The Physicist Who Answered the Oldest Question
Stephen Hawking died on March 14, 2018 — Pi Day, and the anniversary of Einstein's birth. His ashes were interred in Westminster Abbey between the remains of Charles Darwin and Isaac Newton. His final book, Brief Answers to the Big Questions, finished posthumously by his family and academic colleagues, opens with the question that has followed every great scientist since the Enlightenment: Is there a God?
Hawking does not equivocate. He builds his answer methodically, starting from the laws of nature and arriving at a conclusion that is as clear as it is controversial.
Laws Over Lawmakers
Hawking begins with a personal frame. Diagnosed with motor neurone disease at twenty-one, he spent decades in a body that many cultures would have attributed to divine punishment. He rejects this outright:
For centuries, it was believed that disabled people like me were living under a curse that was inflicted by God. Well, I suppose it's possible that I've upset someone up there, but I prefer to think that everything can be explained another way, by the laws of nature.
The deadpan humor is characteristic. But the underlying argument is serious: if physical laws explain everything from the trajectory of a tennis ball to the motion of galaxies, the concept of God becomes redundant — or at best, a synonym for those laws themselves.
One could define God as the embodiment of the laws of nature. However, this is not what most people would think of as God. They mean a human-like being, with whom one can have a personal relationship. When you look at the vast size of the universe, and how insignificant and accidental human life is in it, that seems most implausible.
Hawking follows Einstein in using the word "God" as shorthand for the laws of nature rather than a conscious being. This is a distinction that matters enormously but is frequently lost in popular discourse, where quoting a scientist's use of "God" can make it sound like an endorsement of theism.
The Universe as Free Lunch
The strongest section of the argument addresses the origin question directly. Even granting that natural laws govern the universe, religions have long claimed ownership of the moment before those laws existed. Where did everything come from?
Hawking's answer rests on the concept of negative energy. He uses an analogy: a man digging a hole to build a hill. The hill represents the positive energy of the universe; the hole represents the equal and opposite negative energy stored in space itself. The two cancel out to zero.
So what does this mean in our quest to find out if there is a God? It means that if the universe adds up to nothing, then you don't need a God to create it. The universe is the ultimate free lunch.
This is Hawking at his most accessible — translating difficult physics into vivid metaphor. The leap from "positive and negative energy sum to zero" to "therefore no creator is needed" is elegant, though it does move quickly past a genuine philosophical gap. Explaining how a universe can emerge from nothing is not quite the same as explaining why there is something rather than nothing. Hawking acknowledges the strangeness but does not dwell on it.
Time Itself as the Knockout Blow
The argument's most powerful move comes from general relativity. As the universe is traced backward in time toward the Big Bang, it shrinks to a point of infinite density — effectively a black hole. And inside a black hole, time ceases to exist.
You can't get to a time before the Big Bang because there was no time before the Big Bang. We have finally found something that doesn't have a cause, because there was no time for a cause to exist in. For me this means that there is no possibility of a creator, because there is no time for a creator to have existed in.
This is the argument's logical cornerstone. If time began with the Big Bang, the question "what happened before?" is meaningless — like asking what is south of the South Pole. No time means no prior cause, and no prior cause means no creator.
It is worth noting, however, that this argument addresses a classical, interventionist God — one who exists within or prior to time and sets things in motion. It has less to say about more abstract theological concepts, such as Paul Tillich's "ground of being" or the apophatic traditions that define God precisely as that which transcends categories like time and causation. Hawking's case is devastating against the watchmaker God of popular religion, but the philosophical conversation is wider than the physics alone can settle.
A Cosmos Without Comfort
Hawking does not flinch from the emotional consequences of his position:
It's my view that the simplest explanation is that there is no God. No one created the universe and no one directs our fate. This leads me to a profound realisation: there is probably no heaven and afterlife either. I think belief in an afterlife is just wishful thinking.
There is no softening here. No hedging. The word "simplest" is doing heavy work — invoking Occam's razor without naming it. And yet Hawking finds the conclusion not bleak but liberating. He sees one finite life as reason for urgency and gratitude rather than despair.
We have this one life to appreciate the grand design of the universe, and for that I am extremely grateful.
The phrase "grand design" is a deliberate echo of his earlier book by that title. Coming from a man who spent fifty-five years in a failing body, the gratitude lands with unusual force.
Science as Moral Engine
The book's introduction extends the argument beyond cosmology into ethics. If there is no divine plan, the responsibility for humanity's future falls entirely on human shoulders. Hawking embraces this weight:
Let us fight for every woman and every man to have the opportunity to live healthy, secure lives, full of opportunity and love. We are all time travellers, journeying together into the future. But let us work together to make that future a place we want to visit.
It is a humanist creed, delivered without apology. The rhetorical shift from physics to moral exhortation is abrupt, but that may be the point. For Hawking, the absence of a cosmic plan is not an excuse for passivity. It is the reason action matters.
Bottom Line
Hawking's argument against the existence of God is built on three pillars: the laws of nature explain everything we observe, the universe's total energy sums to zero, and time itself began at the Big Bang, eliminating the possibility of a prior cause. The case is strongest when it stays close to physics and weakest when it implies that physics alone can resolve questions that are partly metaphysical. But Hawking was never writing for philosophers. He was writing for the millions of ordinary people who asked him this question at lectures, in letters, and on the street. For that audience, Brief Answers to the Big Questions delivers exactly what its title promises: a clear, courageous, and profoundly human response to the biggest question of all.