Kirk Cameron Challenges Stephen Hawking On Existence Of Heaven

Kirk Cameron, best known for playing Mike Seaver on the ’80s TV show “Growing Pains,” has challenged theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking’s claim that heaven is a “fairy story for people afraid of the dark.”

Cameron, who founded his own Christian ministry in 2002, told TMZ, “Professor Hawking is heralded as ‘the genius of Britain,’ yet he believes in the scientific impossibility that nothing created everything and that life sprang from non-life. Why should anyone believe Mr. Hawking’s writings if he cannot provide evidence for his unscientific belief that out of nothing, everything came?”

Cameron then used John Lennon’s lyrics in his stance.

“(Hawking) says he knows there is no heaven. John Lennon wasn’t sure. He said to pretend there’s no Heaven. That’s easy if you try. Then he said he hoped that someday we would join him,” Cameron said. “Such wishful thinking reveals John and Stephen’s religious beliefs, not good science.”

In an interview published earlier this month in The Guardian newspaper, the 69-year-old Hawking said the human brain is a like a computer that will stop working when its components fail.

“There is no heaven or afterlife for broken-down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark,” Hawking said.

In “Grand Design,” a book published last year, Hawking had declared that it was “not necessary to invoke God … to get the universe going.”

Hawking is nearly totally paralyzed by motor neurone disease, diagnosed when he was 21.

Hawking says he is not afraid of death, but adds: “I’m in no hurry to die. I have so much I want to do first.”