by Mike Gray

Alan Boyle writes on MSNBC’s Cosmic Log that the widely-circulated quote from cosmologist Stephen Hawking needs some amplification:

British physicist Stephen Hawking’s latest book is already making waves with his observation that science can explain the universe’s origin without invoking God.
“Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing,” Hawking and his co-author, Caltech physicist Leonard Mlodinow, write in “The Grand Design,” which is due to be issued next week. “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.”
That’s the quote that lit the fuse in The Guardian as well in The Times of London, which published an excerpt from the book in its Thursday edition. But by itself, the quote doesn’t have much “there” there. If Hawking is saying merely that something can arise from nothing willy-nilly, that’s not much of an explanation for the origin of the universe.
What he’s actually saying in the book is that when we study the universe’s origins, we have to work our way back from the present, rather than assuming there’s an arbitrary point 13.7 billion years ago when Someone pressed the button on a cosmic stopwatch. And when you look at it that way, the universe looks more and more like a quantum phenomenon, in which a multitude of histories diverge. This is what Hawking calls top-down cosmology.

Does Hawking’s view mean that modern physics “leaves no place for God in the creation of the universe,” as the Times suggests, or that “God did not create the universe,” as The Guardian claims? Not unless you need a “God of the Gaps” to step into science’s place. A more sophisticated view would hold that physics (and evolutionary biology, to cite another example) are the not-always-mysterious ways in which God routinely works. In fact, Soren Kierkegaard would say that God’s workings have to be transparent — and I tend to side with Soren.