Pints With Aquinas - 136: God, the Big Bang, and the Multiverse, with Dr. Stephen Barr

Episode Date: December 11, 2018

Today I sit down with theoretical particle physicist, Stephen Barr to discuss God, the Big Bang, and the Multiverse. SPONSORS EL Investments: https://www.elinvestments.net/pints Exodus 90: https://exodus90.com/mattfradd/  Hallow: http://hallow.app/mattfradd  STRIVE: https://www.strive21.com/  GIVING Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/mattfradd This show (and all the plans we have in store) wouldn't be possible without you. I can't thank those of you who support me enough. Seriously! Thanks for essentially being a co-producer coproducer of the show. LINKS Website: https://pintswithaquinas.com/ Merch: https://teespring.com/stores/matt-fradd FREE 21 Day Detox From Porn Course: https://www.strive21.com/ SOCIAL Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mattfradd Twitter: https://twitter.com/mattfradd Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mattfradd MY BOOKS  Does God Exist: https://www.amazon.com/Does-God-Exist-Socratic-Dialogue-ebook/dp/B081ZGYJW3/ref=sr_1_9?dchild=1&keywords=fradd&qid=1586377974&sr=8-9 Marian Consecration With Aquinas: https://www.amazon.com/Marian-Consecration-Aquinas-Growing-Closer-ebook/dp/B083XRQMTF/ref=sr_1_4?dchild=1&keywords=fradd&qid=1586379026&sr=8-4 The Porn Myth: https://www.ignatius.com/The-Porn-Myth-P1985.aspx CONTACT Book me to speak: https://www.mattfradd.com/speakerrequestform

G'day there! Welcome to Pints with Aquinas. My name is Matt Fradd. If you could sit down over a pint of beer with Thomas Aquinas and ask him any one question, what would it be? Today we're going to talk to Thomas Aquinas about the origins of the universe and the Kalam argument and the multiverse, which of course he knew nothing about. That's why we are joined around the bar table by theoretical particle physicist Stephen Barr. Enjoy the show. Dr. Stephen Barr, thanks for being on Pints with Aquinas. Well, thanks for having me on. Dr. Stephen Barr, thanks for being on Pints with Aquinas.

Well, thanks for having me on. Yeah, now you probably don't remember this, but I was at the Thomistic Institute Faith and Science Symposium. Yeah, a couple of months ago when you spoke. Oh, okay. So you were in the audience. Yeah, I really enjoyed your talk. A lot of it went over my head, I'm not going to lie. Well, a lot was about Aquinas, so I hope it didn't go over your head. Well, it was more the scientific, cosmological sort of stuff. But I found it fascinating nonetheless.

But, hey, tell our listeners a bit about yourself and the work you're involved in before we get underway. Well, I'm a physicist by trade. My field is theoretical particle physics. And I'm a professor at the University of Delaware. But I have a second career I do in my spare time, which is I write about science and religion. I frequently lecture about it. And a couple of years ago, some colleagues and I started the Society of Catholic Scientists, which is an international organization of Catholic scientists, which maybe we could talk about later on. Right. Theoretical particle physicist.

Yeah. That sounds really impressive. What does that mean? Well, it's one of the... Let's think of the Big Bang Theory, you know? Right. Well, actually, some of the physicists on that show are supposed to be particle physicists. So particle physics is the branch of physics that tries to find out what are the fundamental constituents of matter, what are the fundamental forces by which they interact, and what are the fundamental laws that govern all of that. and what are the fundamental laws that govern all of that. Some people regard it as the most fundamental branch of physics.

They might get an argument about that. I'm a theorist. Scientists, at least physicists, are generally divided into theorists and experimentalists, and I'm on the theoretical side. I remember, I think it was Stephen Hawking in that movie said that cosmology was like a religion for atheists. Do you find that many people in your field are atheists? Well, there are quite a few atheists, no question about it. I've never surveyed my colleagues, so I don't know to what extent they're just indifferent

to the question, whether they have well-considered opinions, whether they're agnostics, atheists. But there are, you know, a not insignificant minority of scientists and people in my field who are religious. We're not the majority. You don't get a lot of the airtime, do you, though? No, we don't. We're not the majority, but on the other hand, let's put it this way, we're not as rare as hen's teeth. To give you an example, we just started the Society of Catholic Scientists the summer of 2016, so it's only a little over two years, and we already have over 860 members. And those are, for the most part, PhD scientists. Quite a lot are in my field, actually.

I think that probably two dozen of our members are theoretical particle physicists, some very well-known ones, well-known in our field, let me say. People should not get the impression that the world of science is a wasteland as far as religious belief goes. There are a significant number of scientists who are religious. Even in that show we referenced a moment ago, Big Bang Theory, Sheldon's mom is the kind of caricatured religious woman who they always make fun of as being anti-scientific. So that is the impression you get from a lot of mainstream shows. It is, it is. Were you a Catholic, what, your whole life? Yes, I'm a cradle Catholic. My mother was a cradle Catholic. My father actually only was baptized at the age of 79. Wow. So in my family, my father was a skeptic, attracted to Catholicism, but nevertheless, it took him a while to overcome his ingrained skepticism.

But he raised us. He thought it very important that we be raised Catholic, and he knew a lot about the faith and about the history of the church. And he knew a lot about the faith and about the history of the church. So, yeah, I'm a cradle Catholic, but my father was an example of a highly intelligent person who was not Catholic. And so maybe that made me think more about these issues, you know. Well, when my mom gets to brag about her son, she says he runs a podcast. But your dad got to say that he was a physicist. So, I mean, he must have been really proud of you. And as someone who you say was maybe naturally skeptical, did you all have questions and conversations about the big things in life? Well, yes, we had some conversations, not a large number of them.

