FROM ROBERT LAWRENCE KUHN, HOST AND CREATOR OF CLOSER TO TRUTH: When I was 12, the summer between seventh and eighth grades, a sudden realization struck such fright that I strove desperately to blot it out.

Why not Nothing? What if everything had forever been Nothing? Not just emptiness. Not just blankness. But not even the existence of emptiness. Not even the meaning of blankness. And no forever.

Lump together everything that exists and might exist—physical, mental, platonic, spiritual, God. Everything. Call it all “Something.” Why is there “Something” rather than “Nothing”? Why does anything at all exist?
I now attack the question directly—finally in my life—by speaking with some really smart people, primarily philosophers (also one physicist) who have thought long and hard about this seemingly impossible question.
I begin with one of my favorite philosophers, John Leslie, who has been much consumed with Nothing and ultimate explanations. I ask him whether my question is a legitimate one.
“It's legitimate,” Leslie responds, “because it can have answers. Even if one thinks the answer is ‘there just happens to be something,’ that's an answer.”
Is it the most fundamental of all questions?
“One could argue that all one’s views about the nature of the universe will in the end depend on whether the universe, which one believes exists, could have a reason behind its existence,” Leslie says. “I myself don't like the theory that the universe just happens to exist and just happens to have the characteristics which it does.“
At the end of all our strivings, after we have a final theory or a series of final theories, and/or multiple universes with perhaps different final theories in each, will we not still have remaining this ultimate question, Why is there Something rather than Nothing?
“I think that's right,” Leslie says. “I don't think it would be possible to say, for example, that because quantum physics tells us that it's likely that a blank would at some point fluctuate into a real world that that's our final answer. Because the question would then be, 'Why does this kind of quantum physics apply to reality?'"
I try to progress by trying to discern the nature of Nothing. Nothing seems “simpler” than Something, I proffer, in that Something has extra stuff to be explained, whereas Nothing does not?
Leslie agrees, but amplifies. “Even in a blank, there would be all sorts of facts. Try to imagine out of existence all actual things. Is that Nothing? In a sense, yes. But that overlooks the fact that there's an infinite richness of truths about possibilities which is bound to exist even though no actual things exist.”
So it's impossible to have purely Nothing, Leslie says. “Because one always has possibilities. One always has facts about relationships with possibilities. And one also has the fact that certain possibilities are good and other possibilities are bad. These are facts from which one can never escape—even if there were no actualities, no real possibility of any actualities ever occurring, there would still be no contradiction in the assertion that they may possibly or potentially occur. Their occurring would not be like the occurrence of, say, a ‘married bachelor.’”
For a philosopher to assert that anything is “impossible” is an assertion of significance, and Leslie says that it is impossible for there to be a Nothing without possibilities. “One can even go further and say that the condition of Nothing would have to be infinitely rich,” Leslie adds. “There's an infinite number of possibilities and an infinite number of facts about them [which cohabit Nothing]. And those possibilities and the facts about them will be there even if there were no actual things forever and ever.”
To Peter van Inwagen, a philosopher at the University of Notre Dame, Nothing is important. “What would count as an answer to the Nothing question?” he asks. “We cannot describe a way that nonexistent things interact with each other to produce existent things—the nonexistent is never going to produce the existent. This question cannot be like questions about why are there living things, answered by the ways that nonliving things may have interacted to produce living things. Explaining why we have Something would have to have a wholly different kind of answer, if it had an answer at all.”
Inwagen argues that “one sort of answer would be that it was impossible for there to be Nothing, that ‘there being Nothing’ is actually an impossible state of affairs. And that of course would explain why there was Something rather than Nothing, since the impossible cannot occur. There have been two attempts at this in the history of philosophy. One is subsumed under the name ‘ontological argument” [a greatest possible Being must exist] and the other under the name ‘cosmological argument’ [everything that exists must have a reason or an explanation for its existence; whatever begins to exist must have a cause]. But I myself don’t find either of them convincing.”
Another way of answering the question of why there is Something rather than Nothing, Inwagen suggests, would be to show that “it’s vastly improbable for there to be Nothing.” Here’s his argument: “Think of all the possible ways that the world might be, down to every detail. [There are infinitely many such possible ways.] All these ways seem to be equally probable—[which means that] the probability of any one of these infinite possibilities actually occurring seems to be zero, and yet one of them happened.
“Now, there’s only one way for there to be Nothing, right?” Inwagen continues. “There are no variants in Nothing; there being Nothing at all is a single state of affairs. And it’s a total state of affairs; that is, it settles everything—every possible proposition has its truth value settled, true or false, usually false, by there being Nothing. So if Nothing is one way for reality to be, and if the total number of ways for reality to be are infinite, and if all such infinite ways are equally probable so that the probability of any one of them is [essentially] zero, then the probability of ‘there being Nothing’ is also [essentially] zero.”
Inwagen argues that because there are an infinite number of potential worlds, each specific world would have a zero probability of existing, and because Nothing is only one of these potential worlds—there can be only one kind of Nothing—the probably of Nothing existing is zero. A clever argument. But doesn’t it assume that the prior probability of Nothing is precisely the same as that of every one of the infinite number of possible ways the world might have been? Inwagen’s argument turns on the assumption that a “Nothing Total World” is equally probable to every kind of an infinite number of “Something Total Worlds.”
But, to me, Nothing seems different. Nothing seems simpler in that all the other kinds of worlds would require Something more, with additional explanations required for whatever constitutes those Somethings.
Some people would answer the question glibly and say “God”—there is Something because God created it.
“Either God is a necessary being or he’s not a necessary being,” Inwagen responds. “If God is a necessary being then there isn’t any possibility of there being Nothing.” (This, in essence, is the ontological argument, which almost every philosopher rejects as deficient and spurious, though determining precisely why has proved to be maddening.)
“If God is a contingent being,” Inwagen continues, “then we still have the question of, ‘Why is there Something rather than Nothing’ because one of the possible ways for there to be is that there is Nothing, not even God. The doctrine of divine creation would then be, well, if God exists and if anything else exists, that anything else must be because God created it. This may explain why there’s a physical world, but not why is there Something rather than Nothing.”
At the end of all disputations, Inwagen himself says, “I know what I think is the right answer: I think God exists and that God is a necessary being, and therefore it’s not possible for there to be Nothing.”
As for God being the answer, I put the question to University of Oxford atheistic philosopher Bede Rundle, whose book Why There is Something Rather than Nothing rejects the God hypothesis.
“The question is fascinating in that it seems impossible at first blush to give any sort of answer at all,” Rundle says. “It’s had a longish history, starting with [Gottfried] Leibniz; many philosophers have tried their hand at giving an answer. St. Thomas Aquinas worked out his answer: There is God and God has to exist—God exists necessarily.
“Now what I’m interested in,” Rundle continues, “is whether or not that makes sense and can be substantiated." He believes that those who “in effect think that ‘there being Nothing’ is not a genuine alternative because there has to be Something because there has to be God” are on the right track—except for the God part. “I’m trying to agree with the general petition that there has to be Something or other,” Rundle explains, “but the theistic solution seems to me to have its difficulties.
“Well, what are other conditions in which you can speak of Something as beginning to exist?” Rundle asks. “Isn’t it that there has to be a time when it [the Something] doesn’t exist followed by a time when it does exist? But if you don’t have anything at all, then you don’t have ‘enough time’; so it doesn’t make sense to think of a state of affairs of Nothing being followed by a state of affairs of Something.”
Rundle concludes that, “Perhaps we just have to confront it [the fact of Something] as brute fact—that there is Something. One can’t get beyond that, there’s no explaining it, and that’s that.”
To me, to accept “brute fact” as the final explanation of Everything—All-There-Is—is maximally unsatisfying (which doesn’t make brute fact wrong, of course). Is this just a defect of human cognition? Certainly evolution would have no reason to select for capacity to understand this question.
Rundle answers me thus: “If it’s a conceptual truth that there is Something, and if there has to be Something, then that’s an end to your agonizing, surely. And if you could refute all the arguments that say, ‘We can make sense of the state of affairs which is Nothing at all,’ then there is no alternative. … There’s no such thing [or possibility] as there being Nothing.”
So Rundle believes that there must be Something or other. There cannot be Nothing: Nothing is an impossible state of affairs.
Is this progress? Or word games? I can’t decide.
“Nothing” still haunts me.
“God” would close off debate. What are alternatives?
Quentin Smith, an atheistic philosopher who is fixated on the riddle of existence, has his answer.
“The first thing is to recognize that when people have tried to answer this question,” Smith says, “they have defined Nothing as this very thin sort of Something, like empty space, quantum vacuum, the null set, a point, and the like—but few have really talked about Nothing.” A better way to define a real Nothing, he says, “is ’Not Something,’ so the question becomes, ‘Why is it the case that it is false that there is not Something?’”
There is an answer to this, Smith continues, “but it's rather trite and trivial, whereas we've associated this question as having some great, grand, magnificent metaphysical answer—but the answer is just logically trivial and then really quite uninteresting.
“The answer would be this,” Smith explains. “Right now, Something is the state of affairs. The universe is Something. So why does this Something exist? Well, it was caused to exist by the previous state of the universe, which is also Something, and that previous state was also caused by a state previous to that, which again is also Something [and the infinite regress, the endless series of causes backward, can continue without end]. … And so the reason why there is Something is that each Something that exists has been caused by a prior Something, and if you ask why there is Something at all, I say that I just confine myself to one example, this state of the universe.”
After he first realized this, it took him a while to recover from the disappointment, Smith says with some regret: “I thought to myself, ‘I spent all my life wondering why there is Something rather than Nothing … and this is the answer?’”
Smith concludes that to call existence a “brute fact” is a more logically complete explanation than either theism or any other theory because there are no questions left unanswered in the “brute fact” explanation.
So he contends that while “No Thing existing” might have been the case, “Some Thing existing” is the case. And the reason is trivial: Each and every thing was caused by a prior thing.
That can’t be the answer ... but might it?
I still want to scream, “Why Not Nothing?”
Every time I return to it, the question drives me crazy.
To conclude, I consider God. And then no God. In each case, I address the question, “Why Not Nothing?” In each case, I ask one of the world’s most profound thinkers.
I put the question to Richard Swinburne, one of the foremost Christian philosophers, thus: “I am astonished that there is Something, anything at all. Nothing would seem to have been the most likely, perhaps most logical, state of affairs.”
“I share that intuition,” Swinburne begins. “It is extremely puzzling.”
Swinburne’s approach is to first discern the essence of “explanation.”
“All explanation,” he says, “consists in trying to find something simple and ultimate on which everything else depends. And I think that by rational inference what we can get to that’s simple and ultimate is God. But it’s not logically necessary that there should be a God. The supposition ‘there is no God’ contains no contradiction.”
I ask the traditional skeptical follow-up question, “So why is there a God?” Swinburne is clear. “There is no explanation of why there is a God. And it would be theologically problematic if there were [such an explanation of any kind]. If one were to say, well, as a matter of fact, it is logically necessary that there is a God, [that would be a theological problem] because that would mean that the existence of God depended on some principle of logic which was somehow superior to God.
“If God is defined as ‘explaining everything else,’” Swinburne continues, “then God wouldn’t be God if there were an explanation of his existence. God to be God is ‘the ultimate truth.’ That’s just how it is. We can’t go further than that.”
To Steven Weinberg, Nobel laureate in physics, the question, “Why is there Something rather than Nothing” is “just the kind of question that we will be stuck with when we have a final theory [of physics]. … We will be left facing the irreducible mystery because whatever our theory is, no matter how mathematically consistent and logically consistent the theory is, there will always be the alternative that, well, perhaps there could have been nothing at all.”
In modern physics, Weinberg explains, “the idea of empty space without anything at all, without fields, is inconsistent with the principles of quantum mechanics—[because] the [Heisenberg] uncertainty principle doesn’t allow a condition of empty space where fields are zero and unchanging.”
But why, then, do we have quantum mechanics in the first place, with its fields and probabilities and ways of making things happen? “Exactly!” Weinberg says. “[Quantum mechanics] doesn’t answer the question, ‘Why do we live in a world governed by these laws?’… And we will never have an answer to that.”
“Does that bother you?” I ask.
“Yes,” Weinberg says wistfully. “I would like to have an answer to everything, but I’ve gotten used to the fact that I won’t.”
Here's how I see it: The primary questions people pose—Why the universe? Does God exist?—are important, sure, but they are not bedrock fundamental. “Why anything at all?” is the ultimate question.
I’ve come to only two kinds of answers.
The first is that there is no answer. Existence is a brute fact without explanation. Something or Other has to exist. I don’t like this, but I must accept that it may be so.
The second is that at the primordial beginning—whatever that may mean—Something was self-existing. The essence of this Something was its existence, such that nonexistence to it would be as inherently impossible as physical immortality to us is factually impossible.
Candidates for essential self-existence? These include:

