Originally posted by twhitehead
And you are welcome to that belief.
However, I think Hawking was saying that since the current makup of the universe is a result of the events during the big bang and not what came before, it doesn't really matter whether God was behind it. It wouldn't make any difference.
If he had an effect, it would be either in the formulation of the laws of physi nce would it make if the universes existence was just as much a brute fact as Gods existence?
My personal theory and I entrain anyone to disprove it:
Our universe came about in a 'high school' class science experiment, where the kids had 5th dimensional straws where they blew energy into which upset a local condition that they were monitoring attosecond by attosecond for their high school graduation project.
They had to get it right, generating a viable universe, or else they would have been stuck behind a year, doing it all over again the next semester. We can't know if the instructors actually gave them a passing grade for another (what to us) is another 50 billion years or so. Of course to them, only a few weeks pass by while the kids monitor the experiment.
They are taught to have a strictly hands off approach to the project else they interfere with the end product of the experiment, that is, do any life forms generated in that daughter universe evolve enough to see the classroom and discern the students at work?
BTW, here is a link to an alternate physics of the BB, where there is no singularity. Very preliminary for sure, but here it is:
http://www.physorg.com/news198135631.html