The vehicle should be persuasion rather than direct conflict?

I think so. I think it would be nice if the matters before us as a practical political matter were matters that each of the faiths would see the same way but of course there are counter-examples to that. I guess I didn't really delve into that pragmatic an element of things; it was more a spiritual point that in my mind there is no real conflict. I mean you see Christians and Muslims arguing whether Jesus was the Son of God or not and it seems such ridiculous, vacuous things to be debating.

Either you get to that faith point or you don't?

Yeah, that's right. How can you argue against another person's faith? Just because the nature of what it is. You can argue using rationality or reason to debate, that is what debate is about, using logical points to persuade the other person that the evidence is on your side. But when the issue is entirely faith based then there really is no starting point. I find those types of debates completely vacuous.

To return to the math, did you see the math as just a tool to get to the ideas or were you trying to communicate something about the math and the logic too?

It was not the main thrust of the book but there were certain aspects of the math - although, as you know, the math is fairly rudimentary it's not like there is anything really complicated in there - but I thought readers would be interested in the way probability theory works. We all use the word probability and think in terms of probability but most people don't have a specific knowledge of the way true mathematical probabilities work and behave and what they are, and how they are interpreted. People would be surprised, for example, that there is this debate in the world of probability as to how it is interpreted. You know there is the Bayesians versus the frequentists. I think most people are not aware that this is even an issue they think that probability theory has been wrapped up years ago just like basic arithmetic and now it just needs to be applied. But there is actually quite a thriving debate in the technical world as to what probabilities are. So I thought people would be interested in that given that probability is such a fundamental part of our way of thinking.

In a way, doing the probability calculation got me to a point where I could then start to contrast reason based versus faith based belief systems. So it put me in a nice position from that point on. I am not sure I could have gotten to that point quite as compellingly with having gone through the mathematical aspects. Although I would hope a lot of that would still hold if someone wanted to sort of skip over the calculation part.