Can you be a "real" scientist and believe in God? Brian Keating & Michael Dennin Debate

Can a "real" scientist believe in God? Physics professors Brian Keating and Michael Dennin engage in a fascinating discussion about the existence of God, exploring the intersection of science and faith. From cosmic origins to the nature of miracles, these two accomplished scientists examine different perspectives on religion, including insights from Judaism and Catholicism. They tackle challenging questions about the Big Bang theory, multiple universes, and whether scientific evidence can prove or disprove God's existence. The conversation features reactions to arguments from both William Lane Craig and Neil deGrasse Tyson, offering a balanced and nuanced exploration of one of humanity's most fundamental questions. This inaugural episode of The God Question brings together scientific expertise and personal faith journeys, demonstrating how two physicists with similar backgrounds can arrive at different but respectful conclusions about the divine. 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

  Does God exist? That simple, three-word question has beguiled humankind since before recorded history, and it still does today. Our knowledge of the world around us has grown exponentially, yet no definitive proof or disproof of a supreme being that rules the universe exists. So what happens when two physicists meet at the intersection of science and faith? I'm Dr. Michael Dennin. The answer on this episode of The God Question.

• 0:56Speaker 00

  Dr. Brian Keating is the Chancellor's Distinguished Professor of Physics at the Center for Astrophysics and Space Science at the University of California, San Diego. He studies the universe's oldest light, the cosmic microwave background. Dr. Keating is a writer and podcaster and bestselling author. So after that impressive introduction, I'm sure you can answer our fundamental question: Does God exist?

• 1:26Brian Keating?

  Start with a simple question. I love those. People say, "I have a very simple question. What came before the Big Bang?" So I call myself a practicing devout agnostic, which means that the question of God's existence is potentially knowable, but it is not accessible. It is not something that a frail, meek human being, to use the proverb's words, may be comprehensible to a person via the tools that I'm most accustomed to, which is the tools of science. That said, I don't exclude the possibility of God's existence. And there are many ways to know God, and the meaning of God to an individual may not be the same as it is to a collective of religion, of faith.

• 2:10Speaker 00

  From your perspective then, is there a minimal set of characteristics that would be necessary to define something as God?

• 2:18Brian Keating?

  In 61, I think it was, Yuri Gagarin became the first human being to go into space. He landed back in like a good Soviet, you know, citizen apparatchik of the government. He was asked by the, you know, by Pravda, which I always joke, it means truth, right? That's always interesting. So truth asked him, "What did you see up there?" As a softball question to the great hero of the Soviet Republic. And he said, "Well, I'll tell you what I didn't see. I didn't see an old man in a white beard, sitting on a chair." And, you know, "I also don't believe in that kind of a God. You know, I don't believe in the God of, you know, the fairy tales and so forth. I don't, I also don't believe in the God that Richard Dawkins doesn't believe in. But the question is, what do I believe in? And what can you at least accept on faith? What can you have permission to believe in?"

• 3:03Brian Keating?

  So in our understanding of God, it's very different from a Christian perspective. God is, possesses properties that endear me to Him because of what is basically not said about Him. I'll give you an example. I'm not commanded, nor are, you know, most, most people that I know, it wouldn't find it difficult to love your children.

• 3:25Speaker 00

  Right.

• 3:26Brian Keating?

  You don't have to be commanded to love your children. So that which comes easy to you is just taken for granted. You're gonna like, you know, you don't have to be commanded to drink water, you know, you have to be commanded to do things that are hard, like not eat those delicious, you know, strips of bacon and, and those little curly, pink things that float around the sea. Those you have to be commanded to, because that's part of human nature to want to partake of that. One thing you're commanded to do in Judaism, in fact, it's the catechism, the equivalent of, of the Lord's prayer in Christianity, and that's in the Shema, and that is, you're commanded to love God. It's not an option, but it's also not, it's not taken for granted that you do love God. In other words, God knows Himself, at least according to the Torah, the Old Testament, He's not lovable.

• 4:08Brian Keating?

  And that's very endearing to me, because it means, you know, someone once said, you know, "Who's the most tragic figure in the Bible? You know, is it Moses, who doesn't get into the promised land? Is it, you know, Aaron, whose sons are, you know, immolated and ...for offerings that weren't permissible. And some say, "God, you know, God is the most..." Because he keeps having his faith, you know, busted. And that, to me, has the ring of truth to it. And science, the imprimatur of science is truth. So the things that speak to human nature that's infallible, you have to look at this book that was around 3,000 years ago and is still relevant to this day. So I take those facts, those aspects of God's, you know, of the testimonial about what is God according to God Himself, rather than what modern-day theologians would say, or even, you know, the ancient rabbis.

• 4:52Speaker 00

  There's a space there I'd really like to challenge you on. But first, it's really interesting to me, as my inaugural guest, how both similar and somewhat different we are. My mother was Jewish, well, is Jewish, she's still alive. My dad's Catholic, Irish Catholic. But I was raised Catholic. My mom's Judaism, she always admitted, was very cultural. Her dad would drive around the Bronx in his car on the high holy days, committed to the idea of God as love. And I found fascinating in your answer, this kind of idea as God as unlovable. And as someone who's looking for more evidence around God, maybe a better sort of experience or proof of God's existence,

• 5:35Speaker 00

  where are you and how would you react to that definition, that minimal characteristic of God as being love?

