Reflections over theory of God as product of human ignorance (A critical assessment of Hawking's cosmological atheism)

The theory of God as the product of human ignorance has been presented by many scientists including modern physicists and biologists. In this article, we address the theory from the view point of Stephen Hawking, a physicist. According to him, belief in God is the product of human ignorance. Humans believe in God as the cause of natural phenomena so long as the cause of these phenomena is not discovered by them; But when their cause is revealed, there is no room for believing in God. In the past, the world was considered as the creation of God because of people's deep ignorance, but today when the natural causes of the formation of the world have been revealed thanks to science, there is no need to assume the existence of God. In this paper which is organized in an analytical-descriptive way, first we deal with the model-dependent realism, quantum physics, M- theory, and God as a being covering gaps as the foundations of Hawking's theory and then attention is paid to issues such as the scientific explanation of the origin of the world, the superiority of the scientific explanation over other explanations, and the incompatibility of the scientific explanation with the religious explanation as the three main axes of Hawking's theory. At the end, we will assess the basic elements this theory contains with a critical approach based on Islamic philosophy and theology.