A thread nominally about logically fallacies is almost entirely focused on interpreting a quote mined appeal to authority.....
Anyway....
dt writes:
In fact, by 1988 Hawking had "changed his mind" about the big bang and the beginning of time so he could avoid the appearance of divine intervention.
So as far as you are concerned Hawking is out to deny God and that is why he put forward the no-boundary hypothesis? Let's look more fully at what Hawking has said.
Hawking writes:
Many scientists were still unhappy with the universe having a beginning because it seemed to imply that physics broke down. One would have to invoke an outside agency, which for convenience, one can call God, to determine how the universe began.
Hawking writes:
There are two attitudes one can take to the results of Penrose and myself. One is to that God chose how the universe began for reasons we could not understand. This was the view of Pope John Paul. At a conference on cosmology in the Vatican, the Pope told the delegates that it was OK to study the universe after it began, but they should not inquire into the beginning itself, because that was the moment of creation, and the work of God. I was glad he didn't realize I had presented a paper at the conference suggesting how the universe began. I didn't fancy the thought of being handed over to the Inquisition, like Galileo.
The other interpretation of our results, which is favored by most scientists, is that it indicates that the General Theory of Relativity breaks down in the very strong gravitational fields in the early universe. It has to be replaced by a more complete theory. One would expect this anyway, because General Relativity does not take account of the small scale structure of matter, which is governed by quantum theory.
Link
So - Yes - Some people (most notably Hoyle) did have an objection to the Big Bang as a a theory because they thought it smacked of "divine intervention" or somesuch.
But Hawking himself was (when he met the pope in 1986) advocating BB theory, pointing out that the basis for BB theory (General Relativity) breaks down at a certain point and writing papers about the possible origins of the universe as well. None of which is really compatible with your assertions about Hawking and his views.
From the same link:
Hawking writes:
Although the singularity theorems of Penrose and myself, predicted that the universe had a beginning, they didn't say how it had begun. The equations of General Relativity would break down at the singularity. Thus Einstein's theory cannot predict how the universe will begin, but only how it will evolve once it has begun.
See?
It's about creating a theory that works and which doesn't break down. God (whatever one means by that term anyway) is, at best, a side issue.
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