Stephen Hawking, formerly of the University of Cambridge and until his death in 2018 the world’s best-known scientist, made a similar argument. In his book The Grand Design, coauthored with Leonard Mlodinow, he argues that “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.” Thus, for Hawking, “it is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the Universe going.”9 The late Victor Stenger made similar arguments in his
...more
