What does his latest book say?
There is no God and science can better explain the universe than a religion, says British physicist and cosmologist Steven Hawking in his latest book, Short Answers to Big Questions, which was just published several months after his death.
This position is certainly not surprising, since as long as he lived, Hawking did not miss the opportunity to state unequivocally that he was an atheist and that he saw the creation of the world from the scientist's point of view alone, often provoking the annoyance of believers in a religion.
His latest book, which includes ten essays with questions and answers, begins with the question of whether there is a god and gives a negative answer. "I think," he says, "that the universe was created spontaneously from scratch, according to the laws of science." If you, like me, accept that the laws of nature are fixed, then you don't have to ask a lot: what role is left for God? '
For Hawking - and many other scientists - the laws of gravity, relativity, quantum mechanics, etc. there are enough to explain everything in the universe. "If you want, you can say that these laws are God's work, but that's a definition of God, rather than proof of existence," Hawking wrote.
But did a divine hand create the "autopilot" of the natural laws that govern the universe? This is the basic belief of religious scholars (about one in three scientists believe in God, according to research) and ordinary people, but not Hawking. As he puts it: "Did God create the quantum laws that allowed the Big Bang to happen?" I don't want to offend any believer, but I think science has a more convincing explanation than a god creator. "
For Hawking, quantum mechanics is enough to explain how subatomic particles behave in order for something to appear somewhere, then disappear and reappear elsewhere. Because the universe itself was once the size of a single particle, it did. "The universe itself, with all its astonishing vastness and complexity, could have simply appeared suddenly without violating the known laws of nature," Hawking said.
And then what was before "Big Bang", the faithful ask? "There was no time before the Big Bang," Hawking said. "It simply came to our notice then that there was no reason why there should be no time for a cause. For me, that means there is no chance of a creator, because there was no time for a creator. "
"Everyone is free to believe whatever they want. In my opinion, the simplest explanation is that there is no God. Nobody created the universe and nobody directs our destiny ", he writes. This is Hawking's main atheistic argument: that you do not need a cause (a creator) to start something, in this case the whole world. Whether this will convince believers and religions is another matter.