Stephen Hawking: God not necessary for creation of universe

Acclaimed physicist Stephen Hawking's new book, The Grand Design, has not even released yet, but it has already caused a stir. Excepts from the book were printed in The Guardian and the Times of London, and set off an explosion the size of the Big Bang.

The Grand Design is co-authored by Caltech physicist Leonard Mlodinow. The excerpt that was released by the Guardian is the following: "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."

However, that is just one paragraph out of a book that is 208 pages long. It's hard to form an opinion on a book from just that. In fact, while there are only a few reviews of the book at Amazon.com, due to its pre-release timing, they are all very positive.

It's the discovery of other planets and solar systems, the authors write, which has cast further doubt on the necessity of God. Hawking writes: "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."

Taking a deeper look at the book than one paragraph, Alan Boyle writes:

What he's actually saying in the book is that when we study the universe's origins, we have to work our way back from the present, rather than assuming there's an arbitrary point 13.7 billion years ago when Someone pressed the button on a cosmic stopwatch. And when you look at it that way, the universe looks more and more like a quantum phenomenon, in which a multitude of histories diverge. This is what Hawking calls top-down cosmology.

At the Amazon.com site, one can read Hawking's statement on The Grand Design:

How can we understand the world in which we find ourselves? Over twenty years ago I wrote A Brief History of Time, to try to explain where the universe came from, and where it is going. But that book left some important questions unanswered. Why is there a universe--why is there something rather than nothing? Why do we exist? Why are the laws of nature what they are? Did the universe need a designer and creator?

It was Einstein’s dream to discover the grand design of the universe, a single theory that explains everything. However, physicists in Einstein’s day hadn’t made enough progress in understanding the forces of nature for that to be a realistic goal. And by the time I had begun writing A Brief History of Time, there were still several key advances that had not yet been made that would prevent us from fulfilling Einstein’s dream. But in recent years the development of M-theory, the top-down approach to cosmology, and new observations such as those made by satellites like NASA’s COBE and WMAP, have brought us closer than ever to that single theory, and to being able to answer those deepest of questions. And so Leonard Mlodinow and I set out to write a sequel to A Brief History of Time to attempt to answer the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything. The result is The Grand Design, the product of our four-year effort.

In The Grand Design we explain why, according to quantum theory, the cosmos does not have just a single existence, or history, but rather that every possible history of the universe exists simultaneously. We question the conventional concept of reality, posing instead a "model-dependent" theory of reality. We discuss how the laws of our particular universe are extraordinarily finely tuned so as to allow for our existence, and show why quantum theory predicts the multiverse--the idea that ours is just one of many universes that appeared spontaneously out of nothing, each with different laws of nature. And we assess M-Theory, an explanation of the laws governing the multiverse, and the only viable candidate for a complete "theory of everything." As we promise in our opening chapter, unlike the answer to the Ultimate Question of Life given in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the answer we provide in The Grand Design is not, simply, "42."

Stephen Hawking retired as Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University last year after holding the position 30 years. Once, it was held by Sir Isaac Newton.

Isaac Newton famously developed the theory of gravity. He argued that his science could explain the universe's behavior, but not its creation, saying "Gravity explains the motions of the planets, but it cannot explain who set the planets in motion."

The Grand Design will ship on Sept. 7th in the U.S., and is already ranked #8 on Amazon.com's books list.