Nietzsche and Hawking

I saw from a friend on Facebook that Stephen Hawking has a new book out, "The Grand Design" in which he claims that physics proves there is no God and the Universe was created by blah blah blah.

Haven't we seen this all before? Nietzsche let everyone know that there was no God and no need for good and evil and that we should all serve supermen who should rule with an iron fist. Of course, Nietzsche didn't, you know, pick up a gun and do anything, because he was, like, busy at the time and anyway he had a bunch of library books that were overdue and the kitchen was really a mess.

Nietzsche was a wimp advocating mass slaughter.


Nietzsche, right before he picked up a gun and ... oh, wait. Hear that? That sounds like the tea's ready.
Nowadays we have Stephen Hawking telling us all that physics can explain the start of the Universe and religion is a waste of time. Of course, he didn't actually see the start of the Universe the way he can see the start of human life with all its physics and stuff. If there's no sky fairy that made the Universe, then there sure as heck isn't any such thing as Stephen Hawking.

Stephen, of course, knows all of this. Still, he's taking the time to write books to convince arbitrarily connected collections of subatomic particles of this or that. Doesn't that sound a bit Nietzschean? I mean, if you believe in this stuff, shouldn't you live your life based on it? Doesn't writing books seem like a contradiction here? After all, his books are written with the underlying assumption that what all the rest of us think matters. But why does it matter?

Update: I revised this post to remove a lot of sneering at Stephen Hawking. It was unnecessarily unpleasant and Dr. Hawking, unquestionably a brilliant man, doesn't deserve such treatment.