I didn't say either were Athiests. I simply said
many had gone from atheist to egnostic. And I'm sure I've read somehwere that Eistein did indeed not believe that God really existed when he started out. But I'll have to find the source.
As for Professor Hawking
Stephen Hawking has worked on the basic laws which govern the universe. With Roger Penrose he showed that Einstein's General Theory of Relativity implied space and time would have a beginning in the Big Bang and an end in black holes. These results indicated it was necessary to unify General Relativity with Quantum Theory, the other great Scientific development of the first half of the 20th Century. One consequence of such a unification that he discovered was that black holes should not be completely black, but should emit radiation and eventually evaporate and disappear. Another conjecture is that the universe has no edge or boundary in imaginary time. This would imply that the way the universe began was completely determined by the laws of science.
(
http://www.hawking.org.uk/about/aindex.html)
Since around 1980 cosmological interest has shifted to the first ten million, billion, billion, billion, billionth of a second (10-43 second) of the universe’s history, when the developing universe was so small as to be significantly affected by quantum theory. Stephen Hawking records that he was at a conference at the Vatican in 1981 at the end of which:
the participants were granted an audience with the Pope (John Paul II). He told us that it was all right to study the evolution of the universe after the big bang, but we should not inquire into the big bang itself because that was the moment of Creation and therefore the work of God. I was glad then that he did not know the subject of the talk I had just given at the conference - the possibility that space-time was finite but had no boundary, which means that it had no beginning, no moment of Creation.
The physicist continues, ironically, ‘I had no wish to share the fate of Galileo...’ However, Hawking has ventured various theological comments much more extreme than any uttered by Galileo, most famously that:
So long as the universe had a beginning, we could suppose that it had a creator. But if the universe is really completely self-contained, having no boundary or edge, it would have neither beginning nor end: it would simply be. What place, then, for a creator?
(
http://www.counterbalance.net/ghc-bb/hhqm-body.html)
I'm sure his wife is a devout Christian, and I must say I'm ignorant of that matter. But as far a Hawking's own comments, what does this say he believed?
