Transcript

Brian Keating:
Foreign.

Hugh Ross:
This live stream is sponsored by the Reasons to Believe scholar community. Welcome and thank you for joining us for this special livestream. Today’s conversation explores if the universe is fine tuned, why isn’t there more life out there? Dr. Hugh Ross, astrophysicist, founder of Reasons to Believe and author of numerous works on the intersection of science and faith, is joined by Dr. Brian Keating, Cosmologist Chancellor’s Distinguished professor of Physics at UC San Diego and host of the into the Impossible podcast. This conversation will be moderated by George Harakson ii, Senior Research Scholar at Reasons to Believe and Senior Adjunct professor in Philosophy and Ethics at Azusa Pacific University. This session is divided into three Understanding our Guests Worldview, Fine Tuning and Life Beyond Earth and a Q and A portion. We’re honored to have you with us for this important discussion.

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

Hugh Ross:
Thank you.

George Harakson II:
You just came back from a trip from Canada, your homeland, as with you, actually, yeah, I was there. Yeah. We got to hang out with quite a number of professors and students. That was a lot of fun. So welcome. And we are also joined here in person, which is wonderful. Dr. Brian Keating, who is the Chancellor’s Distinguished professor of Physics in the Department of Physics at the University of California and you host your own podcast, you’re an author and just something that’s fun is you, you didn’t walk here, you didn’t drive here.

Brian Keating:
But you, I was able to fly here. You flew here in a mighty, you know, four seat propeller plane all the way from San Diego. And I made it on one tank of gas, didn’t even have to refuel along the way.

George Harakson II:
Now that. Is this something you just picked up or. I, I thought I heard you mention. Is this part of like part of your family heritage?

Brian Keating:
Yeah, yeah. My stepfather was a pilot, flew F4 Phantoms in Vietnam and he had all of his training, you know, magazines around and log books and everything. And I always wanted to be a pilot and I said, oh, maybe I could be an astronaut. What do you have to do? And you have to be under, you know, £200 or whatever. And at that time, even I was under 200, still not. And I figured, oh, maybe if I’m a, if I’m a Professor and an astrophysicist, plus a pilot. They’ll take me in. And luckily, you know, I still have time.

Brian Keating:
You know, maybe I’ll get a ride aboard, aboard a SpaceX rocket someday. But that’s the dream. And yeah, that’s. It’s always been part of my, my identity, really. Once you become a pilot, you’re always a pilot. You can’t take it away from you.

George Harakson II:
Yeah, yeah, no, that, that’s good. We all have our avocations or hobbies. You, you look out into the heavens. Both of you. Do you get the flying in the heavens? Hugh, I know you like to hike as high as you can.

Hugh Ross:
I like climbing mountains.

George Harakson II:
Climbing mountains. So different ways we reach the heights. Here I’m just a lowly drummer behind, you know, a drum set. So it’s going to be a lot of fun talking about why the universe is the way it is. Why isn’t there more life out there? These types of questions, but for the first part, we want to talk a little bit about how we approach science, maybe also science and faith issues. Then we’ll go into some of the prepared questions we have, and then we’ll invite those of you who are listening and participating. I know there’s people in our scholar committee who will share questions that I will go ahead and share with both of you and we’ll get your comments on this and feel free to dialogue with one another. It doesn’t have to go through me.

George Harakson II:
I’ll kind of go back into the background as needed. I’m not the astrophysicist here, but, Brian, I wanted to talk to you first. How do you kind of approach science, faith questions? I think I have this right, but you describe yourself as an observant Jew, but an agnostic. Am I stating that correctly?

Brian Keating:
Yeah, I think the term I often use is devout, practicing agnostic Jew. Yeah, hold to the Sabbath, you know, keep the Sabbath. And I really was inspired by my late great friend Freeman Dyson, who was the first guest on the into the Impossible podcast. Titanic astrophysicist, not the inventor of the vacuum. He would have been much richer, have he. But he invented the Dyson sphere and contributed to quantum electrodynamics. And he and I dialogued a lot about faith. And he won the Templeton Prize once and was very humble about it and said he didn’t deserve it, but at least he didn’t deserve it less than some other people who had won it.

Brian Keating:
And I said, you know, it’s interesting, Freeman, because you are by all means a very thoughtful person. But you don’t practice, you don’t do anything. So I said, how would that be any different than an intelligent alien that we’re going to talk about today? If an alien was watching you on a Sunday morning and saw what you were doing and saw what Richard Dawkins, who I’ve also hosted, been privileged to host him, and I said, if an alien saw those two men on a Sunday morning, they’d both not be going to the same church. So how do you, Freeman, distinguish between what you claim is your agnosticism and true atheism? I said, can you be courageous and say that you’re an atheist? And he said, I can’t, but I don’t know how to demonstrate that. And that’s when I came up with this idea about 10 years ago that you could be an agnostic, but you can’t be a non practicing agnostic, or else you’re an atheist. There’s no functional way to distinguish it. So my practice is I observe the Sabbath, I keep kosher, my kids all know 10 times more about the Torah, the Bible, the Tanakh than I’ll ever know. But I’ve done my best.

Brian Keating:
In the time that I’ve had, since I was an altar boy in the Catholic Church, I’ve had a lot of experience in different forms of religion. And for me, as a scientist, the most ecumenical way to do it is approach it as a scientist can approach it, with our frailties and with the courage that you guys exemplify to ask the biggest questions and not be afraid of who you’re asking or what you’re asking about.

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

Brian Keating:
Yeah, he was at my house when

George Harakson II:
he said that he was at your house.

Brian Keating:
My wife would probably agree with Tyler.

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

George Harakson II:
Hugh, a little bit different than Brian. How do you approach the science faith topic? For those who may not know specifically how some people criticize, they want to keep science and faith a little bit separate, different magisterium or that. How do you approach it?

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

George Harakson II:
Does, does your science inform your religious practice? Is there any integration between those two for you or is that somewhat, you try to keep them, you know, there’s a barrier or something?

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

Brian Keating:
Honor Lawrence Krauss. Could you Falsify if a 13 year old comes to you and says, I can falsify your thesis of a universe from nothing, would you believe? No, he doesn’t know anything yet. He doesn’t. So. But you, Lawrence, you Sam Harris, accept the word and falsification from a 13 year old version of yourself. And so how do you do that? I approach scientific questions and I approach the Torah seriously. I take it seriously what I do and I talk about this in my first book is can we approach the Torah and the Old Testament? Can you approach that in the way that I approach a scientific text? In other words, can you demand of God? Can you demand of the text themselves, the spiritual, scriptural sources, the same level of proof, of rigorous, of citations and of perhaps falsification that we demand of science? So you have to be open to this. Otherwise I say, you know, if you don’t believe that God can be questioned and the word Israel, as you guys know, means fights with God.

Brian Keating:
So Jews are not known for being humble, you know, in their opinions always. But. But we all have the same goal, right? But if you can’t ask questions as to the scientific basis for your faith, then to me it’s just, you know, bagels and a yarmulke and, you know, some, some fun times on a Saturday morning. But it’s not, it’s not real.

George Harakson II:
It’s more.

Brian Keating:
It’ of a hobby, of an avocation. Nothing wrong with it. But if you can’t ask questions of God, who can you ask them? So I approach religious questions not as a guide, but as a fact claim that can be interrogated by the tools of science.

George Harakson II:
You see it the same way. Hugh, how would you add to that?

Hugh Ross:
No, I love what you just said. I mean, that’s all.

George Harakson II:
I was smiling over here.

Hugh Ross:
I think that’s really the way to approach these issues.

George Harakson II:
Yeah, we can pursue it. As someone you have met before, I think Dennis Prager wrote the Rational Bible. You know, those kinds of things. So. Well, let’s get into some of those. The topics here. Is the universe ultimately hostile to life? That was one question that we were going to address. And some people have famously quipped before you’ll know who they are.

