The Scientists Ep. 5: Steven Weinberg’s Legacy, Religion, and Cosmology

Please join my mailing list here 👉 https://briankeating.com/list to win a meteorite 💥 Brian Keating reflects on the life and legacy of Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg, the legendary physicist and writer whose influence shaped generations of scientists and thinkers. Driven by the regret of never having hosted Weinberg on the show before his passing, Brian takes listeners on a deeply personal journey—from his formative college years, inspired by Weinberg’s groundbreaking book "The First Three Minutes," to his thoughts on the intersection of science, meaning, and religion. Join Brian Keating as he honors a hero, wrestles with big questions, and invites you to reflect on what truly makes life—and science—impossible to ignore. - The Scientists is a documentary-style podcast series hosted by astrophysicist Brian Keating. Each episode explores the untold stories behind history’s greatest minds—from Nobel laureates to visionary misfits—revealing the personal struggles, intellectual triumphs, and paradigm-shifting ideas that changed the world. Each week, I dive into the life and legacy of a legendary scientist—experimentalists, theorists, and observers alike—and uncover insights you can apply to your own work and worldview. Science didn’t appear fully formed; it was built by real people solving real problems under pressure. Their ideas still shape our future. We’ll examine not just what they discovered, but who they were—from their obsessions and honors to their most spectacular ideas, brilliant blunders, and beautifully human flaws. New episodes weekly. Learn more at BrianKeating.com. 🎙️ Subscribe for compelling science storytelling. 📚 Listen to our companion series Into the Impossible for interviews with living legends. #science #sciencepodcast #historyofscience #nobelprizewinners #famousscientists #scientificdiscoveries #physics #chemistry #thescientistsbriankeating #intotheimpossible #sciencecommunication Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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  Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

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  Open the pod bay doors, Hal.

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  Hey friends, this is a first in the Into the Impossible podcast history, a solo episode with yours truly opining on something important to me, which is the passing of perhaps the one guest that I most wish that I had had on the podcast in years. And now sadly, I'll never get him on the podcast because Steven Weinberg passed away at age 88 this past summer in July. And although he did overlap with past guest Shelley Glashow in a wonderful, quite delightful series of interactions ranging from their growing up together as kids

• 1:56Speaker 04

  in Bronx Science High School, the famed Bronx Science High School where so many Nobel laureates came from. I think it's second only to a few different countries in Europe as to Nobel laureates that came out of that wonderful school. And Stephen's passing closes the door forever in a way that affected me such that I really had some regrets about how I take the direction of the podcast and the people I'm choosing to interview. You know that I have prioritized laureates, have won Nobel prizes, not just because they have won these prizes, but because of the human beings that they are and what they mean to society, what they represent. Not the least

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  of which is because many of them are getting old. And if you have read my latest book, Into the Impossible, you will know that the impetus behind recording these interviews really stemmed from the passing of snubbed laureate, a man who really, truly did lose the Nobel Prize. And that was, of course, Freeman Dyson, my first guest on the Into the Impossible podcast. And his death led an urgent sense to the podcast production and to actually turn the interviews with these laureates into a book, which I am happy to say I did do this past year. But still, time waits for no man or woman at tempus fugit. We must seize the day and all sorts of other platitudes, but they're platitudes

• 3:25Speaker 04

  for a reason. And then the end of the year, December, it's natural to think about these things as we turn the corner from December to January, the God of portals and doors, Janus himself, causes us to look back and look forward. And I look back with regret at the fact that I didn't try harder to get Stephen on. I shouldn't say that I never tried. I did try. I reached out to his colleague, Katie Freeze, his professor at T. Austin, where he was up until the day that he died, a professor of great renown and contribution. And it's not like he didn't really make an effort to ever do podcasts. He did. And you can find many interviews with him. And I wanted to walk you through the fact that

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  I would do such a podcast primarily not to just bag another notch on my belt of Nobel Prize winners. That's not really what I'm in this profession, so to speak. It's really a hobby to do. It's not just to not rack up as many Nobel Prize winners I can. And so what would I bring that's unique? I think, asking him how I came up with the standard model and Electra Week unification and what it was like to work with Shelley and their co-laureate, Abdallah Salam.

• 4:38Speaker 04

  And what that whole thing, that's been covered a lot. And even the things that I'm most interested in, perhaps most uniquely qualified to discuss. I think even those things like his perspective on religion. I don't think that that would be only the subjects that would make an interview with me worthwhile for him. So I did reach out to him to get him to come on the podcast and Katie helped out stupendously. And unfortunately, I think he was, you know, suffering some effects or just far too busy. And he was cordial in his reply that he couldn't do it. And he said, no, so that's the way it goes. I've been rejected many times with many guests on the show, and I assume I'll be rejected many more.

• 5:21Speaker 04

  As the great Nobel laureate of hockey, Wayne Gretzky said, you miss 100% of the shots you don't take. So I keep taking those shots, but I want to walk you through what I would have talked to him about. I'm going to call this episode my never before recorded interview with Nobel laureate Stephen Weinberg. And I want to focus on mostly his writings, his philosophy, his perspective and outlook on physics, ranging from his really incredible breadth of contributions. He was a philosopher of a sort and he was a great writer. And I first became connected to him back in 1992.

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  So I want to take you back into 1992. I had just returned from a fruitful summer working at the College of William and Mary, where I had been an REU student, REU is a program that the National Science Foundation runs for undergraduates. In that case, I had just finished my junior year and so I had been applying to these programs and I got accepted to one and it took me to Virginia, where of all places I got to work at NASA, NASA Langley Research Base and Air Force Base down there. And it was an exciting time. It was before my senior year, I was getting excited, looking into the home stretch. I'd finally decided that I had wanted to go to graduate school for physics

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  and that I would take the graduate record exam, which is no longer required to get into graduate schools these days. We'll talk about that some other time. But I applied and I began studying and I met some really good friends and had some really great contacts that year and I was offered a job at NASA Langley, continuing the program that I'd worked on, which is using infrared radiation to scan aircraft and spacecraft for microscopic cracks in their, in their skin. And I learned all sorts of cool things about airplanes, like the airplane skin on your Southwest Airline jet is held together, not by the rivets that you see, but instead by the glue and the

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  rivets are meant to hold the glue glued panels in place as they cure. I'd never known that and they were interested in looking for delamination cracks in that glue that would lead to a situation where the skin of the plane could rip off. And that had some severe downsides, as you could imagine. It was only a few years after this Aloha Airlines, I think it was, came apart in flight and tragically, some people were sucked out of the plane. I think at least one person felt her death. And so it became a priority for the FAA and for the airlines. And, and so NASA began working on this. They're partially, their aeronautics is in their title. And, and so I worked on this and developed some techniques and helped

• 8:12Speaker 04

  to write some papers and work with an amazing man. I wonder if he's out there anywhere. Sometimes I do get people listening to this podcast, including one of my friends that I met during this program, Joel Sevilllo, who just got in contact with me after many years after hearing this podcast. So Elliot Kramer, if you're out there, please shoot me an email. You made a huge impact on my life, my career, and I wouldn't be doing this without you in some sense. So, thank you, Elliot. But Elliot offered me a job at the end of the summer, being what would be called a, eventually leading to what we called a civil servant or, you know, long-term permanent position, basically like tenure for NASA. And I was flattered and but I was very resolute. I was very set on going to graduate

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  school. And part of the reason was to work on these exciting discoveries. It was only a year or two after Alan Guth had come up with the model of the theory of inflation. And it was at the exact time when the COBE satellite had come out with its phenomenal results, that previous April 1992, in the cosmic microwave background radiation that discovered not only the spectrum was exquisitely measured and faithfully reproduced a black body spectrum, but the anisotropy had been measured to exquisite precision for the first time. So the universe was not isotropic, that it had departures from complete uniformity. And I found that fascinating. And the theory of inflation perhaps purported to explain