• 5:42Brian Keating?

  That's certainly a component of it. It's not, it's not dispositive completely. But before I answer that, I do want to touch upon one thing that you mentioned in terms of love. It is a stark contrast to Judaism. In fact, can I use foul language here?

• 5:54Speaker 00

  Um, that would be...

• 5:55Brian Keating?

  No, just kidding. Can I use a holy language here?

• 5:57Speaker 00

  You can use holy language.

• 5:58Brian Keating?

  Can I use Hebrew here? Okay. So the psalmist says, "Oh, have a..." Uh, uh, let me think of it. One more second. I'll have to edit this out.

• 6:06Speaker 00

  No, it's okay.

• 6:07Brian Keating?

  I don't know. "Oh, have a, deny sinura." Which means, "Those of you who love God must hate evil." In other words, and it's, again, it's in the command form. So Hebrew has command form. People think mitzvah means good deed. It doesn't. It means you're a commandment. So the Ten Commandments are really the Ten Mitzvot. So don't think of it as, "Oh, it's doing a good thing. You're helping a lady across the street." It's, no, no, you have to do this, right?

• 6:27Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 6:28Brian Keating?

  So you're commanded to hate certain individuals. It means it's very different than this concept. So God hates, and we as people are commanded to hate evil. Now, we have to investigate what that means. But it again is a big contrast to this notion of Christian versus... And I think that's fine. I mean, I don't debate theology, right? You can't really, you know, it's like debating taste. Like, I don't like fish. You know, no matter how much my, my wife tries to make fish. I always say, you know, what's the highest compliment about fish? Doesn't taste like fish. So I just skip the middle man. I'll go right to not eating fish. So I don't debate theology. But I will say, you know, in terms of, you know, the tools of science. You know, could we act, what can we hold up as criteria by which we can ascertain if God exists?

• 7:12Brian Keating?

  Again, I have to be somewhat pedantic and say, you know, I tend to, to, to look at what I don't look to for, for proof of God's existence, which is the number one thing that many of the atheists I've talked to on my podcast, you know, Dawkins and Kraus and others, say like, well, if God revealed himself to me, then I would believe it. You know, as if like Brian Keating, Michael Denny, like we're, or Lawrence Krauss. You know, God's gonna say, well, let me just take a pause for a second. Let me go down and talk. First of all, the Bible, again, the Bible itself is most critical of one group in particular. It's not like Palestinians, it's not like Catholic, you know, it's Jews. And it's the most critical, calls us the stiff naked people and that we're, we're basically thankless and graceless and all these other things.

• 7:55Brian Keating?

  But, but literally, you know, 40 days after getting out of Egypt, after witnessing the miracle of all miracles, according to the book itself. So it's self-consistent, you know, they're saying, here's this miracle set that you witnessed, and then you're complaining about the fact, and they, Jews literally complain about missing cucumbers. Right. And garlic. And it's, it's just so ridiculous. And they complained to Moses, and you could just hear, I can just hear my, my Aunt Phyllis saying, as they say in the Torah, were there not enough graves in Egypt that you had to bring us to this desert? You know, you could just hear him saying that. To me, that smacks of authenticity. Very few holy books portray the, you know, protagonist, you know, people in such a negative light. But again, I don't look to, and then...

• 8:38Brian Keating?

  And that, to me, disproves the whole notion, that revelation. I mean, you and I, as scientists, would be, I mean, we'd be the first to say, wow, let's look at, you know, this is, create some grand unified theory. Is there some, like, manipulation of space and time that's being involved in this miracle that split the sea? I mean, so miracles are insufficient justification, which is another reason I, I don't find Catholic, Christianity, rather, as appealing as I did when I was, you know, 13 years old, as an altar boy. And that's, there, there is a place for miracles in Christianity, which doesn't have a place in, in Judaism. And as I understand it, those, those miracles and, and the, you know, kind of providential way in which they're conducted,

• 9:17Brian Keating?

  and, and the, the, the kind of nature of them as performed by Jesus are, are very central to a lot of Christian belief. The resurrection, obviously, is superhuman, it's, it's a miracle, and, and so forth. The, the conception of Jesus from virgin birth, if, if that is, you know, consistent with your theology. These are all things that don't exist in our, and now, we have our own, you know, kind of miracles and, and things that are, you know, would kind of stupefying to a physicist. But, so I don't look to physical, I don't look to revelation. I, I try to be a little bit more sophisticated or subtle about that. And I do count certain things as evidence, but it's not, again, it can't be, I can't look at it as dispositive. For example, one of the things I look to is very, maybe it's tangentially related to your notion of reality that you talked about.

• 10:02Brian Keating?

