Speaker 0 00:00:00 <silence>
Speaker 1 00:00:05 ID the Future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent design.
Speaker 2 00:00:12 Welcome to ID the Future. I am your host, Brian Miller, and today I'll be interviewing Rabbi Aaron Zimmer and Rabbi Ellie Federer about their podcast, physics to God, which can be
[email protected]. These individuals are very, very interesting, so this is gonna be an exciting conversation. Now, both of our guests have extensive rabbinical training, and Rabbi Zimmer has also trained in physics and has studied mathematics, philosophy, and psychology. And what's particularly interesting is he traded commodities for several years by applying a method for analyzing the Talmud, which led to great success and Read by Fedder, has a PhD in mathematics and has published several articles on graph theory. He also has published the book, RIA Refigure, which explores the significance of fine tuning in Torah life in physics. And I'm just gonna read, um, description of their podcast right from their website. The podcast Physics to God is a guided journey through modern physics to discover God. We start from the fine tuning of the constants of nature, travel through the multiverse, and ultimately arrive at a compelling idea of God. I wanna thank both of you for coming on our program.
Speaker 3 00:01:26 Sure, sure. It's been, it's a pleasure. A pleasure. Happy to be here.
Speaker 2 00:01:29 Well, great. Well, I wanna start first by learning more about both of you. So could you please tell our listeners more about your backgrounds and the story of what led you to start this podcast?
Speaker 3 00:01:40 Sure. So when, we'll first tell us, uh, tell you a little bit about ourselves. So I am, I grew up in a, in a home which had a strong value of religion and science. Like grandfather was a rabbi and a chemist. My father is a rabbi and a lawyer. And I just, my early upbringing was, was a strong balance between the two. I was never raised in a way that there was some sort of a conflict between the two, but it was always, both were very important to me. And as I was studying in college, I studied, I decided that I wanted to become a rabbi, but I also wanted to be involved in science and mathematics. And that being the case, it was only natural to me that while I was pursuing my rabbinical training, I also went to a graduate school in mathematics.
Speaker 3 00:02:27 I got a PhD in mathematics in something called a grade group photography. And now my field of research is graph theory. And throughout my years, currently, actually now, I am, I'm a professor in, um, in a local college, a math professor, and I'm also a rabbi. And I teach classes in a local yeshiva, and I teach Talmud and the Bible and o other topics. And they really, I've, I've integrated the, uh, my love of God of religion together, my love of science and mathematics, and that being the case again, rabbi Zimmer, Aaron and I have been studying a lot of Talmud and have been studying Bible and have been studying science and mathematics in a lot of discussions over the years.
Speaker 2 00:03:08 Well, that's fascinating. Could you share more about yourself, Aaron?
Speaker 4 00:03:12 Uh, so, you know, when I was growing up, I, I had this dual curriculum of, we're learning religious studies in Judaism and also secular studies, math, science, english, things of the nature. And for me, there was always this tension between the two worlds. Uh, and I think, I think a lot of people in the modern world have this, that there's almost like a battle, even if it's kind of been, it's in the background, it's always there that there's some conflict between religion and between the modern, uh, rational scientific world. And as I grew up, you know, I, I had to make decisions. You have to choose what you believe. And I, I couldn't, I know a lot of people are able to, in a certain sense, dichotomize their life the way they think, where they have certain categories, they approach religion, certain categories, they approach secular studies.
Speaker 4 00:03:56 For me, that just was never really a viable option. I always felt I wanted to be an integrated, unified person, and I wanted to find a way of reconciling them. And eventually I was able to, throughout my, my teacher, rabbi Cha, and, um, open my eyes to a way of viewing, uh, Judaism in a rational way and a way of interpreting and, and reconciling science with, um, Torah, with religion. And I pursued science really, for its own sake, to understand the, the wisdom of God in the world. I got in physics. And I was always looking for ways to ground my, my beliefs in rational arguments and rational justifications. And eventually when I, you know, I'm sure we'll discuss more, that led me to this, you know, physics to God and the podcast, this whole story, we started to write a book, but it really led me to the whole thing was the pursuit of really trying to integrate the two worlds, uh, the secular world and the religious world in a rational, harmonious way.
Speaker 2 00:04:53 And you do have a really nice flow with each other on your podcast. Do you feel like, uh, you each bring something special to the conversation? How do you interact with each other? What's been, what's produced your really wonderful chemistry?
