Hawking has stated that he is "not religious in the normal sense" and he believes that "the universe is governed by the laws of science". Hawking stated:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Hawking#Religion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Text_of_Creative_Commons_Attribution-ShareAlike_3.0_Unported_License
There is a fundamental difference between religion, which is based on authority, [and] science, which is based on observation and reason. Science will win because it works.
"The laws may have been decreed by God, but God does not intervene to break the laws".[301] In an interview published in The Guardian, Hawking regarded the concept of heaven as a myth, believing that there is "no heaven or afterlife" and that such a notion was a "fairy story for people afraid of the dark". In 2011, when narrating the first episode of the American television series Curiosity on the Discovery Channel, Hawking declared:
We are each free to believe what we want and it is my view that the simplest explanation is there is no God. No one created the universe and no one directs our fate. This leads me to a profound realization. There is probably no heaven, and no afterlife either. We have this one life to appreciate the grand design of the universe, and for that, I am extremely grateful.
In September 2014 he joined Starmus Festival as keynote speaker and declared himself an atheist. In an interview with El Mundo, he commented:
Before we understand science, it is natural to believe that God created the universe. But now science offers a more convincing explanation. What I meant by 'we would know the mind of God' is, we would know everything that God would know, if there were a God, which there isn't. I'm an atheist.