Stephen Hawking is a truly remarkable man. Hawking, born Jan. 8, 1942, in Oxford, England, is a theoretical physicist, mathematician and cosmologist with degrees from Oxford and Cambridge. He is a brilliant man, having authored a number of books, including a best-seller “A Brief History of Time,” and a number of papers and articles in scientific journals. His IQ is said to be 160, but he discounts such measurements of intelligence, saying “People who boast about their IQs are losers.” Until last year Hawking held the position of Cambridge University’s Lucasian Professor of Mathematics, a post once held by Sir Isaac Newton. His work includes the study of quantum cosmology, cosmic inflation, Euclidean quantum gravity, wormholes, the density matrix of the universe, Yang-Mills instantons and the S matrix and helium production in anisotropic Big Bang universes. This is the sort of subject that occupies Stephen Hawkings’ mind. I was just thinking about cookies. But this man with the fabulous mind has been betrayed by his body. Shortly after his 21st birthday he underwent a series of medical tests after noticing himself becoming more clumsy, and falling often. He was told he had Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig’s disease, and that he had just a few years to live. Today Stephen Hawking is 68, uses a wheelchair and has a computerized device that allows him to “speak” through a synthesizer (which the proud Brit complains gives him an American accent). The computer is controlled through a switch in his hand, or by head or eye movement. Hawking has not been able to feed himself or get in and out of bed unaided since 1974. He has become one of the world’s most successful, and best known, theoretical physicists despite his physical challenges. In addition, he has been married twice, has three children and one grandchild. Stephen Hawking is a truly remarkable man. He also is wrong. Hawking has written a new book, “The Grand Design,” in which he says God did not create the universe. He says instead the universe kind of created itself, by accident. “Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing,” Hawking writes. “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 not what it says in my book. In my book it says “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” I’m not as hung up on the timeline. The Bible says God worked a six-day week, then rested on the seventh. But the Almighty did not wear a watch, and nor did he rely on human calendars, so that is all relative. But the important thing is that he did it, from “let there be light,” to creating man and woman in his own image. Hawking believes, however, that the entire universe and everything in it were some sort of happy accident, a series of coincidences, the result of the roll of great cosmic dice. Go north and west to Colorado, stand at the foot of a 14,000-foot peak thrusting its snow-covered head into a brilliant blue spring sky and tell me the hand of God was not in its creation. Travel west and stand with your feet in the blue Pacific, watch the sun go down and paint the sky and the gently rolling ocean brilliant shades of orange, and tell me this whole scene was created by mere chance. Look at photos sent back from the Hubble Space Telescope, of nebulae, stars, planets, galaxies and all manner of wondrous phenomena from trillions of miles away, and tell me this was all the result of some fabulous stellar crap shoot. View photos of our own blue planet sent down from the space shuttle or the International Space Station, and convince me this was not part of a grand plan, but merely a product of the Big Bang lottery. Sidle up to a microscope and view a human cell, with its mitochondria, chromosomes, lysosomes, microtubules, ribosomes and rough endoplasmic reticulum, and tell me this all happened by chance. Butter a piece of bread and let it fall to the floor. If it falls on the buttered side, this is chance. But creation was something else entirely. While you’re examining the minute world, consider DNA, the magnificent double helix made up of adenine, thymine, guanine and cytosine with a backbone of sugar phosphate, the building block of life. Put the base pairs in one combination, you get a human being, change them slightly and you’ve got a gecko. Accident? I think not. Witness the miracle of birth, after hours of pain, sweat and struggle a woman brings forth new life — small, red, wrinkled and, with a quick slap on the behind, squalling to beat the band. Gaze on the face of the child, an amalgam of its mother and father, touch its tiny hand. Now look upon the face of the mother as her child is laid upon her breast for the first time and tell me God had no role in this drama. Stephen Hawking is one of the smartest men in the world. He is a respected scientist and an inspiration for all those facing physical hardships. He also, in this instance, is wrong. How do I know? For that answer I’ll fall back on the words of an old, familiar song. “For the Bible tells me so.”  Mullin is senior writer of the News & Eagle. E-mail him at jmullin@enidnews.com.