Can You Find God in the Laws of Physics? This is World!

Please join my mailing list here 👉 https://briankeating.com/yt to win a meteorite 💥 In this conversation, I break down a provocative idea: science doesn’t “prove” ultimate truths — it eliminates what’s false. And if that’s how physics works, then the search for God (or the disproof of God) has to play by the same rules: hypotheses, predictions, and falsifiability. ------------------------------------------------------ Join this channel to get access to perks like monthly Office Hours: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join 📚 Get my books: Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner, with productivity tips from 9 Nobel Prize winners: https://a.co/d/03ezQFu Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner, with life-changing interviews with 9 Nobel Prizewinners: https://a.co/d/hi50U9U My tell-all cosmic memoir Losing the Nobel Prize: http://amzn.to/2sa5UpA The first-ever audiobook from Galileo: Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems: Ptolemaic and Copernican https://a.co/d/iZPi9Un Follow me to ask questions of my guests: 🏄‍♂️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating 🔔 Subscribe https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 📝 Join my mailing list; just click here http://briankeating.com/list ✍️ Detailed Blog posts here: https://briankeating.com/blog 🎙️ Listen on audio-only platforms: https://briankeating.com/podcast #universe #podcast #briankeating #intotheimpossible #science #astronomy #cosmology #cosmicmicrowavebackground #intotheimpossible #briankeating Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:59Brian Keating?

  Do you believe in God? I say, no. I don't believe in God. I don't believe in gravity either. I have evidence for gravity. I'm looking for evidence that God exists. I'm an experimentalist. I'm not a theorist like Stephen Hawking. 90% of American scientists do not believe in God. 90%. But scientists can't even prove a simple fact like the Earth is perfectly round. No, I worked for myself, I worked for the universe to find out what is the truth that we can measure. I don't care about 26 dimensions. Show me a prediction before I die. I want to know answers to these questions. There are religious aspects of the Nobel Prize. The virtue of the steady-state cosmologists is that they don't look like Genesis 1:1. One, single, beginning.

• 1:43Brian Keating?

  A singularity, perhaps. That means if Sir Roger's right, the Bible is falsified.

• 1:56Speaker 03

  Pleasure having you here. Does God exist?

• 2:00Brian Keating?

  So, I think that's one of the biggest questions that a human can ask. Does God exist? It means a lot of different things, and I'm glad you asked it that way. Most people say, "Do you believe in God?" I say, "No, I don't believe in God." I say, "I don't believe in gravity either. I have evidence for gravity," right? So, the question is, is there evidence for God? And so, does God exist in that hypothesis? It's certainly a hypothesis that is worthy of deep, deep consideration. And it's one that most of my colleagues, 90% of American scientists, do not believe in God, do not profess a theistic belief, or even the possibility. 90% either are atheists, or they're basically agnostic,

• 2:45Brian Keating?

  but leaning towards atheist. And it's a shame, because you certainly can be a phenomenal scientist. You can be a phenomenal human being and not believe in God, and not care about God. But, as Einstein said, "Science without religion is blind, and religion without science is lame." So, what does that mean? It means that, even if you don't believe in God, or the importance of the question of God, ignoring it denies at least part of what it means to be a human being, which is the wonder of where did we come from? Where does it all originate from? Religious people will answer that as God. Secular people, atheists, will say it's natural. It evolved.

• 3:31Brian Keating?

  The universe that I study with experiments with telescopes, with computers, emerged from nothing, and had no cause, no first mover, no personal God, no Savior, no Messiah.

• 3:44Brian Keating?

  And obviously, you can be a good person and not believe in God. You can be a bad person and believe in God. There's many different options. For me, does God fit into the program of science? Certainly not necessary. As I said, 90% of my colleagues wouldn't make the progress they do. 90% of the Nobel Prize winners that I've talked to myself, they don't believe in God. So certainly, they got pretty far without that hypothesis. My question is, can we obtain evidence for God's existence?

• 4:15Speaker 03

  Can we?

• 4:16Brian Keating?

  My research is centered on the question of not proving God's existence, because even in science, I can't prove to you that the earth is round. Can't prove it. It is fundamentally impossible to prove that in the same way that a mathematician can prove 1 plus 1 equals 2. And you know, the proof for 1 plus 1 equals 2 takes hundreds of pages of very abstract mathematics, but at least it can be done. But scientists can't even prove a simple fact like the earth is perfectly round, or is round, or has any shape whatsoever, because necessarily, one violation of that hypothesis negates or falsifies the hypothesis. So I don't look for evidence of God. I look for disproves of the existence of God.

