Here there are some good articles that can explain the mistaken theological stance of Hawking.
Stephen Hawking’s God
In his best-selling book “A Brief History of Time”, physicist Stephen Hawking claimed that when physicists find the theory he and his colleagues are looking for - a so-called “theory of everything” - then they will have seen into “the mind of God”. Hawking is by no means the only scientist who has associated God with the laws of physics. Nobel laureate Leon Lederman, for example, has made a link between God and a subatomic particle known as the Higgs boson. Lederman has suggested that when physicists find this particle in their accelerators it will be like looking into the face of God. But what kind of God are these physicists talking about?
Theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg suggests that in fact this is not much of a God at all. Weinberg notes that traditionally the word “God” has meant “an interested personality”. But that is not what Hawking and Lederman mean. Their “god”, he says, is really just “an abstract principle of order and harmony”, a set of mathematical equations. Weinberg questions then why they use the word “god” at all. He makes the rather profound point that “if language is to be of any use to us, then we ought to try and preserve the meaning of words, and ‘god’ historically has not meant the laws of nature.” The question of just what is “God” has taxed theologians for thousands of years; what Weinberg reminds us is to be wary of glib definitions.
God and Time
In his book “A Brief History of Time” physicist Stephen Hawking made the claim that if his “no-boundary cosmology” was correct then there would be no need for a creator. His cosmological model proposes that there was no precise moment when the universe “began”, because there was no precise moment when time began. Because of that Hawking, claimed, there would be no role for a creator. In Hawking’s model, the quality called time emerged out of a kind of quantum fuzz in which there was, at least at the initial moment of the big bang, an “imaginary” component of time. This term, does not mean a kind of Alice-in-Wonderland time, it has a precise mathematical meaning - relating to what are called complex numbers. The details of imaginary time are not important, what matters rather is Hawking’s notion that time as we know it did not begin at a specific point, but gradually emerged from something more complex. According to Hawking, the universe did not begin “in” time, rather time itself came into being with the universe.
But if Hawking sees this as an argument against a creator, physicist and theologian Robert Russell begs to differ. Russell points out that Hawking’s idea is very similar to the idea proposed over 1500 years ago by the great early Christian theologian, Saint Augustine. Augustine too declared that the universe was not created in time, but rather with time. As Russell notes, here is a beautiful instance where classic theology and contemporary science are very much in sync with one another. “You have an interesting picture of two very different cultures,” he says, “but a similar intellectual question being asked in both cases.” And, moreover, similar answers being given. What this shows us, Russell says, is that “Hawking is actually our ally, theologically, because he tells us that the notion of a finite universe as the creation of God can be sustained, whether or not it has a beginning point.”