• matter-energy and space-time.
• natural laws of physics or higher-order laws that generate quantum mechanics and perhaps multiple universes.
• forms of consciousness, cosmic or otherwise.
• a creator God or an ultimate cause beyond the physical.
• some overarching principle or value, like Plato’s “the good,” which somehow has causative powers.

There are no doubt other candidates. And the argument that our human brains/minds are incapable of answering this question, or even properly addressing it, cannot be refuted.
Why is there Something rather than Nothing?
If you don’t get dizzy, you really don’t get it.
Nothing is … closer to truth.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn speaks with John Leslie, Peter van Inwagen, Bede Rundle, Quentin Smith, Richard Swinburne, and Steven Weinberg in "Why Is There Something Rather Than Nothing?" the 39th—and final—episode in the Closer to Truth: Cosmos, Consciousness, God TV series (directed by Peter Getzels). The series airs on PBS World (often Thursdays, twice) and many other PBS and noncommercial stations. Three new series of Closer To Truth: Cosmos, Consciousness, God —13 episodes each, 39 all together—will begin around January 2010.

FROM V.V. RAMAN, EMERITUS PROFESSOR OF PHYSICS AND HUMANITIES AT THE ROCHESTER INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY: Eternal life, as a mere persistence of life here on Earth, could be very boring. But then, considering that old age doesn’t have to be boring, if there are things to do and experiences that one enjoys, whether it's listening to music, eating chocolates, reading romance novels, or tending to gardens, never-ending life could be a welcome permanence.
We may trivialize the concept by saying that it all depends on the phase and health of life at which this imagined eternal existence is going to be. If it is going to be in the sort of physical body we are accustomed to in the prime of salubrious life, with refreshing showers, decent wardrobes, and variation in breakfast cereal and dinner menu, with near and dear ones within reach, it would be ideal.
We may say that our images can be eternal (whether as fading photographs or on YouTube), by which we mean existence of form and sound for others to see and hear as long as technology and terrestrial civilization last. Likewise, there is immortality in the ideas and discoveries left behind. In recent decades, some physicists have argued that eternal life is a distinct possibility for us all in cyberspace. Like alchemists of ancient times, one might concoct any theory to make ourselves live in saecula saeculorum: forever and ever, to use a biblical phrase from Galatians.
The temporal view of eternity was expressed by the poet Bayard Taylor:

Till the sun grows old,
And the stars are old,
And the leaves of Judgment Book unfold.

