Dr. Brian Keating joins Dr. Carl Sagan to discuss the relationship between science and ethics. Dr. Keating has been a guest on my podcast before and that was plenty of fun, and we had a chance to continue our ongoing conversations.
00:42:35.320You didn't think you were going to go down and you're going to discover dust instead of the Big Bang,
00:42:39.500which is what happened to me in my, I described in my first book.
00:42:42.340We thought we saw the gravitational wave aftermath of the inflationary universe that we talked about in my first podcast episode with you.
00:42:50.000But instead, that led to the Simons Observatory.
00:42:54.000It's led to a $200 million project that is now going to not only look for the gold, but also look for the dragons, look for the dust, look for the things that are the impediments.
00:43:27.380But there's a little bit of that thrill that you get when you are surprised.
00:43:32.700Well, the surprise, the thing is, is that if you lay out a prediction in keeping with your understanding of the world and something else occurs, you have no idea what you've discovered.
00:43:48.080Now, what you might have discovered is that your reputation is now shot and your future is looking gloomy, right?
00:43:53.900I'm sure that that's not going to happen.
00:43:55.540But you also have no idea, like, that's a reservoir of unrevealed truth of indeterminate magnitude, right?
00:44:02.820And so, the proper response, and I did learn this in the lab that I trained in, the proper response to your error as an experimental scientist is,
00:44:13.620I probably just stumbled across something that was even more important than what I was investigating.
00:44:28.220Do you know, Jordan, that we're made of matter, right?
00:44:30.020But in the early universe, we think that almost there was an exact symmetry.
00:44:35.780It's one of these guiding principles of physics, that there are symmetries.
00:44:39.340Conservation of energy is a type of symmetry.
00:44:41.840Angular momentums conservation is another type of symmetry.
00:44:45.320Displacement, the symmetry, those are all the things that we say the laws of physics shouldn't change.
00:44:50.180They should not look different in a mirror or upside down or on Pluto or in Arizona.
00:44:55.800It should not make a difference who you are, where you are.
00:44:58.440It's kind of the great democratic process of science known as the Lorentz principle of Lorentz invariance that Galileo really crystallized and then later eventually—
00:45:07.360Fundamental things apply everywhere in all directions.
00:45:10.100Fundamental truth to the extent that we can perceive it.
00:45:13.660And so, you know, when you do something and you find out, well, this is not correct, like the fact that the postulate was, and all the greatest scientists thought, there should be equal amounts of matter and antimatter.
00:45:25.220We wouldn't be here if that were true.
00:45:26.520All the matter particles would annihilate with the antimatter particles, and the universe would be a universe of complete, barren, sterile radiation.
00:45:34.740Pretty boring unless you happen to be a photon.
00:45:54.000Well, we have to look how symmetric is the universe, how beautifully, finely balanced, tuned, if you believe in an intelligent designer, how finely tuned did he tune it to be?
00:46:05.260Well, it turns out he did a spectacular job because for every particle of matter, there was another particle of antimatter, except for there was one.
00:46:14.240For every billion particles of antimatter, there was a billion and one particle of matter.
00:46:20.740So the two matching a mirror image, matter and antimatter particles, they destroyed each other.
00:46:27.140And what was left, one particle of matter, and the rest was a bath of photons.
00:47:06.140A quarter of a percent mistuning, you can perceive it.
00:47:09.380How well tuned does the universe have to be in order for us to be having this conversation?
00:47:14.420And then the supposition is, well, if it's extremely finely tuned across a whole vast panoply of different areas, from the strength of these constants, the number of protons, to the number of antiprotons, then, you know, you might start to think this is suggestive.
00:47:28.820But it's not a scientific hypothesis, right?
00:47:31.940We can't say—we can always say God, and we can always say there was no God.
00:47:36.620And I think this is an important fact that people get—I was on with a young man that you've met many times, Stephen Bartlett, on his podcast.
00:48:07.580And it's been—yeah, I always say I'd kill for 1% of God's, you know, book sales.
00:48:11.740But, you know, and I told him, look, what you're searching for, I can't necessarily give you.
00:48:17.060I can give you the approach to me that I find persuasive.
00:48:19.940But it's not going to be persuasive to you because it's specific to me and my life history and how I understand how I got to be who I am.
00:48:26.620And it doesn't use the strength of quantum electrodynamics.
00:48:29.580And it doesn't use all sorts of things.
00:48:31.200And when you search for that, I think—I told him, I said, Stephen, you know, and I think I got this from you in the conversation you had with Dennis Prager that I was privileged to be a part of in Santa Barbara about five, six years ago.
