Hawking says God's not needed. So?

British physicist Stephen Hawking's latest book is already making waves with his observation that science can explain the universe's origin without invoking God.

Rodger Bosch / AFP - Getty Images filePhysicist Stephen Hawking delivers a lecture in South Africa in 2008. In a new book, he says science doesn't need God to explain the origin of the universe. British physicist Stephen Hawking's latest book is already making waves with his observation that science can explain the universe's origin without invoking God.
"Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing," Hawking and his co-author, Caltech physicist Leonard Mlodinow, write in "The Grand Design," which is due to be issued next week. "Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist. It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going."
That's the quote that lit the match in The Guardian as well in The Times of London, which published an excerpt from the book in its Thursday edition. But by itself, the quote doesn't have much "there" there. If Hawking is saying merely ...