It is 13 minutes to 8.

It's time for thought for the day.

The speaker in our studio this morning is the chief rabbi.

Lord Sachs, good morning.

Good morning.

Tonight is Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year.

The festival that commemorates the anniversary of creation

the moment God said, let there be and there was.

So it was with a wry smile that I read the headline

about scientist Stephen Hawking, and of course we've just heard him repeat it this morning,

that we don't need God to explain creation. The universe created itself. Well, if this sounds like

a new challenge to religion, it isn't. It's one of the oldest of all for more than 2,000 years.

Until relatively recently, there was a much bigger challenge to the idea that God created the universe.

It came from the philosopher Aristotle, who held that there was no creation because matter is eternal.

There never was a beginning to the

universe. It was only in 1964 that Arno Penzias, who as a Jewish child, was rescued by the British

from Nazi Germany, identified together with Robert Wilson the cosmic microwave background radiation that finally establish what we now call Big Bang.

The universe did have a beginning after all. But there's something surreal about this whole line of thought.

Religion isn't science and science isn't religion. And the best way of seeing this is through Rosh Hashanah itself.

Try this thought experiment. Suppose scientists could determine exactly the moment the universe sprang into existence.

Would that change your life? Would it make any difference at all? Would you celebrate? Would you

hold an annual holiday to commemorate that moment? In fact, can you even remember the date

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