Quantum tempest in a celestial teapot

So Stephen Hawking by some accounts is the new heir apparent to the French astronomer Pierre-Simon Laplace. For those who don't recognize the name, here is a reported exchange between Napoleon and himself regarding one of Laplace's propositions:

Napoleon: "M. Laplace, they tell me you have written this large book on the system of the universe, and have never even mentioned its Creator."

Laplace: "I had no need of that hypothesis."

LaPlace felt previous ideas regarding the nature of God and its relationship to the mechanics of the universe were unnecessary.  Indeed, the idea of making God into a puppeteer pulling the strings of the universe developed in response to the rise of empiricism and science under the belief it would allow for the kind of "proof" of God that had previously been unavailable, largely irrelevant, and in some cases blasphemous. It was based on the idea of God's necessity to explain the currently unexplainable in the workings of the material world.