I believe in intelligent design

Matthew Du Plessis: Regular readers could easily be forgiven for thinking that the weekly scribblings that appear here under my byline are the work of a godless heathen.

And boy, would they be wrong! Like the headline says, I believe in intelligent design. At least, I do now, after reading a piece in The Telegraph this week.

This puts me quite squarely at odds with Stephen Hawking, who says in his new book, The Grand Design that the universe essentially created itself.

Pshaw!

How does he know? Was he there at the Big Bang? No, he wasn't - at least, I haven't noticed him in any of the pictures from the grand opening, and I think you'll agree he's not exactly inconspicuous, am I right?

Yes, I am.

To borrow a quote from his book (actually from the Reuters story about the book - you can't expect me to actually read such heretical quick-quackery, can you?), Hawkings states: "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 . It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going."

First off, what does that even mean? Secondly, WRONG!

If nobody created the universe, how come we're here to talk about whether or not somebody created it? Clearly in his sophomoric imaginings, "Professor" Hawking didn't think this all the way through.

Incidentally, that's pretty much the same problem I have with the universe, but more on that later.

Over the years, believers have had to give a fair bit of ground on the matter of creation.

While there are still some among us (I get to be "among" now. I like the sound. Like a priceless Ming vase only with a different vowel) who believe Big God McBeardy brought the project home in under a week, the rest of us, who have some experience with contractors, realise this is severely unlikely, and doesn't explain the dinosaurs.

Still "we" did win a little victory when the unpredictable craziness of quantum physics came along to mess with scientists' minds.

The result is that now, to many creationists, and even to many scientists, the idea of a creator sort of setting things in motion and then backing off isn't anathema.

Anathem, meanwhile, is the name of a book by Neal Stephenson, who is very clever. In it, he doesn't address the notion of a creator at all, but considers the idea of there being not just one creation, (or universe, if you prefer), but, like, a whole lot of them.

An infinite number of different dimensions - or worldlines, as he calls them - sprouting from the Big Bang. And they all differ ever so very slightly from their point of dispersal, so that the physics of each universe - the "constants" that were hitherto thought immutable, such as Planck's constant, gravity, the speed of light, the three-second rule for food dropped on the floor, and so on - are subtly, or unfathomably and vastly, different. And of those universes, only those with just the right balance of physical properties can support life.

Think of a universe like a cake that can only rise properly if the right proportions of each ingredient are combined correctly. Otherwise it's a flop - and because the conditions for life aren't in sync, there's not even anyone around to lick the bowl.

So within the infinite number of universes, a hugely infinite number of them are barren wastelands, while a much smaller (but still infinite, mind you) number supports life. Grand, no?

Now, according to that piece I mentioned earlier - "Are we living in a designer universe?" (Telegraph, August 31) by one Dr John Gribbin - the idea of a sentient creator is not only feasible, but exceedingly likely.

Because, as it turns out, making universes is ridiculously easy. All you need is a big old particle accelerator - just a teeny bit more advanced than the Large Hadron Collider.

Bang a few particles together and BAM! Let there be light, ek sê.

He cautions that unless this is done very carefully, the universes thusly created will be the barren lifeless ones.

But give humanity half a chance, and maybe a singularity or two, and we'll be fine-tuning our very own little sea-monkey aquariums, full of sentient migmogs and gimgallahs, in no time.

Just have to tailor the physics right, is all.

Which, together with the Heisenbergian uncertainty of our very badly put-together quantum physics, is why there is every reason to suspect that not only was our universe specifically designed, it was also badly designed. By someone who, like Stephen Hawking (or possibly me) just didn't think things all the way through.