Closer To Truth Podcasts

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 - 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.

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?

MEANING - Judaism, Christianity and Islam teach the ‘resurrection of the body’, the person brought back to life. But isn’t a ‘body’ out of place in a nonphysical hereafter? Isn’t a body a burden throughout eternity? Moreover, how to resurrect a body?

MEANING - What kind of God would create hell? Does the truth of Christianity, Judaism and Islam depend on the reality of Hell? Does the nature of Hell offer Insight into what that God would be like?

MEANING - Judaism, Christianity and Islam each proclaim a resurrection of the dead, a bodily reconstruction of all people from all time. How would it work? Does it make sense?

CONSCIOUSNESS - Humankind has learned so much, so fast. What are the risks of scientific knowledge? Look to the future. Artificial intelligence. Genetic engineering. Benefits? Dangers?

COSMOS - Scientists split on whether the universe confirms or denies God. Though most leading scientists do not believe in God, some do. What can we learn from the dispute?

COSMOS - Why is an observer key to quantum physics? Does the act of observation affect what exists and what happens in the external world? Why is Observation in the quantum world a mystery?

COSMOS - Lots of things exist. But what’s truly fundamental? The challenge is to discern the minimum number of basic categories that explains the entirety of existence.

COSMOS - How things start helps reveal what things are. How to conceive the beginning of the universe? What are latest theories? Are they all speculation? What’s the recent evidence?

COSMOS - The observable universe may contain two trillion galaxies and there may be innumerable universes. Is there ultimate unification, a final theory? Search for deep harmony. Discern deep meaning.

CONSCIOUSNESS - What makes me a self? I see. I hear. I feel. How can separate perceptions bind together into a coherent mental unity? How can all be me? And how does my self persist through time?

COSMOS - Some think metaphysics is ancient nonsense; others that it's the bizarre occult. Real metaphysics asks the most profound questions, seeks the deepest truths.

COSMOS - It is the Holy Grail of physics: All the particles and forces of nature unified and explained by equations so simple that you can print them on your tee shirt. Are we getting there?

COSMOS - I look up and I look down and I chill with awe. I look up to the universe and envision hundreds of billions of galaxies. I look down to the atom and imagine minuscule, infinitesimal particles and forces. This is reality.

COSMOS - Of all human knowledge, the most stunning may be multiple universes—very many universes, perhaps an infinite number of universes. Are multiple universes—the ‘multiverse’—scientific fact, theory or speculation?

COSMOS - The expanding universe is humanity's monumental discovery. Beginning with something infinitesimally small, the universe has become something majestically large. How could this happen? What could this mean?