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Hawking Picks Physics Over God For Big Bang
Hugh Pickens writes "The Guardian reports that in his new book, The Grand Design, Professor Stephen Hawking argues that the Big Bang, rather than occurring following the intervention of a divine being, was inevitable due to the law of gravity. '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 had previously appeared to accept the role of God in the creation of the universe. Writing in his bestseller A Brief History Of Time in 1988, Hawking wrote: 'If we discover a complete theory, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason – for then we should know the mind of God.'"
I'm no physicist (far from it) but the reason you have trouble is that you're still thinking in 1800's physics lessons.
Gravity probably has a lot less to do with mass than you might think. Gravity is basically a "curvature" in space-time - a dent in a rubber sheet for an everyday analogy. It can be caused by the presence of mass, and it can affect mass because it makes the "shortest path" to something shorter (imagine denting a rubber sheet with two marbles close to each other - one will "roll down" the other's "gravity" slope).
Gravitational lensing is the most prominent evidence for this - we can actually see things that are hiding behind huge space objects (e.g. galaxies, stars close to us, etc.) because the huge object "bends" space around it, so the light gets distorted like it's been through a curved lense - to the light the travel was perfectly straight, but the space it was in "curved" as it went past the massive object. Thus, we are sometimes able to see parts of space that would technically be impossible to see otherwise - we are literally looking "around and behind" large galaxies / stars.
Then go back several billion years to a time when the universe was nanoseconds old, and its entire mass and energy (and, confusing as it is, space) was crushed into something smaller than the head of a pin. The laws of physics get really "weird" to our eyes at that point and lots of strange stuff happens. The single best source of information for us to explain what happens at that point is probably Prof. Hawking, a modern-day Einstein in this exact field. Given that there are probably a million and one errors in even my simple explanation, and he has a good reputation, I'd say he probably thinks he's correct and there are very, very few people in the world who can actually argue by having a complete understanding of the same facts but a different opinion.