Eternal life is a sophisticated theological concept, which has little to do with physical time. It is related to the doctrine that we are all endowed with a soul. The soul may be envisioned as an intangible supernatural entity that can exist beyond space-time, with an innate connection to an Eternal Being. The general religious belief is that in the postmortem phase, eternal life would be ecstatic for the soul that attains the celestial realm.
The eternity of which religions speak is holistic existence that transcends ticking time. As Robert Neville put it in his book Eternity and Time’s Flow, “eternity is the togetherness of past, present, and future in which they are all equally real and in which each allows the others to be what they are precisely in their temporal difference, … eternity is an eternal togetherness.” In the imagery of poet John Donne, who described time as a short parenthesis in eternity, we may say that our physical life is an even shorter parenthesis within that parenthesis. Thus, eternal life would involve jumping out of two parentheses into an ocean without bounds. Another poet noted that in mystic moments, we are watching the shadows of eternity. In this metaphor, we may say that eternal life would be moving from sheltered shade to dazzling sunshine.
From a mathematical perspective, the only things of whose eternal life we can be rationally certain (not in the temporal sense but in their continued actualization ad infinitum) are the values of pi and other transcendental numbers that go on and on and on without end in their decimal mode, and the integers more generally (1, 2, 3, …). But their eternal life, impressive as it may be, gets to be pretty drab after a while.

V.V. Raman appears with Richard Swinburne, J.P. Moreland, Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Neil Gillman, Michael Tooley, and Huston Smith in "Eternal Life Is Like What?" the 38th episode in the Closer to Truth: Cosmos, Consciousness, God TV series. The series airs on PBS World (often Thursdays, twice) and many other PBS and noncommercial stations. Every Friday, participants discuss a recent episode.

FROM V.V. RAMAN, EMERITUS PROFESSOR OF PHYSICS AND HUMANITIES AT THE ROCHESTER INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY: The question by itself is incomplete, for it is important to specify: fundamental to what, and in what sense.
The word "fundamental" pertains to that which is at the basis of something and is essential for its existence. Thus, carbon is fundamental to life, love and relationships are fundamental to sanity, and nuclear fusion is fundamental to stars. So it is important to state for what something is fundamental.
From all that we know about our universe in the framework of current physics, consciousness is not fundamental to the existence of the physical universe. That is to say, the physical universe was there, is there, and will be there whether or not it incorporates consciousness in it. There can be rocks and pure water, sand and nitrogen, and cosmic dust: The universe at large will exist without any consciousness.
On the other hand, in the framework of religion, consciousness (humankind) is what the universe was created for. God made man in his image in the Judeo-Christian framework, and Purusha (consciousness) was primary in Hindu cosmogony. Many venerate and worship a Cosmic Consciousness, variously named and described.
This is an important difference between science and religion: For science, consciousness is an epiphenomenon associated with some brains that happen to have evolved in an insignificant niche in the universe during the past couple of million years—in an indifferent universe whose history stretches back to well over 10 billion years. For most religions, consciousness is supremely central to the universe, the heart of the universe, as it were.
It is important in this context to recognize that, as conscious beings, our experiences are rich and unique: We taste and smell, feel softness, enjoy music, and perceive color. These, as far as we know, are not explicit in the physical universe, but emerge from the interaction of physical processes and entities with the extraordinarily complex human brain (itself, as far as we can tell, a purely physical entity). Furthermore, we also love and hate, engage in ideas and values, speak of truth and commitment, are involved with mathematics and science, and enthralled by beauty. None of this would be possible without consciousness. It is therefore fair to say that consciousness is fundamental to the experience of a good many intangible aspects of the universe.
One may ask: Can there be an inverse square law in mathematical terms without consciousness? Are the numbers e and pi in the universe, or are they merely in the human mind? Can the elliptic orbits of planets ever be recognized as such without consciousness? Whether these are mere creations of the human mind or are aspects of the universe that become manifest only through consciousness is a valid question.
If the latter is the case, then it is fair to say that consciousness is fundamental to the full expression of the physical universe, just as an audience is fundamental to an enacted play. If the world is a sonnet that happened by chance, consciousness is the reader without whom that sonnet would forever remain in a dark abysmal depth. In this sense, the emergence of consciousness was as important an event in cosmic history as its natal big bang.

V.V. Raman appears with David Chalmers, John Searle, Marilyn Schlitz, Paul Davies, and Andrei Linde in "Is Consciousness Fundamental?" the 37th episode in the Closer to Truth: Cosmos, Consciousness, God TV series. The series airs on PBS World (often Thursdays, twice) and many other PBS and noncommercial stations. Every Friday, participants discuss a recent episode.

