Sir Roger Penrose & William Lane Craig • The Universe: How did it get here & why are we part of it

For more discussion updates and a bonus video from Sir Roger Penrose describing his work with Stephen Hawking to find the Big Bang, sign up to the Big Talking Points programme. Hi, I'm Justin Briley and welcome to season two of the great conversation about the incredible exploration of faith. science, history and philosophy and asking what it means to be human, the big conversation is presented by leading Christian radio in association with the Templeton Religion Trust and today our big conversation is about the

universe

, how it got

here

and why we are

part

of My Conversation Partners Today they are Roger Penrose and William Lane Craig, so Roger Penrose is a famous mathematical physicist, among many achievements he worked alongside Stephen Hawking to produce the Penrose Hawking singularity theorems that help confirm the Big Bang cosmology.

He describes himself as an atheist but has rejected the idea that the

universe

has no purpose, saying that I believe t

here

is something much deeper about its existence of which we have very little indication at the moment. Professor William Lane Craig is a renowned Christian philosopher and the founder of Reasonable Faith, an organization that seeks to defend Christianity through reason and evidence is well known for arguments for the existence of God, such as the argument Kalam cosmology and the fine-tuning of the universe for life. He believes that God is the best explanation for the origins of the universe and why we find ourselves. in it, so today we will look at the deep mysteries of the universe and whether its complexity orders its origins and the fact that it produced us points beyond itself and, if so, what is it referring to Bill and Roger, welcome to the program, It's great to have them. both with me, I feel like a kid in a candy store because having them both here is like a dream come true for me, well, I want to say from the beginning how aware I am of the tremendous privilege of being on the same program. with one of the world's leading cosmologists and I am honored to speak with dr.

Penrose, it is a great pleasure and honor for you as well. I'm glad we all agree on these issues. How much do we have to be something? Yes, let's see where we don't agree with the course of the program, but let's have some presentations for you two, Roger, what drew you in the first place to science and mathematics in

part

icular when you were young. I think it was largely my father who has a great, I mean, he was a scientist, a human geneticist with primarily medical training, but also him. He had lost a philosophical and mathematical background, so he had a good understanding of mathematics and I think mainly he had a kind of playful understanding, like puzzles.

He certainly was, he was a big chess problem: disorder and also wealth. Chess was big in the family, my younger brother became British chess champion at the same time, which of course tells me something about the way their brains are wired, maybe too, it wasn't exactly the same. Same with all of us, but Oliver, my older brother, was too. An excellent chess player became a champion of Cambridge University, for example, but I was not at all interested in chess, but I was very interested in puzzles and games, types of mathematical puzzles and also physical geometric puzzles, sometimes like that.

I think that was an important feature of my upbringing, but we used to go for long walks and look at plants and talk about the universe and its shapes. Did faith ever appear in your childhood or not particularly? I would say no, it didn't appear in the sense of a particular religion, no, you see, my father came from a Quaker family, so he had that kind of background, but he had a lot of sympathies with the Quakers, as you know it's very pacifist and that kind of thing I didn't do. He doesn't like conflict, but he wasn't a believer in the sense of religious belief, he wasn't a Christian, certainly not, nor was my mother.

I said that wasn't part of his family upbringing and did you ever have a brush? with religion growing up or as a student ja no, I wouldn't say, so I mean, maybe at the age of seven or six or something, I'm not sure we count that kind of thing, I know, I know I wouldn't even send that at that time. I also didn't think there was a big question mark and what I wasn't going to say, I mean, as your scientific career progressed, did that open up any of those big questions about where all this came from?

There was a curious thing I remember in Once, when we were in Canada during the war years, we used to go to Sunday school every Sunday. I think my younger brother, Jonathan, asked the question. Know. We kinda suspected this was just a way to get us out of the house, but very good halves in peace you see, and Jonathan asked my mother if she really believed it and she got that embarrassed look on her face, but apparently this It was an indication that I don't believe. there was some confession for us that we hadn't really been sure this was true, it was a way to have a little peace during the Sunday and Jonathan sang in the choir, well I remember this was no, this is like that, that kind of aspect of in a sense, some of that has filtered down to you in terms of at least appreciating what people often talk about about the majesty of choral singing oh yeah, Oxford University, where you've been based for a long time. , there are beautiful chapels and that's not I think everything he does makes a big impression on me, yeah, and me and the music, well, I'm a tremendous Bark fan, you see, and I think there's something absolutely incredible about the music and I can understand it.

I mean he was driven by his religious faith, Christianity, and it was obviously a very important thing, and if the expression of that in music can be extremely moving, yeah, we'll come back. I want to talk to you about your work with Stephen Hawking, obviously. And that will feed into what we're talking about today on the show, but we're going to introduce you to Bill on the show. It's wonderful to have you here. I guess in many ways the kind of things that Roger has been working on throughout his life. They've been very influential in some of the important arguments that you would be making for the existence of God because I think it was in the 1970s that you really started to get involved with Big Bang cosmology and see that there was an interesting, fluctuating relationship. fruitful relationship here with some other philosophical arguments yes, interestingly my background sounds quite similar to Rogers's in terms of my upbringing.

I think you were actually more involved in the trajectory than I was. My parents were, at best, nominal Christians, but we never attended church, but when I became a teenager I began to ask what I call the big questions of life: Who am I? Because I am here? What is the meaning of my existence? And as I looked at the universe I couldn't see any meaning to my existence. He knew that humanity would eventually perish. in the heat the death of the universe and I could see no reason for its existence for the existence of human beings and in particular for my existence and I simply faced an inevitable death in which I would cease to exist and so for me it would be these great and deep existential philosophical questions that ultimately, through the testimony of a girl who sat across from me in my high school German class, led me to faith in Christ and, as a Christian, to finally answer your question, Justin, it is important for me to have a synoptic worldview, that is, a worldview that includes a Christian perspective on all the different facets of human learning, whether it be science, literature, art, psychology, history, philosophy. and the deep metaphysical question, so you are right when I wrote my PhD thesis on Kalam's Cosmological Argument under the direction of John Hick at the University of Birmingham.

One of the things I began to explore was whether there might not be some kind of scientific confirmation for the claim of Kalam's cosmological argument that the universe began to exist and I was surprised to see the extent to which contemporary astrophysics supported this premise is due in much of it to Professor Penn Roses mmm-hmm's work on singularity theorems, so that's an important part of my worldview as a Christian and that's why you've engaged with Rogers' work. Really a big part of your life and I know that you yourself have had several discussions and dialogues with important scientists and philosophers.

