By HANNAH DEVLIN - THE TIMES (LONDON)
Updated: Thu, 02 Sep 2010 12:57:20 UTC

Stop Press: The Times are running on on-screen (typed) discussion between me and the two journalists involved, Hannah Devlin and Ruth Gledhill. Others will be able to join in. This will be at 2.30 pm on Thursday 2nd September. More details to follow, watch this space.

Here's the link. Click where it says "The God Debate with Richard Dawkins.

BUT, infuriatingly, although the link above is not behind the paywall, the debate itself is! This means that you can take part only by paying £1 to swell Rupert Murdoch's coffers. Sorry, but it's too late for me to back out now, and there's nothing I can do about it.

Richard

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Andrew

The Times today (2nd Sept) publishes an extract from Stephen Hawking's new book, The Grand Design. Hannah Devlin's article begins as follows:-

Modern physics leaves no place for God in the creation of the Universe, Stephen Hawking has concluded.

Just as Darwinism removed the need for a creator in the sphere of biology, Britain’s most eminent scientist argues that a new series of theories have rendered redundant the role of a creator for the Universe.

In his forthcoming book, an extract from which is published exclusively in Eureka, published today with The Times, Professor Hawking sets out to answer the question: “Did the Universe need a creator?” The answer he gives is a resounding “no”.

Far from being a once-in-a-million event that could only be accounted for by extraordinary serendipity or a divine hand, the Big Bang was an inevitable consequence of the laws of physics, Hawking says.

“Because there is a law such as gravity, the Universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the Universe exists, why we exist,” he writes.

“It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the Universe going,” he finds.

Read on (but The Times makes you pay)

Ruth Gledhill, the Times religion correspondent, also weighs in with "Stephen Hawking is the voice of reason on religion" in which she says:

When it comes to religion, Stephen Hawking is the voice of reason. Not for him the polemical style that has propelled Richard Dawkins to the fore of national consciousness in the God debates. His argument is likely in the long term to be more dangerous to religion because it is more measured than The God Delusion.

Read on (but again there is a pay wall)

And The Times, in accordance with its enlightened policy, has devoted one of its Leading Articles to the subject:

Religious believers have long seen evidence of a designer in the complexity of the natural world and the apparent fine-tuning of the universe. That notion was shaken by Charles Darwin, who demonstrated that evolution by natural selection accounted fully for the origin of species. And the most famous British physicist since Isaac Newton now suggests how the universe could likewise have come into being from nothing, without any need for supernatural intervention.

TAGGED: RELIGION, SCIENCE, STEPHEN HAWKING