00:48:42.960And you said, you know, who am I to say—this is you—who am I to say I believe in God?
00:48:48.080Like, what is a man to say such a thing?
00:49:51.560I mean, the fine-tuning argument I find specious, and maybe I'm wrong about this, because I think that you can obliviate its unlikelihood with an evolutionary argument.
00:50:08.620It's like, well, if life evolved under these conditions, it's not surprising that there's a tight tuning between what's necessary for life and the conditions of the universe, no matter how improbable they are, because this form of life wouldn't exist without that form of material reality constituting the substrate.
00:50:32.260And so, if something has adapted to something unlikely, the unlikeliness of what it's adapted to doesn't presume a designer.
00:50:42.580I think there are more powerful arguments.
00:50:44.740I'm going to give you this book right now.
00:50:46.560So, this is the new book I wrote, We Who Wrestle With God.
00:50:49.800It's a good time to give this to you, because I've made other arguments about the relationship between science and the divine, let's say, in this book.
00:50:59.520I tried in this book not to put forward any propositions that I couldn't justify scientifically, but I'm not making a scientific case for God.
00:51:07.540I think the case, I think the rapprochement between science and religion is not going to be found in use of materialist reductionism to prove the existence of a designer.
00:51:23.040I think it's going to be more a consequence of us coming to understand what it means that science itself is not science without maintaining its embeddedness in an underlying upward striving ethos.
00:51:38.460So, for example, Cardinal Newman, a famous Catholic theologian, his existence proof for God was an argument from design, which is an argument that's been around for a long time.
00:51:54.200It was much more akin to something that's laid out in a sequence of Old Testament stories.
00:51:59.000There's an identity proclaimed in the story of Elijah and the story of Jonah, Job as well, to some degree, that one of the manifestations of God is the voice of conscience.
00:52:14.560And I really like that argument, but more it's a definition, you see, not so much an argument.
00:52:20.960Because before you talk about the existence of God, you have to say what the hell it is that you're investigating.
00:52:35.860I found it as a call to kind of a clarion call because it made me think, look, Jordan, there's, what, a billion, you know, Hindus and Buddhists and so forth.
00:52:46.760It can't only be that Judea Christian, you know, theology is correct.
00:52:57.520In other words, maybe there's, just assume this proposition and then you can take it apart.
00:53:03.740Assume all religions that have at their base a moral goodness, an aspect of improving human flourishing and the human condition, not some nihilistic, you know, witchcraft or whatever that seems to serve no theology, teleology whatsoever.
00:53:16.980But where there is clearly, and we know that Christianity and Judaism have this embedded within them and, you know, Buddhism I'm less familiar with, but as elements of that.
00:53:24.600And take away the theology and just talk about the values.
00:53:29.160There's an equivalence class in mathematical terms of all religions that practice good values.
00:53:44.180Assume that God, in other words, is, you know, there's no such thing as a, we don't believe that there's a thing called a photon, like a, specifically a particle.
00:53:53.660We believe the fundamental element is called the photon field.
00:53:57.040That the field, which exists everywhere at all times in all places, that that is what's fundamental.
00:54:02.740And then this photon, you know, the human eye is miraculous.
00:54:32.880Anyway, getting back to my proposition.
00:54:34.020Imagine God is a field so that – and then each – what we see as a photon or what we see as Hinduism or Judaism or Christianity is an instantiation, is actually the particle version of it, if you will, of a field that exists throughout all space and all time.
00:54:51.960In other words, what if God is – and we can't – and this is not refutable because you can't – you know, we're saying by definition it's incorporeal, it's a field, and just like you can't feel the photon field, you can detect its manifestations.
00:55:05.120And so what if the – you know, the fruits of the tree are sort of proof of what it was made to do, right?
00:55:11.120An apple tree doesn't produce a grapefruit, and each – a honeybee doesn't produce a spider web.
00:55:15.720So the instantiation, how do these things, you know, connect to one another, it's a relational system, and that is –
00:55:23.660Well, I think the great comparative investigators of religion, Mircea Eliade, probably foremost among them, he was part of Jung's broad school, and maybe played a role equivalent to that of Jung.
00:55:39.900They certainly identified the same kind of patterns in profound religious thinking that you can see characterizing literature.
00:55:55.100I mean, literature, stories are identifiable because they are manifestations of an underlying pattern.
00:56:02.340And I think you can make that case in the religious domain.
