The Big Bang was the result of the inevitable laws of physics and did not need God to spark the creation of the Universe, Stephen Hawking has concluded. Photo: GETTY
The scientist has claimed that no divine force was needed to explain why the Universe was formed.
In his latest book, The Grand Design, an extract of which is published in Eureka magazine in The Times, Hawking said: “Because there is a law such as gravity, the Universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the Universe exists, why we exist.”
He added: “It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the Universe going.”
In A Brief History of Time, Prof Hawking's most famous work, he did not dismiss the possibility that God had a hand in the creation of the world.
He wrote in the 1988 book: "If we discover a complete theory, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason — for then we should know the mind of God.”
In his new book he rejects Sir Isaac Newton's theory that the Universe did not spontaneously begin to form but was set in motion by God.
In June this year Prof Hawking told a Channel 4 series that he didn't believe that a "personal" God existed. He told Genius of Britain: "The question is: is the way the universe began chosen by God for reasons we can't understand, or was it determined by a law of science? I believe the second. If you like, you can call the laws of science 'God', but it wouldn't be a personal God that you could meet, and ask questions."
Until his retirement last year Prof Hawking was Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge, a post previously held by Newton.
The book, co-written by American physicist Leonard Mlodinow, is published on September 9.
Poster Comment:
Hawking is an idiot. Here are some comments from the source. kkp 3 minutes ago Einstein, that silly clerk, remember him? In his Bio he said the main motivating factor that drove him was: If he were able to understand how the universe functioned, how physics worked, etc. then he would maybe be able to understand how the mind of God worked by understanding his creations. I was blown away by this and had assumed he was like many people of science now who run away as fast as they can from any "intelligent design" possibilites. I have 3 horses. They were engineered and built, natural selection, maybe, evolved from a one cell creature, no. samsamtheretiredman 26 minutes ago Ok, the "Perfessor" has identified the very first effect, but every effect must have a cause. When is he going to share that? clownhair 37 minutes ago Do people not realise the true cause of oppression? NARCISSISM. iteotwawki 3 minutes ago It's not a matter of will, it's a matter of Matter e.g. the stuff you look at and see around you. Next time you’re at the beach, pick up a grain of sand, look at it and then look all around you. Contemplate the universe and everything in it. Now imagine that everything in the universe came from, not that grain of sand, but something smaller but not something smaller, rather something that did not exist. If gravity, a physical property, where so great as to keep all non existent matter held together, then what was it that caused gravity to be overwhelmed with such force as to allow the Big Bang to occur. If you really want to bake your biscuit, imagine that all this is an illusion and that we and everything you see in the universe, exists in the mind of an infinite entity. Explaining why science cannot pinpoint our origin. Hawking’s theory is fiction. Todd Enders 45 minutes ago Hawking seems to think that the a Grand Unified Theory has actually been found, which would allow us to at least do the non-scientific retrogression to the Big Bang and beyond. Unfortunately, the Nobel Prize in Physics hasn't been awarded for that accomplishment as of yet. That being the case, Hawking is speaking purely out of speculation, rooted in his own philosphical bent. He has done much fascinating work, but even if such a theory were found and evidence discoverd which strongly supports it, it would still be assuming that understanding a dixie cup leads immediately to an understanding of all the processes that lead to it's existance. And even then, it does not lead to an understanding of why the laws of nature exist as they do in the first place. Perhaps he has further speculated that they are all quantum informational fluctuations. Talk about a God of the Gaps. When science declares what it can never demonstrate, it ceases to be science. 3 Nazism was a classical example of a narcissistic, secular cult - it was inspired in part by eugenics and lead by someone diagnosed with "psychopathic hysteria" in WWI. Societies which have tried to rid themselves of religions have replaced threm with something else, generally some kind of personality cult (with a narcissist at its head). Richard Dawkins is an arch narcissist and who knows what motivated Stephen Hawking, but anyway, two traits most striking about the average strong atheist are their blind spots and their ego.......