FROM ROBERT LAWRENCE KUHN, HOST AND CREATOR OF CLOSER TO TRUTH: In every generation, in virtually every religion on earth, some believers have imagined their time to be the “End Time,” a pivotal epoch of disruptive change, usually generated supernaturally, that brings about perpetual transformation. These End-Time seekers have expected, or hoped for, the obliteration of society and often the intervention of their God, the return or advent of a messiah or the equivalent. And there were always some who saw signs of apocalypse just over the horizon.
Each generation has thought itself unique—our generation, it seems, particularly so.
In our time, “End Times” abound. What drives such zealotry?
James Tabor is a leading scholar of early Christianity and a careful observer of apocalyptic and messianic thinking. He is the chairman of religious studies at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte and the author of The Jesus Dynasty. There is no one with whom I would rather start. (In the spirit of full disclosure, Jim is a lifelong friend.)
The contemporary End-Time emphasis, Tabor says, “is mainly coming right out of the Bible. Particularly in the Hebrew prophets, the Bible focuses on this ideal time of the future, this ‘eschatology,’ this story of ultimate things.” Then, he adds, “as time goes on, particularly into the time of Jesus when Christianity and other apocalyptic movements (such as the writers of the Dead Sea scrolls) arise, we find them saying not only is the End Time coming, but we will likely live to see it.”
Although “apocalypticism, this idea that the End Time is in our day, is a very interesting idea,” Tabor says, he reminds his students that it has “a 100 percent failure rate.” So, he tells them, “you’re buying into an idea that may be fascinating, but so far it’s always been wrong.”
Tabor believes that “what fueled the kind of apocalyptic fervor that we find among fundamentalist Christians is the establishment of the State of Israel, and then the Six-Day War [1967], where Jews occupied Jerusalem—or re-gained it, depending on your point of view—for the first time in 2,000 years. So now, supposedly, one can open the Book of Revelation or the Book of Daniel, which are two of the Bible’s primary prophetic books, and you can think that you are reading events in a very literal way.”
Granted, the “End Times” is a compelling, even intoxicating idea. It reaches deep into human longing by extending the abstract meaning and often distant impact of religion into, allegedly, real-world relevance. It also has a way of generating group cohesion among believers and bringing, so the believers believe, just desserts to nonbelievers. But with its history of “100 percent failure,” why do some scholarly believers still take it seriously?
Robert Saucy is a professor of theology at the Talbot School of Theology at Biola University in Los Angeles. He takes the “End Time” seriously—not as sociological substrate, but as prophetic reality.
Key to Saucy’s understanding, which is widespread among many Christian groups, Is the notion of “dispensationalism”—different periods in biblical history, and the anticipation of the literal fulfillment of biblical prophecies in the “End Time” period.
“Dispensationalism is prominent in today’s theological discussions,” Saucy says, “largely because of Israel.” Dispensationalism, as an understanding of the Bible “by those who take the Bible fairly at face value,” Saucy says, “puts more emphasis on prophecy, and that includes restoration of the State of Israel.” He differentiates dispensationalism , which he says “takes biblical prophecies fairly straightforward,” from non-dispensationalism, “which tends to believe that the church has replaced Israel.” This means that non-dispensational interpretations of Old Testament prophecies are made with references to the spiritual church, and not to the nation of Israel. Israel is left out of the non-dispensational picture, Saucy says, and “the re-establishment of the State of Israel would not have biblical significance for the non-dispensationalist.”
I ask Saucy whether he, in a serious cerebral way, looks forward to a literal millennium.
“I do,” he says without equivocation, again stressing the restoration of the State of Israel after 2,000 years as the critical phenomenon.
Saucy is not alone. Many evangelical Christians believe that the existence of Israel heralds the beginning of the End Time, and that its culmination may be imminent.
Bizarre as this may sound, to be fair, if one’s beliefs are based on a word-by-word reading of the Bible, it’s a view that seems consistent with the literal texts. End-Time prophecy is intoxicating because, If true, it would prove the veracity of the Bible and the existence of its God.
But there are other understandings of Christian prophecy.
Nancey Murphy is professor of Christian philosophy at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California. A committed and devoted Christian, she is not at all concerned with prophecy.
“There's no way to know when the End Times will happen,” Murphy says. “I grew up in the Catholic tradition and the emphasis there was Jesus saying that even he didn't know when the end of the world was coming.”
Although a “remarkable number of Christians” seem to adhere to a “millennialist theology,” Murphy explains that “the more sophisticated biblical scholars would deny almost all, and perhaps literally all, of the predictions purportedly drawn from Scripture about when the end of the world is going to come.”
Yet Murphy does believe, in a more fundamental way, that there will be an end to this physical world in some God-directed way. I push to get her to give me some kind of time frame.
“OK,” she says reluctantly, “here's a not terribly serious order of magnitude. The Earth is about four and a half billion years old. The sun is going to expand and burn us all up in about four and a half billion years from now. So Jesus came right smack dab in the middle of that, give or take 2,000 years.” She then concludes, with a laugh, “So, I think we're right in the middle.”
But, she continues more seriously, “I think it depends on whether there's extraterrestrial life. For all we know, there are other planets with life spans that will last far beyond that of the Earth.”
Murphy is clear. She believes in God, the Bible, Jesus, and the ultimate transformation of the heavens and earth. But not in the near-term prophecies that many of her co-religionists propound and preach.
Although prophecy today is largely the province of Christians, there is also a long Jewish prophetic tradition. Arthur Hyman, a professor at Yeshiva University, is a leading authority on Jewish eschatology—what is prophesied to happen in the End Time. In explaining the Jewish view, Hyman calls attention to the biblical requirement that “there are conditions that have to be fulfilled.” He then reiterates “the Jewish claim against Christianity—which is part of many medieval discussions—that Jesus cannot be the Messiah because the conditions of the coming of the Messiah had not been fulfilled.” Primary among these, he says, is “a kind of a big cataclysmic war between Gog and Magog, who were biblical characters sort of projected into the future.” And then after this war, Hyman continues, “the Messiah will come and the dead will be resurrected, which is then followed by ‘the world to come,’ which brings peace on earth, no sickness, no death, and so on.”
Hyman notes that in Jewish history, there have been “Messianic pretenders in almost every generation,” but “the counterclaim always is that the conditions of the Messiah have not been fulfilled.”
The specific events that some Jews claim will lead to the Messiah’s first coming are similar to those that many Christians claim will lead to the Messiah’s second coming. Though they disagree on what “number coming” it will be—the first or the second—fundamental Jews and Christians agree that these kinds of events will signal the advent of the End Times.
But End-Time thinking has minimal importance in mainstream Judaism. What about in mainstream Christianity?
I ask Greg Boyd, founding pastor of the Woodland Hills Church in Minnesota, who has a doctorate from Princeton Theological Seminary.
Boyd recognizes that “the present state of the world, this present era, isn’t eternal—it comes to an end.” It’s like a chapter of a book that’s going to conclude, he says: “We don’t know when. We don’t know the details of how.” He then adds, “But there are plenty of people out there who say they know when, and say they know how, but they don’t know what they’re talking about—and they do damage by ranting like that—though they usually make a lot of money.”
Boyd is adamant: “But we don’t know when, and we don’t know how,” he asserts. “However, our present Earth will come to an end—the Bible describes it as the coming of the Kingdom of God, when God’s going to make right all that is wrong.”
Boyd sees the Kingdom of God as a literal kingdom, not just something “spiritual in your heart” as some believe. “As depicted in the New Testament, God brings the Kingdom to earth,” he states.
It will happen, he reiterates, but he is loathe to even hazard a guess as to when. “If there is anything we should know from history,” he says, “it is that we shouldn’t try to guess when. Such speculation only sets up people for disappointment. It sometimes gets them to do crazy things.
“We should leave the things of God to God,” Boyd stresses. “God will know when to wrap it all up. Our job is to live every day like it’s our last. Speculating about the details of these sorts of things is the equivalent of going to a tarot card reader and trying to find out exactly how you’re going to die—it’s morbid.”
In contrast, Boyd asserts, “the thrust of the teaching in the New Testament is that we’re to live with the anticipation that the Lord is going to return and set up his Kingdom. And that could happen at any time. So live every day like it’s your last and don’t sweat the details.”
Does that mean Boyd doesn’t pay attention to world news in the sense that perhaps current events may have something to do with Bible prophecy?
“No, I really don’t,” he says. “It’s so speculative that I don’t see any good fruit coming of that at all. I really don’t think that God so loved the world he gave us a jigsaw puzzle so that we could figure out what’s going to happen in the last seven years of world history.” He adds: “When God wants to be clear, God is clear.”
Still, throughout its history, Christianity has had groups and sects preaching “End Time,” imagining all varieties of prophecies about to be fulfilled. This was true in the early church, and it is true today. And not only in Christianity. The vision of a culmination of human events cuts across cultures—which anthropologists take as shared transmissions or common thinking, but which believers take as common truth.
The eschatological hope is a natural one. If one is a believer, one would certainly wish the advent of a new age and the unambiguous presence of God. Glorious rewards. All wrongs made right. All doubters convicted.
So here’s how the opposing views line up. On one side is psychology and sociology, personal hopes and social movements, all energized by anthropological trophisms that explain why such false beliefs take root and propagate. On the other side is the claim that our generation, as opposed to all other generations, really is special—with nuclear proliferation, global warming, escalating religious conflict, confrontation in the Middle East, “wars and rumors of wars” in the oft-quoted warning.
The former, with 100 percent historical success, must be the default position. The latter, with 100 percent historical failure, must bear the full burden of proof.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn speaks with James Tabor, Robert Saucy, Nancey Murphy, William Grassie, Arthur Hyman, and Greg Boyd in "Is This the End Time?" the 36th episode in the Closer to Truth: Cosmos, Consciousness, God TV series. The series airs on PBS World (often Thursdays, twice) and many other PBS and noncommercial stations. Every Friday, participants discuss a recent episode.