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  how that could come to be. And so it was an exciting time for cosmology. And little did I know, I would someday have on John Mather, who was the leader behind the FIRAS, the far infrared spectra photometer experiment, that he would come on this podcast and be in my book. Thank you, John. And so, looking back, that year, that summer was a real turning point. And it was especially so because that was the summer I had my really first serious girlfriend, who was in the math program of this RU program at the College of William and Mary. And I won't name her, maybe she's listening, she'll know who she is. I hope she's moved on from the devastation of dating me. But we were very serious for several

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  years. And so much so that in 1992, in the fall, I went to go visit her and she was at one of the state universities of New York, in this case, at Binghamton. And I was in Cleveland, Ohio, home of the Spartans of Case Western Reserve University, as those of you who have followed me for some time now. Also, one of my former dorm mates contacted me, or I contacted him recently. Hey, Jay, if you're out there listening. So it's amazing what this podcast has done for me, really enhanced my social life in ways that even Facebook could not have accomplished. And in that lovely kind of interstices between the end of my junior year summer

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  research at College of William and Mary and then starting up in the fall and what would be my last year at Case Western, I was dating this young lady and she was at SUNY Binghamton. I would commute from, not commute, I would travel from, from Case Western, which is in Cleveland via Amtrak, President Biden's primary mode of transportation. And fun fact, I'd recently, when I was in Washington DC, if you follow my mailing list, if you don't, please sign up. It's very easy to subscribe to. Just go to briankeating.com. It'll be flooded with invites to join. It's very easy to join, very easy to leave. And I send out messages about once, twice a month, what kind of cool things are out there in the universe.

• 11:44Speaker 04

  Call it my Monday magic message in honor of Sir Arthur C. Clarke's statement about sufficiently advanced technologies being indistinguishable from magic. Anyway, I had a wonderful summer and fall and I was visiting my girlfriend. And the only way to get there was by train. And the fun fact about the train that I want to mention is just a month ago, I was in none other than Wilmington, Delaware, hometown of, of Amtrak Joe Biden, on an Amtrak going down to Washington DC to give an award to past guest Michio Kaku from the Arthur C. Clarke Foundation for his lifetime achievement. So all these cool things come together. And I just remember one fact about Amtrak, which was that the train from Cleveland to Binghamton

• 12:27Speaker 04

  took me through Buffalo. And this is, you know, 1992. So this is long before smartphones could keep us busy. I think I had a Walkman, maybe I had a Walkman for music, maybe not. But I had a book and we'll get to what that book was in just a bit. And I was trying to sleep and getting back and forth. And I kept remembering this fun fact that I had learned not too long before that Amtrak takes as long, if not longer, at that time to get from Cleveland to Buffalo than it did 100 years earlier. I just found that, you know, bizarre. And it's really not gotten too much better that train from Penn Station where I took it to Washington DC, the Excela, the speed version, got there 20 minutes before

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  the local version of the Amtrak corridor line would have gotten me there for twice the price. Anyway, we have a lot to do when it comes to logistics and I hope Mayor Pete Buttigieg will address that. Anyway.

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  On that night train to Binghamton, I do believe I had a Walkman because I remember listening to some songs that I had really fallen in love with. And one of them was called Can't You See by the Marshall Tucker Band. And I would play that on repeat. And I won't sing. I don't have the greatest voice, not terrible, but it's not great. And I don't want to ruin my first and maybe possibly only Ask Me Anything. And not Ask Me Anything. It's just a solo episode. Don't, don't get too afraid. If you don't like it, there'll be regular episodes with Nobel winners and losers, including Jocelyn Bell and other phenomenal guests coming up very soon. And Reinhard Genzel, winner of the Nobel Prize

• 14:05Speaker 04

  coming on soon. Anyway, getting back to the night train, listening to Marshall Tucker through the late fall, going from Cleveland to Binghamton, passing through Buffalo, and reading a book that wouldn't allow me to sleep. And that book was called The First Three Minutes. That was written, of course, by the famous Stephen Weinberg, who this episode is dedicated to, the guest I never got, the guest I most wish to have had on. And it was really an incredible book. It was first published in 1977. And even though it's coming up on, you know, 45 years old, 46 years old, this book really was an incredible

• 14:50Speaker 04

  tour de force in that it was still, it is still relevant. And it had many, many precursors to the things that I would later get to, get to study. And I want to read just a clip from my friend Dan Falk, who wrote an obituary, maybe a eulogy, this is kind of a eulogy, about Stephen Weinberg. He said, his most famous, or perhaps infamous statement can be found in the second to last page of his popular book, The First Three Minutes. Having told the story of how our universe came into being with the Big Bang some 13.8 billion years ago, and how it may end untold billions of years in the future, he concludes that

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  whatever the universe is about, it sure as heck, isn't about us. And then he said, quoting Stephen, "The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless."

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  And I found that quite shocking at the time. I do remember reading about the the subject of the first three minutes is really what we know about the early universe, which is really culminating with the formation of the light elements. And going earlier than that is really leading towards speculation that we, in some sense, are trying to unravel and reveal with the Simons Observatory, the bisep array experiment, my former collaborators on that project, and trying to hopefully unravel the prediction that would be made in 1980. I might have said 1992 earlier, so scratch that. 1980, Alan Guth had this spectacular realization,

• 16:25Speaker 04

  and that was two years after the publication, or 1979, it was a two-year after the publication of this great work by Steven Weinberg. And I can't help but think there was some influences. We'll see as we go on, the influence of Steven Weinberg on the understanding of the first three minutes naturally begged the question of what happened before the first three minutes.

• 16:45Speaker 00

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• 17:16Speaker 04

  And could we come up with a plausible theory that would eventually be cemented by data at the same level as the CMB and the abundances of light elements would provide? Now, in this book, The First Three Minutes, again, published in 1977, this is 12 years after Penzies and Wilson discovered the cosmic microwave background, or CMB, that 2.7-degree Kelvin radiative glow that permeates all of space and time, local time at least, it was hotter in the past. But that signature was discovered and then awarded a Nobel Prize for Penzies and Wilson the year after the publication of The First Three Minutes, and then just a

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  year before, Steven Weinberg himself would win a Nobel Prize for his contributions to the standard model and so-called electra week unification, among many other things. And one of the things that Stephen came up with is sort of some of the deepest motivation for what we call a non, you know, an anthropic explanation, a non purely rational or purely physical reason that the laws of nature instantiate in such a way as to produce a universe that has cosmologists within it. So he, he worked on this for later, about 10 years later, and this book has been through many, many publications and many printings, and you can get a copy for a couple bucks. Even to this day, it's one of the most popular

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  books and for good reason. It really does describe what we knew at that time. And in some sense, we've added on a lot of precision in the ensuing 40 plus years since the publication of the, of this first three minutes. But there's also, you know, kind of a depressing amount that we haven't really unraveled. We don't really have a strong enough motivation for the understanding what kicked off the first, you know, milliseconds, three seconds, three milliseconds, three microseconds, three nanoseconds, or trillions of a second. And after the big bang, what does that mean? And in this book, Stephen Weinberg also discussed the notion of the cyclic model. And a lot of people like to say that the CMB's discovery

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  in 1965 was the death knell for the standard, for the steady state model. But Stephen points out very clearly that it wasn't, that it was not by any means the most definitive evidence that we now in 2020 hindsight year, look back on it as having. It's not at all clear that the universe at that time could rule out the possibility of having existed in some sense in a quasi steady state. And they went to great lengths to, he went to great lengths to kind of motivate why that is true. And in fact, he says at one point, maybe earlier than this, he had a book on cosmology in the early 1970s. And I searched through my notes and I keep Apple notes, basically as my second brain, as Tiago Forte

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  and David Perel, past guest on the podcast, call it, refer to them for more information. They say everyone should have a, a second brain. Because our brains are squishy, wet brains are really good for having ideas, but they're not good for holding ideas. They're not good for keeping ideas. And I agree with that. So I take billions of notes. I store them just in Apple Notes. Now, that's kind of my workflow. It has hyperlinks. I can do all sorts of cool things, embed pictures. But the one thing I can also do on like a handwritten note is I can search. I can search different terms. And when I search on Weinberg, I get the most number of hits, both, you know, kind of telling myself to invite him. Don't forget to invite him. Could be too late to invite him.

