Theology unnecessary

Theology is unnecessary. So says Stephen Hawking, the world-famous physicist who controversially argues in a new book that God did not create the universe.


"God may exist, but science can explain the universe without the need for a creator," Hawking told CNN's "Larry King Live" in an interview that aired Friday.

Hawking, 68, says in his book "The Grand Design" that, given the existence of gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing. "Spontaneous creation," he writes, is the reason why the universe and humanity exist.

"Gravity and quantum theory cause universes to be created spontaneously out of nothing," Hawking told Larry King.


King asked Hawking why he thinks people have reacted so strongly to his book.

"Science is increasingly answering questions that used to be the province of religion," Hawking replied. "The scientific account is complete. Theology is unnecessary."




Hawking said his book is an attempt to give a "broad picture of how the universe operates and our place in it. It is a basic human desire and it also puts our worries in perspective."

The idea behind it is "M-theory," which, he says, allows there to be many universes that were created out of nothing, none of which required the intervention of God.

That's because if there are many universes, one will have laws of physics like ours -- and in such a universe, something not only can, but must, arise from nothing, Hawking says. Therefore, he concludes, there's no need for God to have played a part.

That's the point of his book, Hawking told King -- "that science can explain the universe, and that we don't need God to explain why there is something rather than nothing, or why the laws of nature are what they are."

Hawking said that if he could travel through time -- which he said is theoretically possible -- he would go to the future to "find if M-theory is indeed a theory of everything."

Hawking has ALS, or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, which has confined him to a wheelchair and leaves him unable to speak without the help of a computerized voice synthesizer. The disease is also known as Lou Gehrig's Disease in the United States and motor neuron disease, or MND, in Britain.

He told King he's doing "pretty well" with the disease, 45 years after he was first diagnosed. The disease has a life expectancy of two to five years, according to the ALS Association.


In the twentieth century evolutionists resisted the idea of a “Big Bang” beginning of the universe. They wanted a universe that had no beginning but the evidence did not cooperate but rather increasingly pointed to the Big Bang model. Now cosmologists, such as Cambridge University’s Lucasian Professor of Mathematics Stephen Hawking, say the Big Bang is no longer a problem to understand. It turns out the universe “blasted itself into existence spontaneously,” as one science writer put it. Or as a leading physicist explained, a consequence of general relativity is that “universes are free! It costs precisely zero energy (and zero anything else) to make an entire universe. From that perspective, perhaps it's not surprising that the universe did come into existence.”


Hawking and co-author physicist Leonard Mlodinow write in their new book, The Grand Design:

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 … On the scale of the entire universe, the positive energy of the matter can be balanced by the negative gravitational energy, and so there is no restriction on the creation of whole universes.

There you have it, the culmination of evolutionary thought: The universe can and will create itself from nothing—universes are free! Evolutionary thinking, going back centuries, has thoroughly compromised science. It is now its own reductio ad absurdum.

Cosmologists report speculative hypotheses with all the certainty of a child telling you about their imaginary friend. Others in the field commend the “findings” and journalists dutifully pass along the new truth. For whom should we have more pity, the cosmologists promoting their “truths,” or the journalists who must package the silliness?

Here is one example of how evolutionary thinking influences cosmology. Hawking and Mlodinow explain that the discovery of planets orbiting distant stars refutes Isaac Newton’s suspicion that planetary systems did not arise from the unguided play of natural laws.

But why is that so? Certainly distant planets, by themselves, do not reveal their origin. In fact, several of the distant planets have contradicted evolutionary theories.

So how do Hawking and Mlodinow conclude that these planets refute Newton? Their hidden premise is that god would not create such planets. He would only create the planets that orbit the Sun and no others. The finding of others, given that religious premise, proves that planetary systems can evolve (in spite of the empirical evidence). Religion drives science and it matters.