Bayesian Analysis of God’s Existence

This caught me off-guard (kudos to Chris­tian­i­ty Today Blog for find­ing it): a sci­en­tist has done a Bayesian cal­cu­la­tion to deter­mine the prob­a­bil­i­ty of God’s exis­tence (which he pegs at 67%).

The sci­en­tist’s name is Stephen Unwin (read an inter­view), and the book detail­ing his thoughts is The Prob­a­bil­i­ty of God: A Sim­ple Cal­cu­la­tion That Proves the Ulti­mate Truth

The open­ing line of his book is “Do you real­ize that there is some prob­a­bil­i­ty that before you com­plete this sen­tence, you will be hoofed insen­si­ble by a way­ward, minia­ture Mediter­ranean ass?”

How cool is that?

I’ve not read it yet–so I have no fur­ther com­ments except to say that it looks extreme­ly inter­est­ing.

2 thoughts on “Bayesian Analysis of God’s Existence”

  1. Hel­lo Glen. I was surf­ing the web and noticed that your blog referred to my book The Prob­a­bil­i­ty of God. I hope you enjoy it and that you will email me any com­ments you may have after read­ing it.
    Best
    Steve Unwin

  2. I’m sor­ry I did­n’t reply to this ear­li­er. I fin­ished your book quite a while ago and have been con­sid­er­ing what to say.

    I liked it a great deal. I thought it was inter­est­ing and well-writ­ten (and per­sua­sive). You might be inter­est­ed to know that I shared a sum­ma­ry of your book with a group of pro­fes­sors and doc­tor­al stu­dents in the Deci­sion Analy­sis Work­ing Group here at Stan­ford. They liked it (although being aca­d­e­mics they quib­bled about whether the cat­e­gories were col­lec­tive­ly exhaus­tive and mutu­al­ly exclu­sive). I tried to help them see that the main point was refram­ing the dis­cus­sion from an absolute to a prob­a­b­lis­tic dis­cus­sion.

    Any­way, I got at least one of them to read the book.

    After reflect­ing on your book for quite a while (I used it as a resource when putting togeth­er the first ser­mon in a series on the Apos­tles’ Creed, believe it or not), I think I’ve only got one sug­ges­tion for your future pre­sen­ta­tions. Instead of dis­miss­ing the anthrop­ic argu­ments at the begin­ning, you should real­ly take that same infor­ma­tion and place into one of the evi­dence chap­ters and wind up con­clud­ing that it has a D fac­tor of 1. It’s func­tion­al­ly the same, and I think it more accu­rate­ly reflects the type of think­ing one has to do.

    But maybe I’m just quib­bling like those aca­d­e­mics.

    It was a good book, and you should be proud of it!

    By the way, I’ve expand­ed the Excel Spread­sheet pro­vid­ed in your book. I thought you might like a copy: revised Excel spread­sheet.

    God bless,

    Glen

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