How did you come up with that first sentence? As I noted here before, I thought it was a great first sentence.

Well, I wanted to come up with something that would grab the reader, maybe something a little off the wall, yetrelated to probabilities. As to how I came up with that particular one, I can't cast my mind back and recall exactly how I came up with it. I guess it just came to me and I said let's go with it - that should intrigue someone. Actually, there is always a danger that you are sort of trivializing the subject by using humor. Throughout the book, although there is a lot of humor injected here and there, I tried to do it in a way that was not at the expense of the serious themes of the book. I wanted it to be thought provoking but I wanted to be a fun read. I didn't want it to be a tome on theology or math. I wanted it to be something people would enjoy reading as well as hopefully get something out of it in terms of new ideas.

I think people might need humor to rub the edges off a subject like this.

I think so. Books about math can be dull and books about theology can be dull so if you bring them together you really got the potential for it to be "supernaturally dull" as it were. I didn't want that to happen. I think the Philadelphia Enquirer had a review that sad it was "pleasantly breezy" which I thought was a nice way of describing it.

What type of readers did you envision? Were you thinking of people that were already believers, people that had doubts, people that were diehard atheists?

To be honest with you, when I started writing it - not being a professional writer of trade books - I wasn't writing it for an audience and thinking of it as a business proposition. I was really trying to get some thoughts down and help me get through the process; and maybe people with like view, people who held both religious and naturalistic views and wanted to reconcile them in their mind and how they were balancing those world outlooks. But then as I began writing it, it occurred to me that these issues might be of interest to anyone on the spectrum whether they were completely atheistic and would hopefully give them a way of understanding why other people think differently from them. And maybe even challenge them to go through the thought process and see just how different their numbers would be. And then at the other end of the spectrum people who already hold faith based religious beliefs who maybe want to analyze their own belief system the way I did. What's amusing is that most people who talk to me want to me sign this book to someone else not to them and this is often an atheistic friend or relative or something - which is kind of funny. I didn't necessarily intend that for the book but it is a nice thought that they feel it might make someone think twice about their world outlook.