Nature is enough

I'm really glad that Stephen Hawking has finally cleared up the much quote-mined sentence at the end of his now famous 1988 book "A brief history of time". In that book he signed off with the words, "if we discover a complete theory, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason – for then we should know the mind of God." Of course people that know him have always said that he's referring to "God" here in the Deistic sense, i.e. meaning "Nature" or the Universe but never the less religious fundamentalists and creationists everywhere have used this sentence to make half-baked assertions along the lines of "famous scientist believes in God" This is about as likely as me killing my children because I say things like "if you don't stop arguing with your sister you're not going to reach your tenth birthday!". Language is such an imprecise way of communicating ideas and feelings.

In a new book titled "The grand design" Hawking says (more clearly this time) that "It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going". New ideas and discoveries in physics strongly suggest that because of physical laws like gravity Universes can and will create themselves from nothing and develop completely naturally, including the evolution (and descent by natural selection) of sentient beings such as ourselves in suitable environments. Since 1992 (and mentioned regularly here) we are discovering exoplanets and other features of the universe which make the assertion that our existence is somehow special or necessitates a divine (supernatural) spark of some kind redundant.

Sounds like an interesting book;

PS if you want to see a live debate between Ruth Gledhill and Richard Dawkins about this topic then you can watch it (live) here. So far, nothing new from the theist side, just the usual ontological diversions about "purpose" and x might be true or y might be true, science can't prove (insert Deity of your choice) doesn't exist. Celestial teapots in spades and god of the gaps ad nausea, let's hope she comes up with something more convincing or I predict the usual post coital excuse of "I lost the debate because Dawkins is so shrill, oh yeah and what about all the charity, therefore God exists".