Open Letter to Stephen Hawking

An Open Letter to Stephen Hawking (published on publisher’s web page):

Sir, with all due respect to you and to your scholarly and scientific achievements, I am compelled to ask you to re-examine the logic, if not the science, from which you have derived this statement:  “Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing.”  At best, we can state that gravity is a force.  Though we can neither see nor physically examine gravity, we can to a limited extent measure it.  Yet, we can “measure” gravity only with respect to matter.  Without some form of matter, gravity would remain indiscernible.  Matter, then, is the sine qua non of gravity.  It follows that both matter and gravity exist.  It also follows that the two are mutually dependent.   Science, Professor Hawking, has established that we humans can neither create nor destroy matter (law of conservation of mass or matter).  Science has also told us that we humans cannot create or destroy energy – though we are able to change energy from one form to another (first law of thermodynamics).     Logic also tells us that self cannot create self.  Gravity did not create gravity.  Matter did not create matter.  That brings us to “source.”  If gravity is, as you say, a law, then it has an author, that is to say, a source.  And since matter did not create matter, it, too, has a “source.”  And, Professor Hawking, that which has a source is not “spontaneous.”  So, we find ourselves, Sir, seeking that which man from his earliest days has sought.  The source.