  But if you look at, you know, what, what is the minimal set of things that God had to do, if God exists, for us to have this conversation, for us to exist, and so forth. And you find a very, very minimal set of things. It would be much, much less, you know, I mean, for us to have this conversation, it's different, but for us to exist, right? We could be protoplasm, we could be amoebas in, in a Petri dish, right? And we could have that kind of an existence, that's existing. But the fundamental thing that God did, in the Jewish way of looking at it, is that He, by creating us, and by creating a world, rather, He constrained the amount of things that He could do. So in other words, He took upon Himself to limit His free will.

• 10:41Speaker 00

  What about miracles? It is clearly a big part of the Christian faith, and something one might obviously think a scientist Just says, nope, no miracles. It's all natural law. Most of us who are scientists, I think, and involved in faith and religion, have played that game of trying to come up with the scientific explanation for our favorite miracle. I know I spent a lot of my childhood, my young adulthood, doing that. One of the favorite ones is, you know, the Israelites escaping and the Red Sea parting, and people saying, what was actually the Reed Sea? It was more mud. There was some wind. The Israelites were on foot, and the Egyptians were in chariots, so they got stuck. But I've really come to believe, and sort of evolved my thinking on this,

• 11:25Speaker 00

  that the scientific lens to these was never intended. The Bible's not a science textbook. And one of the greatest examples for me is the Noah flood story. We realize, when we put it in historical context, almost every culture had a flood story. And people are like, well, why did every culture have a flood story? And if you think about it, civilization starts on rivers, and rivers flood. The beauty of the Old Testament miracle was not so much that God saved Noah and his family. That's in lots of stories. But at the end, there's the rainbow, and God promises to never do this again. The miracle has to do with God's relationship with us and our faith.

• 12:08Speaker 00

  And I think it's kind of a sad commentary that so many Christians take that flood story, forget about the rainbow, and blame current floods and natural disasters on God, when really, that's just physics and nature. God told us so Himself. Fast forward to the New Testament and Jesus's miracles, and I was struck by Jesus's own language. There's a famous miracle where He goes and He meets this person, and He first says, "I forgive your sins." And everybody challenges it on that. How can you forgive sins? And Jesus's reaction is, well, which is harder? Telling the guy to stand up or walk, or forgiving his sins? So you know I have the power to forgive sins. I'm gonna tell him to get up and walk, and the guy does.

• 12:54Speaker 00

  And He heals him. And the point of the story never was, did Jesus really heal the guy or not? The point is, the amazing miracle of forgiveness. And so I do think miracles are real, and there probably are physical miracles as well. But the real focus of miracles for me is that transformation. And I do wonder if we overly scientificize the Bible, I'm just making up that word. But we look at it with this scientific lens and it gives us too narrow a view. And we miss the real meaning of the text, the real meaning and inspiration of the message that is coming to us.

• 13:31Brian Keating?

  My favorite miracles are actually in the Moses story when he brings the staff to the Pharaoh's court. And then he says he's going to turn the river to blood and then Pharaoh gets his magicians to do the same thing. So he's like, we're gonna like kill all the animals and he's like, oh, you see that? I'm gonna kill every animal also. You know, it's like, yeah, I'm gonna punch myself in the face and hit myself in the crotch. So there are a lot of comedic, you know, kind of purposes. But if you approach it purely antagonistically, you're not gonna see those, you're not gonna care about those. But actually to the subject of it, I think that there's a tremendous veneration of knowledge. I think it's evolutionarily, you know, kind of preferred or selected that we are the wise man, you know, the priest.

• 14:14Brian Keating?

  So they had a greater mate selection, they had greater accoutrements and so forth. And so there became kind of a benefit to being in the priestly class, the knowledge class, eventually into the scientist class. Because we venerate science and knowledge and so much, but we actually forego the more important thing, which is wisdom. You know, I don't know about you, but a lot of these atheists, or let me just say it like that, I won't name names. But I don't want ChatGPT babysitting my kids, you know? I'm sorry, it may know everything, it may, you know, index the internet, you know, forever. And maybe I'll predict exactly what I'm gonna say next, but it has zero wisdom. It has absolutely no capacity to draw from the knowledge, which is much more important.

• 14:55Brian Keating?

  You know, so part of my mission and my outreach and podcasts and so forth is to see if, is it possible? You know, I've interviewed 20 plus Nobel Prize winners. Now, can you convert enough knowledge into wisdom? And I still don't know if the answer is yes. In other words, just knowledge is insufficient to tell me what I care about most, which is, are you a wise person?

• 15:16Speaker 00

  So I'm gonna push you a little bit here. What I'm hearing, actually, is not so much that you don't know if God exists, that if I was to say it, you actually believe in God, you may just not believe you have enough evidence to believe in God. So I'm putting something on you. Take that where you want, but I challenge you a little bit here. Do you really believe in God?

• 15:41Brian Keating?

  Yeah, I think that, you know, the, kind of the, uh, the signature, again, of science and of God is truth.

• 15:49Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 15:49Brian Keating?