Obviously it's a very controversial argument, but I think we'll get to some of the interesting aspects of it. In the course of today's discussion, thank you both very much for joining me on today's show. Roger, I said I wanted to ask you about Stephen Hawking, of course, that he was a brilliant mind, a convinced atheist and, above all, lately he came to believe that science had ruled out God or at least as an explanation of the universe. To what extent did he agree with his former colleague on that? Well, you see there's a huge irony in all of this, of course, which is my view on the origin of the universe and I remember that.

I heard there was a little bit, just that there was a new posthumously published Stephens book, yeah, and there's a chapter where he talks about the origin and the Big Bang and I thought that was the least compelling part of the whole thing, so you see . The great irony here is that I changed my mind about all of this, so the singularity theorems were as you describe them, they were confirmation of this singular origin. I am the singular word that needs to be explained here, it means a place where you essentially find your equations go to infinity and you have to give up other words, it is where your equations stop working and stop telling you what to do if you want to and the idea is that Let's go and take observations on the expansion of the universe and the equations.

Einstein and try to extrapolate backwards and use general theorems that show that you really can't evade the singular origin, so that's where the equations blow up and you have to do it, you can't trust the equations to tell you what happened in the initial state and Steven has a particular way of looking at that, which was an interesting way. I do not think it works. He developed an idea with James Hartal and an American who in California is a very interesting man and I think The idea is very interesting but I have some problems with it, you have some serious reservations, yes, but the main thing is that my current point of view is that the Big Bang, although it existed, there was a Big Bang, it was not the beginning, um, and so there was something before the big bang, but if you like reasons, the original reasons why I think of this are a bit like the kind of stuff you're talking about, I know what the universe is for a while, what you're doing in kind.

Of those types of questions, should I get into that? Well, I want to go deeper into you, yes, the way you are now, yes, absolutely fascinating and mind-blowing on some level, but maybe we should start on a more fundamental level because I quoted in my introduction from a quote of yours I will read it in its totality now you say there is a certain sense in which I would say that the universe has a purpose it is not just there by chance some people take the view that the universe is just there and works it's a bit like it just computes and by chance we find ourselves in this thing.

I don't think it's a very fruitful or useful way of looking at the universe. I think there's something much deeper to it. about your existence, which we have very little idea about at the moment and obviously you've also written extensively and talked about the fact that you see that there are sort of three ways that you can look at reality: the mental and the physical and the abstract. and in a sense, you really believe that there is more to this reality than just the physicality that many people, many of your atheist colleagues would say, well, that's all that ultimately exists here.

Roger, do you want to just start with kind of spelling out what your view of the world is in that sense well, you mentioned that when you say my world you mentioned the three worlds that I used to describe like these are things also the three mysteries, if you like one of these, you say that there is the physical world, you know things like tables and so on, and what we think is that it is the physical world. All of this is not entirely clear when we dig into it, what is going on, what that really means, but never mind that, the physical world and then there is. a mental world which is our experiences, consciousness, feelings about things, etc., and then there is what you call the abstract world.

I would be more specific about it being a mathematical abstraction, so we're thinking about what it is like. Secondly, let me explain the mysteries above. The number one mystery is the fact that this world of physics seems to depend on such extraordinary precision and the more we explore it, the more precise we see it, it is precisely guided by physical equations, but sorry, mathematics, and that's why we have these mathematics, let alone equations. Those are very specific mathematical principles, yes, that govern in such a precise way the way this physical world operates and, if you like, there is a great mystery, I call it mystery, these things we are never verysure whether this is what Eugene Wigner found that it is, because as the unreasonable effect of mathematics, it seems to be an extraordinarily remarkable fact that mathematics is that the universe seems to be written in that language and we can discover that it is exactly yes, and the more we know. about how things work, I mean, there is extraordinary precision in measurements now, the science of general relativity is determined very precisely and the laws of quantum mechanics and how they interrelate internally with gravity. in some respects I mean to how clocks and one of Einstein's predictions is that there is a clock, a pie will run slower than one down here and this precision in that I'm sorry, I got it backwards.

I know you mean, yes, that. the Mazama is extraordinary, yes, the precision you know even from down here to maybe a central centimeter up and they can measure the difference, yes, so these extraordinary precise now, okay, it just shows that mathematical theories when we really understand them and when we get them Well, that's clear, but still the precision is extraordinary, so that's mystery number one. Mystery number two is how is it possible that conscious experience can arise when the circumstances seem right at the moment? They probably aren't. I'm just guessing, but I don't think it's present in that glass or in the water in the glass, but it certainly seems to occur with humans and I think with our animals, I don't think it's a unique design of brain structures. somehow it seems to lead to a yes to this and there is a genuine mystery and I think it's not just a matter of you knowing the complicated calculations of the company or something much more subtle that is going on, so that's mystery number two and mystery number three is our ability to We use our conscious understanding to understand mathematics and these extraordinary self-consistent ideas with profound ideas that are very far from my experiences, that is how we understand ephemeral mathematics and in that sense you believe that mathematics, for example, they are discovered rather than invented. but really in that sense it exists independently yes, of course, yes, and and, and one of those great mysteries, as you say, is the fact that we can access it, yes, in itself, a remarkable feat of reality, that is correct because it is so indirectly connected to our existence and what you know is how we get along in the world and not how natural selection has helped us survive etc., it is very difficult to see how these things arise.

Well, there are three big mysteries there just to start with Bill. his response to some of these huge... Well, first I want to say that one of the most interesting things about Rogers's thought is this profound metaphysical vision of reality that he has, which contrasts so much with the kind of positivist and verificationist pronouncements of many scientists who think that philosophy is dead and that these metaphysical questions are meaningless Roger is engaged in questions that are not simply physical or scientific, these are metaphysical questions and I believe that the fundamental question that this tripartite metaphysics raises is the ancient philosophical problem of one and the many, that is, what is the underlying unity of these three seemingly disparate realms of reality: the mental, the abstract and the physical, these realms of reality are so different, so causally disconnected, that one seems to wonder which one is the underlying unit. for all of these, so how are these three browns related?

For example, the mathematical abstract realm cannot be the source of the physical or conscious mental realm because abstract objects, by definition, are causally a feat that is part of what it means to be an abstract object, number. seven for example have no effect on anything, so the abstract realm cannot provide the source of unity, could it be the physical realm that provides the source? Rogers already mentioned the second mystery, how does the physical give rise to consciousness, particularly intentionality? of our mental states I can think of on my summer vacation no physical object has intentionality so the mental is difficult to derive from the physical and the abstract seems impossible to me because the mathematical field is characterized by necessity, these are logically necessary truths and In its fullness, there are infinite realms of mathematical objects and the physical realm, on the other hand, is contingent and therefore cannot ground these logical and mathematical truths and is plausibly finite as well, so the physical cannot need support.

