Two Scientists, One Question: Does Alien Life Need a Soul? - #556

An astrophysicist and founder of Reasons to Believe argues the universe looks increasingly designed for life — while a cosmologist challenges whether fine-tuning proves anything at all. If we're alone in the cosmos, the implications are staggering. If we're not, it could change science, religion, and humanity's future forever. Hugh Ross is an astrophysicist, founder of Reasons to Believe, and author focused on the intersection of science and faith. We cover: - Why the search for extraterrestrial life may be making Earth look more unique - Whether fine-tuning points to a Creator or a multiverse - What happens if AI becomes the dominant intelligence in the universe - Why scientists increasingly believe intelligent aliens exist despite lacking evidence - The cosmic time windows that make human existence possible Can hope survive in a universe that eventually dies? Timestamps: 00:00 Why Are We Here at All? 10:44 Is the Universe Designed to Kill Us? 20:25 The Evidence That Humans Are Different 29:42 Why Scientists Still Believe in Aliens 40:08 The 25 Conditions Life Needs to Exist 49:42 Does Fine-Tuning Prove a Creator? 55:37 Could an Alien Have a Soul? 1:03:26 What Happens After This Universe Ends? 1:05:59 Do Parallel Universes Solve Anything? 1:12:09 Will AI Replace Humanity First? 1:17:55 The Strongest Case Against Fine-Tuning 1:24:00 Would You Baptize an Alien? ——— 📬 Get the transcript, fascinating bonus content, and my Monday M. A. G. I. C. Message: https://briankeating.com/yt 🌠 Have a .edu email and live in the USA 🇺🇸? You automatically win a meteorite: https://BrianKeating.com/edu 🔔 Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 🎯 Support Into the Impossible on Patreon — get my weekly M. A. G. I. C. Message, unfiltered bonus content, and live monthly Office Hours with me: https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating ⭐ Join this channel for perks, monthly Office Hours, and your name in the Member Roster at the end of every episode: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join 📚 My books: Losing the Nobel Prize (memoir): http://amzn.to/2sa5UpA Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/03ezQFu Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/hi50U9U Galileo's Dialogue (first-ever audiobook): https://a.co/d/iZPi9Un 🌐 More: 🏄‍♂️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating 📚 Substack https://briankeating.substack.com/ss ✍️ Blog: https://briankeating.com/blog 🎙️ Audio-only: https://briankeating.com/podcast #intotheimpossible #briankeating #science #physics #astronomy #cosmology #podcast #universe #extraterrestrial #scienceandfaith Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:35Speaker 01

  This livestream is sponsored by the Reasons to Believe scholar community. Welcome and thank you for joining us for this special livestream. Today's conversation explores, if the universe is fine tuned, why isn't there more life out there? Dr. Hugh Ross, astrophysicist, founder of Reasons to Believe, and author of numerous works on the intersection of science and faith, is joined by Dr. Brian Keating, cosmologist, chancellor's distinguished professor of physics at UC San Diego, and host of the Into the Impossible podcast. This conversation will be moderated by George Heraxson II, senior research scholar at Reasons to Believe and senior adjunct professor in philosophy and ethics at Azusa Pacific University. This session is divided into three parts:

• 1:19Speaker 01

  understanding our guest's worldview, fine tuning in life beyond Earth, and a Q and A portion. We're honored to have you with us for this important discussion.

• 1:31Speaker 01

  Welcome to this Reasons to Believe quarterly livestream broadcast where we explore God's world and God's Word. And as you heard, I'm George Heraxson, a senior research scholar here. And I'm joined by two very fine people. I call them my intellectual Sherpas for today. And we have Dr. Hugh Ross, astrophysicist. Welcome, Hugh.

• 1:55Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 1:56Speaker 01

  You just came back from a trip from Canada, your homeland, as they say.

• 2:00Speaker 02

  With you, actually.

• 2:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was there. Yeah, we got to hang out with quite a number of professors and students. That was a lot of fun. So, welcome.

• 2:08Speaker 02

  And we are also joined here in person, which is wonderful. Dr. Brian Keating, who is the chancellor's distinguished professor of physics in the Department of Physics at the University of California. And you host your own podcast, you're an author, and just something that's fun is you didn't walk here, you didn't drive here, but you.

• 2:31Brian Keating?

  I was able to fly here.

• 2:32Speaker 02

  You flew here.

• 2:33Brian Keating?

  In a mighty, you know, four-seat propeller plane, all the way from Zandia, and I made it on one tank of gas and didn't even have to refuel along the way.

• 2:41Speaker 02

  Now, is this something you just picked up, or I thought I heard you mention, is this part of, like, part of your family heritage?

• 2:48Brian Keating?

  Yeah, yeah, my stepfather was a pilot, flew F-4 Phantoms in Vietnam, and he had all of his training, you know, magazines around and logbooks and everything, and I always wanted to be a pilot, and I said, oh, maybe I could be an astronaut, what do you have to do? And you have to be under, you know, 200 pounds or whatever, and at that time even, I wasn't under 200, still not, and I figured, oh, maybe if I'm a professor and an astrophysicist, plus a pilot, they'll take me in, and luckily, you know, I still have time, you know, maybe I'll get a ride aboard a SpaceX rocket someday, but that's the dream, and yeah, that's always been a part of my identity, really. Once you become a pilot, you're always a pilot, you can't take it away from you.

• 3:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, no, that's good, we all have our avocations or hobbies, you look out into the heavens, both of you do, you get to fly in the heavens. Hugh, I know you like to hike as high as you can. I like climbing mountains. Climbing mountains, so different ways we reach the heights here. I'm just a lowly drummer behind, you know, a drum set. So it's gonna be a lot of fun talking about why the universe is the way it is, why isn't there more life out there, these types of questions, but for the first part, we want to talk a little bit about how we approach science, maybe also science and faith issues. Then we'll go into some of the prepared questions we have, and then we'll invite those of you

• 4:07Speaker 02

  who are listening and participating, I know there's people in our scholar committee who will share questions that we will, I will go ahead and share with both of you, and we'll get your comments on this, and feel free to dialogue with one another, it doesn't have to go through me, I'll kind of sift, go back into the background as needed, I'm not the astrophysicist here. But Brian, I wanted to talk to you first.

• 4:33Speaker 02

  How do you kind of approach science faith questions? I think I have this right, but you describe yourself as an observant Jew, but an agnostic. Am I stating that correctly?

• 4:45Brian Keating?

  Yeah, I think the term I often use is devout practicing agnostic Jew.

• 4:49Speaker 02

  Devout, hold to the Sabbath.

• 4:51Brian Keating?

  Keep the Sabbath. And I really was inspired by my late great friend Freeman Dyson, who was the first guest on the Into the Impossible podcast, Titanic astrophysicist, not the inventor of the vacuum. He would have been much richer, had he, but he invented the Dyson sphere and contributed to quantum electrodynamics. And he and I dialogued a lot about faith and he won, he won the Templeton Prize once and was very humble about it and said he didn't deserve it, but at least he didn't deserve it, less than some other people who had won it. And I said, you know, it's interesting Freeman, because you are, you know, by all means, a very thoughtful person, but you don't practice, you don't do anything. So I said, how would that be any different than an intelligent alien that we're going to talk about today? If an alien was watching you on a Sunday morning and saw what you were doing and saw

• 5:36Brian Keating?

  what Richard Dawkins, you know, I've also hosted, been privileged to host him. And I said, if you saw, if an alien saw those two men on a Sunday morning, they'd both not be going to the same church. So how do you Freeman distinguish between what you claim is your agnosticism and true atheism? I said, you know, can you, can you be courageous and say that you're an atheist? And he said, I can't, but I don't know how to demonstrate that. And that's when I came up with this idea about 10 years ago, that you could be an agnostic, but you can't be a non-practicing agnostic, or else you're an atheist. There's no functional way to distinguish it. So my practice is I observe the Sabbath, I keep kosher. My kids, you know, all know 10 times more about the Torah, the Bible, the Tanakh than I'll ever know, but, but I've done my best in the time that I've had since I was an altar boy in the Catholic Church.

• 6:19Brian Keating?

  I've had a lot of experience in different forms of religion. And for me as a scientist, the most ecumenical way to do it is approach it as a scientist can approach it with our frailties and with the courage that you guys exemplify, to ask the biggest questions and not be afraid of who you're asking or what you're asking about.

• 6:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, I was just mentioning, I was reading an economics professor by the name of Tyler Cowan, and he observed that in our culture today, that we live in a new time where he calls it a new culture of anger and resentment.

• 6:50Brian Keating?

  Yeah, he was at my house when he said that.

• 6:52Speaker 02

  He was at your house.

• 6:56Brian Keating?

  My wife would probably agree with Tyler.

• 7:00Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, that's one thing, as I observed on your podcast, on your interactions, I think RTB wants to hold this up to create a culture where we're cheerful, we are full of goodwill, we want to pursue truth together, you're not the problem, persons aren't the problem, we want to tackle things, pursue truth together, kind of in arms, locking arms together, and we want to do it, we always say around here, with gentleness and respect, thinking beyond, or as you talk about in your podcast, into the impossible. We want to address these issues and be courageous but humble in that process. I call you guys kind of my intellectual Sherpas, we all need guides in life, and I'm the philosopher,

• 7:41Speaker 02

  but you're the physicist, astrophysicist. Hugh, a little bit different than Brian, how do you approach the science faith topic for those who may not know specifically? How, some people criticize they want to keep science and faith a little bit separate, different magisterium, or that, how do you approach it?

• 8:00Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, unlike Brian, I didn't have a religious background, but I got into science starting at age seven very seriously, and over the years, as I was growing up, recognized, hey, the universe has a beginning, seems like there has to be a cosmic beginner, I want to find that beginner, and after a two-year search, I realized, I think the Bible accurately describes the origin, the history of the universe, it seems to predict future scientific discoveries. So, as a sophomore physics student, I dedicated my life to Jesus Christ, and, you know, 41 years ago, launched Reasons to Believe, and it's based on what I call the two-books doctrine, that God has given us two trustworthy books, the Book of Scripture and the Book of Nature.

• 8:45Speaker 02

  Does your science inform your religious practice? Is there any integration between those two for you? Or is that somewhat, you try to keep them, you know, there's a barrier or something?

• 8:56Brian Keating?

  Yeah, I mean, I don't subscribe to the Stephen J. Gould, you know, the nice Jewish boy who, like many Jewish boys, from Lawrence Krauss to Carl Sagan, you know, saw their bar mitzvah as their graduation from religion, right? Saw this as a time when they can abandon it and then pursue true reason. And I never got to meet Carl Sagan. I met his widow and dialogue with her, Andrea. But I did talk many times with, you know, people from Sam Harris to Lawrence Krauss and many others. And the thing I'm always left with is that they're left with a 13-year-old's understanding of the Bible and of the Torah, in my case. And in that case, I say to them, well, would you trust, you know, Sam Harris? Would you trust the word of a 13-year-old neuroscientist? Absolutely not. Or Lawrence Krauss?