But, yeah, we talked about religious things from time to time. Yeah, so, yeah, we talked about religious things from time to time. Yeah, so, yeah, he – yeah, go ahead. Sorry. In becoming, like, a scientist, did that challenge your faith, or did it strengthen it? I would say it, in the long run, strengthened it. strengthened it. I don't think I ever really had a series of doubts. To use the distinction of John Henry Newman, Cardinal Newman, well, blessed John Henry Newman, I guess we should say now. Is he a saint yet? I don't know. Well, he said, you know, a thousand difficulties don't make one doubt. And I had a number of difficulties, especially as a teenager, as a young adult, many detailed questions about the faith, things that I wanted to think through and try to make sense of.

But I don't really think I ever had doubt. And certainly not – and to the extent I had difficulties, they were not really coming from science. And to the extent I had difficulties, they were not really coming from science. The questions that I thought a lot about were more philosophical, were things coming from history, were aspects of the doctrines of the church, theological questions. There's really nothing in science. And I've been – I was interested in science. I knew I was going to be a scientist from the time I could talk, really. Why was that? What was it? I was one of those little nerdy guys, I guess sort of like Sheldon Hooper, is that his name? I was one of the, I mean, I loved math.

I mean, when my brothers were all out playing touch football in the park, I was curled up with books on recreational math, doing puzzles and solving math problems. So I always knew I was going to go into science. But it's never – never did science or anything discovered by science – did I find that problematic from the point of my faith. Now, I don't mean to dwell on this because, as you say, there are a lot of Catholic kind of physicists and intellectuals. But that said, I mean, the kind of public assumption seems to be that if you're a high-level scientist like yourself, that you wouldn't be a man of faith.

Do you tend to encounter people who look at you quizzically when they find out that you're both a faithful Catholic and a scientist? Well, as I always say, I don't know what people say behind my back. But, you know, I don't think most people, well, most people didn't know in my field, probably didn't know I was religious until, well, maybe 10, 20 years ago. Because I, like many others, if you're in the academic world, and you are somewhat out of step, again, and you are somewhat out of step. Again, not that all my colleagues are atheists, but anyway. But you tend to, especially when you're young, you tend to keep your head down a little bit.

If your views on whatever, politics or religion or anything, are a little bit out of step with your academic environment, you play it safe and you don't go around publicizing the fact. You know, later in my career, when I was more secure, when I had a reputation, you know, then I was not so afraid of showing, you know, that I was Catholic. And so I started writing and speaking about it. People found out. And I didn't encounter any, well, hardly any hostility. I didn't notice that anyone thought less of me as a scientist. I'd already built up a reputation as a scientist, and so people knew I was a good scientist. But I'd never known.

There were only been two occasions in my life where I faced actual hostility from a fellow scientist when they found out that I was religious. And it kind of startled me because it was so, you know, it was not what I normally experienced. Yeah, I wonder if he thought you were a young earth creationist or something like that. No, it's just one colleague, this was about 15, 20 years ago, and I said something that made him realize I was religious, and he turned on me with a kind of fury. And we were waiting for a red light to turn at the crosswalk, and he turned on me with a sort of anger in his face and said, how can you, a scientist, be religious?

But as I said, that was one of only two times in my whole life that I've experienced. You know, this is me psychologizing, but I wonder if he was raised in a religious home. It seems to me when I encounter these YouTube atheists who are frothing at the mouth a bit that most of them were raised in a fundamentalist type home. Well, no, he wasn't raised in a fundamentalist home, but I'm sure he was raised in an atheist home. That is, I think, well, I think a lot of people who are atheists or hostile to religion in the scientific world are probably – so before they became scientists. That is, they were probably raised – or as you say, some people are raised in very fundamentalist homes and react against that because to them that is what religion is all about. But it's not usually that – there are not that many cases where you have a very devout, knowledgeable religious person who goes into science as a religious person. And then because of what he or she discovers in research, what they discover or what they learn in graduate school or in their own research suddenly become an atheist. I don't think that's what normally happens. Right. So, even if it were true that

the vast majority of people in your field were atheists, correlation doesn't show causation, right? Yeah. Right. And a lot of it is sociological. Who knows? I mean, you know that probably, I think there have been polls that show the overwhelming majority of journalists, for example, are non-religious. Journalists attend church at far smaller rates than the general population. That's not because, as journalists, they've discovered something. They have some sort of inside knowledge which makes them realize there's no God. It's because certain types of people go into certain types of fields. There's a lot of sociology there. And people raised, people who go into science are often, actually, they often pick up, they often learn a myth, the historical myth.

