http://www.wnd.com/?pageId=251685By Gene Koprowski
© 2011 WorldNetDaily
The book "is a vehicle for putting across lightweight speculation that anybody could imagine," asserts MIT-educated physicist Thomas P. Sheahen in a paper provided to WND.
Hawking and co-author Leonard Mlodinow, a Caltech physicist, claim there was no need for a creator, as the law of gravity assures that the "universe can, and will, create itself from nothing."
"If the author names were reversed, Mlodinow first, everyone would ignore this book," Sheahen writes in "A Physicist Looks at The Grand Design.'" "Only Hawking's fame boosts it to totally undeserved prominence."
Get Ray Comfort's "Nothing Created Everything" to dismantle the arguments of skeptics
Among physicists, Hawking is esteemed because of his contributions to cosmology, including breakthroughs on black holes, and he has drawn public admiration for courageously continuing his work despite suffering from Lou Gehrig's disease.
Published by Bantam Books, the 208-page work posits that this "spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist."
"The folly of Hawkings' claim is pretty obvious," E. Calvin Beisner, national spokesman for the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation in suburban Washington, D.C., told WND. "The law of gravity is, of course, not nothing, and consequently the universe's spontaneous self-creation wouldn't be a creation from nothing anyway."
Beisner argued further that "the law of gravity is a law of physics, affecting the interaction of physical, material things."
"There is no law of gravity where there are no physical things," he reasoned.
In "The Grand Design," Hawking and his co-author take on not only religion but philosophy as well.
"Philosophy is dead," the authors claim. As it has "not kept up with modern developments in science, particularly physics, and scientists have become the bearers of the torch of discovery in our quest for knowledge."
The discovery of other solar systems, which has picked up since the early 1990s with new radio-telescopes and other technology, helped frame Hawking's contention that the earth and its neighbors are not of divine origin.
"That makes the coincidences of our planetary conditions, the single sun, the lucky combination of Earth-sun distance and solar mass, far less remarkable, and far less compelling as evidence that the Earth was carefully designed just to please us human beings," Hawking and Mlodinow write.
The authors rely on the concept of a "multiverse" – that there are many universes in existence, and the universe in which Earth resides is a statistical accident that survived while others did not.
"Just as Darwin and Alfred Wallace explained how the apparently miraculous design of living forms could appear without intervention by a supreme being, the multiverse concept can explain the fine tuning of physical law without the need for a benevolent creator who made the Universe for our benefit," the authors contend.
Prominent physicists such as Albert Einstein, however, did not rule out the involvement of a higher being in the creation of the universe. Sir Isaac Newton, who developed the theory of gravity, insisted that science could only explain the universe's behavior, not its origin.
"Gravity explains the motions of the planets, but it cannot explain who set the planets in motion," Newton wrote.
Some polls have indicated a majority of American scientists don't believe in God, but Zbigniew Jaworowski, chairman of the Scientific Council of the Central Laboratory for Radiological Protection in Warsaw, Poland, urges a closer examination of the data.
"It is interesting that among 40 percent of American scientists polled in 1997 who defined themselves as believing in God, the majority belonged to exact sciences," Jaworowski told WND.
Jaworowski added that many of science's most famous names were priests, such as Georges Lemaitre, who formulated the Big Bang theory in 1927.
Sheahen maintains that Hawking's book "has carried speculation too far."
"There is a steady stream of accurate scientific statements, although customarily dumbed-down to avoid displaying equations, interspersed with totally unsupported assertions in the fields of philosophy and theology," he writes.
"The Grand Design argues at some length for the existence of multiple universes, known as 'the multiverse,'" he continues. "Correct scientific notions are connected to unfounded claims by grammatical rules, but not by the rules of argumentation and emphatically not by scientific rules. The phrase non sequitur comes immediately to mind."
Read more: Stephen Hawking takes on God
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