Speaker 3 00:05:04 Great question. So I guess, I guess you could start as Aaron really has a stronger background in physics than I do. And he kind of got us into this area in the first place. And he reads a lot of physics. I also do, but he studied it in a more, more rigorous way than I did. And, you know, one day he kind of said to me, Ellie, it's unbelievable. I'm reading this book by, um, at least Smolen and this unbelievable, it provides an argument which supports the existence of God, and we gotta, we gotta pursue this. So that's kind of how things get started. But I guess what Aaron brings to the table is he is, um, in, in the details of the physics, and again, I I I'm familiar with physics and mathematics and philosophy, and we, we would like to argue these points out.
Speaker 3 00:05:48 And, well, one thing which I think I bring to the table, and it creates like a nice balance between the two, is I'm a professor and I teach, I teach math in a community college. And that being the case, my students are often the types of students who will never quite understood math. They're afraid of math, and they certainly would be afraid of physics if I even try to mention it. And that being the case, it's like my job on a daily basis to try to get through to, to students and to get through them on a level that they could understand. And therefore, in a certain sense with, uh, when Aaron and I discussed, there's a back and forth, this project started out as we were writing a book. So we had a blog, and then we ended up making into a book, and then we decided to make into a podcast.
Speaker 3 00:06:27 And basically there's always, there's, there's often a tension where Aaron is trying to present the material in a, on a higher, more rigorous level, which I appreciate. It's important to be rigorous when you're dealing with these areas. At the same time, I appreciate the fact that our, our, our listeners are my students or people who are, you know, listening to our podcasts may not be able to really, uh, take in the physics or they be scared off. So I kind of try to make it simpler, and sometimes Aaron tries to make it more rigorous, and I try to make it simpler, and there's like a back and a forth, and that's kind of the way we've been developing these ideas over the years, and in that type of way.
Speaker 4 00:07:02 Yeah, I, I would just say one thing is that we've had this argument for 20 years. I think it boils down to one thing that like, I, I feel like when you say an idea, you should put the onus of responsibility on the listener to try to use their mind to understand what's going on. And, and it's beneficial to them to not just spoonfeed them, break down everything into little bite-sized pieces. Let them think, let them try to understand, and when they, even if it's not so simple right away, but by them engaging their own minds, they end up acquiring the knowledge in a much deeper way because they work to understand it. While Ellie feels like the onus and responsibility is on the speaker, to make it as clear as possible and as simple as possible, and give an analogy and give a summary.
Speaker 4 00:07:44 And, you know, I'm always like, Ellie, why? You gotta make a summary. Why do we have to repeat what we just said? Why you gotta use an analogy. It's simple, it's clear. Like let them, let them think a little bit. So, you know, we basically have had this argument for many years. We've, we've had, we both, you know, teach, we have students, um, I'd say mostly appreciate Ellie more <laugh>. Most people appreciate Ellie more. They like it when it's fed to them and it's spooned to them. And, you know, I just, I, I, I just, I don't think it's the best thing for the student. I think it's students like that. People like a listener wants to hear it simply and they don't wanna have to work. But I think that they gain more from working. But, you know, we fight about these things in the podcast, usually Ellie ends up winning and we do it, you know, because most people kind of agree with him. I recognize that. So we kind of do make it simple on the podcast and summarize things and make analogies, but I'm always in the back of there trying to make it a little more complicated, you know?
Speaker 3 00:08:32 Yeah. I think it is, it is important to have Aaron's part also, because again, when you're dealing with, there's a danger of oversimplifying things, and anyone could argue for the existence of God, if you wanna oversimplify things, these things are complicated and physics is hard. And to just gloss over all the details and not get down to the hard science is also a mistake. So I think that that's why we have the back and forth. Well, I
Speaker 2 00:08:53 Like the balance you achieve, because on one hand you do make it accessible for laypeople, which is very valuable, but then you also will inspire people to greater heights by, by challenging them to think deeper. So I think it's a very beautiful balance that you have. And I remember one of the most valuable experiences I had was teaching five-year-olds for my church. And that forced me to explain things really, really simply. Wow. So now I've been able to speak to audiences that include junior high students, but also occasionally audiences that include Nobel laureate physicists and, you know, world leading chemists and things like that. So I I, I greatly appreciate that balance you've, you've produced. Now, along those lines, what is the general content of your episodes and really who is your target audience?
Speaker 3 00:09:39 Okay, so the general I, the content, the overall content of argument is that we present, as you read, as you have description, but we're basically presenting an argument based upon discoveries of modern physics. Specifically discover is something called fine tuning. We'll talk more about Zoom discovery to show how these modern discoveries lead to the existence of God. They point to, to show you that in a sense, like there's an intelligent cause for our universe. And that's basically the overall picture of what we're trying to do. But we do that in a, in through a lot of slow, slow, slow process. Because again, as physics is hard, people aren't familiar with it. So we try to build each episode, build a little bit more, and we develop an argument, a step-by-step argument, which ends up leading the listener to be able to see for themselves the fact from modern physics, the fact that God exists.
