The article is weak, there is no real reasoning to follow. This is at best a teaser at his book, for a real discussion we'd have to get and read that. But even

The article is weak, there is no real reasoning to follow. This is at best a teaser at his book, for a real discussion we'd have to get and read that. But even beyond that, I heavily disagree with the whole discussion. If I haven't missed some important new advance, the whole parallel universes theory and much of the theories of what happened before or during the beginning of the Universe are not really science. Most of it is based on some speculative interpretation of the mathematical formulas of quantum physics and/or string theory. But there is no reason those formulas have to be an accurate description of the physical laws in those boundary conditions, where they are known to break hard. So basically they make assertions based on a mathematical theory (which is not bad per se), but those assertions cannot be falsified, as they all operate outside the boundaries of the Universe itself. Non-falsifiable theories are just not science. The same goes for the strong anthropic principle. This is again making statements that are inherently not testable. That might be philosophical speculation, but it's not hard science. This is particularly strange as Hawking uses those borderline scientific theories to discount a religious speculation; but both theories are non-falsifiable by definition, so what's the point? I'm not religious, but I don't see the big difference between two non-falsifiable cosmologies there.