• 9:40Brian Keating?

  Could you falsify, if a 13-year-old comes to you and says, "I can falsify your thesis of a universe from nothing." Would you believe it? No, he doesn't know anything. Yeah, he doesn't. So, but you, Lawrence, you, Sam Harris, accept the word and falsification from a 13-year-old version of yourself. And so, how do you do that? I approach scientific questions and I approach the Torah seriously. I take it seriously. What I do, and I talk about this in my first book, is can we approach the Torah and the Old Testament? Can you approach that in a way that I approach a scientific text? In other words, can you demand of God, can you demand of the texts themselves, the spiritual, scriptural sources, the same level of proof of rigor of citations and of perhaps falsification that we demand of science?

• 10:24Brian Keating?

  So, you have to be open to this. Otherwise, I say, you know, if you don't believe that God can be questioned, and the word "Israel," as you guys know, means "fights with God." So, Jews are not known for being humble, you know, in their opinions, always, but we all have the same goal, right? But if you can't ask questions as to the scientific basis for your faith, then to me, it's just, you know, bangles and a yarmulke and, you know, some fun times on a Saturday morning, but it's not, it's not real. It's more, it's more of a hobby, of an avocation, nothing wrong with it. But if you can't ask questions of God, who can you ask them of? So, I approach religious questions, not as a guide, but as a fact claim that can be interrogated by the tools of science.

• 11:06Speaker 02

  Do you see it the same way, Hugh? How would you add to that?

• 11:09Speaker 04

  No, I love what you just said. I mean, that's all I would-

• 11:11Speaker 02

  Who's smiling over here?

• 11:12Speaker 04

  I'm smiling. I think that's pretty the way to approach these issues.

• 11:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, we can pursue it. As someone you have met before, I think Dennis Prager wrote "The Rational Bible," you know, those kinds of things. So, well, let's get into some of those, the topics here. Is the universe ultimately hostile to life? That was one question that we were going to address. And some people have famously quipped before, you'll know who they are, you know, "The universe is out there to kill you." Or, I think Neil deGrasse Tyson had an episode on his StarTalk one time, his podcast, entitled "How Will the Cosmos Kill You?" And I was reflecting on this a little bit, and I thought about, you know, when I was in middle school, I took shop class, woodmaking, you know, crafting.

• 11:58Speaker 02

  And I remember the wood shop teacher telling me, "Everything in the shop is out to kill you." You know, "Here are all these beautiful machines, a saw, a lathe, all designed, meant to do particular things, but they were, they were there to kill me if I wasn't careful." Is that a helpful analogy to the way the universe is? Because if we're too close to a black hole, that's not, that's not good, right? Talk about that. Well, let's start with our guest first, Brian. When you hear that question, is the universe ultimately hostile to life, therefore, there's some implications to that that we'll get into, how do you approach that?

• 13:05Brian Keating?

  I love when, you know, I've been on Neil's show many times, he's been on my show many times. I love when that question is, or that statement is posed by him, because he's effectively admitting to the essence of the- Existence of a designer, right? He's saying it's designed to kill you. Well, I'm sorry, Neil, that means, you know, welcome to the club now, maybe, perhaps. It seems to stipulate that there must be some malevolent designer, not benevolent, God, that we might, you know, consider here. But, uh, but that it's designed, no, it's not designed. If you can't have it both ways. You can't say it's designed, you know, to ultimately destroy everything and we're here by acts of random chance, right? And, and these are the dominant kind of things that I think we're gonna get into from the cosmic scale that I study. You know, how is it possible to exist in a multiverse of an infinite number of possible universes?

• 13:48Brian Keating?

  Does that explain our anthropic origins and existence here? Or no? Or is there astrobiological reasons? Are there great filters out there that prevent us from, you know, either contacting or, or receiving evidence? But again, we have to treat things as scientists here, uh, because there's so much non-science, nonsense in the public sphere and, and never more so. I mean, it's concomitant with what Tyler Cowen was saying, the hostility and resentment and anger, but it's also never been a more kind of anti-scientific age. Uh, I don't know if it's getting worse, if it's getting, if it can get better, but if scientists don't uphold some standard of rigor and also intellectual honesty, then when you say things like, "The universe is out to get you," that you're implying there is some force of design, which goes against previous statements that my friend Neil has

• 14:33Brian Keating?

  made. So I, I, I think that there's arguments to be made for these things, but again, my role as I see it today is to be, act as my hero in all things science and even in religion, Galileo, uh, bequeath to us. He said, you know, "A scientist's job is to measure what you can measure and make measurable what you cannot yet do." And that, he said, in the book of, of nature is written in these symbols that we can comprehend, the symbols of math, of triangles, of, of, of, of mathematical formulae, but it's also accessible to reason. And, and from that perspective, postulating reasons why we don't see essentially the answer to the great filter or the Fermi's, you know, paradox, uh, to assume that there's a reason that we're not able to connect with other life forms or see them yet with conclusive

• 15:16Brian Keating?

  evidence, which I think is a non-disputable fact right now. We have no explicit evidence for alien existence. I mean, maybe that kills the life stream right now, but we're done here. But it's certainly fun to consider.

• 15:30Speaker 02

  Hugh, how do you approach that question?

• 15:32Speaker 04

  Well, I find it interesting that both Jews and Christians for over 2,000 years have debated this issue. Are we alone in the universe? Or did God, you know, perform miracles on some other planet and created life there? And people who've argued, no, we're the only ones, cite passages where it says, "God doesn't perform gratuitous miracles." And it seems like he's concerned of the way he does his miracles. And hey, he only needs one planet. Others have argued, "Look at all the texts that you see, especially in the Psalms. It seems like God really enjoys creating." You see that in the Book of Job, the Book of Proverbs. And he seems to be a compulsive creator.

• 16:15Speaker 04

  He's got to have done it many places in the universe. I think what's special about the time around now is that astronomy has advanced to the point where it seems to be favoring the model that we're alone, as opposed to, hey, life is everywhere. Now with that, I would make an important caveat. I think it's going to be relatively soon, we're going to find the remains of life on virtually every solar system body. And people will look at that and say, hey, it looks like, you know, life is everywhere. But I've always argued, that's inevitable because of how prolific life is here on Earth. We've been exporting life throughout our whole solar system, especially on the moon, to a lesser degree on Mars.

• 17:00Speaker 04

  It's simply inevitable we're going to find the remains of Earth fossils on these bodies. It's the interstellar problem that I think is a challenge. We're not exporting microbes to other planetary systems, but we are in our own system. But astronomy seems to be agreeing with Neil deGrasse Tyson. It really does look like it's out to kill us. With the one exception, the planet that we're on, the planet that we're on seems wonderfully designed to make our existence possible, and I would think all the hostility we see elsewhere basically drives home the point, we're living on our very special planet, orbiting a very

• 17:42Speaker 04

  special star, in a very special galaxy, in a very special galaxy cluster, on a very special part of the cosmic web. And so, what does that tell us about the significance of human beings?

• 17:55Brian Keating?

  Yeah, it might be that the universe isn't out to kill us, it might be that we're out to kill us. I mean, there's certainly more risks, you know, that we take on a daily basis, you know, speaking of someone who just flew up here, right, in a small, you know, contraption that has the kind of appointments of a 1988 Honda Accord. People think, oh, the private jet travel is so nice, yeah, it must be. But yeah, certainly, we have innumerable ways to kill ourselves and to fight with ourselves and to maybe even extinguish life on Earth, as precious as it is. And I think sometimes there's a coping mechanism that secular people have, which is to say that there must be life elsewhere in the universe, such that if we destroy the one, you know, body that we know for sure has conscious life,

• 18:37Brian Keating?

  has technological life, that there's sort of a backup drive, you know, that we can boot up somewhere else and the light of consciousness, as Elon Musk, who I talked to briefly once in my podcast, says, won't be extinguished, right? That's his big goal. And I stipulate, everything you said is probably true. We not only have microbes that we get from other bodies, but we export them to other, you know, now we're exporting technologies. So, imagine a civilization far away, if it existed, looking at us, it would see mostly nothing for 4.2 billion years. In the last 75 years, it's all these things sprouting off of it and going around it and going into the heliopause and visiting other solar systems and then light days away from Earth. And I agree with you. I've heard a lot of rumors and, you

• 19:19Brian Keating?

  know, I can't speak about the autops, I mean, I can't speak about the aliens now that, but I have heard, you know, rumors from the most credible scientific sources that, yeah, it's imminent. We're going to announce, just as you said, life, whatever that means, it's not going to be dolphins with iPhones on, you know, on You know, planet orbiting Proxima Centauri. But it will be something, you know, that will be revolutionary. I mean, let's, let's just concede that that discovery will change, you know, humanity forever. It doesn't mean, doesn't have any implication for our degree of less specialness. I think you're right. But I think we get in a parochial kind of bubble, literally and figuratively, that we think that, you know, we've, we've searched and searched and therefore we haven't found something and

• 20:00Brian Keating?

  that evidence of absence is absence of evidence, or maybe the reverse. And, you know, that's a classic logical fails, you know, to say that we've searched. My friend Jill Tarter, who is the inspiration for the character Ellie Aronway in the movie Contact, written by Andruyan and her, and her late husband Carl Sagan, you know, that, that, you know, she's, she said, basically, we've, we've scooped up about the, the amount of, of exploration we've done is equivalent to this coffee mug, which you guys Irished up for me, thank you guys so much, compared to the Pacific Ocean. And, and it's just incredible to think we can make that. Now, if we can't say something based on that, you know, if I go down to the Pacific Ocean, I scoop up some water and it has no microbes in it, well, that would kind of upend a lot

• 20:42Brian Keating?

  of what we know about a host of different scientific claims that have been made and we've never had evidence for that. But, so the, the lack of evidence so far doesn't imply a continual lack of evidence and we have developed more and more powerful tools. But I'm, I'm all in agreement that I think that will change things. I also think we're isolated and special in so many ways that the secular person will attempt to deny. You know, for example, we often hear we're 99.7% similar to chimpanzees. And, you know, my friend Dennis Brager once said, yeah, I wish it was 100%. You know, because it's like, oh, that, that 0.3%, you know, whatever it is, that, that little bit, I mean, what is that? What, is that a brain size? No, there are animals that have a lot bigger brains than we have. Is it some neural density? No.

• 21:25Brian Keating?

