Stephen Hawking: God didn't create universe

&#62;<i>And, indeed, he argues, any form of intelligent life that evolves anywhere will automatically find that it lives somewhere suitable for it.</i><p>Definitely deserves a "well, duh", but <i>so many people</i> seem averse to this line of thought. I can't count the number of times people have argued in my vicinity for God's existence based on how nicely our planet suits us... while in the same breath demonstrating that they understand <i>nothing</i> about what they're arguing against.<p>That said, the world <i>is</i> trying to kill us. If we didn't fight back with intelligence and reproduction, we'd die off rather quickly. Maybe it's not so suitable for us.

I find it funny how <i>hands-off</i> the article is. CNN tries too hard not to offend anyone, and unlike most articles, it doesn't actually present its own opinion.<p>Which would be nice to see in everyday reporting, but it seems the risk of offending people is the only way to garner true neutrality.

So the reason there is a God, is that there must be a reason everything is created. I have tried to find out why that must be so, but have not come up with it. The only reason I could think of why people are saying this is that it might feel better for us humans that there is a reason.

First the existence of aliens and now the existence of God. What totally unscientific speculation is Stephen Hawking going to make next for the media to latch on to?

A perfect title for a post not to be read. If you don't believe in God then for sure that you don't believe that he creates the universe. So nothing fancy here.

Evolution, that's where many scientists and skeptics fail to address the <i>big question</i>. I can't believe that life <i>evolves</i>, in the sense of growing organs to meet specific needs. Natural selection does not work like that: if you have organs which don't suit you, they atrophy, that's it; if they suit you, those which have them stronger will survive. That's it. You don't grow wings to fly, lungs to breath air, brains to think. OTOH, believing in a creator just moves the issue elsewhere: who created such creator? Is he/she/it alone? I've grown comfortable with not knowing for sure what the heck we are doing here.

I propose something interesting. Create a computer program that has some rules so is able to question whether there is God, and whose answer is We are. Then you can refine the program, when then program is very complex, say it satisfies Turing test, we can think about God with the help of this machine. I think people playing the game Life with its evolving capabilities must have been thinking something along these lines.

It should clearly be announced here:<p>Hawking is doing a really bad job to atheists here: he's becoming as anti-scientific as one can get...<p>Science has its very defined principles, as they are: they don't have to contradict all of: philosophy, mathematics, physics, (and so on...).<p>This is a really sad story: he simply seems to be a really sad and angry person (personally, I would be worse, in his actual state...), and this seems to influence all of his excogitations...

<i>it is somewhat more likely that there is a God than that there is not</i><p>[citation needed]

Heh, it's actually funny because in the bible it states that 'the Word of God holds the universe together'

I'm guessing Stephen Hawking has now run out of things to say.

&#62; any form of intelligent life that evolves anywhere will automatically find that it lives somewhere suitable for it.<p>This is circular reasoning.<p>I know it's unpopular to question evolution, and this might lose me all the points I gathered in the past three weeks, but,<p>But this kind of argument assumes that life can and will inevitably evolve spontaneously some where, some how.<p>It's a tautology.<p>Sure, there could be a completely different form of intelligent life, in a completely different kind of environment, but that just means that God can and will create any form of life in any kind of environment.<p>The core question is, can life really evolve spontaneously? I'm sure many will scream "of course yes, duh".<p>Natural selection doesn't explain anything about how something might evolve, it just says: if you can produce many many good options, the best will survive, and therefore you get optimal design.<p>Sure, if there are forces that produce new ideas and things, and you can choose the best every step of the way, you'll get something really good. Like if, say, people submit patches to Linux, and they get reviewed and tested, you'll get something that Linus himself couldn't have come up with on his own.<p>NS is useless if there's nothing that can produce these patches. If you have a really good team of tester and code reviewers, but no one submits any patch (or, no one makes any change), then the software will not evolve on its own. It will not get better just because there are a lot of people to test it. It needs other people to make changes/submit patches.<p>It's the "mutation" part that tries to explain how new things actually get produced, and I find it ridiculous. Not only does it not fly with me conceptually, I'd say - at the risk of being stoned - that there's no real evidence for it. It's usually just a lot of hand waving as if, "of course mutation can produce many useful things for NS to select from, how dare you object to that?".<p>Yes, you can observe variations, and you can observe certain variations being selected. Like skin color, or hair type. This is, however, entirely different from observing useful patches being produced by mutations.<p><i>All</i> cited instances of observed NS operate on variations that are already there. This is where hand waving about mutations come in.<p>Video games can be designed to use a high resolution or low resolution depending on the system specs. It's therefor not surprising when users on low end machines will "select" the low-resolution configuration. There are options to select from, but these options weren't produced by anything remotely resembling a mutation; it's a built-in option that's already available -- nothing new.<p>No one denies the design; no one, none at all. Neo-Darwinism just says that design can be automated by mutation and natural selection.<p>It is easy to describe how a complex system works once you discover it; but that doesn't make it any less impressive. I'm often impressed by some of my own programs, despite the fact that, not only do I know exactly how they work, but I even built them myself. Usually when you discover the internals of a system, it gets even more impressive.

If evolution is such a obvious theory as to be taken as fact, then why are there no species obviously evolving into another?<p>According to the theory, millions of years ago Chimps evolved into humans. Why then are there no chimps in a stage of evolving that would signify a progression to a different species? They've had millions of years to do so...

&#62;"The 'god' that Stephen Hawking is trying to debunk is not the creator God of the Abrahamic faiths who really is the ultimate explanation for why there is something rather than nothing," said Denis Alexander.<p>Wrong.