"},"modified":"2015-01-12T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2015-01-12T00:00:00","slug":"film-about-stephen-hawking-is-god-haunted","status":"publish","type":"sermon-illustrations","link":"https:\/\/www.christianitytoday.com\/pastors\/preaching\/sermon-illustrations\/film-about-stephen-hawking-is-god-haunted\/","title":{"rendered":"Film About Stephen Hawking Is &#8216;God-Haunted&#8217;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The great British physicist Stephen Hawking has emerged in recent years as a poster boy for atheism, especially in light of his heroic struggles against Lou Gehrig&#39;s disease. But the new film about Hawking&#39;s life, <em>A Theory of Everything<\/em> has been called a &quot;God-haunted movie.&quot;<\/p>\n\n<p>In one of the opening scenes, the young Hawking meets Jane, his future wife, and tells her that he is a cosmologist. &quot;What&#39;s cosmology?&quot; she asks, and he responds, &quot;Religion for intelligent atheists.&quot; &quot;What do cosmologists worship?&quot; she asks. And he replies, &quot;A single unifying equation that explains everything in the universe.&quot; In another scene Jane asks, &quot;So, I take it you&#39;ve never been to church?&quot; When Stephen replies &quot;Once upon a time,&quot; she asks, &quot;Tempted to convert?&quot; Stephen replies, &quot;I have a slight problem with the celestial dictatorship premise.&quot;<\/p>\n\n<p>Later on in the film, Jane challenges him: &quot;You&#39;ve never said why you don&#39;t believe in God.&quot; Hawking counters, &quot;A physicist can&#39;t allow his calculations to be muddled by belief in a supernatural creator,&quot; to which she responds, &quot;Sounds less of an argument against God than against physicists.&quot; In one of her two published memoirs, the real Jane Hawking argued, &quot;However far-reaching our intellectual achievements &hellip; without faith [in God] there is only isolation and despair, and the human race is a lost cause&quot;<\/p>\n\n<p>This spirited back and forth continues throughout the film as Hawking settles more and more into a secularist view and Jane persists in her Christian beliefs.<\/p>\n\n<p><em>Possible Preaching Angles: The movie does not come to any hard and fast conclusions about faith and doubt, but it does provide an interesting way to set up a sermon on worldviews, atheism, secularism, or faith and doubt.<\/em><\/p>","protected":false},"author":30,"featured_media":0,"template":"","tax_ctp_audience":[],"tax_ctp_authors":[],"tax_ctp_categories":[165],"tax_ctp_format":[171],"tax_ctp_illustration_types":[411],"tax_ctp_multimedia":[],"tax_ctp_point_editor":[],"tax_publications":[140],"tax_ctp_tags":[3424,3450,3478,3713,3726,3827,3902,3915,3939,4069,4392,4752,4771,4891,4900,4992,5303],"tax_ctp_topics":[393,397],"class_list":["post-41649","sermon-illustrations","type-sermon-illustrations","status-publish","hentry","tax_publications-ct-pastors","tax_ctp_tags-apologetics","tax_ctp_tags-atheism","tax_ctp_tags-belief","tax_ctp_tags-creator","tax_ctp_tags-culture","tax_ctp_tags-doubt","tax_ctp_tags-evidence-of-god","tax_ctp_tags-existence-of-god","tax_ctp_tags-faith-obstacles-that-test","tax_ctp_tags-gods-character","tax_ctp_tags-loss-of-faith","tax_ctp_tags-questions","tax_ctp_tags-reason","tax_ctp_tags-science","tax_ctp_tags-secularism","tax_ctp_tags-skepticism","tax_ctp_tags-worldview"],"acf":{"scripture_references":[{"first_verse":null,"add_second_verse":false,"second_verse":null},{"first_verse":null,"add_second_verse":false,"second_verse":null},{"first_verse":null,"add_second_verse":false,"second_verse":null},{"first_verse":null,"add_second_verse":false,"second_verse":null},{"first_verse":null,"add_second_verse":false,"second_verse":null},{"first_verse":null,"add_second_verse":false,"second_verse":null},{"first_verse":null,"add_second_verse":false,"second_verse":null},{"first_verse":null,"add_second_verse":false,"second_verse":null},{"first_verse":null,"add_second_verse":false,"second_verse":null},{"first_verse":null,"add_second_verse":false,"second_verse":null},{"first_verse":null,"add_second_verse":false,"second_verse":null},{"first_verse":null,"add_second_verse":false,"second_verse":null}]},"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v22.9 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Film About Stephen Hawking Is &#039;God-Haunted&#039; - CT Pastors<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.christianitytoday.com\/pastors\/preaching\/sermon-illustrations\/film-about-stephen-hawking-is-god-haunted\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Film About Stephen Hawking Is &#039;God-Haunted&#039; - CT Pastors\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"The great British physicist Stephen Hawking has emerged in recent years as a poster boy for atheism, especially in light of his heroic struggles against Lou Gehrig&#039;s disease. 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