Did Stephen Hawking Sacrifice God on the Altar of Science?

Physicist, Stephen Hawking, died on March 14, 2018. His book, The Grand Design, caused many to believe that he widened the chasm between science and faith.

July 30, 2025 by Father Gordon MacRae

Back in 2010, in the earliest days of this blog, I wrote a post about the late, great physicist, Stephen Hawking. It was among my first posts about the dichotomy between science and faith. A controversial book, The Grand Design, published not long before I wrote about Professor Hawking, caused many to believe that he was an atheist who concluded that there is no reason to believe that God created the Universe or anything else. He attributed all of creation to one overpowering force, gravity. At the time I was pondering a response, I imagined that if I had been on an archeological dig among 15th Century ruins in Rome and found a worn chisel that was known to have belonged to Michelangelo, and used to create the Pieta, what sort of controversy would that entail? Would naysayers suggest that Michelangelo did not thus create the Pieta, his chisel did. That is the simplest response to anyone who used gravity to demonstrate that Stephen Hawking did not believe in God. God created not only the material Universe, but also all the material tools that brought the Universe into being.

Also a few weeks before I first wrote about Hawking, Pope Benedict XVI beatified John Henry Cardinal Newman in Birmingham, England. The Holy Father emphasized Cardinal Newman’s “insights into the relationship between faith and reason,” and commended him for applying “his pen to many of the most pressing subjects of the day.” Without doubt, Cardinal Newman also might have had a pointed response to the media tremors after physicist and author, Stephen Hawking declared that science can explain the creation of the Universe without God.

I mentioned Stephen Hawking in another 2010 post, “A Day Without Yesterday: Father Georges Lemaitre, and The Big Bang.” His declaration about creation came in The Grand Design.  Many in the media called it a definitive statement about the existence of God. It was no such thing, but the news media cannot be accused of a lack of trying to diminish the faith of billions.

I cannot claim to have even a fraction of the gifts of faith and reason that Saint John Henry Newman would call upon to respond, but as a priest who respects science, I feel driven to weigh in. First, I have to confess that I had not by then read The Grand Design, but I eventually did. However, in a full-page article in The Wall Street Journal in 2010, Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow laid out the cosmology behind the book and their conclusions (“Why God Did Not Create the Universe,” September 4-5, 2010).

It is to that article that I here respond. If you have a concern for the implications of Professor Hawking’s pronouncement that God had nothing to do with bringing you and your world into being, please read on. There is a lot at stake here. I will address this from two points of view.

My Response as a Priest

Like Father Georges Lemaitre and Saint John Henry Newman, my response is first and foremost that of a Catholic priest. I have known many priests who have struggled with faith and some who have lost their faith. I correspond regularly with a priest who lost his faith years ago. Now this declaration by Stephen Hawking feels like a nail in faith’s coffin for him. I have lived 72 years of struggle over the question of God. I have arrived — in spite of toil, trial and tribulation, and more than my share of each — at what I think is a more than tepid faith in God’s existence and in His Grand Design. I believe in His creation of our existence.  I believe in His enduring and caring Presence in this life and the promised life to come. I believe that our relationship with Him can survive this life if we walk the path He has shown to us.  I wrote about that path in a recent post, “What Shall I Do to Inherit Eternal Life?”

I have read nothing in any of Stephen Hawking’s writings that causes me to wonder whether my faith conclusions are valid. I write as a priest and believer. My faith and my priesthood both came into being in a time of great social upheaval. The existential philosopher, Frederick Nietzsche (1844-1900) seemed to rule the reasoning — or lack thereof — of the 1960s. His contempt for Judaism and Christianity, and his cynical view that mankind is but a herd at the mercy of the ruling and gifted intellectual elite, marked the dawn of the “God is Dead” movement. The bumper stickers were everywhere:

“GOD IS DEAD!” Nietzsche

In the 1970s, that sorry and narcissistic wave began to dissipate, but not before destroying the faith of many who bought into it. I remember buying a bumper sticker for my seminary room door in 1978:

“NIETZSCHE IS DEAD!” God

The three masters of deceit — Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche — are all dead and not only their persons but their ideologies as well. Each reduced man to his basest, soul-less drives, and each in his own way was an enemy of faith. I do not count Stephen Hawking among them. Contrary to what the news media was lifting out of his latest book — and out of context — Stephen Hawking did not denounce God, nor does he claim to have proven that God does not exist. The exact quote that so many in the media now read into from his WSJ article cited above, and from his book is this:

“The discovery recently of extreme fine-tuning of so many laws of nature could lead some back to the idea that the grand design is the work of some grand Designer. Yet the latest advances in cosmology explain why the laws of the universe seem tailor-made for humans, without the need for a benevolent creator.”

