From Tom Conroy’s review of Hawking’s Discovery Channel special tomorrow at 8 pm, “Did God Create the Universe?”

In one of several leaps that most of us will agree to accept rather than understand, he says that the universe contains as much negative energy as positive energy, and thus, it adds up to nothing, so the mass or energy didn’t need to come from somewhere else.

Yes, because it comes from the Oracle, most of us will just accept this, like steers that accept their place in the line to the slaughterhouse. Others will insist that just because someone is a famous physicist, he doesn’t get a free pass when he says something that is self-evidently absurd. Hawking is a living master of this.