I have the greatest respect for Stephen Hawking as a brilliant scientist
and a man whose response to extreme physical disability has been to
rise above the physical with superior intellect. I will be the first to
admit that I don’t follow his thought processes. I mean, how many people
do? Like the line in the movie IQ,
when Albert Einstein asks his auto mechanic, “Are you thinking what I
am thinking?” and the mechanic replies, “Well what would be the odds of
that happening?” Except in my case, if my mechanic, Marty, asked me if I
was thinking what he was thinking, I’d be just as lost. Yeah, not
really a deep thinker here.

However, shallow as my thought processes may be, I’ve decided to take issue with Stephen Hawking’s claim in his new book, The Grand Design, that God does not exist because of the discovery of extrasolar planets orbiting sunlike stars. Here's a quote from an interview with Hawking:

"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 evidence that the Earth was
carefully designed just to please us human beings," he writes. Hawking
believes that other universes, as well as other solar systems, are also
likely to exist. But if God's purpose was to create mankind, he wonders,
why would He make these redundant and out-of-reach worlds?

So, according to this brilliantly complex scientific thought process, a
creator who creates more than one of something good becomes redundant if
he keeps creating? The very act of creation after a certain point
disproves the existence of the creator? The purpose of creation is to
please creation? Is that what I’m reading? According to this theory of
creativity, God should have stopped making planets and stars and
galaxies and universes after he made ours. So bringing that down from
the divine to a level of thought I’m a bit more comfortable with,
DaVinci should have stopped painting after completing the Mona Lisa;
Mozart should have stopped composing after Eine Kleine Nachtmusik;
Frank Lloyd Wright should have stopped designing buildings after
Fallingwater; I should have stopped baking chocolate chip cookies in
1981; Madonna should have stopped recording after Vogue. Okay, I’ll give him that last one.

The point is, a creator continues to create for the sheer joy of creation. I
have a whole bagful of knitted dishcloths lurking in a corner of my
bedroom. I didn’t quit after I got the hang of making them. I found I
enjoyed it and I obsessively knitted dishcloths all last winter. In the
same way, but of course on a much grander scale, if there is indeed a
Supreme Being who created our solar system, galaxy and universe, who are
we to say that He couldn’t have created other planets with other forms
of life, other solar systems designed to support that life, and an
infinite number of galaxies and universes? Why should God stop knitting
dishcloths if it gives Him joy to keep knitting?


Just as I can only understand a tiny fraction of the brilliant mind of Stephen Hawking, humans who believe in God can only claim to know that
tiny fraction of His divine mind that He deigns to reveal to us. Who are
we to claim to know the entirety of God’s thoughts? We can’t even
understand why our spouse takes the can opener out of one drawer and
puts it away in another.

As one who does believe in a creative God, but who doesn’t presume with my puny understanding to put limits on
His purpose, or methods or timeframe, I take great delight in the
thought that there may be new life forms and new civilizations existing
in galaxies far, far away.