The brilliant scientist loses his brilliance: Life imitates art (sort of)

In high school, I had something of a reputation for being a video geek. Among my more or less memorable productions was a fast-paced farce whimsically titled, "The Brilliant Scientist Loses His Brilliance." It was, needless to say, a less than brilliant piece of cinematography. The "scientist" carries his "brilliance" around in a large briefcase (actually the carrying case for the bulky video camera which was, at the time, state of the art equipment) and "loses" it when a band of juvenile thieves mug him and make off with the booty in a go cart. In lieu of dialogue, the plot unfolds over the background music of Foreigner's early-80's rocker "Urgent," chosen for no particular reason other than the fact that the guitar riffs and Junior Walker saxophone solo matched well with the pace of the action.

I only mention this sordid chapter from my youth because I was reminded of it yesterday morning when I read the headline on Wade Burleson's blog, "When a Brilliant Scientist Sounds Brilliantly Stupid It's Both Bizarre and Sad." Like a number of Christian bloggers, Burleson was referring to Stephen Hawking's latest foray into the muddled milieu pseudo-philosophical scientific conjecture in which he makes the not so novel assertion that the universe essentially created itself without any assistance from some divine first mover, a.k.a. "God." 

"Brilliantly stupid" is a particularly appropriate term to describe Hawking's atheistic theory of "spontaneous creation" which requires, as Burleson says, "enormous, google-like faith." Several centuries after its first attempts to separate itself from religion and theology, "science" has come to this: a thoughtless exercise in dogmatism requiring maximum faith but minimum intelligence. Hawking, and those like him, including the "new atheists" who imagine themselves so intellectually superior to the ignorant masses, have become every bit the narrow-minded fundamentalists they so decry. It would be funny, if it weren't so tragic.

Going a step further, Greg Goebel explains how the "god" so often discounted by scientists is