Speaker 4 00:10:32 There's also, that's like the first series, we're almost done with that. Um, we've released, I think the first seven episodes, there's probably gonna be about 10, um, in that first series that's intelligent cause showing how there's an intelligent cause. We're gonna have two other separate series. One about the multiverse, which is what, again, we'll probably talk about that more later. That's physicist response in a certain sense to all these arguments in general, there's an infinite number of unobservable universes with all different laws of nature and, and things of that sort. Um, so we're really gonna have to take that up seriously and break it down, show that it's what it needs to prove and show whether, you know, do they prove it? Do they not prove it? Are there any problems, logical foundations, which we think there are at the very foundation of multiverse theory, but we're, that's also gonna be a separate series.
Speaker 4 00:11:18 And then our third series is gonna be about God and the idea of God answering questions about what caused God, what does God even mean? Who designed the designer? You know, there are a lot of people using you say you, you give a whole argument for God, fine tune the Constance, or you know, God designed this, God designed that. But then people ask you who designed the design? You have to be able to answer these questions. And there's much more the classical questions on God, what you know, and you have to have a clear definition, a coherent, logical definition of, of God, or else you haven't really accomplished anything. Then, you know, and then, then you just, you know, you've shown a lot of problems, but your solution is no better than all the problems. So we're gonna have another separate series, probably around the same 10, 12 episodes about God. And those are, those three are essentially what we plan on doing for this podcast. Three separate series.
Speaker 3 00:12:02 Yeah. So yeah, so about, about our target audience. So I guess we, we kind of narrow it down to two classes of listeners. One is religious people who, you know, as Aaron was discussing before, who embrace their religion, but they also embrace science. And they're kind of confused, perplexed. They feel like, in a certain sense it often seemed like these two are in conflict. I think scientists often presented that way. They often presented that, well, if you believe in science, then you can't believe in God. And we're trying to show that on the contrary, not only does science disprove God, but on the contrary, science, modern discoveries lead to the existence of God. So we think that a lot of religious people struggle with these. The world certainly tries to paint the picture that God is outdated. And we're trying to show that, talk to those people and show them whatever religion they may be from. It's not, we're not, we don't get into any specifics of Judaism or any religion. It's very much about the existence of God, who's the foundation of any religion. So that's kind of our first, our first market listener, right?
Speaker 4 00:13:02 Our second, our second one is, and maybe this is <laugh> a pipe dream, but we think that there's an open-minded secular person who's just, you know, willing to hear about the possibility that you can have a rational philosophical argument based on science that can point to the existence of God in a clear, convincing, compelling manner, which we think we do. We think this is far and away the best argument that we've ever seen. I think it's better than a lot of the other arguments that people use out there. And this is really a convincing argument. And for somebody who's open-minded, if you just come to the table without any preconceptions, our podcast doesn't assume religion. It doesn't assume revelation. We never mention any of those things any proven. We're not, we're not involved. We're really just trying to show from science. If you have an open mind and you use proper philosophical reasoning, you'll arrive at a very clear and convincing idea that there is an intelligent cause for the universe. And we'll define that idea of God. And you know, we don't know how many of those people there are and how many will be able to reach, but that really is, you know, part of what we're trying to do is for the secular person who's open-minded to give them something that's really, uh, solid and rational justification for believing in the idea of God.
Speaker 2 00:14:12 That's fascinating. So you're, what you're hoping to do is really help people to realize that there really isn't this conflict between faith and science, but the science through a rational lens points to a designer. Is there any other hopes you have for people listening to your podcast? Like after you, they listened to your podcast? Would you like for them to do anything else or explore it even in more depth?
Speaker 3 00:14:32 Well, one thing we, we'd like to do is that through, besides for the arguments leading to the existence of God, we think that with studying the physics, through studying what we're gonna talk about, fine tuning and the laws of nature and something called initial conditions of our universe, we hope to give the listener a feel for the wonders of the universe, the wisdom in God's universe. And we really think that the idea of love of God is, is a person who sees the wisdom of God is drawn to be able to understand more of what God created. And that's what we hope to inspire people to enlighten, to show the unbelievable wisdom that's built into the very fabric of the universe from its very inception.