• 20:52Speaker 04

  And also, you know, how I can get to him, you know, through what channels, what friends, what contacts of contacts. His, one of his former graduate students is now a colleague of mine, UC San Diego, Raphael Flauger, renowned young cosmologist, winner of a breakthrough New Horizons Prize, I think they call it. But as, as I'm saying, the notion that the universe was completely ruled out from being a steady state, as you know from past guests, Giant and Arlo Kar, even today, there are people like Giant and Fred Hoyle and my late great colleague Jeff Burbage, who took to their grave the notion that the the Big Bang was more or less preposterous. And so we're not going to get into that. We've talked about that

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  a lot, although it is cute to note that, that we are still discussing in great depth in the works of Sir Roger Penrose and in the works of Paul Steinhardt, and even in Robert Brinnerberger, my former professor at Brown University, models of the universe which are not inflationary. They are not singular. They avoid singularities and attendant issues that singularities bring up. And so I think it was good that we had a, a push, an alternative. As Weinberg said, the quasi-steady state had virtues. And the biggest virtue of that was that of this quasi-steady state was that it could be falsified. It could be ruled out. And he said the ruling out would come from a precise measurement

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  of the thermal spectrum of a black body. And that was very difficult to obtain in the context of a steady state cosmology. Of course, that didn't stop Hoyle and Burbage and Narlikar. As you'll note from the interview I did with him almost exactly a year ago, Narlikar. That they tried and tried and they actually came up with ways you could get a thermal spectrum from the interstellar dust and intergalactic dust pervasive throughout the cosmos, which is plausible, it does exist. And when asked, you know, which is more plausible, that there's dust in the universe throughout on all structures and all scales from my toddlers, all the way up to clusters of galaxies and interstacy regions between the galaxies, and an infinitely hot, infinitely dense, infinite

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  high-pressure singular origin of the universe, one might say that, well, we have no examples of singular origins, singular quantities, singular physical entities of infinite anything. So that on its face should just be ruled out. There's no evidence for that, whereas there's copious literal, literally littered is the cosmos with dust. So there's something to be said for that. Again, we're not going to relitigate that, but to note, the virtue of these things is being falsifiable. And even the, the new instantiations or incarnations of the steady state by my friend Paul Steinhardt and Aegis, who will be a guest someday on the show, they have a notion that the universe can avoid a quantum mechanical phase.

• 23:48Speaker 04

  And that's good because not only does it avoid a singularity, it avoids the whole need from a cosmological standpoint of having a quantum theory of gravity. So I think that that is quite fascinating and amazing, and I'm very excited to see where that goes. And I've done many videos about that on my YouTube channel, check that out, Dr. Brian Keating. And we will talk about that in future episodes. I hope to have Paul Steinhardt on, as I said, Anna Aegis on, and we've had on people like Sir Roger Penrose. All those models are falsifiable precisely by the exact same experimental apparatus that my colleagues and I are building with the Simons Observatory. Namely, if we see primordial B-modes that are a cosmic background, represent a cosmic

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  background of primordial gravitational waves, that will be nail in the coffin proof that those theories of alternative cosmology, alternative to inflation are wrong. Won't prove inflation. It won't cast no more doubts on inflation. There'll still be questions about the validity of inflation. However, they will rule out these other models. So they're very much in the tradition of the Stephen Weinberg proposal that there's a virtue in these models unlike the Big Bang, which is, according to him, not falsifiable. And all the more so when it comes to the inflationary universe. So I think that's fascinating, and it's a theme I'm going to keep exploring. And that was touched upon after the successor to the first

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  three minutes was really Stephen Hawking's Brief History of Time, where he spoke about the issues of what would come before the first three minutes. And in that, it was slightly before even the notion of the inflationary universe had become popular. And sort of the successor to A Brief History of Time, which is a successor to The First Three Minutes, was Alan Guth's book, The Inflationary Universe. And I hope to get Alan on the show at some point, and Andre Linde as well. But that will be a topic for a future time. I'm always reluctant to say who I'm going to have on, who I've had on. A lot of you don't like

• 25:54Speaker 04

  it and say I'm name dropping. Well, I mean, what else am I going to do? I feel like I can't offer you the totality of cosmological knowledge that has been acquired by my Titanic colleagues and collaborators. So if I don't name drop, you're going to assume it's me coming up with all these things, which it certainly is not. So my job is kind of like, I always like to say, I'm like, you know, the person that they say in the old joke, what do you call the person who hangs out with musicians? You call them a drummer. I hope, you know, I can be kind of the person that hangs out with these theorists. And it helps that I'm an experimentalist, I suppose. And so getting back to this kind of the follow

• 26:36Speaker 04

  on, the successor to the first three minutes was this book, A Brief History of Time. In which he also Stephen Hawking now, different Stephen, different spelling of the word Stephen, Stephen Hawking takes on Stephen Weinberg's notion of pitilessness, meaning that there is no dominion, there is no need for an all powerful, omniscient, omnipotent being. And we'll get into some of the statements that Weinberg made, but that truly was a torch that was passed to Stephen Hawking 11 years later. And Stephen clearly took up this mantle, passed again, baton passed or mantle, I don't know, what's

• 27:16Speaker 04

  a mantle? How do you pass a mantle? But anyway, the laurels, it was, it was a clean, clean transfer of power, so to speak, between the two Stephens. And even more so perhaps with Alan Guth, and we'll talk about that in a later time, in the inflationary universe, although Alan speaks less, much less about theology and theism than do either Weinberg or Hawking. I mean, Hawking says, if we do come up with, with a theory of everything, which he suspects will come from M-theory, and he already did pretty much presuppose, even prior to Kobe, that the inflationary universe was correct, that he noted that

• 27:56Speaker 04

  there'd be some sense of, of a new, a new era in which we wouldn't need God, we wouldn't need an all powerful, omniscient, omnipotent creator. And Dan Falk, my friend Dan, who interviewed Stephen in 2009, he said that Stephen told him that that sentence about the pointless universe led to a number of negative reactions, sometimes taking the form of, wow, why did you think it would have a point? Others say, well, this is outside the province of science to decide whether it has a point or not. And, and I think, and then Stephen Weinberg says, I agree with that. I don't think that science can decide that there is no point, but it can certainly testify that it has failed to find one.

• 28:40Speaker 04

  And that's one of the things I really take issue with. Again, his atheism, as Dan says, on a par with Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, in the later atheism of Lawrence Krauss, who certainly has taken the first three minutes in the inflationary universe, and to some extent, you know, a type of no-boundary proposal that leads to the non-existence of an origin of time in the classic sense, that Krauss takes upon this new mantle that the universe can come from nothing, i.e. no thing, not necessarily no laws, not necessarily no quantum fields, but utilizing this Bourdais-Guthlinken theorem and other conjectures that Lawrence,

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  past guest on the podcast, has come up with a notion that the universe can come from nothing. And that's hotly debated, even the notion of what nothingness entails is not so clear as Lawrence and I talked about this past summer. And I'll get back to Lawrence in just a minute because he does feature in this. And so, this notion of God as sort of this all-powerful, you know, all-caring, you know, being, that is one aspect, featured not necessarily in the Jewish tradition that Stephen and I were sort of brought up in, but certainly in the Christian sense, ability, is that he, you know, he recognized that there would be this lacuna,

• 30:08Speaker 04

  this gap in our sense of meaning. And the fact that I've maintained many times throughout my career and on this channel and elsewhere in my interviews, has been that to look to science for meaning or a point is somehow, you know, a fool's errand. Because I think that, you know, to think about the notion of belief coming from evidence, I find that very simplistic. And in fact, a lot of what Stephen was turned off by, you know, was the fact that, you know, many of his family members were killed in the Holocaust. And of course, that's something you can't really argue against, but this is not exactly new.