  So sometimes that, that, that lack of specialness is used as, as a way to say we're insignificant, we're unimportant, we're meaningless. The concept Oliver Berkman wrote about called Cosmic Insignificance Therapy. Meaning that you can comfort yourself, Hugh, that you're meaningless compared to the planet Jupiter and therefore, you know, the, the, nothing that you do matters really and in 100 years and 1,000, no one will even know that you existed. Now, I don't believe that. I don't believe that's a relevant question. I believe that gives permission to deny. I believe that gives people reasons to deny, not reasons to believe. And I think that ultimately that's not approaching things in a scientific fashion.

• 22:03Speaker 02

  Let's just be clear on something that I made sure I heard right and for our audience. Hugh, you said, "We're gonna find life, but it's gonna be remnants of life from Earth" that has hit other planets and that. I also thought I heard you say, "We're gonna find life." Did you, were you saying the same thing as Hugh?

• 22:21Brian Keating?

  I was saying slightly different. I was saying, so Hugh's talking about a theory that's related to a concept called panspermia that was popularized by Fred Hoyle, who coined the term "big bang" as a pejorative, as an insult against the theory that we now dedicate most of our research to. And that was the theory that life is delivered elsewhere to the Earth. It doesn't solve the origin of life problem, it solves the origin of life on Earth. So there's reverse panspermia. I brought you guys last time, I'm sure you still have it, little fragments of Mars and the moon and meteorites. And so we got meteorites from Mars, and so therefore we have Earth meteorites on Mars, right? So it must be there. In fact, there must have been some when Mars was wet and moist, because that's when

• 23:03Brian Keating?

  the Earth was being bombarded 4.2 billion years ago, when Earth and Mars were young. There was a lot more exchange of interplanetary material between the two planets. It acted like UPS, you know, going between and back and forth between the planets, delivering life, microbes, whatever, to the... Now, I don't think we're gonna find life on Mars, I don't think that's what you're saying, but I think you're saying, "Oh, we'll find fossils on Mars."

• 23:23Speaker 04

  Or find fossils.

• 23:23Brian Keating?

  Perhaps, perhaps, yes. But, but I think what my astronomer colleagues are telling me is that they've already seen signatures of molecules that seem to only be produced by life, and maybe might be produced by some form of technology. Like, if you see freon, the gas that powers our air condu... That is a very difficult molecule, entropically to create naturally via stochastic processes, but it's trivial for us to do it here on Earth. Technology can produce certain molecules that show up in the transiting spectra of extrasolar planets. And I'm hearing rumors, and I can't, I'm not gonna stake my career on it, but there are very credible people saying it's just a matter of time. There have been many announcements of both life from Mars and molecules that seem to suggest the existence of life, not only in other stars, but from our own star on the

• 24:08Brian Keating?

  planet Venus. Not, not many of them, if any of them, have been really confirmed beyond a reasonable doubt, though.

• 24:15Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, phosphine on Venus, but you're right, they've not been able to confirm it. And bisulfides they found in the spectra of planets, but now we know that can happen naturalistically without life. So, yeah, that's not settled.

• 24:30Brian Keating?

  So we should hold these people to the same level of rigor that they're gonna hold a believer to their claims about the existence of God, of Jesus in your case, right? So I don't think anyone should get a free pass. I think we should interrogate these things and see, is it exciting? You know, I'd like to know from your perspective, you know, because I was told I could ask questions with my friend here. So the Torah and the Talmud, which is a commentary on the Torah, as you know, has no problem, it seems to suggest in certain passages, although I think it's kind of meaning, the meaning's in doubt from my professional cosmological but not rabbinical training, right? I'm not a rabbi. But there seems to be no problem with that. Now, obviously, Giordano Bruno, you know, he had a different experience in 1600 being burned alive by the Catholic Church,

• 25:12Brian Keating?

  first suggesting that every point of light was a star which had a planet around it, which had life on it, which seemed to contradict the existence and the possibility of Jesus dying for our humans' redemption. So how do you, what are the claims? Just as a scientist, scientist, what are the New Testament and Gospel claims that either permit, forbid, or allow us to falsify the claim of Jesus' existence? I'm sorry to say in those stark terms, but if it's a scientific claim.

• 25:40Speaker 04

  Well, the ones that have been cited to falsify the idea that God created life elsewhere are particularly New Testament texts where you see Jesus, Christians believe to be the Creator, refusing to do certain miracles. And it seems like he only does miracles to fulfill his stated purpose. So theologians have looked at that and said, "I think we can work out a Christian theology that God can achieve everything he wants to achieve with life on one planet." And, but then there's been pushback where other Christian scholars have said, "But look at the degree to which God enjoys creating. He's promised he's gonna be creating way beyond in the new creation."

• 26:23Speaker 04

  And it's like, that would seem to imply that he wouldn't live in himself to creating life just here on planet Earth. There's gotta be millions of planets in the universe where he has done that. So it's kind of a balanced debate. It depends on your theological perspective to give more weight to that. The texts that talk about God's enjoyment of creating, and especially they cite the fact, notice how these texts, especially in Psalm 104, talk about the diversity of God's creation. So we should expect that not only is our life elsewhere in the universe is going to be diverse from the life we see here on planet Earth. But then there are those who argue, they say, God doesn't waste his miracles.

• 27:02Speaker 04

  And I also think the Bible talks about our desire to make contact. And I mean, you saw that in the novel you just mentioned. I mean, that was a whole theme.

• 27:13Brian Keating?

  That's right.

• 27:14Speaker 04

  It's something within us that wants that contact. And from a Christian perspective, well, God's the one that we need to make contact with. He's the extraterrestrial we need to relate to. But, you know, I actually had Carl as a professor when I was at University of Toronto. And he basically was lecturing, saying, we humans are without any hope if we don't make contact with extraterrestrial aliens. And so he believed that they have published in Encyclopedia Galactica, and that we can somehow use our radio telescopes to read that Encyclopedia Galactica that will solve all of our problems.

• 27:53Brian Keating?

  Wouldn't it were so, right?

• 27:55Speaker 04

  Well, I was sitting in the second row, and I just nudged my fellow grad student, said, don't we already have an Encyclopedia Galactica? Carl overheard me. He says, I know the book you're talking about. No one can live up to its moral standard. And it's like, well, isn't that the point of the book? That's exactly its message. So that was an interesting dialogue that took place there. But I think what it concerns me as an astronomer, I read these surveys, not just of late people, but of astronomers. And I thought, well, we're in the 21st century now. Astronomy seems to be revealing more and more evidence that our planet is unique,

• 28:37Speaker 04

  our star is unique, our galaxy, even our super galaxy cluster is unique. And it seems to be giving more evidence. Yeah, once we get past Earth, the universe seems to be able to kill us. But the paradox is, the number of late people that believe that there are intelligent aliens like us and other planets, in 2019, that was 33% of US adults. It's now 64%.

• 29:06Speaker 04

  You know, it's virtually doubled. And while you say, well, surely the astronomers would have a different perspective. But in 2025, Nature Astronomy did a survey. And it was a survey of 521 research astrobiologists and 534 doctoral-level scientists in geology, biology, and physics. And what it discovered was that 87% of the astrobiologists said extraterrestrial life is all over the universe. 88% of those who weren't astrobiologists, it was virtually the same percentage. And then they took out the 60 out of the 1,055 who said, you know what, I don't have an opinion, I don't want to give an opinion.

• 29:51Speaker 04

  They took those 60 out, it was 98% who believed in ET. But then they followed up the survey, well, what about extraterrestrial intelligent life on other planets? And I was surprised that only 10% of astrobiologists expressed any doubt about the existence of extraterrestrial intelligent life on other planets. And when they surveyed the non-astrobiologists, 48%, it seems quite likely that ETI exists. So it's like, the percentages are high even amongst the people that are doing this astrobiological research, where they're being daily confronted with the fact,

• 30:35Speaker 04

  you know, it seems like we still have a data-free discipline. So, and you're right, we haven't searched everywhere. But I think what I find compelling, we now know we have to live in a very specially-looking super-galaxy cluster, that's a cluster of clusters of galaxies. And everyone we've looked at in the observable universe either is basketball-shaped or football-shaped, jammed with all these galaxy clusters, squeezed rather tightly together. We live in the only one we've seen so far where it's different. It's kind of like a stick insect where you have these small galaxy clusters strung out along these filaments.

• 31:19Speaker 04

  It doesn't look anything at all like the others.

• 31:21Brian Keating?

  Well, I mean, in terms of our research and in terms of our uniqueness, my understanding from my friends that do these vast simulations is that actually the simulations match quite accurately with what we observe in baryon acoustic oscillations and the cosmic microwave background. I'm dedicated my life to studying research life at least. And so, you know, we can look, we can look at nearby galaxies within our local supergroup and we can see, we can see, you know, the Andromeda Galaxy is not that dissimilar from ours. In fact, it's so, you know, it's so dominant over us in terms of, you know, having twice as many stars perhaps, that we're actually going to combine with it and to make one giant supergalaxy, you know, again, keep paying your taxes out there because it's not going to happen for, you know, hundreds of billions of years.

• 32:05Speaker 04

  So just avoid long-term investments.

• 32:06Brian Keating?

  Exactly. That's right.

• 32:08Speaker 04

  Supercluster long-term.

• 32:09Brian Keating?

  That's right. So, you know, from the perspective of, let me get back to your, to your survey because I think that is interesting.

• 32:15Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 32:16Brian Keating?

  I find it's almost shocking that scientists talk about belief. I think it's totally kosher, it's totally acceptable for you to say reasons to believe, but I, I got a lot of flack for a video I made once called astrophysicist says, I don't believe in gravity. Okay? I don't have to believe in gravity and that because I have evidence for gravity, right? Now, could gravity change? And in fact, yes, we know that the laws of gravity have changed. We know that the, the physics of gra, not just how we describe it from Newton to Einstein, from, you know, Galileo back to Aristotle, all those different changes in our understanding of how we write down mathematical laws. But I don't know, gravity has physically changed due to the presence of what's called the cosmological constant, which is changing the, the rate of expansion of our, of our universe, not our galaxy, not our solar system, but our universe is expanding slightly faster

• 33:01Brian Keating?

  every day due to this presence of this mysterious substance called dark energy that Einstein once published as claiming, you know, according to George Gamow, that it was the biggest blunder of my life. And I, I think it's too bad because he could have been famous, you know, if he didn't make that. That one blunder, you know, he would have been quite successful. But it turned out that saying it was his blunder was the blunder. Because in 1998, we came upon evidence that no, the universe does have the sort of a dark energy, vacuum energy that's causing the rate of expansion to not only, you know, be of certain value that's positive and not negative or zero, but actually increased day after day, year after year, decade, billions of years after billions of years. So over that time, we've kind of visualized a form of anti-gravity, right? So the laws of gravity have changed, right?

