Stephen Hawking (along with the distinguished physicist Leonard Mlodinow) has just published a new tome on why God doesn’t exist. I should warn you that it isn’t easy going to read; and it isn’t at all easygoing about whether God exists or not. It’s called Grand Design, and it maintains that God had nothing to do with that design – ie, the Universe.

I think he’s almost certainly right. But like so many mega-bright people, Mr Hawking makes a couple of false assumptions along the way – humungous false assumptions – and without those holding good, the whole set of theories is bunk. He may well have a brain the size of the solar system and all it contains, but he’s capable of making errors just like the rest of us. In this sense, he tends – like most highly-intelligent experts – to make the mistake on page one.

The first clue is in the book’s title, Grand Design. No intelligence is required to make something very to the power of infinity big. But you can’t have design after design after design without intelligence. Even monkeys and typewriters getting to the answer after a million goes couldn’t do it without enough grey matter to connect the keys to the letters in the first place.

Hawking’s first assumption is that there is nothing between zero intelligence and God: ergo, the Universe (he contends) was created spontaeously:

Now your objection to the above might be that there’s an awful lot of ex cathedra assertion in there; but to be fair to Hawkers, he does explain why this is possible. My brain hurts very badly after trying to follow why, but then I’m not MENSA. But again, he makes the same mistake of logic: in order to set the mechanism in motion to get spontaneous universes going, you have to have the intelligence to work out how to do it. Saying ‘it just does’ isn’t quite enough.

This has always been my beef with Big Bang as was – as indeed it was for nearly four decades: “there was no time before the Bang” they all told me….but you have to have time to complete the chemical reaction, so there must have been. Ten years ago they decided we doubters might have a point – from which came first, the even dafter idea of a little weefer-theen beet of spontaneous time – and now Stephen Hawking’s answer, spontaneous creation. This doesn’t cut it either.

The fundamental flaw in the logic is almost Freudian in its irony: there’s no such thing as a Deity, and you don’t need a Deity to create a Universe…ergo, the Universe was created spontaneously. You could go round in that circle forever and never reach the Start again. The reality is that a bright living thing devoid of Godliness could do it – but Black Hole Man doesn’t even go there.

Huge sections of the book are fascinating. The multi-Universe idea is explained for my feeble brain properly for the first time, and seems to make sense. But here too, Hawking is the first to admit that even the most minute differences in universal laws would make it a mathematical certainty that his other universes couldn’t support life. In other words, we ‘re back where physicists have been since Planck said Newton had got it wrong: the whole thing was just an enormously lucky accident. Phew.

Sorry, I don’t buy it. The laws of strong nuclear force, e= mc2 and a whole host of other rules ensure, spookily, that nothing physical can break free from our Universe. This is Hawking’s comment on that:

Did you spot that? Bringing in ‘designed to accommodate mankind’ as a way of positioning those who disagree as fruitcakes. It’s just not on, Stephen: our argument is the existence of design per se, not a blueprint for Man – or even life for that matter. Anyway, this is the Master’s conclusion – and before you get there, I need to point out that the anthropic principle means creating states specifically for Man to exist in. I knew that anthro meant something to do with us, but I had to look it up:

Impenetrably put, but in fact on very close examination it’s just the same red herring: you really don’t have to accept the anthropic principle to frame the contention that there is huge evidence of intelligent design in this Universe. For some reason, Stephen Hawking doesn’t want to accept that. And it might have something to do with the fact that his hang-up is not really God at all, but the Intelligent Designists.

Most of the extracts and trailered pr for the book have focused on God – ‘Hawking proves God didn’t create the Universe’ and so on. Having read it, I now realise that Professor Hawking is simply using God as a Weapon of Mass Distraction.

So at the end of all this, it’s a draw really: he doesn’t believe in God, and I don’t believe that every Universe creation could possibly have been spontaneous. That’s because I think all original creation needs intelligence. And initially, all original intelligence requires life.