• 4:59Speaker 03

  Is there any room for God within the hard science, hard physics?

• 5:05Brian Keating?

  Absolutely, there is room for it. The question is, is it part of the scientific program? For example, I could hypothesize to you the following situation. God created the universe and set it up such that astronomers, cosmologists, experimenters like me would look for evidence of God and not find it, right? That's within God's powers as the Judeo-Christian God, which is the only God I'm familiar with. I'm not familiar with other types of gods or God figures. Certainly not a polytheist in any way. I don't believe in Zeus or Thor and so forth. So at most, I could say that I believe in one God. But again, I don't say I believe in God. That's dangerous language. Don't ever say, "I believe in gravity," right? You say, "We have evidence for gravity.

• 5:49Brian Keating?

  If I drop something, it will do what it does." But it could, the next day... They not do what it does every other day. The sun could not rise in the east, correct?

• 5:58Speaker 03

  Correct me if I'm wrong.

• 6:00Brian Keating?

  Yeah.

• 6:00Speaker 03

  Do you look for God by trials and arrows, you know, like scientists look for gravitational waves?

• 6:08Brian Keating?

  Yes, so exactly. So I do, but not in the way that you just phrased it, but adjacent to what you just said. Here's the way I look at it. There are certain postulates of the religion that I've practiced. I'm a practicing Jew, okay? So I practice Judaism, but in the sense that Judaism is a religion based on practice. It's not a faith-based religion as Christianity is. Christianity emerged from Judaism, but they're very separate, or else they'd be the same thing. In Judaism, there's a notion of active participation and active engagement, and it's not faith-based. I cannot say I believe in Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior and achieve the rewards that Jesus died on the cross for his believers, okay?

• 6:53Brian Keating?

  That doesn't exist in Judaism. Well, Judaism is a series of rules, of practices, that are intended to be both positive and negative. For example, you should rest every seven days on the Sabbath, on Saturday. I do that. I don't work. I wouldn't... Remember, you wanted to have this interview potentially tomorrow, which is Saturday. I said, "Sorry, I don't work on Saturdays. I don't send emails. I can't get in touch with me." I'm with my family, I'm with my community, I'm with my temple. I'm doing things actively. I am practicing. Do you understand? But I also have things I can't do. I cannot eat pork. I cannot eat shrimp. And there are no reasons for those. The Torah, the Old Testament, doesn't say,

• 7:38Brian Keating?

  "Don't eat this because of X, Y, or Z," and this is important. If it did, it would be open to what I do do. I didn't tell you what I do yet, okay? I told you what I can't do. I can't prove the earth is a sphere. Remember, I said that. I don't do that. I prove negatives, or I look for falsifications. For example, if it is claimed the universe began in a big bang, and I find evidence that disputes that or refutes that, there's some evidence that the universe is not expanding, or is older, or is contracting, right? That would violate the Big Bang hypothesis. That would falsify, in the language of Karl Popper, that would falsify the existence of the Big Bang cosmology, or cast it into serious doubt.

• 8:23Speaker 03

  Is the Big Bang pushed the Creator out of the picture, or put him into it?

• 8:28Brian Keating?

  We're covering so much. Let's take a step back. So I have plenty of time, by the way. Don't worry about time. Let's step back. Again, what I do, I don't prove things. I falsify things. I tell you what's not true, and then what's left could be true, is closer to the truth. Again, if I say the Earth is flat, like this table, I'm wrong. I am wrong. The Earth is not flat like this table. I can falsify that, claim that the Earth is flat. If I say the Earth is a sphere, I'm also wrong, but I'm less wrong, correct? The Earth is not a perfect sphere. It bulges at the equator, it has more of a pear shape, a prolate spheroid. It has certain characteristics of a sphere. Certainly is not a sphere, but it's also very much not flat, like this table. Therefore, a good scientist would say,

• 9:12Brian Keating?

  the Earth is not flat, it's not a sphere, but it's much more spherical than it is flat, okay? What a scientist should do is tell you what he or she can't do, not what he or she wants to do, or can do. If you say to me, "Are you looking for God?", that, to me, says, "I have an agenda", which I have. I'm a human being. I have all sorts of agendas. There are things I want in my life, including the Nobel Prize. Many, many agendas that I have. Those aren't scientific, though. Those are personal. Let's cut those out. Let's ask, what can a good scientist do? And what should a good scientist never do, that bad scientists do all the time?

