来源：《卫报》
原文刊登日期：2021年6月6日
Do the laws of science and mathematics explain everything, without any need to bring God into it? The pious once believed that angry deities could unleash plagues. As reason emerged in the temple of thinking, there was a move to claim God was behind the advance of reason. In this struggle between beliefs, new pathways of thought emerged, to the benefit of humanity.
难道科学和数学的法则可以解释一切，而不需要把上帝带入其中吗？虔诚的人曾经相信愤怒的神可以释放瘟疫。当理性出现在思考的殿堂时，有一种说法是上帝是理性发展的背后推手。在信仰之间的斗争中，出现了有益于人类的新思路。
The fruits of this theological and scientific collision have been revealed during Covid. The work of Thomas Bayes, an 18th-century clergyman and mathematician, has become central to understanding the pandemic. Bayes’ theorem is used to work out the conditional probability that a person is not infected, given a positive test. This is just the tip of the Bayesian spear. David Spiegelhalter and Anthony Masters wrote in April that many complex pandemic analyses “have been ‘Bayesian’, including modelling lockdown effects and Pfizer’s vaccine trial”.
这一神学和科学碰撞的成果在新冠疫情期间得到了揭示。18世纪的牧师兼数学家托马斯·贝叶斯的工作已经成为理解这种流行病的核心。贝叶斯定理用于计算一个人在一个阳性检验结果下没有被感染的条件概率。这只是贝叶斯理论这把长矛的尖儿。戴维·斯皮格豪特和安东尼·马斯特斯在4月份写道，许多复杂的流行病分析“都是‘贝叶斯’分析，包括模拟封锁效应和辉瑞的疫苗试验”。
The mathematical theory was born of a debate about reason and religion. Bayes and his friend Richard Price were motivated by a desire to refute an attack on Christianity by the philosopher David Hume. In his 1748 essay Of Miracles, Hume had argued that “no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous, than the fact, which it endeavours to establish”. He would not be convinced by anyone who told him that a dead man could be “restored to life”, a provocation to those who believed in Christ’s resurrection. Hume’s argument was that to claim to have witnessed a miracle is poor evidence that it happened, since it goes against what is observed daily. Price thought, via Bayes, that Hume was mistaken. In 1767, Price showed that even if a person had seen a high tide a million times, this was not enough, statistically, to say that the waters would always come in. It was impossible to eliminate the chance of a miracle based on a very large number of negative observations.
贝叶斯理论诞生于一场关于理性和宗教的辩论。贝叶斯和他的朋友理查德·普莱斯的动机是想反驳哲学家大卫·休谟对基督教的攻击。在其1748年的文章《神迹》中，休谟认为“任何证词都不足以确立一种神迹，除非是这样一种证词，即如果这种证词是虚假的，那么由此得到的结果将会比证词本身所要确立的那个事实更加荒谬”。他不会相信任何人告诉他，死人可以“复活”，这是对那些相信基督复活的人的挑衅。休谟的论点是，声称自己目睹了神迹并不能证明神迹的发生，因为它违背了我们每天所观察到的。根据贝叶斯的理论，普莱斯认为休谟错了。1767年，普莱斯指出，即使一个人见过一百万次涨潮，从统计学上来说，这也不足以说明涨潮总是会到来。基于大量的反面观察结果是不可能消除神迹发生的可能性的。
Hume’s “miracles” theory was rooted in his irreligion. It collapsed because of his ignorance of the probabilistic tools his contemporaries were developing. While Christian leaders attacked Hume as a “rascal and blockhead”, Price thought him “mistaken, but capable of reason and conviction”. Both men trusted in the power of reasoned debate.
休谟的“神迹”理论植根于他没有宗教信仰。由于他对同时代人开发的概率工具的无知，他的理论崩溃了。当基督教领袖抨击休谟是“流氓和傻瓜”时，普莱斯认为休谟虽然“错了，但有理性和信念”。两人都相信理性辩论的力量。
The Enlightenment empowered the “enlightened”, and its revolutionary values helped to usher in a more democratic age. Today, political power is no longer the preserve of an elite. There is wisdom in diverse crowds. Reason has become central to explaining, describing and justifying actions. But whether the emerging theories are moral, or explain how values connect to our beliefs, remains in the realm of philosophy, not science.
启蒙运动赋予了“开明者”权力，其革命性的价值观帮助开创了一个更加民主的时代。今天，政治权力不再是精英的专属。不同的人群有不同的智慧。理性已经成为解释、描述和证明行为正当的核心。但是，这些新兴的理论是否合乎道德，或者是否解释了价值观如何与我们的信仰相联系，仍然属于哲学领域，而不是科学领域。