One of the things that contributes to the belief that science and religion are at odds is a widespread belief that historically science and religion have been at war and that religious institutions and religious people have tried to suppress science. fair as typifying the 400 years of modern science, whereas it was really an extremely atypical event. Most of scientific history, certainly the first few hundred years of modern science, say 250 years, almost all the great scientists were religious themselves. But people going into science learn this lore that science and religion have been and are sort of inherently at odds with each other. So, I think a lot of it, people are socialized into this belief that religion and science are incompatible. Yeah. Well, that leads us to our next point here, speaking of this science-faith thing. Which insights of St. Thomas Aquinas do you think are most helpful in thinking about this science-faith questions that come up today? Well, I'm glad you asked that, because I think the soundest

basis on which to approach the kinds of questions and science-faith questions that arise today are the most solid basis of the thought of Thomas Aquinas and St. Augustine, I should say. With Aquinas, there are a number of really important insights that he had. I can't say they were all original to him completely, but one of the most important when you come to cosmology is the distinction between the beginning of the universe and creation. Many people tend to identify that. And of course, you know, the first words of scripture are, in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. And many people, very sophisticated people and ordinary people,

tend to see creation as something, as equivalent to beginning. So, creation is something that equivalent to beginning. So, creation is something that happened a long time ago at the beginning, and only at the beginning. God did something at the beginning, and that was the act of creation. Push the domino, as it were. Right. And so, they think of, they identify those two things. And that's a very dangerous, first of all, it's not right, but it's also a very dangerous way to think. Because then they believe that, well, if science can explain what happened at the beginning of the universe, then somehow you won't need God. This is what atheists think, and many religious people think that way, too.

Um, the, what St. Thomas, however, saw that beginning and creation were two distinct ideas, and that they didn't necessarily imply each other. So, for example, he thought that you could prove, one could prove by know that the natural light of reason could demonstrate that or allows one to demonstrate that, but he did not think that it could be proven that the universe had a beginning that it has a finite age or to be more precise there were no arguments that he knew of that he saw as compelling. He didn't say it couldn't be proven, but he said that he had not seen any arguments.

And he was pretty strong on this point too, wasn't he? Right. He said that all the arguments that claimed to prove that the universe had a beginning, he said, have no compelling force. And this would be like William Lane Craig's kind of Kalam argument, at least the philosophical side of it today. So Aquinas would presumably disagree with Craig and Al-Ghazali and Bonaventure. Right. Philosophical arguments. Right, yes. Bonaventure and I think St. Albert the Great, some other great medieval, other great scholastic theologians, some of them felt that if the universe is created, then it must have had a beginning.

And there have been philosophers who argue that if the universe had a beginning, that that in itself proves that it is created. That is the Kalam argument. As you say, William Lane Craig. I think that's a dangerous way to think. In the first place, it's not, if you're going to base your proof of the existence of God on the fact the universe had a beginning, you first have to prove, if at all possible, just from reason. St. Thomas said, we only know the universe had a beginning because that's revealed. That was revealed. Do you think these thought experiments that are often put forth aren't much good? Right. There were arguments, Bonaventure, I think Bonaventure, St. Bonaventure, arguments that, you know, there are people who attempt to prove that there's something inconsistent logically or philosophically with the idea that the universe is infinitely old.

And Thomas Aquinas, very brilliantly, he saw through those arguments. And so he goes through the arguments that some people had made that you cannot, that it is somehow – it's not self-consistent to say the universe is infinitely old. And he knocked down those arguments. Would you be open to discussing this a little bit? Because I would like to be dispossessed of this philosophical belief, which I still haven't been dispossessed of, if you're open to talking about it. Well, we can talk about that to some extent.

I don't want to lose sight of some of the other great things at St. Thomas. But so one of the arguments, for example, St. Thomas considered, which I guess people like Bonaventure had advanced, was that if the universe is infinitely old, then there have to have been some times. He called them days. Then there had to have been at least some day that is infinitely remote from us. But that you can easily, leads to a problem. Suppose there's some day that's infinitely remote from us in the past. Well, then the day after that is also infinitely remote. And the day after that is, in fact, every day that succeeds it will be infinitely remote from us.

So you can never get from there to here. That's right. But that's a fallacy because the universe being infinitely old does not imply that there's any particular day that is infinitely far in the past. And that's just a very common, simple fallacy. It's the same as the fallacy. Consider the natural numbers, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, that is the positive integers. There are an infinite number of them, but every single one of the integers is finite. Any integer you can name is a finite size, but yet there's an infinite number. Is that a contradiction? No. Mathematicians know that that's not a contradiction. It may be sort of puzzling to people, but it's not a contradiction. And there's no contradiction in saying that every single particular day in the past is a finite time in the past, and yet there's an infinite sequence of them. But St. Thomas understood that that was

a fallacy, which is quite impressive in the 13th century, because really, thinking about infinite quantities, really, mathematicians didn't really sort out all these so-called paradoxes of the infinite until really the 18th, until the 19th century. But St. Thomas saw through these arguments. What was another argument? They were similar, oh yes, Another argument that St. Thomas considered, I think Bonaventure advanced this, was that you cannot add to infinity. Right. And so if you already have an infinite number of days, then how can you – You arrive at this day. How can you have even more days by having another day elapse?

Right. Well, St. Thomas said you can add to infinity on the one – not on the infinite side side but on the finite side so i mean so uh the time is infinite into the past but it's uh the present is a is a that is the past is infinite but only in the past direction right not in the forward direction where you can add another day you can imagine a line that's infinite, that starts at one point and then it goes on infinitely in some direction. But you can't add to it in the infinite end of it, so to speak. But you can add to it at the place where it began. You can extend it a little bit. So again, St. Thomas saw all of these kinds of arguments that purport to show that there's something incoherent about an infinite past. They simply don't hold water. I think to most people who are mathematically knowledgeable, they're not convincing.