  So if you find something that's false, then you would be forced, at least, to confront your suppositions that lead up to that, you know, logically, right?

• 15:58Speaker 00

  When I think about evidence, as we're discussing that a lot, is how much I've leaned all in on experience as evidence, just like you would an experiment as a scientist. And I think it's no coincidence they come from the same root. So I take experience very seriously, and my experience of having a relationship with God, knowing God, experiencing God knowing me. And I think this is the part that is both natural to me, but also a little weird, right? Because it is really where the hubris comes in. This idea that there is this infinite, all-knowing, infinite-loving being, or reality itself.

• 16:43Speaker 00

  Because I certainly don't think of God, actually, as a physical being, you know, the classic old guy in a beard we keep coming back to. But reality has a relationship with me, is a strange, prideful thing to have when I am finite and a finite creature, yet deeply real, because it is my experience. And so this is where this whole disproving God becomes a challenge. I don't even think of it that way, because for someone to do that, they'd have to disprove my experience. And how do you disprove someone's experience? You really can't do that. And then the other piece that comes into it for me that just augments my own experience is tradition, where we have millions of people who have shared their experiences,

• 17:27Speaker 00

  which are similar enough to mine, that it just adds to the evidence that this experience of reality as all-loving, all-knowing, yet still having a relationship with me, is just foundational.

• 17:42Speaker 00

  I'd like us to look at a clip from William Lane Craig. He's a philosopher, Christian apologist, and he has an interesting approach to proving the existence of God that's based very strongly on causality. So let's take a look at the clip and go from there.

• 17:58Speaker 02

  For me, my favorite argument for the existence of God that I find the most compelling is a version of the cosmological argument, which goes like this: Whatever begins to exist has a cause. Something can't just come into being from nothing. Secondly, the universe began to exist. I think we have both good philosophical arguments and scientific evidence for the finitude of the past, from which it follows, third, therefore, the universe has a cause. And when you do a conceptual analysis of what it is to be a cause of the universe, you arrive at a being which is an uncaused, beginningless, timeless, spaceless, enormously

• 18:41Speaker 02

  powerful, personal creator of the universe.

• 18:44Speaker 00

  I think a lot of believers look at this and go, "Great, we're done. See? Science proved God's existence." But I know you know, and I know, the science is a little more nuanced than this. Now, I can talk about it if I wanted to. Except my expertise is bubbles and foams. Yes, I learned about it in my classes. I talked to my colleagues at UC Irvine, who are some of the world's experts. But this is your actual area of research. So for the audience, help them understand, why does science actually think there is a beginning?

• 19:16Brian Keating?

  Well, that, I would say, is one of the most hotly contested claims in all of science. Not just, you know, if you go to Wikipedia and you just type in "science," not cosmology, but a picture about cosmology comes up as the, basically, the epitome, that which epitomizes all of science, is cosmology. That we have this model that explains an extrapolation back from today or forward from the past, exactly the features on large scales and small in some cases, that we see in the universe. So the question is whether or not we conflate properly the Big Bang with the origin of time. And clearly, Kalam and Craig do. And that's simply not a proven statement.

• 19:58Brian Keating?

  And at a meta-level, it's perhaps more useful to start with an even more basic question, which is, you know, what is science? Right. Because if you can say that science accepts this, well, again, he has to then define, well, what is science, right? So, again, we can say it what it's not, but it's very hard to say what it is. But I'd say the first thing that we can say about science is that it's never settled. Right. When you hear things about settled science, it just means there's an overwhelming consensus. But the job of science is to make itself irrelevant. Where, again, in contrast, religion is to be eternal. So there you see a fundamental incapability between religion and science.

• 20:37Brian Keating?

  If you use science to prove, as Craig and Kalam are doing, the proposition that there was an origin and that points to a creator with different properties, then you have to say that if the science were to change, namely if we were to discover evidence of, oh, I don't know, a multiverse, which is the exact area of science that I study, if we were to find evidence for that, then how would that impact? Would that mean the Bible is wrong? I mean, I think that would make theists very uncomfortable. And it's simply not true that you can say definitively that the universe had a starting point in a finite space. And it's really overinterpreting what we do know.

• 21:20Brian Keating?

  So what I study is a cosmic microwave background radiation, which is the oldest light in the universe. It's basically the cosmic wallpaper. Right. Like these curtains. It's basically what's in the background frame of every single thing that you look at. But it's not the earliest event that ever happened in history. It's a fossil left over from the fusion of protons and electrons into atoms, the simplest atom, hydrogen. That's all it is. Beyond that, you can't see with visible radiation. What my groups are trying to do... Is to unravel using other forms of information, namely what's called gravitational radiation, gravitational waves, whether or not there was a pre-existing phase of the universe in its most earliest phase, still after it came into existence called inflation.

• 22:05Speaker 00

  Right.

• 22:05Brian Keating?

