Philosophical musings on Quanta & Qualia; Materialism & Spiritualism; Science & Religion; Pragmatism & Idealism, etc.
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-
That’s how Bayesian probability1 works. It builds on a postu-
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-
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-
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-
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 ”