Now, what about the mental? the source of these other two realms well, in mental causality we have the experience that the mental causes physical changes in our brain. I can stand up or speak in a similar way. Many philosophers have thought that the abstract realm is not really a separate realm that exists on its own but they are ideas in the mind of consciousness hmm that are the result of the intellection of a mind now the problem is that no human mind could be the source of the abstract realm because of its fullness and necessity, while we are contingent and finite, then what I want to invite Roger to comment on is why the mental realm could not include an infinite consciousness, that is, an omniscient mind that has created the physical realm and which is the source of the abstract mathematical realm. solve the problem of the one and the many and give you an underlying unity for this tripartite metaphysics that you claim and what you just described sounds suspiciously like God, you say that, well, see, you're posing it as an interesting you.

Put it back in the mental world if you want, whereas I tend to put it in myself in the Platonic mathematical world. You see I don't understand why, I mean, how do you handle precision? You see just a mental thing it doesn't seem like to me but I don't really see why it helps if you want, I mean you can postulate a super mental being or something like that, I mean what does a mental existence have without a physical one?, that's the idea , Yeah. mental this mind this patient this mind has created a contingent physical realm, yes, and is also the source of the conceptual realm.

I can't see well, you could say that it contains all that because it is so infinite that it contains the entire mathematical world. yes, it makes sense, but where does it come from?, what is it?, it would have to be metaphysically necessary to be the source of itself, mathematics and broadly logically necessary truths and I would say other types of truths, ethical truths that are plausibly necessary , this is It's very curious, you see that the mental world is unnecessary, right, and I have the mathematical world being somehow an evaluated, eh, because I somehow appreciate the necessity, but the problem is that the abstract realm does not have causal powers, these are causally a feat.

Objects that never come into physical contact with things, cannot move them, push them or pull them, do not exert forces, are not minds and therefore cannot make decisions to cause things, are not causal agents, so it seems To me, positing that the abstract realm is fundamental is causally inadequate and what one would gain from what I propose would be a solution to these three mysteries, it would give explanatory depth to your worldview. I don't really see how it explains everything I want to say. I mean you are speaking from the perspective of a religious person and therefore one thinks about this in some way?

I mean specific religions are much more specific than that, and that's why I grimaced a little when you say that from a religious perspective it's a philosophical perspective, but that's okay, I'm happier with that because then I think this is What I have the most trouble with, trying to make it specific in certain directions regarding one religion or another, but if it's such an abstract notion, it's not me. I am necessarily unhappy with it, except that I don't know what to do with it because it is very vague mm, that is interesting only for my benefit, yes, this is an abstract realm of mathematical objects etc., yes, you say it is there, it is a mystery why.

It's there, well, I wasn't calling the daycare either, yeah, look, the mysteries are the connections. I like it. I make this drawing with the three worlds. You see, the worlds are there. Mysteries are the connections between my worlds. So the number one mystery was how somehow. From a small part of this mathematical totality we see physical laws and it is only a very small part. I mean, if you look at any old magazine, pretty well, a mathematical magazine, you'll see that it's full of stuff. I'm talking about pure mathematics, it's full of things. which certainly do not claim to have any connection with the physical world, I mean, some of them seem to have and it seems to be a very small part of that world that has to do with the functioning of the physical world.

So that's one of the mysteries and then the next mystery is why is it a very small part of what we call the physical world organized in a very specific way, it occurs very rarely, I mean all these p

lane

ts around or how many of them? Do we really believe that he has life of some kind in his conscious life? That's a great question, but anyway, whatever it is, it's a very small part of what gives rise to the mindset, as far as we can see, and then it's a very small part of our mindset. I mean, even mathematicians don't spend all their time thinking about math, they have other activities you know, they go to the movies, sometimes they have a love life and some movies and they try to solve that mystery by saying, well, what if there's a reason? underlying?

The explanation is that everything is contained within a divine mind, well in mind, in one of these worlds. See, which I kinda find a little bit not just asymmetrical. I just find it not very explanatory, but why not? Why do you find at least This doesn't work well if you just say well there is a super mentality somehow and it can do anything. I don't know what, I don't know, yeah, I think I need more explanation about exactly right. for example tides mr. Islands are one of the applications of mathematics. I think this is a big problem because in Platonism you have this abstract temporal non-spatial realm of objects causally a feat and the physical world operates according to certain mathematical principles that you and Mary Lang, who is a philosopher of mathematics at the University of Liverpool who has said about Platonism that the applicability of mathematics to the physical world is a happy coincidence that seems incredible;

In contrast, we know that minds can design things, and the view that there is an omniscient mind that has designed the physical world according to the mathematical model it had in mind is a very old view that goes back to Middle Platonism and people like Philo of Alexandria. , who said that the intelligible world, the intelligible cosmos, exists first in the mind of the logos, the divine. intellect and then it is instantiated in the physical world by the log house that creates the world according to this plan and that seems to me to be a good solution for one and many problems.

I think you call it a solution. es, I think my problem is too vague. I don't see how much can be done with this particular vision. When it comes to explaining how a physical world works in mathematical terms, it is extraordinarily precise and you can say a lot about that, but a statement like the one you make here worries me because yes, you can call it a solution, but it doesn't tell us much, the mystery is because it is very difficult to investigate this explanation. itself, the mysteries behind the mysteries, you need to be able to say how you can contradict a few, you see, it's so vague in a way, I mean, why wasn't there a mind that was malicious?

Well, maybe she's malicious. I don't know, no, it's just saying it's a mind without telling us well. I haven't said anything about the moral properties of this. I mentioned before that among the logically necessary truths that this mind would know and substantiate would be not only mathematical truths but certain ethical truths. I believe that certain ethical principles are not contingent but necessarily true and therefore this would provide a basis for the objectivity of moral values ​​and duties in a paradigmatic good, this being would not only be the source of the mathematical. realm but of the ethical realm for being the supreme good and that is why we are now beginning to add a little more content to this notion as creator the physical realm this mind would have to be causeless, timeless, spaceless, immaterial, enormously powerful to be able to cause the ethical realm would have to be good, perfectly good and to cause the mathematical realm would have to be omniscient and so we are ending up, I think, with a very rich theological foundation, yes, yes, I mean, of course, you are touching on these other platonic aspect that learns morality and well, you didn't refer to the beauty aspect, good point, aesthetic values ​​have those three platonic aspects and one can extend the idea of ​​truth if you want, which is perhaps the mathematical part of self and notions platonic and two other three as well, which I'm very happy to consider, but I guess my problem is that I just said this before I'm too lazy to know what to do with it in these words.