George Harakson II:
You know, the universe is out there to kill you. Or I think Neil Degrasse Tyson had an episode on his StarTalk at one time, his podcast entitled How Will the Cosmos Kill you? And I was reflecting on this a little bit and I thought about, you know, when I was in middle school, I took shop class. Wood. Wood making, you know, crafting. And I remember the wood shop teacher telling me, everything in the shop is out to kill you. You know, here are all these beautiful machines, a saw, a lathe, all designed meant to do particular things, but they were, they were there to kill me if I wasn’t careful. Is that a helpful analogy to the way the universe is? Because if we’re too close to a black hole, that’s not. That’s not good.

George Harakson II:
Right? Talk about that. Well, let’s start with our guest first. Brian, when you hear that question, is the universe ultimately hostile to life? Therefore there’s some implications to that that we’ll get into. How do you approach that?

Brian Keating:
I love when, you know, I’ve been on Neil’s show many times. He’s been on my show many times. I love when that question is or that statement is posed by him because he’s effectively admitting to the essence and the existence of a designer, right? He’s saying it’s designed to kill you. Well, I’m sorry, Neil, that means welcome to the club. Now maybe, perhaps it seems to stipulate that there must be some malevolent designer, not a benevolent God like we might consider here, but that it’s designed. No, it’s not designed. You can’t have it both ways. You can’t say it’s designed to ultimately destroy everything.

Brian Keating:
And we’re here by acts of random chance, right? And these are the dominant kind of things that I think we’re gonna into from the cosmic scale that I study. You know, how is it possible to exist in a multiverse of an infinite number of possible universes? Does that explain our anthropic origins and existence here or no? Or is there astrobiological reasons? Are there great filters out there that prevent us from, you know, either contacting or receiving evidence? But again, we have to treat things as scientists here because there’s so much non science nonsense in the public sphere and never more so. I mean, it’s concomitant with what Tyler Cowen was saying, the hostility and resentment and anger. But it’s also never been a more kind of anti scientific age. I don’t know if it’s getting worse, if it’s getting, if it can get better. But if scientists don’t uphold some standard of rigor and also intellectual honesty, then when you say things like the universe is out to get you, that you’re implying there is some force of design which goes against previous statements that my friend Neil has made. So I think that there’s arguments to be made for these things. But again, my role as I see it today is to be act as my hero in all things science and even in religion.

Brian Keating:
Galileo bequeathed to us, he said, you know, a scientist’s job is to measure what you can measure and make measurable what you cannot yet do. And that he said in the book of nature is written in these symbols that we can comprehend. The symbols of math, of triangles, of mathematical formulae, but it’s also accessible to reason and from that perspective, postulating reasons why we don’t see essentially the answer to the Great Filter or the Fermi’s paradox, to assume that there’s a reason that we’re not able to connect with other life forms or see them yet with conclusive evidence, which I think is a non disputable fact. Right now we have no explicit evidence for alien existence. I mean, maybe that kills the live stream right now, but we’re done here. But it’s certainly fun to consider.

George Harakson II:
Hugh, how do you approach that question?

Hugh Ross:
Well, I find it interesting that both Jews and Christians for over 2000 years have debated this issue. Are we alone in the universe or did God, you know, perform miracles in some other planet and created life there? And people who’ve argued, no, we’re the only ones cite passages where it says God doesn’t perform gratuitous miracles and it seems like he’s concerted the way he does his miracles and he only needs one planet. Others have argued, look at all the texts that you see, especially in the Psalms. It seems like God really enjoys creating. You see that in the Book of Job, the book of Proverbs, and he seems to be a compulsive creator. He’s got to have done it many places in the universe. I think what’s special about the time we’re in now is that astronomy is advanced to the point where it seems to be favoring the model that we’re alone as opposed to, hey, life is everywhere. Now with that, I would make an important caveat.

Hugh Ross:
I think it’s going to be relatively soon. We’re going to find the remains of life on virtually every solar system body. And people will look at that and say, hey, it looks like, you know, life is everywhere. But I’ve always argued that’s inevitable because of how prolific life is here on Earth. We’ve been exporting life throughout our whole solar system, especially on the Moon, to a lesser degree on Mars is simply inevitable. We’re going to find the remains of Earth fossils on these bodies. It’s the interstellar problem that I think is a challenge. We’re not exporting microbes to other planetary systems, but we are in our own system.

Hugh Ross:
But astronomy seems to be agreeing with Neil Degrasse Tyson. It really does look like it’s out to kill us, with the one exception. The planet that we’re on. The planet that we’re on seems wonderfully designed to make our existence possible. And I would think all the hostility we see elsewhere basically drives home the point we’re living on our very special planet, orbiting a very special star in a very special galaxy, in a very special galaxy cluster, on a very special part of the cosmic web. And so what does that tell us about the significance of human beings?

Brian Keating:
Yeah, it might be that the universe isn’t out to kill us. It might be that we’re out to kill us. I mean, there’s certainly more risks, you know, that we take on a daily basis. You know, speaking of someone who just flew up here, right, in a small, you know, contraption that has the accompany the kind of appointments of a 1988 Honda Accord, people think, oh, the private jet travel is so nice. Yeah, it must be. But yeah, certainly we have innumerable ways to kill ourselves and to fight with ourselves and to maybe even extinguish life on Earth as precious as it is. And I think sometimes there’s a coping mechanism that secular people have, which is to say that there must be life elsewhere in the universe, such that if we destroy the one body that we know for sure has conscious life as technological life, that there’s sort of a backup drive, you know, that we can boot up somewhere else. And the light of consciousness, as Elon Musk, who I talked to briefly once in my podcast, says, won’t be extinguished.

Brian Keating:
Right? That’s his big goal. And I stipulate everything you said is probably true. We not only have microbes that we get from other bodies, but we export them to other, you know, now we’re exporting technology. So imagine a civilization far away. If it existed, looking at us, it would see mostly nothing for 4.2 billion years. In the last 75 years, it’s all these things sprouting off of it and going around it and going into the, into the heliopause and visiting other solar systems and light days away from Earth. And I agree with you. I’ve heard a lot of rumors and you know, I can’t speak about the autopsy.

Brian Keating:
I mean, I can’t speak about the aliens now that, that. But I have heard, you know, rumors from the most credible scientific sources that, yeah, it’s imminent. We’re going to announce, just as you said, life, whatever that means. It’s not going to be dolphins with iPhones on, you know, on, you know, planet orbiting Proxima Centauri. But it will be something, you know, that will be revolutionary. I mean, let’s, let’s just concede that that discovery will change, you know, humanity forever. It doesn’t mean, doesn’t have any implication for our degree of less specialness. I Think you’re right.

Brian Keating:
I think we get in a parochial kind of bubble, literally and figuratively, that we think that, you know, we’ve, we’ve searched and searched and therefore we haven’t found something. And that evidence of absence is absence of evidence or maybe the reverse. And, you know, that’s a classic logical fallacy, you know, to say that we’ve searched. My friend Jill Tarter, who is the inspiration for the character Ellie Arroway in the movie Contact, written by Andrewian and her and her late husband Carl Sagan, she said, basically, we’ve scooped up about the amount of exploration we’ve done is equivalent to this coffee mug, which you guys Irished up for me. Thank you guys, so much. Compared to the Pacific Ocean. And it’s just incredible to think we can make that now if we can’t say something based on that. You know, if I go down to the Pacific Ocean, I scoop up some water and it has no microbes in it.

Brian Keating:
Well, that would kind of upend a lot of what we know about the host of different scientific claims that have been made. And we’ve never had evidence for that. But so the lack of evidence so far doesn’t imply a continual lack of evidence. And we have developed more and more powerful tools. But I’m all in agreement. I think that will change things. I also think we’re isolated and special in so many ways that the secular person will attempt to deny. For example, we often hear we’re 99.7% similar to chimpanzees.

Brian Keating:
And my friend Dennis Prager once said, I WISH it was 100% because it’s like, oh, that 0.3%, whatever it is, that little bit. I mean, what is that? Is that a brain size? No. There are animals that have a lot bigger brains than we have. Is it some neural density? No, no. So sometimes that, that, that lack of specialness is used as a way to say we’re insignificant, we’re unimportant, we’re meaningless. The concept Oliver Berkman wrote about called cosmic insignificance therapy, meaning that you can comfort yourself, Hugh, that you’re meaningless compared to the planet Jupiter and therefore you know, nothing that you do matters, really, and in 100 years and even know that you existed. I don’t believe that. I don’t believe that’s a relevant question.