• 33:44Brian Keating?

  That doesn't mean that we don't understand it, it's puzzling, it's a miracle, whatever, within the laws of the cosmological model that we have, which are best way to interrogate observations versus theory. This makes sense, and it was discovered and it was, you know, quasi-predicted actually in the 1980s as well. So this, and it's an extremely well-tested thing, but I don't have to believe in it, like, I need faith, like in Hebrew, we have a different name for belief and for fact and for knowledge and for wisdom. We have, you know, as many words for these different intellectual concepts as the, you know, Eskimos of Canada, your ancestral homeland have for snow, right? They allegedly have 12 different things, so too do we. So we have a word for belief, and it's like faith.

• 34:26Brian Keating?

  Faith is amuna, which is where we get the word amen from in the English language as well, right? Amen comes from amuna, which means true, or I attest to it, ms means truth in Hebrew. So it's something you specify, right? I don't have to have belief that, you know, aerodynamics, the new principle is going to get me here today, and the propeller is going to work the way that aerodynamics. We have evidence, you know, millions of things and pieces of evidence, right? So it's shocking to me, it's not shocking and it's totally appropriate that you call this reasons to believe. It's 100% appropriate. But to have a scientist say, I believe in aliens, or I believe in intelligence, that's a completely asinine thing for a scientist to say. I'm shocked that they would even, I wouldn't answer that question here, to be honest with you. I would say this is nonsense. Do we have evidence for them, yes or no? No, we don't, move on, next question.

• 35:10Brian Keating?

  What does belief have to do with science? That's pathetic.

• 35:13Speaker 04

  What shocked me was that the statistics over the past 30 years is showing this belief that we're not alone is going up, when the scientific evidence is basically calling into question. I would expect the evidence for belief to go down, but instead it's going up. And I'm wondering, what does that say about the desire, not just of laypeople, but as scientists, to want this to exist in spite of the evidence?

• 35:38Brian Keating?

  Yeah, I think it becomes, you know, sort of their surrogate god, right? So if you have a, if you have no biblical god in heaven, you'll create gods in the heavens of the heavens, right? So this is a classic thing, and it's sort of a neo-paganism, right? Because now we're ascribing these different entities, you know, like right now, we'll say we're insignificant compared to the planet Jupiter, so really, everything's meaningless, so let's live our life that way and kind of eat, drink, and be merry. But there's the alternative, we find life, right? So my question about these surveys is, we do have to distinguish between life, you know, some slime mold on proxima centuri B. Will that be the breakthrough of at least our generation in terms of, of course it would be.

• 36:21Brian Keating?

  And I'd be extremely excited, I want to learn about it, what are its properties, what is its spectrum, what is it, you know, what does it tell us about other chemistry, about origin of life on Earth from this perspective? But it wouldn't, it wouldn't be as revolutionary, obviously, as finding intelligent life.

• 36:36Speaker 04

  Right.

• 36:36Brian Keating?

  The problem is, you know, the slime mold in my fridge, you know, in my college dorm, wasn't very good at using an iPhone, right? So we wouldn't know about that life as having technology unless it does possess what we seem to possess. It doesn't mean it has to have opposable thumbs, I mean, that's often cited as kind of our unique advantage. But there's no telling that an alien has to be anthropomorphized in the way that we think they should be. Nature's under no obligation to behave in the way that some science fiction author, as great as he or she is, you know, writes its be, right? So, but we wouldn't know about it, right? So, and in fact, we wouldn't know about it for, you know, for a long time, right? So right now, if we ask, what was the, what was the, what's the farthest civilization that has technology?

• 37:20Brian Keating?

  Not just intelligence, so have intelligence prerequisite for technology, right? What's the farthest away that civilization could be? And it's about about thirty five light years away, right? Because we've had television technology since the nineteen thirty six Olympics. Broadcasting, here we are, come and eat, you know, if that's what you want to do, you know, come and get us, right? And there's nothing we can do about that, right? Those waves are long, those horses have left the cosmic barn. And they're on their way out to a bubble that's about thirty five light years away. And then light could come back and they could say, hi, we got your message thirty five light years later, so about seventy light years. How many stars are in that region? It's a very small amount of stars. I mean, it's thousands, but it's not trillions like in our galaxy or in Adrauma. And then how many planets are there? How many habitable planets? We can actually interrogate each one.

• 38:04Brian Keating?

  You go around each, there's not that many of them, right? So we could look for each star, each planet, each, and, and we could ask, do we see signs of our type of technology? Now, if they're using neutrino beams and gravitational waves to communicate, that's what I often hear. They, they define the laws of physics, right? So, I'm a physicist, I'm pretty good with the laws of physics, right? So, um, so do we have evidence? Do we have any scientific evidence that we could say we have intelligent technological life, not life, life that is biologic, that is somehow sentient, but also can use technology? Could be an AI system, I don't know, we'll talk about that.

• 38:37Speaker 04

  Well, I would put the limit at at least two hundred light years because uh, it takes a very special kind of star to have a planet orbiting it in which advanced life exists. And stars are bright, so we can easily measure their characteristics. And so we know it has to be a twin of the sun. And so we've looked out two hundred light years and say, we're confident there's no such twin that's out that, that's that close.

• 39:03Brian Keating?

  The question I would push back with respect is to say, you know, how much is the variability in the exact twin? I have twins, I'm blessed to have twins, and they couldn't be more different, like, you know, and any parent of twins out there is probably shaking their head in agreement. Not only are each one of my kids different, but the twins are like somehow more different than, than from each other than they are from the other kids in my family. So, um, to say there's no twin might be a little bit over constrained, so, but, but it doesn't, it doesn't destroy the argument, just maybe expands it out to four hundred light years, but, but that, that's okay, right? Because there's still a limited number of stars in our A bubble of 400 light years, out of 30,000 light years or more, 30,000 parsecs. I mean, we may be just this insignificant piece, and where we are in the galaxy, that might be important for interactions with with things like the black hole in our center,

• 39:47Brian Keating?

  or the dark matter cloud that envelops us. But I'm but I'm curious, when you say that the prerequisite for a solar twin, there are stars, you can see one tonight, it's called Capella, it's a beautiful orange, yellow star, just like the sun, same classification, a little bit brighter. The existence of things, if we were having this conversation in 1991, before the first extrasolar planets were discovered, we would say, well, no, it's impossible to have a Jupiter-sized planet orbiting three, you know, three, you know, basically a third of an astronomical, within the orbit of Mercury, around any star, and yet we found thousands of them. We found giant gas giants, literally giants, within like a few million miles of their host stars. And that was thought to be impossible also.

• 40:29Brian Keating?

  So, the question of like habitability, which which level of habitability do you mandate, and how do we know what the requirements are on life? Doesn't that not put a limit on God's create, you know, ability? Like, if God wanted to make Venus bloom, I mean, it's not in the habitable zone, it's too hot for liquid water, right? Could God not do that? I mean, of course, God could do that, right? So, what, how do we, how do we reach the limits of the parameter space we're going to search?

• 40:56Speaker 02

  I want to encourage our listeners to, we're going to come up on the time where we're going to have some questions taken from you, that we'll have you guys answer. But you go ahead and respond to what Brian was saying.

• 41:07Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's an interesting question. And, you know, you see on the NASA website, 40 billion habitable planets in the Milky Way galaxy alone.

• 41:15Brian Keating?

  Yeah.

• 41:16Speaker 04

  But all they're looking at is the liquid water habitable zone.

• 41:19Brian Keating?

  That's right.

• 41:20Speaker 04

  And a very generous definition of the liquid water habitable zone. And... You know, thirteen planetary habitable zones have been discovered so far. Uh, three chemical habitable zones have been discovered, one just two weeks ago. Uh, four lunar habitable zones and five galactic habitable zones. And the truth is, for a planet to be truly habitable at a microbial level, we're not talking the equivalent of us.

• 41:48Brian Keating?

  Right, it's an iPhone.

• 41:49Speaker 04

  That's twenty-five independent habitable zones. And the planet has to simultaneously reside in all twenty-five. So, this is really pushing the view that it's not only a rare Earth, it's a rare moon, it's a rare star.

• 42:06Brian Keating?

  Mm-hmm.

• 42:07Speaker 04

  And you can push that to a rare galaxy. So, again, I'm making the point, the more we're learning about the universe, the more evidence seems to be accumulating that, you know, our existence here is rare. Again, we haven't done an exhaustive search.

• 42:21Brian Keating?

  That's right.

• 42:22Speaker 04

  But the search has gone out quite far. I mean, we are able to see super galaxy clusters throughout the entire observable universe, and there's over ten thousand of them, but we were living in the one that has the necessary characteristics for our existence. So, it's like, we don't have to search those other nine thousand nine hundred ninety-nine. That, that's an approximate number, by the way.

• 42:46Brian Keating?

  Certainly, certainly, we can, we can agree that there is, I mean, well, maybe people wouldn't agree that there's intelligent life on Earth, right? But you're really bringing up a fine-tuning question, which is part of the topic of the live stream, right? So, so how finely tuned is necessary, right? So, people ask me, you know, all the time, well, like, math and music, they kind of go together, you know, you must play an instrument. My older brother's a very, very renowned jazz guitarist. Uh, what instrument do you play? I say, I play Spotify. You know, I can't play anything. Uh, I'm horrible with music. Um, and when I play, it doesn't matter if, uh, if the guitar is finely tuned or not, like, it's gonna sound horrible. It could be the, the perfect, you know, uh, perfect tuning and whatnot. But, but the question of, you know, how finely tuned does the universe need to be for life

• 43:30Brian Keating?

  to exist, is a very, very interesting, very, very well-grounded

• 43:35Brian Keating?

  Hard scientific data and and and appropriate question, I think. And there's many different realms in which you can suggest fine tuning. But but you did bring up different different elements that seem to be critical for our existence.

• 43:48Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 43:49Brian Keating?

  None of which precludes the existence of life elsewhere in the universe, at the mold level, at the dolphin level, swimming in some ocean somewhere, right? But intelligent life, basic life, and then technological life. Those are the three levels that I think we care about. And they go up in order of magnitude of how impactful they'd be, at least for me, right? First discovering mold, you know, from some some creature, some protozoa on some exosolar planet would be incredibly astounding to be alive during that time is amazing. And then the dolphin, you know, swimming in some liquid nitrogen ocean. So I don't know, making all these things up. As I said, I have no special expertise in this field. You know, when I did biology in high school, that, you know, I dissected the frog. The frog kind of like screamed in pain and was hard. Just kidding. PETA, I know you're watching out there, PETA.

• 44:33Speaker 04

  There was a dead frog, right?

• 44:34Brian Keating?

