Brief Answers to the Big Questions

by Stephen Hawking

If you like, you can say the laws are the work of God, but that is more a definition of God than a proof of his existence.

If you accept, as I do, that the laws of nature are fixed, then it doesn’t take long to ask: what role is there for God?

One could define God as the embodiment of the laws of nature. However, this is not what most people would think of as God. They mean a human-like being, with whom one can have a personal relationship.

I use the word “God” in an impersonal sense, like Einstein did, for the laws of nature, so knowing the mind of God is knowing the laws of nature. My prediction is that we will know the mind of God by the end of this century.

The laws of science determine the evolution of the universe, given its state at one time. These laws may, or may not, have been decreed by God, but he cannot intervene to break the laws, or they would not be laws. That leaves God with the freedom to choose the initial state of the universe, but even here it seems there may be laws. So God would have no freedom at all.

Something eternal is more perfect than something created.

If the laws of science are suspended at the beginning of the universe, might not they also fail at other times? A law is not a law if it only holds sometimes. I believe that we should try to understand the beginning of the universe on the basis of science. It may be a task beyond our powers, but at least we should make the attempt.

One cannot accurately predict both the position and the speed of a particle. The more accurately the position is predicted, the less accurately you will be able to predict the speed, and vice versa.