Brian Keating:
I believe that gives permission to deny. I believe that gives people reasons to deny, not reasons to believe. And I think that ultimately that’s not approaching things in a scientific fashion.

George Harakson II:
Yeah, let’s just be Clear on something that nature. I heard right. And for our audience here, you said we’re going to find life, but it’s going to be remnants of life from Earth that has hit other planets and that I also thought I heard you say we’re going to find life. Did you? Were you saying the same thing as Hugh or.

Brian Keating:
I would say slightly different. I would say so Hugh’s talking about a theory that’s related to a concept called panspermia that was popularized by Fred Hoyle who coined the term Big Bang as a pejorative, as an insult against the theory that we now dedicate most of our research to. And that was the theory that life is delivered elsewhere to the Earth. It doesn’t solve the origin of life problem, it solves the origin of life on Earth. So there’s reverse panspermia. I brought you guys last time. I’m sure you still have it. Little fragments of Mars and the.

Brian Keating:
And meteorites. And so we got meteorites from Mars. And so therefore we have Earth meteorites on Mars. Right. So it must be there. In fact, there must have been some when Mars was wet and moist, because that’s when the Earth was being bombarded 4.2 billion years ago. When Earth and Mars were young, there was a lot more exchange of interplanetary material between the two planets. It acted like ups, you know, going between and back and forth between the planets, delivering life, microbes, whatever to.

Brian Keating:
Now I don’t think we’re find life on Mars. I don’t think that’s what you’re saying, but I think you’re saying we’ll find fossils on Mars.

Hugh Ross:
We’ll find fossils, perhaps.

Brian Keating:
Perhaps, yes, but. But I think what my astronomer colleagues are telling me is that they’ve already seen the signatures of molecules that seem to only be produced by life and maybe might be produced by some form of technology. Like if you see freon, the gas and powers are air conditioned. That is a very difficult molecule entropically to create naturally via stochastic processes. But it’s trivial for us to do it here on ear. Technology can produce certain molecules that show up in the transiting spectrum of extrasolar planets. And I’m hearing rumors I can’t. I’m not going to like stake my career on it.

Brian Keating:
But there are very credible people saying it’s just a matter of time. There’s been many announcements of both life from Mars and molecules that seem to suggest the existence of life not only in other stars, but from our own star on the planet Venus. Not many of them if any of them have been really confirmed beyond a reasonable doubt, though.

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

Brian Keating:
So we should hold these people to the same level of rigor that they’re going to hold a believer into their claims about the existence of God, of Jesus in your case. Right. So I don’t think anyone should get a free pass. I think we should interrogate these things and see is it exciting? You know, I’d like to know from your perspective, you know, because I was told I could ask questions to my friend here. So the Torah and the Talmud, which is a commentary on the Torah, as you know, has no problem. It seems to suggest in certain passages, although I think it’s kind of meaning the meanings in doubt from my professional cosmological but not rabbinical training. Right. I’m not a rabbi, but there seems to be no problem with that.

Brian Keating:
Now, obviously Giordano Bruno, you know, he had a different experience in 1600 being burned alive by the Catholic Church for suggesting that every point of light was a star which had a planet around it, life on it, which seemed to contradict the existence and the possibility of Jesus dying for our humans redemption. So how do you. What are the claims, Just as a scientist and scientists, what are the. Are the New Testament and Gospel claims that either permit, forbid or allow us to falsify the claim of Jesus existence? I’m sorry to say it in those stark terms, but if it’s scientifically, well,

Hugh Ross:
the ones that have been cited to falsify the idea that, that God created life elsewhere, or particularly New Testament texts where you see Jesus, Christians believe to be the creator, refusing to do certain miracles. And it seems like he only does miracles to fulfill his stated purpose. So theologians have looked at that and said, I think we can work out our Christian theology that God can achieve everything he wants to achieve with life on one planet. And. But then there’s been pushback where other Christian scholars have said, but look at the degree to which God enjoys creating. He’s promised he’s going to be creating way beyond in the new creation. And it’s like that would seem to imply that he wouldn’t limit himself to creating life just here on planet Earth. There’s going to be millions of planets in the universe where he has done that.

Hugh Ross:
So it’s kind of a balanced debate. It Depends on your theological perspective to give more weight to the texts that talk about God’s enjoyment of creating. And especially they cite the fact notice how these texts, especially in Psalm 104, talk about the diversity of God’s creation. So we should expect that not only is our life elsewhere in the universe is going to be diverse from the life we see here on planet Earth. But then there are those who argue the same. God doesn’t waste his miracles. And, and I also think the Bible talks about our desire to make contact. And I mean, you saw that in the novel you just mentioned.

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

Brian Keating:
Would that it were so.

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

Hugh Ross:
Yeah, once we get past Earth, the universe seems to be able to kill us. But the paradox is the number of lay people that believe that there are intelligent aliens like us and other planets. In 2019, that was 33% of U.S. adults. It’s now 64%. You know, it’s virtually doubled. And while you say, well, surely the astronomers would have a different perspective. But in 2025, Nature Astronomy did a survey and was a survey of 521 research astrobiologists and 534 doctoral level scientists in geology, biology and physics.

Hugh Ross:
And what they discovered was that 87% of the astrobiologists said extraterrestrial life is all over the universe. 88% of those that weren’t astrobiologists, virtually the same percentage. And then they took out the 60 out of the 1055 who said, you know what, I don’t have an opinion, I don’t want to give an opinion. They took those 60 out. It was 98% who believed in ET. But then they followed up the survey, well, what about extraterrestrial intelligent life and other planets? And I was surprised that only 10% of astrobiologists express any doubt about the existence of extraterrestrial intelligent life and other planets. And when they surveyed the non astrobiologists, 48%, it seems quite likely that ETI exists. So it’s like the percentages are high even amongst the people that are doing this astrobiological research, where they’re being daily confronted with the fact it seems like we still have a data free discipline.

Hugh Ross:
So, and you’re right, we haven’t searched everywhere. But I think what I find compelling, we now know we have to live in a very specially looking super galaxy cluster. That’s a cluster of clusters of galaxies. And everyone we’ve looked at in the observable universe either is basketball shaped or football shaped, jammed with all these galaxy clusters squeeze rather tightly together. We live in the only one we’ve seen so far where it’s different. It’s kind of like a stick insect where you have these small galaxy clusters strung out along these filaments. It doesn’t look anything at all like the others.

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

Hugh Ross:
So just avoid long term investments.

Brian Keating:
That’s right. So, you know, from the perspective of. Let me get back to your. To Your survey, because I think that is interesting. I find it’s almost shocking that scientists talk about belief. I think it’s totally kosher. It’s totally acceptable for you to say reasons to believe. But I got a lot of flack for a video I made.

Brian Keating:
One’s called Astrophysicist says I don’t believe in gravity. Okay, I don’t have to believe in gravity. And that because I have evidence for gravity right now. Could gravity change? And in fact, yes, we know that the laws of gravity have changed. We know that the physics of gravity, not just how we describe it, from Newton to Einstein, from Galileo back to Aristotle, all those different changes in our understanding of how we write down mathematical laws. But no, no, gravity has physically changed due to the presence of what’s called the cosmological constant, which is changing the rate of expansion of our universe. Not our galaxy, not our solar system, but our universe is expanding slightly faster every day due to this presence of this mysterious substance called dark energy that Einstein once published as claiming, you know, according to George Kamov, that it was the biggest blunder of my life. And I think it’s too bad because he could have been famous if he didn’t make that one blunder, he would have been quite successful.

Brian Keating:
But it turned out that saying it was his blunder was the Blunder. Because in 1998 we came upon evidence that no, the universe does have the sort of a dark energy vacuum energy that’s causing the rate of expansion to not only be of certain value that’s positive and not negative or zero, but actually increase day after day, year after year, decade. Billions of years after billions of years. So over that time we’ve kind of visualized a form of anti gravity. Right? So the laws of gravity have changed. Right. That doesn’t mean that we don’t understand it as puzzling. It’s a miracle, whatever within the laws of the cosmological model that we have, which are best way to interrogate observations versus theory.