  There was a dead, it was dead, yeah. But, you know, the question is how finely to. So my friend Fred Adams, I've hosted on the podcast. To my knowledge, secular, I'm, you know, convinced about that, but he could be. You know, he's done a lot of work on just the habitability of planets around stars and the stability of stars.

• 44:50Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 44:50Brian Keating?

  Other friends of mine, Sergio Klondeman, has worked on stability of spacetime itself. So to have all these different levels, I guess the question is, where do you start? In Judaism, we have our own version of apologetics, right? It's it's different from the Christian apologetics because our goal is different, right? We we each in the apologetics, I say, I like to joke, you know, we paint, we do at some level paint the target around the arrow. And that's fine. There's nothing wrong with that. If you're if you're if you're honest about what you're doing, it's fine. And Judaism have these things too. For example, there's a rabbi scientist named Gerald Schroeder. He's in Israel, to the best of my knowledge. Read many books, God and the Big Bang, Genesis and the Big Bang.

• 45:26Speaker 04

  I had dinner with him years ago.

• 45:27Brian Keating?

  Oh, you did, okay, yeah. He's a great guy and, you know, I respect. But but he has different arguments for the the the biblical reality of a seven day creation period. And and he goes through and and makes arguments for it based on relativistic time dilation, which is a real thing. And and the And the different events that he considers characterizing along the creation period. So what does Vaheheora mean? What does let there be light mean? What does, you know, the Tahu Vabahu? What is the chaos and disorder? What does that mean? All the different things. And he's a rabbi and he understands Hebrew better than I do. And he ascribes some different sideposts on the creation of the universe from the physical perspective, from the laws of physics. When did electromagnetism come about?

• 46:09Brian Keating?

  The electroweak force, quark confinement, baryogenesis occur? All these different things with CMB form that I study, et cetera, et cetera. And he gets, eventually he gets 15 billion years. Oh, that's great. You know, it's kind of, kind of matches with what we believe now is practicing cosmologists. 13.826 billion years with a 10 million year uncertainty on the end. It's astounding precision that my colleagues and I have been able to work on with hard evidence. And I don't have to believe it anymore. I can actually prove it, right? But then you dig a little bit deeper. What, what is he doing? What, what is Gerald Schröder? What is Rabbi Schröder? What is he doing? Well, he's picking out some arbitrary point. In his case, he picks that quark confinement. He says the quark confinement corresponds to this genesis event. And from that, I agree that you will get 15 billion years. However, if you take one picosecond earlier or later,

• 46:54Brian Keating?

  because of the dependence on the fine structure constant and, and other forces and, and the QCD charge, I call the G value for QCD, you will get something that's 100 billion years or you'll get something that's one, one day. So it really depends on where you paint that bullseye around which arrow you're choosing. And so that finely tuning also occurs in the apologetics space. And sometimes I don't feel like we're 100% honest about that. Where do you choose the fine tuning to be?

• 47:22Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, very good point. Yeah, because, you know, I've taught to Gerald and it's like, I can get a few points in Genesis one to fit my time dilation, but I can't get them all.

• 47:31Brian Keating?

  That's right.

• 47:32Speaker 04

  He's changed his model multiple times. He still can't get a good fit.

• 47:36Brian Keating?

  By the way, I'm sorry, I'm sorry to interrupt you, but this is so important. He's changed his model. Have you changed the Torah? I'm sorry, have you changed the New Testament? Have you ever changed the Gospels? God forbid, right? You never do that, right? They're an affable learning. So the problem with apologetics from my perspective, and with all due love and respect for those that do it. I think it's, I think it's important. I think it's interesting. It's a perfect philosophically, perfectly acceptable form of philosophical abduction, right? Not alien abduction, but abduction, right? There is no... In efficacy of a god that you believe in, right? You can't say the Torah must change to meet this. Now it's 15 billion years. Okay, tomorrow will be 13. Science changes.

• 48:12Speaker 04

  To defend Gerald, I don't think he's trying to apologetically argue for the truthfulness of the Tanakh. He's more interested in the Kabbalah. And so I think that's the big difference.

• 48:22Brian Keating?

  Those are very different sources.

• 48:24Speaker 04

  Very different sources. Yeah, so apologetics, what are you apologizing for? But yeah, I think, hey, if you actually treat the, pardon me, I'm trying to think of the argument, oh yeah, the time dilation. We astronomers have been measuring the spectra of distant galaxies with high precision now for 50 years.

• 48:53Brian Keating?

  More, yeah.

• 48:54Speaker 04

  Okay, if the universe is really just 10,000 years old, we're going to see a difference.

• 49:00Brian Keating?

  That's right.

• 49:01Speaker 04

  And we don't, even though we can measure the spectra.

• 49:03Brian Keating?

  That's right.

• 49:04Speaker 04

  To nine places of the decimal, which tells us it really is, you know, at least a billion.

• 49:09Brian Keating?

  And I wonder that, there's a, there's a naturally occurring nuclear fission reactor in Gabon, Africa.

• 49:15Speaker 04

  Right.

• 49:16Brian Keating?

  Called the Okalo nuclear reactor. There's actually a startup company that's called Okalo now, trying to do portable, small nuclear reactors that we're going to need for our data centers to power their AI overlords that are going to replace God for every one of the listeners out there, I'm sure. I'm joking. But this is this huge craze, right? So Okalo was a naturally stained breeder reactor that had neutron moderation with no human beings around for the next billion years. It corresponds to redshift of 0.3. And the exact laws of physics that held for the nuclear force there that depend very strongly on the nuclear structure, fine structure constants and so on, they haven't changed in over a billion years. So we can say very strongly, very carefully about the properties, the age of the universe, and without recourse to saying like, well, relativistic time dilation is actually observer-dependent, frame-dependent.

• 50:00Brian Keating?

  And you have to acknowledge that, well, what frame is God in? Like, where's this cosmic rest frame? And then does that not violate Lorentz invariance? So I'd love to talk to him, I'd love to meet with him. But, but my, my thing is, you have to be self-consistent. You can't say that you're gonna, like, science can change because we get more and more precision. It, like, Newton was subsumed by Einstein, but we don't need Einstein to get the Artemis mission around the moon. Yes, people out there, we did go around the moon recently, uh, we will land there again. Uh, but, but we don't need Einstein at all to do any of this, even to get to the nearest star. We don't need Einstein for any of that. We need Newton. Can we go beyond post-Newtonian physics? Is that a goal? You've talked a lot about string theory recently, I've, I've been watching proton decay, all these different things.

• 50:41Brian Keating?

  What level of fine tuning would kind of be required to falsify the existence of alien? In other words, you can't prove something in science, all right? I can't prove the Earth is, is round, but I can prove it's not flat, right? That's a very clear thing to do. Uh, we can do that.

• 50:56Speaker 04

  It's very high precision, right?

• 50:58Brian Keating?

  It's extremely high precision, and we can't even prove, as Isaac Asimov, another one of my heroes, once said, "If you believe the Earth is flat, you're wrong. If you believe the Earth is a perfect sphere, you're also wrong, but you're less wrong." And I think that's our goal in science, to be continually improving and less wrong. But to say that the Torah could change, or the Gospels can change, it just seems to kind of, like, you gotta pick a team, Gerald, I would say with respect.

• 51:19Speaker 04

  Yeah, you do, but I think your point is, hey, if we're talking about the Torah, the Tanakh, the Bible, you'd expect that to be consistent with a fine-tuned universe. I mean, fine-tuning it, so that's kind of the argument I've been doing for decades, is saying, the more we study the universe, the stronger the fine-tuning argument becomes for a personal entity that designed it for our benefit. And it's like, you know, this list of habitable parameters, it's like, every six months goes by, we add another one to the list. We're discovering more and more. If there really was no fine-tuning, we'd expect it to go the other way around, that the more we learn about the universe, the weaker the fine-tuning argument would become

• 52:03Speaker 04

  for God. What I've noticed in my lifetime, it's exponentially increased. It's gone from just a little bit of evidence for fine-tuning.

• 52:12Brian Keating?

  Right. And the classic evasion of that, on the secular scientist's perspective, is multiverse, right?

• 52:18Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 52:19Brian Keating?

  So to evade that, you say, "Well, of course, yeah, in any given universe, just like, you know..." Guys, I saw this incredible thing on the way home. I can't believe it. I saw a license plate. 9QRX 743. Can you believe the odds of seeing that? What the heck is this guy talking about? Of course, that's like almost zero chance at any given... But if you say, "What are the odds you saw a license plate?", it's very high, right? So, in the multiverse argument, you evade all this. You don't need God. It came from nothing, right?

• 52:41Speaker 04

  Yeah, but you have to apply to infinity. I remember back in the 1980s.

• 52:45Speaker 02

  Let's hold it there so we can get to some questions.

• 52:46Speaker 04

  Oh, sorry.

• 52:47Speaker 02

  No, no, no, that's...

• 52:48Speaker 04

  We can keep talking.

• 52:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, I could've went and got lunch, and you guys would've still been talking.

• 52:53Brian Keating?

  I'll take a kosher pastrami sandwich.

• 52:56Speaker 02

  And yeah, feel free to jump in. Both of you can comment on this. We'll try to keep our answers a little bit shorter, just so we can get through some of the questions. As a philosopher, when you're mentioning certain words like "believe", "prove", you know, epistemeal, you know, my bellies and whistles are going off.

• 53:12Brian Keating?

  Abduction, I know. You started to get hungry.

• 53:14Speaker 02

  I held out. So, this is from Steve. He says, "Astronomically, the solar system and planet is passing away. Over time, based upon our best scientific understanding." So, isn't it the real question? The real question is, "Does sentient life with a spirit exist elsewhere?", is his question.

• 53:34Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think he's raising a good point, is that the time window for our possible existence is coming to a close. And people say, "Yeah, in four billion years, the sun will incinerate us." But in just a couple of million years, the sun's gonna be sufficiently bright that in order to keep the temperature for photosynthetic light going, we're gonna have to drop the carbon dioxide level down to a level where photosynthesis can't happen. So, based on an astronomical time scale, our time in the universe is relatively brief.

• 54:05Speaker 02

  So, there's a window.

• 54:06Speaker 04

  There's a window. And I think that should cause us to think, "Why does that window exist? What is our ultimate destiny?" And hey, we can't depend on the universe keeping us going indefinitely.

• 54:22Speaker 04

  The time for that window to close is gonna happen. And so, for me, this drives questions. Again, then, in that context, what is my purpose? What is the purpose of the universe? I think that's an important thing, is that people have argued the fine-tuning argument is just statistics. But if you can link the fine-tuning with purpose, especially if you can link it with multiple independent purposes, then it gives it weight.