You say well, it does this and it does that, it explains this and that, but in a way that I don't really want to say, if speaking is something that people already know.scientists, let's say Bill has this hypothesis that God is the ultimate explanation in Because there are several phenomena that you believe in and you see that it's so great that you discover that the hypothesis itself doesn't because you can't investigate that. I think it's less of a hypothesis. I think that's the main problem. Having it is not difficult. know what to do with it and it inevitably goes beyond science in that is exactly I mean we are doing metaphysics here we are not physics we this is a metaphysical view of reality that consists of a tripartite division of realms that have very mysterious interconnections and So what I am suggesting is a metaphysical hypothesis that will provide unity in diversity and resolve the one among the many and I think it is quite specific.

I recited several of the properties that this mind must possess and I believe that it does not. Let me pose a problem to you, yes, because if we are putting this thing into the mental world, then to me that means that it would be possible to be that thing, which means that one could be this entity, this God or whatever it is called. and I find that it's really difficult to perceive, I mean, in some ways, with a being of this type with this type of total control over everything. I mean, it's very strange with my own experiences, but certainly, conscious experience is a pretty conscious thing.

Do you believe we have free will? I think there is something there that is not explained. I mean, this addresses some technical issues here, but about how the world works and where our understanding of physics might have a gap. in it and so on and perhaps one could call that free will. I would keep an open mind when it comes to pricing. So if this being has chosen to create agents with free will, then it is not true that he is in control. He really he didn't have them right. He had the freedom to not have all this yet.

I mean in some ways I think that's one more question to explore. It seems to me that he is the creator of the physical realm. It would be very easy for this mind. have created a world without free moral agents, a world in which the highest form of life is, say, rabbits and there would be no free will, but if I don't know, maybe if this being has chosen to create meaningful moral agents that they are endowed with freedom of will then it means that not everything that happens is controlled by this being in a kind of puppet and I think that would fit very well with our experience.

I think this would fit with our experiences of beauty and ethics. norms and obligations that pressure us and regarding our own freedom to transcend the physical realm and not simply be determined, then this really fits wonderfully with our experience. I think it would be needed. I guess I've been like no one else. What would I do? It is needed to go from recognizing the mystery and depth of what the reality is that we live in to recognizing a source of the type that Billie is pointing to. I just don't see why it is a solution to these problems.

Think it is so. My real problem, I mean, is that you can postulate that there is some kind of thing that could be called god, I guess, and that thing is supposed to inhabit this world, which to me is the mental world, that's a hypothesis that I can't . I see what to do with I mean, I'm not saying it's wrong. I just don't see why one should attribute this, which is somehow the answer to all the questions. He must inhabit the world of. It sounds like you'd rather have the questions and then give that kind of explanation to the questions.

Yes, I think there might be truth in such a view, but I don't see why I'm driven to believe that and I don't see why I should know anything conscious, you see, this is, I mean, it could be, I'm not right. , I just don't see the ex explaining why this explains much to say that this divine entity, whatever it is, is something with consciousness. by itself now I'm not saying it's wrong and it could be that there is such a thing maybe one that you know like in some religious views once after death somehow once consciousness becomes part of that thing No I'm saying, I think it's a wrong view.

I don't necessarily think it's a wrong view, let's have an answer and then let's move on to some of the specifics of cosmology here. I'm not trying to draw any conclusions. I am offering a metaphysical solution. to which you admit are deep mysteries in your own worldview where we have these three disparate realms of reality that don't seem to connect very well and since you already have the mental realm, you already have the mind realm. It's a small step to postulate an omniscient mind, but why don't you think we've already gone to the physical world? You say you could.

Why don't we put it there? Well, I already put it there. I already talked about that because you can't put it in the abstract realm because that realm is causally a feat. you can't put it in the physical realm because the physical realm is contingent and finite and therefore cannot explain the infinite and logically necessary abstract realm and it is very difficult. to explain the mental realm on the basis of purely physical causes I think we just said, you're just saying it's neither here nor there, it doesn't mean it's third, well, anyway, well, no, no, I mean , if there are these three realms of reality and unity, the underlying unity, cannot be found in two, it logically follows that it will be found in the third, unless there is no unity to be found, perhaps unity is something much deeper than any of the three.

These images where all those years contain him have more to do with the totality of the three putting him in the mental world, so what they wanted to say is that putting him in the mental world is giving him a, I mean, degrading him in a way, I think that's what I feel like he seems unbalanced to you yes, unbalanced and if he has free will and something here then that somehow degrades him because they said that somehow he could have done something else he's like us, he's too much like us yeah , just like the ancient views of good, the Greek User for God in some sense we are finite, we are talking about a metaphysically necessary source of the Platonic realm and a physical world, this is a this is not and perhaps significantly the Judeo-Christian traditions , of course, speak of humanity being made. in the image of God, you're having trouble with that idea, well, it's been a fascinating conversation, gentlemen, I really enjoyed it, why don't we move to one of these specific worlds, the physical world, because we're obviously titling this discussion like the universe?

How it got here and why we're part of it Let's talk about the fact that we now know things we could never have dreamed of knowing a hundred years ago about the nature of the universe we live in It must have been an extraordinary and exciting time When you were developing those theorems with Stephen Hawking and you saw them confirming what you had obviously already been encountering from observational evidence from the Big Bang, microwave background radiation, etc., can you describe a little bit about what that felt like? in those, you know, very significant, you see, there is also an evolution of my thinking and of course it has changed, this has been there for a long time and I started to worry, well, you know, people study about the models of the universe and they were always I only studied the one in which Lemaitre had very symmetrical models of universes where you didn't even need.

I think if you want, because everyone was looking, the cases were completely symmetrical. Listen in idealization and I was concerned why they are so different. let's say the singularity in the Big Bang when the details when you look at what happens in the case of the collapse are completely different mmm I mean, the similarity was what started this, but when you look at it in detail it is completely different now this has to do with This fundamental principle of physics is known as the second law of thermodynamics. Now, the second law of thermodynamics tells us, generally speaking, that things become more and more random as time goes by.

There's something called entropy, which is a measure of this randomness, so this is the general impression it's a very fundamental principle of physics and it's everywhere, yeah, and you see this in this singularity, it's the Big Bang with this idealized singularity very, very special and in black holes it is almost completely opposite hmm, the beginning of low entropy and the incredible order singular of high entropy at the beginning yes, rather it is very diffuse and the nature of that order seemed to be in paradox with The observations of the Cosmic Microwave Background, these are the first observations of radiation coming in all directions, this is microwaves.

