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Hawking sees no divine hand
We're not certain the news reports about Stephen Hawking's new book are 100 percent accurate (and we're looking into it -- trying to get our hands on a copy of the book) but apparently Hawking has written something to the effect of this: God did not create the universe. Well, coming from a physicist, that doesn't sound like a very bold statement, but everything Hawking says, or writes, seems to get a lot of play. In the new book, "The Grand Design," he argues that the Big Bang, rather than occurring after divine intervention, was inevitable due to the law of gravity, the Guardian reports. "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," Hawking writes. "It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going." Right. Sounds like something a lot of scientists might say. So why all the media attention (Yahoo! homepage and front-and-center on just about every other major news site today)? Because here's what Hawking wrote in "A Brief History of Time," previously, according to Reuters: "If we discover a complete theory, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason for then we should know the mind of God." Now there was a bold statement.
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