Speaker 2 00:15:14 Well, that, that's really inspiring. Uh, and now we can do is let's talk a little bit about the actual content of your episodes. And in your early episodes, you discussed the constants of nature. Could you explain what the constants of nature are and why are they important to discuss?
Speaker 4 00:15:31 So the constants of nature are the quantities and the laws of nature. So for example, let's take a law of physics, let's like electromagnetism, which is that two charges, two electrons or two negative charges would repel each other. Um, so the question is, how strong is that force between them of pushing them away? That's a quantity, that's a number. That's, that's not, that's an amount, it's not a quality. The quality would be opposite charges that, and same charges repel, but the quantity was called a fine structure constant. And that quantity can exist in, in quantities exist everywhere in nature, the rate of expansion of the universe. How quickly is the universe expanding something called the cosmological constant? So there are these, about 25 of these numbers, most of them come from quantum mechanics, but one comes from general relativity. And there are these specific numbers and values that are built into the very laws of nature.
Speaker 4 00:16:26 And they're always the same everywhere. And that's why they're called constant. So how heavy an electron is, it's mass is a constant, the strength between two electrons, that's a constant. And since they're the same everywhere, these numbers, these values, they're called constants. And they're incredibly important because you can't have qualities without quantities. You can't just say there's a force of gravity of two masses attract, without telling me how strong they attract. It's everything in the, in the universe has to have, besides the qualitative description of its laws, it has to have a quantitative description. And these constants are the numbers that set those values.
Speaker 3 00:17:02 You wanna say what, what these numbers are? I just, I wanted to point out that these numbers are not like numbers like three or four or even pi, but the numbers are strange looking numbers, like the fine structure constant, I don't have it in front of me, but it's like 137.1 3 9 9 9 0 4 7 or something like that. Or the cosmological constant, which is this, the rate at which the universe is expanding is something like three times 10 to the negative 120 second power. That's 0.0 zero zero zero zero, a hundred twenty one zeros and a three. So these numbers are, all the numbers are, they're very strange numbers, but these are fixed numbers that are built into the very fabric of our universe. And in a certain sense, when, when scientists try to understand the universe, this is kind of the goal of scientists, is to try to take all the phenomenons we observe and try to simplify, unify.
Speaker 3 00:17:54 There's a search for something called the final theory or e theory of everything, where they're trying to understand everything in terms of certain basic laws. And they have, they've been largely successful at getting it down to general relativity and quantum mechanics are these two qualitative laws, which everything else in a certain sense emerges from. But these two laws or sets of laws have these constants, these numbers are like seemingly built into the very fabric of our universe. And there's a quote from Feynman where he, he says, or Richard Feynman, where he says like, explaining these numbers is one of the greatest mysteries of physics. Where do these numbers come from? He's specifically talking about the fine structure concept, but he's saying in general that these numbers, where do they come from? What's the cause of these seemingly arbitrary numbers? Where does scientists try to understand everything, to explain everything and break it down to simpler and simpler? And we get down to the basic core of our universe, we end up at just these seemingly arbitrary numbers. And this was a mystery, it's a mystery from fine's time. This is in book u e d I think it's 1985. We wrote it. But basically it's a mystery, you know, going back, nothing to do with God, nothing to do with fine tune, do with anything. It's just a mystery. How do you explain the values of these, these numbers?
Speaker 2 00:19:04 I, I really appreciated you mentioning, uh, Richard Feynman because he is an amazing physicist who was one of the most thoughtful thinkers about the big picture of science. And he was a great communicator. So I I, I really loved that you, um, brought that in one of your episodes. Now in later talks you talk about what's called the fine tuning of the laws of physics and that deals with these constants. Now, would you please explain, how would you explain the idea of the fine tuning and how it relates to these different quantities and constants?
Speaker 4 00:19:33 So this is really the key idea of presenting the whole argument. A lot of times people start with fine tuning and they think that the problem is fine tuning. That's a mistake. Fine tuning is not the problem. It is the clue which points the solution of the constance. So the mystery of the Constance, which Ellie just explained, that's the real problem. How do you explain these 25 numbers? You want a theory of everything that can explain, um, everything in the universe, but how does a theory explain 137.0 3 5 9 9 9 1 3 9? What qualitative theory generates that number? It seems impossible to come up with it. That's the mystery of the constant. But then fine tuning is this clue. Fine tuning means that when we study these numbers, they're not just these random numbers, they're not arbitrary. If 137 seems like this arbitrary number, it could have been a million, it could have been 214.39392, it could have been anything.