• 9:47Speaker 03

  You just said about Torah, so how I should understand that? Is science, without the wisdom of the Torah, just useless?

• 9:58Brian Keating?

  It's not useless at all. It's beautiful. It may be the only glimpse that we have of the Creator, if the Creator exists. I have to say, as a scientist, again, I don't believe in God, I don't believe in not God. I am what is called an agnostic that practices. So what does that mean? Agnostics typically mean, "I can't know." It means unknowable. It means a question that has no answer, like, what is the sound of one hand clapping, like a koan or something? I don't mean it like that. Most agnostics, people that say they're agnostic, the very first guest on my podcast was a man by the name of Freeman Dyson, very famous physicist. He was incredible. He was a very,

• 10:42Brian Keating?

  very famous agnostic. He won the Templeton Prize. I said, Freeman, you said you're an agnostic. And he said, that's right. And I said, your friend, Richard Dawkins, says he's an atheist, correct? He said, yes. And I've interviewed Richard many times. And I said, well, let me ask you a question. If somebody from space on another planet was looking at you and was looking at Richard Dawkins on a Sunday, what would they observe being different between you, Freeman, and him, Richard? You both are not going to the same church. Freeman didn't go to church. So I said, in practice, how do you distinguish

• 11:21Brian Keating?

  between your agnosticism and his atheism? And he said he couldn't. There's really no difference. But most people use agnosticism as a cop out, as an excuse. I don't want to say that there's no God. Maybe as Stephen Hawking said, if you mention God, you get more book sales. He said that. He said, if you have equations in your books, you lose book sales. So he was kind of reluctant to admit, but he was an atheist. Stephen Hawking was an atheist. So these questions are very important, but most scientists will lie to themselves or lie to other people. And either say they're, they know for sure there's no God, which is something you cannot know and you cannot prove, or they'll say, I'm agnostic,

• 12:03Brian Keating?

  which means I don't do anything. I'm saying what I'm, what I'm saying is I'm different. I don't know if God exists. I'm looking for evidence that God exists. I'm also looking for evidence that, that the Torah could be wrong.

• 12:17Speaker 03

  Hawking argued that gravity allows the universe to, that's what, allows the universe to create itself from nothing.

• 12:25Brian Keating?

  Yes.

• 12:26Speaker 03

  So if the laws of physics are sufficient for the Big Bang, isn't God?

• 12:34Speaker 03

  Redudant?

• 12:36Brian Keating?

  So, it's very good that you brought that up, because the very last lines of his very most famous book, A Brief History of Time, says that when we do come upon the thing that breathes fire into these equations, the thing that gives rise to string theory, that was his main motivation, and M-theory, which is a derivative of string theory, he said, quote, "Then we will know the mind of God."

• 12:59Speaker 03

  The mind of God.

• 13:00Brian Keating?

  The mind of God, the last three words of his most famous book, billions of people have read this book, millions of copies of himself, "The mind of God?" Well, wait, God doesn't need to exist, and I don't believe that he believed in God, I don't believe that he converted, or, I believe he was an actual atheist. However, you see by that quote, you cannot ignore God, even if you're an atheist, especially if you're an atheist. It's important to reconcile between what the idealized world is, which is the mind of God world, and the practical world. Now, I should say, I'm an experimentalist, I'm not a theorist like Stephen Hawking, far from it, or Freeman Dyson, or anybody else like that, or Brian Greene, or many of the, Michio Kaku, the people that you have interviewed

• 13:42Brian Keating?

  on this wonderful podcast, right? I'm not a theorist, but that means something very specific. Theorists can speculate. Brian Greene's most famous book, what is it?

• 13:53Speaker 03

  The nominee to the Pulitzer Prize, right?

• 13:56Brian Keating?

  Yes.

• 13:56Speaker 03

  I don't remember the title, but I know that book.

• 13:59Brian Keating?

  Yeah, so he's had many, many books. His most famous book-

• 14:03Speaker 03

  It was 20 years ago, right?

• 14:04Brian Keating?

  Yeah, it's 25 years ago, that's right, right. So, The Fabric of Reality is one of his books, right? So, he talks about string theory. You know, you're not an expert, but you know string theory has made zero prediction.

• 14:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, but it's a beautiful mathematical-

• 14:18Brian Keating?