00:56:05.240I would make that case biologically in part by – this is the way I conceptualize it – is that there's a virtually infinite number of ways that you can interact with someone, but there's a finite number of ways, extremely restricted and finite number of ways that you can interact with someone in a manner they and you approve of simultaneously.
00:56:27.500Like a father, right, like a parent, right.
00:56:45.360Okay, so now there's many ways that we could interact.
00:56:49.080Some of them we'll jointly appreciate.
00:56:52.740Okay, in consequence of that appreciation, we'll want to continue them.
00:56:56.380That's the establishment of a relationship.
00:56:58.080Okay, so now imagine there's a smaller subset of those games that will maintain their value across time and stay voluntarily desirable or improve.
00:57:09.180Now, that's an even smaller number of potential games.
00:57:13.040Well, those games are going to have a pattern.
00:57:15.960And it's the pattern of human interaction, sustainable human interaction.
00:57:19.860My suspicion is that conscience as an instinct indicates a violation of the rules of that game.
00:57:27.340And I suspect further that that's universal.
00:57:30.680Now, out of that, a realm of story is going to emerge.
00:57:35.060There's going to be representations of games that deteriorate and games that have a tragic end and games that are sustainable where everyone lives happily ever after.
00:57:45.400Those are going to have a universality across cultures.
00:57:48.780Now, cultures are going to vary in the sophistication with which they represent those games.
00:57:56.220But it's almost like making the same claim that obviously all languages are the same because they're identifiable as languages and they're characteristic of human beings.
00:58:11.560But within the family of languages, there's commonality still, grammatical structure, there's nouns and verbs, like there's tremendous commonality.
00:58:21.620But there's also tremendous variability.
00:58:24.620So I think that religious domain is analogous to that.
00:58:28.020But my sense, I've done a fair bit of study of comparative religion is my sense that the Judeo-Christian endeavor proceeded farther along the line of explicit representation than any other religious system.
00:58:48.500Now, we could debate that, but, you know, that's not much different than saying that Western cultures are the most literate, which is, that's the case.
00:59:30.440Yeah, and with literacy and, you know, the language and being able to communicate that as well, but also expressing something which must be intrinsic.
00:59:37.420And I find when I, I hosted Richard Dawkins in Vancouver, Ian asked me to come up.
00:59:42.700I had him on my podcast for two episodes for his most recent book.
00:59:47.220And I'm always, you know, kind of, and I've had Sam Harris on the last year as well.
00:59:52.400And the thing that's frustrating to me about when I talk to scientists like them is how simple their understanding is, quite frankly, of religion, specifically Judeo-Christian.
01:00:24.400And because of the richness, and by the way, I often call myself a practicing agnostic, meaning, which I think is in harmony with your famous statement that I mentioned before.
01:00:35.600In other words, if you know for sure that God exists, then you're an absolute fool or an imbecile if you don't believe in him or whatever that means, almost to the point of evidence.
01:00:44.460And I don't dispute that many, many Christians feel it in a way that Jews don't, you know, this personal relationship with God.
01:01:26.480Like, one of the characteristics of the meditative tradition that Sam is partaking in is that the God of that meditative tradition is extraordinarily ineffable.
01:01:39.640Not defined and also not concretized into ritual or story.
01:01:44.580Now, the advantage to that is that you can't criticize it intellectually.
01:02:21.460It's so simplistic, and Sam, to some extent, is worse just from the perspective that he's so, he's so persuasive.
01:02:28.680I mean, he's the only person besides you that I've ever known, I've spent four hours with, that never uses the word, you know, has any verbal crutches whatsoever.
01:02:38.680And I don't mean to jinx our conversation.
01:02:40.340But he just speaks in complete, he speaks in prose, as they say, you know, paragraphs.
01:02:45.180And, you know, when we talk about things, very simple things, why don't you do, you know, what is your feeling about, you know, Judaism that made you reject, you know, I guess his dad is Jewish, I forget.
01:03:35.660And there was this concept called indentured servitude, which is actually a kindness.
01:03:40.100If you couldn't pay your debt to me, Jordan, and you were going to steal something, no, no, no.
01:03:43.940I would give you, basically employ you, and I provide food and shelter.
01:03:47.380And by the way, sometimes you wouldn't want to leave.
01:03:49.980After six years, you wouldn't want to leave because I treated you so well as my slave that I would have to take your ear and hammer it into the door with a nail.
01:03:58.140And this was a part of a tradition that Jewish slaves had to undergo in order to remain with their masters because we're meant to be free.