Radiation like in your microwave oven, yes, and this radiation seemed to be very uniform over the sky, not only because it had a spectrum, that is, the frequencies are different, the intensities of different frequencies or such that it showed that there was a state of high maximum entropy. The most random Asian you could have, so it was completely random, but it still had to be ordered, so I was puzzled about this for a long time and you have this order, the explanation is, and I think I'll more or less accept it now, is that the The explanation is that the order is in gravity and not in anything else, so you have this very gravitationally ordered structure, let's say that the gravitation of the degrees of freedom did not participate in this thermalization, everything else, all the photons or matter, everything else was random, but not gravity and this seemed to me to be a great paradox, how is this imbalance between one and the other possible?

That had been on the back burner for a long time. My thought now was a particular moment, but I should describe it. Keep going. I mean, it's a bit like the questions you raise, see? I was thinking about the future of the universe and what we've come to understand in recent years is that these black holes exist, not only are they there, but they are absolutely enormous. The ones in our galaxy, in the middle of our galaxy, there's a black hole that's about four million times the mass of the Sun and it's there and you can see the stars spinning, I mean, you can measure them in real time.

In the movie, the stars spin and then there's something in the middle. Here is this one that was photographed recently and it was not the same one. I think it was thought that it was going to be that, but the image they showed. it was a different galaxy, okay, with a much bigger black hole, so I guess I can't remember how much bigger it is in this one, much bigger, so you see these huge black holes in the centers of galaxies, you know what What is going to happen. I will start swallowing more and more material.

Some of it will escape, but maybe about half. I don't know what the figure is. So exactly what is swallowed now in a group of guys, you get a lot, we are in a group. I only have about three or four, I don't remember how many there are, the largest is the Andromeda galaxy and we are on a collision course with the Andromeda galaxy. It will be a few billion years before we find it, but then black holes will appear. they will sense each other, they will collide, they will swallow each other, it will be mainly what one will swallow us and when I say we, I mean our black hole and the material in the cluster, most of it will be swallowed eventually.

When you have much larger clusters, then most of the material gets sucked in and there, so it's a pretty boring state because she just has these black holes in there and most of the matter gets swallowed up in a pretty boring way and I thought, well. , it's not interesting, this happened because Stephen Hawking explained that this is his greatest contribution, it is something very important, black holes are not completely black, they have a very, very black color, but they have a very, very low temperature, but with the passing of the years, and the years, not thousands, not millions, gazillion gazillions. million you have to think in terms of Google if it's rice then that's ten to a hundred and ten years think of one followed by 100 zeros yeah that many zeros and probably more with really big ones and after that period the radiation from these black holes will disappear. it takes away all the power and energy and then it disappears with a little pop when I said pop okay nuclear explosion depends on how you measure it doesn't matter too much anyway they disappear and we just had this very boring area when we had the boring time when black holes were the most exciting things and then it got really deadly boring and this is what you've described as the heat death of the universe in the sense that it's in, it's in, but whatever , It is very boring.

Nothing, nothing of interest exists at West Point, so I mope on one side of the universe and we live and that's this endless tedium. That's what awaits us. What's the point of all that? The exam and that's your question, but then I thought so. so it's worse and I don't know if it's worse than tedium, but I mean we'll be there to experience it, it's now, it's boring, it fades away, yes, but that's okay sir, you're making a key point, we won't be there, but who will be there photons mainly now you see, it is very difficult to bore a photon not only because I don't think photons have experiences,but in reality they don't, if I could use the experience again, they were in the correct sense, perhaps inappropriate, don't experience the passage of time then time is not the way relativity works the time since the creation of that photon to infinity is nothing as far as that photon is concerned that is true, yes, it does not have no, like a clock, no it does not have a Sun because it has no mass essentially and it is correct that something acts like a clock, it has to have mass, but it's the point at which you have no mass in the universe exactly just photons, then, when, then. you don't have time is that there is no time and if there is no time there is no measurement of space either because how space is measured knows in terms of time how long it takes for light to get from here to here that distance is a time and that the measurements of distance are in terms of time, this is how physics is understood and this is how distances are understood.

You have measured a lot, you know that the metro in Paris is no longer useful as a subway thing, you define it in terms of light and how long it takes to travel. go from here to there and how far it is, so if you don't have any measurement In time you don't have any measurement of scale and that means that big and small are equivalent, so in this remote future distances become irrelevant and you have to understand a little more details that I can't go into here, of course. but it's what's called a conformal image, which is quite useful to think about, many of our listeners might have seen some of these images from Asia, the things called circular boundaries, you can have these angels and intellect is a good thing, right? what if you have these angels and demons and they crowd more and more along the edge of this thing and they get something extraordinary known precisely to the edge and that is the infinity of the world these beings inhabit but yet you can see it as a finite limit and it is a conformal map that they crushed both this way and that and in space-time it means that time and space are crushed by the same amount so that the future over the Infinite is somewhere, that is the point I am making, it is actually a place or time, I should say what infinity is and if you did not have mass you would get there, it is like angels and demons and that the limit of this image of Asha is something that is there at even though it represents the infinity of that world.

It's still there, yes, and you can imagine a continuation of something on the other side and the photo that I have that was presented I don't know about 15 years ago, not many people paid attention to it is that there was something on the other side. side and what there will be something on the other side and that is the big bang of a later eon, and similarly our Big Bang was the continuation of the remote future of a previous eon, now I am using the word eon, I looked up at dictionary to make sure that the word Aeon did not mean a definite number of years, so I'm using it, it just means an unimaginably vast period because I'm saying that and this is what you've called the conformal cyclical psychic cosmology and in that sense it sounds which shouldn't be confused with, but it sounds a bit like the kind of bang crunch idea that was fashionable at one time, yes, but it's actually a sequential series of bang. there's no collapse, you see, it's different, I mean, that's right there, one of Freedman's models, right after Einstein produced equations, had one university expanded and collapsed and then it could bounce back and have another one, but this is essentially a continuous expansion, you never collapse, but at the point where time becomes irrelevant, it is almost indistinguishable from another of the Big Bang, where time is also true, you could say that they are not very different, but the thing is that the Big Bang It is hot and dense, very concentrated and extremely hot, while the remote future is extremely cold and rarefied but you see when you lose the scale it applies to the mass and Whitman applies at what temperature if you want so you crush when you crush the temperature rises when you You stretch low and they are completely equivalent.

I want to return to this fascinating idea before I make that bill. First, let's talk briefly about his work with Kalam's cosmological argument, which has focused a lot on Big Bang cosmology as it is. has been traditionally understood until now, and if you like Rogers' thesis, it's kind of an extension of that, but his view has been that actually what we know about cosmology, what seems to be verified by science, supports this idea that the universe had a beginning that there was a cause for the universe and philosophically we can talk about that cause being God.

