Where Does God Fit in an Infinite Universe Brian Cox and Joe Rogan

Well, I think the distribution of information has changed so radically over the last couple hundred years and particularly over the last 20 that you're seeing these trends now where more people are inclined to abandon a lot of the, even if you remain religious or remain, you keep a thought or a belief in a higher power, people are more inclined to entertain these concepts of science and to take in the understanding of what has been observed and documented and written about among scholars and academics. And there's more, there's more people accepting that. Have you looked at the number of agnostic people now as opposed to 20, 30 years ago, it's rising, it's changing. And I think there's also because of you and because of Neil deGrasse Tyson and, you know, Sean Carroll and all these other people that are public intellectuals that are discussing this kind of stuff, people like myself have a far greater understanding of this than I think people did 30, 40 years ago. And that trend is continuing, I think in a very good direction. Yeah. I mean, I don't, you know, what we should say is that science, we don't know all the answers, so we don't know where the laws of nature came from. We don't know why the universe began in the way that it did, if indeed at a beginning. So I don't know why the Big Bang was very, very highly ordered, which is ultimately, as Sean Carroll actually, you mentioned him often points out, he's right, that the whole difference, the only difference between the past and the future, the so-called arrow of time is that in the past, the universe was really ordered and it's getting more disordered. And that's that necessary state of order at the start of the universe, which is really the reason that we exist. That's the reason because the universe began in a particular form. We don't know why that was. So we will probably find out at some point and it'll be something to do with the laws of nature. But so I'm always careful. I don't want to, science can sometimes sound arrogant, right? It can sometimes sound like it's the discipline of saying to people, well, you're not right. Yeah. And it's not the discipline of saying you're not right. It's saying this is what we found out. I like to say that it provides a framework within which if you want to philosophize or you want to do theology or you want to ask these deep questions about why we're here, you have to operate within that framework because it's just an observational framework. So everything we've said is stuff we've discovered. It's not stuff that someone made up. We understand nuclear physics. We can build nuclear reactors, for example. So we understand the physics of stars. So we understand that the stars built the carbon and oxygen and we know how they did it. And we can see it because as I said before, we can, if you look far out into the universe, you're looking way back in time. And as you look back in time, you see less carbon and less oxygen. So we have a direct observation that in the earliest universe, there wasn't any because we can see it. And now we see that there is some and we know how it was made. So I think it's always important to be humble when you're talking about science and you're not saying this is the way that it is. I mean, you are in a sense, but it's not able to answer ultimate questions at the moment. It's not able to answer even whether the universe had a beginning or not. We don't even know that. And I gave a talk to, I was asked to give a talk to some bishops in the UK about cosmology. And I said, yeah, that'll be great fun. And so I went and gave him this talk. And at the end, I said, I've got some questions. So if the universe is eternal and it might be, it might not have had a beginning. If it's eternal, what place is there for a creator? That's a good question. They didn't have an answer, of course, right? An eternal creator. But I think that these, it might be eternal and we might discover that. So we don't know at the moment, but we might. So I think my point is that these other human desires, they're very natural to religions and natural thing, right? People, you see it all across the world in all different cultures. But I think that in the 21st century, religion needs to operate within that framework. If it's going to operate, there are still great mysteries and it is appropriate to think about what it means to be human and I'll give you my view of what it means. But I don't think the problem comes when your theology or your philosophy forces you to deny some facts, some measurement. These things are measurements. We're not saying it's not my opinion the universe is 13.8 billion years old. We measured it. It's like having an opinion between the distance from LA to New York. You can't have an opinion on that. We know what it is. And it's the same. It's like these things, you know, people say the earth's flat or whatever. It isn't. And we've measured it. So it's just stop it. But that doesn't mean you can't be spiritual and you can't be religious. I would say it doesn't mean you can't believe in God or gods. That's not ruled out.