God no longer has any place in theories on the creation of the universe due to a series of developments in physics, British scientist Stephen Hawking said in extracts published Thursday from a new book, according to the AFP.

In a hardening of the more accommodating position on religion that he took in his 1988 international best-seller "A Brief History of Time," Hawking was quoted as saying the Big Bang was merely the consequence of the law of gravity.

"Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist," he writes in "The Grand Design," which is being serialized by The Times newspaper, the AFP said.

In his 1988 book, Hawking had suggested that the idea of God or a divine being was not necessarily incompatible with a scientific understanding of the universe.

But in his latest work, Hawking cites the 1992 discovery of a planet orbiting a star outside our own Solar System as a turning point against Isaac Newton\'s belief that the universe could not have arisen out of chaos.