  Beautiful mathematical, but it's not math, it's physics, right? It purports to be, as Stephen Hawking said, "The mind of God," right? The operating system for the universe. So, they can speculate on something, string theorists, theorists in general, and they can have a very productive career. Michio Kaku, another one, his book, I think it was called The God Equation, right? That was about string theory. He's not believer or not, I think he considered himself an agnostic. You'll look back at your wonderful interview with him, we can see. He's a theorist. There's no way to prove or disprove string theory, and there might not ever be. An experimentalist like me, if I put on my grant application, I may never, ever have an answer. I may never, ever have a test, right?

• 15:02Brian Keating?

  I will get zero dollars. I cannot do that. Experimentalists have to be confronted by the hardcore reality that what we're doing could be completely wrong, could yield a null result, but at least it's bold and assertive enough to make a prediction. That this experiment, if successful, will tell us X. If it fails, it will tell us Y. That will reduce the island of ignorance is a perimeter, or it will decrease the ocean of ignorance that surrounds the island of knowledge, as John Archibald Wheeler called it. That's what we do as experimentalists. I don't prove them right. I don't, I don't work for Brian Greene, despite having the same first name. No, I work for myself. I work for the universe to find out what is the truth that

• 15:42Brian Keating?

  we can measure. I don't care about 26 dimensions. Show me a prediction. What does it say I can go out with my telescopes and my colleagues and my computers and my graduate students and measure before I die? I want to know answers to these questions. How did the universe begin? Is there room for a God? That's an absolutely legitimate question to ask.

• 16:02Speaker 03

  I remember my interview with Michio Kaku. I asked him if we can look for God using statistics. Where do you stand on this? Is the universe designed for us, or did we just get lucky in multiverse?

• 16:22Brian Keating?

  Right now, the statistics that you mentioned are horrific. If I wanted to say, what is the population, what's the average height of a unicorn? You couldn't answer that question. You know, there aren't any unicorns that we know about. There's zero statistical, right? Right now, there's six white rhinoceroses on Earth, right? I say, what's the average weight of a white rhinoceros? There's six of them. If I ask, what's the average weight of an adult human male? There's three and a half billion or four billion of us, right? We can get an average, very tight statistics, very good mean, median, average mode. But for things where only one thing exists, like a universe, right? Uni means one, right? Multiverse means multiple. But we don't know there's a multiverse.

• 17:07Brian Keating?

  We only know of our universe. Right now, if you said, what are the average statistics of planets that have life? There's only one that we know about, out of perhaps 10 to the 24th planets in the observable universe. There could be that many planets, but we don't know of any of them that have life. So we only have one statistic. So the only average we have has zero. Now, when you do mathematically, when you construct the average and the standard deviation, you divide by numbers like the total population minus one. So therefore, with only one thing, N equals one, one minus one in the denominator, that expression blows up and is meaningless. So we can't say anything about either God, our universe, or... Until we have multiple copies and enough to do statistical analysis on.

• 17:51Brian Keating?

  For life on other planets, I'm optimistic that we can at least create statistical ensembles of potentially habitable planets and then ask, why or why do they not have life on them? For universes, this may be the only universe. And so, asking about the questions of, is it designed for us? Well, if there's only one universe, it would... It might lead people, including Nikolai Copernicus, who I'm sure you're familiar with.

• 18:17Speaker 03

  Polish scientist, right?

• 18:18Brian Keating?

  Polish scientist, one of the greatest in all time. He had no other evidence, but remember, he published The Revolution of Us. How do you say it in Polish, by the way?

• 18:28Speaker 03

  O obrotach sferniubieski.

• 18:29Brian Keating?

  Sferis nubus. That's beautiful. Thank you for saying that. I've never heard a real Pole say that.

• 18:33Speaker 03

  About the blue sphere.

• 18:34Brian Keating?

  Now, he published it. Do you know when he published that book? The day he died. Why didn't he publish it before he died?

• 18:39Speaker 03

  Have no idea.

• 18:41Brian Keating?

  He was probably a little nervous. After all, what happened to Bruno 60 years later, what happened to Galileo 80 years later, it could have happened to him. In other words, proposing the heliocentric universe, where we have this seemingly demotion of the Earth from being the center of the universe to the Sun being the center of the universe.

• 18:59Speaker 00

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• 19:28Brian Keating?

