Dr. Brian Keating
speaker
1,291 appearances
4 recordings
4 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Sep 2025
Dr. Brian Keating’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
And 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, wonderful podcast. And we spent four hours together. And one of those hours was just about me, him asking me to prove God scientifically. I said, I'm sorry, Stephen, again and again. I cannot do that. He's searching. He's reaching for something.
Yeah. Well, he probably talked more about God with me than he did with you. And I was quite surprised that he did because I'm a cosmologist. I'm not a theologian.
Yeah, I always say I'd kill for 1% of God's book sales. And I told him, look, what you're searching for, I can't necessarily give you. I can give you the approach to me that I find persuasive, but 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.
And it doesn't use the strength of quantum electrodynamics, and it doesn't use all sorts of things.
And 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. And you said, you know, who am I to say, this is you, who am I to say I believe in God? Like, what is a man to say such a thing? I mean, it's so ridiculous.
And I've turned that around. I say, I don't believe in gravity. And he's like, what are you talking about? And Stephen said, you're a physicist. You have to believe in gravity. I said, no, if I take this meteorite and I drop it, I don't believe it's—I have evidence for it. What is the notion of evidence? It means it's something we can't necessarily define, but we can say it's certainly not faith.
I don't have faith that it's going to do that. We have empirical evidence. DNA leads to the genetic inheritance that we have. Those things you don't have to take on faith. You have evidence for them. So science and religion—science should not be used— It's not one of its tool, its best purposes. You know, you have a hammer. You don't use it to screw in a screw.
You have to use the tool in the domain for which it's designed or perhaps best.
And so resonant, that phrase that you used that, you know, is tattooed on my brain, you know, who am I to do that? I 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. It can't only be that Judeo-Christian, you know, theology is correct. It's the only approach, right?
It can't be the only approach. And maybe it's not the only truth. In other words, maybe there's—just assume this proposition, and then you can take it apart. Assume 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 teleology whatsoever.
But where there is clearly, and we know that Christianity and Judaism have this embedded within them, and Buddhism I'm most familiar with, but it has elements of that. And take away the theology and just talk about the values. there's an equivalence class in mathematical terms of all religions that practice good values. They have this in common.
Whatever this is, this notion of human flourishing and goodness and treatment and so forth. Again, proposition, I'm not saying it's true. Assume it's true. Just assume that's true. Assume 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 specifically a particle.
We believe the fundamental element is called the photon field. That the field, which exists everywhere at all times in all places, that that is what's fundamental. And then this photon, you know, the human eye is miraculous. We can see a single photon in the right circumstances. Right.
It's incredible. And that's part of the loss you spoke about earlier where we think about the loss of the night sky. I'm curious. We'll talk some other time about how the human psychology will be robbed of this and maybe that will do something like having phthalates or microplastics. Those things are tangible.
But the intangible loss of the night sky from all places on earth perhaps, God forbid, but let's just say. Anyway, getting back to my proposition, imagine 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 locally.
throughout all space and all time. In 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. And so what if the, you know, the fruits of the tree are sort of proof of what it was made to do, right?
An apple tree doesn't produce a grapefruit, and a honeybee doesn't produce a spiderweb. So the instantiation, how do these things, you know, connect to one another?
And the Jews thought there early. Yeah, and I always say, you know, we have the Eskimos in northern Canada reputed to have 12 words for snow. And you find that with the Jews. You find there's six different types of words for knowledge and wisdom and intuition and wisdom. You know, you can identify them. They don't have as many words for snow. And so what were their tools?
What was their environment like? It was saturated with religion. And with literacy. Yeah, and with literacy and, you know, the language and being able to communicate that as well, but also expressing something which must be intrinsic. And I find when I hosted Richard Dawkins in Vancouver, he asked me to come up. I had him on my podcast for two episodes for his most recent book. And...
And I'm always, you know, kind of—and I've had Sam Harris on the last year as well. And 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. I'm not an expert in anything. I mean, I was an altar boy in the Catholic Church as a kid, a complicated story.
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