IM Stephen Hawking

Amid all the eulogies I long for some balance and honesty. When Castro died there was much praise for his achievements but voices like those my friend whose family fled Castro's Cuba were not heard. I recall eulogies for the mass murderer Mao too.
   Much of the praise for Hawking the scientist is about his views on cosmology which IMO are not science but faith based philosophy. The faith is based on the presupposition of the uniformity of natural causes in a closed system.  But that is accepted orthodox dogma - not science.
   Then there is the character of the man.  This is from my review of his first wife's biography.
   'Jane Hawking gave up any hope of a career for the love of a man she knew to be suffering from an incurable disease. Stephen Hawking is a genius scientist but he is not an attractive man as portrayed here. He is shown to be self-centred and demanding, coming from a family that could be insensitive in the extreme. What sort of a mother in law asks if a child is her son's or someone els's? Jane is a woman who devotes 25 years of marriage to care for her eccentric, demanding husband. For many years he insists only his wife nurse him. When eventually nurses become necessary, one of them manages to seduce him away from his wife, estranging them and breaking up the marriage.' - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Music-Move-Stars-Life-Stephen/product-reviews/0330392476/ref=cm_cr_dp_d_show_all_btm?ie=UTF8&reviewerType=all_reviews
   On the positive side - "The victim should have the right to end his life, if he wants. But I think it would be a great mistake. However bad life may seem, there is always something you can do, and succeed at. While there's life, there is hope"- Stephen Hawking,on euthanasia: , Quoted in People's Daily Online, June 2006
   But the philosopher?
"If we find the answer to that, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason - for then we would know the mind of God" -Stephen Hawking, On the reason why the universe exists: A Brief History Of Time, published 1988