But who would then explain the identity of the Tailor? This comes as no great revelation. One might expect that I, as a priest, would proclaim that the Universe was brought into being and maintained, at least in part for our benefit, by a Divine Creator whose title is also His name: God. But did anyone really expect Stephen Hawking, or any cosmologist to make the same declaration? What Professor Hawking has written is neither new nor surprising in cosmology. I do not, and will never have a faith that depends on science to finally and definitively weigh in on God’s existence and creation of the Universe. Science should never be able to do this to the satisfaction of any person of faith. To say that science can explain creation without God is not to say that God did not create everything — including the science and scientists trying to nudge Him from center stage. Faith is far more than the dictates of reason and the pronouncements of science.  Our tradition of faith does not reduce God to His quantum mechanics, and does not promise to teach all there is to know about the created Universe or the laws of physics.

Our faith promises that we can know God through Christ in a personal relationship without fully explaining God. Who in this world can claim to fully comprehend God? Certainly not I. Faith is not an event, and science does not make or break it. Faith is a pilgrimage, and like any pilgrimage, most of us will have times of wandering, and wondering whether we will ever arrive, whether we will ever get to the point at which there are no doubts. That is the point of faith. It is its own evidence.

“Faith is the assurance of things hoped for; the conviction of things unseen”

— Hebrews 11:1

Faith at some point involves an assent of the intellect (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 155) to the revealed truth about God Himself. Central to that truth is the redemption offered to us through Christ who not only reveals God to man, but “fully reveals man to himself” (Gaudium et Spes, 22). None of us looks to Stephen Hawking, or to science, to reveal the truth about God. Faith in God and His creation can no more be subjected to the scientific method than science can legitimately be subjected and defined in the light of faith. Who among us, when faced with life’s inevitable crises, ever cried out to Stephen Hawking for mercy or for redemption?

The greatest physicist of the 20th Century, Albert Einstein, never pondered God until his discussions with fellow physicist Father Georges Lemaitre. When those discussions proved to Einstein that the Universe came into being at a specific point some 13.2 Billion years earlier, Einstein responded, “I want to know God’s thoughts. The rest are just details.”

My Response as a Student of Science

I write secondly with a lifelong respect for science as a tool, not for understanding God, but for understanding the mechanics of the Universe in which we exist. This has been not so much a journey of the mind, but of the heart and soul. I at one time thought quantum mechanics referred to guys who worked on Volkswagen Beetles. To my great fortune, my mind has expanded a bit since then.

I have several times written of one of my heroes on the parallel journeys of both science and faith. One of these posts, “A Day Without Yesterday” is the story of priest, mathematician and physicist, Father Georges Lemaitre, the originator of the Big Bang explanation of cosmology and the man who changed the mind of Albert Einstein on the origin of this created Universe.

A French publication, Les Dossiers De La Recherche (No. 35, May 2009) had an interesting article entitled “Le Big Bang Histoire: De La Science A La Religion” (“The History of the Big Bang: From Science to Religion”). I am grateful to my Belgian friend, Pierre Matthews (who is also the Godfather of Pornchai Moontri). Pierre and his family knew Father Georges Lemaitre well and they translated into English this portion of the article cited above in French:

“Pope Pius XII, an enthusiastic amateur astronomer, addressed the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in 1951. His talk dealt with recent findings in cosmology stating: ‘It appears truly that today’s science going back millions of centuries has succeeded to witness the initial ‘fiat lux’ [Let there be light], coming out of nothing, that very moment of matter and ocean of light and rays, while the chemical components of particles split and assembled into millions of galaxies.’

“Pope Pius XII referred openly to Fr. Georges Lemaitre’s scenario. But this ‘concordism’ assumed to exist between revealed truth and science is counter-publicity for those, among them Fr. Georges Lemaitre, wanting a total and independent separation of the history of the Universe, evolution, and religious truth.

“Following a meeting with Fr. Lemaitre, Pope Pius XII a year later rejected, before the General Council of the International Astronomical Federation, any concordance between the two fields: science and faith. For Father Lemaitre, this was a double victory: cosmology can develop in total freedom and religion should no longer fear contrary positions based on new scientific discoveries.”

Why was Father Georges Lemaitre so insistent that the Pope should declare no concordance between faith and science? The obvious reason is that, for Father Lemaitre — a man of deep faith and a brilliant physicist and cosmologist — faith and science are parallel fields and should never limit each other. The Church suffered a black eye for its condemnation of Galileo’s views about science four centuries ago, but science has often seemed utterly ridiculous for holding the Church in contempt for not responding to science in 1660 as it would in 2025.

In 2005, noted science writer, Chet Raymo wrote a blog post entitled “The Future of Catholicism” on his Science Musings blog (April 10, 2005). Raymo wrote:

“In spite of the pope’s outreach to the scientific community, the Church has been slow to understand the theological implications of the scientific world view. The Church’s truce with modern cosmology and biology is uneasy at best, although certainly more enlightened than the outright rejection by fundamentalist faiths.”