Yes, this is a very old argument for a creator dating back to the early philosophers' attempt to refute Aristotle's doctrine of the eternity of the universe. and during the Middle Ages it was developed in great detail by medieval Islamic philosophers and then mediated through Jewish philosophers to the Latin-speaking West and finally became enshrined in the thesis of the first antinomy of Amanus about time and basically says: well, it is a very simple argument, everything that begins to exist has a cause, secondly, the universe began to exist and then the conclusion follows, therefore, the universe has a cause and in support of that second premise that the universe began to exist, medieval proponents of the argument appealed primarily to philosophical problems with the infinity of the past and raised a number of very compelling objections to the notion of the finitude of the past, but now, with the advent of the modern cosmology, we seem to have some pretty dramatic empirical evidence in support of the second premise as well, so I think the premise is more likely than not, both in light of the philosophical argument and the scientific evidence, and that's where they've focused many of his discussions around knowing if there is a beginning for the universe, if there is a kind of limit, if time is preferred, etc., if we can talk about a cause why that universe came to exist and if that course It could be God, yes, although the question of the beginning of time is a question after the beginning of time. the universe I believe that time is a metaphysical quantity different from our measurements of time the fact that a photon does not measure the passage of time I believe is irrelevant to the fact that the photon exists in time I agree with Newton on that In this sense, time itself is a metaphysical reality and what physics discusses about physical time are our best attempts to provide some measurement of this time and these measurements can be precise or inaccurate, affected by gravitational fields affected by motion uniform, etc., but time itself is not. something that is a physical quantity is a metaphysical reality that we travel with, I mean, sure we have, I mean, this view that we have in relativity is that we certainly don't have time in the sense that we talk about time in language. normal because it doesn't work the same for everyone, if you want, I don't know if I understood exactly what you're saying, but it's as if somehow there was a time in the sense that it progresses universally, yes, of course, you see, like that For example, these photons in the distant future, these photons in the distant future are temporally subsequent to the photons that exist now, in fact, some of them may have had emission events in the past, well, if they have a past and they are in the future, You are clearly in time, you know something about a ship itself that you agree with, not that, you see, it is suggesting that there is some kind of time that progresses or is independent, no, you can have a temporal order without having a time associated with it and if you have Distant events then go according to a different, you can have a that is earlier or later for a particular thing, I mean, that is earlier or later in an event in the Andromeda galaxy, as you see, for example, depends on whether I start moving forward.

It's no different than when I move back, so I'm probably for weeks, so how come you're saying there's somehow a universal answer? I won't be Lorentzian about that, I think like many other contemporaries. Lorentzian physics, you mean they chain Lawrence, yeah, I'm not quite sure what's technical when you say there are relations of absolute simultaneity in the world, even if our measuring devices are affected by motion in the typical relativistic way , Yes Yes. and you know I don't agree with that, you don't agree with that, I mean we're probably not going to get to the bottom of this, but could I raise an issue?

This day is more mental. Okay, I noticed that when you were talking about these symmetrical ones. predictions of a singularity and your work in showing that even in a universe that is not isotropic and homogeneous, this singularity would occur, you talked about whether they were realistic solutions or not and I think this is one of the fundamental questions to ask about your cosmology conformal cyclic, to what extent do you think this is a realistic representation of the universe as opposed to a mathematical model? I noted in 2006 that you said that until now we consider conformal spacetime before the Big Bang to be a mathematical fiction.

However, my scandalous proposal is to take this mathematical fiction seriously as something physically real. Now I'm suspicious of that scandalous move when you see me use the word scandalous as a defense against people who would be like that. It is not very different from the conventional view. Yes. I don't think, in fact, it isn't. If you ask me now what I think, I think it's right. I think this is good enough evidence now. This is very different from those days. There is enough evidence now to indicate that it makes predictions that are not made by the conventional view and we will begin to see that they are actually present in the observations.

Now this is pretty new. There are things that are a few years old that had to do with the signs. The week you see, I had this view. We're going back to when it was 2006 or something, yeah, when there was no observational indication of this particular view other than it seemed to make sense for certain things that are puzzles that other schemes don't seem to make sense of. I mean, I think I mentioned earlier the fact that the gravitational degrees of freedom are highly suppressed in the early universe, while the others are not in this scheme that is explained where it is in other models of the universe, inflationary cosmology, etc.

I don't see an explanation but that's not the point I'm making here these are later yeah I mean I used to lecture on this considering you describe more or less this is an interesting idea no one will ever know if is correct or not. I'll be able to continue lecturing on this at the end of my time at least without contradictions, but then I started thinking, well, maybe there are observations, observational evidence, and I started to worry why it's as violent as possible other than the Big Bang and I was thinking OK. I mentioned our collision with the Andromeda galaxy, which will eventually take place, and our black holes, which will sense each other and eventually swallow each other and there will be a fantastically enormous emission of energy in a way that perhaps we wouldn't even feel if in that moment we were pleasant in the form of gravitational waves, it would have been an absolutely enormous release of energy and that enormous release of energy would spread throughout the universe but it would be, in principle, detectable by the beings in the cut in the next eon I now affirm that These things happened in the eon before ours and that the signals produced by these collisions between supermassive black holes, where are these signals? they are actually observed and with an Armenian colleague vaheguru John I article about This is a quite independent article from ours, written by some Polish colleagues led by Christoph Meisner and the most recent article they did about this was originally about this satellite that was called satellite W Maps, which is like a microwave background and then they made more refined observations of the The Planck satellite was analyzed by this Polish group later and they found that with 99.4% confidence these signals were real and not artificial, so It is believed that there has been physical confirmation in that sense that yes, the cyclic model and the most recent observations of the things that I call the Hawking points, well, let's not go into much more detail, but let's say what, let's say, you know that possibly this model could be a potential way of understanding the universe.

I guess my question, a question I have is: does that mean it's infinite in the past and that would mean that you sort of avoid the need for a divine starting point; Well, I can't resist saying first that observational data are subdeterminative, most cosmologists don't. I do not explain the data through this particular model. In fact, I mean that most cosmologists, as I understand it from my reading, don't believe that entropy will ever disappear in the way this model requires, and they don't believe that particle physicists don't. I don't think electrons decay so that there are never just photons left, so I don't think they decay, but I do think they all disappear, right, no, they, the mass, there's a, there's a look, I mean, sure. thatthe view is.

It is not currently accepted by modern cosmologists and I agree with that, but they haven't looked. I have never had any explanation. Let's take the Polish work because they are more explicit about probabilities. I have not seen the Polish work. Someone contradicts what they have done. I have not seen any response to this 99 point probability confidence level for now. This is good. This paper was published earlier this year, but there was a previous paper that it heads up and there's a We had a previous paper and I and I haven't heard anyone say that there's anything wrong with it um, but the point is that the data is little decisive.

