Grand Design & Stephen Hawking

"It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going."

This sentence provoked a lot of chatter, most of it implying that Hawking might, at some stage in his career as a physicist, have believed that God could have been a contender. This is not the case. In the first place, even though Hawking invoked the name of God a number of times in 1988 in A Brief History of Time, he clearly never believed in a supernatural explanation. In the second place, science works by concentrating on natural explanations. Anything else would be cheating.

And in the third place, although you cannot prove a negative – that God does not exist – you can deliver partially testable theories of creation that might explain the existence of time, space, matter and energy without His help. And even those physicists who do believe in God and serve as lay-preachers do their best without supernatural feedback. It's what science is good at. It is why people can talk with such confidence about the history of the universe, shortly after the very beginning.

Tim Radford, The Guardian Review of the Grand Design