  That was a big blow to religious doctrines. So for centuries, scientists have been terrified of the God question. It's sort of like, we have it in our, in our, Dawkins might say, we have it in our phenotype, like, something extended from our, not just our genes, our DNA. There's something about the zeitgeist, as he calls it, or something about science that is currently in a natural state of fear, perhaps resulting from the oppression and suppression of scientists going back hundreds of years by the Catholic Church, unfortunately. And for very abstract reasons, I have a great deal of affection for the Catholic Church, because I was actually an altar boy in the Catholic Church before I became more committed to Judaism.

• 20:11Brian Keating?

  So I've been a Catholic and I've been Jewish, but nevertheless, despite loving both religions, the Catholic Church did, unfortunately, accuse Galileo of heresy. He wasn't killed, he was put into a prison, which was his home, in Archetree, Italy, where I've been many times. Actually hosted a conference on relativity in his house/dungeon prison in 2015 to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the theory of general relativity. Wonderful thing. And he was in prison there because of his production of the dialogo, which suggested that the Earth orbits around the Sun.

• 20:50Brian Keating?

  Even at that point, even 200, 300 years later, in 1992, he was never pardoned by the Catholic Church. Pope John Paul II was a wonderful Pope, from your homeland, right? He said that Galileo was right, but he never pardoned him. So scientists have a natural distrust of religion. I'm not saying today, we're going to be persecuted by the Catholic Church, there's no such entity. Even the Trump administration, or Biden, they can't have these powers over life and death, or imprisonment and freedom for scientists. But I think there's still something in the extended DNA of a scientist that doesn't like to talk about God. Because of this...

• 21:31Brian Keating?

  Past history, which was dangerous and maybe anti-scientific to harm scientists in the past. So maybe it's a natural reason my fellow scientists don't like to talk about it, but I love to talk about it.

• 21:42Speaker 03

  Do you truly believe that someone on other side hears you? Maybe that's creation of our brain.

• 21:51Brian Keating?

  Certainly, a lot of people believe that God didn't create man, but man created God.

• 21:55Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 21:56Brian Keating?

  Many more people believe God is dead, but for God to be dead, he had to exist, right? Many people believe in multiple gods. Many people on a prosaic level worship idols, you know, that are that are money, fame, power, influence, science, the Nobel Prize. These are all idols that are to one level or another, become obsessions, not unlike gods, not unlike religion. For example, the Nobel Prize ceremony, you went to one of them, you went to one of the announcements.

• 22:25Speaker 03

  Two times.

• 22:26Brian Keating?

  Two times, wow. I've nominated people two times, but but since my books have come out, maybe they'll never invite me because I'm quite critical of some of their.

• 22:36Speaker 03

  Why?

• 22:36Brian Keating?

  Yes. Very good. So, but I don't criticize the winners because the winners cannot, the only thing they tell you when you get a nomination form, you cannot nominate yourself. That's one of the things they tell you. So I never criticize the winners and I've had 22 of them on my podcast so far. And I love their minds and they've sat in that chair and we have wonderful conversations. So my criticism never directed at the person, only at the institution. But the institution has rituals, it has garments, it has food, it has ceremonies. Do you know what day the Nobel Prize is? Do you remember what day they're giving away?

• 23:13Speaker 03

  December 9th.

• 23:15Brian Keating?

  December 10th, yes, December 10th. And do you know why that date is important?

• 23:19Speaker 03

  Why the date?

• 23:20Brian Keating?

  Why do they choose December 10?

• 23:21Speaker 03

  No.

• 23:22Brian Keating?

  That's Alfred Nobel's.

• 23:25Brian Keating?

  Death Day.

• 23:26Speaker 03

  Death Day, right.

• 23:26Brian Keating?

  Not his birthday.

• 23:27Speaker 03

  You're right, you're a good point, yeah.

• 23:28Brian Keating?

  Now, a lot of religions have connections to death, not just birth. Christianity, obviously, has birth and death, very significant, right? I believe in Russian, maybe, in Polish, I'm not sure. Sunday, sometimes, in some languages, is resurrection day, is called resurrection day, correct? So, these are-

• 23:45Speaker 03

  In Polish is resurrection.

• 23:47Brian Keating?

  Resurrection, perfect, okay, good. So, when you look at that, you see that there's, there are religious aspects of the Nobel Prize, literally. You have a golden image, I have a copy of the Nobel Prize here.

• 23:59Speaker 03

  There, somewhere there.

• 24:00Brian Keating?