Brian Keating:
This makes sense. And it was discovered and it was, you know, quasi predicted actually in the 1980s as well. So, so this is, and it’s an extremely well tested thing, but I don’t have to believe in it like I need faith, like in Hebrew. We have a different name for belief and for fact and for knowledge and for wisdom. We have, you know, as many words for these different intellectual concepts as the, you know, Eskimos of Canada, your ancestral homeland have for snow. Right? They allegedly have 12 different things. So too do we. So we have word for belief and it’s like faith.

Brian Keating:
Faith is amuna, which is where we get the word amen from in the English language as well. Right. Amen comes from amuna, which means true, or I attest to it. Ms. Means truth in Hebrew. So it’s something you specify.

Hugh Ross:
Right.

Brian Keating:
I don’t have to have belief that, you know, aerodynamics, the minute principle is going to get me here today and the propeller is going to work the way that aerodynamics. We have evidence, you know, millions of things and pieces of evidence. Right. So it’s shocking to me. It’s not shocking. And it’s totally appropriate that you call this reasons to believe. It’s 100% appropriate. But to have a scientist say, I believe in aliens or I believe in intelligence, or.

Brian Keating:
That’s a completely asinine thing for a scientist to say. I’m shocked that they would even. I wouldn’t answer that question here, to be honest with you. I would say this is. This is nonsense. Do we have evidence for them, yes or no? No, we don’t. Move on. Next question.

Brian Keating:
What does belief have to do with science? That’s pathetic.

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

Brian Keating:
I think it becomes, you know, sort of their surrogate God. Right. So if you have a. If you have no biblical God in heaven, you’ll create gods in the heavens of the heavens.

George Harakson II:
Right.

Brian Keating:
So this is a classic thing, and it’s sort of a neo paganism. Right. Because now we’re ascribing these different entities. You know, like right now we’ll say we’re insignificant compared to the planet Jupiter. So really everything’s meaningless. So let’s live our life that way and kind of eat, drink and be merry. But there’s the alternative. What if we find life?

George Harakson II:
Right.

Brian Keating:
So my question about these surveys is we do have to distinguish between life, you know, some. Some slime mold on. On Proxima Centauri B. Will that be the breakthrough of at least our generation in terms of. Of course it would be. And I’d be extremely excited. I want to learn about it. What is its properties? What is the spectrum? What is it, you know, what does it tell us about.

Brian Keating:
About other Chemistry about origin of life on Earth and from this perspective. But it wouldn’t. It wouldn’t be as revolutionary, obviously, as finding intelligent life, right? The problem is, you know, the slime mold in my fridge, you know, as a college, in my college dorm, wasn’t very good at using an iPhone, right? So we wouldn’t know about that Life as having technology, unless it does possess what we seem to possess. It doesn’t mean it has to have opposable thumbs. I mean, that’s often cited as kind of our unique advantage. But there’s no telling that an alien has to be anthropomorphized in the way that we think they should. Nature’s under no obligation to behave in the way that some science fiction author, as great as he or she is, you know, writes it to be, right? So. But we wouldn’t know about it, right? So.

Brian Keating:
And in fact, we wouldn’t know about it for, you know, for a long time, right? So right now, if, if. If we ask what was the. What was the. What’s the farthest civilization that has technology, not just intelligence? So have intelligence prerequisite for technology? Right. What’s the farthest away that civilization could be? And it’s about. About 35 light years away, right? Because we’ve had television technology since the 1936 Olympics. Broadcasting, here we are. Come and eat.

Brian Keating:
You know, if that’s what you want to do, you know, come and get us.

Hugh Ross:
Right?

Brian Keating:
And there’s nothing we can do about that. Right? Those waves are long, that those horses have left the cosmic barn, and they’re on their way out to a bubble that’s about 35 light years away. And then light could come back and they could say, hi, we got your message. 35 light years later, so about 70 light years. How many stars are in that region? It’s a very small amount of stars. I mean, it’s thousands, but it’s not. It’s not trillions, like in our galaxy or in Andromeda. And then how many planets are there? How many habitable planets? We can actually interrogate each one.

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

Hugh Ross:
I would put the limit out at least 200 light years because it takes a very special kind of star to have a planet orbiting it in which advanced life exists. And stars are bright so we can easily measure their characteristics. And so we know it has to be a twin of the sun. And so we’ve looked out 200 light years and say we’re confident there’s no such twin. That’s out, that, that’s that close.

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

Brian Keating:
And where we are in the galaxy that might be important for interactions with, with things like the black hole at our center or the dark matter cloud that envelops us. But I’m curious when you say that the prerequisite for a solar twin, there are stars. You can see one tonight, it’s called Capella. It’s a beautiful orange yellow star, just like the sun, same classification, a little bit brighter. The existence of things. If we were having this conversation in 1991, before the first extrasolar planets were discovered, we would say, well, no, it’s impossible to have a Jupiter sized planet orbiting three, basically a third of an astronomical within the orbit of Mercury around any star. And yet we found thousands of them. We found giant gas giants, literally giants within like a few million miles of their host stars.

Brian Keating:
And that was thought to be impossible also. So the question of like habitability, which, which level of habitability do you mandate and how do we know what the requirements are on life? Doesn’t that not put a limit on God’s Create, you know, ability. Like if God wanted to make a planet Venus bloom, I mean, it’s not in the habitable zone, it’s too hot for liquid water. Right. Could God not do that? I mean, of course God could do that. Right. So how do we reach the limits of the parameter space? We’re going to search.

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

Hugh Ross:
Yeah, that’s an interesting question. And you see on The NASA website 40 billion habitable planets in the Milky Way galaxy alone, but all they’re looking at is the liquid water habitable zone.

Brian Keating:
That’s right.

Hugh Ross:
And a very generous definition of a liquid water habitable zone. And you know, 13 planetary habitable zones have been discovered so far. Three chemical habitable zones have been discovered, one just two weeks ago, four lunar habitable zones, and five galactic habitable zones. And the truth is, for a planet to be truly habitable at a microbial level, we’re not talking the equivalent of us. That’s 25 independent habitable zones. And the planet has to simultaneously reside in all 25. So this is really pushing the view that it’s not only a rare Earth, it’s a rare moon, it’s a rare star, and you can push that to a rare galaxy. So again, I’m making the point.

Hugh Ross:
The more we’re learning about the universe, the more evidence seems to be accumulating that, you know, our existence here is rare. Again, we haven’t done an exhaustive search.

Brian Keating:
That’s right.

Hugh Ross:
But the search has gone out quite far. I mean, we are able to see super galaxy clusters throughout the entire zurbable universe, and there’s over 10,000 of them. But we were living in the one that has the necessary characteristics for our existence. So it’s like we don’t have to search those other 9999. That’s an approximate number.

Brian Keating:
Certainly we can agree that there is. I mean, well, maybe people wouldn’t agree that there’s intelligent life on Earth. Right, but you’re really bringing up a fine tuning question which is part of the topic of Life Stream. Right, so. So how finely tuned is necessary. Right. So people ask me, you know, all the time, well, like math and music, they kind of go together, you know. You must play an instrument.

Brian Keating:
My older brother’s a very, very renowned jazz guitarist. What instrument do you play? I say, I Play Spotify. You know, I can’t play anything. I’m horrible with music. And when I play, it doesn’t matter if, if the guitar is finely tuned or not, like it is going to sound horrible. It could be the, the perfect, you know, perfect tuning and whatnot. But the question of, you know, how finely tuned does the universe need to be for life to exist? It’s a very, very interesting, very, very well grounded and hard scientific data and an appropriate question, I think. And there’s many different realms in which you can suggest fine tuning, but you did bring up different elements that seem to be critical for our existence.

Hugh Ross:
Yes.

