The bible thumpers are burning torches in the village tonight.

from www.nydailynews.com – When it came to the creation of the Universe, God just wasn’t necessary.

That’s the conclusion renowned scientist Stephen Hawking has made in his latest tome, “The Grand Design,” set to hit book sellers next week.

“It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the Universe going,” Hawking writes, according to an excerpt featured in London’s The Times.

The Big Bang was a natural event which would have happened without the help or involvement of God, he argues.

“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,” he says.

The discovery of other planets and solar systems outside of our own, which has increased since the early 1990s, helped shape Hawking’s belief that the earth and it’s neighbors were not divinely developed.

“That makes the coincidences of our planetary conditions – the single sun, the lucky combination of Earth-sun distance and solar mass – far less remarkable, and far less compelling as evidence that the Earth was carefully designed just to please us human beings,” he writes.

Scientists, including Albert Einstein, generally did not rule out the involvement of a higher being when it comes to the creation of the universe. Even Hawking did not exclude the possibility in his earlier book, “A Brief History of Time.”

Isaac Newton, who developed the theory of gravity, historically argued that his science could only explain so much of the universe’s behavior, but not its creation.

“Gravity explains the motions of the planets, but it cannot explain who set the planets in motion,” he wrote.

Hawking retired as Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University last year after 30 years, a position once held by Newton.