Hawking and God

The vast majority of my theologian friends wouldn’t recognise a scientific theory if it reared up and bit them, so I have been surprised to be asked so often recently if the late Stephen Hawking’s final paper strengthened the case for God?

He was an agnostic, and the lines in his famous book A Brief History of Time, (achieving a “theory of everything” would be “the ultimate triumph of human reason for then we should know the mind of God”) are a rhetorical flourish.

Hawking’s final paper is an interesting hypothesis about how our universe could look on the largest scale. It suggests that it may be simpler than we believe today, but I doubt it’s more enlightening than the Buddha’s discreet silence on the subject.

(REV DR) JOHN CAMERON,

Howard Place, St Andrews