One of the foremost theoretical physicists, of our time, is Stephen W. Hawking. He states, in the acknowledgments of his book, A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes, that the purpose of this book is to describe the "basic ideas about the origin and the fate of the universe . . . in a form that people without a scientific education can understand" (vi). Stephen Hawking does not give a clear thesis statement for this book. An implied thesis of this book would be that humans have always sought to understand how the universe was created and works; with continued development of the Grand Unified Theory (GUT), complete understanding begins to be possible. He poses the age old questions of: "Where did the universe come from, and where is it going? Did the universe have a beginning . . . what happened before then?" (1). Breakthroughs in physics and technology suggest answers to some of these long asked questions which before now could only be answered with philosophy and theology (1). This book is mainly a description of these developments and theories.
Stephen W. Hawking initiates his discussion, of the creation of the universe, with an overview of past and presently accepted theories. He is clear that all of these are just theories. No one knows for certain what happened at the beginning of the universe, or even, if there was a beginning of the universe. Hawking avoids taking a position on whether there was or is divine intervention in the world or universe.
He defines a good theory as having two properties: "It must accurately describe a large class of observations on the basis of a model that contains only a few arbitrary elements, and it must make definite predictions about the results of future observations" (9). It is interesting to note that as Hawking applies this definition of a good theory, he does not discount the possibility of divine intervention or God. He does claim that if God exists, ...