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Richard Dawkins
On
The Probability
of God

   Post 111.  October 12, 2020

  The Probability of God

   The Hard Question of Divine existence

 The author begins by admitting that his original notion of God was more philosophical and ethical than personal or religious. I’m guessing that his childhood religion may have been Anglican, which has been described as Catholic Lite. “It was arriving in the United States almost 20 years ago that my religious sensibilities were shaken”. Instead of an abstract symbol of ethical behavior, he found a more visceral god-model in American society. “So God, as viewed through religion, has personal tastes and preferences”. Invigorated by this emotion-grounded belief system, he decided to apply his rational mathematical methods to decide the god-question once and for all. “We can then incorporate the probability of God into everyday decisions with the comfort of knowing that we are behaving rationally, as the numbers dictate”. However, his thesis begins, not with numbers, but with already established beliefs.

That’s how Bayesian probability1 works. It builds on a postu-lated hypothesis, expressing a tentative belief, and then applies propositional logic to evaluate that prior belief in numerical terms. If the hypothesis is based on a biased view of the evidence, that slant can be amplified by the mathematical procedures of computing Probability. As a professional in the field of Risk Analysis & Management though, Unwin is aware of this inherent weakness. So he tries to weed out his own biases. And his training as a theoretical physicist could very likely have included the typical scientific prejudice against supernatural explanations for events in the natural world.

Unwin commences by trying to define the kind of God his calculations are intended to support or oppose. He notes that theoretical physicist, Albert Einstein’s notion of God was Pantheistic and similar to philosopher Spinoza’s god-model, as the embodiment of Nature. But Unwin’s personal hypothesis is based on the Bible God of Christianity. He is not interested in the probability of “Nature”, which is 100%. So he contrasts that with his own view : “This is the antithesis of the person-God view that revolves around God as the master of supernature.” So, he concludes that “the person-God of the major faiths is the subject of our analysis and not the God of Spinoza”. Of course, that assertion establishes the personal bias in his god-hypothesis. And yet, his analysis argues both sides of the Christian versus Pantheistic god-models. But it doesn’t make much allowance for the completely opposite Atheist position of a godless world.

He next discusses what kind of evidence will be included in his calculations. But first, he disallows the notion that randomness and chaos could create the kind of orderly world that Einstein found to be both beautiful and mysterious. Unwin labels that appeal to beauty & harmony as the “rose petal” argument for an intelligent designer. He notes that “only an ordered universe can be observed”, and mentions the Anthropic Principle2 as evidence of such intentional design. Since human minds can understand the natural world he takes it as evidence that the world was designed with homo sapiens in mind. Atheists though, counter that the human brain evolved as an adaptation to the natural world. So that principle can be interpreted as both pro and con, on the god-question.

                   Post 111 continued . . . click Next

The God Question


1. Bayesian Probability :
    an interpretation of the concept of probability, in which, instead of frequency or propensity of some phenomenon, probability is interpreted as reasonable expectation representing a state of knowledge or as quantification of a personal belief.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayesian_probability
 

2. Anthropic Principle :
   A cosmological hypothesis that natural laws & constants of the universe are constrain-ed by the necessity to allow human existence. This implies that the world was created with man in mind.



The Probability of God
A Simple Calculation
That Proves the
Ultimate Truth


Steven D. Unwin
Physicist, Risk Management

Since the existence of God is the ultimate uncertainty, and probabilistic analysis is the means of addressing uncertainties  . . .
The probability of God
begs to be computed ”