Oddly, the latter part of this statement represents what logicians call a tautology—a vacuous statement that simply states the same thing twice in two different ways. “Spontaneous creation” is not “the reason there is something rather than nothing.” The phrase “spontaneous creation” simply refers to something coming into existence from nothing. By invoking “spontaneous creation,” Hawking did not identify a cause of the universe, still less a materialistic one.3 Nevertheless, in The Grand Design he asserted that spontaneous creation made it unnecessary “to invoke God to . . . set the universe
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