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Coming up, the DOJ has filed a major anti-monopoly lawsuit against Google, and I think that's going to produce good things.
I'll reveal how meta Facebook, despite its promise to restore Trump, is still deeply involved in the censorship business.
I'm actually crying, but with laughter over Adam Schiff, Eric Swalwell, and Ilhan Omar being booted off their committees.
And I also want to discuss the difference between Christendom and Christianity.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Show.
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I've talked a good deal about censorship on high-tech platforms on the podcast.
And a question we might think about is, which is the worst of all these big tech conglomerates?
I don't think anyone today would answer Twitter now that it's under the aegis of Elon Musk.
So which is it?
Is it Facebook? No.
It's Google.
Google is the most powerful of these big tech entities.
And it's powerful not just because it controls so many other entities.
For example, Google owns YouTube.
The censorship on YouTube is driven by Google.
But Google also operates invisibly.
And by invisibly, I mean Google runs the search.
And you don't always know what is the manipulation that's going on behind the scenes.
Google is, in a sense, playing with, when you're trying to find information, what comes up before you.
You might think it's automatic.
You might think that this is somehow, there are search words.
But Google has a way of waiting Which sites come up and which sites don't.
So Google controls public discourse in a frightening way.
And the damage that is done by Google is even greater because it is hidden.
On other platforms, for example, if Facebook takes you down, you don't have your Facebook page anymore, or you're sent a notice of a violation, or even in the old Twitter where you're shadowbanned, by and large, you can see that.
You can see, oh, wait a minute, I'm getting a lot fewer likes.
Debbie once noticed, she's like, you know, I... I used to have 12,000 followers and get, you know, 80, 100, 300 likes.
Now I've got almost 100,000 followers and I get two likes.
How is that possible? Well, somebody must be blocking me.
Somebody must be shadow banning me.
So Google is the worst of the worst.
And I'm happy to say...
That the Justice Department has just filed a big lawsuit against Google, and we'll have to see how it goes.
These things drag out.
They're expensive. Two powerful entities, the DOJ and Google, you know, crossing swords here.
But this might end up in the breakup of Google, which, of course, would be a very good thing.
I would like to tell you that the lawsuit the DOJ has filed is over Google's suppression of conservative views, its blocking of Republican sources, its attempt to sort of undermine the Republican National Committee, the RNC. Google may well be doing all those things, but obviously Merrick Garland's DOJ is not upset about that.
So the lawsuit has nothing to do with political targeting, with political suppression, or even with censorship per se.
It's about Google being anti-competitive.
Now, our antitrust laws do require that companies that have monopolies act in a certain way, open themselves up to, don't create what are called barriers to entry, blocking new people from entering that kind of space.
Or every time a company comes along that's threatening to become a competitor, Google steps in and buys out that company, so thus wiping out the competition.
Google also has a way to manipulate and control ads so that it's able to, A, appropriate the revenue from ads all to itself, but second of all, pressure advertisers to advertise with Google because of their dominance of this social media market, forcing publishers and advertisers to use Google products and blocking the access of competitive products.
So this is really what this lawsuit is all about.
It says that Google, quote, buys up competitors, forces the adoption of Google's tools for website publishers, Distorts the competition in what are called ad auctions by limiting bidding of ad companies and also manipulating these auctions to its own advantage.
suppressing alternative technologies, blocking rivals.
So all of this would seem to be a case.
And if it has to be shown and proven, and Google of course will do its best, it'll put on a massive song and dance routine to say, no, we're not really doing this.
But I think the Justice Department should be able to prove its case.
I mean, think about it.
The reason we use Google as a verb, hey, I'm gonna Google it, is because there's no other alternative.
Yes, there are other search engines, but Google in a sense owns this space.
And so what I'm hoping will happen, this will be the law of unintended consequences, is if the DOJ is able to put sufficient pressure on Google, maybe even break up Google into splinters.
So you now have five Googles, all of which have different management, different names, and now, in a sense, begin to compete with each other.
The reason that would be a good outcome is I think that that would have benefits for the political openness debate.
It's much more difficult for five Googles to systematically censor you than for one Google which owns the space to do it.
One Google, in a sense, has immunity.
Think about it. There's no penalty for them.
If a lot of conservatives who have huge channels are somehow blocked on YouTube, what does Google care?
They have nowhere really else to go.
Now, there might be other platforms like Rumble which are coming up, but they're still a long way from YouTube, and Google dominates the search engine business.
They, in a sense, have it all to themselves.
So what I'm hoping is that you have an anti-competitive I'm sorry, an anti-competitive lawsuit against Google that has a good outcome, the breakup of Google, but that has ancillary benefits and the ancillary benefits is that we all are able to speak a little more freely and we're not going to have our searches blocked by a single tyrannical regime at Google that is a monopoly over that space.
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We have seen through the Twitter files the inner workings of the censorship regime at...
Twitter. What we haven't seen is how it works at YouTube, how it works at Facebook, also called Meta.
Now there seems to be one positive development at Meta, although it's not a development I would argue changes the depth of censorship that goes on over there.
And that is that Trump is going to be allowed back on both Meta, Facebook, and Instagram.
And now, Trump has been let back on Twitter, but he hasn't posted on Twitter.
So there's some question about whether Trump is coming back to Twitter.
I think he is.
And the reason I say that is because I saw something yesterday where Trump, in a sense, says something like, Truth Social has done an amazing job.
They've got a wonderful future.
It's a very Trumpian type of...
I won't call it parting of the ways.
I'm not saying that Trump is going to get off Truth Social by any means.
