Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Can You Find God in the Laws of Physics? This is World!

Episode Date: February 23, 2026

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

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Just steps from the water. The Hilton sale is on now. Book on Hilton.com or the Hilton app and save up to 20% to get the stay you expected. When you want savings, not surprises. It matters where you stay. Hilton for the stay. Do you believe in God? I say, no, I don't believe in God. I don't believe in gravity either. I have evidence for gravity. I'm looking for evidence that God exists. I'm an experimentalist. I'm not a theorist like Stephen Hawkins. 90% of American scientists do not believe in God. 90%. But scientists can't even prove a simple fact like the Earth is perfectly round. No, I work for myself. I work for the universe to find out what is the truth that we can measure. I don't care about 26 dimensions. Show me a problem.

Prediction. Before I die, I want to know answers to these questions. There are religious aspects of the Nobel Prize. The virtue of the steady state cosmologist is that they don't look like Genesis 1-1. One single beginning, a singularity perhaps. That means if Sir Roger is right, the Bible is falsified. Pleasure having you here. Does God exist? So I think that's one of the biggest questions that a human can ask. Does God exist? It means a lot of a lot of different things. And I'm glad you asked it that way. Most people say, do you believe in God? I say, no, I don't believe in God. I say, I don't believe in gravity either. I have evidence for gravity, right? So the question is, is there evidence for God? And so does God exist in that

hypothesis? It's certainly a hypothesis that is worthy of deep, deep consideration. And it's one that most of my colleagues, 90% of American scientists do not believe in God, do not profess a theistic belief or even the possibility. 90%. Either are atheists or they're basically agnostic, but leaning towards atheists. And it's a shame because you certainly can be a phenomenal scientist. You can be a phenomenal human being and not believe in God and not care about God. But as Einstein said, you know, science without religion is blind and religion without science is lame. So what does that mean? It means that even if you don't believe in God or the importance of the question of God, ignoring it denies at least part of what it means to be a human being,

which is the wonder of where did we come from? Where does it all originate from? Religious people will answer that as God. Secular people, atheists will say it's natural. It evolved the universe that I study with experiments, with telescopes, with computers, emerged from nothing and had no cause, no first mover, no personal God, no Savior, no Messiah. And obviously, you can be a good person and not believe in God. You can be a bad person and believe in God. There's many different options. For me, does God fit into the program of science? Certainly not necessary.

As I said, 90% of my colleagues. wouldn't make the progress they do. 90% of the Nobel Prize winners that I've talked to myself, they don't believe in God. So certainly they got pretty far without that hypothesis. My question is, can we obtain evidence for God's existence? Can we? My research is centered on the question of not proving God's existence,

because even in science, I can't prove to you that the Earth is round. Can't prove it. It is fundamentally impossible to prove that. in the same way that a mathematician can prove one plus one equals two. And you know a proof for one plus one equals two takes hundreds of pages of very abstract mathematics, but at least it can be done. But scientists can't even prove a simple fact like the earth is perfectly round or is round or has any shape whatsoever because necessarily one violation of that hypothesis negates or falsifies the hypothesis.

So I don't look for evidence of God. I look for disproves of the existence of God. Is there any room for God within, you know, the heart science, art physics? Absolutely. There is room for it. The question is, is it part of the scientific program? For example, I could hypothesize to you the following situation. God created the universe and set it up such that astronomers, cosmologists, experimentists like me,

would look for evidence of God and not find it, right? That's within God's powers. as the Judeo-Christian God, which is the only God I'm familiar with. I'm not familiar with other types of gods or God figures. Certainly not a polytheist in any way. I don't believe in Zeus or Thor and so forth. So at most, I could say that I believe in one God. But again, I don't say I believe in God. That's dangerous language. Don't ever say, I believe in gravity, right? You say we have evidence for gravity. If I drop something, it will do what it does. But it could the next day not do what it does every other day. The sun could not rise in the east, correct? Correct me,

