Physicist Brian Keating had a perfectly delightful and quite unusual conversation with our colleague Stephen Meyer. For his Into the Impossible podcast, he posed three fascinating existential or metaphysical questions that would have had me sweating if they had been posed to me. Dr. Keating is a Chancellor’s Distinguished Professor at U.C. San Diego and Dr. Meyer is the author most recently of Return of the God Hypothesis: Three Scientific Discoveries That Reveal the Mind Behind the Universe. 

Keating asks, among other things, what Meyer would inscribe in a space-bound time capsule intended to last a billion years, like the Voyager Golden Record, as Carl Sagan had the opportunity to do. It’s a really sweet conversation. One point that Steve makes is that he has tried to take the hostility or militancy out of exchanges with people who see things differently than we do. That is something for us all to keep in mind. Let’s not be “militant theists,” as Meyer puts it. Keating’s own position is as yet a bit enigmatic to me, and I would like to seek further clarification at some point. He is a wonderful personality. Enjoy:

You can find the rest of their discussion for the podcast here.