Stephen Hawkings now believes there is no God and he did not did not create the universe.

In his new book called "The Grand Design" Hawking refutes his earlier theory that an omnipotent God was possible

The "Big Bang" was merely the outworking of the laws of physics, the British theoretical physicist now argues.

He previously wrote in A Brief History of Time that an all seeing God was definitely a possibility ... "If we discover a complete theory, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason -- for then we should know the mind of God."

Now he begs to differ . "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," Hawking writes.

"It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going."

Hawking, 68, said the 1992 discovery of a planet orbiting another star other than the Sun helped negate the view of Isaac Newton that God was neccessary to help create the order out of chaos.

The new plane circling an alien sun " 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," he writes.

Hawking, has suffered from neuro muscular dystrophy and can only speak through a computer-generated voice synthesizer.