God did not create the universe, the man who is arguably Britain's most famous living scientist says in a forthcoming book.

In the new work, The Grand Design, Professor Stephen Hawking argues that the Big Bang, rather than occurring following the intervention of a divine being, was inevitable due to the law of gravity.

In his 1988 book, A Brief History of Time, Hawking had seemed to accept the role of God in the creation of the universe. But in the new text, co-written with American physicist Leonard Mlodinow, he said new theories showed a creator is "not necessary".

The Grand Design, an extract of which appears in the Times today, sets out to contest Sir Isaac Newton's belief that the universe must have been designed by God as it could not have been created out of chaos.

"Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing," he writes. "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."

In the forthcoming book, published on 9 September, Hawking says that M-theory, a form of string theory, will achieve this goal: "M-theory is the unified theory Einstein was hoping to find," he theorises.

"The fact that we human beings – who are ourselves mere collections of fundamental particles of nature – have been able to come this close to an understanding of the laws governing us and our universe is a great triumph."

Hawking says the first blow to Newton's belief that the universe could not have arisen from chaos was the observation in 1992 of a planet orbiting a star other than 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," he writes.

Hawking had previously appeared to accept the role of God in the creation of the universe. Writing in his bestseller A Brief History Of Time in 1988, he said: "If we discover a complete theory, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason – for then we should know the mind of God."

Hawking resigned as Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University last year after 30 years in the position.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/ ... ng-creator

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But surely a theory can't really 'show' anything?

Anyway, I'll have a proper read at that later and I thought some of you might find it interesting

Gods one big role, for which no human could claim responsibility and then gets written out of their one big role.

"Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist."

I really hope there's some more detailed explanation on that statement in the book / article, because on its own it does rather sound like someone talking of mystical cosmic forces.

This human need to find the answers and explain everything is a terrible affliction, don't you think? I wonder if that's why some folk end up falling back into the arms of superstition, because knowledge scares them.

It’s more likely that the picture we have of the Universe is wrong - so wrong that we have to fill in the gaps with supernatural beings, just to explain those gaps.

There is always an argument for God IMO. If there was nothing before the big bang, how did it happen? If gravity was present then surely that means something else was present too, what was there before all of that was present? One can only explain so far back, I'm not sure science can explain something from truly nothing.

personally i think its amazing. wed still be living in caves if some clever clogs hadnt been curious about how fire works



same with religion. if the universe was created by a God, then what created him? and what created that? and what created that ad infinitum.

truth is both arguments rely on spontaneous creation, which means no-one really has the foggiest

What if the whole Big Bang theory is wrong. The universe we think kicked off by the Big Bang may only be our universe: just a bubble in a much larger entity.

There's a lot of evidence I see coming out that points to the whole Big Bang and expanding universe theory being a bit off the mark. It's leading to a fair amount of wasted research trying to explain stuff like dark matter and dark energy, which might be perfectly explainable if you look at things another way.

For example, let's assume the universe just is. It's infinite in size. Let's also assume the speed of light varies under different local factors (which it does appear to). The current theory is that light takes so long to get here from distant parts of the universe that it gets red shifted by the Doppler effect. What if, instead, light just gets tired. It can't travel for an infinite distance. Eventually, it'll run out of puff, and to us it will appear dark. We seem to have reached a physical limit to the edge of the universe we can detect or observe. That doesn't mean it's the actual edge, and it's still growing. It might just mean the light from further out is tired and doesn't manage to reach us.

That's not an argument, that's a 'make something up because we don't understand' attitude.

Let's put it this way, our simple little minds would not yet be able to comprehend what/how/why everthing happened so to believe we can answer it by saying 'oh god did it' is to give up on evolving to the point where one day we may understand.

Mind you, I have a strong feeling that the answer to the question is that there is no question. Not really.

Either that or it's computer generated. The more and more I live my life the more and more it seems far to, well, artificial.

i like to think its an Inception-type situation, since we are all here in this place, but no-one knows how we got here

I just think we all took the blue pill.

Is it not entirely possible that we, as a species, are merely incapable of comprehending the totality of what goes on and has already happened in "the universe"?

If there are things that we do not understand that means that we have incomplete knowledge. No need to revert to a God.

I'm not the scientific type, but I'm pretty sure you have misunderstood the red shift thing. The point I believe is that the wavelength of the light emitted is stretched if the object is moving away from the viewer, and contracted if it moves towards them. The distance the light travels has nothing to do with it, only the relative convergence or divergence of the observer and the object being observed.

As for the topic; Hawkins never had any scientific reason to suggest God was involved in the origins of the universe, and he has none to now say God was not. God is not a valid subject of scientific inquiry. The phrases "God made the big bang", and "God does not exist, so therefore the big bang happened without him" are expressions of religious faith, not empirical propositions.

that is the doppler effect, same thing happens with sound e.g. the pitch of ambulance sirens and racing cars as they go past

i also believe HK was being sarky