Stephen Hawking: "God didn't create universe"

"LONDON, England (CNN) -- God did not create the universe, world-famous physicist Stephen Hawking argues in a new book that aims to banish a divine creator from physics.

Hawking says in his book "The Grand Design" that, given the existence of gravity, "the universe can and will create itself from nothing," according to an excerpt published Thursday in The Times of London.

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

"It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper [fuse] and set the universe going," he writes.

His book -- as the title suggests -- is an attempt to answer "the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything," he writes, quoting Douglas Adams' cult science fiction romp, "The Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy."

http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/europe/09/02/hawking.god.universe/index.html?hpt=C1

Great! Now you guys can quit killing each other. Finally eh?

Bonus song!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=siZS40DBmoo

"it does it all by itself!"

-Ugo Tognazzi as Renato Baldi in La Cage Aux Folles

Wait a sec...

Isn't gravity a property of matter?

If so, how can you have gravity with "nothing"?

Scientist rarely if ever accept God as the creator.This is no suprise.This guy flip flopping on these issues isn't giving him much credibility.

Hawking is wrong. He is wrong because I willed him to be wrong. The universe (you and Hawking are all in it) is nothing more than a figment of my imagination. One day I may decide to eliminate the universe from my imagination and you will all disappear. I may do that soon as you all have become boring to me.

I must confess that I'm a bit disappointed in Dr. Hawking for having made such a loose statement (if indeed he has made this statement).

To begin with, does he even bother to define what he means by "God"?

Is he speaking specifically about the "Biblical God", and the Biblical story of creation?

If so, then I see his point and I'm in complete agreement with him.

However, given a more abstract pantheistic view of God via the Eastern Mystical picture, such a statement as "God didn't create the universe" would be utterly absurd. We simply don't have sufficient information to make that statement based on that philosophical picture.

So I'm wondering if he references specifically the Biblical Creation Myth?

He probably should have been more clear in his statement and actually said more specifically, "The Biblical God didn't create the universe"

Now that has indeed been proven time and time again. So he won't get any argument from me on that one. It's about time scientists stepped up to the plate on that one.

Bobby,

Could you do me a favor and stop imagining me right now. Because, to be perfectly frank about it, I'm not well-pleased with the rest of your imagined universe.

Howso has science "proven" The biblical God didn't create the universe?

I've already gone though this with you several times before. If you didn't understand it then, what's changed?

Science has long since "proven" that disease, death, and all of the activities that we common refer to as "sins" have been exhibited by animal behavior long before mankind ever came onto the scene. Thus mankind's so-called "Fall From Grace" cannot be the cause of these things.

Your rebuttal argument was that somehow those things aren't considered to be "sins" if animals do them. Personally I didn't buy your argument. These very things that we consider to be sins are obviously innate to all living creatures, and always have been.

They've been killing each other, competing for territory (i.e. wars), fighting for mating rights sometimes to the death. The fact that man does this on a more conscious level doesn't change the fact that these are innate characteristics of all loving creatures in this universe. So mankind's so-called "Fall From Grace" doesn't hold up since animals have behaved this way innately since the dawn of time.

I also pointed out that God would have had to have looked at this dog-eat-dog world that he created and "Saw that it was Good", but there can be nothing "Good" about animals that need to eat other animals to survive.

Your rebuttal argument for that was that, from your perspective, a dog-eat-dog world is divinely perfect.

Well hey, to each their own.

Personally I don't buy into the idea that a dog-eat-dog world is "Divinely Perfect". So once again, your arguments to try to keep this ancient mythology alive just aren't impressive.

And all to what end? Just to salvage some insane idea that all men are guilty of sin and need to accept that God sent his only begotten son to be butchered on a pole to pay for our horrible behavior?

It's ridiculous. Why do you beat this dead horse so fiercely?

It's not even a desirable fable. It's a horror story. And it's been proven to be false even via it's very own self-contradictions.

