Well, it was an experiment. I hadn't really thought through the way I thought about it. I mean these were things I had basically taken for granted in terms of the absence of any conflict between my religious world outlook and my scientific world outlook. I was really forcing myself to think through an issue that I never had in the past, at least not in a systematic way. It was kind of putting my self on the spot in a way, to see how far the rational evidence would take me along the belief curve as far as God's existence. Would it take me only a small part of the way, would it take me almost 100% of the way, or somewhere in between? I went in to this exercise with an honest - with no bias as to where I was going to come out at the end. When the numbers were actually produced it wasn't some predetermined number I was trying to get to, it was legitimate outcome from that thought process.

At the beginning you take a moment to think about other ways to approach the probability of God's existence. You discuss intelligent design and reject that option. Yet, the Bible seems to suggest nature as a way to God or at least a way people become aware of God. And certainly this has historically been used as a way to point to God's existence. Why tackle Intelligent Design and why is that not a useful way to God's existence?

Well for the reasons you state, it is often viewed as a crucial and central argument for God's existence and that if he does exist he designed the world the way it is. I guess the conclusion I reached in the book, based on thinking through the facts, is that certainly we do live in a very structured world and things do give the appearance of design - whatever that word design means - but I really don't believe that one needs to rely on a theistic view of the world to explain to the satisfaction of our own intellects why the world is the way it is. Now that is not to say that if God does exist that he wouldn't be playing an absolutely crucial role in the way the world is. For example, people often argue, "do you believe in creation or in evolution?" Well, I think that is a false conflict because I strongly believe in evolution. To my mind it is one the most successful natural theories in the history of the human intellect. Yet in my mind it is not at the expense of belief in God, I mean one can believe that those complex mechanisms were set up in some way. So if one has to concede design it is in the design of those mechanisms not in the more naïve engineering sense of someone sitting there with a blueprint of a human eye and building it that way.