You said you were 99% sure the signs were actually correct, but the question is how? Would you better explain this trace? Yeah, I'd like my biggest question about this to be: I guess that's the question. Let's say we are living in this si si si ma chatte. I think you're right. We should be talking. about exactly yes, I mean, the perhaps most obvious fundamental question is well, if that's the case, where did it come from? why is there in a universe? For you, the Big Bang cosmology and so on has served to reinforce that idea that there is a mind behind the universe, that there is a cause, yes, and that the cyclical model, if it were somehow shown to be a good representation of the Actually, it would undermine that undermined the idea that we have to have a cause behind it, well, it doesn't show that the past is infinite, it just talks about two eons.

Again I'm skeptical that it's appropriate to talk about these other universes existing temporally before our own because if time disappears then they are not temporally related, you can't say one is prior to something you see, yes when you say time disappears , it doesn't cut off order, not just as temporal order, it doesn't disappear, so I think there's a misunderstanding here if time, the notion of the duration of time, is maybe not conserved in a certain sense, but necessarily, but the order of time, whether something was before or after, is still preserved in the sense of causal relations and that is not affected by conformal maps, so it can. can squash time or stretch it, but which is earlier than which is early in which is later is still preserved you're talking about the metric yes, hello, yes, as opposed to the temporal order of before and after, well, that's clear, okay , I mean.

How does that influence your overall picture of the idea that the universe is caused? Yeah, well, I'm still under the light that it can extend to infinity beyond. Yeah, the question, yeah, I mean, you say it might have been the first 73 time if you go back and that was the first one you see. You can see? It's interesting because I actually talked about this at the meeting at the Vatican. It wasn't serious a few years ago. I can't say what it was exactly and they came up with what I thought was, from their point of view, the correct answer, which is to say, okay, let's assume that this infinite succession of eons is the correct explanation of the physical world, surely God created everything and what is the temporal order of these things. not the important point, yes, and I thought yes, from your perspective, that is the correct answer mm-hmm, it is satisfactory to you, well, there would be a different form of cosmological arguments such as those defended by Leibniz Leiden, it is argued that even if you have an eternal universe in the past which does not explain why a universe exists but why nothing but nothing is correct and therefore for the living Nets the eternity or infinity of the past was irrelevant to the question of whether there is an eternal universe. be metaphysically necessary that explains why the universe exists, but this would be relevant to Kalam's cosmological argument because if it turned out to be correct and could be extended to the infinite past, then it would not be true, at least scientifically, that good evidence can be given. that the universe came into existence, you would still have all the philosophical arguments in place against an infinite regress of these kinds of eons, obviously we don't have time to develop in detail the argument about whether we can establish, you know? that particular model, but there is one aspect of it that I would love to delve into the last time we are together, gentlemen, and that is why this particular universe and the way it seems to be governed by these fundamental constants and forces. which seem incredibly tight to allow life to appear at some point.

This is often called fine-tuning the universe to build life. You want to explain very briefly from your perspective why you see this as an interesting argument in favor. the existence of God well, in the contemporary literature on fine tuning there are basically three explanatory options, either the physical necessity that these constants and quantities must have the values ​​that they have, that it is non-contingent or a second chance, and the way What this normally takes would be a kind of multiverse hypothesis and then an appeal to a self-selection effect of observer selection that we can only observe universes that are finely tuned for our existence, so we should not be surprised that somewhere in the infinite multiverse let us appear in such a universe and then the third would be the design that there is an intelligence that is not designed for the universe and Rogers I think a special contribution to this has been to place a very significant objection and question mark behind the explanation of the multiverse hypothesis between the self-selection effect because if we were simply a random member of a multiverse, we should be observing a universe very different from the current one.

I want to get to that, I mean first of all this question of fine tuning, which again might be worth explaining in detail. a little bit for the audience, you yourself have interestingly contributed to this, there is a certain aspect of reality, the initial distribution of mass and low entropy energy, now without getting too technical on this point, this is essentially the idea that caught him. Alluding earlier that at that very early point that singularity is large in the Big Bang cosmology there is an incredible amount of order versus disorder, the entropy that appears later needs to be there for a life-sustaining universe to in fact be possible. you put this extraordinary number in it precisely enough to be 1 in 10 to the power of 10 to the power of 123, which I'm told is if you tried to write that down there and put a zero in each of them. particle in the observable universe, you still wouldn't have enough zeros, so this is kind of mind-blowing, but it seems like it looks like someone like you knows who it was that said that someone has been playing with physics, what a real red hole they said it looks like. that as Bill has said some type of design is to ensure that we get here now yes, now what do you say to that no, I did well, I'm agnostic, I would say about that one you see, it's not clear to me, I mean, people talks about the mass ratio between the proton and the neutron and the fact that the neutron is a little more massive than the proton and K is like this, the other way around and so on, but it's very difficult, since we only know one type of life that you see or a type of consciousness production, it may be very rare in the entire universe, I mean, it is possible that not all numbers are like that or that good.

You see, you can imagine playing with them so that they were consciousnesses everywhere. You see, I don't know, you see, we don't know enough about that and there are some good examples from science fiction that show different changes. I like it. Fred Hoyles' idea of ​​the black cloud, you see, was a completely different way of imagining a conscious self, which was this huge cosmic cloud that communicated to those that electromagnetic signals didn't reach and things froze. The other story I like to refer to is one by Robert Forward that was a dragon egg, I think it was the name of the story where there was a neutron star that was approaching the Sun and the people of Earth went to explore it and it turned out that they were living beings in this neutron. star that instead of using chemistry they use nuclear processes and this means that their lives and evolution took place millions of times faster than us and how you can make a story with this total imbalance is an incredible achievement, I hope, but, they even had a religion that took place in the chillers that were the inhabitants of this neutron star and when the thing approached them they built their entire religion in the star that appeared, you see in do you think it is?

I mean, these are obviously stories, but do you think it's possible, in some sense, that some kind of conscious reality could exist even in the absence of the physical kind of carbon-based life that we obviously need? It could have been done very differently, in a different place, totally different, in many different parts. of the universe where the physics are very different from what it is just the Earth and maybe a different type of life could have evolved there and I have no idea we just don't know that there are puzzles that look like coincidental things and they were One of the first with Hoyles think about the energy level of carbon that hadn't been there then, so you couldn't have surpassed Evil Bill, what's your response to these kinds of ways of dealing with adjustment?