Science has also shown that no world-wide flood ever took place whilst humans were alive on this planet, so the story of Noah and his floating zoo has got to go too.

What in the world are you talking about? Disease, disorders, disabilities, and all those things of such have NOTHING to do with sins we commit. The ONLY way they can be linked to sin is when adam/eve ate of the fruit and being kicked out of the garden, cause in the garden there was no disease or anything. That is the ONLY way the two can be linked.

Just because someone commits sin does NOT mean they will get sick because of it. Sickness is here on earth because of sin yes, but what i'm saying is more on an individual perspective. Just because so and so lies and steals something does NOT mean they will get sick.

Well that just it. You've argued before that sickness would vanish from humanity if mankind were to stop sinning. But that's clearly an unwarranted pipe-dream of your own that science does not support.

Disease has always been around, as has death, and all of the behaviors that we associate as 'sinful acts'.

In other words, the biblical God would have had to have created the Earth with animals that already do all of the things the He doesn't like and he would have had to look upon that as being "Good".

But that's an oxymoron right there.

The Bible tries to pin all this crap onto Mankind via the story of Adam and Eve and their "Fall From Grace", but it doesn't wash. The behaviors that are being pinned onto this hypothetical Adam and Eve were already innate in "Creation" or the universe, long before this mythological Adam and Eve came onto the scene.

Therefore the story has no credence.

It's been shown to be as false as the mythologies of ancient Greece.

I said no such thing. We're always gonna have sickness on this earth. We aren't in the garden of eden. I said and I quote "Sin has brought sickness ONLY through the fact that we were kicked out of the garden because of sin." BUT on an individual perspective just because you sin does NOT mean you'll get sick, nor does it mean if you don't sin you won't get sick.

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In other words, the biblical God would have had to have created the Earth with animals that already do all of the things the He doesn't like and he would have had to look upon that as being "Good".
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Animals do not sin my friend. God's law is for man/woman. Animals do not have souls, they were put here to serve us in one way or other. Weather it was for eating, for using to plow the fields, to feed the other animals we use, upon many many many other uses for all the different animals. Weather it's a direct use or domino effect use.

Science has long since "proven" that disease, death, and all of the activities that we common refer to as "sins" have been exhibited by animal behavior long before mankind ever came onto the scene. Thus mankind's so-called "Fall From Grace" cannot be the cause of these things


so..

because ANIMALS were already victims of death and disease before the fall from grace , HUMANS cant be the victims of death and disease before the fall from grace,,,,

...I think that is faulty logic somehow

it ASSUMES that we HAVE to have been created with IDENTICAL traits as animals,,,

it would be true to say
because ANIMALS were already victims of death and disease before the fall from grace , ANIMALS cant be the victims of death and disease before the fall from grace

Some would say that gravity is not a property of matter, but a property of space (or the metaphorically labelled fabric of space). Gravity comes into existence due to an effect that matter has on space, but its not necessarily the case that matter must exist for space to have that quality. I'm not asserting this as the truth, only that this is a view taken by some modern physicists, at least in some circumstances.

In this view, you can have gravity without matter...though I'm not sure how you'd sense, measure, or test for it .

This doesn't address the question of having gravity with 'nothing', if by 'nothing' one means no space as well as no matter.

Really? Are you so sure? A surprisingly large number of the scientists I've known were Deists. So they may not accept your god as the creator - but the accept god exactly as the creator (and little or nothing more).

I don't have any kind of numbers, poll results or whatever, for this. This is anecdotal, and you may be right.

No man's sin isn't what put sickness on "THIS EARTH" no. But it is man's sin that got mankind kicked out of the Garden of Eden. So in the long run if man would never had sinned we would never have had sickness and other diseases cause we would live in the garden of Eden.

Exactly!!!

Nope. Since there is no God to answer to, then there is no negative judgement for killing. So let the killing begin!! Lets start in the Middle East!!