In his book, The Grand Design, Stephen Hawking has three questions to ask about the laws of nature.
These are: ‘What is the origin of these laws?’, ‘Are there any exceptions to the laws, i.e. miracles?’ and ‘Is there only one set of possible laws?’
He suggests that the traditional answer to the first question, given by the great pioneers of science like Galileo, Kepler, Descartes and Newton, is that the laws are the work of God. Hawking adds: ‘However, this is no more than a definition of God as the embodiment of the laws of nature. Unless one endows God with some other attributes, such as being the God of the Old Testament, employing God as a response to the first question merely substitutes one mystery for another’.
