God in Stephen Hawking's A briefer history of time

My Intro:
Yesterday I finished reading Stephen Hawking's ‘A briefer history of time’. Reading it, I must candidly admit, my inadequacy in Physics stood thoroughly exposedJ Most of the concepts were more than handful for me. With such commoditized science books a layman like me tends to broadly understand the conclusions the author draws. That’s that. The reasoning involved in drawing those conclusions is either too detailed or too complex to understand. That said, I still would recommend this book to you guys for it makes one appreciate the vastness & complexity of the universe we live in and how insignificant our existence really is. Questions, which plague us forever, get discussed in elaborate detail: How did the Universe start? Where is it headed? Time’s nature? There are also lots of interesting anecdotes about different scientists who have made significant contributions in arriving at the current level of understanding. Hawking’s ruminations on God interested me most. I have given them below:

Excerpts from the Book

Page 15, Chapter 3: The Nature of a Scientific Theory

There is this question about initial state of the universe. Some people feel that science should be concerned with only the first part; they regard the question of the initial situation as a matter for metaphysics or religion. They would say that God, being omnipotent, could have started the universe off any way He wanted. That may be so, but in that case God also could have made it develop in a completely arbitrary way. Yet it appears that God chose to make it evolve in a very regular way, according to certain laws. It therefore seems equally reasonable to suppose that there are also laws governing the initial state.

Page 23, Chapter 4: Newton’s Universe

Newton was very worried by this lack of absolute position, or absolute space, as it was called, because it didn’t accord with his idea of an absolute God. In fact, he refused to accept the lack of absolute space, even though his laws implied it. He was severely criticized for this irrational belief by many people, most notably by Bishop Berkely, a philosopher who believed that all material objects and space and time are an illusion. When the famous Dr.Johnson was told Berkely’s opinion, he cried, “I refute it thus!” and stubbed his toe on a large stone.

Page 87, Chapter 9: Quantum Gravity

Is it really possible for scientists to calculate what all our actions will be in future? A glass of water contains more than 1024 molecules (a 1 followed by twenty-four zeros). In practice we can never hope to know the state of each of these molecules, much less the complete state of the universe or even of our bodies. Yet to say that the universe is deterministic means that even if we don’t have the brainpower to do the calculation, our futures are nevertheless deterministic. This doctrine of scientific determinism was strongly resisted by many people, who felt it infringed God’s freedom to make the world run as He saw fit. But it remained the standard assumption of science until the early years of twentieth century. One of the first indications that this belief would have to be abandoned came when the British scientists Lord Rayleigh and Sir James calculated the amount of blackbody radiation that a hot object such as a star must radiate.

Page 93, Chapter 9: Quantum Gravity

Quantum mechanics therefore introduces an unavoidable element of unpredictability or randomness into science. Einstein objected to this very strongly, despite the important role he had played in the development of these ideas. In fact, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for his contribution to quantum theory. Nevertheless, he never accepted that the universe was governed by chance; his feelings were summed up in his famous statement “God does not play dice.”

Page 102, Chapter 9: Quantum Gravity

In the classical theory of gravity, there are only two possible ways the universe can behave: either it has existed for an infinite time, or else it had a beginning at a singularity at some finite time in the past. For reasons we have discussed earlier, we believe that the universe has not existed forever. Yet if it had a beginning, according to classical general relativity, in order to know which solution of Einstein’s equations describes our universe, we must know its initial state – that is, exactly how the universe began. God may have originally decreed the laws of nature, but it appears that He has since left the universe to evolve according to them and does not intervene in it. How did He choose the initial state or configuration of the universe? What were the boundary conditions at the beginning of time? In classical general relativity this is a problem, because classical general relativity breaks down at the beginning of the universe.

If there is no boundary to space-time, there is no need to specify the behavior at the boundary – no need to know the initial state of the universe. There is no edge of space-time at which we would have to appeal to God or some new law to set the boundary conditions for space-time. We would say: “The boundary condition of the universe is that it has no boundary” The universe would be completely self-contained and not affected by anything outside itself. It would just BE. As long as we believed the universe had a beginning, the role of a creator seemed clear. But if the universe is really completely self-contained, having no boundary or edge, having neither beginning nor end, then the answer is not so obvious: what is the role of a creator?

Page 134: Chapter 11: The forces of Nature and Unification of Physics

There seem to be three possibilities:
There really is complete unified theory (or a collection of overlapping formulations), which we will someday discover if we are smart enough
There in no ultimate theory of the universe, just an infinite sequence of theories that describe the universe more and more accurately but are never exact
There is no theory of the universe: events cannot be predicted beyond a certain extent but occur in a random and arbitrary manner

Some would argue for the third possibility on the grounds that if there were a complete set of laws, that would infringe God’s freedom to change His mind and intervene in the world. Yet, since God is all powerful, couldn’t God infringe on His freedom if He wanted to? It’s a bit like the old paradox: can God make a stone so heavy that He can’t lift it? Actually, the idea that God might want to change His mind is an example of the fallacy, pointed out by St. Augustine, of imagining God as a being existing in time. Time is a property only of the universe that God created. Presumably, He knew what He intended when He set it up!

With the advent of quantum mechanics, we have come to recognize that events cannot be predicted with complete accuracy: there is always a degree of uncertainty. If you like, you could ascribe this randomness to the intervention of God. But it would be a very strange kind of intervention, with no evidence that it is directed toward any purpose. Indeed, if it were, it would by definition not be random. In modern times, we have effectively removed the third possibility above by redefining the goal of science: our aim is to formulate a set of laws that enables us to predict events only up to the limit set by uncertainty principle.