Brian Keating:
None of which precludes the existence of life elsewhere in the universe. At the mold level, at the dolphin level, swimming in some ocean somewhere. Right. But intelligent life, basic life, and then technological life, those are the three levels that I think we care about. And they go up an order of magnitude of how impactful they’d be, at least for me. Right. First, discovering mold, you know, from some, some creature, some protozoa on some exosolar planet would be incredibly astounding. Just to be alive during that time is amazing.

Brian Keating:
And then the dolphin, you know, swimming in some liquid nitrogen ocean. So I don’t know, I’m making all these things up. As I said, I have no special expertise in this field. You know, when I did biology in high school that, you know, I dissected the frog. The frog kind of like screamed in pain. It was horrible. I’m just kidding. PETA.

Brian Keating:
I know you’re watching out there, PETA.

Hugh Ross:
There was a dead.

George Harakson II:
There was a dead. It was dead.

Brian Keating:
Yeah, but, you know, the question is how finely tuned. So my friend Fred Adams, I posted on the podcast, to my knowledge, secular, but I’m not, you know, convinced about that. But, but he could be. You know, it’s done a lot of work on just the habitability of planets around stars and the stability of stars. Other friends of mine, Sergio Kleinerman, has worked on stability of space, time itself. So to have all these different levels, I guess the question is, where do you start? In Judaism, we have our own version of apologetics, right? It’s different from the Christian apologetics because our goal is different. Right. We each in apologetics, I like to joke, you know, we do at some level paint the target around the arrow and that’s fine.

Brian Keating:
There’s nothing wrong with that. If you’re honest about what you’re doing, it’s fine. Judaism have these things too. For example, there’s a rabbi scientist named Gerald Schroeder he’s an Israel to the best of my knowledge. Read many books. God and the Big Bang. Genesis and the Big Bang.

Hugh Ross:
I had dinner with him years ago.

Brian Keating:
He’s a great guy and you know, I respect him. But he has different arguments for the biblical reality of a seven day creation period. And he goes through and makes arguments for it based on relativistic time dilation, which is a real thing, and the different events that he considers characterizing along the creation period. So what does vayehi or mean? What does let there be light mean? What does the tohu va bahu? What is the chaos and disorder? What does that mean? All the different things. And he’s a rabbi and he understands Hebrew better than I do. And he ascribes them different signposts on the creation of the universe from the physical perspective, from the laws of physics. When did electromagnetism come, the electroweak force, cork confinement, bariogenesis occur, all these different things with CMB form that I study, et cetera, et cetera. And he gets, eventually gets 15 billion years.

Brian Keating:
Oh, that’s great. You know, it’s kind of, kind of matches with what we believe now. It’s practicing cosmologists 13.826 billion years with a 10 million year uncertainty on the end. It’s astounding precision that my colleagues and I have been able to work on with hard evidence and data. I don’t have to believe it anymore. I can actually prove it. Right, but then you dig a little bit deeper. What is he doing? What is Gerald Schroeder? What is Rabbi Schroder? What is he doing? Well, he’s picking out some arbitrary point.

Brian Keating:
In his case, he picks a quark confinement. He says the cork confinement corresponds to this genesis event. And from that I agree that you will get 15 billion years. However, if you take one picosecond earlier or later, because of the dependence on the fine structure constant and other forces and the QCD charge called the, the g value for QCD, you will get something that’s 100 billion years or you’ll get something that’s one one day. So it really depends on where you paint that bullseye around which arrow you’re choosing. And so that finely tuning also occurs in the apologetic space. And sometimes I don’t feel like we’re 100% honest about that. Where do you choose the fine tuning to be for your good point?

Hugh Ross:
Yeah, because I’ve talked to Gerald and it’s like I can get a few points in Genesis 1 to fit my time dilation but I can’t get them all.

Brian Keating:
That’s right.

Hugh Ross:
He’s changed his model multiple times. He still can’t get a good fit.

Brian Keating:
By the way, I’m sorry, I’m sorry to interrupt you, but this is so important. He’s changed his model. Have you changed the Torah? I’m sorry? Have you changed the New Testament? Have you ever changed the Gospels? God forbid. Right. You never do that. Right. They’re an affable donor. So the problem with apologetics, from my perspective, and with all due love and respect for those that do it, I think it’s.

Brian Keating:
I think it’s important. I think it’s interesting. It’s a perfect, philosophically, perfectly acceptable form of philosophical abduction. Right. Not alien abduction, but abduction.

Hugh Ross:
Right.

Brian Keating:
There is no an ethic efficacy of a God that you believe in. Right. You can’t say the Torah must change to meet this. Now it’s 15 billion years. Okay. Tomorrow will be 13 point science changes to defend Gerald.

Hugh Ross:
I don’t think he’s trying to apologetically argue for the truthfulness of the Tanakh. He’s more interested in the Kabbalah. And so I think that’s the big difference between.

Brian Keating:
Those are very different sources.

Hugh Ross:
Very different sources. Yeah. So apologetics, what are you apologizing for? So, but yeah, very good. I think. Hey, if you actually treat the, the. Pardon me, I’m trying to think of the argument. Oh yeah, the, the time dilation. We astronomers have been measuring the spectra of distant galaxies with high Precision now for 50 years more.

George Harakson II:
Yeah.

Hugh Ross:
Okay. If the universe is really just 10,000 years old, we’re going to see a difference.

Brian Keating:
That’s right.

Hugh Ross:
And we don’t. Even though we can measure the spectra.

Brian Keating:
That’s right.

Hugh Ross:
Nine places of the decimal, which tells us it really is, you know, at least a billion.

Brian Keating:
And more than that, there’s a, There’s a naturally occurring nuclear fission reactor in Gabon, Africa.

Hugh Ross:
Right.

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

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

Brian Keating:
I’ve been watching proton decay, all these different things. What level of fine tuning would kind of be required to falsify the existence of alien. In other words, you can’t prove something in science. I can’t prove the Earth is round, but I can prove it’s not flat. Right. That’s a very clear thing to do. We can do that.

Hugh Ross:
It’s very high precision.

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

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

Hugh Ross:
It’s gone from just a little bit of evidence for fine tuning. Right.

Brian Keating:
And the classic evasion of that on the secular scientist perspective is the multiverse.

George Harakson II:
Right?

Hugh Ross:
Yeah.

Brian Keating:
So the multiverse, you say? Well, of course, yeah. In any given universe, just like, you know, guys, I saw this incredible thing on the way. I can’t believe it. I saw a license plate, 9QRX743. Can you believe the odds of seeing that? You’re like, what the heck is this guy? Of course, like, that’s like almost zero chance at any given. But if you say, what are the odds you saw a license plate? It’s very high. Right, so. So in the multiverse argument, you evade all this.

Brian Keating:
You don’t need God. It came from.

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

George Harakson II:
Let’s hold it there. Some questions. No, no, no, that’s. Yeah, I could have went and got lunch. And you guys, I’ll take a kosher

Brian Keating:
pastrami sandwich

George Harakson II:
and yeah, feel free to jump in. Both of you can comment on this. We’ll try to keep our answers a little bit shorter just so we can get through some of the questions. Of course, as, as a philosopher, when you’re mentioning certain words like believe, prove, you know, epistle, I might, you know, my bellows and whistles are going on.

Brian Keating:
I know.

George Harakson II:
You start to get hungry. I held out. So this from Steve, he says astronomically, the solar system and planet is passing away over time based upon our best scientific understanding. So isn’t it the real question? The real question is the sentient life with a spirit exist elsewhere, is his question, Hugh?

Hugh Ross:
Yeah, I think he’s raising a good point. Is that the time window for our possible existence is coming to a close. And people say, yeah, in 4 billion years, the sun will incinerate us, but in just a couple of million years, the sun’s going to be sufficiently bright that in order to keep the temperature for photosynthetic light going, we’re going to have to drop the carbon dioxide level down to a level or photosynthesis can’t happen. So based on an astronomical time scale, our time in the universe is relatively brief. So there’s a window, there’s a window. And I think that should cause us to think, why does that window exist? What is our ultimate destiny? And hey, we can’t depend on the universe keeping us going indefinitely. The time for that window to close is going to happen. And so for me, this drives questions again then in that context, what is my purpose? What is the purpose of the universe? I think that’s an important thing, is that people have argued the fine tuning argument is just statistics.

