Stephen Hawking, the leading physicist, recently stated in his book The Grand Design, that the birth of the universe was an inevitable consequence of the laws of physics and did not need a creator to act as a midwife. Here are some responses from other thinkers:
John Lennox, professor of maths, Oxford University: “The laws of physics can explain how the jet engine works, but someone had to build the thing, put in the fuel and start it up. The jet could not have been created without the laws of physics on their own – but the task of development and creation needed the genius of [Sir Frank] Whittle as its agent. Similarly, the laws of physics could never have actually built the universe. Some agency must have been involved.”
Elsewhere Hawking has invoked the idea of multi-universes (“multiverses”) to explain why our universe is so perfectly balanced in terms of gravity, the speed of light, the cosmological constant, and dozens of other finely tuned physical constants, which make galaxies, carbon, and life itself possible. If you have to go to the lengths of proposing an infinite number of universes just to make the fine balance of ours seem possible or likely, then you must be a half-mad materialist. I.e., you must have such faith that the universe needs no God that you are willing to theorize any solution, even infinite universes which would be impossible to confirm or investigate by definition.
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