• 30:49Speaker 04

  The notion of theodicy in which a question is rightfully posed as to whether or not you can believe in a god that is good, and that's what the word god derives from in German, good, god, and they're very similar. And whether or not God's goodness can be reconciled with the allowance of evil to take place in the universe. Well, you know, that's this classic problem. Again, this is not new. You can cite Aquinas and all sorts of other sources, both Gentile and Jewish and elsewhere. And this is, again, a very simplistic notion. So one of the notions I would have loved to get into and explore is exactly what he

• 31:33Speaker 04

  thought about God. Because, you know, many, many times, he would say things, Steven Weinberg, this is, he wouldn't appeal to God in the same sense that Michio Kaku does in his God Equation, or Stephen Hawking does in the end of the first three minutes where he says that if we do discovery theory of everything, which he assumed would come from M-theory, to give us laws of nature and a but no boundary explanation for the origin of the universe itself, that we wouldn't need a god, but we would instead know the mind of God, literally is what he said. Weinberg never really mentions that. He doesn't lay out, it's certainly in the first three minutes, which is not a philosophy book, but the sort of notion that we don't really matter in the universe, and therefore that somehow

• 32:18Speaker 04

  provides the lack of evidence is evidence of lack. Again, these are grand questions. These are things that go back to, you know, thousands of years, and we're not exactly going to make great triumphs. And Thomas Aquinas has a pretty high H-index, right? So it's hard to think about how we're going to really supersede what was done. On the other hand, you know, I can speculate and I can ruminate on what it would have been like to encounter Steven Weinberg and ask him these questions and what we would talk about. And, you know, with my typical sense of respect, but always wanting to be, you know, at least ask the questions that you all would like to ask the person that I have

• 32:59Speaker 04

  the benefit of interviewing, I think it is, it's incumbent upon me to take this, these questions seriously. And I think a lot of the notion of what Stephen would say is not really as sophisticated, certainly as is physics. And so from that perspective, I get a little uncomfortable, obviously, talking about what a person who's not here to defend himself. But nevertheless, I don't have the opportunity to talk to him. And so I would like to go off on this fan fictional discussion, not knowing what he would say, but sort of using what he has written to suggest perhaps directions that I could have asked him. And again, this is the biggest regret of my podcast career, such as it is to date. And I'm sure

• 33:44Speaker 04

  I'll have many, many more regrets to come. So with that, let me take you through the next segment of comments on religion that Stephen Weinberg is, is famous for having made. And my responses to them. I wish I had his voice for some of these. I do for some, but not for all. So there's one famous segment where Weinberg's being interviewed and he talks about religion. And this is pretty mild for him, as you'll hear. This particular quote betrays none of the underlying hostility that I will review for, from Weinberg about religion and practitioners of religion. This one's pretty mild. So here's an audio recording of him from an interview.

• 34:26Speaker 04

  It looks like it was done from the video in the seventies, no, probably eighties. It's not quite that old. So enjoy this and then we'll get back to his greatest hits or misses right after this.

• 34:43Speaker 05

  Necessary conflict between being a scientist and being religious. I suppose I have to agree there. Even now, there are very fine scientists who are deeply religious. I know a few. But the, I think what happened, and it only began to happen with Galileo and Newton. So it took a long time to mature. What happened was that much of the early basis for religious belief was dissolved by science. It wasn't that scientific discoveries made religion impossible. It's that they made irreligion possible. It became possible to understand

• 35:23Speaker 05

  how things worked without the religious explanation. And particularly, I think more important than anything any physicist did was what Darwin did.

• 35:34Speaker 04

  So that's about as charitable as good old Stephen was towards religious practitioners, as you'll hear, not in his own voice, unfortunately for you, but in my voice. And now we will go into some of his comments about religion and its ultimate corrosive, pernicious, denigrating effect on human beings and on science itself. Okay, so now I'm gonna go off a little bit and editorialize in my own fashion. And those of you who are Weinberg worshippers may wish

• 36:14Speaker 04

  to tune out right now because I don't think it will be quite as favorable to the position of reverence of hakeography that you may hold Weinberg in. And I think a lot of times we have this notion of the halo effect, which is where one's perception of somebody precedes And transfers their affection, their authority from one field, in Weinberg's case, from physics, to another field, which in this case is atheism or commentary on religion and/or religiosity. And again, I never like to proselytize. It's actually forbidden in the religion that I practice in Judaism. Not proselytize, we also actively will try

• 36:58Speaker 04

  to dissuade people from joining our religion because we have it in our mind that we may be chosen for some very unpleasant missions in life. As Eli Wiesel once said, that God told the Jews he had a mission for them. He just didn't say it was a suicide mission. So Weinberg certainly deserves our credits, our accolades and esteem for all that he did accomplish as a scientist. But quite frankly, I believe many of his comments, especially on religion, are very simplistic. And although they're held up and they're quite pithy and he had a way with words, very good wordsmith, I don't think he was

• 37:43Speaker 04

  a very serious person. I don't take his ideas very seriously, at least when it comes to religion. And I want to illustrate that by some of his more famous quotes about God. And of course, he was Jewish and he would use that on occasion as a bludgeon or cudgel to attack the notion of religion, not just Judaism. Didn't say much about Judaism as far as I know it. He would transfer his ire from, you know, the basics of religious fervency or belief. And he would kind of paint the religious with a very, very oversimplified view of religion. And it really makes me think that he knew very little about it.

• 38:24Speaker 04

  And really dismissed it at an early age. And so having this incredible esteem that he did have in physics. Uh, is really no, um, no free pass to comment, uh, especially when you're almost willfully ignorant. I mean, some of the things I'm going to read to you as quotes, which are held up in such incredible, uh, you know, to such incredible fanfare by fellow atheists are really quite simplistic. And, uh, I want to, uh, maybe start with one of those right now. So he said in a very famous quote, um, and we'll cover the, the highlights or rather the lowlights. And again, it's really not fair of me to do this.

• 39:07Speaker 04

  I mean, the man's not here to participate. He didn't, um, you know, I can't fault him for not coming on the, my podcast in the waning months of his life. That would be pretty hubristic of me. But he seemed to be on a mission for at least much of his, uh, commentary that he had about the, the notion of religiosity and, and the scorned disdain that he really had for religion. It wasn't this kind of benign, um, uh, approach to it where, you know, kind of non-overlapping magisteria of Stephen J. Gould, often also an atheist, or, you know, perhaps even Carl Sagan, or, uh, even to some extent,

• 39:49Speaker 04

  you know, the modern atheist, but he was really the first in the breed of what would be called later on, the militant atheist. And these are people like, uh, Lawrence Krauss, past guest on the show, and Richard Dawkins, uh, of course. And, you know, I've really been troubled by some of their relatively, uh, sophisticated analyses of religion. And I did confront Lawrence about this on the show when he was on, to some extent, commenting that, you know, he wasn't even aware of the basis for, uh, the very name of the religion that he was born into. Uh, and the other name that, uh, Jews go by is the nation of Israel, the Benet Israel, the children of Israel.