  We actually cannot ask what happened before inflation, before the Big Bang, if that represents time equals zero, the beginning of time itself. That concept is nonsensical. There is no notion of time. But there are very many models. Some would say preferable even so to the singularity that is represented in the Big Bang and postulated by Craig in his column, you know, usurpation of column, that there might be evidence for a pre-existing phase of our universe, what's called a bouncing cosmological model, which wouldn't have been a surprise to people as late as 100 years ago.

• 22:41Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 22:41Brian Keating?

  When they thought the universe is eternal, which is certainly a possibility in a certain sense as well. What we know for sure is that the universe isn't static. It is expanding. Whether it will expand forever is unknown. It's an area of hot research, connected to research that I'm doing, and as well as whether or not the universe did indeed have a singularity. Those are simply not settled science and nor should we think of them as being settled science. That's antithetical to science itself. So therefore, you know, to say that science says this and therefore that proves God's existence is very problematic.

• 23:13Speaker 00

  So that was one person's view. I think it's useful to take a look at an alternate view. In this case, we'll turn to Neil deGrasse Tyson. I think many of our viewers are familiar with him, astrophysicist, popular realizer of science. And as you can imagine, he takes a different perspective on this whole question.

• 23:32Speaker 03

  If your concept of a creator is someone who's all-powerful and all-good, that's not an uncommon pairing of powers that you might describe to a creator, all-powerful and all-good. And I look at... Disasters that afflict earth and life on earth. Volcanoes, hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, disease, pestilence, congenital birth defects. You look at this list of ways that life is made miserable on earth by natural causes. And I just ask, how do you deal with that?

• 24:14Speaker 03

  So philosophers rose up and said, if there is a God, God is either not all-powerful or not all-good. I have no problems if, as we probe the origins of things, we bump up into the bearded man. If that shows up, we're good to go. Okay? Not a problem.

• 24:36Speaker 03

  There's just no evidence of it. And this is why religions are called faiths.

• 24:41Speaker 00

  I think he's pretty clearly coming from this position of the argument from evil as reasons to believe God doesn't exist. He takes it in a more scientific and natural world perspective. He kind of talks about, we know the rules of the physical world. We know what's going on. I would argue God is love. And I think he takes this position, well, God really can't be all-loving and still exist. So when you listen to this argument, how does this fit into your perspective? What's your take on what Neil is doing with this argument?

• 25:13Brian Keating?

  So Tyson points out the problem of bad things happening to good people or innocents, so forth. You ever hear them say, account for all the good stuff that happens to bad people? Or forget about bad people, just good stuff that happened. All the babies that are born without cancer.

• 25:27Speaker 00

  Right.

• 25:28Brian Keating?

  All the babies that don't suffer from debilitating birth, you know, birth defects.

• 25:33Speaker 00

  Right.

• 25:33Brian Keating?

  All the, you know, kind of earthquakes that don't happen. It's very day in Southern California, we are experiencing a day. It's like the people that, you know, when they win the lottery, they never say, why me? You know? But, but again, you should be saying, why me all the time? And that's one of the more convincing and beautiful aspects about religion is that it teaches you a source of gratitude. And fundamentally, you cannot be a happy person if you're an ingrate.

• 25:57Speaker 00

  Right.

• 25:58Brian Keating?

  Be an angry person and a happy person at the same. I don't, I just mean like angry and simultaneous. No, no, fundamentally, an unhappy miserable person and do good in the world. So I think that's a very powerful thing that people don't really justify. So if we showed him, again, ninety-nine percent, ninety-nine point, ninety-nine percent of babies are born birth defect free, does that give him? No, so there are exceptions, of course, tragedies, and I don't want to minimize that. But to say that's a disproved is just very oversimplified, in my opinion.

• 26:28Speaker 04

  Yeah, no, I totally agree.

• 26:29Brian Keating?

  You know, I've had Neil on my podcast, and I've been on his podcast as well. And I accuse him of being ignorant of a statement by a famous scientist, who once said that, you know, "Science is the, is the ability to prevent you from knowing a little bit about something to know, think you're right, but not knowing enough to know that you could be wrong."

• 26:49Speaker 04

  Right.

• 26:51Brian Keating?

  And that scientist's name is Neil deGrasse Tyson. So he knows very little about actual, you know, certainly about biblical religions. And I, you know, he's a well-known atheist, and good luck to him. But I think his, his understanding is just far too simplistic to really give it much attention. And I don't think we would give him much of attention if he was talking about, you know, I don't know, baseball scores in the nineteen thirty. I mean, it just, we're conflating because he's so smart that he's wise. And again, that's a fundamental attribution error. We should not ascribe wisdom to people who merely, quote unquote, have intelligence, which is very important.

• 27:30Speaker 04

  Right.

• 27:30Brian Keating?

  Right? I mean, you want your, your, you know, brain surgeon and your pilot to be very, very smart and know a lot about their subject, but you don't necessarily have to think that they're wise in their, in their personal life. Who cares? But for people that are pining about these very, very majestic and weighty subjects, I doubt he knows the first thing about, you know, the, the concepts of, of, you know, free will and, and, and the restriction of God's abilities to make himself to diminish his own power, to make him less than omnipotent, certainly. And then the question of the Odyssey, I mean, Tyson's acting like, you know, he's discovered this, this new, this new idea that like, bad things happen to good people. I mean, I always like- Ask people, you know, what's worse when something good happens to someone who's bad or something bad happens to someone's good, like which bothers you more? Those are ancient questions.