Speaker 4 00:20:27 And you say it's 137.039, that seems like an arbitrary number, that's a mystery. Fine tuning says that only if this number's within a small range, like let's say between 136 and 138, something like that, a small range. And if it was any different, there wouldn't be atoms because this number regulates the strength between two charges. So let's say a proton and an electron and an atom. And the reason that atoms are stable is because the fine structure constant is this specific number 137. If it was different by about 5%, or if in one direction or the other, there wouldn't be any atoms, there's not mean molecules not gonna be planted. It's in stars. And you're not gonna have any of these things. So what fine tuning is, is basically it shows for all these constants that in a sense scientists overlook something initially. I mean, they obviously, scientists discovered fine tuning, not anybody else. But initially the whole problem when fine was discussing the mystery was by not realizing that they're not arbitrary numbers, but they have to be within a specifically small range in order to produce a certain result of having atoms and molecules and planets and stars and galaxies. And if they were slightly different, you wouldn't have any of that. So it's a clue to show you that these, the significance of these numbers, it's knowledge about the numbers, how they're incredibly important in order to produce a complexor universe.
Speaker 3 00:21:48 Right? Just provide an analogy when we talk about this on our, on our podcast, this, the idea of these numbers. 'cause again, I think people have a hard time with physics and they're not so accustomed to laws, qualitative laws and constant, and it's just, it's perhaps scary to some people. So analogy we, we described is, imagine you have, um, an ethical system, right? It can mean any society has an ethical system, an ethical system might have a number of laws, like you're not on a steal, you're not allowed to cheat, you're not allowed to kill, you're not allowed to charge interest, you're have to give charity and so on and so forth. And you could have many laws. And if someone is trying to understand the core of this ethical system, which may have tens of laws, you might come to a principle and say, we're looking for a, an underlying theory which unifies them all.
Speaker 3 00:22:33 And that underlying theory might be nuance in your neighbor as you want onto ourselves. And that would be like a law which underlies all of those different, uh, laws. So all the laws could be an expression of that same one law, but within these laws, which, which they, which we're trying to explain, you might have, for example, you have to give charity. So imagine it says you have to give charity of 13.874326%, or you're not allowed to charge interest of more than 18.703, six 4%, something like that. So those are those, the idea of what we mean by quantity. So laws don't only have qualities. They have charity, but they also have a quantity. How much, part of the mystery of the Constance was that the quantities which are built into these laws seem to be totally arbitrary. It's not like give charity 10%, but it's like the numbers are, it's totally hard to understand.
Speaker 3 00:23:19 And how in the world could you explain numbers like this? How would you, you're trying to understand the fundamental building blocks principles which underlie our universe, which underlie this ethical system. We would be stumped by finding numbers that were so far out there, so strange. And the discovery of fine tuning in our analogy would be like, let's say we were to study the, the, you know, economics of a society. And we'd realize that if the amount of charity were too high, then rich richer people wouldn't work because they say, listen, it's not worth it. We're gonna have to work so hard and we're gonna have to give so much charity. And on the other end, if the amount of charity were too so, or too small, then four people would be upset and they'd fight and there'd be class warfare. And if, let's say we were to discover through rigorous economics, mathematics, which again is not reasonable in, in these areas, let's to discover that if the rate of charity had to be somewhere in the ballpark of 18.34, six, 7%, if it were too far off of that, we wouldn't have a stable society.
Speaker 3 00:24:19 And that's kind of the idea of that would, that would be an indication that this number is fine tuned, but it's not too high, it's not too low. It's just in the right point, which allows for the future, for the emergence of a type of a society which we're, which we're looking for. That's kind of the discovery of what fine tuning is showing us. These numbers are not arbitrary. They might look arbitrary, 137.139, whatever might seem arbitrary. But science is discovered, and again, this is discovery that e s atheists, everyone agrees to this discovery. Fine tuning is that if the numbers were different, were far, were a little bit often, if they weren't in this small range, our entire universe, Adam's molecule, star galaxy of life, everything wouldn't, wouldn't exist. And that's what we mean, that's the discovery, which kind of is, is a clue to solving the mystery of the constant. What are these, what's the cause of these numbers? It certainly has something to do with fine tuning. These numbers are not arbitrary, but they're special values which are uh, which are only those values which will allow our inverse to complex universe to inverse.
Speaker 2 00:25:21 That is a beautiful analogy. I mean that, that, that, and I can see how your rabbinical training really has helped you to make certain connections. That was very impressive. This is the end of part one of the interview for I Do the Future. I'm Brian Miller. Thank you for listening.
Speaker 1 00:25:38 Visit
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