FROM RUSSELL STANNARD, EMERITUS PROFESSOR OF PHYSICS AT OPEN UNIVERSITY: "The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless." Those are the words of Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg in his book The First Three Minutes. He goes on to dismiss human life as "a more-or-less farcical outcome of a chain of accidents."
It is not difficult to appreciate how one might arrive at such a gloomy assessment. Take, for example, the size of the universe. It takes 13.7 billion years for light to reach us from the farthest depths of space, even though it travels at 300,000 kilometers per second. Are we really expected to believe that God designed it as a home for humans? A case of over-design perhaps?
Most places in the universe are hostile to life. The depths of space are incredibly cold. The most prominent objects in the sky, the sun and the other stars, are balls of fire and thus not suitable places to find life. For the great majority of the history of the universe, there was no intelligent life. After the stars have exhausted their fuel, there comes the Heat Death of the universe—an infinity of time when there will again be no life. Hence the view that life is but a fleeting, accidental byproduct of no significance. Or is it?
Suppose you were put in charge of making a universe. You have freedom to choose the laws of nature and the conditions under which your imaginary universe operates. The aim is to produce a universe that is tailor-made for the development of life—the kind of universe a sensible God would have created if it were really intended primarily as a home for life.
Let us assume you start off your universe with a big bang. All the galaxies of stars are to be receding from each other in the aftermath of that great explosion. The first decision is how violent to make your big bang. You might feel, for example, that the actual big bang was somewhat excessive if the aim was simply to produce some life forms. How about something more discreet? It turns out that if you make the violence of your big bang somewhat less—only a little less—then the mutual gravity operating between the galaxies will get such a secure grip that the galaxies will slow down to a halt, and will thereafter be brought together in a big crunch. Moreover, this will happen in less time than the 13.7 billion years it took for us humans to appear on the scene in the actual universe. So, turn the wick down, and you will get no intelligent life.
All right, you might say, I'll turn the wick up a little. I'll make my big bang more violent than the actual one. What happens now is that the gases come out of the big bang so fast that they do not have time to collect together to form embryo stars before they are dispersed into the depths of space. Since there are no stars, you get no life. In fact, it turns out that as far as the big bang's violence is concerned, the window of opportunity is exceedingly narrow. If you are to get life in your universe, the thrust must be just right—and that is what our actual universe has managed to do.
The next point to consider is the force of gravity. How strong will it be in your imaginary universe? If you make it a little weaker than it actually is, you will collect gas together after the big bang. It will squash down, but there will not be enough of it to produce a temperature rise sufficient to light the nuclear fires. No stars, no life.
On the other hand, you must be careful not to have your gravity too strong. If it is, you will get only very massive types of stars. These burn exceedingly fast and last for only 1 million years. For evolution to produce intelligent life on a nearby planet, you must have a steady source of energy for 5,000 million years; you need a medium-sized star like the sun. Indeed, when you come to think of it, the sun is a remarkable phenomenon. After all, what is a star? It is a nuclear bomb going off slowly. Have you any idea how difficult that is to achieve? The amazing thing is that the sun manages this. The secret is the way the force of gravity in the sun conspires to feed the new fuel into the nuclear furnace at the center of the star. It does so at just the right rate for the nuclear fires (governed by the nuclear force, an entirely different force from that of gravity) to consume it at a steady rate extending over a period of 10 billion years.
So, in order for there to be life, the force of gravity—like the thrust of the big bang—must lie within a very narrow range of possible values. And the gravity of the actual universe does just that.
Next, you must turn your attention to the materials from which you wish to build the bodies of living creatures. This is no small matter. After all, what have you got coming from your big bang? The two lightest gases—hydrogen and helium—and precious little besides. And it has to be that way. Remember, we need a violent big bang to stop the universe from collapsing back in on itself prematurely. And because of that violence, only the lightest nuclei could survive the collisions occurring at that time, anything bigger getting smashed up again soon after its formation.
But you cannot make interesting objects like human bodies out of just hydrogen and helium. So the extra nuclei—those that go to making up the 92 different elements found on Earth—must be manufactured somehow after the big bang. That's where the stars have another important role to play. Not only do they provide a steady source of warmth to energize the processes of evolution, but they also first serve as furnaces for fusing light nuclei into the heavy ones that will later be needed for producing the bodies of the evolving creatures.
But this process is far from straightforward. Perhaps the most important atom in the making of life is carbon. In a sense, it is an especially "sticky" kind of atom, very good at cementing together the large molecules of biological interest. But forming a nucleus of carbon is by no means easy. Essentially, it consists of fusing three helium nuclei together—which is as unlikely as having three moving snooker balls collide simultaneously. It involves something called a "nuclear resonance," and the occurrence of this resonance is so highly fortuitous that its discoverer, one-time atheist Fred Hoyle, was moved to declare that "a commonsense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with the physics."
So, we have our precious carbon. A collision between some of these carbon nuclei and further helium nuclei yields oxygen—another vital ingredient for life—and so on. Thus, you must be sure to incorporate a fortuitous nuclear resonance in your imaginary universe.
Does this mean that the stage is now set for evolution to take over and convert these raw materials into human beings?
Not so. You have your materials, but where are they? They are in the center of a star at a temperature of about 10 million degrees. Hardly an environment conducive to life. The materials have to be got out. But how?
What happens in the actual universe is that a proportion of the newly synthesized material is ejected by supernova explosions. These occur when massive stars—several times the mass of our sun—run out of fuel. They suddenly collapse in on themselves. But that raises a problem. How can an implosion produce and explosion? This was a conundrum that exercised the minds of astrophysicists for many years.
The mechanism turned out to be the strangest imaginable. The material is blasted out by neutrinos. Neutrinos are famous for hardly ever interacting with anything. One could pass a neutrino through the center of the Earth to Australia 100 billion times before it had a 50:50 chance of hitting anything. Neutrinos are incredibly slippery. How fortunate they were not any more slippery than they are.
There are many other conditions that had to be satisfied in order for there to be intelligent life anywhere within the universe. The sum total of these "coincidences" goes under the name "the anthropic principle."
We are faced with the simple fact that the universe, far from being hostile to life as Weinberg would have us believe, has seemingly bent over backward to accommodate life. As the physicist Freeman Dyson has put it, "The universe knew we were coming."
The mysterious appropriateness of the universe for the evolution of life is something that calls for explanation. There are two main possibilities.
The first is to assert that our universe is not alone. There are a great many universes—perhaps an infinite number of them—and they are all run on different lines with their own laws of nature. The vast majority of them have no life in them because one or other of the conditions were not met. In a few, perhaps in only the one, all the conditions happen by chance to be satisfied and life was able to get a hold. The probability of a universe being of this type is small, but because there are so many attempts, it is no longer surprising that it should have happened. We, being a form of life ourselves, must of course find ourselves in one of these freak universes.
This is a suggestion that has been put forward by some scientists, but that does not make it a scientific explanation. For one thing, the other universes are not part of our universe and so, by definition, cannot be contacted. There is no way to prove or disprove their existence.
The second alternative is simply to accept that the universe is a put-up job; it was designed for life, and the designer is God. Now, one always gets a little bit worried over arguments in favor of the existence of God based on "design." The original argument from design held that everything about our bodies, and those of other animals, is so beautifully fitted to fulfill its function that it must have been designed that way—the designer being God—and therefore you must believe in God. The rug was pulled from under that argument by Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection— at least in terms of it being a knockdown proof of God's existence, one aimed at convincing the skeptic.
So it is that I would urge caution on those religious believers tempted to make too much of this new argument from design, this time based on physics and cosmology. One can neither prove nor disprove God on the basis of such reasoning. All one can say is that if one already believes in God on other grounds—say, on the basis of religious experience—then the simplest explanation might be in terms of a Designer God. For religious believers, such an explanation introduces no fresh assumptions over and above what one already accepts as the explanation of other features of one's life.
Not that the alternative suggestion, the many-universes argument, is necessarily to be regarded as an atheistic theory. Certainly, it will be the theory favored by atheists. But it could well be that the God who used evolution by natural selection as the means for making intelligent creatures like ourselves (and a whole host of other interesting animals along the way) might well have used the same scatter-gun approach to make not only our life-friendly universe, but a whole host of other interesting universes—universes that carry no life, but could nevertheless be appreciated by God.

Russell Stannard appears with Sir Martin Rees, Leonard Susskind, Alexander Vilenkin, Lee Smolin, and Roger Penrose in "Is the Universe Fine-Tuned for Life and Mind?" the 35th episode in the Closer to Truth: Cosmos, Consciousness, God TV series. The series airs on PBS World (often Thursdays, twice) and many other PBS and noncommercial stations. Every Friday, participants discuss a recent episode.

