Plan B Forum

2 September 2010 Last updated at 08:18 GMT

Stephen Hawking: God did not create Universe

There is no place for God in theories on the creation of the Universe, Professor Stephen Hawking has said.

He had previously argued belief in a creator was not incompatible with science but in a new book, he concludes the Big Bang was an inevitable consequence of the laws of physics.

The Grand Design, part serialised in the Times, says there is no need to invoke God to set the Universe going.

"Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something," he concluded.

In his new book, an extract of which appears in the Times, Britain's most famous physicist sets out to contest Sir Isaac Newton's belief that the universe must have been designed by God as it could not have sprung out of chaos.

Citing the 1992 discovery of a planet orbiting a star other than our Sun, he said: "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 adds: "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."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-11161493

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

Current status

Gravity has yet to be successfully included in a theory of everything. Simply trying to combine the graviton with the strong and electroweak interactions runs into fundamental difficulties (the resulting theory is not renormalizable). Theoretical physicists have not yet formulated a widely accepted, consistent theory that combines general relativity and quantum mechanics. The incompatibility of the two theories remains an outstanding problem in the field of physics. Some theoretical physicists currently believe that a quantum theory of general relativity may require frameworks other than field theory itself, such as string theory or loop quantum gravity. Some models in string theory that are promising by way of realizing our familiar Standard Model are the Perturbative heterotic string models, 11-dimensional M-theory, Singular geometries (e.g. orbifold and orientifold), D-branes and other branes, Flux compactification and warped geometry, Non-perturbative type IIB superstring solutions (F-theory).[1]

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

he claims gravity not being able to fit into a 'unified theory' is proof of spontaneous creation. A leap of faith,'eh?