• 40:31Speaker 04

  And I asked Lawrence, you know, I actually said, I believe Lawrence Krauss that you are an Israelite. I said, what do you mean? And he said, uh, I said to me, and I told him the word Israel in Hebrew means fights against God. Struggles with fights against God. And it seems to me that you spend a lot of your time occupying your time by arguing, fighting with wrestling with God, which is actually ironically very much in the Jewish tradition. So you're an Israelite, but it troubled me. He had no knowledge of even the basis of of this, of the knowledge of the basis of one of the major world religions. And I think also, you know, to the extent that Weinberg would cite Judaism, as he

• 41:12Speaker 04

  will, and this quote that I'll read in just a moment. Again, it was a very, very simplistic aspect of what we call theodicy, that it seems to me any, you know, 10 year old in in a religious school, in a parochial school would have confronted at one point or another. So I'll read it. And he says at one point, "It seems a bit unfair to my relatives to be murdered in order to provide an opportunity for free will for Germans. But even putting that aside, how does free will account for cancer? Is it an opportunity of free will for cancer, for cancer tumors, to be

• 41:51Speaker 04

  specific?" So obviously, that's, you know, kind of this dark humor playing up on the connection that he had his relatives who were murdered in the Holocaust. Of course, that's a great tragedy. But it was not specifically his ire about Germany and and later in life, he railed against or invade against atomic weapons and how deadly they were and how almost reminiscing that they they maybe should never have been invented or used. And, you know, that that's somewhat, again, troubling. When you think about the outcome of World War II and how that could have played out differently

• 42:31Speaker 04

  had we not invented the atomic bomb and utilized it in America, we're not going to get into a history discussion about that.

• 42:40Speaker 04

  But to invoke the kind of Jews that died in the Holocaust, which is kind of unique form of evil. And then a count that says that, you know, that would be unfair and that God is somehow, you know, giving in order to give an opportunity for free will to the Germans who are the Nazis who killed Jews during the Holocaust, that the necessity of free will, that you also have to have free will for tumors. So, you know, this is kind of a very, very silly thing to say, in my opinion. Again, it was, it's credited to great fanfare and I'm quoting, all these quotes I'm going to get are from these inspirational quotes, A to Z websites. So these are, you know, websites that not only traffic in his quotes in physics, but

• 43:24Speaker 04

  90% of them are about atheism and, and, you know, kind of condemning religious theism for perniciousness and for its corrosive effects, as you'll see in just a bit. So he had a really deep antipathy towards religion. And yet he had never obviously confronted, you know, the most basic aspects of theodicy, the, the question of how, you know, omnipotent God can allow for bad things to happen to good people or good things to happen to bad people and which is worse. And I think this is kind of, again, the notion of free will is not necessarily the germane factor.

• 44:05Speaker 04

  When you talk about the evil perpetrated by individuals, it's not necessarily that God has to give free will. If you look at the biblical interpretation, there's many points in, in the Bible itself where God expresses the intent to give free will and then effectively regretting that he gave this power to mankind. And again, I'm not a biblical literalist. I'm not gonna, you know, pretend that I am a fundamental Bible beating Jew in my case. But nevertheless, it's clear when he, God quotes from, and I'm sure Stephen was ignorant of this, as, as Lawrence is as well, and Dawkins is, I'm sure, as well. These notions that God is somehow this celestial butler who is

• 44:49Speaker 04

  Just supposed to make everything turn out great and never let bad things happen. Uh, even overlooking the fact that it's a totally different category class where the Germans committed evil, which is very different from what can't can't, you know, speak about someone getting cancer and then saying it's evil or COVID. And say it's evil. There's a nature to the universe where we have things like cancer cells and mutations. Uh, and those are completely devoid of intent, purpose, teleology. So it's very simplistic. And then to say that, you know, God is somehow responsible for the, uh, for the affairs of man and violence and evil, true evil against other men.

• 45:32Speaker 04

  In the case of the Holocaust or any one of the genocides of the past hundred years. Or hundreds of years in the case of the Jews and other persecuted minorities. Um, so I think this and including my conversation with Steven Pinker, uh, who's, you know, very cheerful about the progress of humanity over the past hundred, you know, years and along certain axes, of course, it has improved tremendously. Uh, but that the Holocaust occurred in the memory of some of the guests and occurred to some of my guests on the podcast, Rose Schindler. My close friend from, uh, from San Diego, she, uh,

• 46:11Speaker 04

  wrote a book and was on my podcast to her, who survived about the, her surviving Auschwitz. So it's not like some distant thing and that, um, you know, way back thousands of years ago, man was treating other man evilly and now we're so much better. It's, it's literally this happened to my friend Rose and has uh, a tattoo on her arm permanently to testify to that. So I think this notion that we're inexorably getting better and that's all thanks to, to science and the progress of science, as Weinberg would also say. Science is corrosive of religious belief and it's a good thing too. And I wonder how, again, how smart a man could, could really postulate such a thing.

• 46:53Speaker 04

  And, and be taken seriously. And again, of course it's something, you know, there's no evidence, there's no, um, there's nothing that he's saying other than, uh, you know, and in fact, they, uh, the, the, the statement about Germans just a minute ago. Is it, is a religion free, almost a devoid of religiosity. The Germans had their symbol, a twisted cross and not, not a, uh, a cross in.

• 47:16Speaker 00

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• 47:45Speaker 04

  It's self, they were racist, they had, the Nazis were racist, but they weren't backed and professing any religious doctrine behind that. In fact, they were the most secularly advanced scientific society in the planet's history. Let's not kid ourselves. And in fact, many of their great contributions, their noblesse, were not only great scientists like Weinberg, Nobel Prize winners, but they went on to participate actively and take over, you know, the mantle of using the scientific breakthroughs. I'm thinking of Fritz Haber and chemical weapons in World War I, which would then be used on his own family members as Zyklon B and in World War II in the concentration camp.

• 48:28Speaker 04

  So let's not pretend that a society that's secular is somehow this perfect paradise without any evil perpetrated by man on man. It just happens to not have a god center to blame. And I think, you know, to the extent that Weinberg was hostile to God really comes through in some of these quotes that we'll be discussing. So I want to turn next to perhaps his most famous of all quotes about religion, which is the following. "With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion."

• 49:11Speaker 04

  This is like on the masthead of many, many atheist websites and publications. And this, mind you, I've spoken at humanist societies, in fact, the Ethical Humanist Society of Chicago, I spoke at this past summer, and it was quite a great experience for me. And I love talking with atheists or humanists as they've rebranded themselves for reasons that somewhat elude me, except as Michael Shermer has told me, you know, atheism professes the belief in what it is by its opposite, whereas humanism supports the notion of humans as somehow agents of the fundamental atomic entities, and therefore centered on human progress.

• 49:55Speaker 04

  And I think, and I've talked with others like this Travis Pangborn, and I've spoken at the Sunday Assembly of San Diego many times, as I call it atheist church. I'm very happy to do it. I have no problem talking about it with honest people, honest atheists or humanists. We can have very hearty and enjoyable conversations. But I think to use statements like this, these commentaries on religious people, not just on religion itself, because he really probably had a very shallow, as I say, interpretation or knowledge about religion. And I always point out, you know, he would never have taken a refutation of electorally unification from a 13-year-old.

• 50:38Speaker 04

  He would have to say this 13-year-old who's conjecturing that he or she has found a flaw in my brilliant reasoning is just not knowledgeable enough, needs to hit the books more and come back. And yet, they were all too willing, as is Kraus, to abandon their religion in their cases, and that's the two of Kraus and Weinberg, to abandon religion at age 12 and 13 after they did their bar mitzvah and then never approached again. And so they're really left with a 13-year-old's understanding at best of religion. And to say something, as he did, basically to want to intentionally weaken religion, explicitly, he says, anything that we scientists can do to weaken the hold of religion.