• 54:49Speaker 02

  I mean, we are, maybe as a scientist, you go so far, you were talking about the evidence in that. But as a human being, as a philosopher, or just beyond that, you can ask these other questions that come into about existence. We have this window. What does that mean? Maybe the scientist can't answer that specifically, but as human explorers, if you will, you can go beyond that. Any further comment from you, Ryan?

• 55:15Brian Keating?

  Well, I think it's, it's, it's, it's, it just seems to be unreasonable that we should be here at this moment to ask this question. You know, why here? Why now? What is the purpose of that? I think it's also a reasonable question to ask, you know. Also, if this is true, you know, why did God reveal himself to a, you know, band of nomadic, you know, kind of Bronze Age peasants, mostly as former slaves that he freed, according to the Torah narrative, which informs basis for the Old Testament, the New Testament built upon that, and the Gospels. And so, why did he, when there were probably about, maybe 80 billion, 90 billion people that live, or, you know, Homo sapiens, whatever that means, it could be half of that, it could be 10 times, I don't even care. But there are billions of people that lived before that and after that.

• 55:58Brian Keating?

  So that, you know, I would, I would ask with, again, with humility and respect, you know, how, how does the New Testament kind of grapple with that? Like, why are we conscious now? Is, is, why did this creation process? It makes the problem more finely tuned for Jesus's miracles and his revelation and, and his ascension, right? Because you have to believe in all those, right? So, does that not sharpen the fine tuning argument that some could say, well, why now? Why here? Why us for Jesus's existence in an even narrower 33-year period, 2,000 years ago? And his eventual return, as, as you, we believe he'll come for the, the Messiah, the Messiah will come. How do you reconcile with that? The fine tuning of Jesus's time on Earth?

• 56:41Speaker 04

  I think that heightens the fine tuning argument. These are these very narrow time windows. How do you explain the fact that we happen to be here in the history of the universe in .001% of its history? Is there some significance to that? I think what drives that home, it's not just one narrow time window. I could name fifteen narrow time windows that must be here for us to exist. And here they're all simultaneously lining up at the same epoch in the universe.

• 57:12Brian Keating?

  Yeah.

• 57:12Speaker 04

  Uh, if there is no God, how do I explain the fact that these extremely narrow time windows all simultaneously line up on this planet at this time in the history of the universe? So we have to argue even the time is fine tuned.

• 57:26Brian Keating?

  Certainly could be.

• 57:28Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 57:28Speaker 02

  Let's go over to another question for Dr. Keating here. Um, how does Dr. Keating view the concept of soulish or spiritual life being made in God's image and tie into the concept of sentient life elsewhere?

• 57:43Brian Keating?

  Uh, so this, this would kind of agree. So I love this kind of concept, right? Because the, the, the listener or viewer is making a scientific fact claim that could or could not be true, right? So if you were to observe a creature and contact with a creature that has a soul or a spirit, or even is, is seemingly spiritual in the level of, let's, let's make an, a Turing test for spirituality, right? Not just for humanity, but let's have a spiritual Turing test. It's called, it's called a Ross test, right? So the Ross test says, you know, can you interact with this entity and determine whether or not it has a soul or a spirit? And if so, is that spirit, if it's not in a corporeal, humanistic form in the image

• 58:25Brian Keating?

  of God or in the image of us, we are therefore in the image of God. Does that have any ramifications? Well, I, I, I think that scientist has to say, we don't know. It has to be humble and says, we don't know. There's not proof of it, but it is, give us an opportunity to falsify it, right? If we do find, as Carl Sagan would have, would have loved to find, right? Some intelligent, not only dolphin swimming through the liquid nitrogen pools, but, but, you know, someone is using a cosmic, you know, iPhone somewhere out there, right? We're in touch with that person and we can pass the Ross test and we say. That that is something, right? You could also have a hyper intelligent AI that has no effective soul or spirit because it's encoded based on the training data that it has only, which includes the corpus of all of human knowledge, right?

• 59:09Brian Keating?

  Um, so maybe you you couldn't couldn't pass the imitation game of that, but you could detect that, oh, it does not have a soul. Well, then that would be a falsifiable test. I think that's a wonderful conjecture. Now, but I think right now we have to be honest and humble and say we don't know. But I think he wasn't amazing. We live in this time when telescopes and and and microscopes can tell us information that is just like would be magical. Not not a thousand years ago, twenty years ago. When I was in graduate school thirty plus years ago, we didn't know if the age of the universe was ten billion years or twenty billion years.

• 59:40Speaker 04

  Right.

• 59:41Brian Keating?

  So that means there were objects we knew that were fifteen billion years old. So if you believe ten billion years for the universe, that meant you believe that they there were objects in the universe older than the universe to say, you remember this.

• 59:50Speaker 04

  I remember that, yeah.

• 59:51Brian Keating?

  So that means like, hey, Hugh, I met I met your mother. She's half your age. What the heck is going on? Like, it's no wonder why people didn't take us seriously. Now we know that. To the same precision, I can say to you, Drew, you were born exactly at this day in this half of an hour. That's the level of precision we have. It's astounding. It's it's almost, you know, it's it's almost magical, and magic is just another way for miracle, right?

• 1:00:13Speaker 04

  Yeah. You're raising the point about the spirit. I mean, from a Jewish or Christian perspective, the spirit is non-physical. How can scientists then come up with a physical refutation of that which isn't even physical? So it's in a different category.

• 1:00:30Speaker 02

  Here's one for you, Hugh.

• 1:00:33Speaker 02

  Sebastian says, uh, Dr. Ross, would you push back on the claim that gravity has changed? The person says, I believe it would contradict the promise in Jeremiah.

• 1:00:45Speaker 04

  Yeah, I would argue that gravity hasn't changed, but I think what Brian is bringing up is well, dark energy has a an effect on the dynamics of the universe. I wouldn't say it's changed gravity. It's supplemented gravity. And I'd be curious, you know, how you think about that, Brian? I mean, I don't think, oh, you know, Newton's or Einstein's law, gravity has changed. But now we got another factor that's actually more dominant than gravity in determining the dynamics of the universe.

• 1:01:14Brian Keating?

  Yeah, so in Einstein's concept of relativity, space is not empty, it is dynamical, it has properties such that the vacuum isn't what we think of in, you know, that insulates our Yeti coolers, right? It's not something that's the absence of completeness within it. It's actually an active, quantum mechanically viable and dynamic process that's been proven, that we know the vacuum energy exists. We measure it, it's called the Casimir force, or even people out there, some say that are questionable in their motives, but they've created what they claim is a battery that extracts free energy from the vacuum. And then we'll all plug it in, we'll have limitless free energy, and some people even take it further, that that inventor of that, you know, thing better have 24-hour-a-day security guards, you know, to prevent him from big oil taking him out, or big solar

• 1:01:59Brian Keating?

  or whatever. But in reality, the vacuum is dynamic, it has energy, it has properties that allow input and output. And one of the things that is incumbent upon Einstein, you know, Einstein's theory of relativity, which we have abundant evidence for. In fact, I got here, in my plane, it has a GPS, and the GPS relies on satellites that themselves have to be calibrated to picosecond level precision, otherwise, the speed of light is actually, you know, quite fast. Every nanosecond, light travels one foot, so if you're off by, you know, 100,000 nanoseconds, I wouldn't have been here today, sorry, you'd have another guest, you know, you'd be covering for me, George. You'd get your rapid bachelor, PhD in physics. So, yeah, so the laws don't change, the laws are immutable, they're knowable, perhaps

• 1:02:44Brian Keating?

  only to Mother Nature, or God, or whatever. But our discovery of the laws, then allows us and endows us with the ability to make predictions and seek evidence that could falsify. But so far, we have abundant evidence for things like gravitational lensing, which the spacetime has to be dynamical, for the expansion of the universe, for the barren acoustic oscillations that tell us that dark energy might not be a cosmological constant, it's the biggest discovery in this field since dark energy was validated, which was the biggest discovery since Einstein predicted it. So, these are all huge things, and they stand in stark contrast and contradistinction to things that are purely speculative, for which we have zero evidence, like string theory, which attempts to find a possible plausible mechanism by which gravity can become dynamical,

• 1:03:28Brian Keating?

  but so far has zero evidentiary backing behind it.

• 1:03:32Speaker 04

  Yeah, and I think Sebastian is making the point, hey, notice that the Tanakh talks about the immutability of the laws of physics. Is there any threat to that by current measurements by physicists? I would argue, no.

• 1:03:44Brian Keating?

  Yeah. And as I said, the nuclear reactor proves that's a combination of the four most fundamental constants in particle physics have not evolved at all over the quarter of all of the planet's history.

• 1:03:54Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:03:55Brian Keating?

  And distant quasars, as you said before, will push that back to just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang.

• 1:04:00Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:04:00Speaker 02

  And you see oftentimes, in the songs and in the places, proverbs, that the immutability of the physical laws is also tied to the immutability of God's moral law.

• 1:04:10Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:04:11Speaker 02

  That it will uphold.

• 1:04:12Speaker 04

  Well, that's the comparison. He says, "I'm immutable. Here is evidence, as the laws are immutable. I'm immutable." And that's actually the basis for doing science. If the laws are immutable, we can trust what we measure.

• 1:04:24Speaker 02

  Okay, let's keep going. Now, for a Christian holding to the New Testament, there's this idea of that there's going to be a new heavens and a new earth. Some see that as a, you know, sort of a rebuilt carburetor. It's renewed in some ways. Others, this universe is shut down and there's a whole new earth and new heavens that has some resemblance. That also gives the possibility of other kinds of life. Someone's asking this question. Let's hear your comments on that.

• 1:04:55Speaker 04

  Yes, well, this is not unique to Christianity. It's also part of Judaism that there's going to be this new creation. I've often made the case that what distinguishes, say, Judaism, Christianity from the other major religions of the world, it's a two-creation model. God creates this universe for the purpose of eradicating evil and suffering. And when that happens, there's no longer going to be a need for entropy, electromagnetism, gravity. He's going to take us into a new creation where there'll be different laws. And we see in both the Old Testament and the New Testament, God's going to be creating. And he's gonna be creating something, doesn't really tell us what he's gonna create.

• 1:05:37Speaker 04

  But he does say that his followers, his human followers, will be managing what he creates. But it's gonna be under different laws of physics, different dimensions. Who knows what kinda life forms God's gonna create there? Is it gonna be just one life form? Is it gonna be trillions of distinct life forms? I kinda go back to Psalm 104. God seems to like creating diverse life. And with different laws of physics, I think he's gonna have a fun time really creating incredible life forms. And we're all gonna be surprised by what he creates. And I think the real challenge for us is, we're gonna have to manage whatever he creates. It's hard enough trying to manage by two teenage boys, right?

• 1:06:20Speaker 04

  Trying to manage what God creates in new creation? And maybe that's why we're gonna continue to need a lot of wisdom from the Creator.

