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GameOver22 on 05 May 2011
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trestres said:
September 03, 2010 "The Universe Exists Because of Spontaneous Creation" -Stephen Hawking

In "The Grand Design," Stephen Hawking and Caltech physicist Leonard Mlodinow suggest that physics and metaphysics (and religion) are merging. The grand design which we have taken for granted since Newton is more complex than anything we ever dreamed of. Models of the universe are changing radically. Many physicists doublt the reality of a Big Bang. We live in a world in which many physicists have come to believe there are not merely three dimensions plus time, but 10, or possibly 11 -a new world view world that encompasses that includes black holes, supermassive black holes, galaxy-mass black holes, dark matter, dark energy , string theory, M-theory, alternate pasts and alternate futures. 

p { clear: none ! important; } "The universe began with the Big Bang, which simply followed the inevitable law of physics," Hawking writes. “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.The universe didn't need a God to begin; it was quite capable of launching its existence on its own," says reknowned physicist Stephen Hawking Hawking explains in his new book, The Grand Design.

“It is not necessary to invoke God to set the universe going." In his famous 1988 book, A Brief History of Time, Hawking did not dismiss the possibility that God may have played some role in creation. But earlier this summer he said in an interview that he does not believe in a "personal" God, reported Great Britain's Telegraph. "The question is: is the way the universe began chosen by God for reasons we can't understand, or was it determined by a law of science? I believe the second," he explained. "If you like, you can call the laws of science 'God,' but it wouldn't be a personal God that you could meet, and ask questions."

Casey Kazan

Source:

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-ca-stephen-hawking-20100905,0,2573263.story

 

Now, even Hawkins believes in spontaneous creation, but he doesn't credit God for it rather than laws themselves. An atheist like him crediting absolute nothing for something, how is that possible?

I guess there's some of us who will believe that there was someone that existed for eternity that made this something that we call universe. Others will credit the "nothing" and say things begin to exist just because.
I will chose to believe in the first one, although I don't follow any set religion, but I do believe in the creator, in the initial force that let everything else be, otherwise I would be believing that out of nothin,g something can be made, which is absurd.

That is really the point of that phrase, "In the beginning, there was nothing. Which exploded." Its just taking a shot at the claim that something can from nothing. The debate really comes down to which claim is more reasonable: 1.) whether some physical thing can exist uncaused, 2.) whether some physical thing can exist for eternity, 3.) whether something non-physical (God) can exist for eternity. The real problem with this dilemna is that none of the choices are necessarily false. All the options are possible, and it really comes down to which one is more likely. The problem at this point is that we don't have any realistic way to assign probability functions to the options (making it difficult to determine which one is more likely). This is one reason why I admit that both sides have good arguments, but its unlikely that the debate will ever be settled definitively.