• 51:21Speaker 04

  Should be done and may in fact in the end be our greatest contribution to civilization. That is borderline, you know, kind of, I don't want to say heresy. I think it's abject stupidity. And again, I would not refrain from, you know, having, I wouldn't say he's stupid in front of his face. But were you on the show, I would certainly like to debate this point with him. Nah, I mean, he would not want to debate with me. I mean, he has better things to do with his time. In fact, he did, and hopefully he, he had a very benign ending to his life. But to say that religion is a contribution that should be extirpated from, from civilization.

• 52:04Speaker 04

  I think that is borderline, you know, mendacious and perhaps even on its face evil. As I point out, most atheists that I know and most humanists that I know, they claim to practice the golden rule. They claim to adhere to basic moral principles. In fact, they, they might even say that, you know, they abide by the, most of the 10 commandments. You know, they're not murdering anybody. They're not committing adultery or covetousness of their neighbor's ass. Or as some say, their neighbor's wife's ass. Uh, but in any event, they, you know, kind of hoping that they're, you know, they've made their, their kind of assessment, self-assessment. They've done their little, you know, little check, their COVID on their soul kind of check.

• 52:48Speaker 04

  And they come up clean, of course. I mean, who thinks that they're actively evil? Even the most evil people on earth, they'll think that they're evil. And I'm not saying Weinberg was evil. But to say that they can go through life and that the contributions of religion um, have not been a net benefit. Even disregarding the, the great scientists, every one of which who is religious pretty much last 400 years. Um, even ignoring that fact that a Newton claimed his greatest contribution in his life was not the principia, not his optics, not his many treatises on calculus and invention of it. Uh, but that he died a virgin like his idol, Jesus Christ. So these are deeply religious.

• 53:31Speaker 04

  Human beings and to say that, of course, you know, you might say everybody was religious back then, even though that really wasn't true. Nevertheless, you could say, well, that was just the way things were. But to ignore the present day benefits of religious life, which even atheists like, there's a guy Phil Zuckerman here in Southern California, who talks about living the secular life and how you can do it. And you can do it by basically copying and aping the religious practices, namely giving charity, sadaka, as we call it in Judaism, you know, doing some kind of service work and so forth. But effectively, they're just imitating what religions do. They

• 54:13Speaker 04

  get together at the Sunday Assembly on Sundays to sing, you know, they sing Peter, Paul and Mary. They don't sing gospels. They don't read from the Book of Luke or, you know, they're reading from Philip Roth. Literally, this is what happens at these meetings. And they do a service work and they have some a kiddish, you know, like a nosh afterwards. So they exactly are mimicking it. And why are they doing it if not for the fact that it has tangible, practical, measurable, discernible benefits? Happiness, the amount of charity given by religious people is far dwarfs what what what secular people do. And, you know, to think about, you know, getting your fulfillment from science as being the greatest contribution to civilization, I think that's really conflating

• 54:58Speaker 04

  the two things that I most inveigues, which is conflating knowledge with wisdom. Clearly, Weinberg had tremendous knowledge, but I think in this case, his wisdom was found wanting. And, you know, to think about some of his, you know, the grand desires that science should work to take down religion rather than try to enhance the flourishing of mankind via the contributions to our knowledge, which is the only domain in which science can really operate. I think it's pretty, again, hubristic and immature and illogical. So not to say that you can't be

• 55:39Speaker 04

  an atheist. Of course, you can be an atheist. You can be agnostic. Many of my closest friends are. I've called myself a practicing agnostic in that I actually go to religious services. I go to a temple. I study the Bible. I read Aramaic and I taught myself it later on in life. I know the Christian canon because I was an altar boy in the Catholic Church. And you can read my first book, Losing the Nobel Prize, to learn a little bit about my strange and ecumenical upbringing. But nevertheless, I've been exposed to it. I haven't been exposed as much to Islam. I have many good friends, obviously, and many of my students in the STEM profession and

• 56:24Speaker 04

  those on whose thesis committees I've sat on over 25 at UCSD who are either from Muslim-majority countries or active practicing Muslims themselves. And that's always very much a delight to participate when a student gets his or her PhD. And Steven Weinberg talked about his friend, his deceased friend, Abd al-Salam, a very devout Muslim, who was trying to bring science into the universities in the Gulf States. And Abd al-Salam was a Pakistani by birth, if I recall. And he told Steven that he had a terrible time because although they were receptive to technology,

• 57:08Speaker 04

  they felt that science would be corrosive to religious belief. There's that word again, corrosive. First that religion is corrosive, now science would be corrosive to religion, and they were worried about it. And damn it, I think they were right. It is corrosive of religious belief, and it's a good thing, too. So again, this is not promotion of science for its own sake. It seems like he has an axe to grind against religion. And, you know, it might be ecumenical of him to comment on multiple religions and not confine it to just Judaism, which he almost never talked about, but mostly it was Christianity. Although in that one case, Abd al-Salam, he did mention Islam, obviously. Again, no examples, just these blandishments that we're supposed to take seriously that,

• 57:53Speaker 04

  you know, that people in Muslim countries would not like science. It's really preposterous that they only care for technology. I think, you know, it's the kind of thing that would get him canceled had he said it today. And, you know, I don't think cancellation is a great thing. I'm not saying he should be, but I'm just saying that, you know, to say an entire 1 billion, 200 million people just care about technology, don't care about science is really kind of preposterous. Again, on its face, but it's again, a part of his worldview that I would have loved to explore with him on a podcast. I think we could have taken a deeper, gone into directions that people wouldn't ask him because they were held him in such reverence, ironically, hate geographically, worshiping this science,

• 58:38Speaker 04

  the scientist, in part because of these incredible, you know, like haymaker punches that he had thrown on religions. And one of them is, again, this is now speaking primarily about Christianity as America is predominantly Christian country. Said, "I'm offended by the kind of smarmy religiosity that's all around us, perhaps more in America than in Europe, and not really that harmful because it's not really that intense or even that serious." But just, you know, after a while, you get tired of hearing clergymen giving the invocation at various public celebrations and you feel, "Haven't we all outgrown this? Do we have to listen to this?" This just seems like a petulant little child in his hands. And again, you know, he's not here to offend himself. I feel really bad. I think

• 59:23Speaker 04

  this is like very simplistic, you know, because people are celebrating. We live in a country who was founded by Christians. I'm not Christian. He's not Christian. And we have Christian holiday. Christmas has just come upon us in America. It's a Christian holiday, but we're, you know, founded by Christians. Doesn't mean the only Christians can be here. I love America. It's the greatest country in the history of the world. But the majority of our, my fellow countrymen celebrate Christmas. So I wish people a Merry Christmas. I think it's a beautiful thing. I think, you know, when, instead of looking at it very sarcastic cynically, and to look at it and like, that it is beautiful thing, that we do live and we do get together in the most organized efforts to bring the greatest

• 1:00:06Speaker 04

  sacrifices to, to our fellow human beings in America, are really directly come from the biblical Judeo-Christian tradition. I think that's wonderful. And he obviously didn't. And he also, you know, ultimately will will get to a level. You know, he was genuinely poetic and beautiful. He did say some things like, "The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts human life a little above the level of farce and gives it some of the grace of tragedy." Okay, come on, that's a great line. I don't believe that there are very few things that lift a human life. And I think there are many things. And I think that's ultimately the the canonical refutation of his

• 1:00:49Speaker 04

  worldview. And I think I want to get to that. I'll close. I have to have one of his most famous quotes, which is, "Science doesn't make it impossible to believe in God. It just makes it possible not to believe in God." Now, clearly, he wanted to kind of rule out the existence or any motivation or mandate to believe in God. And, you know, to some extent, it was behind one of those most brilliant insights into what we call the anthropic principle, predating the discovery of the cosmological constant or so-called dark energy that he predicted, you know, in some sense, on, you know, the various parameters of it, back when nobody thought it was a possibility, that had been thoroughly rejected

• 1:01:32Speaker 04

  by Einstein himself, calling it his greatest blunder. And to have Stephen, in one of his greatest papers, make a an estimate of how big the dark energy should be in order for us to have a universe like the one we inhabit, is really a triumph. And it has, according to folks like Krauss and others, provided a reason for a universe without God. And I don't believe that many scientists have have tried to kind of suggest that. It does also tend to beg the question of how did that cosmological constant come to be, might push back or push forward in some of the infinite series of turtles that will inevitably arise, and fundamentally be unanswerable about, you know, what was the nature of the beginning

• 1:02:17Speaker 04

  of time, as we have talked about many times on this podcast.