And if you're going to base your argument for the existence of God on a proposition which is itself highly debatable, highly and very dubious— You better roll out your best argument. Yeah. I mean, so you're trying to prove the—many people—I think the arguments for the existence of God are – the existence of God is more obvious – obviously true than the proposition that the universe had to have a beginning. So you're trying to prove the more obvious thing from the much more debatable thing, and that's not strategy. Maybe its appeal is that it's very simple. Well, what do you think about the scientific argument for the beginning of the universe would you uh you pro or con that well i think what we can say is this um that that the probably it may be impossible to ever know

with certitude uh or that the universe had a beginning. But the weight of argument at the moment is that it had a beginning, scientifically. So some people may be surprised at that, because they say, well, we know there was a Big Bang, you know, about 14 billion years ago. That is true. The evidence that there was a Big Bang 14 billion years ago is overwhelmingly strong. No one in cosmology, no one in physics doubts that, really. But there is some question, was the Big Bang the beginning of the universe? Probably, and that's what people normally assume. Most physicists assume that. But there are speculative hypotheses, scenarios, in which the universe had some history before the Big Bang. And then one can ask, could that history have extended infinitely into the past?

Well, there you can't rely on observations, because if there was anything before the Big Bang, we really can't know about it. The Big Bang, it would have sort of effaced, wiped out any evidence of it. We can only see back to the Big Bang. We can't see beyond that. But there are theoretical arguments that it's very difficult to construct a sensible theory, a physics theory of a universe that's infinitely old. And the reason, the basic reason for that is the second law of thermodynamics. The reason, the basic reason for that is the second law of thermodynamics.

The second law of thermodynamics says everything tends to wear out, to run down, to grow old, you know, to wear out and so on. And that's why we die, you know, second law of thermodynamics. And the second law implies that you can't have what's called a perpetual motion machine. And physicists regard a machine that would keep running on its own. You could just leave it alone. It would keep running forever. That is regarded as physically impossible. It would eventually break down or wear out.

And if the universe were infinitely old, then in some sense it is a perpetual motion machine. It's been going for infinite time without having run down. to a motion machine. It's been going for infinite time without having run down. And that's very hard, it's very hard to, when you try to construct models of the universe, theoretical models, where it's infinitely old, you always run into the second law, you run into problems. Yeah. Why don't we talk about the distinction between what Aquinas and Aristotle talked about with primary and secondary causality, and how this applies to this science-faith question. Okay, but I want to go back a little bit to the beginning in creation, if I could. Yeah, please. Or maybe can I... We can do that now. Hello, hello? Yes, did we get disconnected?

Just for a second, so feel free to begin again and I'll edit that out. Okay, I'm sorry, something happened. I think something popped up on the computer. Okay, so I'd like to go back to that question of beginning and creation. The analogy I like to use, and it's not – I don't know that St. Thomas used it, but is of a piece of music or a novel or a play. There's a difference between the beginning of the piece of music, which is just the first few notes, and the origin or the cause of the piece of music, which is the mind of the composer. And if somebody said, why is there the symphony Schubert's Fifth Symphony? It would be silly to answer that question of why there's the symphony

by saying, well, look at these notes here, these first few notes. The first few notes are not the cause of the symphony. They're simply the way the symphony began. The cause is the composer's mind. Same with a novel. If somebody said, why is there a novel called, you know... Brothers Karamazov. Brothers Karamazov.

Why is there, to point to the first few words of the novel as if that explained why there's a novel is absurd. So that's the mistake people make when they say, why is there a universe? Well, let's go look at what happened at the beginning of the universe.

Well, that's irrelevant, actually. What happened at the beginning of the universe is just, God doesn't just, God is not an event that happened within the universe. He's not some – like a spark that set off an explosion or dynamite that made the universe expand or something. God is – gives the universe reality. He gives it being.

As St. Thomas said, God is to all things the cause of being. So God is the reason that the universe is real, that it exists. And you would need to have God make the universe real and exist, whether the universe had a beginning or whether it was infinite into the past or whether it had a cyclic history. So you could imagine by analogy a book that had a plot that went around in a circle and that it was printed on a scroll that had no beginning and no end. Well, that novel has no beginning, but it still needs an author. So there's completely distinct questions. questions. And the reason this is important is that this insight, which St. Thomas had, shows that anything modern cosmology discovers about how the universe began, or even whether it began, is irrelevant to the question of whether the universe has a creator. It's a completely...

Well, and that's shown from Aristotle, who thought we could actually prove that the universe has a creator. It's a completely... Well, and that's shown from Aristotle, who thought we could actually prove that the universe is eternal, and yet he had no problem believing in a prime mover. He believed in a prime mover, but it wasn't a creator God. Right. He did not have a creator. And that's something that, you know, my Thomist friends often forget. What did he mean then by prime mover? But God was a prime... I'm not an expert on Aristotle but I do know he didn't believe in a creator God that is uh but in his prime mover was simply I think moving things by as a final cause that is he was the prime mover did not was not an efficient cause of the existence of the universe. He was sort of, he was the final cause

of things, of movement within the, so everything is seeking an end, you know. A living thing is seeking a certain entelechy or whatever, seeking some sort of a fulfillment or end. And everything ultimately has to be some ultimate end of everything that's drawing everything, that is the reason for all change in the universe. That's how I understand. But he did not believe in a creator. He did not believe in creation ex nihilo, or a God who was the cause of the world's existence. That's a Christian idea. And I think a lot of my Thomist friends would do well to

remember a basic fact about Aristotle, which is he was not a Christian. He was a pagan, and his views on God were not the Christian view. So St. Thomas synthesized Aristotle Aristotle with biblical revelation and with the idea that there is a cause of being, a causa essendi. I don't think in Aristotle there is a causa essendi. Okay. To be clear to all those who are listening, though, even though Aquinas didn't think you could prove philosophically that the world began, as you've already said, he accepted that because of divine revelation. So, I don't want anyone getting the idea that Aquinas thought the world began, as you've already said, he accepted that because of divine revelation. So, I don't want anyone getting the idea that Aquinas thought the world was eternal. Right. And by the way, science has vindicated something about the beginning, to the extent that science now leans heavily towards saying there's a beginning. That's a vindication for