  It's a gilded, you'll show maybe an image of it, right? A golden engraved image, Second Commandment. Do not make golden engraved images of other gods. Now, people worship the Nobel Prize, they do worship it. I worshipped it for many years, it was my obsession, I wanted to win it. I wanted to be the best scientist, I wanted to do it for something that would be inarguably the greatest discovery of all time, which was detecting whether or not the universe began in a singularity, and began with what's called inflationary expansion. We can talk about that. And that certainly-

• 24:34Speaker 03

  You are, because famously, you lost potential Nobel Prize.

• 24:38Brian Keating?

  That's right, so my book, my first book is called Losing the Nobel Prize, as opposed to winning it, because we were at the precipice for an experiment that I created, called BICEP, at the South Pole, in Antarctica, where I've been many times. That experiment claimed, we claimed that we captured the very first radiation in the universe, long before the CMB, that I say the cosmic microwave background, the light afterglow of the Big Bang, the fusion of the first elements on the periodic table. Long, long before that, billions of billions of billions of billions of seconds, after the singularity of the universe coming into existence, we said we saw that radiation. It wasn't light, it was gravity, waves of gravity, not unlike the gravitational wave detectors called LIGO and LISA

• 25:23Brian Keating?

  that they tried to detect, and have detected, from black holes. This is from the emergence of the universe, creating a background of radiation in the form of gravity. We claimed we detected it. We later found out that what we actually saw were these particles of dust in our galaxy, not in the cosmos, not a blunder, not a mistake, not some stupid error or some typo. We actually saw stuff in space that was astrophysical, resulting from the explosion of a star that lived in our galaxy a billion years before our sun. And those explosions, called type 2 supernovae, produce microscopic grains of dust that exactly mimic the signal we were searching for.

• 26:05Speaker 03

  Is God falsify?

• 26:07Brian Keating?

  So, what I look for to do a falsification, you have to have a hypothesis. You have to make a prediction. I predict when I drop a pencil, it will fall, okay? That means, and my theory of gravity suggests that the pencil is being attracted to the center of the earth by the much more massive gravitational force of all the atoms on earth, is pulling this relatively small amount of matter in the form of a pencil, and is falling towards the ground, correct? That's Newton's theory of gravity. If I make one observation, and I drop it and it goes up, the theory is falsified, right? I've disproven at least that version of Newton's theory of gravity. That's a simple example. So, what you do to falsify something?

• 26:48Brian Keating?

  You ask for a prediction, but you ask for how could that prediction be proven wrong? You don't just say, "How could I take my ticket to Stockholm? How do I get invited to win my Nobel Prize?" No, you have to say, "What are all the ways I could be wrong?" Not "right," that's a trap. I fell into that trap. That's why we lost the Nobel Prize in part. We were so obsessed with proving this hypothesis of inflationary gravitational waves that we initially at first suggested that any evidence that we saw that counteracted that, namely from dust or something else, we said we could exclude that. Now we know better, and so our new experiments like the Simons Observatory and the Bicep Array, they're all saying we have to not only look for what you want to see,

• 27:31Brian Keating?

  but all the ways that you could falsify your dreams, crush your spirit, and be disillusioned forever because you could be wrong. You always have to assume you're wrong, not right.

• 27:41Speaker 03

  I know scientists who think that when you...

• 27:45Speaker 03

  Think of God in science, we expose physics to the charge of being unfalsifiable.

• 27:53Brian Keating?

  Hmm, there are aspects of what is considered mainstream physics that are unfalsifiable. We already talked about string theory. String theory is not a, currently in its current manifestation, tomorrow it could change, is not falsifiable. And there are other things that are not falsifiable. Inflation, which is what I study, is currently not really falsifiable. But, here's the crucial thing. The alternatives, the contenders to take inflation's place, they are falsifiable. They're falsifiable by the very type of experiment that I'm trying to do. In other words, you cannot prove inflation. You also can't falsify inflation. You cannot disprove or prove that the universe began in a hyper-expansive singularity.

• 28:37Speaker 03

  So, what will you do if your observatory shows the inflation theory is wrong?

• 28:42Brian Keating?

  Well, again, we can never say that it's wrong because it's unfalsifiable. That doesn't mean it's bad. It makes predictions. We can falsify another type of, uh, of model. So, the model, for example, I already gave you an example. The static universe, we can falsify that. We can also falsify what's called a cyclical or bouncing universe. So, the chief alternatives, Roger Penrose has one of these, you've interviewed Roger Penrose many times. One of his models is that the universe never undergoes inflation. It undergoes expansion at the end of what are called aeons, or eons, he calls them eons, that are driven by a type of, new type of dark matter particle called an aerobon. Um, he has a very involved theory, it's called a conformal cyclic universe.