• 28:15Brian Keating?

  Actually, I think we as, you know, people that are either theophilic or theo-practicing, you know, are much more familiar with the atheist arguments.

• 28:24Speaker 00

  Right.

• 28:25Brian Keating?

  You know, as it said, you know, kind of a theist has to account for one problem, the issue of good, bad things happening to good people, theodicy, and the atheist has to account for everything else. It's a little oversimplistic.

• 28:38Speaker 00

  Right.

• 28:39Brian Keating?

  So I think it is certainly a challenge, but is it really a fatal thing? And again, he makes the supposition that, oh, if the white beard came to him, that's fine, he'd accept. No, he wouldn't.

• 28:50Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 28:51Brian Keating?

  I mean, there's just no, he'd be trying to explain it using lasers and swamp gas and all sorts of other things, right?

• 28:55Speaker 00

  I'd really like to put these two clips in context because I think they highlight the challenge of going too strongly into science is either disproving God's existence or science even proving God's existence. You know, on the disproved side, I mentioned how much experience matters to me as evidence for God, and science is never really going to disprove my experience of a relationship. You know, on the other side, if you go too heavy in science proving God's existence, you've alluded to this already in your answers, you know, science does evolve, science does change, and if we're looking for God in what's classically called the God of the gaps, gaps

• 29:38Speaker 00

  in our scientific knowledge, I think we could run into some real problems there. You know, it seems to me that this is kind of a challenging area that you really want to avoid. So I'd kind of like you to explore a little bit of this. I mean, obviously, at the high level, we agree in the physics world on the Big Bang, and at the high level, we agree on evolution. You know, if we didn't disagree on details and there wasn't still work to do, there wouldn't be Departments of Evolutionary Biology, you wouldn't have a job because the problem would be solved. So there's clearly work going on, and maybe comment on that process with experimental facts and evidence. Why are there still discussions? How do models come into this?

• 30:22Speaker 00

  How do we think about scientific knowledge? Because that impacts how we connect it to God's existence or not.

• 30:28Brian Keating?

  We have many disadvantages over people that study foam bubbles. Right. Or who study biological physics. As cosmologists, as astronomers, we cannot do proper experiments. I cannot change the magnetic field on the sun, yet. I cannot change the magnetic field on the sun and ask, "Well, what does that do to the sunspot and solar activity?" Right? That's an experiment. Honest to goodness, we can't do that. With cosmology, if indeed there's one universe, which is a controversial statement to some of my colleagues, but if indeed there's one uni... We can't even look at assemblies of stars or galaxies and things like that. No, there's nothing like that. There's only one universe. So, let alone you can't do an experiment on it. But you only have one sample, a sample of N equals 1. So, there's no statistical possibility to probe it further. So, we're limited by that.

• 31:13Brian Keating?

  But we have a very powerful advantage over every other scientific field, and that's that we have time machines. We have telescopes. Right. That allow us to see backwards in time. So, I'm looking at you now, we're two feet away. Light travels one foot per nanosecond. I'm not seeing you as you are now, I'm seeing you as you were two nanoseconds ago. So, you look remarkably young. Right, yes. Beautiful, jovial. We see the sun as it was eight minutes ago. We see certain stars as they were not now, four years ago, etc. So, we have time machines. One of our time machines can operate using microwaves instead of visible light, and that allows us to see the infant universe when it was only 380,000 years old. And that was 380,000 years after perhaps a big bang, perhaps a singularity, perhaps

• 31:57Brian Keating?

  a pre-existing universe that came together, collapsed, and made a singularity from which we sprang from, in which case the question of, as I always like to say, what happened on the Tuesday before the big bang? That makes sense. It could be that that singular process occurred once, or it could be that it wasn't even a singularity. In other words, we never got down to a quantum mechanical singularity where quantum mechanics and gravity have to be reconciled, which is a theory for which we are currently lacking. So, all these things point us to say that it's very dangerous to say, "We know exactly what happened at the very beginning," as Craig said, even that there was a beginning. There's certainly ample evidence that there could be a cyclical model where the universe is cycling into and out of existence. It has certain virtues in that it doesn't require a singularity.

• 32:42Brian Keating?

  So when you study the orbits of planets and even the orbits of galaxies themselves, you need to use gravity and the field, the physics of gravity. At the microscopic scales, on the other hand, we don't have a quantum mechanical theory of gravity. It eludes us, a theory of everything that unifies together all forces, fields, energy, and so forth. It doesn't exist. And there's certainly many lacune in our current cosmological model, even neglecting the Big Bang, whether it was a singularity. We don't know what 90% of the matter is in the universe or so. We don't know what 75% of the universe's energy is. So we're missing out on about 95%. We have no physical evidence for 95% of the universe's energy. And yet, that 5%, and even less than that, the 1% of the periodic table like you and

• 33:25Brian Keating?