Jewish and Christian revelation. And I want to say one more thing, because I think this whole question of beginning is so important. In antiquity, the pagans would mock the Jews and Christians for believing that the universe did have a beginning. And one of their favorite questions was, well, what was your God, your Christian God, doing for that infinite stretch of time before he finally got around to making the universe a finite time ago? And St. Augustine gave a very profound answer to that. I think I know what it is. You tell us. Yeah, his profound answer was that there was no time before the beginning of the universe, that the very question, what was God doing before the universe began, is meaningless, because time, St. Augustine's argument was, time is something created. It's a feature of the created world. And so, you cannot talk about a

time elapsing before there's anything created. There's a self-contradictory. So St. Augustine very profoundly understood that if there's a beginning of created things a finite time ago, then that's also the beginning of time itself. There was no such, he says, do not ask what God was doing then, meaning before the beginning. Do not ask what God was doing then.

There was no then, where there is no then, where there is no time. How revolutionary was that at the time? That's very revolutionary. And in fact, I don't think anyone really had that insight until St. Augustine, or at least had it clearly. People talked about the beginning of time, but St. Augustine really understood, I think, most clearly and for the first time that time itself would begin when the universe begins. And, you see, modern physics caught up to that 15 centuries later because physicists tended to believe until Einstein came along that the universe had always existed. Yeah. physical things, so to speak. And therefore, if the universe has a beginning, that must also, from the viewpoint of modern physics, that must also be the beginning of space and time.

So the logic parallels St. Augustine. He said, time is something created, therefore, there's no before creation. And the physicists say, time is something physical, it's part of the universe, and therefore there's no time before the universe. And so they end up in the same place. And that's a very important insight when you're thinking about creation, and also the whole idea that God is outside of time. God is outside of time the way the author is outside the plot or the time of his novel. It's fascinating. I think I heard somebody say, time the time of his novel. It's fascinating. I think I heard somebody say time is one of those concepts. I understand until you tell me to explain it or to define it.

So what is time? Well, it's very mysterious, and St. Augustine had famous statements. Well, it's too difficult to talk about. Isn't that wonderful? It is a feature of the physical world. Well, let's put it this way. Physical time, and I like physical space, is a feature of our physical universe. One might think of some more generalized notion of time, if one is talking about time in the afterlife, in the next world, but of course we don't know what that's like. But anyway, I wanted to get back to that just briefly because St. Augustine's insight,

this is a very important insight, that God is outside of time. The time is just a feature of changing things and of the changing created things. God is not a part of the universe. He is not subject to time. You don't say God will do something, God did do something. God, as St. Thomas Aquinas said, God lives in an ever-present eternity. For God, everything, God just is. He doesn't have a past or a future. He doesn't have a past or a future. He doesn't change. As it says in Genesis, in the burning bush, God says, I am who am. And Jesus said, before Abraham was, I am. God lives in an eternal present.

And to him, there is no past. He does not change. He has no past or future. God is the fullness of being, and you cannot take away or add anything to God. He cannot to exist, even though it sounds like you would say it's not irrational to think that the universe is eternal or to think that one day that could be proven. It's not irrational to think that. But it is a vindication because Jewish and Christian revelation said in the beginning that it – that is revealed truth. And it was something that was mocked by the pagans of antiquity. And it is something that modern atheists have tended to be very reluctant to believe. It really goes against the grain for them. They like much more the idea the universe has always existed. You see, if something's always existed, I think it's a psychological thing more than anything else. If something's always existed, you can take it for granted. That's just the way things are and

the way they have to be. When suddenly something makes an appearance, then you tend to ask, well, where the heck did that come from? Yeah. I got to read that quote from Robert Jastrow in his book, God and the Astronomers. He says, for the scientist who has lived, but you've heard this quote, I'm sure. For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He's scaled the mountains of ignorance. He's about to conquer the highest peak. As he pulls himself over the final rock, he's created by a band of theologians who've been sitting there for centuries. Right. It is a great vindication that the universe did – turns out probably all the evidence seems to point that way, that it had a beginning. But then what do you think is the most powerful argument for God's existence?

So if you were talking to another scientist, would you trot out the evidence from science from the beginning of the universe or would you use more of a metaphysical unmoved mover argument or something? Well, I don't like to say unmoved mover because that's very widely misunderstood. I mean, many people think of the move because move, first of all, movement in Aristotelian philosophy meant any kind of change. But even so, when people visualize, when you say unmoved mover or the first mover, prime mover, they think of a sequence of things. Like there's a billiard ball, hits another ball, hits another ball, hits another ball.

So there's a sequence of events and each one causing the next one. And it's a temporal sequence. So each one causes the later ones to occur. And there had to have been a first one. And so people, that naturally leads people into the idea that- Back to the Kalam argument.

