Paul Davies

Paul Davies (b. 1946) is a British-Australian theoretical physicist and cosmologist, currently Regents' Professor at Arizona State University, where he directs the Beyond Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science. Trained at University College London and Cambridge, he has held chairs at Newcastle, Adelaide, and Macquarie. Davies is among the most widely read interpreters of physics on questions traditionally belonging to natural theology. In God and the New Physics (1983) and The Mind of God (1992)—the latter contributing to his 1995 Templeton Prize—he argues that the laws of physics, the rational intelligibility of the cosmos, and fine-tuning of physical constants raise questions that scientific naturalism alone cannot fully answer. His position is broadly deistic or naturalistic-theistic rather than confessional: he resists supernatural intervention but treats the lawful, life-permitting structure of the universe as suggestive of a deeper rational order. Later works (The Goldilocks Enigma, 2006) explore multiverse responses to fine-tuning and propose a self-explaining universe via biofriendly laws. Davies has been criticized by Richard Dawkins and other new atheists for granting religion epistemic credibility, and by theologians (e.g., Keith Ward, John Polkinghorne) for an overly impersonal conception of the divine. Philosophers of religion also question whether his cosmic 'mind of God' carries the explanatory weight he assigns it, given underdetermination between theistic and multiverse interpretations of fine-tuning.