Does God exist?

Atheists the world over respect no religious tradition Hindu or otherwise. Belief in a god or gods, it seems, arises naturally the world over. It seems that there is some element common to all human experience that causes us to look for something transcendent on which to build our lives, to ask the question Does God exist? and to affirm, at least in some sense, that he does. Yet this type of argument does not manage to sway those among us who deny the existence of a Supreme Being. The greatest mystery that mankind has been unable to solve till date is whether God exists or not.

Is the belief in God a mythological or an infantile belief or is there really a creator for this whole universe? In the new book The Probability of God: A simple Calculation that proves the Ultimate Truth, Pub Date: Oct 2004, Publisher: Three Rivers Press (CA) ISBN: 1400054788 Stephen Unwin, a theoretical physicist, tries to calculate the probability of God’s existence. This text is worth a read on the subject of the existence of God. Unwin uses a large quantum of accumulated data to work out these probabilities, for instance:

1. The electromagnetic field is exactly 1039 times stronger than the gravitational force: had it been a little weaker, say 1033 times as strong, stars would have been a billion times less massive, and would have burnt a million times faster. Long before any of us — or our forefathers —  were born, universal darkness would have buried us all. 2. If the differences between the mass of the proton and the neutron were not exactly what it is-roughly twice the mass of the electron-all neutrons would have become protons and matter would cease to exist. 3. Water, almost alone among compounds, is lighter in its solid state than in its liquid state; ice floats. Had it not done so, oceans would have frozen from the bottom up, and in time the earth would have been entirely covered with ice. In the text Unwin refers to many more of such examples, from several branches of science: physics, chemistry, astronomy and biotechnology in his study. Unwin asserts that all this couldn’t have happened by chance and there must therefore have been someone who created the universe to support life, and as such he comes to the conclusion that there is a 67 percent likelihood that God exists.

At its core, this book reveals how a math equation developed over 200 years ago by noted European philosopher Thomas Bayes can be used to prove the probability that God exists. The equation to calculate the probability of the existence of God itself is much more complicated than a simple coin-toss chance, yet Dr Unwin writes with a clarity that makes his proof easy for even the non-mathematician to read, understand, and enjoy. In a media interview Dr Urwin was asked “What led you to tackle such a huge subject ? the probability of God’s existence — for your first book?” To this he answered “I had a relatively religious upbringing and at the same time I was educated in the sciences; physics in particular.

“And while I was going through that educational process it never occurred to me that there could be any conflict between a religious description of the world and the naturalistic description I had been learning in science. “And yet many years later when I came to the US with my job, I became gradually aware of an ongoing debate that apparently put science and religion in conflict with one another, which seemed very counter-intuitive to me. So in many ways this project was to kind of help me think through, at least to my own satisfaction, why I had this perception that there was no conflict between the two.

“It seemed to me that one of the characteristics of this debate was that both sides of the debate were extremely certain in their position. It occurred to me that really the legitimate position to take was one of uncertainty, in terms of the existence of God. So I kind of started from that point and I sort of hypothesized from the point that we were all really uncertain about whether God exits? and all my professional life I had worked in the mathematics of uncertainty so it was a natural route to addressing the uncertainty to apply those sort of mathematical concepts.

“So the idea of calculating the probability of God in my mind was always a first step of that process, of understanding the role that uncertainty plays in the way we believe about God, and the way we talk about faith, and such things like that.” Some critical book reviews of Unwin’s theory however pointedly observe “In his theory, Unwin ignores various questions. What is the origin of God? If God created matter/energy, and designed the systems that have propelled matter into its present arrangement, who or what accomplished that for God? If God has created the universe, who created God? Why is it any more reasonable to believe that God has always “been” than it is to say that matter has always “been?”

As Carl Sagan has said, “If we say that God has always been, why not save a step and conclude that the universe has always been?” So long as critical evidence is not forthcoming, so long as fundamental questions like these remain unanswered, Unwin’s theory on the probability of God’s existence is questionable from the scientific angle. Unwin’s theory therefore is a perversion of scientific investigation. His theory is not allowed to evolve out of facts and it has no scientific and rational reasoning.” The Probability of God: A simple Calculation that proves the Ultimate Truth remains however an interesting read and supportive materials for those who believe in God.