Stephen Hawking, Leonard Mlodinow, the anthropic principle, and God.

When asked if I believe in god (or just a god... any god...) I often fall back on the answer that although I don't believe in any superior being interacting with humans in any sort of way, even after death, I do believe that that there must have been something out there that started this whole universe thing going. I mean, what put all the elements out there in the first place? Why not just nothing?

Well, that qualification for the existence of a god may not be necessary anymore. Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow (remember him?... the random numbers guy who spoke at the Perimeter Institute.. ) have released a scientific explanation to the origins of the universe without the necessity of a god.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704206804575467921609024244.html

"As recent advances in cosmology suggest, the laws of gravity and quantum theory allow universes to appear spontaneously from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist. It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going.

Our universe seems to be one of many, each with different laws. That multiverse idea is not a notion invented to account for the miracle of fine tuning. It is a consequence predicted by many theories in modern cosmology."

We don't need the almost 1000 comments on this article in the WSJ at the time of posting to tell us that this is obviously still quite a controversial conclusion. However, it would be really interesting to read up on the particular aspects of the laws of gravity and quantum theory that do predict spontaneous creation of universes. Hopefully there'll be a layman's book out soon?!

--

ps. Is 'god' capitalized? I've heard this before but here's a pretty good article summing it up.

"Confusion is caused by the fact that Christians don't typically ascribe a personal name to their god - some use Yahweh or Jehovah, but that is pretty rare. The name they use happens to be the same as the general term for the class that being belongs to. It's not unlike a person who has named their cat, Cat."...