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God: the Science, the Evidence - Michel-Yves Bolloré and Olivier Bonnassies ***

This is, to say the least, an oddity, but a fascinating one. A translation of a French bestseller, it aims to put forward an examination of the scientific evidence for the existence of a deity… and various other things, as this is a very oddly structured book (more on that in a moment).

In The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins suggested that we should treat the existence of God as a scientific claim, which is exactly what the authors do reasonably well in the main part of the book. They argue that three pieces of scientific evidence in particular are supportive of the existence of a (generic) creator of the universe. These are that the universe had a beginning, the fine tuning of natural constants and the unlikeliness of life. 

To support their evidence, Bolloré and Bonnassies give a reasonable introduction to thermodynamics and cosmology. They suggest that the expected heat death of the universe implies a beginning (for good thermodynamic reasons), and rightly give the impression that while Big Bang is not universally accepted amongst cosmologists it is the best supported theory.

As for the fine tuning problem, the authors rightly point out the ridiculously unlikely reality that so many constants of nature are so precisely set to enable the existence of life, leading those who can’t face the idea of a god hypothesis to produce the solution of a multiverse of universes, each with different physical constants. This is countered here mostly with Occam’s razor, missing the far more convincing point that it’s a misuse of probability, deploying the reverse gamblers' fallacy. Of course you can say the creator hypothesis is ascientific because you can't provide proof, but that doesn't stop cosmologists deploying the equally ascientific multiverse hypothesis. I'm less convinced by the life argument, though I do agree that getting to life is a lot more unlikely than has sometimes been suggested.

Overall this section is handled well, making the point that the existence of a creator of some sort is a perfectly reasonable hypothesis which is often simply ignored because many scientists don't like it. The rest of the book, though, moves away from science and tries to go from this to an arguments for a specific Christian God, which works far less well. Bits of this were interesting - notably how unusually close to reality Old Testament cosmology is compared with other contemporary religions - though, of course, the cosmology primarily predates Genesis, some Ancient Greek philosophers, for instance, had some similar views, and you have to interpret some things like creation in seven days loosely. But much of the rest, notably the account of the alleged miracle at Fátima in 1917 stretch objective credibility to breaking point. (It’s interesting that while we are shown photographic evidence of the crowd’s response, there's nothing of the actual event.)

One other oddity is the formatting of the book: this is far more like a Word document than a traditional book with, for example, some text highlighted in blue and paragraphs with line breaks instead of indents. It doesn’t make it harder to read, but just feels amateurish. The book as a whole often comes across as a collection of unconnected parts, leading to considerable overlap and some oddities like one chapter that contains ‘one hundred essential citations from leading scientists’ and two other chapters trying to work out what Einstein and Gödel believed. Does anyone care?

I expected to give up with this book early on, finding it yet another attempt to prove the existence of God. From the start the authors maintain this isn’t possible, but also point out that hardly any scientific hypothesis or theory can be proved - we can merely amass evidence that may or may not support the hypothesis. Like my scientific hero Fred Hoyle before me, I find it difficult not to be swayed towards some kind of intention by the fine tuning evidence. Anything more is a matter of faith, not science. But it was fascinating to see how the authors attempted to go further. A flawed book, but an interesting one.

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