Astrophysicist Does His Best to Stump Dennis Prager

I want to continue to fan the flames of that incipient curiosity through this humble memoir. But the story is far from finished. And I always ask people, I'll ask you, what is the most important date on the calendar to Dennis Prager?

I never thought of that question. I don't have an immediate thought of the most important. I will say that— I'm sorry. Oh, my birthday. Oh, you think anybody's birthday? I was going to say America's birthday, July 4th, 1776, but it's still a birthday.

Okay, so you will pass this professor's first quiz question. Yeah, that's right, most people say their birthday, their anniversary, etc. And why is that? Because we're fascinated with origins. And what's the most intriguing and sort of fascinating origin of them all? Well, it's perhaps the origin of everything. And I think that's why people have been fascinated with cosmology since we first emerged from caves, and it's in fact the reason the Bible The Bible could have started with the laws of Kashrut, of kosher, or, you know, if it only pertained to this nomadic tribe of Semites, it could have started with some laws, as many people have remarked. Instead, it starts with the creation of the entire universe. There's a reason for that. Creations and beginnings speak to our innermost nature to want to know what came before us, if anything.

So, I'm going to say this to my listeners. Much of this discussion of the Ultimate Issues Hour is going to be about that. What do— where is science right now, not theology, where is science on the issue of how the universe began? So, the— tell me if I'm right, for most of the history, or let's see, 20th century, for most of the 20th century, physicists or cosmologists, though I doubt if there were cosmologists in 1900, I don't think they had the term then. But if I would say to most scientists, well, when did the world begin? I assume most would have said it didn't begin, it was always around. Is that correct?

Yes, they would have said it was eternal. In fact, the great Albert Einstein thought it was eternal even after seeing some preliminary evidence that it was in contrast observationally to that opinion. So even great Einstein was wrong, and it's too bad because he could have had a good career.

That's right, and gotten the Keating Prize. So did, did scientists believe that there was no beginning, it always was, even though there was no human mind that can grasp that concept, that it is not possible? So nevertheless, did they believe that for science reasons, or, or I'll put it easily, other reasons?

I should say that there were other conjectures. There's, there's basically 13 or 14 different versions of cosmogenesis, meaning the origin of the universe, not the evolution of the universe. And I'm documenting those in an upcoming book I'm doing with a friend named James Altucher. And that those myths Theories could be things like cyclical universes, they could be eternal universes, they could be a cosmic egg. There are all sorts of, you know, kind of conclusions. And what's so delicious and delightful to me now is that some of these ancient notions going back to the Greeks and before, in South America, Incas and so forth, some of these are coming back again, but dressed up in the guise of modern cosmological and astrophysical parlance. And so these things have always— I wouldn't say that it was that most scientists, or most creation myths so to speak, had an eternal cosmology, but the most prevalent, the most predominant ones did have an eternal universe long after there was evidence that that couldn't really be the case.

So that's my question: why did they do it? Was it an anti-the-possibility-of-a-creator vision, or all science-driven?

In part, a little of both. There are certainly scientists who found the Genesis 1:1 description anathema, but there's also a problem because formally speaking, the Big Bang predicts a singularity, a point of infinite temperature, infinite density, completely unlike human experience that we can really wrap our minds around even today. And because of that, and because the Big Bang demands such a singularity of infinite temperature, I'll ask you, you know, have you ever seen an actual triangle, Dennis Prager? Not the instrument that you conduct, but a triangle. A perfect mathematical triangle?

I would assume I did in my geometry texts.

No, because everything you would draw on a piece of paper or pencil has actually 3 dimensions, and to make a triangle you need 3 zero-dimensional points without length, width, or breadth. So no human being has ever seen of it, and yet we can easily comprehend it.

All right, back in a moment, Professor Brian Keating.