if I'm wrong. Yeah. Do you look for God by trials and eras, you know, like scientists look for gravitational waves? Yes, so exactly. So I do, but not in the way that you just phrased it, but adjacent to what you just say. Here's the way I look at it. There are certain postulates of the religion that I've practiced. I'm a practicing Jew, okay? So I practice, so I practice Judaism, but in the sense that Judaism is a religion based on practice. It's not a faith-based religion as Christianity is. Christianity emerged from Judaism, but they're very separate, or else they'd be the same thing. In Judaism, there's a notion of active participation and active engagement, and it's not faith-based. I cannot say I believe in Jesus Christ as my

Lord and Savior and achieve the rewards that Jesus died on the cross for his believers. Okay? That doesn't exist in Judaism. What Judaism is a series of rules, of practices that are intended to be both positive and negative. For example, you should rest every seven days on the Sabbath, on Saturday. I do that. I don't work. I wouldn't remember you wanted to have this interview potentially tomorrow, which is a Saturday. I said, sorry, I don't work on Saturdays. I don't send emails. I can't get in touch with me. I'm with my family. I'm with my community. I'm with my temple. I'm doing things actively. I am practicing. Do you understand? But I also have things I can't do. I cannot eat pork. I cannot eat shrimp. And there are no reasons for those.

The Torah, the Old Testament, doesn't say, don't eat this because of X, Y, or Z. And this is important. If it did, it would be open to what I do do. I didn't tell you what I do yet. I told you what I can't do. I can't prove the Earth is a sphere. Remember, I said that. I don't do that.

I prove negatives or I look for falsifications. For example, if it is claimed the universe began in a Big Bang, and I find evidence that disputes that or refutes that, there's some evidence that the universe is not expanding or is older or is contracting, right? That would violate the Big Bang hypothesis. That would falsify in the language of Carl Popper. That would falsify the existence of the Big Bang cosmology or cast it into the, a serious doubt. Is the big bank push the creator out of the picture or put him into it?

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

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

Is science without a wisdom of the Torah just useless? It's not useless at all. It's beautiful. It may be the only glimpse that we have of the creator if the creator exists. I have to say as a scientist, again, I don't believe in God. I don't believe in not God. I am what is called an agnostic that practices. So what does that mean?

agnostics typically mean I can't know. It means unknowable. It means a question that has no answer. Like, what is the sound of one hand clapping, like a colon? I don't mean it like that. Most agnostics, people that say they're agnostic, the very first guest on my podcast was a man by the name of Freeman Dyson. Very famous physicist. He was incredible.

He was a very, very famous agnostic. He won the Templeton Prize. I said, Freeman, you said you're an agnostic. And he said, that's right. And I said, your friend, Richard Dawkins, says he's an atheist. Correct? He said, yes. And I've interviewed Richard many times.

And I said, well, let me ask you a question. If somebody from space on another planet was looking at you and was looking at Richard Dawkins on a Sunday, what would they observe being different between you, Freeman, and him, Richard? You both are not going to the same church. Freeman didn't go to church. So I said, in practice, how do you distinguish between your agnosticism and his atheism? And he said he couldn't. There's really no difference.

Most people use agnosticism as a cop-out, as an excuse. I don't want to say that there's no God. Maybe, as Stephen Hawking said, if you mention God, you get more book sales. He said that. He said if you have equations in your books, you lose book sales. So he was kind of reluctant to admit. but he was an atheist. Stephen Hawking was an atheist. So these questions are very important, but most scientists will lie to themselves or lie to other people and either say they know for sure

there's no God, which is something you cannot know and you cannot prove, or they'll say, I'm agnostic, which means I don't do anything. I'm saying what I'm saying is I'm different. I don't know if God exists. I'm looking for evidence that God exists. I'm also looking for evidence that the Torah could be wrong. Hawking argue that gravity allows the universe to, that's a quote, allows the universe to create itself from nothing. Yes. So if the laws of physics are sufficient for the Big Bang,

isn't God redundant? So it's very good that you brought that up, because the very last lines of his very most famous book, a brief history of time, says that when we do come upon the thing that, breathes fire into these equations, the thing that gives rise to string theory, that was his main motivation, and M theory, which is a derivative of string theory, he said, quote, then we will know the mind of God. That's unusual. The mind of God. The last three words of his most famous book,

