One of my New Year’s resolutions is to be more humble and accepting of the wisdom of elders. It’s still December though, so today I’m arguing cosmology with a physicist.

Victoria University’s Dr Jeff Tallon writes in today’s Herald that the upcoming NZ Atheist Bus Campaign is ultimately a bit misguided.

I could be wrong, but the bus slogan “There’s probably no God” is probably, nay, almost certainly, incorrect. It is a purely dogmatic statement that is not informed by science.

Well, why should we believe there’s an intelligent creator? Dr Tallon argues the odds – the universe we live in, he writes, exists on a knife edge.

Its density, back at the first moments of the “big bang”, was critically balanced to better than one part in one billion billion billion billion.

A fraction more dense and it all would have collapsed again. A fraction less dense and it all would have evaporated – no galaxies, no stars, no planets, no mother Earth. Read the rest of this entry »