This week Stephen Hawking admitted he’s been wrong for most of his career. Oops.

But he’s better now. Now, we can believe him. No, really.

He knows he is right this time based on things he has observed. Well, there you go. Glad that’s settled. Whew.

Wrong about what? Apparently God isn’t necessary.

His newly-minted, genuine, Hawkins-observed, sure-as-shootin’, can’t-be-wrong-this-time, mind-boggling theory can be summed up thusly:

Stuff Happens.

It should be a bumper sticker. Or maybe it was.

Stephen revealed the correction this week during a lecture at the California Institute of Technology promoting his new book entitled Stuff Happens (Also known as  “The Origin of the Universe” with  co-author, Leonard Mlodinow which is due out next week).

The British physicist began with African creation myths and then made jokes about the Pope and the inquisition, which Hawking never observed.

The vastly simplified version of the argument is that gravity shapes time and space therefore gravity balances the equation. Time and space didn’t exist in the original black hole therefore God had no time with which to create the universe and wasn’t needed.

“Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing,” Hawking and his co-author, Caltech physicist Leonard Mlodinow, write in “The Grand Design,” which is due to be issued next week. “Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist. It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going.”

“Because gravity shapes space and time, it allows space-time to be locally stable but globally unstable. On the scale of the entire universe, the positive energy of the matter can be balanced by the negative gravitational energy, and so there is no restriction on the creation of whole universes.” link

Nice to know there were no restrictions on the universe where we live. I was worried – a fact unobserved by Stephen Hawking.

This also presupposes that there was nothing whatsoever before the Big Bang and therefore science covers everything that has ever been. If it can’t be observed scientifically, according to Hawking, then it is unanswerable and doesn’t matter to him.

That includes God, otherwise known as He-whom-Stephen-Hawking-has-not-observed.

That would be God, who introduced Himself to Moses as “I Am”, meaning eternal, before time, in time and beyond time, God who described Himself as a spiritual being not of this physical world, God who called Himself the Creator of all that exists.

Logically, it would take someone outside of time and matter to create all time and matter, which doesn’t matter to Stephen Hawking.

But then, he’s been wrong before.

 

Photo Credit: NASA/WMAP
This graphic shows a timeline of the universe based on the Big Bang theory and inflation models.