Stephen Unwin has an impressive bio:

Stephen Unwin was born in Manchester, U.K. He attended Chetham's Hospital School and obtained his bachelor's degree in physics from Imperial College, University of London. For his research in the field of quantum gravity, he received his doctorate in theoretical physics from the University of Manchester. He has held the post of British technical attache to the United States Department of Energy, and is currently the president of his own consulting firm, specializing in risk analysis and risk management for Fortune 100 clients. He lives in Ohio.

To top all this off, he decided to write a book that would calculate the probability of God's existence. After reading the book (my review is here) I thought Dr. Unwin would be fascinating person to talk to. I was right. Luckily for you I captured our conversation on tape (with his permission of course). The interview was conducted via phone and can be found below. The bold is me the non-bold is Dr. Unwin. Enjoy.

What led you to tackle such a huge subject - the probability of God's existence - for your first book?

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.

Was this an explanation of your thoughts or an experiment for you too?