First lets be clear that they are not saying God is ruled out. While most (but not all) articles managed to avoid claiming that, the lack of clarifying details , sloppy phrases used and tedious discussions about what this might mean for religions allowed exactly such a confusion to spread.
Phrases like "God did not create the universe" do appear in many newspapers, implying that any universe creating God is ruled out by science. This is not what Hawking (or Mlodinow) actually said. In phrasing it this way the BBC, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, The Daily mail, CNN, and many more are misrepresenting what Hawkings and spreading misinformation. Richard Dawkins, a famous science communicator, also seemed to have an exaggerated view bof the statements religious significance in a debate. Some newspapers, like The Telegraph and The Huffington Post, report "there is no need for a creator" much closer to what Hawking appears to have actually said.
The other big confusion spread by the press is that this is a reversal of Hawking's previous position. For example the BBC state
In his 1988 bestseller, A Brief History of Time, Prof Hawking appeared to accept the role of God in the creation of the Universe. "If we discover a complete theory, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason - for then we should know the mind of God," he said.apparently missing that Hawkings was using god in a metaphorical sense, and was not suggesting that a physical creator god made up part of his understanding of the universe.
"Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing. 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."To me the god reference seems merely an attempt to express the grand scope of their claim. Hawking seems to think there is a now a theoretical framework which provides a satisfactory natural description of the universe coming into existence. Seeking natural models to describe physical reality is what theoretical physicists (religious, agnostic and atheist) do and from a science perspective this is a very interesting statement, and while I suspect I may not be as convinced as Hawking I nonetheless look forward to reading his view. But what about all the religious ruminations discussed in newspapers?
The first point to make, almost entirely absent in the newspaper coverage, is that Hawkins argument involves many elements not tested experimentally. Believers can still think that god created the universe without conflicting any observational evidence. They simply can't state there is no framework in science which could explain the universe existing to motivate their belief. Therefore there is still no inconsistency between science and a creator god.
Secondly God didn't really have a role in science prior to Hawking's statement, because to invoke god as a solution to existence involves infinite regression and of course makes no testable predictions. You may as well just postulate the universe exists as postulate god exists then created it. The absence of satisfactory physical model of how the universe came into existence motivates scientist to investigate the question, it does not motivate god. This does not mean one cannot believe in a creator god, but the motivation should not be the lack of a fully fleshed out competing theory.
So on the religion side nothing has really changed. But this has not stopped many angry responses from religious people. And for many others correcting these misunderstandings has been a huge distraction; Jon Butterworth paused while writing a paper to clarify the situation for channel 4 news.
So who is to blame? The press have certainly been irresponsible, both in misrepresenting Hawking and treating his words in a popular science book as prouncements of "What The Science Says", without ever wondering what scientific papers are behind the comments. So far it sounds like the media are entirely responsible, but it is difficult to be sure to what extent this was fed by a publicist promoting the book or even by the authors themselves. There is also the question as to what extent they explained that much of the physics used to construict this argument, like M-Theory is not confirmed experimentally. And while their words have be taken out of context perhaps Hawking and Mlodinow should have realised this might occur when they agreed to have the extracts published in The Times. I'll leave those questions to people who are more media wise than I am though.
Finally some brief, wild speculation on the physics. Since i don't actually know what the Hawking has really talked about in the book I am simply going to discuss some of the ideas which try to explain our universe and why I am skeptical that we really have a good explanation for everything. Sean Carrol made a nice video post trying to explain the physics which may have inspired Hawking's statement. My comments here are really tangential to this, based more on the idea of a theory of everything. Please read this with the 'rant' title of my blog in mind :) and remember I am talking a little outside my area of expertise now.
String theory is probably the best candidate for describing gravity at small scales, thus allowing a theory of everything. There is however an alternative of loop quantum gravity and also the possibility that we haven't invented the right model yet. M-theory is a unification of the 5 different types of superstring theories (the 'super' stands for supersymmetry, which is needed to describe matter as well as forces but don't worry too much about this) and a nice candidate for a theory of everything.
String theory now sadly seems to make few real predictions because there are 10^500 vacua with all kinds of different physics. Many string specialists talk about exploring the string landscape, and some think this is a positive development, but I find the lack of predictivity disappointing. Of course I am not a string expert and they might say I am missing the point.
Quite a long time ago Andre Linde proposed chaotic inflation where you have lots of "bubble universes" forming a multiverse. The model was not arbitrarily invented and was motivated by problems with the standard big bang theory. Unfortunately once again there are difficulties in testing many aspects of this model since the other universes are not observable. This model and the string landscape do fit together well and give a rather nice picture of how our universe might have appeared but the difficulty of testing these ideas remains.
Now if you hypothesise lots of possible physics in different universes then you can always end up with the features we need for life etc, even if the parameters look really fine tuned. Therefore some claim this is a "natural explanation" for all observable features of our universe.
However they are essentially invoking the anthropic principle (we are here and therefore our universe must have the parameters we require or we wouldn't be around to observe it). To me this is not an explanation, since it relies on an untestable hypothesis, much like god, to evade the question. This does not make the model wrong or even a bad idea, but I do not consider it a satisfactory explanation our universe without some experimental confirmation of the different universes, which seems to be a fundamental stumbling block.
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