I'm Sure He Knows Something I Don't

but...

Stephen Hawking lectured to a sold out crowd in Berkeley and said the universe spontaneously came in to existence from nothing.

“If one believed that the universe had a beginning, the obvious question was, what happened before the beginning,” Hawking said. “What was God doing before He made the world? Was He preparing hell for people who asked such questions?”

It appears the good doctor doesn't realize that he's contradicting himself by speaking of eternity and a linear time line in the same context.

Just in case you didn't know, time is a physical property affected by mass, acceleration and gravity. Since it is physical, it is subject to entropy, etc. So what was there BEFORE the physical realm started? Nothing. But God didn't sit around for a LONG TIME before that because time simply did not exist. Even now, God is not constrained by time, he is outside of it. I suppose it's much like being in orbit around the Earth and being able to see Florida and California at the same time. He sees what we call past and future from outside the bounds of that linear path.

Matter cannot materialize out of nothing. Everything comes from something. The 2nd(thanks for the correction Giraffe) 1st Law of Thermodynamics says that "matter can neither be created nor destroyed." Presumably, matter cannot be created by other matter; obviously it can be made by God since He exists outside of the physical world.

It's useless to talk about eternity in terms of it being "a long time" because there is no time involved at all. That's a tough concept to wrap your brain around because we only think in terms of past, present and future.

I theorize that because we pass out of the physical realm when we die that we all arrive at the judgment seat simultaneously. I nearly said "at the same time" but that obviously wouldn't be accurate. Think of two rockets taking off from each coast and meeting a space station. One coast represents the past, the other the future. Think of passing out of the atmosphere as going beyond the physical realm.

Even the highly intelligent and knowledgeable will stretch the bounds of credulity in order to avoid coming to the obvious conclusion that we had to have been created.