• 1:02:22Speaker 04

  And I think, you know, he, uh, he has a couple of other ones. Uh, again, this is a quote, a series of about a hundred quotes. Um, and, uh, 90% of them are about, uh, about atheism and, and mocking religion, uh, including one, you know, again, he, uh, is really invading against in many of these quotes. I can hope that the long sad-

• 1:02:45Speaker 00

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• 1:03:14Speaker 04

  ... story, this progression of priests and ministers and rabbis and ulamas and imams and bonzes, I don't know what a bonze is, uh, and bodhisattvas will come to an end. I hope this is something to which science can contribute. Again, it may be the most important contribution we can make. Uh, I would be terribly depressed if the most important contribution would be, again, the devastation of religion because not only of the benefits in which religion has conferred upon humanity historically and continues to do to this very day, the deep moral questions that it forces us to answer if we take it seriously. And again, I'm not proselytizing. It's not something I'm going to do. But that this was

• 1:03:57Speaker 04

  really driven by this kind of wish fulfillment that he, you know, had this negative conception, again, a very, very strong denigration of the notion of what religion was doing to the world. And it's just, it's very difficult to see that, other than this really occupied him, basically, more or less, throughout his career. Maybe it inspired him. And, you know, all the accounts I've seen of him, again, I never met him. Um, I've, I've read many accounts by him. None of them ever portrayed him as a particularly cheerful or, or happy person. I mean, the interviews that I've read preparing for this podcast are, you know, downright depressing. Um, and, you know, again, these quotes, these, these pithy,

• 1:04:41Speaker 04

  uh, these pithy quotes. Uh, and I think, um, you know, that they sound good, uh, sound bites, but they're really simplistic. I think, you know, in the end, I want to conclude with the quote that I think is perhaps most refutable, which is that, which is that if, he says, "If there is a God that has special plans for humans, then he has taken very great pains to hide his concern for us. To me, it would seem impolite, if not impious, to bother such a God with our prayers." That's basically, you know, counting on the question and undoing the notion of prayer, obviously. And I think, you know, obviously, someone who doesn't believe in God thinks

• 1:05:24Speaker 04

  that prayer is pointless. But here, he's even saying that there wouldn't be a point for God itself, a God itself. And of course, that undermines the very notion of a personal God inherent in both, in all of the Judeo-Christian religions, you know, that God not only is responsible for the creation of the world, the creation of the universe, rather, the laws of nature, and the instantiation of a moral order and a code for people to abide by, but also that he cares and intervenes in our existence. Now, that's much harder to prove, that the sea was split, or that, you know, Jesus arose from the dead and then died for our sins. And these are not, you know, very easy questions to wrestle with

• 1:06:09Speaker 04

  scientifically. But of course, I don't believe that the science and religion have to necessarily be reconciled. Not that I have to believe or, you know, that you essentially, it's all or nothing. At least in Judaism, there is a notion of, you know, picking and choosing. There's some level of that you, you know, you can't eat pork and say that you're a practicing Jew, fine. But there are commands, the command to, you know, believe in God is not really a Jewish notion. That isn't a commandment. You can't command thoughts. There's only one commandment that- Deals with thoughts, but it's thoughts that can connect it to actions and that's coveting.

• 1:06:51Speaker 04

  Coveting is a in in imprecation against coveting, you know, really wanting not only what your neighbor has, but the very thing your neighbor has. So you know, you not only want a lovely wife or husband or partner, you want the exact partner, you want to take that away. And so it's really a thought coupled with an action rather than just a thought. So it's not an imprecation against covet as a thought crime, and nor is the first commandment a commandment to believe in God. Commandment is a statement. And in fact, in Hebrew, for those of you who may not be Semites, the 99.7% of you out there, maybe, weren't Jewish. In Hebrew, the 10

• 1:07:33Speaker 04

  commandments aren't written as commandments. They're not called the 10 commandments. They're called the 10 utterances. And so that kind of displays a little bit different notion behind, say, the first commandment, speaking colloquially. And so I want to close with, again, this, this notion of his most famous religious quotes, anti-religious quotes, one of which wasn't really centered on atheism, but kind of betrays his worldview, as I say, quite depressing. The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless. And I think that that's an extremely depressing, and it's not, you know, Pollyannaish of me

• 1:08:17Speaker 04

  to say that you should not have to confront things that make you upset. I think it's kind of depressing, as I say, on its face, that there is no point to our existence. I think that there's a very, you know, keen point and very crisp point to the existence. And I think you can have that point without God, even. But, but the same that the universe is pointless. And for me, it's connections. And I plan to speak about this in more depth, although I did talk about it. Depending on when you're listening to this, I talked about it with Tom Bilyeu on his Impact Theory, and also with Lex Friedman on his, on his podcast, What is the Purpose and the Meaning of Life? And it has to do with the connections that

• 1:08:59Speaker 04

  we make, not necessarily just with love, but the connections that we make in life allow us to teleport, not ourselves, our bodies, but our, our ideologies, our ethical wills, as I often speak about on the podcast. And I think that it's quite, you know, interesting to think about how to spread this out requires not the teleportation of our bodies, which, you know, might have supernatural overtones, but of our values really, really means connections and fostering connections and fostering connections between our connection and how that can grow almost like neurons in a developing baby's brain. And I think it's quite, um, it's quite, uh, it's quite

• 1:09:44Speaker 04

  lovely to think about. And for me, I thank Stephen for giving me these wonderful things to think about, uh, even though, uh, we didn't agree certainly about this. And I would have loved to talk to him about cosmology and particle physics as well. I want to close with the final statement that really does encapsulate the, the very sharp difference that I had with Stephen. And that's, he says, I don't need to argue that the universe, uh, that, that, uh, let me start again. I do not need to argue here that evil in the world proves that the universe is not designed, but only that there are no signs of benevolence that might have shown the hand of a designer. Here I see him as a

• 1:10:25Speaker 04

  very closed minded scientist, actually, because, you know, often we say, oh, we need to listen to the poets and the, and the painters and the artists, you know, it's nice to listen to them or the spiritual, you know, dancing wu li masters. And I'm not going to say that. I'm going to say we need to listen to Maxwell and Yang Mills and Weinberg and Glashow. We need to listen to the beauty in the theory that they created and realize that it could have been otherwise. And for those of you who aren't experts in, in color theory and Yang Mills and, and the lecture week symmetry breaking, let me just make a simple analogy. There are many, many creatures, maybe most creatures, my biology, friends

• 1:11:10Speaker 04

  and listeners out there in the world can correct me if I'm wrong, but there are many, many, uh, animals that don't see color, that don't have cone cells in their retinons. And so they can't see color. And yet we can see color. We can see different, can see an infinite variety of colors. Um, we sense and we could exist and subsist as many bacteria do on just one type of, uh, of, uh, of nutrients, um, or as plants do, it's just photosynthesize all day long. And I've always seen it as the resplendent extravagant nature of science and the universe is almost like that, like we could live in a very simple one dimensional universe,

• 1:11:53Speaker 04

  or you know, whatever, Hilbert space, as Sean Carroll would say. We could live in such an environment and we could persist and, and you know, there could be some entities living in flatland and look for a treatment of flatland. Hopefully coming soon on this podcast is one of my favorite, if not favorite science, popular science books, really had the deep influence that made me into a a curious young scientist in my early teens or late 10s, or late, not a single digit. And it could be different. We could have lived in a very boring trivial universe. Much the way, you know, ants live and they don't really experience the third dimension. We live in this resplendent extravagant universe.

