Stephen Hawking and Billy Graham

by William H. Benson

March 22, 2018

A preacher and a scientist passed away weeks ago: Billy Graham on February 21, and Stephen Hawking on March 14. One lived in the USA, and the other in the UK. One promoted religion, the other physics. Billy was 99, and Hawking was 76.

Both men achieved unparalleled success, even celebrity status, despite their frailties.

Billy Graham suffered poor health for much of his life. When first married, he came down with the mumps. His biographer said he endured “hernias, ulcers, tumors, cysts, polyps, infections, pneumonia, high blood pressure, headaches, spider bites, and a series of falls that broke eighteen of his ribs,” plus a broken pelvis and hip, and also excess fluid on his brain that required a shunt.

In 2014, his son Franklin said, “He’s hard of hearing, can’t see very well, but his mind his clear.”

None of Graham’s suffering though can compare to Stephen Hawking’s. In 1963, when 21, and studying at Oxford, Hawking’s voice slurred, and he fell down often. Doctors diagnosed Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s disease. They gave him two years to live, but later, doctors decided that his was an early-onset but slow-progressing type of ALS, and that he would live.

Over time, Hawking lost his voice, was forced into a wheelchair, and prior to his passing, caregivers fed him and lifted him in and out of his bed and wheelchair.

Billy Graham preached more than 400 crusades, in tents, stadiums and parking lots, around the globe from 1947 until 2005, when he retired. His lifetime audiences topped 2.2 billion. People everywhere recognized his distinct North Carolina trumpet-like voice. “He preached the Christian faith to more people in person than anyone ever or since in all of Christianity.” 

Billy wrote 33 books, all of a religious nature, and the royalties he received he gifted to his children and grandchildren’s educations.

Hawking was the 17th Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge, a position he held for thirty years, until he retired in 2009. He wrote academic papers, plus books on mathematics and black holes.

In 1982, Hawking wrote a popular, easy-to-read book on the universe. Motivated by his need to finance his children’s education, his A Brief History of Time was first published in April of 1988. It sold over 9 million copies.

Billy married once. Ruth Graham said she had the better job. She watched their five children grow up, at their home at Montreat, North Carolina, near Asheville, while Billy traveled the world.

Ruth joked that when Billy gets to heaven, he will ask for a key to his hotel room.

A historian of religion, Grant Wacker, said, “People who didn’t like Billy Graham spent a lot of time trying to find personal violations of his moral and ethical code, and they couldn’t. They didn’t exist. He was a man who maintained absolute marital fidelity and moral and financial integrity. He was an evangelist who lived the way he preached.”

Hawking married twice. In 1995, after thirty years of marriage and three kids, he divorced his first wife, Jane, who felt overwhelmed. Her husband’s need for nurses and therapists, and his celebrity status intruded into their family life. Also, her strong Christian faith contrasted with his avowed atheism.

After the divorce, that same year he married one of his nurses, Ellen Mason, but that marriage also ended in divorce, eleven years later in 2006.

Because Billy was absolutely convinced of his message, that faith in Christ is essential, he convinced millions of others. In an interview with Brian Williams, Billy said, “The mystery of death. I think there’s a mystery to it. And I’m looking forward with great anticipation to going to heaven.”

Hawking said, “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.”

Yet, Hawking did write, in A Brief History of Time, “If we discover a complete theory, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason, for then we should know the mind of God.”

One interesting note. The Queen approached Stephen Hawking about a knighthood in the 1990’s, but he refused, in protest to scarce government funding for science.

Later, the Queen approached Billy Graham, and he accepted. In a ceremony performed at the British Embassy, in Washington D.C., on December 6, 2001, Sir Christopher Meyer, the British Ambassador, on behalf of the Queen, made Billy Graham an Honorary Knight.

Two celebrities. One a believer in Christianity, the other a believer in science. One wrote books on angels and Peace with God. The other wrote on space and time and how they related. One accepted the Queen’s Knighthood, the other refused. Both suffered poor health. May they now rest in peace. 

