I did a littlle bit more digging and came up with
this nice summary of "The Grand Design". Hawking and his co-author Leonard Mlodinow don't claim to know everything, they just claim to do away with the need for God. They weasel word their answers in order to strike at theology without making their readers soil their pantaloons with existential dread.
On September 9, 2010, Larry King interviewed Stephen Hawking and Cal Tech physicist Leonard Mlodinow, who together co-authored The Grand Design. In this book, they propose that “God may exist, but science can explain the universe without a need for a creator.” They go on to say that “The scientific account is complete. Theology is unnecessary.”
Apparently, there are criticisms of the construct they use to create something from nothing (Genesis without God, but with Hawking and Mlodinow), but I'll leave those be for now. Here's an interesting quote.
From out of left field, King asked Mlodinow what happens to us when we die. After recovering from being stunned at the question, he deflected it a bit, but it led to a very interesting response about consciousness and the limits of science to quantify it. He said, “there’s no physics explanation for consciousness. And as far as I can tell, I’ve never seen consciousness defined in a way that a scientist can really deal with.”
So why write books publicized as doing away with theology when you know it does away with consciousness as well? The only answer I can come up with is that it sells. It would hardly do to tell you're readers they don't exist. Apparently, that concept is even too scary for some scientists.
As (Dr. Robert Lawrence) Kuhn says in the episode (of Closer to the Truth), What Things are Conscious?, "when all the great answers of physics have been found, we will not have begun to unravel the mysteries of consciousness."
Why? If you've got physics done and all wrapped up, you've got everything explained, right? After all, we're just aggregate blobs of components described by physics. This is just wishful thinking and an appeal to magic to console yourself that you really exist. Applying logic and experimental method to one existential issue, but deliberately avoiding applying it to another while wrapping yourself in the mantle of SCIENCE! is pathetic.
This is real, too, because I want it to be and I'm a scientist.