God by the Numbers

An article in this month's Christianity Today uses three unlikely coincidences in mathematics and its applications as evidence of a divine mind. all three have shown up at length before:

1. the probability that the universe was created at random, since slight deviations from its finely-tuned physical constants would make sustainable life impossible. (Beckenstein-Hawking formula)

2. the probability that enough favorable mutations could have occurred since the Big Bang 15 billion years ago. (Dembski)

3. the elegance of e^(pi*i)+1=0, about which an MIT math prof once said, "There is no God, but if there were, this formula would be proof of his existence."

if you're interested in this sort of thing, these are each well known examples worth looking into. they're definitely worth thinking about.

i don't find (1) particularly compelling, unless there's an upper bound on the amount of time in which universes can emerge and disappear. without such a temporal bound, any number of universes with any number of tuned parameters could be tried before arriving at the present one. (2) is interesting, but i haven't yet read Dembski's original argument. the way i've heard it presented, this thesis seems to ignore some evolutionary biology. and (3) is pretty incredible, but drawing conclusions from this sort of thing is speculation.

nonetheless, it's worth returning to these improbabilities every once in a while, to marvel that this place exists...