  I are made up of, that we do have evidence for is the most important matter. I would say it's the matter that matters to me. It's the protons, neutrons, and croutons that make up our lives, right? So in our quest to understand the early universe, we extrapolate back as far back as we can go, but we come upon a point of maximal ignorance. That point, we can call the Big Bang. It's really where the physics that we can experiment with in the laboratory is broken down. My research attempts to go beyond that with a still classical theory of gravity that would produce waves of gravity long after the universe came into existence, our current universe. Whether that will reveal the presence of inflation, which comes concomitantly with

• 34:05Brian Keating?

  the multiverse, which is eternal in a sense that would make Colin roll in his grave and Craig upset about. But clearly, they're not aware of that. So there's a danger in extrapolation of the model, either for religious purposes or for purely scientific materialist purposes as well.

• 34:22Speaker 00

  One of the things that's emerging in our conversation is really this shockingly deep question from physics, the nature of time. But really, this idea of beginnings versus reality just always being there. I mean, for a large part of science history, we thought the universe was static, unchanging, always existed. Most religions, by definition, on the other hand, have a creation story. You kind of mentioned, you know, if science discovers there was no beginning, maybe that's problematic for Genesis. And I think for many believers, there is this kind of deep understanding of God as Creator. So they put it in their minimalist characteristics of God, which, if you noticed, I didn't.

• 35:06Speaker 00

  I actually did not include Creator as a key requirement for God. And I think for me, part of it is just, I've oddly, you know, as a physicist, we have talked about multiple dimensions. I can't picture those to save my life, but I've never had a problem with something that just lasted forever and always was. Hence, I have no problem with God as an eternal thing, reality being. But I do think, both in science, as we finally got the Big Bang Theory and we had to adjust to a beginning, and now we're struggling with was something else always there? This tension, this space of something always being, an uncaused cause,

• 35:46Speaker 00

  it always was, infinite time versus a beginning, a creation, and a start? That tension is an interesting space. And I'd be curious to see, you know, your thoughts on that and how that plays out.

• 35:59Brian Keating?

  Well, yeah, I mean, I always say that it's not obvious to me why, you know, the origin of the universe is actually part of cosmology in the same way that if you're a biologist studying frogs or whatever, right? You know, fruit flies. Like, do you have to understand the origin of life? No, obviously, no one say, oh, well, like, if you don't understand, you know, like, the Miller-Urey experiment, you can perfectly operate on some toad or whatever. I don't, again, I don't know. You should have a look at that biology department. You know, step in as the vice provost and see what they're doing. But, but to me, it almost does bridge into metaphysics.

• 36:34Speaker 00

  Right.

• 36:34Brian Keating?

  Which is certainly something, you know, philosophy, certainly something physicists are deeply uncomfortable with. You know, there is this tension, even going back to Galileo, who used to make fun of philosophers and all sorts of other things. And, you know, modern day, you know, incarnations of him in the form of, you know, Dawkins or Lawrence Krauss. Yeah, these... These are very, very, you know, kind of important questions, but it's not clear to me that a practicing workaday scientist really ever thinks about them.

• 37:04Speaker 00

  Right.

• 37:04Brian Keating?

  I mean, I'm building a microwave background telescope, and I'm tuning a volometer, and I'm using a superconductor to do this, and looking at a vacuum leak in a dilution refrigerator. I'm not thinking about, well, like, if this, if I discover multiple universes, does that invalidate, you know, existence of, could Jesus exist in all these universes? Yeah, like, that's not something I think about on a daily basis. But I do think about it, but it's not central to the craft of being a cosmologist or scientist.

• 37:30Speaker 00

  You talk about not being able to see before the cosmic microwave background radiation. I think this would be a little confusing to some of our listeners. I'd like to go and just clarify that a little bit, tease it out. What do you mean by not being able to see earlier than that time? And how might we do it?

• 37:47Brian Keating?

  So, we can't look with light, radiation, electromagnetic waves of any frequency beyond the, what's called, the surface of blast scattering.

• 37:56Speaker 00

  Right.

• 37:56Brian Keating?

  Effectively, it's like trying to look through a very, very intense marine layer, a thick fog.

• 38:02Speaker 00

  Right.

• 38:03Brian Keating?

  We're familiar with that here in Southern California, in the June gloom, et cetera. And that is essentially a scattering process. So, the photons were very coupled tightly to the electrons and the protons that made up the primordial plasma, primordial soup, that existed from the epoch of the formation of nuclei up until 380,000 years, when the universe had cooled by expansion enough that the first protons and electrons could come together and stay together. And then, the universe becomes transparent. So, from that epoch forward, we can use visible light. Before that epoch, we can't use visible light or radiation of any frequency. But instead, we can use other fossils that, just like these photons, travel through time, and they're in every glass of water that we drank or in the Pacific Ocean not far from here.

• 38:47Brian Keating?

