Mani Bhaumik’s Code Name God explores how the extension of particle physics into quantum theory and the reconciliation of the four fundamental forces: electromagnetism, the strong nuclear force, the weak nuclear force, and gravity, provides a logical argument for the existence of God in some form. It has three main sections: the first being an autobiography, the second being the science section, and the last being the section that combines Bhaumik’s personal experience with the science to try to prove the existence of God.
I think that the first section was incredible. If this book was just an autobiography, it would be fantastic. He tells his story chronologically, starting dirt-poor in a small village in northern West Bengal before working his way up through society to become the multimillionaire inventor of LASIK eye surgery. Along the way, he worked with Gandhiji, moved to Kolkata, got a scholarship to come to the US for research at UCLA, and then being the leader of the team that invented the specific type of laser to be used for the LASIK surgery. After this, he became very rich, moved to Bel Air, and lived a life among the rich and famous but was unfulfilled. After consulting with three close friends, he realized that his science-focused life had become completely detached from spirituality, and he needed to figure out how he could convince himself that spirituality was real. So far, so good.
The second section was also really good. It does really good science education in that it explains things that most people would find reasonably difficult to understand in a way that makes sense and is easy-to-understand but not so much so that it feels demeaning or that the reader is being talked down to. That is a difficult balance to maintain, but this book does it well. In that sense, it reminded me of another fantastic science book I read recently: Dan Levitt’s What’s Gotten Into You, which does the same thing at a lower level. Additionally, it was also part science, part history, and part biography.
The third and final section was the section that I did not appreciate and almost ruined the whole book for me. The first two sections were incredible, so I was expecting something great from the last section, especially given the book’s claims of “logically proving the existence of God” (my italics). It did not live up to that expectation.
This section essentially starts by explaining that all of the five major religions’ perception of God is almost identical. The book does not try to state that all of these religions are the same, but simply that the book’s referral to God is not the god of any specific religion but is rather the concept of spirituality as a whole (kind of, I’m not quite sure how to explain it). I have no objections to this, and it is something that I actually agree with. However, the book’s ‘big inference’ is where it all goes wrong.
During the Big Bang, it is theorized that all four of the forces were reconciled with each other, the holy grail of particle physics. Particle physics has already proven this fact for two of the four: electromagnetism and one of the two nuclear forces (I can’t remember which). Bhaumik assumes that this fact is true. That all seems well and good to me, the theory is there that this fact is true, we just can’t definitively prove it. But then, he completely ignores this theory in the rest of the book. Literally the entire section of the book was to prove that this fact is true (and what that even means), but he just completely ignores this. To be honest, I find particle physics and quantum theory fascinating, so I did not mind at all him proving this, but his conclusion is utterly unsupported by this evidence, and if it is, he doesn’t make the connection. He proceeds then uses one of the most stupid “scientific” arguments for God, the very same one used by political debater Charlie Kirk (AKA that one Republican guy that started a shouting match and got escorted out of the DNC). The argument goes as such:
At the onset of the universe, there were six forces present. These forces were each precisely tuned to be perfect for the existence of life. Had even one of these numbers been 0.01% off what it is, the universe would not be capable of life in any form. The chance that a given universe is capable of life is a whopping 1 in 10^10^123! We live in a universe that both is capable of life and has life, therefore, God. That’s it. That’s the entire argument.
Let me disprove this using the Multiple Universes Theory of particle physics. Let’s say that there are multiple universes. Each one of them has a different configuration of these six forces. There are a near-infinite number of these universes, yet only a few of them are capable of life. If you have a universe incapable of supporting life and observation across universes is impossible, then there's no one to say "yep that's what's expected." Only the universes that are capable of supporting life would have living things there to realize that they are a 1 in 10^10^123 chance of existing. If we assume that there is no communication between universes, there is no way of knowing that it's not an anomaly, but by the same logic, we can assume that it probably is. It's like rolling a dice, writing what you got only if it's a six, and then looking at it and being like "The dice is blessed! I only got sixes! God exists!“
If you're interested, there's a great book about the actual numbers of our universe and why it can support life (that doesn't make illogical conclusions about the existence of god) called Just Six Numbers by Martin Rees.