World famous cosmologist and physicist Stephen Hawking declared “there is no heaven”.  Whether he is correct or not is not something anyone can know for sure.  We can believe as we choose, but we cannot “know” as a matter of fact, either way.

Having made that claim, I will probably annoy both some of those who are believers and some who are not.  The believers may object to my distinction between knowledge and belief.  The non-believers may object to my assertion that they cannot know if in fact they are correct.  Sorry, but that just that way it is.

To be sure, there is no scientific, fact-based, evidence for the existence of heaven.  The inability to know that something exists however is NOT evidence that it does not exist.  It simply reason, for those who limit there understanding of the world to purely rational and scientific ways of knowing, to explain why they do not believe in the existence of heaven.

On the other hand, those who believe in heaven would do well to admit that theirs is in fact a belief, a knowledge that comes from sources other than the rational and scientific worlds.  Ironically the discomfort with admitting this, as is often the case with believers, evidenced by their claims that there “really is” such evidence, is that their obsession with “proving” the existence of heaven simply suggests that they believe more in scientific rationality than they do in their own professed faith.

Personally, I am agnostic about the whole “heaven thing”, or perhaps cautiously believing, would be a better way to describe what I believe.  It just seems narrow-minded to me to declare that the years we spend here are all that there is.  It also seems arrogant to assume that a relatively new and still un-testable belief, the idea that this is all that there is, is definitely correct.  But that’s me.

What do you say?  Is Stephen Hawking correct?  Is there really no heaven?  Let the conversation begin!