I have noticed that even people who claim that everything is predetermined and that we can do nothing to change it, look before they cross the road.
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"You have no talent. You are like a Chinese food delivery guy without Chinese food."
"The universe is a vast and empty place, but it's full of potential."
"What makes human beings unique? Some say it's language or tools. Others say it's logical reasoning. They obviously haven't met many humans."
"There is a fundamental difference between religion, which is based on authority, and science, which is based on observation and reason. Science will win because it works."
"Both of us."
British theoretical physicist whose Hawking radiation work and A Brief History of Time (1988) brought black-hole physics to a mass audience while he lived with ALS for 55 years. Closely associated with Roger Penrose (his collaborator on singularity theorems) and Carl Sagan (fellow popularizer who wrote Brief History's foreword). For an intellectual contrast, see William Lane Craig, American philosopher of religion — Craig's Kalam cosmological argument depends on the Big Bang requiring a divine first cause; Hawking's no-boundary proposal was specifically designed to remove the moment that would require one — the cleanest cosmology-vs-natural-theology contrast in modern thought.
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People who theorize that fate controls everything still instinctively act as if their choices matter — they look both ways before crossing a street. The quote exposes a contradiction between philosophical determinism and lived behavior. If outcomes were truly fixed, caution would be pointless. The act of checking for traffic reveals that even committed fatalists trust their actions can alter what happens to them.
Hawking operated at physics' frontier, where determinism is a genuine scientific question — quantum mechanics, thermodynamics, and cosmology all grapple with it. Despite his own body's total imprisonment by ALS, he never surrendered agency intellectually, continuing to produce, travel, and provoke. His wit here mirrors his life: acknowledging constraints while refusing to stop acting. The observation is both philosophical argument and self-portrait.
Hawking flourished during late 20th-century debates over free will, fueled by advances in neuroscience, computing, and quantum physics. Deterministic thinking was gaining cultural ground as brain-scanning technology suggested decisions precede conscious awareness. Meanwhile, religious fatalism remained widespread globally. Hawking's quip cuts across both secular and religious camps, using an everyday image — crossing a road — to deflate grand claims about human powerlessness.
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