PASCAL'S ODDSMAKER:

An interview with Stephen Unwin (Kevin Holtsberry, 15 December 2003, A Nickel's Worth of Free Advice)

Stephen Unwin was born in Manchester, U.K. He attended Chetham's Hospital School and obtained his bachelor's degree in physics from Imperial College, University of London. For his research in the field of quantum gravity, he received his doctorate in theoretical physics from the University of Manchester. He has held the post of British technical attache to the United States Department of Energy, and is currently the president of his own consulting firm, specializing in risk analysis and risk management for Fortune 100 clients. He lives in Ohio.

To top all this off, he decided to write a book that would calculate the probability of God's existence. [...]

[Q:] At the beginning you take a moment to think about other ways to approach the probability of God’s existence. You discuss intelligent design and reject that option. Yet, the Bible seems to suggest nature as a way to God or at least a way people become aware of God. And certainly this has historically been used as a way to point to God’s existence. Why tackle Intelligent Design and why is that not a useful way to God’s existence?

[A:] Well for the reasons you state, it is often viewed as a crucial and central argument for God’s existence and that if he does exist he designed the world the way it is. I guess the conclusion I reached in the book, based on thinking through the facts, is that certainly we do live in a very structured world and things do give the appearance of design – whatever that word design means – but I really don’t believe that one needs to rely on a theistic view of the world to explain to the satisfaction of our own intellects why the world is the way it is. Now that is not to say that if God does exist that he wouldn’t be playing an absolutely crucial role in the way the world is. For example, people often argue, “do you believe in creation or in evolution?” Well, I think that is a false conflict because I strongly believe in evolution. To my mind it is one the most successful natural theories in the history of the human intellect. Yet in my mind it is not at the expense of belief in God, I mean one can believe that those complex mechanisms were set up in some way. So if one has to concede design it is in the design of those mechanisms not in the more naïve engineering sense of someone sitting there with a blueprint of a human eye and building it that way.

[Q:] Can you give a simple explanation of the anthropic principle and what you mean by it?

[A:] There are various types of descriptions of that principle put out there. There is the so-called strong anthropic principle and the weak anthropic principle. The strong anthropic principle is the one I do not discuss because it is very philosophically unsatisfying in my mind, says that somehow that the laws of nature were specifically tuned and created to result ultimately in the conditions that would be conducive to life, perhaps even human life. The weak anthropic principle, which to me is a very valid principle, is that the universe we would see around us is inevitably the universe that would be conducive to life. In other words, for there to be a perceiver of the things around us the world had to be just right to allow that perceiver to exist. A perceived universe, one that we can see and detect, really always would need to be conducive to life and the person doing the perceiving. I kind of joke in the book, in no universe would the comment be overheard “Just as I thought, no life here.” It is a logical paradox

I also use the device of the little sign in the shopping mall. If you walk up to a sign in a shopping mall it has that little arrow that says, “you are here.” Would you be surprised that the sign is exactly right? I mean it is kind of a miraculous manipulation that the sign was exactly right. It could have anything but it said just the right thing that you are here. Well, the answer is that it is your attributes that make it right. If you were standing somewhere else it wouldn’t be right but you wouldn’t be reading it in that case. So kind of in-built into it is its correctness. So the analogy is that the world is such that the person looking at it would always come into being. So you are always looking at a world conducive to life and structure.

[Q:] Do you have in your mind a relationship between faith and science?

[A:] Well yes, faith is a word that can be used in many different contexts. The specific context and the way in which I talk about in the book and the way I envision it – I go through this process of calculating the probability of God and what I mean by that is based on the evidence and rational analysis using the same sort of process you might use in a scientific analysis here is the probability of or likelihood of God based purely on reason. And I come up with a number that is 67% but then I say if you ask me off the top of my head – more intuitively – what’s the probability that God exists I wouldn’t say 67% I would probably give you a number that is far closer to 100%. What I say in the book is that that discrepancy, the discrepancy between 67% and 100%, that is explicitly the role that faith plays. It is a bit audacious I know but what I do is basically model the number of what the faith factor is so that it is something that accounts for the discrepancy between what is rational belief and what is the full belief. So in that sense the faith factor is really disconnected from the rational analysis by definition. But the situation isn’t all that simple because you ask in a more general sense what faith can be. And in that sense scientists have faith. The faith of a scientist is that reason or rationality is going to help him understand the natural world. We think and we look at the world around us and we take these tools of human reason like say mathematics and it proves to be a remarkably successful way to model the way the natural world works. I mean that is what physics is, it is modeling the way the world works in the language of math. Well you ask yourself did it have to be that way? Can we imagine a world where we come up with all these clever mathematical devices and yet it sheds no light on the physical workings of the world? I think scientists have faith in the fact that they can in principle uncover the way the physical world works by applying human reason and mathematics. So faith can be a very subtle thing. It insinuates itself even into atheistic beliefs. An atheist scientist at core has faith that reason can describe the way the world works.

He concedes more ground than he ought, but interesting nonetheless.

Posted by Orrin Judd at December 17, 2003 8:28 AM