  And that's the abundances of different nuclei that make up the universe. So, we can count how many hydrogen atoms there are for every helium atom, et cetera, and other isotopes. And we can very accurately infer from that what the temperature was in the universe in the first three minutes or 20 minutes after the The Big Bang, and in fact, I always joke that, you know, the Big Bang Theory TV show was actually longer than it took to form every hydrogen nucleus in the entire observable universe. So those are relics from the first 20 minutes of the universe's formation. The CMB comes along much, much later, but you have to use something very different. You can't use nuclei because they didn't exist, they were being shattered apart before three minutes. We believe that we can use the properties of what are called gravitational waves.

• 39:30Brian Keating?

  That's another form of radiation, not electromagnetic in origin whatsoever. It has to do with the ripples of space and time, which would be there if and only if this process of inflation took place. And the process of inflation would be there if and only if we live in a multiverse. So the stakes are incredibly high, and because we can see the imprint of gravitational waves on the CMB, not on the distribution of nuclei, but we can see it exclusively on the imprint of the CMB itself, that's why we choose to study it.

• 39:57Speaker 00

  Here we are, both physicists. We've established, you know, very similar backgrounds. We study slightly different stuff. I study foams, you know, you study the universe. We actually both do it at the same university. There is one, you know, challenging thing. We both moved out here. You did not stay a Yankee fan, you became a Padre fan. I have stayed loyal to the Yankees and stayed a Yankee fan. So we're, we have access to this same evidence, the same experiences, the same ideas, and I think many scientists do, and yet here we are, we don't have the same conclusion. We don't, it's close, but we don't even have the same beliefs around God.

• 40:40Speaker 00

  So the real question is, as we wrap up, how, how is it, what are your thoughts and views on how people can start with these same set of information, training, evidence, and yet come to such very different conclusions?

• 40:53Brian Keating?

  I think it reflects the majesty of the human being, in that, you know, I can remember when we, the first claim that we did detect the inflationary gravitational wave background on March 17th, 2014, the subject of my first book, Losing the Nobel Prize. It was funny to see on that very day, people like Max Tagmark and Lawrence Krauss arguing this is is now definitive evidence that God doesn't exist, you know, goodbye God, hello multiverse, because you can't have Jesus and God and Moses, you can't have them all in all these infinite number of universes, so this is definitive proof, and then, nope, then, you know, Hugh Ross, Reasons to Believe, and Stephen C. Meyer at the Discovery Institute, and theologians,

• 41:34Brian Keating?

  this is proof of God's existence, of a big bang, a singularity, let there be light. So again, reflective, those are all scientists, you know, that are trained in different, with different backgrounds, but all physicists, astrophysicists even, all saw different things. So, we refract things through a whole different repository, different lenses of our upbringing, our attitudes, our perhaps animosity towards religion, because don't forget, if you believe in God, if you believe in Him, as we've been talking about, it's a squishy word, but if you, if it rises to a point where you take God seriously, let me say it like, then you have to change your life. Yeah. It's very uncomfortable for you, I don't know if you've ever had a Jehovah's Witness come to your door, you know? I did, actually.

• 42:17Brian Keating?

  And, you know, they're nice people, I'm sure, they're fine, or Scientologists, they'll, they'll talk to you, right, and, and you might know that it's very, very difficult to change your faith, so to change a faith, you know, from, you know, say Catholicism to Scientology, or, you know, fundamentally, maybe they believe in God, or Jehovah's Witness, they certainly believe in God, right, that's almost an impossible task, all the more so, change from no faith to faith, right? So, of course, we're gonna see things differently, we're gonna see it through a projection of our own self-interest, our life experience, our wisdom, and the synthetic knowledge that comes upon it, but it might be very akin to something in science called the butterfly effect, right?

• 42:58Brian Keating?

  We have these tiny little perturbations in initial conditions, you know, from your science, and they result in dramatic, you know, hurricane-force winds from the flap of a butterfly's wings. It started with the same conditions, more or less, you know, who can say that, but actually, this amplifies through the, again, through the prism of personal experience of their own faith tradition, or non-faith tradition, and their own life experience and wisdom, and that, together, can make it easily explainable that you and I might be not so far apart in some ways, but, but quite a world away in other ways.

• 43:30Speaker 00

  I really like how you brought that back to experience. I mean, I shared how for me, it really is my experience of God. And I do think too often in the scientific world, we get really tied up in the scientific method as the only way of knowing, the only way of getting knowledge. And I think we forget about that fuller human experience and what that brings to us, and we have to take that seriously. Experience of the world around us really does give us knowledge. And I think that's a great way that you brought it together, this idea of a prism or the lens that we view it through. And there's always going to be that experience guiding where we are. So, thank you.

• 44:13Speaker 00

  Are you still confused? Or perhaps enlightened? Well, that is the point of this podcast. To present all sides of the discussion, we bring together a diverse set of scientists, theologians, philosophers, believers and non-believers. You will decide for yourself. The answer couldn't be more personal. I'd like to thank Dr. Brian Keating for being our guest on this inaugural episode. And thank you for watching.

• 45:13Speaker 05

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