Stephen Hawking Says Creation Was Godless, Inevitable

In his new book, the famed physicist dismisses the notion, sometimes peddled by scientists, that a deity was involved with the big bang: “Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing. ... It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going.”

BBC:

Citing the 1992 discovery of a planet orbiting a star other than our Sun, he said: “That makes the coincidences of our planetary conditions—the single Sun, the lucky combination of Earth-Sun distance and solar mass—far less remarkable, and far less compelling as evidence that the Earth was carefully designed just to please us human beings.”

He adds: “Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing.

“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.”

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NASA, ESA, Hubble, R. Sahai (JPL)