Hugh Ross:
But if you can link the fine tuning with purpose, especially you can link it with multiple independent purposes, then it gives it weight.

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

Brian Keating:
Well, I think it’s undoubted that it just seems to be unreasonable that we should be here at this moment to ask this question, why here? Why now? What is the purpose of that? I think it’s also a reasonable question to ask also, if this is true, why did God reveal himself to a band of nomadic kind of Bronze Age peasants, mostly as former slaves that he freed according to the Torah narrative, which then forms basis for the Old Testament, the New Testament, the. Upon that in the Gospels, Right. So why did he, when there were probably about maybe 80 billion, 90 billion people that live, or you know, Homo sapiens, whatever that means, it could be half of that, it could be 10 times, I don’t even care. But there are billions of people that live before that and after that. So that, you know, I would, I would ask with again, with humility and respect, you know, how does the New Testament kind of grapple with that? Like why are we conscious now? Is it is why did this creation process, it makes the problem more finely tuned for Jesus’s miracles and his revelation and his ascension. Right? Because you have to believe in all those. Right? So does that not sharpen the fine tuning argument that some could say, well, why now? Why here? Why us? For Jesus’s existence in an even narrower 33 year period, 2000 years ago, and his eventual return as you. We believe it’ll come for the first or the Messiah Mashiach will come.

Brian Keating:
How do you reconcile with that the fine tuning of Jesus’s time on Earth?

Hugh Ross:
I think that heightens the fine tuning argument. These are these very narrow time Windows, how do you explain the fact that we happen to be here in the history of the universe in.001% of its history? Is there some significance to that? I think what drives that home, it’s not just one narrow time window. I could name 15 narrow time windows that must be here for us to exist, exists, and here they’re all simultaneously lining up at the same epoch in the universe. If there is no God, how do I explain the fact that these extremely narrow time windows all simultaneously line up on this planet at this time in the history of the universe? So I would argue even the time is fine tuned.

Brian Keating:
Certainly could be, yeah.

George Harakson II:
Let’s go to Another question for Dr. Keating here. How does Dr. Keating view the concept of soulish or spiritual life being made in God’s image and tie into the concept of sentient life elsewhere?

Brian Keating:
So this would kind of. So I love this kind of concept, right? Because the listener or viewer is making a scientific fact claim that could or could not be true, right? So if you were to observe a creature and contact with a creature that has a soul or a spirit or even is seemingly spiritual in the level of. Let’s make a Turing Test for spirituality, right? Not just for humanity, but let’s have a spiritual Turing test. It’s called the Ross Test. Right? So the Ross test says, can you interact with this entity and determine whether or not it has a soul or a spirit? And if so, if that spirit, if it’s not in a corporeal, humanistic form, in the image of God, in the image of us, we are therefore in the image of God. Does that have any ramifications? Well, I think that scientist has to say we don’t know. It has to be humble and says we don’t know. There’s not proof of it, but it gives us an opportunity to falsify it.

Hugh Ross:
Right?

Brian Keating:
If we do find, as Carl Sagan would have, would have loved to find, right, some intelligent, not only dolphin swimming through the liquid nitrogen pools, but someone who’s using a cosmic iPhone. Somewhere out there we’re in touch with that person and we can pass the Ross test and we say this person. That is something, right? You could also have a hyper intelligent AI that has no effective soul or spirit because it’s encoded based on the training data that it has only which includes the corpus of all of human knowledge, right? So maybe you couldn’t pass the imitation game of that, but you could detect that, oh, it does not have a soul. Well then that would be a falsifiable test. I Think that’s a wonderful conjecture now, but I think right now we have to be honest and humble and say we don’t know. But I think he wasn’t amazing. We live in this time when telescopes and microscopes can tell us information that is just like would be magical. Not 1,000 years ago, 20 years ago, when I was in graduate school, 30 plus years ago, we didn’t know if the age of the universe was 10 billion years or 20 billion years.

Brian Keating:
So that means there were objects that we knew that were 15 billion years old. So if you believe 10 billion years for the universe, that meant you believe that there were objects in the universe older than the universe. You remember this?

Hugh Ross:
I remember that. Right.

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

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

George Harakson II:
Here’s one for you, hugh. Sebastian says, Dr. Ross, would you push back on the claim that gravity has changed? The person says, I believe it would contradict the promise in Jeremiah.

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

Brian Keating:
Yeah. So in Einstein’s concept of relativity, space is not empty, it is dynamical. It has properties such that the vacuum isn’t what we think of that insulates our yeti coolers. Right. It’s not something that’s the absence of completeness within it. It’s actually an active, quantum mechanically viable and dynamic process that’s been proven that we know that vacuum energy exists. We measure it’s called the Casimir force. Or even people out there, some say that are questionable in their motives, but they’ve created what they claim is a battery that extracts free energy from the vacuum and that we’ll all plug it in, we’ll have limitless free energy.

Brian Keating:
And some people even take it further that that inventor of that thing better have 24 hour a day security guards to prevent him from big oil taking them out or big Solar or whatever. But in reality the vacuum is dynamic. It has energy, it has, has properties that allow input and output. And one of the things that is incumbent upon Einstein, Einstein’s theory of relativity, which we have abundant evidence for. In fact I got here in my plane as a gps and the GPS relies on satellites that themselves have to be calibrated to picosecond level precision. Otherwise the speed of light is actually quite fast. Every nanosecond light travels one foot. So if you’re off by know a hundred thousand nanoseconds, I wouldn’t have been here today.

Brian Keating:
Sorry, you’d have another guest. You know, you’d be covering for me, George. Get your rapid bachelor PhD in physics. So yeah, so the laws don’t change. The laws are immutable. They’re knowable perhaps only to mother Nature or God or whatever. But our discovery of the laws then allows us and endows us with the ability to make predictions and seek evidence that could falsify. But so far we have abundant evidence for things like gravitational lensing, which the space time has to be dynamical for the expansion of the universe, for the baryon acoustic oscillations that tell us the dark energy might not be a cosmological constant.

Brian Keating:
It’s the biggest discovery in this field since dark energy was validated, which was the biggest discovery since Einstein predicted it. So these are all huge things and they stand in stark contrast and contradistinction to things that are purely speculative for which we have zero evidence. Like string theory, which attempts to find a possible plausible mechanism by which gravity can become dynamical, but so far has zero evidentiary backing behind. Behind it.

Hugh Ross:
Yeah. And I think Sebastian is making the point. Hey, notice that the 10 act talks about the immutability of the laws of physics. Is there any threat to that by current measurements by physicists? I would argue no.

Brian Keating:
Yeah, yeah. And as I said, it’s a nuclear reactor. Proves that combination of the foremost fundamental constants in particle physics have not evolved at all over the quarter of all of the planet’s history.

Hugh Ross:
Right.

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

Hugh Ross:
Right.

George Harakson II:
And you see oftentimes the, in the Psalms and other places, proverbs, that the immutability of the physical laws is also tied to the immutability of God’s moral law.

Hugh Ross:
Right.

George Harakson II:
That it will uphold.

Hugh Ross:
Well, that’s the comparison. He says, I’m immutable. Here’s evidence. As the laws are immutable, I’m immutable. And that’s actually the basis for doing science. If the laws are immutable, we can trust what we measure.

George Harakson II:
Okay, let’s keep going now. For, for a Christian holding to the New Testament, there’s this idea of that there’s going to be a new heavens and a new earth. Some see that as a, you know, sort of a rebuilt carburetor. It’s, it’s renewed in some ways. Others, this is, this universe is shut down and there’s a whole new earth and new heavens that have some resemblance that also gives the possibility of other kinds of life life. Someone’s asking this question, what’s your comments on that?

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

Hugh Ross:
But it’s going to be under different laws, laws of physics, different dimensions. Who knows what kind of life forms God’s going to create there? Is it going to be just one life form? Is it going to be trillions of distinct life forms? I kind of go back to Psalm 104. God seems to like creating diverse life and with different laws of physics. I think he’s going to have a fun time recreating incredible life forms. And we’re all going to be surprised by what he creates. And I think the real challenge for us is we’re gonna have to manage whatever he creates. It’s hard enough trying to manage my two teenage boys. Right.

