So, Hawking declares the defeat of the Fine-Tuning Argument for God. But Hawking on "God" is surely questionable, as this quote from Grand Design indicates. Hawking writes:
“Some would claim the answer to these questions is that there is a God who chose to create the universe that way. It is reasonable to ask who or what created the universe, but if the answer is God, then the question has merely been deflected to that of who created God. In this view it is accepted that some entity exists that needs no creator, and that entity is called God. This is known as the first-cause argument for the existence of God. We claim, however, that it is possible to answer these questions purely within the realm of science, and without invoking any divine beings."
Oh my... The question of who or what created God is incoherent if, as theistic philosophers argue, "God" is to be defined as a necessarily existent being that did not begin to exist. If a being did not begin to exist then it is nonsense to ask about who brought that being into existence. Christian theism has viewed God as such an eternal being. Therefore to claim that God created the universe does not set off some infinite causal regress.
