Hawking: Work backwards on cosmology

Trying to figure out the origin of the universe from first principles is problematic because we can't know the starting conditions:

Most cosmologists think, for example, that the universe went through an early burst of rapid expansion, or "inflation". There is some evidence to support the claim, but there's also a problem. Standard inflationary models require a very improbable initial state, one that must have "finely tuned" values that cause inflation to start, then stop in a certain way after a certain time: a complicated prescription whose only justification is to produce a flat universe without any strange topology, and so on - a universe like ours.

(some reactionary theists via robotwisdom)