Closer to Truth Podcasts

COSMOS - To appreciate Time is to touch the texture of reality. Does Time differ from our common perceptions of it? Is Time fixed or flexible?

COSMOS - Information is all the rage in science, changing how we think about fundamental questions. Information has many descriptions, some of them surprising. Why is Information so important to scientists and philosophers?

COSMOS - Perhaps we cannot know the reason for the universe, if there is any. But is it even possible for the universe to have a reason? If yes, how would natural regularities and rules compare with some kind of goal or God?

CONSCIOUSNESS - Religions offer life after death. Many people are skeptical. Evidence for post-mortem survival? Again, skeptics abound. Can death ever be defeated? Are these possible ways?

MEANING - The God debate is not a game. Is there a God? If so, what are God's essences and traits? What are all the ways that God could be? Or could not be? We discover different beliefs of different kinds of Gods.

MEANING - Whether God exists may depend on whether God is necessary. Even if God exists, would it have been possible for God not to exist? In other words, even if God does exist, could it have been otherwise?

MEANING - How to think about God rationally, logically, profoundly, critically? Have no illusion that metaphysics can find God, but can a kind of progress be made?

MEANING - In searching, striving to know God—if there is a God—we discover contrasting ways that God could be. It is good to wonder about God, see a landscape of possibilities, get the big picture of what God may be like.

MEANING - Where do miracles fit in belief systems that center on God? If God exists, how could God make miracles happen, and what would miracles imply about the way God relates to the world?

COSMOS - What remarkable discoveries are being made in cosmology! Cosmologists now develop credible theories about the beginning and end of our universe and theory-based speculations about vast numbers of multiple universes. But does the cosmos have a reason? Could revolutionary ideas support some kind of 'universal reason'? The bar is set high, and it is OK to say no.

CONSCIOUSNESS - It is standard medicine that mental states can affect physical states. That's how placebos work—when sham drugs improve health, working by inducing the body to generate hormones. But some claim that the mind goes even further in healing the body, operating through consciousness in some nonphysical manner. Can this make sense?

CONSCIOUSNESS - Consciousness is what we know best and explain least. It is the inner subjective experience of what it feels like to see red or smell garlic or hear Beethoven. Consciousness is baffling.

CONSCIOUSNESS - Is the self an illusion? Decades roll by; every molecule of my body changes many times. Yet I sense myself the same-continuous, a unity. How can this be?

COSMOS - Is time the ultimate stage on which all events play? Some physicists and philosophers say No -- time is an Illusion; time is not real. How can that be?

COSMOS - The universe works for us because of deep physical laws. But if the values of these laws would much change, then all we see and know could not exist.