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

I am not a theorist, but that means something very specific. Theorist can speculate. Brian Green's most famous book, what is it? The denominator to the Pulitzer Prize, right? Yes. I don't remember the title, but I know that book. Yeah, so he's had many, many books. His most famous book.

It was 20 years ago, right? Yeah, it's 25 years ago. 25 years ago. So the fabric of reality is one of his book. Right. So he talks about string theory. You know, you're not an expert, but you know string theory has made zero predictions. Yeah, but it's a beautiful mathematical.

Beautiful mathematical. But it's not math. It's physics, right? It purports to be, as Stephen Hawking said, the mind of God, right? The operating system for the universe. So they can speculate on something, string theorists, theorists in general, and they can have a very productive career, Mitch Yokaku. His book, I think it was called the God equation, right? That was about string theory.

He's not believer or not disbelief. I think he considered himself an agnostic. You'll look back at your wonderful interview with him. We can see. He's a theorist. There's no way to prove or disprove string theory. And there might not ever be. An experimentalist like me, if I put on my grant application, I may never, ever have an answer.

I may never ever have a test, right? I will get zero dollars. I cannot do that. Experimentalists have to be confronted by the hardcore reality that what we're doing could be completely wrong, could yield a null result, but at least it's bold and assertive enough to make a prediction that this experiment, if successful, will tell us X. If it fails, it will tell us why. That will reduce the island of ignorance, is a perimeter. It will decrease the ocean of ignorance that surrounds the island of knowledge, as John Archerbold Wheeler called it. That's what we do

is experimentalists. I don't prove them right. I don't work for Brian Green, despite having the same first name? No, I work for myself. I work for the universe to find out what is the truth that we can measure. I don't care about 26 dimensions. Show me a prediction. What does it say I can go out with my telescopes and my colleagues and my computers and my graduate students and measure before I die? I want to know answers to these questions. How did the universe begin? Is there room for God? That's an absolutely legitimate question to him. I remember my interview with Michukaku, I've asked him if we can look for God using statistics. Where do you stand on this? Is the universe designed for us or did we just get lucky in a multiverse? Right now, the statistics

that you mentioned are horrific. If I wanted to say, what is the population, what's the average height of a unicorn? You couldn't answer that question. You know, There aren't any unicorns that we know about. There's zero statistical, right? Right now there's six white rhinoceruses on Earth, right? I say, what's the average weight of a white rhinoceros? There's six of them. If I ask, what's the average weight of an adult human male?

There's three and a half billion or four billion of us, right? We can get an average, very tight statistics, very good mean, median, average mode, all those things. But for things where only one thing exists, like a universe, right? Uni means one, right? multiverse means multiple. But we don't know there's a multiverse. We only know of our universe. Right now, if you said,

what are the average statistics of planets that have life? There's only one that we know about out of perhaps 10th to the 24th planets in the observable universe. There could be that many planets, but we don't know of any of them that have life. So we only have one statistics. So the only average that we have has zero.

Now, when you do mathematically, when you construct the average and the standard deviation, you divide by numbers like the total population, population minus one. So therefore, with only one thing, N equals one, one minus one in the denominator, that expression blows up and is meaningless. So we can't say anything about either God, our universe, until we have multiple copies and enough to do statistical analysis on, for life on other planets, I'm optimistic that we can at least create statistical ensembles of potentially habitable planets and then ask why or why do they not have life on them.