Tara Westover’s Educated

by William H. Benson

March 8, 2018

I just finished listening to Tara Westover’s riveting memoir, Educated, an account of her years growing up as the youngest of seven children, in a fundamentalist Mormon family in southeastern Idaho, at the base of a mountain, Buck Peak. 

Tara’s dad, Gene, (a pseudonym) ran a junkyard, and her mother earned money as a midwife, but she also concocted a variety of herbs, oils, and tinctures, potions that she believed healed all ailments.

Dad feared the federal government. He buried gasoline tanks, guns, and ammunition in holes that he dug around his house. He told Tara, “When the feds come to Buck Peak, we’ll be ready.” 

Dad feared hospitals and doctors. “You’re worse off going to the hospital,” he would say. As a result, Tara did not receive a birth certificate until years later, but no one remembered her birth date.

In the home, there was no television, no telephone, no pain relievers, and no vaccinations. 

Dad feared the school system. He pulled Tara’s older brothers out of the public school when they were in grade school. He said, “school was a ploy to lead children away from God.” Mom home-schooled the boys for a time, but Dad needed their help in the junkyard. 

By the time Tara came along, mom had dropped all pretense at home-schooling, and as a result, Tara never received any education. No lessons, no math, no essays, no homework, and no tests. There were books: the Bible, the Book of Mormon, and sermons by Joseph Smith and Brigham Young.

Tara wrote, “I understand that it was this fact, more than any other, that made my family different. We didn’t go to school.” 

Instead, she worked in the junkyard. For the children, it was dangerous work: amputated fingers, gashes in arms, and horrific burns. There was a car-crusher, and a set of shears that cut angle iron but sent it flying at heads and arms. Then, Dad would throw things. He threw a steel cylinder once that caught Tara in the stomach. Another time, he almost ran her through the car-crusher.

Later, Dad started to build milk-barns and haying sheds for neighbors, and Tara’s job was to crawl around on the roof thirty feet high, and drill screws into corrugated metal sheeting, in the wind.

The worst though was the abuse she endured from her older brother Shawn (another pseudonym). When riled, Shawn would twist Tara’s wrist back, or he would grab her by the hair and slam her face first into the toilet. This happened again and again, and her parents chose not to see their son’s abusive acts directed at their youngest daughter, despite a broken toe, and a snapped wrist.

Tara wrote, “My family had violence in it, especially violence against women. We did not confront the patriarch, the father. It would have been inappropriate for me to challenge his authority.” She also said, “In families like mine, there is no crime worse than telling the truth.”

When seventeen, Tara was adamant; she would attend college at Brigham Young University, even though her dad warned her, “You are whoring after men’s knowledge and not God’s.”

At BYU, her ignorance was profound. She knew so little of anything. During a lecture she raised her hand and said, “What is the Holocaust?” She knew nothing of slavery, the Civil War, of Martin Luther King, and the civil rights movement. Yet, she was bright, intelligent, and she knew how to work. 

Her roommates had to help her find clothes other than the men’s jeans and work shirts she always wore, and they had to give her lessons on washing her hands after using the bathroom, and on washing dishes, rather than letting them stack up in the sink for later. 

Tara did well at BYU, and earned a semester at Cambridge, in England, but her dad threatened not to attend her college graduation, unless she admit that her success was due to her home-schooling.

Tara won a Gates Scholarship to study at Cambridge, and also a fellowship at Harvard. She has since completed a Ph.D. in intellectual history at Cambridge University, where now at the age of 31, she lives and works. Hers is a Horatio Alger story, a remarkable story, most astonishing. 

Of all the memoirs I have read, including Angela’s Ashes, Glass Castles, and Hillbilly Elegy, I think this memoir exceeds them all, in terms of the terror and powerlessness that she must have felt when a young girl. I wonder if any producer would dare to make this book into a movie. It was so painful to listen to the book, that I dare not imagine what it would feel like to watch it on the screen also.

Tara recently said that she identifies with the lyrics to a Bob Marley song, “Emancipate yourself from mental slavery. No one but ourselves can free our minds.”