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Good morning. Many tributes have been paid following the death of Professor Stephen Hawking for his extraordinary scientific achievements and his humanity in the midst of severe illness. As someone who has written much about him, he was an inspiration to me in my life as an astrophysicist and as a Christian theologian- though in later life he himself became more convinced as an atheist. I have long been fascinated by Hawking’s work in numerous areas of relativity and quantum theory and his contribution to the long-term goal of bringing these two great theories together in order to describe the very first moment of the universe’s Big Bang. For as you go back in time, our current laws of physics break down in describing the universe within a fraction of a second before the very beginning. Some religious believers see this as a gap to insert a Creator God – the kind of argument that goes if the universe began with a Big Bang then who lit the blue touch paper! Hawking, unconvinced by this, had been working on a ‘theory of everything’, which described the initial conditions as well as the evolution of the universe. As a Christian I welcome this. The God I encounter in Jesus is not a creator who is proved by a god of the gaps argument, that is if science can’t explain something then let’s insert god. Nor do I believe in a deistic creator, a god who lights the blue touch paper of the Big Bang and then goes off for a cup of tea with a cheery wave saying see you on judgement day. Rather the images of God in the Bible are of a God who holds every moment of the universe’s history in the palm of his hand. I interpret this as God being the giver and sustainer of the physical laws by which the universe evolves. Hawking suggested that a theory of everything would be simple enough that it could be written on T-shirts and would enable us to ‘know the mind of God’. However, the T-shirt wouldn’t do justice to the origin of the laws which make up the theory, why they are so elegant and what the purpose of the universe is. Here I would agree that we do see God’s mind in the gift of science but you need more. From this position, I am grateful for the life and work of Professor Hawking. He has given me a glimpse into the mind of God, and inspired me to keep asking questions in both science and faith.