For universes, this may be the only universe. And so asking about the questions of, is it designed for us? Well, if there's only one universe, it might lead people, including, you know, Nikolai Copernicus, who I'm sure you're familiar with. Polish scientists, one of the greatest in all time. He had no other evidence. But remember, he published the revolution of us. How do you say that in Polish, by the way? Oh, obrotas svernybiers.

That's beautiful. Thank you for saying. I've never heard a real poll say that. about a blue sphere. Now, he published it. Do you know when he published that book? The day he died. Why didn't he publish it before he died?

Have no idea. He was probably a little nervous. After all, what happened to Bruno, 60 years later, what happened to Galileo, 80 years later, it could have happened to him. In other words, proposing the heliocentric universe where we have this seemingly demotion of the earth from being the center of the universe to the sun being the center of the universe, that was a big blow to religious doctrine. So for centuries, scientists have been terrified of the God question.

It's sort of like we have it in our, in our Richard Dawkins might say we have it in our phenotype, like something extended from our, not just our genes, our DNA. There's something about the zeitgeist, as he calls it, or something about science that is currently in a natural state of fear, perhaps resulting from the oppression and suppression of scientists going back hundreds of years by the Catholic Church, unfortunately. And for very abstract reasons, I have a great deal of affection for the Catholic Church because I was actually an altar boy in a Catholic Church before I became more committed to Judaism. So I've been a Catholic and I've been Jewish. But nevertheless, despite loving both religions, the Catholic Church did, unfortunately, accuse Galileo of heresy. He wasn't killed.

He was put into a prison, which was his home in Archetri, Italy, where I've been many. times, actually hosted a conference on relativity in his house slash dungeon prison in 2015 to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the theory of general relativity. A wonderful thing. And he was in prison there because of his production of the dialogo, which suggested that the earth orbits around the sun. Even at that point, even 200, 300 years later in 1992, he was never pardoned by the Catholic Church.

Pope John Paul II was a wonderful Pope. from your homeland, right? He said that Galileo was right, but he never pardoned him. So scientists have a natural distrust of religion. I'm not saying today we're going to be persecuted by the Catholic Church. There's no such entity. Even the Trump administration or Biden. They can't have these powers over life and death or imprisonment and freedom for scientists. But I think there's still something in the extended DNA of a scientist that doesn't like to talk about God. Because of this past history, which was dangerous and maybe anti-scientific to harm scientists in the past. So maybe it's a natural reason my fellow scientists don't like to talk about it.

But I love to talk about it. Do you truly believe that someone on other side hears you? Maybe that's creation of our brain. Certainly a lot of people believe that God didn't create man, but man created God. Many more people believe God is dead. But for God to be dead, he had to. exist, right? Many people believe in multiple gods. Many people on a prosaic level worship idols, you know, that are that are money, fame, power, influence, science, the Nobel Prize.

These are all idols that are to one level or another become obsessions, not unlike gods, not unlike religion. For example, the Nobel Prize ceremony, you went to one of them. You went to one of the announcements. Two times. Two times. Wow. I've nominated people two times. But, But since my books have come out, maybe they'll never invite me because I'm quite critical of some of their... Why? Yes. Very good. But I don't criticize the winners because the winners cannot.

The only thing they tell you when you get a nomination form, you cannot nominate yourself. That's one of the things they tell you. So I never criticize the winners. And I've had 22 of them on my podcast so far. And I love their minds and they've sat in that chair and we have wonderful conversations. So my criticism never directed at the person only at the institution. But the institution has rituals. It has garments.

It has food. It has ceremonies. Do you know what day the Nobel Prizes? Do you remember what day they're given away? In December 9th. December 10th. Yes, December 10th. And do you know why that date is important?

Why the date? Why do they choose December 10th? No. That's Alfred Nobel's death day. Death day, right? Not his birthday. You're right. You're a good point.