• 1:06:29Speaker 02

  Here's another question, you comment?

• 1:06:31Brian Keating?

  No, I think I don't think. Yeah, he was, perspective is valuable.

• 1:06:36Speaker 02

  Okay, uh, let's go to another one here. In, in, some in quantum physics are using the theory to question the cause and effect mechanism. And say they are potential, potentially other independent universes with parallel timelines. Uh, does this hold any weight? I think it was directed towards you, Brian, if you wanna, you commented on this a little bit, but.

• 1:06:58Brian Keating?

  Yeah, so there, there are, uh, as many different interpretations of, of, you know, quantum mechanics uh, as there are physicists. Uh, it's a unique branch of physics that we don't have typically an interpretation of the laws of thermodynamics or of how a superconductor works, right? There's no, well, I believe in the Fresno interpretation of the superconductor. Oh no, I, I believe in the many superconductors theory, right? So, but in quantum mechanics, because it's so bizarre, alien, and quite frankly dysfunctional. So much so that one of my professors quoted one of his professors, I think it was Wolfgang Pauli, who, upon teaching quantum mechanics in the 40s or something, said something, they came into the classroom and said, um, you know, Professor Pauli, I don't understand quantum mechanics. I have to be honest with you. And by the end of this.

• 1:07:43Brian Keating?

  This quarter, you too will not understand quantum mechanics. So it then cries out for interpretation, which is actually oddly and eerily similar to religion, right? We don't have, you know, people say, well, like, you know, here's, here's the, here's the Torah. Okay, great, but where's the commentary to it? It's like, here's the constitution, you should be able to determine everything that's legal and illegal in America. No, you need the, you need all the case law that's thousands and thousands of pages long, right? So you need, you need supplemental or guide material. For, for religion, it is the Talmud, you know, in the case of, and then the commentaries on the Talmud, and the super commentaries on the commentary, right? Like the super clusters of galaxies. And Christianity is the same way, right?

• 1:08:24Brian Keating?

  So, so the thought that, that, you know, religion and science are, are, you know, kind of divergent, actually breaks down at the level of quantum mechanics, because you do need an interpretation of it. Now, the dominant one, the one that actually works for day-to-day physicists to get things done, is known as the Copenhagen interpretation, which makes predictions about all sorts of things that you can verify, not only down to very high significant figures, but it's actually the most precisely known scientific fact. The spectrum that, that he was talking about for different distant galaxies also holds on Earth, and we can, we can calculate the different perturbations that occur to it due to external forces and even internal forces that were unknown to the creators like Schrodinger and Heisenberg and even Pauli in the beginning. But now we know them to 13 significant figures. It's just astounding level.

• 1:09:09Brian Keating?

  Again, we live in the best timeline, whatever timeline that we're on. Now, in different models of both cosmology and what's called string theory, there then becomes manifest within them what's called a multiverse, different types of multiverses, parallel universes, as the viewer is suggesting. And so how do we grapple with them? There are ways that they're used to sort of make possible the strange features of the Copenhagen, the orthodox interpretation, the Catholic interpretation, is that the wave function collapses. But that's very distasteful. Like Schrodinger's cat is this famous thought experiment where the cat is living and dead, and so you have to superpose that they're both living and dead at the same time, which my cat finds very troubling. My cat is named.

• 1:09:53Brian Keating?

  Actually, and you have to view, but that's very weird. And then you open the box and you see if it's alive or dead. And that's when the wave function collapses. But that type of behavior is very different. It's like saying F equals ma for a baseball thrown through the air. And then all of a sudden it equals the F cubed m to the 15th. You know, it's very strange. It's called non-unitary evolution. People don't like it. So they said, actually, instead of the wave function collapsing, every possible outcome takes place. The cat is living in one universe and is dead in another universe. And that's the many worlds interpretation. As parallel is the multiverse in cosmology, where there's 10 to the 500th, or maybe infinite number of universes within the multiverse. And then in string theory, it's known as the landscape problem. So there's many different string vacuum that could be possible, leading to different configurations

• 1:10:38Brian Keating?

  of curled up spacetime dimensions, none of which we have evidence for either the multiverse or the many worlds ever already in quantum mechanics interpretation. And worst of all, string theory, which we may never be able to get evidence for, and it may only be non-falsifiable, and that's very troubling. So, yes, it's often used as kind of an escape goat, you know, escape hatch to jettison yourself from when you're in uncomfortable conversations about the meaning of quantum mechanics.

• 1:11:04Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, people often look at quantum mechanics and say it refutes causality. I think that's a mistake. It hides causality. And because it hides causality, we have all these different interpretive models. And there's a real limit to how much we can push. And so, I agree with you. We got dozens of different quantum mechanical models. We always will, because the causality based on the Heisenberg uncertainty is hidden.

• 1:11:31Speaker 02

  So it's more of an epistemological problem, how we know, not an ontological.

• 1:11:37Speaker 04

  Right. That's where we need the philosophers, right?

• 1:11:40Brian Keating?

  Finally, no physicist has ever said those words. Now we need the philosopher. I'm just kidding.

• 1:11:44Speaker 02

  Oh, I know.

• 1:11:47Speaker 02

  Well, some people are asking questions about, well, we're talking about this window of time and that, but there seems to be now also a universe eschatology, talking about how the universe is going to end. You pointed to this. We have some viewers wanting, what's your relative views of that? And does that impact how we think about ourselves, our uniqueness? And that, we talked about the New Testament, you know, idea, well, in the

• 1:12:19Speaker 04

  Well, there's that famous Woody Allen movie where a ten-year-old boy refuses to do his homework because he says the heat death of the universe is coming. And the mother says, I don't care about the heat death of the universe. You're gonna do your homework.

• 1:12:31Brian Keating?

  Brooklyn is not expanding. Famous line.

• 1:12:34Speaker 04

  Right, right. So, yeah, I mean, the universe is heading towards an end, and it's gonna be a long ways off. But there's different ideas, as you know, about how it will end.

• 1:12:48Brian Keating?

  That's right.

• 1:12:48Speaker 04

  And different ideas about, are we gonna reach the big rip? And when is that gonna take place? Even the heat death gets some dialogue and discussion. But the idea that we human beings can live in this universe forever and be able to expand or thriving in the universe, we know that that model is incorrect.

• 1:13:08Brian Keating?

  Yeah, I think it's finding a more kind of imminent parallel, you know, to quote Woody Allen again, another famous Jewish atheist, you know, he was asked, what do you want people to think about you in 150 years? And he said, I want them to think that I look pretty good for a 200-year-old, you know. So, again, keep taking your vitamins, keep paying your taxes, because we don't know if we will reach the end times, right? But I think now the eschatological paradigm is now being kind of manifest over the threat, the opportunity, the benefits and the detriments of AI. I think AI, you know, to quote Yuval Noah Harari, another Jewish atheist, you see why I call myself about?

• 1:13:49Speaker 02

  Teaching at Hebrew University or something?

• 1:13:50Brian Keating?

  Yeah, yeah, which means it's not like a biblical seminary.

• 1:13:53Speaker 04

  The thing I've noticed about some of these Jewish scholars is they're basically pointing out, maybe AI is gonna bring about the end of all of us that passes.

• 1:14:02Brian Keating?

  That's what I'm saying. So say more, say more.

• 1:14:03Speaker 04

  Yeah. There's a couple of papers have been published in the astrophysical literature saying that in terms of our technological future.

• 1:14:12Speaker 04

  It's gonna come to a crashing halt in less than two hundred years. Basically making the point, AI is the first technology we're developing where it's expanding faster than we can control it.

• 1:14:23Brian Keating?

  Exactly.

• 1:14:24Speaker 04

  And, you know, given the nature of humanity, within two hundred years or less, uh, we're basically, AI is gonna bring an end to, maybe not us, but it's gonna bring an end to our ability to control technology.

• 1:14:37Brian Keating?

  That's right.

• 1:14:37Speaker 04

  And that could be the end of us.

• 1:14:39Brian Keating?

  I think that would be sort of what I call an AI event horizon, right? There may be a boundary beyond which we no longer control scientific discovery, factual, ontological, you know, kind of, uh, uh, fact gathering, so to speak, epistemologically. So, so how is it, how is it more relevant? Well, it's, it's upon us now. I mean, some say it's already been achieved. Uh, I don't actually believe that we've achieved AGI yet. I do believe it will have this transformative power, at least as big as the internet, uh, but, but probably some, you know, exponential power of that, uh, both in terms of benefit and in terms of curse. So it has this exact parallel. I talked with John C. Lennox on my podcast about his criticisms of Yuval Noah Harari's Homo Deus, which is, we have become gods. Well, that's the oldest story. I mean, literally the Tower of Babel, right?

• 1:15:24Brian Keating?

  I mean, it's literally, we are going up to make war, you know, to make a name for ourselves, right? What could be better than that? We're technological, we don't need God, we, we are gods, right? And some say in the astrophysical literature that it makes no sense to send, you know, the slime mold, the dolphin with the iPhone. It makes no sense to send that around. You could just send information. You could just send the AI via its source code and, and some blockchain on the cosmic world wide web or internet web, cosmic web, web, cosmic wide web. Uh, so, so how would that then impact us, right? So we might discover life, quote unquote, it might not pass the Ross test for a artificial spiritual intelligence, but it may be the more convenient parsimonious explanation of why we don't see biological life, right?

• 1:16:08Brian Keating?

  We're not, we're not, maybe, and maybe it's not transmitting on a frequency we can dial in with fine tuning. Maybe it's transmitting in some other fact, and, uh, what waveband neutrinos, gravitational waves or, or et cetera. So I'm just saying, the eschogological is on us now. It's not the end times, it's not the revelations, book acts and revelations. It's right now. And the question is, do we manage it? Can we steward it? Is it out of control? And is it, is it sort of already escaped the cage?

• 1:16:33Speaker 04

  AI or some other time window is going to come to a close. I think the basic conclusion is our hope cannot exist in the universe. Our hope has got to be elsewhere besides the universe if we have any hope at all. But what I find interesting, we humans seem to be programmed to search for hope. And we're all programmed for that. There has to be some actual rational hope out there.

• 1:16:58Brian Keating?

  That's right.

• 1:16:59Speaker 04

  And it can't be the universe. It's got to be beyond the universe.

• 1:17:01Brian Keating?

  I agree. The Psalm says, and you'll know the Psalm itself, but it says the Psalm. Man's days are but, you know, a passing, a passing wind, a passing shadow. A night watchman's shadow. I mean, it's incredible to think how brief it is and yet how amazing it is that we are the only creatures that have this ability to interrogate the universe.

• 1:17:18Speaker 04

  But would you agree that's a significant challenge to non-theism?

• 1:17:22Brian Keating?