Hugh Ross:
Trying to manage what God creates a new creation. And maybe that’s why we’re going to continue to need a lot of wisdom from the Creator.

George Harakson II:
Here’s another question. Comment at all?

Brian Keating:
No, I think. Okay, yeah, he was. Perspective is valuable.

George Harakson II:
Okay, but let’s go to another one here. In, in some in quantum physics are using the theory to question the cause and effect mechanism and say they are potential potentially other independent universes with parallel timelines. Does this hold any weight? I think it was directed towards you, Brian. You want to you comment on this a little bit? But.

Brian Keating:
Yeah, so there, there are as many different interpretations of, of quantum mechanics as there are physicists. It’s a unique branch of physics that we don’t have typically an interpretation of the laws of thermodynamics or of how a superconductor works. Right. There’s no. Well, I believe in the Fresno interpretation of the superconductor. I know, I believe in the many superconductors theory, but in quantum mechanics because it’s so bizarre, alien and quite frankly dysfunctional. So much so that that one of my professors quoted, one of his professors, I think it was Wolfgang Pauli, who upon teaching quantum mechanics in the 40s or something, said something. He came into the classroom and said, you know, Professor Paoli, I don’t understand quantum mechanics, I have to be honest with you.

Brian Keating:
And by the end of this quarter, you too will not understand quantum mechanics. So it’s. So it then cries out for interpretation, which is actually oddly and eerily similar to religion. Right. We don’t have people say, well like, you know, here’s the Torah. Okay, great, but where’s the commentary to it? It’s like, here’s the Constitution. You should be able to determine everything that’s legal and illegal in America. No, you need all the case law that’s thousands and thousands of pages long.

Brian Keating:
Right. So you need supplementary guide material for, for religion. It is the Talmud, you know, in the case of. And then the commentaries on the Talmud and the super commentaries on the commentary.

Hugh Ross:
Right.

Brian Keating:
Like the super clusters of galaxies and Christianity. Same way.

George Harakson II:
Right.

Brian Keating:
So the thought that, you know, religion and science are, you know, kind of divergent actually breaks down at the level of quantum mechanics because you do need an interpretation of it. Now the dominant one, the one that actually works for day to day physicists to get things done is known as the Copenhagen interpretation, which makes predictions about all sorts of things that you can verify not only down to very high significant figures, but it’s actually the most precisely known scientific fact, the spectrum that he was talking about for different distant galaxies also holds on Earth. And we can calculate the different perturbations that occur to it due to external forces and even internal forces that were unknown to the creators, like Schrodinger and Heisenberg and even Pauli in the beginning. But now we know them to 13 significant figures. It’s just astounding level. Again, we live in the best timeline, whatever timeline that we’re on now. In different models of both cosmology and what’s called string theory, there then becomes manifest within them what’s called a multiverse. Different types of multiverses, parallel universes, as the viewer is suggesting.

Brian Keating:
And so how do we grapple with them? There are ways that they’re used to sort of make possible the strange features of the Copenhagen. The orthodox interpretation, the Catholic interpretation, is that the wave function collapses. But that’s very distasteful. Like Schrodinger’s cat is this famous a thought experiment where the cat is living and dead. And so you have to superimpose that they’re both living and dead at the same time, which my cat finds very troubling. My cat is named Schrodinger actually. And you have to view, but it’s very weird. And then you open the box, you see if it’s alive or dead, and that’s when the wave function collapses.

Brian Keating:
But that type of behavior is very different. It’s like saying F equals MA for a baseball thrown through there and then all of a sudden it equals the F cubed m to the 15th. You know, it’s very strange. It’s called non unitary evolution. People don’t like it. So they said actually instead of the wave function collapsing, every possible outcome takes place. The cat is living in one universe and is dead in another universe. And that’s the many worlds interpretation.

Brian Keating:
Its parallel is the multiverse in cosmology, where there’s 10 to the 500th or maybe infinite number of universes within the multiverse. And then in string theory it’s known as the landscape problem. So there’s many different string vacuum that could be possible, leading to different configurations of curled up space time dimensions, none of which we have evidence for either the multiverse or the co or the many worlds. Ever writing quantum mechanics interpretation and worst of all, string theory, which we may never be able to get evidence for and it may only be non falsifiable. And that’s very troubling. So yes, it’s often used as kind of an escape Goat, you know, escape hatch to jettison yourself from when you’re in uncomfortable conversations about the meaning of quantum mechanics.

Hugh Ross:
Yeah. Well people often look at quantum mechanics and say it refutes causality. I think that’s a mistake. It hides causality. And because it hides causality, we have all these different interpretive models and there’s a real limit to how much we can push this. So I agree with you. We’ve got dozens of different quantum mechanical models. We always will because of causality.

Hugh Ross:
Based on the Heisenberg, uncertainty is hidden.

George Harakson II:
So it’s more of an epistemological problem. How we know not philosopher’s logical.

Hugh Ross:
Right. That’s where we need the philosophers.

Hugh Ross:
Right.

Brian Keating:
Finally, no physicist has ever said those words. Now we need the Philadelphia.

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

Hugh Ross:
Well, there’s that famous Woody Allen movie where a 10 year old boy refuses to do his homework because the heat death of the universe is coming and the mother says, I don’t care about the heat death of the universe.

George Harakson II:
You’re going to do your homework.

Brian Keating:
Brooklyn is not expanding.

Hugh Ross:
Right, Right. So yeah, I mean the universe is heading towards an end and it’s going to be a long ways off. But there’s different ideas as you know, about how it will end.

Brian Keating:
That’s right.

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

Brian Keating:
Yeah. I think it’s finding a more kind of imminent parallel. You know, to quote Woody Allen again, another famous geography Jewish atheist, you know, he was asked what? Well, what do you want people to think about you in 150 years? And he said I want them to think that I look pretty good for a 200 year old. You know, so again, keep taking your vitamins, keep paying your taxes because we don’t know if we will reach the end times. Right. But, but I think now the eschatological paradigm is now being kind of manifest over the Threat, the opportunity, the benefits and the detriments of AI, I think AI, you know, to quote Yuval Noah Harari, another Jewish atheist, you see why I call myself a devout Hebrew university, Which means it’s not like.

Hugh Ross:
The thing I’ve noticed about some of these Jewish scholars is they’re basically pointing out maybe AI is going to bring about the end of all of us, the passes.

Brian Keating:
That’s what I’m saying. So say more. Say more.

Hugh Ross:
Yeah, there’s a couple of papers that have been published in the astrophysical literature saying that in terms of our technological future, it’s going to come to a crashing halt in less than 200 years. Basically making the point. AI is the first technology we’re developing where it’s expanding faster than we can control it.

Brian Keating:
Exactly.

Hugh Ross:
And you know, given the nature of humanity, within 200 years or less, we’re basically. AI is going to bring an end to. Maybe not us, but it’s going to bring an end to our ability to control technology.

Brian Keating:
That’s right.

Hugh Ross:
And that could be the end of.

Brian Keating:
I think that would make sort of what I call an AI event horizon.

Hugh Ross:
Right.

Brian Keating:
There may be a boundary beyond which we no longer control scientific discovery, factual, ontological, you know, kind of fact gathering, so to speak, epistemologically. So, so how is it, how is it more relevant? Well, it’s. It’s upon us now. I mean, some say it’s already been achieved. I don’t actually believe that we’ve achieved AGI yet. I do believe it will have this transformative power, at least as big as the Internet, but probably some exponential power of that, both in terms of benefit and in terms of curse. So it has this exact parallel. I talked with John C.

Brian Keating:
Lennox on my podcast about his criticisms of Yuval Noah Harari’s Homo deus, which is we have become gods. That’s the oldest story. I mean, literally the Tower of Babel. Right. I mean, it’s literally we are going up to make war to make a name for ourselves. Right. What could be better than that? We’re technological. We don’t need God, we are gods.