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

Resurrection. Perfect. Okay, good. So when you look at that, you see that there are religious aspects of the Nobel Prize, literally. You have a golden image. I have a copy of the Nobel Prize here. It's a gilded. You'll show maybe an image of it, right?

A golden engraven image, Second Commandment. Do not make golden engraven images of other gods. Now, if people worship the Nobel Prize, they do worship it. I worshipped it for many years. It was my obsession. I wanted to win it. I wanted to be the best scientist. I wanted to do it for something that would be in arguably the greatest discovery of all time,

which was detecting whether or not the universe began in a singularity and began with what's called inflationary expansion. We can talk about that. And that certainly you are because famously you lost. Potentially, right. That's right. So my book, my first book is called losing the Nobel Prize as opposed to winning it because we were at the precipice for an experiment that I created called Bicep at the South

Pole in Antarctica, where I've been many times. That experiment claimed, we claimed that we captured the very first radiation in the universe, Long before the CMB, that I say, the cosmic microwave background, the light afterglow of the Big Bang, the fusion of the first elements on the periodic table, long, long before that, billions of billions of billions of seconds after the singularity of the universe coming into existence, we said we saw that radiation. It wasn't light. It was gravity. Waves of gravity, not unlike the gravitational wave detectors called LIGO and Lisa that they tried to detect. and have detected from black holes. This is from the emergence of the universe, creating a background of radiation in the form of gravity.

We claimed we detected it. We later found out what we actually saw were these particles of dust in our galaxy, not in the cosmos, not a blunder, not a mistake, not some stupid error or some typo. We actually saw stuff in space that was astrophysical, resulting from the explosion of a star that lived in our galaxy. a billion years before our sun. And those explosions, called type 2 supernova, produce microscopic grains of dust that exactly mimic the signal we were searching for. Is God to falsify? So, what I look for to do a falsification, you have to have a hypothesis.

You have to make a prediction. I predict when I drop a pencil, it will fall. Okay? That means, and my theory of gravity suggests that the pencil is being attracted to the center of the earth by the much more massive gravitational gravitational. gravitational force of all the atoms on Earth is pulling this relatively small amount of matter in the form of a pencil and is falling towards the ground, correct? That's a, that's Newton's theory of gravity. If I make one observation and I drop it and it goes up, the theory is falsified,

right? I've disproven at least that version of Newton's theory of gravity. That's a simple example. So what you do to falsify something? You ask for a prediction, but you ask for how could that prediction be proven wrong. You don't just say, how could I take my ticket to Stockholm? How do I get invited to win my Nobel Prize? No, you have to say, what are all the ways I could be wrong? Not right. That's a trap. I fell into that trap. That's why we lost the Nobel Prize in part. We were so obsessed with proving this hypothesis of inflationary gravitational waves that we initially at first suggested that any evidence that we saw that counteracted that, namely from Dost or something else, we said we could exclude that. Now we know better. And so our new experiments like the Simon's Observatory

and the Bicep array, they're all saying we have to not only look for what you want to see, but all the ways that you could falsify your dreams, crush your spirit, and be disillusioned forever because you could be wrong. You always have to assume you're wrong, not right. I know scientists who think that when you think of God in science, we expose physics to the charge of being unfalsifiable. There are aspects of what is considered mainstream physics that are unfalsifiable. We already talked about string theory. String theory is not currently in its current manifestation, tomorrow it could change, is not falsifiable. And there are other things that are not falsifiable.

But inflation, which is what I study, is currently not really falsifiable. But here's the crucial thing. The alternatives, the contenders to take inflation's place, they are falsifiable. They're falsifiable by the very type of experiment that I'm trying to do. In other words, you cannot prove inflation. You also can't falsify inflation. You cannot disprove or prove that the universe began in the hyper-expansion of singularity. So what will you do if your observatory?

shows the inflation theory is wrong? Well, again, we can never say that it's wrong because it's unfalsifiable. That doesn't mean it's bad. It makes predictions. We can falsify another type of a model. So the model, for example, I already gave you an example. The static universe, we can falsify that. We can also falsify what's called a cyclical or bouncing universe.