Yeah, to the Kalam,. Yeah, to the Kalam. That God is the first in time. That God was sitting there and he did something. He moved at a certain time and caused all later movement. But as St. Thomas said, there's no reason you could not have an infinite sequence. He said, with a parent being the father of a child and another man being the parent of that man and another man being his parent and all the way back infinitely, infinitely. It doesn't – in a – St. Thomas said in a temporal sequence. There does not – there's no logical reason why there has to be a first thing in that chain. So I – see, I don't – I just really don't like people using prime mover.

chain. So, see, I just really don't like people using prime mover. I mean, the way it was understood by St. Thomas is fine, but it naturally misleads the model. I mean, for you personally, though, so putting aside misunderstandings others might have about the argument, is there a particular argument you go back to in times of doubt or one that convinces you the most? I think the two most traditional arguments that you will find in the church fathers, you will find them in scripture, and you find them in the catechism of the Catholic church where it mentions the two main ways to argue for the existence of God. One is the sheer fact that the universe exists, okay? There needs to be a cause of existence. And that's the sort of – that's really the most fundamental argument.

There needs to be a cause of being. And the second argument, kind of argument, is that the universe is orderly. And if you read the Church Fathers – I wish I had the text in front of me. But I went – and I found almost – they're like a broken record. I guess people don't know what that means nowadays. It's like a malfunctioning iPhone. But, you know, all the church fathers, you go back and what they say, all of them almost using the same words, is the orderliness of the universe shows that it has a – There's an intelligibility to it and they use the word

orderliness or harmony uh beauty lawfulness but let's say the basic idea is the universe is orderly and one of my favorite quotes this one i can remember off the top of my head uh one an early christian writer named minucius felix he says if upon entering some home you saw that everything there was well tended, neat and decorative, you would believe that some master was in charge of it and that he was himself much superior to those good things. So too, in the home of this world, he said, when you see providence, order and law in the heavens and on earth. Know that there is a Lord and author of the universe more beautiful than the stars themselves in the various parts of the whole world. So it was providence, order, and law.

Providence, order, and law. That was what the church fathers pointed to. And that is something that gets stronger. That argument gets stronger the more science discovers. gets stronger, that argument gets stronger the more science discovers. Because the more we discover, the more we understand how deeply orderly the universe is. The order that people knew in ancient times, they only knew a small part of the story. They could look up to the heavens. That was one of their favorite examples, both in scripture, but in the church fathers. Many of their examples

were from astronomy. Look at the orderly orbits of the stars and the planets and so on. And so you see order in the heavens. Earth is very messy. You know, things on earth are very chaotic-seeming and disorderly. And yet, modern science, as we look deeper and deeper into the physical world, we find underneath all that haphazardness, all of that seeming disorder and messiness, there are profound laws. There's deep mathematical order, very profound mathematical order that underlies everything. So the more we discover about the universe, the more orderly it looks to us, the more order we find, and the more impressive order that we find. And that is something that makes it mysterious to me that many scientists, especially in my field, where we're looking at the fundamental laws of physics, that they can be atheists, because how can they look

at this incredible mathematical sophistication? I mean, the universe has an order, but it's not a trivial order. It's not Tinker Toys or Legos. It's not the kind of order that a child could have put together. The order is only expressible in terms of very deep mathematical ideas. And so that seems to me, and I think to many scientists who are religious, points to a great mind at work, you know? Yeah. Now, one of the ways, of course, people try to avoid this is by positing a multiverse. Would you maybe explain for our listeners what that is and your thoughts on it? Well, there's nothing wrong with the multiverse idea.

I want to caution my religious friends or my co-religionists out there. Don't attack the multiverse idea. First of all, it's not just an atheist plot. Do you mind if we begin with what it is? What it is? Well, it's a possible explanation. What it says is this, that the universe, first of all, is much bigger than we can see, than the part we are able to see. It's very, very big. And in the parts of the universe that are remote, so remote that we

can't see them, certain things that we had thought were constants of nature, were fixed features of the universe that were true everywhere, actually are different in those other parts of the universe. So for example, maybe the mass of the electron has one value in the part of the universe we can see, but it might be a different value somewhere else, or the strength of a certain force might be one thing in our part of the universe but different in another place. So what we used to think of as constants of nature are actually things that vary from place to place. That's basically – that in a nutshell is the multiverse idea. There's nothing strange – that may sound funny to some people, but there's actually from the point of view of fundamental physics, that's not a crazy idea at all.

And there are reasons to think some version of that might be true. But the reason it becomes theologically interesting has to do with what are sometimes called anthropic coincidences. catastrophic coincidences. It turns out that many features of the laws of physics as we know them are just right to make the existence of life possible in our universe. So this is something that the physicists have come to reluctantly recognize in many cases. So, for example, there's a certain force that holds atomic nuclei together. If that force were a little bit weaker, it's called the strong force. If it was, say, 20%, 25% weaker than it actually is, it wouldn't be strong enough to hold together certain important nuclei. And as a consequence of that, almost none of the kinds of nuclei that we know exist in nature would exist. In fact, you'd only have hydrogen. The only element in the periodic table that you would have any significant amount of would be hydrogen.

And that's just not enough to have chemistry and have life based on chemistry. So it's really very lucky that the strong force isn't a bit weaker than it is. Other nasty things happen if the strong force is a bit stronger than it is. But there are many examples like this. I wrote a paper on one of these coincidences. There's a certain parameter having to do with the Higgs field, the Higgs boson. A certain parameter, the jargon is Higgs vacuum expectation value. This parameter has to be very finely tuned in a very narrow range. And if it isn't, in order to have life, if this parameter were a little bigger or smaller, we wouldn't be here.

