Is there a creator?

One question cosmologists get asked most often is about what happened before the Big Bang. Hawking’s own view was that the question is meaningless. For all intents and purposes, time itself – as well as the universe and everything in it – began at the Big Bang. “For me, this means that there is no possibility of a creator,” he wrote in his final book, “because there is no time for a creator to have existed in.” That’s an opinion many people will disagree with, but one that Hawking expressed on numerous occasions throughout his life.