But this is certainly not what any of the great monotheistic religions believe. For them, God is not only to be found at creation; He is the author of the whole show. God both created the universe and constantly sustains it in existence. Without him, there would be nothing there for physicists to study. In particular, therefore, God is the creator both of the bits of the universe we don’t understand and the bits we do. And it is, of course, the bits we do understand that give the most evidence of God’s existence and activity. Indeed, just as I can admire the genius behind a work of engineering or art the more I understand it, so my worship of the Creator increases the more I understand what he has done.
That category mistake was not made by a previous holder of Hawking’s chair at Cambridge, Sir Isaac Newton. When Newton discovered his law of gravitation he did not say: “Now I have gravity, I don’t need God”. What he did was to write Principia Mathematica, the most famous book in the history of science, expressing the hope that it would “persuade the thinking man” to believe in God.
Physical laws on their own cannot create anything; they are merely a (mathematical) description of what normally happens under certain given conditions. Newton’s Law of Gravitation does not create gravity. It does not even explain gravity, as Newton himself realized. In fact, the laws of physics are not only incapable of creating anything; they cannot even cause anything to happen. For instance, Newton’s celebrated laws of motion never caused a snooker ball to race across the green baize table: that can only be done by people using a snooker cue and the actions of their own muscles. The laws enable us to analyse the motion and enable us to map the trajectory of the ball’s movement in the future (provided nothing external interferes), but they are powerless to move the ball, let alone bring it into existence." Mathematician John Lennox
In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
Genesis 1:1
