Both the “Parables of the Kingdom” written by Jesus and “Is
Everything Determined?” written by Stephen Hawking deal with trying how humans
try to make sense of the universe we live in and make sense of God. Both of
these readings were challenging for me, and I found it quite difficult to find
parallels between the two of them. In Stephen Hawking’s “Is Everything
Determined?” Hawking lengthily explains all the different ways we could explain
predestination, he touches on quantum mechanics and mentions a lot of different
theories and even acknowledges God and his place in the scientific world of
these theories. He goes farther into his discussion by brining in the concept
of free will and what it means in a world where people believe determinism; Hawking
says, “if everything is determined by the laws of science, then free will must
be an illusion and if we don’t have free will, what is the basis for our
responsibility of our actions? We don’t punish people for crimes if they are
insane, because we have decided that they can’t help it. But if we are all
determined by a grand unified theory, none of us can help what we do, so why
should anyone be held responsible for what they do?” This lengthy quote
explains the flaw in our thinking when it comes to determinism, how can we hold
anyone accountable for their actions if they are programmed to commit the act?
This brings us to where Jesus’s “Parables of the Kingdom” intersects with “Is
Everything Determined?” At the end of Hawking’s essay he writes “In summary the
title of this essay was a question: Is everything determined? The answer is
yes, it is. But it might as well not be, because we can never know what is
determined.” This is similar to “The Ten Virgins” because the last line of the
parable says “Watch therefore, for ye know neither the day nor the hour wherein
the Son of man cometh” meaning that we will never truly know what is going to
happen in the future, we can only prepare for the present which is the same as
what Stephen Hawking says in “Is Everything Determined?”
I disagree with you on not finding parallels. I think that there is one major parallel in the readings and that is the uncertainty of life. In "Is Everything Determined?" when he talks about all the different ways of predestination, it tells the reader how uncertain the future is and how you don't know your future till it happens. In "Parables of the Kingdom" the author literally talks about how we can never really predict the future.
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