i hope that stephen hawking is better than he's represented as being. and no doubt he is; i guess you can't get joe schmoe, or me for that matter, to understand the physics/mathematics of our pythagorean multiverse etc. maybe he knows something we don't. 

Due to laws like gravity, noted last week's excerpt, Hawking writes that it is entirely possible that the universe "can and will create itself from nothing." That's why we exist. That's why there's something rather than nothing. We don't need God.

now surely he's going to discharge the further obligation to explain why there are these laws rather than others, or no laws, for example. how can the headlines be about hawking's denial that there is a god, when in fact the argument appears to be that no god is necessary in an explanation of the origin of the universe? these things matter in the terms of the ancient argument.

at any rate, maybe theism/atheism turns partly on aesthetic sensibilities. there can be beauty in a city that grows up willy-nilly chaotically over time as well as of an area designed from whole cloth, a planned environment. the willy-nilly city may of course also be in principle explicable: well there are economic and political histories and so on. but it teems, is wildly profligate, always just barely eluding your explanatory machinery.