>>>http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/europe/09/03/hawking.god.universe.criticisms/index.html?hpt=C1
>>
>>I don't really have a dog in the fight here, but I wonder (probably shouldn't aloud) how much influence/prominence Stephen Hawking would have if he weren't crippled.
>
>Not that I agree with him, but it is not just that he is crippled. I understand he is one of the leading experts on black holes. It was he who discovered that (theoretically) black holes should gradually evaporate - his calculations have been confirmed by others, and the corresponding (very weak) radiation is now usually know as Hawking radiation (or Bekenstein-Hawking radiation).
>
>Even though he has no openly declared himself as an atheist, I still think he is one of the leading minds in certain areas.

And he's honest about his mistakes:

Preskill was pretty happy in 2004:
Physicist Hawking Concedes Error In Famous Black Hole Theory
http://www.rferl.org/content/article/1053983.html

Snippet:

On 22 July, Hawking stood before hundreds of colleagues at the 17th International Conference on General Relativity and Gravitation in Dublin and said he had been wrong.

...
SNIP
...

Hawking's change of scientific position closed the book on a long-standing bet. John Preskill, a theoretical physicist at the California Institute of Technology, had bet Hawking that he eventually would be proven wrong. Preskill argued that when a star burns out, creating a black hole, matter sucked into the hole eventually would re-emerge.

Conceding the point, Hawking has delivered to Preskill his winnings -- an encyclopedia of baseball.