Stephen Hawking has been called the greatest mind alive or the greatest since Einstein. Perhaps I do not know how to recognize a great mind, but I have a problem with a thought from his new book, that something can come from nothing and that the universe did not therefore need god to come into being. I may be naïve and display my scientific ignorance but I have such difficulty with the notion that something can actually come out of nothing. I wonder if that is scientifically really true and if work down the road will not show that this is not possible. As to the idea of god, unless Mr. Hawking explains what he means by the word god then his argument is weaker than it may look. It’s clear he doesn’t mean the god of the bible, but there are other definitions and concepts of a more impersonal force, or one that can’t easily be described. Regardless though, his current work, or at least the part that has caused talk, makes me wonder whether Mr. Hawking is not a scientific fundamentalist, maybe not as militant as a religious fundamentalist, but fundamentalist nonetheless.