The Grand Design by Stephen Hawking & Leonard Mlodinow | Book review
“Hawking: God did not create universe”, the Times announced on its front page, a splash story that was followed up for several days with as much furious religious reaction that the paper’s writers could muster. Other media outlets followed suit – “Bang goes God, says Hawking”, the Star announced – while rabbis, archbishops and religious historians filled letters pages and comment slots with waves of apoplectic outrage.
It has been a dispiriting experience. Setting religion against science, as the media has quite deliberately done in this case, achieves little for our attempts to understand the complexities of modern cosmology, the specific aim of Hawking and Mlodinow’s book. Worse, the furore suggests that at the beginning of the 21st century, in our apparently rational, secular society, the declaration by a leading scientist that God was not involved in the universe’s creation is deemed to be newsworthy and deserving of front-page headlines in national