FROM ROBERT LAWRENCE KUHN, HOST AND CREATOR OF CLOSER TO TRUTH: Science and religion have been battling—forever it seems, certainly as long as science has affected human thinking. The struggle carries deep significance. Some say that religion is superstition and science should eliminate it, the sooner the better. Others say religion is reality and science should glorify the God that created it, the sooner the better. Worldviews are at stake. As the battle rages, meaning and purpose, if any, hang in the balance.
Between science and religion, many call for harmony. Yet there seems, today, only more cacophony. I like that! With science and religion, I do not like artificial harmony or phony accord. I do not like to be placated or fooled. If there’s truth to be found—especially on matters of ultimate concern—I go for conflict. Give me rough argument over smooth talk.
Because I sense in myself a will to believe, I start with Daniel Dennett, a leading philosopher and skeptic and the author of “Breaking the Spell,” which claims religion to be a “natural phenomenon.”
“People want to believe in God,” Dennett says. “They even believe they believe in God. They are tremendously impressed with the fantastic wonderfulness of the universe. And wouldn’t it be nice if there were some sort of recipient for our gratitude? And I feel that as much as anybody. I wish there were somebody to thank. And there’s nobody to thank. But if you think there’s got to be, then you have a motive for trying to identify something as God. And, if you’re a scientist, it’s likely not going to be a traditional God. It’s going to be something not unlike Spinoza’s God, which near as I can tell, is just nature itself.” Dennett adds, “Do I worship nature? Well, almost. I wouldn’t pray to nature. I wouldn’t expect nature to work miracles for me. But I stand in awe and respect of the natural world and delighted to be here, full of gratitude. And because I can’t thank God, I just thank ‘goodness.’”
I give to Dennett the common hope-for-harmony routine—that because the goals and methodologies of science and religion are so different, they can co-exist.
“I don’t buy it,” Dennett asserts. “There’s truth, and then there’s everything else. There’s poetry, there’s art, there’s fantasy—but they aren’t two different kinds of truth. There isn’t scientific truth and emotional truth. No, there’s truth. And scientific method is the best method we’ve come up with for getting at the truth. I’d want to know how theology aims at the truth without following in the footsteps of science.”
To Dennett, truth is accessed only through science. Other nonscientific knowledge may be interesting, but it is not truth in the same sense.
I agree, but could truth in a different sense reflect reality of a different kind? How would a scientist who believes in God frame the argument?
Owen Gingerich, an emeritus astronomer and historian of science at Harvard University, believes in God. To Gingerich, a major issue in science and religion is “God’s actions in the world. Did God plan it perfectly in the first instance and let it run without meddling, or is God continually nudging it?” He believes that “many people have problems with evolution because they feel it’s eliminating God in the sense that they would like to have God in there each step of the way bringing it about. What I suspect is that many people feel that if they lose that [kind of Godly intervention], then they will equally lose the possibility of God interacting very strongly in the world.” For example, “much prayer assumes that God can be persuaded to do something that if you do not ask might not happen.”
The scientific view, obviously, is that God isn’t doing such intervening. “Now that’s a metaphysical assumption on the part of the scientists,” Gingerich says, “because science can’t prove that this kind of interaction does not happen, particularly as 20th-century science developed quantum theory, the uncertainty principle, chaos theory, and the like.” In his view, “theology can be a very demanding and serious intellectual discipline, even though the general metaphysics of scientists doesn’t give it a place at the table.” For scientists to exclude theology, Gingerich insists, is their own “kind of leap of faith,” which scientists have made in their interpretive process, but which “is not fundamentally a part of science itself.”
This is the core confrontation, and I love it. On the one hand, is the scientific worldview the absolute and only standard for assessing truth in the world? Or, on the other hand, does it, too, require “a leap of faith”? In other words, is a strictly scientific worldview self-referential and circular in its reasoning?
My head says the former; my heart, the latter. Maybe my head needs some help—and I know where to find my potential helper: at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, my alma mater. Marvin Minsky, the legendary pioneer of artificial intelligence, is not known to be shy about entering the science-religion debate.
To get Minsky started (it doesn’t take much), I ask him whether it is efficacious for scientists to seek harmony between science and theology.
Minsky gives me a look and calls religion “an amazing phenomenon for thousands of years” that is a “psychologically wonderful device.” But he’s just warming up.
“Take all the questions you can’t answer and give them a name,” says Minsky. “So somebody says, ‘Well, God did that.’ And the right question to then ask is, ‘Well, how does God work?’ And [believers] regard that as rude. So there’s something strange about theology. It’s a system of thinking which teaches you not to ask questions. And so it’s incompatible with science.
“The trouble with religion,” Minsky continues, “is it picks particular things and says, ‘Don’t think about this.’ ‘Don’t change that.’ ‘Abide by this Book.’ And that’s very convenient. It saves a lot of time. At any period, if there are questions science can’t yet answer, why knock yourself out? I regard religion as a wonderful way to save people’s time.”
Minsky believes that if religion would not have impeded science for hundreds, if not thousands, of years, humanity would be far advanced, even in dramatically extending human life. “I think death will go away,” Minsky opines. “But we don’t need to pray for it. We need to work for it.” Not yet finished, Minsky adds, “If we look at religion as fossilized old beliefs, some of which may have been useful, that’s fine. But I can’t see serious discussions of theological ideas because they’re all nutty. Unless you say how God works, saying that God exists doesn’t explain anything.”
Minsky is fierce. Good for him. Religion as an excuse to avoid hard questions? Based on the history of religion, he makes a good argument.
But from the foibles or fallacies of human religion, does anything really follow about a Creator God?
I sway forth and back. Perhaps I need someone who hears harmonies between science and religion.
Francisco Ayala is a distinguished authority on evolution and a former Dominican priest who has thought deeply about the science-religion interaction. While he criticizes “intelligent design,” he believes in God. When it comes to how science and religion work, he says, “the difference is radical.” In science, Ayala states, “it is always possible to reject something that was accepted in the past—based on observation or experiment. In religion, we are dealing with different matters. Religion depends on revelation and religious experience. They are not subject to rejection by observation or experiment.”
But religion and science need not be in contradiction, he says, “They’re different [kinds of] truths,” he states. “For the religious believer, no scientific discovery, no matter how well-established, is going to challenge his or her strong faith.”
Ayala waxes eloquent on how the discoveries and marvels of science can be a benefit to religion by showing the complexity, diversity, and majesty of physical existence. Speaking as an evolutionary biologist, he says, “the beauty of life is very inspiring,” adding “I think people of faith should gain an inspiration by looking at the world of life and that should inspire them to think more of God and to love God.” To see the presence of God in the world, he says, “that is religion.”
According to Ayala, science can neither prove nor disprove God. But it can show a magnificently diverse world of living things that inspires awe and reverence.
How might religion work with specific sciences? I ask Wentzel van Huyssteen, a theologian and expert on human origins.
“It would be easy to construct a situation where there would be a permanent, eternal conflict between science and religion,” van Huyssteen says. “The strategies are so different. But if one moves up a step from religion and science in general to specific theology and specific sciences, then it becomes more tangible and we can say, OK, here we have a specific kind of theology and a specific kind of science—say, psychology, paleoanthropology, cosmology. And then it becomes possible to see how these very different strategies can be brought closer to each other by asking what is it that we do that could be somewhat similar?”
Van Huyssteen refers to his own expertise. “Take the issue of human uniqueness, which is a term used in both theology and science,” he says. “If one follows this kind of topic, then it becomes clearer how to diffuse a conflict. At some point, one may still reach a point, a point of no return, where each side may want to divert. But if one sticks to the more generic terminology of science and religion, then it’s either a duet or a duel.”
Admonishing theologians to “show that the disciplines we are practicing are philosophically sound,” van Huyssteen states that theologians have a “huge epistemic obligation to show that in thinking about this domain of religion, we can foster interdisciplinary conversations.” Van Huyssteen makes a distinction between the common practice of religion and the academic study of theology, which he says can complement science.
Paul Davies, a cosmologist and director of Beyond: Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science at Arizona State University, is respected by both scientists and theologians. Not moved by flattery, he often disagrees with both sides.
“Science and religion start from opposite poles,” Davies says. “Science begins on the basis that all knowledge is provisional, it must be testable, that we put forward hypothesis about the world and we change our minds if experiments show that we are wrong. [Most] religions start with an act of faith, that there are certain things which are true and must be accepted to be true and they are not testable. And the question is, do science and religion meet somewhere in the middle so that they could be mutually productive?
“What tends to happen,” he continues, “is that the science informs religion more than the other way around.” He has a concrete example that impressed him. “There has been a long tradition of theological inquiry into the nature of time and God’s relation to time,” he says. “One can see the problem immediately. Here we have this notion of a being who is supposed to be all-powerful, all-knowing, and ‘perfect,’ who nevertheless at some particular moment made up his mind to have a universe and, snap, there appeared the universe. If this [creation] was such a good idea, why didn’t God make it ‘earlier’ or ‘before’? An answer goes back to Augustine, who said that the world was made with time and not in time. In other words, he took God right outside of time.”
By taking God outside of time, Davies explains, one problem went away, but it was replaced by another problem: namely, that “if God is a truly timeless being—eternal in the sense of being outside of time altogether—then what meaning could one attach to things like prayer and God interacting in history? Can one make any sense of an atemporal God—a God who is outside of time—entering into history in any sort of meaningful way? Well, there was no real answer to that, and theologians have debated these issues for centuries. But now along comes physics. Einstein showed that time is not some sort of arena in which the drama of nature is acted out. Space and time are not just there as the stage on which the play of the world takes place. Space and time are part of the cast; that is, space and time are part of physics just as much as matter and force, and that if you believe the universe came into existence with a big bang, then space and time could have come into existence with a big bang as well. Just as Augustine said: The world was made with time and not in time.
“So physics tells us that time is part of the physical universe,” Davies concludes. “So if you want to have a God who is somehow responsible for this physical universe, then this God has to be outside of time—and physics supports the notion of a timeless being. So that’s one concrete way, I think, in which science can inform theology.”
As for the traditional personal God, Davies says, “it may be that we simply have to accept that these thousands of years of tradition of a guardian-angel type of God, a personal being with whom one can have a personal relationship, and who will look after us and make sure nothing dreadful will happen … maybe we just have to let that go and find inspiration from science and from what we find at the scientific frontier. It’s not [as some scientists would say], a cold, meaningless, heartless universe in which human beings have no place. I think we have a place. It’s not a central place. We’re not the pinnacle of creation. We’re not at the center of the universe, but we have a role nevertheless, and that is enough to sustain me.”
Science is not going to be a substitute for religion, Davies says, “but it can provide a framework of ideas in which there can be a genuine spiritual dimension without having to go back to the guardian-angel God.”
OK, it’s my time to get personal. Here’s what I think (circa mid-2009; I, for one, should always date my belief system assertions).
That the universe is majestic, all agree. That God is the reason, all do not. Some scientists say there’s no need for God. Others say that science is perfectly consistent with a creator. Still others find meaning in the (assumed) fundamental nature of mind or consciousness without a traditional God. That mystery remains, all agree.
Whether science and religion conflict depends on one’s definition of science. If science is a truthful and growing body of knowledge about the physical world, then science, by this definition, has nothing to say about anything that is not part of the physical world. Science would have to be neutral—radically neutral—about religion, with science and religion operating, quite literally, in different domains. (In no way, however, would this stance validate religion as an independent avenue to apprehend reality.)
On the other hand, if science is defined as a method of critical thinking that is the only path to absolute truth, then science, so defined, is the mortal enemy of religion because all religions’ claims about God will fail the standard scientific-method tests of experimentation and repeatability.
What about the religious claim that science describes a world consistent with a supreme creator?
Here I will be precise. If it turns out that there is a God, then it would have made sense to read into the world the evidence of God’s handiwork. However, it still would not follow that science can ever be used in the first place to justify the existence of such a God.
There is unremitting tension between science and religion—and to me, that’s good to get … closer to truth.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn speaks with Daniel Dennett, Owen Gingerich, Marvin Minsky, Francisco Ayala, Wentzel van Huyssteen, and Paul Davies in "Do Science & Religion Conflict?" the 34th episode in the Closer to Truth: Cosmos, Consciousness, God TV series. The series airs on PBS World (often Thursdays, twice) and many other PBS and noncommercial stations. Every Friday, participants discuss a recent episode.

