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Look, there's no question Stephen Hawking is the most brilliant physicist since Einstein, and Einstein was the most brilliant since Newton. I would never deny that.

But the man's a physicist. Physics is what he knows. Maybe nobody knows physics better, but that doesn't necessarily have anything to do with mastery of other subjects.

I would never go to a theologian for an opinion on quantum mechanics. If anyone ever came to me (not, by the way, that I would consider myself the rabbinic equivalent of Stephen Hawking!) and said, "Rabbi, can you please give me your opinions on the implications of special relativity to me?" I'd tell them to find a physicist: as a rabbi, I have no qualifications to give opinions on that subject.

So why on earth would we decide that a physicist-- even a once in a lifetime physicist-- is qualified to give expert opinions about God?

Well, since I think God created the universe ex nihilo, yes. I do think something can be created from nothing.

Why would it? Scientists disagree with one another often. Many scientists are religious people. Other respected scientists have expressed atheist views, and it didn't cause all scientists everywhere to suddenly become atheists. Some respected scientists have expressed theistic views, and it didn't cause all other scientists to become believers.

Of course.

Without doubt. Both are vitally important to human existence, in very different ways.

I hope so. I think it's important that religion curb the tendency of some of its believers to fundamentalism, which is not good religion, and tends to attempt to impress its absolutist views everywhere, including the province of science, where it has no business. Likewise, if the few outspoken scientists who are aggressive professional skeptics could rein it in a bit, and take a little more of a live and let live attitude, that would be helpful also. Religion and science can coexist, and even do so productively and in harmony. But they need to respect one another, and give one another space. It's possible. Will it happen? Who can say?

__________________
Dull sublunary lovers love,
Whose soul is sense, cannot admit
Absence, because it doth remove
That thing which elemented it.

(From "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning" by John Donne)