• 29:28Brian Keating?

  We will ignore the details of the mathematics, but we'll say one thing. It predicts that there will be no waves of gravity from the singularity, because there is no singularity. There'll be no inflationary background of gravitational waves, which we believe, if inflation takes place, imprints on the cosmic microwave background, a telltale pattern, a swirling pattern of polarization called B mode polarization. If we see that B-mode polarization, it doesn't prove inflation's right. It gives a lot of evidence towards inflation, but it disproves Sir Roger Penrose's Nobel Prize winner's theory that the universe has a cyclical behavior. That's a tremendous thing, right? If you believe that the universe is cyclical, getting back to your questions about God,

• 30:12Brian Keating?

  and I know that you want to talk about these big picture things. The Torah, Old Testament, Bible states there was a beginning, in the beginning, right? That's the first sentence in Hebrew, "Barashus borough Eloquim," which means, "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth." That means there was a beginning, one single beginning, a singularity perhaps. That means if Sir Roger is right, the Bible is falsified. Do you understand?

• 30:38Speaker 03

  Okay, but I need to ask you one more time from the prism of God. What will you do if silence in B-mode means the universe had no beginning?

• 30:50Brian Keating?

  Hmm, that would be...

• 30:53Speaker 03

  That's one of the options, right?

• 30:55Brian Keating?

  Yes, it's one of the options, absolutely. I am 100% open to that option. Would it mean that there's no God? No, it wouldn't mean that there's no God. Would it mean that the Torah, if read in that way, that there's a singularity or a singular beginning, it means that this book is wrong. It could mean, though, that some other real Jainism, Buddhism, Taoism, whatever. It could mean, it doesn't say that they are wrong, right? They have versions of God too, correct? I mean, it could mean that there's Zeus. It doesn't falsify God. It falsifies the Torah, or the Old Testament, or the Bible's claim, if indeed it claims that there was a singularity or something in the beginning. That's also debatable.

• 31:40Brian Keating?

  So what I'm saying is, if there's a concrete prediction, right? If the Torah, the Bible, makes a prediction, then it's subject to falsifiability. That's a good thing. That's a good thing. It should risk things, right? Let's take one giant step back. Go back to 1919. Again, Einstein, smartest man on Earth. Nobel Prize has been around for 18 years at this point. And every single scientist on Earth and every single practicing scientist for hundreds of years, thousands maybe, going back to Aristotle, believe the universe is eternal, static, and unchanging. All of a sudden, by 1929, fast forward 10 years, Hubble says the universe is not static.

• 32:23Brian Keating?

  It's not unchanging. And Le Matre says it was actually smaller and compact in the past. That means the universe has been expanding and it started, he called it a primeval atom, a big bang. He coined, the term big bang was coined by Fred Hoyle, but it was made as a pejorative, as an insult. They were saying things that were consistent, and in fact, they hated the Bible so. Fred Hoyle was an atheist. The man who used to occupy this office right here where we are at UC San Diego, Jeffrey Burbidge, was an atheist. They hated Genesis. They had a model called the quasi-steady-state universe. They did not believe in God and they said, and even Steven Weinberg said,

• 33:03Brian Keating?

  "The virtue of the steady-state cosmologist is that they don't look like Genesis 1:1." So do you understand? Scientists wanted to believe in this model that was the least like the Torah. But for thousands of years, the Torah has stood and then all of a sudden, it's still valid now, 3,000 years after it was written. That's pretty remarkable. So it is falsifiable. And if it gets falsified, the scientist part of me will rejoice because it's so rare you get new data. Look, we've been waiting with the Einstein cosmology for more or less 100 years now without much change. I don't know how much longer I'm going to be alive for. I want my experiment to surprise me. I don't want to look anymore for the thing that gets me the Nobel Prize. I want to look for the truth.

• 33:47Speaker 03

  Correct me if I'm wrong. The Bible says...

• 33:52Speaker 03

  Let there be light and the science says the Big Bang. Could that be the same moment?

• 34:00Brian Keating?