FROM V.V. RAMAN, EMERITUS PROFESSOR OF PHYSICS AND HUMANITIES AT THE ROCHESTER INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY: Someone was once asked: “How come there is only one science, but there are so many religions?” The answer that was given: Because there can be only one right answer to a question, but there can many wrong ones. This flippant reply may satisfy atheists and those who attach little importance to religions, but it cannot be taken seriously, given that religions have played such a major role in culture and civilization. It is difficult to accept, but over the centuries, hundreds of thousands of intelligent people have been persuaded by the truths of religion.
And yet, given that there are so many religions, it is legitimate to ask: “(How) can many religions all be true?” The answer to this question depends on the meaning of the word "true" in the context of religion.
Truth, as commonly understood, is an attribute one associates with facts and other elements that have tangible existence. With this meaning, it is logically impossible for different religions, adhering to different and often mutually contradicting doctrines and dogmas, to all be true. Not all the colors of the rainbow can be white.
However, it is important to realize that there are truths that touch the core of our being, that bring meaning and relevance to existence, that reveal hidden dimensions of the human condition. The truths of literature and art, in music and myths—and religion—belong to this category. These endopotent truths are not more true or less true than the facts and laws that undergird the physical universe (exopotent truths); they are truths of an altogether different category. Endopotent truths have greater value to individuals, communities, and cultures than the equations of quantum mechanics, the existence of quarks and leptons, or the big-bang origin of the physical universe.
Endopotent truths are multivalued; they can be manifest in multiple modes—as the Vedic hymns to ancient sage-poets in India, as the Commandments conveyed to Moses, as the enlightened utterances of the Buddha and Mahavira, as the sermon Jesus gave on the Mount, as the revelations to the Prophet Muhammad, as the syncretic insights of Guru Nanak. Indeed, there are many religions, and they can all be true in this sense, just as every interpretation of a great poem or work of art has validity for the keen student, just as every piece of music is equally music.
But it is important to realize that all truths have both positive and negative impact potentials, depending on the actions and attitudes they enable (exopotent) and inspire (endopotent) us to.
With both religion and science, then, what is important is not so much to inquire about their truth content in the conventional sense (which will invariably lead to confrontation and mutual disrespect, if not contempt and belligerence), but to be concerned about their potential impacts. Any religion that leads to positive actions and attitudes, such as caring, compassion, and ecstatic spiritual experience, is desirable, and any religion that engenders hate, hurt, and persecution is not. Likewise, any science that leads to an improvement in human health and the human condition is preferable to one that can be used for destruction and devastation.

V.V. Raman appears with Alvin Plantinga, Richard Swinburne, Arthur Hyman, Seyyed Hossein Nasr, and Ananda Guruge in "Can Many Religions All Be True?" the 33rd episode in the Closer to Truth: Cosmos, Consciousness, God TV series. The series airs on PBS World (often Thursdays, twice) and many other PBS and noncommercial stations. Every Friday, participants discuss a recent episode.