And so there are many examples of this kind of thing. So why do you say that religious people shouldn't be frightened of the multiverse? Well, the multiverse, see, the way the multiverse might explain some of these coincidences, you say, okay, you say the strong force has to be in a certain range in order for there to be life. And you want to say, well, God chose it to be this particular value because he wanted there to be life, or he chose the King's vacuum expectation value, or this other quantity, or that other quantity, so as to make life possible. But another possibility is these quantities do not have a fixed value, that the strength of the strong force varies from place to place in the universe,

fixed value, that the strength of the strong force varies from place to place in the universe, and therefore there were bound to be some places in the universe where that strong force has the right strength and these other parameters have the right values to make life possible. You know, if you roll the dice enough times, it's going to come up the way you want it eventually, right? So if all these parameters are taking different values in different parts of an extremely large universe, then you're bound to be some places in the universe where everything lines up just right to have life. And that may actually be the correct explanation of many of these so-called anthropic coincidences. I should point out, for people who think that the multiverse

idea was just cooked up by atheists to defeat an argument for the existence of God, most atheist scientists hate the multiverse idea. They hate it. Why is that? Because it's not testable. Yeah. And one of the reasons they don't believe in God is they think, well, you can't test that. I can't do an experiment that shows there's a God. And so they're sort of – it's deeply ingrained in many atheists and many skeptics to say, well, you can't prove it to me. You can't prove it from experiment.

Then there's no reason to believe it. Well, the multiverse can't be proven experimentally. No one knows of a way to do that. And so they really dislike the idea intensely, the great majority of atheists and the great majority of physicists. So it's not something that atheists like. On the other hand, there are some very smart atheists who recognize that probably the only naturalistic way to explain many of these coincidences without invoking God is the multiverse. So very smart atheists like Steven Weinberg, they like the multiverse idea. But the thing is,

whether we like the idea or don't like it is irrelevant. An idea in physics, you don't evaluate it on the basis of whether it confirms your religious or anti-religious views. The world is the way it is. And if it's a multiverse, it's a multiverse. And I don't think we should scoff at that idea because, well, it might be an idea that atheists like or that might help them in some way. But doesn't it make our universe a lot less impressive if there's seemingly millions or infinite number of multiverses out there this one just happened to have the conditions the multiverse as in the in the sort of the garden variety sort of most conservative version of the multiverse the multiverse is one universe okay

it's not a lot of different unrelated let me let me step back just like i did a moment ago and asked about time what do we mean by universe well i would say it's a whole lot of physical stuff that's all interacting with each other some way so it's one time and well i mean yeah you could say well there's some other universe people do you know you connect some people to ask whether it could be many universes that have nothing whatsoever to do with each other uh well i mean if they have nothing to do with us, then it's kind of irrelevant to us. But the multiverse idea is not that. The multiverse idea is that there's one universe.

It's just huge. It's very much bigger than what we can see. It's not like separate bubbles that you can't cross from one to the other. No, no. I mean, if you could travel, you can't. But, you know, there's something called a horizon. We can't see farther than about 10 billion light years away because the universe, light from farther away, wouldn't have had time to reach us. And the universe is only about 14 billion years old. So anything that's 100 billion light years away, we can't see it because no light could have gotten from there to here since the Big Bang.

So we have this horizon. The idea is the multiverse is simply that the universe is vastly bigger than the horizon. could have gotten from there to here since the big bang so there we have this horizon the idea is the multiverse is simply that the universe is vastly bigger than the horizon vastly bigger and that things might be very different in those parts of the universe outside our horizon that's all it is it's not necessarily saying they're more than one you and in the multiverse idea that any physicists would take seriously in the entireiverse, the multiverse is a kind of universe. In that whole multiverse, there's deep down, deep down at the bottom, there's one set of laws that governs the whole multiverse. Now, is it less impressive? I don't think so,

because actually, those laws are very, very, as I said, very deep and mathematically. And actually, and this is what I would say to people who would use the multiverse to argue for atheism somehow. I think what we now can say with some reasonable confidence is if you want a universe that has life in it, that has complicated things like ourselves and animals and so on, you need the laws of physics to be very, very special in one way or another. They can either be special because they have certain parameters and stuff fine-tuned to particular values, but they could also be special because they're the kinds of laws that give you a multiverse. To have a multiverse, deep down, the most fundamental laws have to be very special to give you a multiverse.

Not any old laws give you a multiverse. So the laws have to be special one way or the other if you're going to have living things. I think that is a good takeaway lesson that you shouldn't take for granted that the universe has life. That's an astonishing thing. Not any old laws of physics would have led to a universe with life. Really, the laws had to be very peculiar in some way to give you a universe with enough richness and complexity and things balancing each other in just the right way to give you the possibility of life. By the way, one of the anthropic coincidences, which I think is very important to point out,

has to do with the size of the universe. Many people look at how big the universe is, and they say, well, you know, how can we be important? How can God have created all this for us when we are tiny, tiny infinitesimal speck in this vast emptiness of space? You know, it doesn't seem to make sense. If God, if we're the point of all of this, or one of the points,

