On Mon, 21 Jan 2008, Jim Farmelant wrote:
> Actually, Holt is wrong about Hawking. In his book, *A Brief History of
> Time*, Hawking wrote that if "the universe is really self-contained,
> having no boundary or edge, it would have no beginning nor end, would
> simply be. What place then for a creator?" (p. 157).
Leaving aside the fact that this depends on the concept of imaginary time (Hawking agrees that the universe we inhabit has a beginning in real time -- in fact he is one of the main guys whose work made this into the accepted wisdom), Hawking also famously says in the same book that if we could find a solution to the Theory of Everything (aka a scientific answer to the question of why anything exists) we would have "seen into the mind of God." Which many people have taken to imply a belief in what has been called the god of Spinoza and Einstein. Which many people would take to be the original model of Western pantheism (Spinoza, that is).
But to get back to the original point, these meanderings of Hawking or Vilenkin and other top cosmologists aren't evidence that god exists or is even a useful concept. But they are evidence that, FBOW, many of the scientists most qualified to pronounce on the subject don't find any fundamental incompatibility between a physical universe understood entirely in scientific terms and various possible conceptions of god.
That doesn't mean you can't make a case for such incompatibility. But it does seem to mean that you can't claim this incompatability is so obvious and certain that you're a blind idiot if you don't see it. Clearly it's a topic on which (very) intelligent people can disagree.
Michael