So the chief alternatives, Roger Penrose has one of these. You've interviewed Roger Penrose many times. One of his models is that the universe never undergoes inflation. It undergoes expansion at the end of what are called aeons or eons. He calls them eons that are driven by a new type of dark matter particle called an aerobon. He has a very involved theory. It's called a conformal cyclic universe. We will ignore the details of the mathematics, but we'll say one thing.

It predicts that there will be no waves of gravity from the singularity because there is no singularity. There'll be no inflationary background of gravitational waves, which we believe, if inflation takes place, imprints on the cosmic microwave background, a telltale pattern, a swirling pattern of polarization called B mode polarization. If we see that B mode polarization, it doesn't prove inflation's right. It gives a lot of evidence towards inflation, but it disproves Sir Roger Penrose's Nobel Prize winner's theory that the universe has a cyclical behavior. that's a tremendous thing, right? If you believe that the universe is cyclical, getting back to your questions about God, and I know that you want to talk about these big picture things, the Torah, Old Testament Bible, states there was a beginning, in the beginning, right?

That's the first sentence in Hebrew, Baratius, Borough, Elohim, which means in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. That means there was a beginning. One single beginning, a singularity, perhaps. That means if Sir Roger is right, the Bible is, falsified. Do you understand? I need to ask you one more time from the prism of God. Yeah. What will you do if silence in B mode means the universe had no beginning? That would be... That's one of the option, right? Yes, it's one of the options, absolutely. I am

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

That's also debatable. So what I'm saying is if there's a concrete prediction, right? If the Torah, the Bible, makes a prediction, then it's subject to falsifiability. That's a good thing. That's a good thing. It should risk things, right? Let's take one giant step back. Go back to 1919.

Again, Einstein's smartest man on earth. Nobel Prize has been around for 18 years at this point. and every single scientist on Earth and every single practicing scientists for hundreds of years, thousands maybe, going back to Aristotle, believe the universe is eternal, static, and unchanging. All of a sudden, by 1929, fast forward 10 years, Hubble says the universe is not static, it's not unchanging,

and Lemaître says it was actually smaller and compact in the past. That means the universe has been expanding and it started, he called it a primeval Adam, a Big Bang. He coined the term Big Bang was coined by Fred Hoyle, but it was made as a pejorative as an insult. They were saying things that were consistent, and in fact, they hated the Bible. Fred Hoyle was an atheist. The man who used to occupy this office right here where we are at UC San Diego, Jeffrey

Burbage was an atheist. They hated Genesis. They had a model called the quasi-steady state universe. they did not believe in God and they said, and even Stephen Weinberg said, the virtue of the steady-state cosmologist is that they don't look like Genesis 1-1. So do you understand? Scientists wanted to believe in this model that was the least like the Torah. But for thousands of years, the Torah has stood and then all of a sudden it's still valid now 3,000 years after it was written. That's pretty remarkable. So it is falsifiable. And if it gets falsified, the scientist part of it.

of me will rejoice because it's so rare you get new data. Look, we've been waiting with the Einstein cosmology for more or less 100 years now without much change. I don't know how much longer I'm going to be alive for. I want my experiment to surprise me. I don't want to look anymore for the thing that gets me the Nobel Prize. I want to look for the truth. Correct me if I'm wrong. The Bible says let there be lied and the science says the Big Bang. Could that be the same thing? Could that be the same moment? It could be, but I am very cautious. I never look at the Bible as a science book, and I never look at my textbooks as a book of wisdom. Stephen Hawking was a brilliant scientist. I don't choose to raise my children or determine what I do on Saturday mornings or determine what

