God may be thought of as the cosmic watchmaker, the engineer who constructed the initial state and lit the fuse.

Problems in debates about physics and religion. In: Physics and Our View of the World (Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 207.

Wrongly attributed to Carl Sagan in Gaither's Dictionary of Scientific Quotations (2012), p. 916. It states the source is: Stephen W. Hawking, A Brief History of Time: From The Big Bang to Black Holes (1988), Introduction. But it is not there.

Probably, the source of the misunderstanding comes from the way Drees wrote the sentence in his book: 'God' may be thought of as the cosmic watchmaker, the engineer who constructed the initial state and lit the fuse. Carl Sagan wrote in his preface to Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time that the consequence of Hawking's theory is that there is no absolute beginning of reality, and therefore no need for a creator (Sagan 1988, p. x).