BBC report on Stephen Hawking's new book.

In his new book The Grand Design out this week, Stephen Hawking, the 68-year-old reknowned British theoretical physicist says God did not create the universe, reports Reuters.com. Hawking has seemingly changed his views on the creation of the universe, previously thinking "there might be room for God and physics," according to BBC.

Hawking argued in the book he co-authored with American physicist Leonard Mlodinow, "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." He added, "It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going."

Citing the discovery in 1992 of a planet orbiting a star other than the sun, Hawking said, "(It) 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 evidence that the Earth was carefully designed just to please us human beings."

"One of the world's leading scientific authorities," Hawking is "renowned for his work on black holes, cosmology and quantum gravity," according to Reuters.com. He wrote A Brief History of Time, a 1988 book on the origins of the universe. Due to a neuromuscular dystrophy, he is almost completely paralyzed and speaks through a computer-generated voice synthesizer.

For more on this story, log on to Reuters.com.