01:04:06.040And so this was meant to show as an outward symbol to the world that I chose not to be free.
01:04:10.380And we know many people choose to be slaves of a different kind rather than be free men and women.
01:04:15.720But I said, he had no idea about this.
01:04:18.100Well, it's also the case that, like, first of all, the entire story of Exodus is about the movement from slavery and tyranny to freedom.
01:04:27.320So, and that's like, that's a major part of the biblical library.
01:04:31.960And then, even more importantly, the metaphysical insistence is that if you're not a slave to God, let's say, so to speak, there's something that you're a slave to.
01:05:03.400They work six, you know, all days of the week.
01:05:05.780They're so fascinated because it's so intoxicating.
01:05:08.440And you know, you have that feeling when you discover something and you realize, wow, gee, I am the first human, frail human, that's ever understood this in the history of the planet.
01:05:42.700You must work, Jordan, because you can't appreciate the true sense of soul society, you know, satiating on your soul unless you have that feeling of accomplishment, of working the earth, of working the laboratory.
01:05:56.260But if you only do that, if you only do that, you're a slave.
01:06:00.260You might have a Nobel Prize, but you're a slave.
01:06:03.480And so, yeah, when I talked to Richard and I talked, I came away, you know, somewhat depressed.
01:06:08.860Because also, you know, as you know, in Judaism, the word Judaism comes from the word gratitude, hodo, hodea, which means to give grace, to give gratitude towards God.
01:06:17.220You know, Judah's name for the thanksgiving that his mother gave to God.
01:06:22.200So, it's endemic, and that's why we do say blessings, because you can't look at a meteorite, a meteor shower.
01:06:27.880You can't look at a rainbow, and not, if you bless it, you can't be angry and grateful at the same time, right?
01:08:01.080Not a single bloody one of them thought they were doing evil.
01:08:04.180They justified it as great good, whether it was eliminating Jews or, you know, whatever.
01:08:08.140I don't even have to take it that far.
01:08:09.920So, he's trying to justify, I think, his behavior.
01:08:13.240Because what happens, Jordan, when you believe in God or you have some notion of a moon or faith or just want to approach a creator or something bigger than you?
01:08:44.940It's like, well, if you get rid of the involuntary part of that and you make it voluntary, now you're voluntarily shouldering a great weight.
01:08:55.160When you go see a movie about a great adventurer, a secret agent, say, the thing that characterizes his journey that you find so compelling is that he's doing something impossibly difficult voluntarily.
01:09:10.200It's like, so people don't want an obligation, but that's because they have the wrong attitude towards obligation.
01:09:17.560It's like, no, you actually want a stellar obligation.
01:09:21.220If I told you 20 years ago, Jordan, you eat meat only and salt.
01:09:52.300Jordan, 20 years ago, could eat all the Doritos or I don't know what you ate back then or has this prescribed thing to do and is in the prime of his life.
01:10:01.360And I feel that way about – so I said that to, you know, Stephen and also to Sam.
01:10:05.380And when you're given, you know, look, as a Jew, I don't eat pork, right?
01:11:04.040But then there's a very large subset of atheists who are relieved at their atheism because they were brutalized by Pharisaic religious pretenders, right?
01:11:21.720And I've met lots of people who were very badly hurt by fundamentalist types.
01:11:27.620I don't want to say, you know, okay, so now I don't have to listen to him because he was abused.
01:11:32.300You know, it's like if you meet somebody who was physically abused as a child and then they turn out to – you don't want to make that an excuse because look at the other people that were.
01:11:40.660So I don't want to let him off the hooks so easily in that sense.
01:11:43.900But I guess the challenge that I have is when I deal with somebody like that because I can talk science with either one of them, Lawrence Krauss, again.
01:12:25.340And then what does it mark for most Jews, men, Carl Sagan, Stephen Jay Gould, Lawrence Krauss, Sam Harris, if he had one?
01:12:34.700It marks sort of a graduation from religion.
01:12:38.700It marks the parole from prison of this obnoxious, not really satisfying or meaningful tradition that was forced upon you by the circumstances of your birth.
01:13:03.400But, you know, at the same token, if you deny somebody that, like, there's almost no chance.
01:13:08.400I'm sort of miraculously – because both my parents were kind of atheists.
01:13:11.620They didn't take Judaism very seriously.
01:13:13.280My dad was an active militant atheist.
01:13:15.320He used to say to me, I don't believe in God.
01:13:16.860I believe in Satan because he made you believe in God.