why did God create these billions of light years of empty space? Okay? And one answer to that is that actually physics tells us that if you want to have living things with the laws somewhat like they are in our universe, you need the universe to last for a long time. Evolution on Earth, starting from inanimate stuff all the way up to us. Life took billions of years to lead to us. And even before that started, to produce the chemical elements that you need to make living

things required billions of years of history before biology began. It took billions of years of the universe's history for the chemical elements to be synthesized. So you need a universe that lasts billions of years to have living things. Well, according to Einstein's theory of gravity, there's a relation to the age of the universe and how big it is. If you say the universe never gets bigger than a certain size, then it won't last longer than a certain time. Suppose you say, I don't want the universe to last, well, I mean, to have the universe last billions of years, it has to be at least as big as our universe. And therefore, the size of our universe is like a prerequisite, it's a condition for us being here. And if you said, I want the

universe, you know, I don't want the universe to be any bigger than North America. That's plenty of space. Well, it would have lasted for about a hundredth of a second. And if you say, I want the universe never to get bigger than the solar system, which is pretty big, vast to us, it would have only lasted a matter of hours or days. So, actually, the vastness of the universe, which many people think points to our insignificance, actually is a precondition for living things like us to be here. So, it really, in a way, points to us. I can also see an atheist saying, if the universe were a lot smaller, he could object, well, if there was a God, wouldn't we expect a much grander, much larger universe? It's almost like you can't

win. Well, actually, it's interesting. In the Middle Ages, in the late Middle Ages, Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa, one of the great thinkers of the late Middle Ages, a German cardinal, his speculation was that the universe was infinitely large because he felt that only an infinitely large universe would reflect the glory of its creator. And he also felt that in this infinite universe, there would be an infinite number of planets or stars and there would be no center. Everything would be moving, the earth, the sun, everything was in motion. And he felt that all these other stars had inhabitants, that they were creatures and living things

everywhere throughout the universe. So, very modern view, much more radical than, say, Copernicus or Galileo, who came later, right? Hey, this has been so fascinating, and I would love to get together for a beer with you and chat forever. But we should probably wrap up and let you get back to your important work. I just got a question, though. Tell us a bit more about the Society of Catholic Scientists. You brought it up in the beginning of the show. Tell us a bit about it, what it is, who can join it. Thank you for allowing me to plug it.

Oh, yeah. You know, it was founded two years ago. If you want to find our website, you can just Google Catholic and scientists and you'll find it. But the website is catholicscientists, all one word, catholicscientists.org. So our main purposes are fellowship among Catholic scientists. You know, many religious people in science feel a bit isolated because, as I said, religious people are sometimes shy about, you know, showing their faith too openly. And as a consequence, they don't know of each other's existence. They may be all over the place, but they think they feel alone. And so, this is partly to get all the Catholics in

science to come out of the closet. This is great. And by the way, the website's beautiful. Right. And you go and we'll have fellowship with each other. And also to show the world that there are a lot of Catholic scientists. As I said, we have 860-something members as of today. It's growing rapidly. And those include many top scientists. And people can apply for a membership on the site. for a membership on the site yes yes now if you are in science as if you have a phd in a natural science or are a graduate student working towards a phd or an undergraduate science major uh then you qualify and you should apply through the website it's very simple it takes a few

minutes dues are only twenty dollars a year um and actually less if you get five years pay for five years or a lifetime membership uh and and so anyway you get five years, pay for five years, or a lifetime membership. And so, anyway, you would qualify. And I should say, natural science, we include mathematics and computer science. We do not include the social sciences, but we do include math. But if somebody had a PhD in lesbian dance theory, would you take them? Very, no, not at all. Any kind of dance it doesn't have to be lesbian how would lay people benefit from this are you giving you know recorded lectures and things that people could try

and uh try and listen and keep up with we have uh the the talks from our conferences on the website but we are actually at the present moment going going to augment, we're thinking of ways to augment our website to have more material for the lay audience out there. Because that's another thing. We also want to be a resource for people to help them think about science and religion questions. But we're young, and we're still growing. So a lot of this hasn't been put into place. That's great. CatholicScientist.org.

Yeah, everyone go check that out. Final question for you. What perhaps book would you recommend to the kind of intellectually inclined inquisitive lay person that wants to learn more about how creation points to a creator? Well, at the risk of being immodest, I've written a couple of books, which I think I wrote for just that audience. For those who are more serious, I would say Modern Physics and Ancient Faith is a book I wrote. There's another one, which is more essays and book reviews, which is perhaps a little bit easier going. It's called The Believing Scientist. you're going. It's called The Believing Scientist. There's a book that is being redone by a fellow,

a friend of mine named Christopher T. Baglow. I think it's called Faith, Science, and Theology, or something like that. Faith, Science, and Reason. But go to Amazon, look at Christopher T. Baglow. And he wrote a textbook on science and religion for use in Catholic high schools. So I greatly recommend this book. A new edition is being prepared that's going to be very different, but it's an excellent book. I strongly urge people to go out and buy Christopher T. Baglow's book. Another book, though, I would not recommend the ending of it, the appendix, which has some bad stuff in it. But Francis Collins, who's not a Catholic, but his book, The Language of God, is very good. The appendix has stuff on bioethics, which is not what the Catholic Church teaches.

But the rest of the book is fantastic. And I would urge people to buy The Language of God. Excellent. Dr. Stephen Barr, thank you so much for taking time out to be on the podcast today. Well, thank you very much for having me. Wow, that was amazing. Thank you so much to everybody who tuned in and listened to the entirety

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Too many grains of salt and gin Left me before the world could see