Has Stephen Hawking ended the God debate?

Stephen Hawking has declared that his latest work shows there was no creator of the universe. But we shouldn't imagine that will settle the God vs science debate, says Graham Farmelo.

The Telegraph
03 Sep 2010

Has Stephen Hawking ended the God debate?; Hawking says science will explain the beginning of the universe; PA

God did not create the universe, Stephen Hawking revealed yesterday. In the flurry of publicity preceding his new book, The Grand Design, to be published next week, he does some serious dissing of the Almighty, declaring him/her/it irrelevant. The point is, he says, that our universe followed inevitably from the laws of nature. But, we might ask, where did they come from?

It is perhaps a bit rich for Hawking to make God redundant after granting him/her/it a celebrity cameo at the end of his multi-million selling A Brief History of Time. In his famous conclusion to the book, Hawking wrote that if scientists could find the most fundamental laws of nature "then we should know the mind of God". To be fair, he was writing metaphorically – we all know what he meant.

He now suggests that the search for this particular Holy Grail is over, now that scientists have come up with a type of theory, known as M-theory, that may describe the behaviour of all the fundamental particles and force, and even account for the very birth of the universe. If this theory is backed up by experiment, it might perhaps replace all religious accounts of creation – in Hawking's capacious mind, it already has.

The science-religion debate has been going on since science was born, centuries ago. Until relatively recently, it seemed to have quietened down, but now Hawking and others have brought it back into the limelight. It's striking that the scientists who contribute most vociferously to the arguments work in the field of evolutionary biology and fundamental physics. These, at least superficially, appear to be the territories where science and religion can make conflicting claims, leading us to ask which has the better case. But are they alternatives? Is there really any serious argument between the two?

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