The Grand Design V. The Intelligent Design

Not quite as old as the battle of the sexes is the battle between creation and evolution.  Stephen Hawking, who is a British theoretical physicist and cosmologist, has recently released a new book called “The Grand Design.”  In it he states that “because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing...Spontaneous creation is the reason why there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist;" meaning that the universe is something that came from nothing.

Father Robert J. Spitzer, a Jesuit priest who recently published a book called “New Proofs for the Existence of God: Contributions of Contemporary Physics and Philosophy,” says that “what many term the first principle of metaphysics” is “From nothing only nothing comes.”  He goes on: “If the physical universe had a beginning (a point at which it came into existence) then prior to that point it was nothing,” Father Spitzer said in his blog. “And if it was nothing then it could not have created itself (because only nothing can come from nothing). “So what does that imply?” he asked. “The very reality that Dr. Hawking wants to avoid, namely, a transcendent power which can cause the universe to come into existence.”

“Belief in God is not about plugging a gap in explaining how one thing relates to another within the universe,” Anglican Archbishop Rowan Williams of Canterbury said. “It is the belief that there is an intelligent, living agent on whose activity everything ultimately depends for its existence.”