Did Stephen Hawking Believe in God?

No. Stephen Hawking did not believe in God. He was an atheist who held that the universe can be explained entirely by the laws of physics, with no need for a creator. The confusion comes mainly from his most famous book, which has misled many readers about what he actually thought.

The "mind of God" misunderstanding

A Brief History of Time ends with a now-legendary line about how a complete theory of physics would let us "know the mind of God." Many took this as a statement of faith. Hawking was clear that it was nothing of the kind: he used "God" as a figure of speech for the fundamental laws of nature, not for any conscious being. It was metaphor, not belief.

What he actually said

Over time Hawking grew more explicit. In The Grand Design (2010), written with Leonard Mlodinow, he argued that because a law like gravity exists, the universe can and will create itself from nothing, and that it is therefore not necessary to invoke a creator to set it going. In his final book, Brief Answers to the Big Questions (2018), he was blunter still, stating plainly that in his view there is no God and no one directs our fate.

He also rejected the idea of an afterlife, once describing heaven as a comforting story for people afraid of the dark. He saw the brain as a kind of computer that stops working when its components fail, with nothing to follow.

A respectful unbeliever

It is worth being precise about his tone. Hawking was not aggressively anti-religious in the manner of some public atheists; he often spoke about these questions with curiosity and good humour rather than hostility, and he was happy to use religious language as metaphor. His position was simply that the evidence and the physics pointed to a universe that needs no supernatural explanation, a conclusion he reached through his work on the origin of the universe and the no-boundary proposal, which sought to describe a cosmos with no first moment for a creator to act upon.