FROM JOHN LESLIE, AN EMERITUS PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY AT THE UNIVERSITY OF GUELPH: As well as such things as stones, the real world contains qualities of things: For instance, a particular stone is red. Now, many philosophers insist that though qualities REALLY EXIST, they aren’t themselves REAL THINGS. To be a real thing, they declare, a whatnot has to be able to exist all by itself, at least in theory. The redness of the stone couldn’t exist all by itself, without the stone, could it? To call it a real thing is misuse of the English language.
However, such verbal hairsplitting doesn’t interest ordinary folk. Ordinary language, therefore, takes no firm stand on the real-thing-ness of qualities. Mr. Dunce, for example, is foolish, really foolish. Question: Is his foolishness a REAL THING, or is it instead just A REALITY? Please yourself! How to use English here is entirely up to you. That’s the only answer the question ought to get.
Here, though, is a more interesting question: Was Plato right? In addition to the world of things like stones, is there a realm of abstract realities? Are there real whatnots that don’t depend for their reality on the existence of concrete objects such as galaxies, stones, atoms, or you and me?
Answer: Plato was right. There are infinitely many abstract realities. There is, for example, the reality that two and two make four. I take this to mean that—genuinely, which of course makes it A REALITY—IF there were to exist any two sets of two things (for instance, galaxies), THEN there would exist four things. This IFFY-THENNY affair doesn’t derive its reality from the existence of any concrete objects such as galaxies or humans who count them. What if all such objects suddenly vanished? In the resulting emptiness, it would still be a reality that IF any two sets of two galaxies ever were to exist, THEN there would be four galaxies. This reality inhabits the Platonic realm.
The Platonic realm contains infinitely many mathematical realities. Also, infinitely many realities of being possible, where this means being what might, without contradiction, enter into an actual, concrete situation. A trillion apples, for example, would involve no contradiction. Those apples wouldn’t be as absurd as round squares. The Platonic realm contains infinitely many possible apples. Infinitely many possible dragons, too, if they’d not be like round squares either.
Further, the Platonic realm contains infinitely many IFFY-THENNY realities of good and evil. For instance, it’s presumably real that IF there were to exist a trillion intelligent and happy beings, THEN this would be a good state of affairs.
Shouldn’t we say, though, that being a Platonic reality doesn’t make a whatnot into AN EXISTING THING? Despite the vagueness of the word “thing,” this could be wise. It could help make the point that the contents of the Platonic realm are in a way none too important. Breaking a vase could be cause for weeping. The Platonic realm contains infinitely many broken vases, but no tears need be shed over them. Almost all of them will forever remain merely possible vases, “unactualized” Platonic realities, whatnots that are non-things or at least shouldn’t be called existing things.
Maybe Plato’s writings aren’t very clear or very right on these matters. They can give the impression that the actual vases in our universe are in part illusory because they lack the eternal, unconditional reality of mathematical facts or of The Perfect Vase, which, inhabiting the Platonic realm, is a far more valuable component of Reality than any actual vase. Maybe Plato turns in his grave when I describe the Platonic realm as filled just with possibilities plus consequences that would accompany any actualization of those possibilities.
Consider the reality that red is nearer to orange than to yellow. I take this to be the reality that IF any red objects, orange objects, and yellow objects were to exist, THEN the red ones would be nearer in color to the orange ones than to the yellow ones. A reincarnated Plato might shrink from such IFs and THENs. He might yearn for non-IFFY whatnots called The Form of Redness and The Form of Yellowness, with The Form of Orangeness situated somehow in between them. However, that looks a mistake.
I like to say, though, that I’m a follower of Plato. Above all, I think Book Six of his Republic right in suggesting that the reason why our universe exists is simply that its existence is good. You could express the point as follows: As an eternal and unconditional reality, the existence of any universe like ours would be a good affair, the satisfaction of a requirement that can be called “ethical.” Now, this may well be why our universe exists.
Dealing with all goods and evils, Ethics extends well beyond Morality, which deals only with good and evil actions. An eternal, unconditional, universe-creating requirement couldn’t possibly be a MORAL requirement. Moral requirements are merely needs for people to behave in various ways. Their reality isn’t unconditional since they could exist only when at least one concrete object—at least one person—had already arrived on the scene. In contrast, the ETHICAL requirement that there exist a good universe doesn’t depend on the arrival of any person or thing. It’s simply a requirement that’s fortunately satisfied if a good universe exists, and that unfortunately fails to be satisfied if there’s no such universe. Call it an “axiological” requirement if you want, but it can be preferable to avoid such philosophically coined words. So long as you don’t treat “ethical” as always only another way of saying “moral,” “ethical” can do the job nicely.
In many places, but in most detail in my book Infinite Minds, I’ve argued that there’s no absurdity in the idea that an ethical requirement is responsible for the existence of our universe. It would make no sense to say that the reality that two and two make four, or redness, or loathsomeness, had created a universe. In contrast, the ethical requiredness of that universe could be in the right ballpark because ethical requirements are requirements for things to exist.
All the same, it can be difficult to sell the idea that one such requirement did create our universe. For a start, there’s the knee-jerk objection, “Only concrete objects ever create anything. An omnipotent divine Person could create everything apart from himself, but first he’d have to exist for some reason unknown. Some reason, anyway, having nothing to do with the abstraction that his existence would be something good. We all know that abstract realities exert no power!”
“Sez who?” could be the best reply to this objection. It’s a thoroughly question-begging objection, isn’t it? And don’t many theologians write that God is an abstract creative principle, not any kind of person? IF a universe of a certain type existed, THEN a requirement would be satisfied—now, why couldn’t this be a reality that created a universe? Why would it be obviously preferable to suppose that the big bang simply happened to happen? How could it be more than just question-begging to protest that the requirement in question would be “only ethical”?
More forceful is the following objection: Many reasonable folk consider our universe rather an unpleasant affair, perhaps actually worse than a blank. How could “being ethically required” explain anything so disappointing?
The answer, I suggest, lies in picturing our universe as immensely interesting, tremendously complex, yet at the same time unified in its existence. Its parts simply couldn’t exist each in isolation from the others. In that respect, they are in the same boat as the redness of the stone. Unity despite complexity characterizes minds, and our universe is mental through and through. The patterns of its events are simply patterns in an infinite mind, a mind that contemplates everything that’s worth contemplating. It contemplates not only those patterns, but the patterns of many other universes as well: perhaps infinitely many. It contemplates them eternally.
This may strike you as a strange picture. Still, it can seem compatible with what physicists say.
First, physicists say they investigate the patterns into which events fall. They aren’t trying to discover whether those patterns exist inside some super-gigantic computer or in an infinite mind that contemplates them. No possible physical experiment could settle such questions.
Second, quantum physicists often suggest that the events of our universe are so much tangled up with one another that they couldn’t exist each in isolation from the rest. They seem to occur inside a single Existent that stretches across billions of light-years.
Third, relativity theory suggests that all the successive events in our universe exist side by side and eternally in an interesting sense. As Einstein put it, the universe would seem to have “a four-dimensional existence” so that the distant past and the far future are just as much existent as the present. True, they aren’t existing in our NOW. But neither, when a man’s in California, is New York existing in his HERE.
Fourth, many physicists have concluded that our universe is only one among countless universes, all of them equally real. Here are patterns that an infinite mind could find worth contemplating.
According to my world-picture, what things really exist? Please remember that ordinary talk about “things” commits us to very little. Do I say that our universe consists of hugely many real things? Or, since I’m picturing an infinite but unified mind as generating all of the universe’s patterns just by thinking about them, must I instead be declaring that the whole shebang involves only a single real thing, the mind in question? Please yourself, for all that’s at stake is how you personally want to use the words “single real thing.” Just don’t accuse me of denying that individual stones, trees, birds, humans, can be real things! They could be worth calling real things, say I and says Ordinary Language, even if they are simply patterns in an infinite mind. The idea that every real thing must in theory be able to exist all by itself isn’t forced on us by Standard English.
Have I joined the pantheists? Do I think that our universe is, if not God, then at least part of God? Talk of an infinite mind that carries the universe’s patterns could certainly sound like God-talk. And the suggestion that this mind exists for a Platonic reason, namely, that its existence is good, could sound like God-talk also. The theory that why God exists is that God’s existence is supremely worthwhile—mayn’t that even be fairly standard theology? Still, the word “God” tends to carry a great deal of religious baggage that I reject. Do I believe in God? Unclear question!
Does only one infinite mind exist? No, there are infinitely many. You can never have too many good things, not even when each of them is infinitely good.
Could immortal souls exist? That depends on what you mean. An infinite mind inside which your mind existed might well not stop thinking about your experiences at the point where your life on Earth ended. It might think of them as continuing onward, no longer controlled by Earth’s physical laws. This would give your mind one of the three kinds of immortality discussed in my most recent book, Immortality Defended.

John Leslie appears with Roger Penrose, Peter van Inwagen, John Searle, Huston Smith, and William Lane Craig in "What Things Really Exist?" the 32nd episode in the Closer to Truth: Cosmos, Consciousness, God TV series. The series airs on PBS World (often Thursdays, twice) and many other PBS and noncommercial stations. Every Friday, participants discuss a recent episode.