This Review & Critique of Hawking's book was published on the ABC religion website:
Every shrewd publicist knows that the best way to sell a book is to generate lots of advance publicity. That's why there's been such interest in Stephen Hawking's latest work declaring that there is no need for God to light the blue touch paper of the cosmic firework.
In his latest book, The Grand Design - released in Australia today - Hawking declares, "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."
The "big bang" just happened spontaneously, the outcome of the laws of physics, not a cosmic designer. It's a great way to promote a book. And it's also a great way to keep the age-old debate about God going, as it raises such interesting questions. Let me explore some of these.
I used to be a scientist myself. My undergraduate degree from Oxford was in chemistry, and my first doctorate in molecular biophysics. It's widely agreed that the natural sciences are neither atheistic nor theistic. They just don't operate at that level.
They can certainly be interpreted in religious or anti-religious ways. The militant atheist Richard Dawkins uses science as a weapon in his war against religion. But others see science and religious faith as mutually illuminating.
For example, Francis Collins's book The Language of God argues that belief in God makes more sense of science than atheism. Both sides can be argued, neither has been able to prove its case, and both are entirely reasonable.
So what about Hawking's latest book? Does this move things along? I don't think so. My scientific colleagues in Oxford and London are puzzled by Hawking's bold declarations about God, mainly because they are such speculative interpretations of what is already a very speculative theory.
The rest of the article (on the ABC website) can be found HERE. It's well worth a read
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