Well, this is fascinating. to me because, as I understand it, Roger, you are defending neither physical necessity nor chance through the multiverse hypothesis and the self-selection effect nor design, but would simply deny the fact of completely adjusting that the universe does not is tight. In order not to be too strong I said I don't know, you don't know, yes, and for me that is very unlikely. We simply find example after example of fine tuning in contemporary physics and it seems to me a desperate device to deny it. that exists in the absence of fine tuning, there wouldn't even be matter, there wouldn't be chemistry, so I think the idea that that in other life forms would evolve is logically possible, but it's not, I think it's the most plausible solution .

The problem well, I mean, we know very little about what constitutes life and what it is like, I mean we have the universe that we have and you can imagine playing with the numbers and making them, to what extent that freedom is there mathematically is not clear. III. I think we just know. I mean, I can see the arguments and I can see that there are reasons for the argument to say that okay, from certain points of view, it seems that there are accidental things about the constants of nature that have allowed things to happen that otherwise would not have happened. happened, we wouldn't be here and that's true, but maybe there would be something else here, which could.

I was wondering if you are the conformal cyclical model that somehow does the work of a multiverse to the extent that Also, if the universe has had these rebirths over and over again, perhaps we are living in one that was habitable for life. human, that capacity, yes, there could be an evolution of constants. I mean, this was an idea that John Wheeler did not propose this model but other models that announced universal models that maybe each time a new set of constants were produced and they were different each time and it turns out that we are living in a particular Aeon, if you I could use that word here. in which the constants see at least the kind life we ​​experience, so it's potentially a solution, what do you think?

However, it seems to me that that solution falls victim to the same argument you give against using the anthropic principle with respect to the multiverse. Since what you've done in trying to push the cyclical model conforming to past infinity is any given, establishing a multiverse except it is ordered sequential II rather than simultaneous in any case, then the question is why we observe a fine-tuned universe like this. of one that is unfathomably more likely, that is, no larger than our solar system, a slice of order that is so large that it would be unfathomably more likely than a fine-tuned universe, and in fact, maybe we are all just Boltzmann brains with illusions in the external world around us why you know it falls prey to this same objection is an answer, you see, I won't give him this house because I don't like it, okay, so this is not your favorite, it is not my favorite, but it is. one possible correct answer, eons are different than numbers differ, you can't differ much from an observational point of view, but I mean, some of them don't differ much, but they could differ and they couldn't, yes, I like. but it is a possibility, true, but it does not explain our observations because they are the most probable observable universes, they are not the ones we like.

This one we use the other argument. You said we're in the one where they're nice. You know, okay, there are eons where this is not one in five million or something, maybe it has good conditions, sure, I mean, it's excellent, I don't like it, it's an answer to this question, I mean, in some sense, you. However, I have said from the beginning that you are agnostic, essentially YES on this whole fine tuning thing, you recognize that we seem to live in a fighting universe that is finely tuned for life to do at some point. The point is made, but you're at this point, you don't think we have any suitable ones.

I don't think we've ever explained that. Is it that convincing? Alrightbecause we don't even know what restrictions there are on what these numbers are. It could be for theoretical reasons, it could be a big question mark, but a possible answer to the question. I don't see why you object to this, it would be that from time to time, in this succession of eons, the numbers come out. right for life to work and we happen to be in one of these because we have to be in them because we can't be in the dead, but we can be in observable universes that are not finely tuned for our existence and those are in fact, it's incredibly more likely that you yourself in your work have said that the chances of our solar system coming together by random collision of particles are about 10 between 10 and 60 oh yes, others jovi this no, no, that part is completely explained by the model no, no, no, that's not the point.

I thought you were talking about small effects, you know, it depends on life, it may depend on a certain chemical, no, what I'm saying is that it's attractive to an observer. The selection effect is not enough to explain why we observe a finely tuned universe, but it's your decision about a part between 10 and 10 124 whatever it is, I mean, it's perfectly explained by the model, that's not a question, how do you mean? it's perfectly explained by the way oh no, the right CCC model gives you That's right, yes, no, no, about that number. I'm not taking it as I was using it as an illustration of the fact that an observer self-selection effect is not enough to explain why we observe a finely tuned universe and there.

There are a multitude of other finely tuned constants, but I want to know if he funded you and what you're talking about, if we're talking 10 to 10 to 120 for four instead of three because of the obscurity, it doesn't matter, okay? It doesn't matter too much, it's still a huge number, yes, that number, yes, it's a big enigma, that's one of the reasons for the CCC, yes, not that. I won't include it, right? We don't need to include it. That was just an illustration, yes. Okay, no one believes me, but I say that, however, there are other aspects of that that seem to be finely tuned, even which the CCC model would not directly explain just in this sense that we live in the EON in which potentially this takes a different way, you see, you could argue that you have a spread, there is a type of instability, some of these numbers mean that evolution disappears and you don't have a good continuity of eons that were similar to each other, so there are different questions that don't could be raised in this forum, it's probably time to start taking our conversation into something absolutely fascinating and I've really enjoyed it.

Thank you very much for starting with you. Roger. I hinted at this at the beginning, but is it there? anything that makes you cross the line from mystery to maybe there really is a divine mind behind all this incredible complexity of order and you know the unfathomable uniqueness of who we are in this universe, my God, it could appear, but then you say would I trust that they will look pretty? It's not more I think it's more Could opinions be twisted on what I think he said? I don't have a very clear vision beyond a general picture of what is really happening in this and me.

I mean, okay, maybe I'm talking about the three mysteries of connecting the worlds, but there's a bigger mystery that's not something wonderful, you see, and it's just that I don't disagree in some ways with that question, but but I. I'm not quite sure that there is some kind of mind that is supposed to answer these questions, it is actually an answer. I don't find it satisfactory. I mean, his colleague Hawking was sure at the time of his death that there would be nothing on the other side to greet him. Well, if it were the case that you discovered that there was a divine mind, I would like there to be someone on the other side of the Sun to greet me when I arrive.

In the end I don't. I think experiences can go on, you see, because once one's memories are seen, one's experiences involve one's memories and all that, and I can't imagine coming as another being later on. and have the same experience just as I had it and so on. That doesn't make much sense to me, but whether the experience in some abstract sense can continue is another question and are you open to that possibility or yes, you show it, no, I'm closed to any of these things that I just had. Even though it's the most confusing idea, what are you thinking as we bring this conversation closer to a close?

Well, I guess my general impression would be that theism provides a kind of fundamental metaphysical unity to the world that is absent in the absence of the existence of a creator and designer of the universe and source of moral goodness. The theistic hypothesis has a tremendous unifying force to give it meaning to reality and therefore I believe it deserves serious consideration by any thinking person today. Well, Rocha and Bill, thank you very much for joining me on the program. today, thank you, yes, for more discussion updates and an additional video that you won't find here on YouTube of Sir Roger Penrose describing his work with Stephen Hawking to find the Big Bang.

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