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BK Brian Keating Cosmologist and Chancellor's Distinguished Professor of Physics at UC San Diego who studies the cosmic microwave background.

“People cherry pick. They say, if the universe was one proton heavier per kilogram in the early universe, we wouldn't have existed. Okay, that's true. If it was one proton now, it wouldn't have any effect whatsoever. So it could be completely the same quantity, just at two different times. And one or two percent is not finely tuned at all. That's actually extremely coarse. The Wi-Fi in this room is tuned to something like a part in 10 to the 9th.”

Into the Impossible With Brian Keating · Ideas & Essays · November 2026

“People cherry pick. They say, if the universe was one proton heavier per kilogram in the early universe, we wouldn't have existed. Okay, that's true. If it was one proton now, it wouldn't have any effect whatsoever. So it could be completely the same quantity, just at two different times. And one or two percent is not finely tuned at all. That's actually extremely coarse. The Wi-Fi in this room is tuned to something like a part in 10 to the 9th.” — Brian Keating, Into the Impossible With Brian Keating

Context

Responding to a TV clip in which a character argues the universe's forces are so precisely balanced that they point to a creator, Keating says the fine-tuning argument depends on picking special moments and quantities, and compares the supposed precision to everyday engineering.

Transcript

Into the Impossible With Brian Keating Around 57:29 into the episode
Brian Keating

…of God to prove God's existence, to prove consciousness is real. So it's a circular argument. It's called begging the question. You assume that people think begging the question is like raising the question. No, no, begging the question means you answer your own question. It's tautology typically.

Speaker 1

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Brian Keating

So in this case, you're assuming the existence of God, and it has to be finely tuned. But what a scientist should do, and he's supposed to be a scientist. I like the fact that they said 5 billion people because we know there's 8 billion people. So it must have been when he was young, Sheldon. It's all he's a baby, but whatever. I don't. I could quibble with that too. But, but hey, you know, would he ask about his mother? You know, is it him? Is it his genetics? Like, what made him become who he is that he thinks that she's the perfect mother? I mean, in some ways, like, it couldn't be else otherwise. Even if you had a horrible mother, like, you wouldn't exist if that mother didn't give birth to you. So, by definition, anyway, in the case of fine-tuning of the strength of these forces, that's completely nonsensical. So, he talked about the universe would go into a ball. That's there's no sense to that. There's no, there's no ball. I don't know what he's talking about. I think he's talking about a black hole. Yeah, which yeah, which you know is is is reasonable if there's an extreme mistune. But the problem is, people always do these things for like extremely special starting cases. Like, if right now, the universe is dominated by…

Speaker 3

Has your view, though, on God for, and you can define what your view on God is as well, which I don't believe that the God is a person whitebeard either, but what your view on God is now and has it changed ever since you went into this journey of cosmology and science?

Brian Keating

Yeah, I would say it's been a very circuitous and torturous kind of relationship with God. I like to say, you know, God cares if Brian Keating believes in him, like, you know, the tooth fairy cares if I believe in her. If God exists, I can think as a scientist, I can only say, you know, kind of a…

Speaker 3

Morality.

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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