• 1:12:37Speaker 04

  And it's a delight in that we have these great, these great features. We taste, you know, four or five different dimensions on our tongue and salt and sweet and hot and not spicy, et cetera, et cetera. Umami, it could be very, very different. And likewise, and so we should have sort of reverence for that. When we see a rainbow in Judaism, we're supposed to say a blessing. We meet a brilliant person or head of state, even if you don't agree with that person's politics, you're supposed to say a blessing, invoking the name of God himself. And again, I'm not proselytizing. Don't, don't send me any email about that. Okay. I will never do that. I would get kicked out of being, uh, no, I won't get kicked out.

• 1:13:19Speaker 04

  But the point being, uh, the universe is, is, I don't want to say designed, because I don't believe in the, in the very, um, concrete definition that is associated with intelligent design, as you know, from my conversation with Stephen C. Meyer. On the publication of his book, The God Hypothesis, Return of the God Hypothesis, I want to say instead that if you looked at it and you see the beauty of the natural world from color to taste to sound, again, we could just hear monochromatic, monotonic sounds and exist. I mean, there are creatures that do that. They don't have music. They don't, you know, you don't have bats. The bats use, you know, sound waves and they have different properties of echolocation, but they're not singing the way that birds

• 1:14:04Speaker 04

  or humans do. So I think it's quite beautiful that we have this, this really over the top, almost as if there is someone saying like, you've got it really good. It's very benevolent how our universe is. Of course, benevolence implies the existence of a benevolent with a capital B entity. And so you're kind of assuming the conclusion. Nevertheless, when you look at that, and then you have a brilliant intellect such as Stephen's, and you couple it with the, with the deep, you know, kind of creations that he came up with, with SU2, electroweak, and you say, it could be very different. And yet it wasn't. And it has this beautiful, beautiful symmetric appearance. I say that's benevolent. It's benevolent

• 1:14:48Speaker 04

  for our brains in the same way that umami and salt and sweet are benevolent for our tongues, and that different colors, for those of us that are colorblind, can see these beautiful colors and sounds from a, from a, you know, a five hertz, you know, whale song to, to the, to the cries of a newborn at hundreds and thousands of hertz. It's incredible. So to say that there are no signs of a benevolence, and that almost a designer is really, I think, both even from a layperson's perspective, is again, a very trivial, simplistic,

• 1:15:27Speaker 04

  sophisticated notion that I would have thought better of him. And so, you know, I have many different feelings about him. I loved him as a, as a mind, as a physicist, and inspiration, and his story. And just how dedicated his workflow was that he could just concentrate until the days before he died and just what he wanted to do and how he wanted to do it. On the other hand, I think we have this tendency to associate, you know, greatness in one field with greatness in another field. And I think that's simply not true. You don't look to, you know, LeBron James. As, you know, probably the greatest basketball player who ever lived and say, you know, like, tell me your theory about Romanian poetry of the 16th century.

• 1:16:12Speaker 04

  But you don't expect that. And likewise, we shouldn't expect scientists to have any special knowledge or insight into religion. And that I think now, I think in the past, it was the religious that wanted to preserve this notion of, of, you know, this eternal battle between science and religion. But now more and more, and thanks in part to Stephen and the influence he's cast on his fellow militant atheist. You know, I think that that is now more in the domain of what the atheists are trying to promulgate in order to maintain their relevancy.

• 1:16:47Speaker 04

  Not that religion has somehow, you know, superseded science or I, I think it's a meaningless question. It's like, you know, why is electromagnetism better than, you know, than cooking or something? It's irrelevant. I think that there are pathways, if you want to see the, you know, the hand of God and the organization of information and in the creation of the genetic code. And, and in the creation of the conditions necessary to have the beryllium resonance of, you know, that leads to carbon, you know, being formed, you can do that. And, you know, but you should be very careful. I also do chase in my religious friends to not put too much emphasis on science.

• 1:17:32Speaker 04

  To prove the existence of God, because that undermines the whole notion of what we call in Judaism, Amunah. Our faith, which is where you get the word amen in English, comes from the Hebrew "emuna," to profess belief. So I think it's a perilous slope for religion to try to rely overmuch on scientific advances, and that there should be a peaceful coexistence, and that scientists could do well by learning a lot more about the religion and not kind of having these tropes of religious, you know, Bible beating, anti-evolution, creationist, and say, yes, those people exist, they're very rare. I've almost never met anybody.

• 1:18:13Speaker 04

  And I am an active participant in religion, spoken at churches, spoken at atheist events, spoken in synagogues, spoken in Israel, spoken at the South Pole, I don't know what relevance that has. But anyway, the point being, the two groups, if they want to have a dialogue, should really, you know, be a lot more respectful in the sense of wanting to understand the basis before you get into an argument, before you get into a debate trying to win, to understand the limitations of your own argument, and also to have respect for the non, you know, kind of overlapping magisteria, as Gould called it, and that you may have zero things

• 1:18:57Speaker 04

  to say, especially if you don't study it, either as a scientist or a religious person, you know, just, you know, opining about the nature of science, that would be ridiculous. But for some reason, we think of, you know, these notions of the existence of God and our belief in God, and I've spoken about, I don't believe you can believe in God, I don't think that makes sense. Nevertheless, I think in this waning moments of December, I want to share these ideas with you, saying I do miss Stephen. The ultimate irony is if he's in heaven, but, you know, who knows, if that's really true, I think it'll be kind of fun to see his reaction. But, you know, he's clearly a reductionist, a materialist,

• 1:19:37Speaker 04

  and a humanist, and a real brilliant, but somewhat, somewhat overreaching atheist, and I would have loved to talk to him. And I want to thank him for his books, including his book that I read on that night train to Binghamton. Oh, so many years ago when I was young and in love and had no idea how my life would turn out. And if you're listening out there, my, my senior, junior, senior girlfriend, I say hi. I hope you had a, had a good life. Um, her, her last name is very close to Weinberg,

• 1:20:16Speaker 04

  but I'm not going to say what it is. Uh, of all things, uh, I've gone on to, to have a wonderful life. I hope you have too. And I hope all of you out there will have a wonderful life, a wonderful 2022. And this is the last episode of the year in 2022. We have many things coming up in the universe of Into the Impossible, including interviews with, as I say, Nobel Prize winners and losers. And, um, maybe I'll do another solo episode. I don't know. Leave a, leave a review, uh, cause this is only going to be an audio podcast. So please just, you know, in your review, say, I hate these solo episodes. Never do another one. You're an arrogant jerk. Or say, I really, you know, found it interesting and hope you'll do more solo episodes

• 1:21:00Speaker 04

  in the future, whether they be about religion or cosmology, or something completely different. So for now, I am signing off, wishing you a wonderful, healthy, happy, wholesome, wealthy, productive, and wonderful 2022. Your fearful host, Brian Keating, signing off for the last time in 2021. I hope you won 2021. I am now out.

• 1:21:37Speaker 02

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• 1:21:43Speaker 03

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