  Hmm. It could be, but I am very cautious. I never look at the Bible as a science book and I never look at my textbooks as a book of wisdom. Stephen Hawking was a brilliant scientist. I don't choose to raise my children or determine what I do on Saturday mornings or determine what food I eat or don't eat based on what Stephen Hawking believed. He was just a man. We know he's just a man. We know he's dead. He was a great brilliant brain. He accomplished much and inspired me tremendously, but he was a human being. He was not a God. I don't look, he didn't claim to be a God. I don't look to him for wisdom. I look to people, Jesus, I look to Moses, I look to Buddha.

• 34:44Brian Keating?

  I look to the Stoics who weren't, you know, classically, there weren't Judeo Christians. I look to ancient wisdom for what wisdom can provide. I never look at Epictetus and say, tell me about the gravitational radiation. It's a stupid thing to try to do. So too, I look at the Torah and I say, is the Torah, does it even say it is a book about science? Let's look at the Torah. Do you know, well, I'll just tell you. The Torah in Hebrew, which I've read completely seven times over at least, has 35,000 verses. Like you said, let there be light, that's verse two, right? Uh, three. There's 35,000 other verses in the Torah.

• 35:25Brian Keating?

  The first 30 have to do with the Big Bang, Adam and Eve, not the Big Bang, but the origin of the universe, the creation of the earth and the sun, the heavens, the animals, the beasts of the field, then finally man on day six. And then day seven, nothing happened. That's the end of the creation story, right? So 30 verses divided by 30,000, just round numbers, that's 0.1%.

• 35:50Brian Keating?

  So this book, if I take one of my textbooks there, and there's one page out of a thousand that's about the topic on the cover, you'd say, "This is not a book about quantum mechanics. This is a book about the New York Yankees." Or, "It's got 999 pages about the New York Yankees, one page about quantum mechanics, and it's called quantum mechanics?" No, no, this is not a book, this is mistitled. So the Torah, the Bible, the Old Testament, is not a science book. The sun is created on day four. Why is that? The sun and the moon aren't created on day one. Why do we have even a day? Is it 24 hours? We don't know. It's written to do something completely different. The Torah puts the sun and the moon on the fourth day for a very specific reason that was related to polytheism. People worship the sun and the moon.

• 36:35Brian Keating?

  Even to this day, people worship the sun and the moon. But 3,500 years ago, that was, they were obsessed with the sun and the moon, right? The Egyptian sun god, Ra. The lunar god, La, Allah, whatever it's called in Middle Eastern religions. That object is of worship. People worship it, right? So the question is, what was the Torah trying to do? It's a book of wisdom, not a book of science. It's not saying planetary geology and how the moon formed. It's saying, "No, this is something not to be worshiped because God didn't even get around to create it." If you believe in God, if you have evidence for God, or want to have bolster your faith in God, He created it on the fourth day. He didn't even think of it on the first day.

• 37:14Speaker 03

  I have my own idea, by the way, how to connect quantum mechanics and God.

• 37:18Brian Keating?

  Okay, go for it. Maybe you'll win the Nobel Prize.

• 37:22Speaker 03

  Quantum mechanics suggest the observer is fundamental to your reality. Is it possible that the universe required consciousness to exist? A prime observer? Maybe God as creation of our brain and our consciousness? Maybe this is missing, Lee?

• 37:43Brian Keating?

  Sure. You can certainly believe that. Many thousands of brilliant people have believed it. You can't, I don't think you can be a Christian or Judeo-Christian and believe it. Because not only do the Judeo-Christian tradition believe in the Creator, prime mover, God, Created the heavens and the earth, but also that there it is a personal God, that Jesus died for your sins. He was resurrected to cleanse the world. He came to obviate original sin, right? In Christianity. In Judaism, we have different notions of what the personal gods, you know, demands of us are, whatever. It's not important. So, yes, in Aristotle's language, the prime mover was created and then he created or it

• 38:25Brian Keating?

  created the universe and then put everything in motion and then disappeared. But obviously Aristotle was wrong about almost every scientific fact that he ever projected that he thought heavy things fall faster than light things, for example. He thought that men and women have different numbers of teeth. You know, I always wondered, did he, was he married? Like, couldn't he ask Mrs. Aristotle, could you open your mouth, honey? I want to check out and see if you have the same number of teeth. But he didn't do that, right? So, he wasn't an observer. He didn't, but he could have falsified, this is what I'm saying. A scientist who's good, and he was a great scientist, but a good scientist should always look now, how can I be right and win a shiny gold engrave and image? No, how could I be wrong?

• 39:05Speaker 04

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