Only by tweaking the meanings of either or both of the words could it possibly be brought into the realm of coherence, but then it wouldn’t be the same idea anymore.

Nothing can create itself. we know this on an a priori basis. for something to be able to create itself, would mean that it would have to exist prior to itself! Obviously, this makes no sense whatsoever. This is different than saying God is necessary, or not necesary for the universe to exist.

As I was scrolling down to the bottom of the comments to respond to Jake Max I came upon your reply to his snarky remarks. Thank-you, I couldn’t have said it better.

Now, the question of “the origin of the Universe” is, as Dr. Barr points out, well outside human experience. Why should we expect human intuition to be any kind of reliable guide? It’s been regularly and spectacularly wrong before (e.g. geocentrism, continental drift, evolution, relativity, quantum mechanics).

The best answer we could have right now is “I dunno.” Hawking is quite correct that some models don’t need a God, and so assertions that God is the only possibility are wrong. That doesn’t disprove God, only the assertion of necessity.

I strongly suspect that, if and when somebody has the right insight to make sense of cosmological origins, it will be just as big a counterintuitive surprise as the other examples I listed above.

The tone of your remarks suggests to me that you imagine yourself much more scientifically knowledgeable than the people who post here, probably because we are in your eyes mere “theologians”, who by definition are scientific ignoramuses.

Unfortunately for you, however, it also seems that you really are quite unfamiliar with the relevant branches of physics, as appears from your response to potkas7. I actually do theoretical research in particle physics and cosmology; so I will now set you straight about something.

You say to potkas7 that “Any theoretical model based on mathematics can be used to make testable predictions, which means it’s inevitably falsifiable.” Only someone who understands very little about the current situation in particle physics and cosmology could say such a ridiculous thing. One could have a mathematical model of what goes on inside the Schwarzschild radius of a black hole,. but such a model is not testable in practice.

It is a fact that no one in the particle physics community has at the moment even the faintest idea how M theory can be tested, not just now, but in the future. It may turn out to be testable, but that is far from certain, and in fact, a large portion of the physics community doubts it quite strongly. That is why there have been few faculty hires in that area in physics departments in recent years. It is expected by many physicists that M-theory/superstring theory will be seen more as a branch of pure mathematics than as physics in the years to come. Of course, we may get lucky and find a way to test it; but no one is holding his breath.

Consider even a much simpler theoretical idea: “grand unification”, one of my areas of expertise. (I wrote the article on Grand Unified Theories for the Encyclopedia of Physics.) Most of the phenomena predicted by grand unified theories lie far beyond the range that is accessible to man-made experiments. There are a few things we MIGHT be fortunate enough to see experimentally (proton decay, particles called “gauginos” at the LHC) that could allow us to test grand unified theories, but it is more than merely possible, in the view of experts, that we shall NOT see these particular things. So the likelihood is high that grand unified theories will remain untestable (neither falsifiable nor conformable), despite the fact that most theorists think the basic idea is correct. I do not say this with any satisfaction. Quite the reverse, since it is a field I have done much of my research in.

Your comment that “Hawking doesn’t need to be theologian to make the simple remark that we no longer need to invoke God to explain the existence of our universe”, is equally unthinking. The question whether we need to invoke God to explain the existence of the universe is a philosophical question, not a physics question. Hawking himself said as much in his earlier book “A Brief History of Time”. So Hawking may not have to be a theologian to make his “simple statement”, but he needs to be a philosopher or at least aware of philosophical ideas and arguments. And that is precisely Martin Rees’s point.

Atheists, no matter how uninformed about science they may actually be, have an annoying habit of descending upon religious websites to bring scientific enlightenment to the ignorant backwoodsmen they imagine to be there. Very frequently, these Prometheuses simply embarrass themselves by finding out, too late, that they are actually speaking to people who know far more about science
than they do.