Stephen Hawking U-turns on God's creation of Universe

  • 02 Sep 2010

Internationally famous physicist Stephen Hawking has gone back on his previous beliefs about the creation of the Universe, stating in a forthcoming book that physics, not God, made the Big Bang.

Hawking has long held the position that while the Universe is governed by the laws of science, those laws were created by God. He said in 2008 at an event with the Pope, "The laws may have been decreed by God, but God does not intervene to break the laws."

But in his new book, The Grand Design, Hawking states that new theories show that a creator is "not necessary". A section printed in The Times says: "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. It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going."

Instead, Hawking puts his faith into a form of string theory called M-theory, which hopes to present a unified theory in 11 dimensions that can account for every type of physical behaviour. However, theorist Edward Witten believes that a formulation of M-theory will require an entirely new mathematical language to be developed.

Hawking says that the first blow to his beliefs came in 1992, when a planet was found orbiting a star that wasn't our Sun: "That makes the coincidences of our planetary conditions -- the single sun, the lucky combination of Earth-Sun distance and solar mass -- far less remarkable, and far less compelling as evidence that the Earth was carefully designed just to please us human beings."