01:13:19.400But the point being, you know, if you deny something that could be beneficial, even if you don't believe it yourself, I think it's – I don't want to say child abuse, but you're denying your children something.
01:13:32.600And I said, you know, the avatar for me –
01:13:35.560Well, what do they have if they don't have a tradition?
01:14:05.820Like, you'd only think that the child stripped of tradition has himself in the untrammeled sense if you believe that the self that was the true self had no relationship whatsoever with the surrounding community.
01:14:25.660And is it going to be a bitter, unhappy –
01:14:27.380Well, and also maybe narcissistic and self-serving, because if it's all about you, independent of anyone else, then, well, it's all about you.
01:14:37.320So, one of the things I discovered in this book, and I outlined this in painful detail, you might say, is that the postmodern types were correct and the scientists wrong, or the empiricists at least.
01:14:52.100The postmodernists were correct in their proclamation that we see the world through a story.
01:14:57.320A description of the structure through which we perceive the value of the world is a story.
01:15:04.420When you go see a movie, you're looking at the consequences of the value structure of the protagonist, and you want to know that, because it orients you in their direction so you can try that out.
01:16:04.140The biblical library is predicated on the idea that the foundation of community is voluntary self-sacrifice, and that's right.
01:16:15.040And it's actually self-evident, because when you engage in a social relationship, what you're doing is you're giving up the primacy of your immediate desire for the benefit of the relationship.
01:16:50.220That's why he got so interested in games.
01:16:51.880Well, when a child makes the transition from two-year-old egotist to three-year-old social creature, because that's when that occurs, one of the hallmarks of that development is taking turns.
01:17:40.860And so the idea that, see, we're acting out, this is something else I realized, is the typical European town, Christian town, let's say, has a cathedral or church at its center.
01:18:24.240Well, obviously, because that's the definition of community in some sense, is that the individual is brought into relationship with others.
01:20:44.740And there's been huge battles in the Christian church.
01:20:47.760The iconoclasts were people who believed that icons had the danger of concreteness, which is exactly the danger that, say, Dawkins' fault prayed to when he concretizes a metaphor.
01:21:55.680We put so much emphasis on scientists that they are sort of gods, right?
01:22:00.740They manipulate—what did Arthur C. Clarke say?
01:22:02.500He said, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
01:22:06.580I actually opened my podcast with that, with his actual voice, because I'm at the Arthur C. Clarke Center.
01:22:12.160So when you look at that, who wields magic?
01:22:14.840Well, it's gods or it's magicians and fairies and all sorts of wonderful creatures that certainly aren't people.
01:22:19.640But when a scientist can unlock the power of the atom or can unleash, you know, humanity's need on electricity with infinite energy or, you know, can develop a superconductor or all the lasers, anything that we take for granted in technology, all came from basic physics.
01:22:37.840And when you look at that, then you expect that they're ineffable, just like they're primitive, childish, infantile notions of what we think God is, right?
01:22:47.160They think that we think that he's the guy in the chair in outer space with the beard.
01:24:04.640Well, and even in that analysis, you're pointing to an a priori distinction between the things that made them truly great scientists in that necessarily ethical sense.
01:24:15.300And all the flaws that are part and parcel of being a human but aren't in the same category.
01:33:17.100I mean, we can put up many counterexamples of things that are extremely exquisitely tuned that didn't have a designer whatsoever.
01:33:23.780And the Earth's distance to the sun is not exquisitely tuned in the sense that it necessitated a designer to do it.
01:33:30.580In other words, we wouldn't, you know, the anthropic principle would suggest we wouldn't be here if things were radically different from the way it is.
01:33:36.440And actually, a lot of the parameters in cosmology and particle physics and symmetries that we talked about earlier are not as finely tuned as a radio dial, if you remember those, as you and I do, but most of the younger folks won't.
01:33:49.840But actually, you don't have to tune it that exquisitely any better, in fact, than the universe was tuned along the lines of certain parameters.
01:33:57.080But this alien, you know, kind of hypothesis has gotten a lot of attention.
01:34:02.280You know, it's political ramifications.
01:34:07.500But I'm curious from your perspective, you know, putting on my podcast or how it now, is there, you know, this compulsion to sort of, you know, feel that there will be – you're familiar with the Drake equation.
01:36:16.400One of the things that means is that the burning question that I wanted to ask Dr. Keating has to wait for the Daily Wire side.
01:36:25.560And what that means for you poor people on YouTube is that in order to hear that part of the podcast, you actually have to have a subscription to the Daily Wire.
01:36:33.920And that sleight of hand, you might say, wasn't done by design.