  To that, that the existence of us as, as this, as this only species that we know.

• 1:17:27Speaker 04

  Or we're, we're this hopeful species and yet our hope can't last in this universe. It really seems like our hope has got to be elsewhere.

• 1:17:35Brian Keating?

  I guess it depends on what's the end of hope, you know, to probably Obama's 17th autobiography will be called The End of Hope or something. But, but my question is, is hope coming to an end with, from within or without? Is it the laws of physics, the laws of biology, the laws of our, our, you know, the micro world? Or is it the laws which are much harder? The laws of how we treat each other. And I think there's a much higher risk of existential demise from our fellow humans before we think about asteroid collisions or the big rip. I mean, it's, or even AGI. I mean, we might live in the final days, God forbid. But, but because of what we're doing with nuclear weapons and biological weapons, superintelligence, uncontrollable superintelligence.

• 1:18:15Speaker 04

  It reminds me of the debate I had with Victor Stenger where he was making the claim the universe is all there is. Well, the universe is all there is. We have no hope. Interestingly, he said, I agree. We have no more hope than a piece of rock or a piece of dust. That's it.

• 1:18:30Brian Keating?

  Yeah, that's the insignificance therapy, right?

• 1:18:32Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:18:33Speaker 02

  And at least in the Christian view, hope is a virtue, it's also a gift.

• 1:18:37Brian Keating?

  Right.

• 1:18:38Speaker 02

  A transcendent gift. And despair is somewhat looked down upon as a type of sin. To, literally despair means that there is no hope in God.

• 1:18:49Brian Keating?

  Right.

• 1:18:50Speaker 02

  And Christians are supposed to not give in to that.

• 1:18:54Brian Keating?

  It's true for Jews.

• 1:18:55Speaker 02

  And it's true for Jews.

• 1:18:56Brian Keating?

  The national anthem of Israel is called "Artikva," the hope.

• 1:18:58Speaker 02

  Right, right. Well, we're quickly running out of time here. Let me see if I can take one more question.

• 1:19:03Brian Keating?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:04Speaker 02

  And then we'll wrap things up. Just for you, Brian, real quick, so try to make it short. It's like, you know, explain the universe, but in two sentences.

• 1:19:13Brian Keating?

  I'm gonna buy it.

• 1:19:14Speaker 02

  What is your strongest argument against fine tuning as evidence for a creator or intelligent designer?

• 1:19:22Brian Keating?

  Yeah, so not to be too Bill Clintonian about it, but it depends on the meaning of fine tuning, right?

• 1:19:26Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:19:27Brian Keating?

  So, a lot of studies suggest things can be relatively coarsely tuned. It's not like tuning a radio, or violin, or guitar. That you'll have a kind of on-off switch, which will tell you in a binary Boolean fashion that you're not tuned or not, or are tuned. For example, the force of gravity can vary, you know, by some, some large fraction. We often hear that, oh, the cosmological constant has to be fine tuned, you know, to 120 orders of magnitude. It's a complete category error, that's actually not. The cosmological constant, which I said is Einstein's greatest blunder, but then came to be his greatest blunder. Because he called it his greatest blunder, it is actually an observable piece of evidence in our cosmological model. It could, it's basically completely insignificant.

• 1:20:08Brian Keating?

  It hasn't played a role in the history of the entire universe, including up to Jesus, to us, whatever you want to believe. It's come up, it has no bearing on it whatsoever. And we could vary it by a factor of, you know, 10, you know, probably 10 or more times. Nothing would happen, make it much smaller, nothing would happen, by a factor of 10. So, is that finely tuned? I mean, if I take, again, if I take a radio station on my frequency that I have to communicate with the air traffic control tower here in Pomona, and I tune it off by just a tiny bit, I cannot communicate. I will, you know, be fined by the FAA. That's extremely finely tuning, with huge consequences to my life and my finances. And my my ability to fly my safety, I could, God forbid, something could happen, right? That's exquisite. We have five digits on the on the radio dial and a and a and a and a plane like mine, a private airplane.

• 1:20:53Brian Keating?

  And if you're off by one of the last digit, you will not be able to communicate with anybody, and you will also possibly risk your life and other people's lives, and you'll be fined and sued. Right? That's fine tuning with a consequence immediate for me, right? But if I can tune that by a factor of 10, either direction, it doesn't matter. I would say it's not fine tuned. So I don't feel the fine tuning with the degree of of kind of of weight that that Hugh does in terms of believing and and and again, I don't like that word, belief. But I like reasons to believe. I like the I like and and that's the way my particular branch of, as I said, devout, practicing agnostic Jewish atheism, agnosticism, rather, i- is manifest. So it's it's.

• 1:21:34Speaker 02

  How would you comment on that? You I know there's a number of people would want to hear you comment what Brian is saying right there.

• 1:21:40Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think what's compelling for me is that the more we search for fine tuning, the more we find. It seems to have predictive value. People have made that comment about the anthropic principle. As we find evidence for the anthropic principle, it leads to other things we didn't expect to find. And it's like, the trail never ends. The evidence for fine tuning always increases, it never decreases, and the increase seems to be exponential just within the few decades in which we've been alive. One sense, I think it's a privilege to be alive in the 21st century. Because 200 years ago, we didn't have this these kinds of tools. Today, we do. And look what we found. And what is it revealing about our place in the universe, our time and place?

• 1:22:24Speaker 04

  And the fact that we seem to be at a very special location in the universe where we can see all this stuff. If we were close to the black hole in the in our galaxy, we wouldn't be able to make these observations. Or we were in the halo of our galaxy, wouldn't be able to do it. And we seem to be at this fine tuned place. So. I mean, everywhere you look for fine tuning, you seem to find it. And so I think that's a compelling argument.

• 1:22:49Brian Keating?

  I'll just give one counter example if I could, just to that again. There's nothing wrong. Give me about a minute. Okay, yeah. So, so I, I posted something recently on, on X, uh, which was, which is if you look at a circle inside of a square, and scrub a circle inside of a square, how much area is in the kind of corners? How much area does a circle occupy out of a given square, cube, et cetera, et cetera? And when you go into higher and higher dimensions, as you know, you're fond of talking about, and the string theory kind of, um, concept that you're just saying, actually, all of the, the, the inhabitable region, you'll get, you get within like a billionth of a percent of the perimeter of a sphere, of a hypersphere.

• 1:23:23Speaker 04

  If you have enough dimensions.

• 1:23:23Brian Keating?

  If you have enough dimensions, right? So if you were living in such a universe, like I live in the, in the outer skin, like one atom thick, one plank layer thick, of this vast cosmic universe, what are the odds of that? But there's not, that, it's more a statement about dimensionality than it is about the tuning that led to that, right? So we just have to be careful in what we count towards evidence that's exculpatory versus probative. And I, I, I think it's legitimate. I think there's absolutely consistent with your worldview. And I just, I'm more and more curious to learn, how do these different pieces of evidence from different fields, the consilience that we get from different fields in astronomy, tell us about, yeah, I'm all for viewing ourselves as important as having the only mandate that we know in the universe to interrogate it, as I said, as conscious entities?

• 1:24:07Brian Keating?

  And, and how we use that is, is at our peril if we use it incorrectly.

• 1:24:11Speaker 04

  Well, fine tuning can be just a statistic, like, you know, what are the odds of getting a particular hand in poker? It's the same for every hand. Uh, but when you bring in purpose, especially when you bring in multiple purposes, you know, that's something that we've been doing work on, and say, when you look at the universe, it seems to be fine tuned to fulfill at least 11 known distinct purposes. And I think this gives meaning to the fine tuning we're seeing. If we only saw fulfilling one purpose, you could say, well, maybe that's a statistical accident. Uh, but the fact that it's fulfilling multiple radically distinct purposes, I think gives it philosophical importance.

• 1:24:52Speaker 02

  Someone give me a book from the scholar community. So I ask this Hugh for fun. Would you baptize an extraterrestrial?

• 1:24:59Speaker 04

  Would I baptize an extraterrestrial? Depends on whether that extraterrestrial is capable of sin and has repented of their sin.

• 1:25:09Speaker 02

  Would you make him observe the Sabbath?

• 1:25:12Brian Keating?

  We're forbidden to force people to do that.

• 1:25:15Speaker 02

  To force people to do that, yeah, yeah. We just ask him, do you want to be baptized?

• 1:25:20Speaker 02

  Well, Ryan, thank you very, very much. You've been very gracious. Obviously, you have a depth of knowledge there. We have similar subjects that we're interested in, and we want to keep dialogues like this going on. I love your podcast. So where would you want to point people to discover more about you, your podcasts, some of your written work?

• 1:25:38Brian Keating?

  I think the main thing is, yeah, the YouTube channel. I have conversations with 25 Nobel laureates to date and scholars and thinkers like John Lennox. Next week, I'll have Stephen Meyer on again. So, yeah, it's kind of the intellectual salon I wish existed. You know, when I was in college and sleeping through lectures, and I've been able to create it with these, you know, geniuses from around the multiverse of minds that I get connected to.

• 1:26:01Speaker 02

  You really can get an education just listening to it.

• 1:26:03Brian Keating?

  Yeah, it's free, and you can take it, class in your pajamas. Which I don't allow my students at UCSD.

• 1:26:10Speaker 02

  What's the address for that?

• 1:26:11Brian Keating?

  It's Dr. Brian Keating on YouTube.

• 1:26:15Brian Keating?

  And the podcast audio is into the impossible.

• 1:26:17Speaker 02

  We have Star, Souls, and God is one podcast that you're on, Hugh. What about a book you would recommend for people?

• 1:26:25Speaker 04

  Well, an easy to read book I've written, it's called Why the Universe is the Way It Is. Relatively short, introduces the fine tuning argument, but especially focuses when we're talking about the multiple purposes for the fine tuning. And I find people really enjoy just like, oh, I had no idea that these purposes are relevant and actually all fit into the fine tuning. Why the Universe is the Way It Is.

• 1:26:50Speaker 02

  And you answer questions on Facebook and other places.

• 1:26:52Speaker 04

  I answer hundreds of questions, literally every day.

• 1:26:55Speaker 02

  Literally every day, every day. Well, we want to thank you for joining us on this livestream. Please, it helps us, hopefully it helps you. Be sure to subscribe to this RTB YouTube channel and see future livestreams that are coming. Brian, you know, people ask me when I get on a plane, they say, "Have a safe trip," and I say, "That's up to the pilot." But this is truly up to you. But have a safe travel. So, thank you for visiting us in person. It makes a huge difference. We appreciate you and your friend who came. Hugh, always great to have you, the time and the interaction. I look forward really to taking this further, hopefully someday.

• 1:27:33Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's been a fun conversation.

• 1:27:34Speaker 02

  Thank you for joining us.