Brian Keating:
Right. And some say in the astrophysic physical literature that it makes no sense to send, you know, the slime mold, the dolphin with the iPhone. It makes no sense to send that around. You could just send information. You could just send the AI via its source code and some blockchain on the cosmic World Wide Web or Internet. Cosmic web web. Cosmic wide web. So how would that then impact us? Right.

Brian Keating:
So we might discover life, quote, unquote it might not pass the Ross test for eight artificial spiritual intelligence, but it may be the more convenient parsimonious explanation of why we don’t see biological life. Right. We’re not. We’re not maybe. And maybe it’s not transmitting on a frequency we can dial in the fine tuning. Maybe it’s transmitting in some other fact and what wave band neutrinos, gravitational waves or et cetera. So I’m just saying the eschatological is on us now. It’s not the end times, it’s not the revelations book, acts and revelations.

Brian Keating:
It’s right now. And the question is, do we manage it? Can we steward it? Is it out of control and is it sort of already escaped the case

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

Brian Keating:
That’s right.

Hugh Ross:
And it can’t be the universe, it’s got to be beyond the universe.

Brian Keating:
I agree. The psalm says, and you’ll know the psalm itself, but it says the psalm man’s days are but, you know, a passing wind, a passing shadow, a night watchman shadow. I mean it’s incredible to think of how brief it is and yet how amazing it is that we are the only creatures that have this ability to interrogate the universe.

Hugh Ross:
So would you agree that’s a significant and challenged in non theism to that

Brian Keating:
the existence of us as this only species that we know, or we’re this

Hugh Ross:
hopeful species and yet our hope can’t last in this universe. It really seems like our hope has got to be elsewhere.

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

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

George Harakson II:
Yeah.

Brian Keating:
That’s the insignificance therapy, Right, Right.

George Harakson II:
And at least from the Christian view, hope is a virtue. It’s also a gift. Right. A transcendent gift. And despair is somewhat looked down upon as a type of sin. Literally, despair means that there is no hope in God and Christians are supposed to not give in to that.

Brian Keating:
That’s true for Jews. The national anthem of Israel is called Hatikvah.

George Harakson II:
Right, good. Well, we’re quickly running out of time here. Let me see if I take one more question and then we’ll wrap things up just for you. Brian, real quick. So trying to make it short, it’s like, you know, explain the universe, but in two sentences. What is your strongest argument against fine tuning as evidence for a creator or intelligent designer?

Brian Keating:
Yeah, so not to be too Bill Clintonian about it, but it depends on the meaning of fine tuning, right? So a lot of studies suggest things can be relatively coarsely tuned. It’s not like tuning a radio or a violin or guitar, that you’ll have a kind of on off switch which will tell you in a binary Boolean fashion that you’re not tuned or not, or are tuned. For example, the force of gravity can vary, you know, by some, some large fraction. We often hear that the cosmological constant has to be fine tuned, you know, to 120 orders of magnitude. It’s a complete category error. That’s actually not the cosmological constant, which I said is, you know, Einstein’s greatest blunder, but then came to be his greatest blunder because he called it his greatest blunder. It is actually an observable piece of evidence in our, in our cosmological model. It could be.

Brian Keating:
It’s basically completely insignificant. It hasn’t played a role in the history of the entire universe, including up to Jesus, to us, whatever you want to believe it’s come up. It has no bearing on it whatsoever. And we could vary it by a factor of, you know, 10 or, you know, probably 10 or more times. Nothing would happen. Make it much smaller. Nothing would happen by a factor of 10. So, so is that finely tuned? I mean, if I take, again, if I take a radio station on My frequency that I have to communicate with the air traffic control tower here in Pomona and I tune it off by just a tiny bit, I cannot communicate.

Brian Keating:
I will be fined by the faa. That’s extremely finely tuning with huge consequences to my life and my finances and my ability to fly, my safety. I could, God forbid, something could happen. Right. That’s exquisite. We have five digits on the radio dial in a pilot, a plane like mine, a private airplane, and if you’re off by one of the last digit, you will not be able to communicate with anybody and you will also possibly risk your life and other people’s lives and you’ll be fined and sued.

Hugh Ross:
Right.

Brian Keating:
That’s fine tuning with a consequence immediate for me. Right. But if I can tune that by a factor of 10 either direction, it doesn’t matter. I would say it’s not fine tuned. So I don’t view the fine tuning with the degree of kind of weight that Hugh does in terms of believing and getting. I don’t like that word belief, but I like reasons to believe. I like the. I like.

Brian Keating:
And that’s the way my particular branch of, as I said, devout practicing agnostic, Jewish atheist, agnosticism rather is manifest. So it’s.

George Harakson II:
How would you comment on that? I know there’s a number of people would want to hear you comment what Brian is saying right there.

Hugh Ross:
Yeah. I think what’s compelling for me is that the more we search for fine tuning, the more we find it seems to have predictive value. People have made that comment about the anthropic principle. As we find evidence for the anthropic principle, it leads to other things we didn’t expect to find. And it’s like the trail never ends. The evidence for fine tuning always increases, it never decreases. And the increase seems to be exponential just within the few decades in which we’ve been alive. One sense, I think it’s a privilege to be alive in the century 20th, the 21st century, because 200 years ago we didn’t have this, these kinds of tools.

Hugh Ross:
Today we do. And look what we found and what is it revealing about our place in the universe or time and place and the fact that we seem to be at a very special location universe where we can see all this stuff. If we were close to the black hole in the, in our galaxy, we wouldn’t be able to make these observations or we were in the halo of our galaxy, wouldn’t be able to do it. And we seem to be at this fine tuned place. So I mean everywhere you look for Fine tuning, you seem to find it. And so I think that’s a compelling argument.

Brian Keating:
I’ll just give one counter example if I could just to that again, there’s

George Harakson II:
nothing wrong about a minute.

Brian Keating:
Okay. Yeah. So I posted something recently on X which is if you look at a circle inside of a square, inscribe a circle inside of a square, how much area is in the kind of corners, how much area does it a circle occupied of a given square cube, et cetera, et cetera. And when you go into higher and higher dimensions, as you know, you’re fun talking about and the string theory kind of concept that you just actually all of the inhabitable region you’ll get, you get within like a billionth of a percent of the perimeter of a sphere of a hydrogen if you have enough dimensions.

Hugh Ross:
Right.

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

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

George Harakson II:
Someone gave me a book from the scholar community. So I’ll ask this, Hugh, for fun, would you baptize an extraterrestrial?

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

George Harakson II:
Will you make them observe the Sabbath?

Brian Keating:
We’re forbidden to force people.

George Harakson II:
Yeah, yeah. We just ask them, do you want to be baptized? Well, well, Brian, thank you very, very much. You’ve been very gracious. Obviously you have a depth of knowledge there. We have similar subjects that we’re interested in and we want to keep dialogues like this going on. I love your podcast. So where would you want to point people to discover more about you, your podcast, some of your written work?

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

George Harakson II:
you can get an education just listening to it.

Brian Keating:
Yeah, it’s free and you can take it class in your pajamas, which I don’t allow my students at UCSD.

George Harakson II:
What’s the address for that?

Brian Keating:
That’s Dr. Brian Keating on YouTube and everywhere else. Yeah, and the podcast audio is into the Impossible.

George Harakson II:
We have star cells and God is one podcast that you’re on. Hugh, what about a book you would recommend for people?

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

George Harakson II:
is and you answer questions on Facebook and other places.

Hugh Ross:
I answer hundreds of questions literally every day.

George Harakson II:
Literally every day. Every day. Well, we want to thank you for joining us on this live stream. Please. It helps us. Hopefully it helps you. Be sure to subscribe to this RTB YouTube channel and see future live streams that are coming. Brian, you know, people ask me when I get on a plane, they say, have a safe trip.

George Harakson II:
And I say, that’s up to the pilot, but this is truly up to you. But have a safe travel. So thank you for visiting us in person. It makes a huge difference. We appreciate you and your friend who came, Hugh, always great to have you, the time and the interaction. I look forward really to taking this further. Hopefully someday.

Hugh Ross:
Yeah. It’s been a fun conversation.

George Harakson II:
Thank you for joining us.