Welcome back to the show. This week's installment of the podcast is a live recording, the second half of our live show at Westminster's Royal Institution Theatre. If you haven't listened to the first half, go back and do so. Sure, I'll wait. Wow, that was quick. Welcome back. In this installment, we continue the debate before taking questions from our wonderful audience. Thank you again for your support. We hope you enjoy the show.

Pan, pan, pan, pan, pan, pan, pan, pan, pan, pan, pan, pan, pan, pan, pan, pan, pan, pan, pan, pan, pan, pan, pan, pan, pan, scicast. Jessica, would you like to kick us off?

So I'm kind of interested in the way that everyone is suggesting different kinds of explanations for what the whole of existence, what kind of explanations we would want.

And I kind of want to ask each of us, from a philosophical, a scientific, a Christian

theistic perspective, what kind of thing would a complete explanation look like from each

of these perspectives?

So from a philosophical perspective, if we had the whole explanation, what kind of thing could that be?

Well, as I said in the beginning, I think complete explanation would, of course, involve the ongoing efforts of physics and cosmology

to figure out what can be said about the very first moments of the existence of our universe.

But at the same time, I think from a slightly different point of view,

perhaps from a religious point of view, we should ask the question,

what's the purpose of everything, and really listen to what different traditions

and religions have to say about that?

Perhaps try to see if there is

anything besides ethics or acting morally that is at the core of these views.

From a philosophical point of view, so I'm looking at things from a very detached point of view.

One thing that I find very interesting is that many people seem to take

issue with postulation of an entity, let's call it entity like God, on the one hand, precisely

because that entity has, well, is so non-standard, it's so different from the kinds of entities

that are around us everywhere. Doesn't have. That entity doesn't have any causal properties, for example, no spatio-temporal extension,

et cetera, et cetera.

So many people feel reluctant to even posit such an entity, but on the other hand,

...