Chet Raymo was right, but in a limited way. He very much understated the appreciation for scientific achievement demonstrated by the Church in the last century. We can expect this to improve greatly during the pontificate of Pope Leo XIV whose own education includes a degree in Mathematics, which leaves him well disposed to the work of Fr. George Lemaitre.

I had a brief discussion about this some years ago with a fundamentalist Evangelical pastor I know. He is an educated man, a university graduate, and well read but only very narrowly so. I asked for his opinion of what I have written above about Stephen Hawking’s views.

His response came as no surprise, and it was little different from what we might have heard from one of the Calvinist Puritan founders of New England in 1620. His view was an utter rejection of science. “The Universe was created by God in six days about 6,000 years ago. There is no such thing as poetic and metaphorical language in Scripture.” I asked him how he would explain the discoveries of bones that are many tens of millions of years old, or the fact that we can see galaxies that are millions of light years away. His answer was to simply ignore the questions. Of course, this man also believes that the Catholic Church is the anti-Christ, the “Whore of Babylon.” He believes it is not only science that is condemned, but the Catholic Church as well, and he would cite the Church’s nod to science as evidence for that view.

Science is the empirical examination of the physical Universe. Gone are the dark days in which science and religious dogma demanded conformity one with the other. There are legitimate forums for dialogue, however. It is more than ironic that Stephen Hawking was a lifetime member of the Pontifical Academy of Science. There were calls for him to resign after he wrote The Grand Design, but I believed then that he should retain his position. Dialog should not require conformity, and the Church should not be daunted by diverse scientific views.

Using Father Georges Lemaitre’s model, Stephen Hawking should no more publicly weigh the legitimacy of Judeo-Christian belief in Creation as a design plan of God than the Pope should affirm or deny black holes. My concern for the controversy surrounding Stephen Hawking’s 2010 book is not that it encourages masses of believers to set aside their Catholic faith, as Chet Raymo declared to have done, but that it may have the effect of encouraging some Christians, Catholics among them, to set aside science. Either approach would be tragic.

Professor Hawking’s foray into the realm of faith does not change the way I perceive God. The very fact that I perceive God at all is its own evidence, “the conviction of things unseen,” (Hebrews 11:1). What it does change is my respect for the strides taken by science to speak also to the masses of people who are not scientists, but are people of faith open to science. There is a danger that science is gradually placing itself outside the experience of the great majority of people while claiming to enlighten its own elite. In this, there is a growing rift between science and the reality experienced by billions of people of faith.

The late Stephen Hawking’s view was in danger of sparking a return to the bad old days of Nietzsche, this time by the establishment of the “uber-scientist” for whom masses of faithful believers are but an ignorant herd. It is science, and not faith, that faces the greatest harm. Stephen Hawking presented that the laws of gravity, and not God, created the Universe we live in. I am not prepared to rewrite Scripture. It is not the experience of thousands of years of belief that “In the beginning, Gravity created the heavens and the earth.”

I have a response as a prisoner, too. I certainly believe in gravity, but there’s precious little solace in it, and it speaks nothing to the reality of my soul. Sorry, Professor. I respect your cosmology greatly, but I think you should not have thrown in with the wrong “G!”

I still like you, though, and I believe God does, too. He has inspired me to pray for you.

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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: Thank you for reading and sharing this post. Sharing is important to place these pages before believers who may benefit from them. For 15 years we shared posts at various Catholic groups on Facebook. A few months ago Facebook called my posts “spam” and froze our account. I can no longer share there, but you can, and I thank you if you do so.

You may also like these related posts from Beyond These Stone Walls:

“A Day Without Yesterday:” Father Georges Lemaitre and The Big Bang

Science and Faith and the Big Bang Theory of Creation

The James Webb Space Telescope and an Encore from Hubble

For Those Who Look at the Stars and See Only Stars

Albert Einstein and Fr. George Lemaitre at the California Institute of Technology in 1930.
"I want to know God' thoughts. The rest are just details." -- Albert Einstein

The Eucharistic Adoration Chapel established by Saint Maximilian Kolbe was inaugurated at the outbreak of World War II. It was restored as a Chapel of Adoration in September, 2018, the commemoration of the date that the war began. It is now part of the World Center of Prayer for Peace. The live internet feed of the Adoration Chapel at Niepokalanow — sponsored by EWTN — was established just a few weeks before we discovered it and began to include in at Beyond These Stone Walls. Click “Watch on YouTube” in the lower left corner to see how many people around the world are present there with you. The number appears below the symbol for EWTN.

Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.

The following is a translation from the Polish in the image above: “Eighth Star in the Crown of Mary Queen of Peace” “Chapel of Perpetual Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament at Niepokalanow. World Center of Prayer for Peace.” “On September 1, 2018, the World Center of Prayer for Peace in Niepokalanow was opened. It would be difficult to find a more expressive reference to the need for constant prayer for peace than the anniversary of the outbreak of World War II.”

For the Catholic theology behind this image, visit my post, “The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God.”