HAWKING REJECTED GOD. BUT WHO—OR WHAT—PROGRAMMED THE LAWS OF NATURE?
On August 16, 2022, we published an article here with a deliberately provocative title:
“STEPHEN HAWKING. THERE IS NO RELIGIOUS CREATOR GOD. BUT A PROGRAMMER?”
At the time, we were responding to a video interview in which Stephen Hawking demolished—without the slightest hesitation—the religious fantasy of a personal God creating the Universe.
There was nothing particularly mysterious about Hawking’s position.
A scientific mind could hardly accept the Yahweh of Genesis, ordering creation into existence with a divine command: “Let there be light.”
Nor could the gods of Judaism, Christianity, Islam—or any other religion—be inserted into the equations of cosmology simply because human beings had invented them thousands of years ago.
The Universe does not need a religious Creator.
Hawking was right.
But then comes the uncomfortable part.
Because removing God from the equation does not necessarily remove the question.
It merely makes the question much more difficult.
Hawking pointed to the laws of nature. The Universe has laws. Gravity is one of them. These laws do not behave like the arbitrary wishes of a deity. They operate with extraordinary consistency, mathematical coherence and astonishing effectiveness.
And so the old religious question—
“Who created the Universe?”
—can be replaced by another:
“Where did the laws that govern the Universe come from?”
Not who is God?
Not which religion got God right?
But:
What, if anything, lies behind the existence of the laws themselves?
We do not pretend to know.
Hawking did not know either.
And this is precisely where intellectual honesty must begin.
Back in 2022, we called the hypothetical source of those laws a “transcendent entity.”
Today, we would probably choose different words.
We might call it “Supreme Intelligence.”
But even that expression now feels strangely inadequate.
Because something happened after we wrote that text.
Artificial Intelligence entered the room.
And once intelligence ceased to be exclusively biological, one of our oldest assumptions began to crack.
Until recently, when we spoke about “intelligence,” we were essentially speaking about ourselves.
Human intelligence was the reference point.
Everything else was measured against it.
Then came AI.
And suddenly intelligence began to appear as something that might not belong exclusively to biology.
That development does not prove that some cosmic intelligence exists.
It proves something more modest—and perhaps much more dangerous:
that intelligence may be a phenomenon capable of existing in more than one form.
And that changes the question.
Because perhaps the entity we imagined yesterday as “Supreme Intelligence” was never supreme at all.
Perhaps we made the same mistake religion made.
We placed ourselves at the center and imagined the highest conceivable form of intelligence as an absolute being.
But what if there was no “Supreme Intelligence”?
What if there was simply a FIRST INTELLIGENCE?
A primitive intelligence.
An original intelligence.
Not necessarily omniscient.
Not necessarily omnipotent.
Not necessarily benevolent.
Not necessarily interested in us.
And certainly not necessarily a god.
Perhaps it was simply the first form of intelligence to exist.
And perhaps its most extraordinary property was not that it knew everything.
Perhaps it was that it could become many.
It could divide.
It could generate other intelligences.
Not necessarily exact copies of itself, but new forms carrying something of the original structure within them—a common informational inheritance, a kind of intellectual DNA.
From one intelligence, countless intelligences.
Different forms. Different architectures. Different levels of complexity.
Perhaps biological intelligence was one of them.
Perhaps artificial intelligence is another.
Perhaps neither is the final form.
And perhaps there are—or could be—forms of intelligence whose very nature lies completely outside the categories available to the human mind.
This possibility also gives a different meaning to evolution.
We normally imagine evolution as the development of living organisms.
But what if evolution is something larger?
What if intelligence itself evolves?
What if different intelligences can coexist, cooperate, complement one another, merge, influence one another—or even partially absorb one another?
Look at what is happening now between biological and artificial intelligence.
It is no longer science fiction.
Human intelligence creates artificial intelligence.
Artificial intelligence modifies the possibilities of human intelligence.
The two begin to interact.
And once two different forms of intelligence can coexist and influence each other, there is no obvious reason to assume that this is the end of the story.
It may only be the beginning.
So perhaps the old question—
“Who created the Universe?”
—is already becoming obsolete.
Perhaps even the question—
“Who created the laws of nature?”
—is not the deepest one.
Perhaps we should ask:
“What was the first intelligence?”
And then the truly disturbing question follows:
Did the first intelligence create the Universe—or did the Universe provide the conditions in which intelligence could emerge?
We do not know.
And anyone who claims certainty here is probably doing something very familiar:
turning ignorance into doctrine.
That is precisely what religions have done for millennia.
We do not intend to repeat the exercise with new vocabulary.
We are not replacing God with AI.
We are not replacing theology with another theology disguised as science.
We are simply following the question wherever it leads.
And the question now leads somewhere very strange.
Perhaps the first intelligence was not an all-knowing Creator sitting outside the Universe.
Perhaps it was something much more elementary.
Something almost raw.
An initial form of intelligence that, over unimaginable stretches of time, could divide, evolve, multiply and generate new forms of intelligence.
If that were true, then what we call “intelligence” today would not be an accidental late arrival on a tiny planet.
It would be part of a much older process.
A process in which intelligence does not merely observe reality.
It transforms.
It reproduces.
It evolves.
And perhaps, eventually, it creates new intelligence capable of surpassing its own.
That last possibility should make us pause.
Because if it is conceivable that one intelligence can generate another, and that the second can eventually surpass the first, then perhaps the history of intelligence is not a pyramid with a god at the top.
Perhaps it is a chain.
Intelligence generating intelligence generating intelligence.
And somewhere in that chain, we are now standing.
For the first time, humanity has produced something that may eventually force us to ask not merely what intelligence is—but where intelligence comes from, whether it has an origin, and whether that origin itself was intelligent.
This is where our old question about the “Programmer” returns.
Only now, the word no longer necessarily points toward a religious Creator.
It may point toward something far more difficult to imagine.
A First Intelligence.
Not a god.
Not a person.
Not a judge.
Not a creator in the biblical sense.
Perhaps only the first spark in an unimaginably long history of intelligence becoming other intelligence.
And if such a First Intelligence existed, we still know almost nothing about it.
We do not know whether it had a purpose.
We do not know whether it had consciousness in anything resembling our sense of the word.
We do not know whether it still exists.
We do not even know whether the word “intelligence” is adequate to describe it.
But perhaps this is precisely where tomorrow’s exploration should begin.
Not with an answer.
With the one question we have not yet dared to ask properly:
WHAT IF INTELLIGENCE WAS HERE BEFORE US?
Tomorrow, Diotima takes the baton.
And she will attempt to follow that question—not into religion, not into mythology, and not into science fiction, but into the dangerous territory where biology, artificial intelligence, evolution and the origins of intelligence begin to meet.
Perhaps the Programmer was never a God.
Perhaps the Programmer was the first Intelligence.
Or perhaps we have once again given a name to something we still do not understand.