Stephen Hawking says pope told him not to study beginning of universe...

HONG KONG (AP) — "World-renowned astrophysicist Stephen Hawking said Thursday that the late Pope John Paul II once told scientists they should not study the beginning of the universe because it was the work of God.

Hawking, author of the best-seller A Brief History of Time, said John Paul made the comments at a cosmology conference at the Vatican. He did not say when the meeting was held.

Hawking quoted the pope as saying, "It's OK to study the universe and where it began. But we should not inquire into the beginning itself because that was the moment of creation and the work of God."

The scientist then joked that he was glad John Paul did not realize that he had presented a paper at the conference suggesting how the universe began.

"I didn't fancy the thought of being handed over to the Inquisition like Galileo," Hawking said during a sold-out audience at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

The church condemned Galileo in the 17th century for supporting Nicholas Copernicus' discovery that the Earth revolved around the sun. Church teaching at the time placed Earth at the center of the universe.

But in 1992, Pope John Paul II issued a declaration saying the church's denunciation of Galileo was an error resulting from "tragic mutual incomprehension."

Hawking is one of the best-known theoretical physicists of his generation. He has done groundbreaking research on black holes and the origins of the universe, and he proposes that space and time have no beginning and no end."

Sort of like the Kennedy's. People that have seen the elephant know that evil is a palpable entity, without start or finish, and it isn't a manifestation of consciousness as much as that tingle on the nape of your neck that tells you a Teddy or a Pelosi has just entered a room. Geniuses have that same feeling when trying to understand the heretofore unexplainable. They can sense it, but the process itself can escape them until the likes of a Galileo, or Einstein come along.

As far as the Pope telling Hawking not to delve too deeply, that's to be expected. No one wants to lose a phat gig.

Some, who should know better, forget that religion fills an important niche in the human psyche, and is quite understandable. The genuine atheists are usually quiet until one religion or another makes headline news by doing something totally preposterous such as what we've been seeing from the sand fleas, and their kneejerk retort is to paint all beliefs with the same ever so broad strokes. People need religion, and Pope's will always ask for a time-out when science gets too close to the origin of it all.