food I eat or don't eat based on what Stephen Hawking believed. He was just a man. We know he's just a man. We know he's dead. He was a he was. a great, brilliant brain. He accomplished much and inspired me tremendously. But he was a human being. He was not a God. He didn't claim to be a God. I don't look to him for wisdom. I look to people, Jesus. I look to Moses. I look to Buddha. I look to the Stoics who weren't, you know, classically, there weren't Judeo-Christians. I look to ancient wisdom for what wisdom can provide. I never look at Epictetus and say, tell me about the gravitational radiation. It's a stupid thing to try to do. So too, I look at the Torah and I say, is the Torah, does it even say it is a book about

science? Let's look at the Torah. Do you know, well, I'll just tell you. The Torah in Hebrew, which I've read completely seven times over at least, it has 35,000 verses. Like you said, let there be light. That's verse two, right? Three, there's 35,000 other verses in the Torah. The first 30 have to do with the Big Bang, Adam and E, not the Big Bang, but the origin of the universe, the creation of the Earth and the Sun, the heavens, the animals, the beasts of the field, then finally man on day six, and then day seven, nothing happened. That's the end of the creation story, right? So 30 verses divided by 30,000, just round numbers, that's 0.1%. So this book, if I take one of my textbooks there, and there's one page out of a third. thousand that's about the topic on the cover. You'd say, this is not a book about quantum mechanics.

This is a book about the New York Yankees. It's got 99 pages about the New York Yankees, one page about quantum mechanics, and it's called quantum mechanics? No, no, this is not a book. This is misty. So the Torah, the Bible, the Old Testament, is not a science book. The sun is created on day four. Why is that? The sun and the moon aren't created on day one. Why do we have even a day? Is it 24 hours? We don't know. It's written to do something completely different. The Torah puts the sun and the moon on the fourth day for a very specific reason that was related to polytheism. People worship the sun and the moon, even to this day, people worship the sun and the moon. But 3,500 years ago, they were obsessed with the sun of the moon, right?

The Egyptian sun god, Ra, the lunar god, la, Allah, whatever it's called in Middle Eastern religions. That object is of worship. People worship it, right? So the question is, what was the Torah trying to do? It's a book of wisdom, not a book of science. It's not saying planetary geology and how the moon formed. It's saying, no, this is something not to be worship because God didn't even get around to create it. If you believe in God, if you have evidence for God or want to have bolster your faith in God, he created it on the fourth day.

He didn't even think of it on the first day. I have my own idea, by the way, how to connect quantum mechanics and God. Okay, go for it. Maybe you'll win the Nobel Prize. Because quantum mechanics suggest the observer is fundamental to your reality. Is it possible that universe required consciousness to exist a prime observer? Maybe God has creation of our brain and our consciousness. Maybe this is that is missingly.

Sure. You can certainly believe that. Many thousands of brilliant people have believed it. I don't think you can be a. Christian or Judeo-Christian and believe it, because not only do the Judeo-Christian tradition believe in the Creator, prime mover God that created the heavens and the earth, but also that it is a personal God, that Jesus died for your sins. He was resurrected to cleanse the world. He came to obviate original sin, right? In Christianity. In Judaism, we have different notions

of what the personal gods, you know, demands of us are, whatever. It's not important. So, yes, in Aristotle's language, the prime mover was created and then he created, or it created the universe and then put everything in motion and then disappeared. But obviously Aristotle was wrong about almost every scientific fact that he ever projected, that he thought heavy things fall faster than light things, for example. He thought that men and women have different numbers of teeth. You know, I always wondered, was he married? Like, couldn't he ask Mrs. Aristotle? Could you open your mouth, honey? I want to check out to see if you have the same number of teeth?

But he didn't do that, right? So he wasn't an observer. He didn't, but he could have falsified. This is what I'm saying. A scientist who's good, and he was a great scientist, but a good scientist should always look. Now, how can I be right and win a shiny, golden, graven image? No, how could I be wrong?

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