But I think there's a recognition on the part of Trump and the Trump campaign that it's essential that he be active on Facebook and It's essential that he be active on, well, he hasn't been allowed back on YouTube yet, if he will be at all, but he would have now both Twitter and Facebook and Instagram.
And let's remember, I did the math at one point, but if you just add up those platforms, you're talking about something like 100 million plus people.
I don't think it makes any sense to run for president and, in a sense, cut yourself off from these platforms if they're open to you.
Back to Meta. The lawsuit that is being filed by a couple of Republican states against these social media platforms has been yielding some kind of fascinating information.
We can't call them the Twitter files.
I guess we could call them the Facebook files.
And the Facebook files are not really an inside look in the way that the Twitter files are.
But what they are is Facebook is forced to reveal information.
And some of this is now getting out.
And what we see, for example, is that Facebook has been operating closely tied with the CDC. Now, what I'm about to tell you isn't really new.
You suspected it. It's just that now you kind of know it.
So here, for example, it turns out...
Facebook has been submitting to the CDC a wide range of claims that appear on Facebook and asking the CDC basically, is this right?
Is this right? Should we ban this or shouldn't we?
So the CDC is exercising direct authority over Facebook because Facebook is treating the CDC as the singular authority on these subjects.
And So you've got all kinds of statements.
For example, COVID-19 has a 99.96 survival rate.
And the CDC gets to say yes or no.
And so if the CDC says no, Facebook starts basically restricting and banning people who say that.
Or COVID-19 vaccines cause Alzheimer's.
Or there are other side effects.
It's not safe for women on their period to take the COVID-19 vaccine.
I'm not really debating the accuracy of any particular assertion.
I'm just saying that there is a long list of these claims and the CDC. So we're seeing direct government involvement and also final authority on what is happening in terms of censorship.
Now, we're not talking just about factual claims.
Claims vetted by the CDC included whether, quote, COVID-19 is man-made.
Now, there's a huge debate that's going on about that.
It's a legitimate, open question.
But the CDC tells Facebook that, quote, it's theoretically possible but extremely unlikely.
What? Unlikely based on what?
Certainly the natural source of COVID-19 has not been located.
So Facebook has, well, the CDC has no basis.
Nor is the CDC conducting any direct investigation.
The World Health Organization at one point had some people in Wuhan looking for the source of the virus.
But the CDC has nothing like that.
And so the CDC is rigging the debate.
Over the origins of COVID by declaring people who claim that COVID is somehow man-made as somehow advancing an extremely dubious and unlikely thesis.
Then we find out that by July 2021, the CDC isn't just evaluating something, whether it's true or false.
But whether it would, quote, cause harm.
So now we're moving into new territory.
Because something can be true.
But if the CDC thinks, well, this is going to discourage people from taking the vaccine, it could cause harm, then they say, ban this guy.
And so Facebook now responding to the CDC is going beyond misinformation.
See, they don't tell you this. They don't tell you, listen, we're just going to ban anybody the CDC wants banned.
We're going to ban anyone who's seen as an opponent of the policies of the CDC. We're even going to ban eminent scientists who disagree with the CDC. Here's Mehta providing the CDC with new claims about vaccines and asking whether the government thought they could, quote, contribute to vaccine refusals.
So now we're in new territory still because now what the issue is, is this going to make people less likely to take the vaccine?
So let's say, for example, the vaccine has a side effect and you go, the vaccine has this side effect, a known side effect.
But the CDC goes, well, yeah, even though that's true, you know, people might be more reluctant to take the vaccine, so let's ban that guy.
So you see the horrific situation that's developing here, and I'm really glad that Republican states are ferreting out this information.
You obviously have the question, where is it going to go?
I think ultimately it's going to go to court, and courts move really slowly on these sorts of things.
But what I like is that the incriminating evidence showing not just the direct involvement, it's one thing of the...
CDC was making suggestions to Meta and Facebook, and Facebook was making its own decisions.
But it looks like it's the CDC making the decisions on censorship, not Meta.
And that has important, not just legal, but constitutional implications.
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So obviously this is a guy who wants to be anonymous.
But he seems to be, if it's a he, a very well-informed guy because he did a Twitter thread recently, which I saw...
And as I scroll through it, it is name after name after name after name of deep state operative, someone who worked in the national security apparatus or the CIA or the FBI, and now they work in the censorship apparatus of...
Meta, Facebook, or Google, or Twitter.
So in other words, what Name Redacted is getting at in what turned out to be a 30-part post, so a thread that went for 30 postings, he was saying, look, we think of the deep state, the FBI, the CIA, as interfering in the operations of these social media platforms.
He goes, no. What you really have is that A large procession of people have moved from the deep state to these social media platforms, and they are running things over there.
So the deep state is now in the digital platforms.
And again, this guy seemed to really have chapter and verse on this, so I shared his post.
And now I see that the journalist...
John Solomon has picked up on it in a very interesting article in Just the News, and he says that his investigation building on Name Redacted and checking out those details and confirming that, yeah, this guy did used to be at the FBI, and yeah, he's now at a big tech platform, he found, quote, at least 200 people.
Former workers of the Central Intelligence Agency, the FBI, the National Security Agency, the National Security Council, the Homeland Security Department, all have now somehow landed in Silicon Valley.
Many with, quote, Now, wow.
I mean, think about it. These guys have been trained at taxpayer expense in many cases to go after foreign adversaries, to go after Islamic terrorists, to go after other types of terrorists around the world, to get information on the Chinese military, or even domestically to go after criminal networks, crime syndicates, the mafia.
And they're taking all this knowledge and now offering it for sale To very high bidders in Silicon Valley.
So they get out of the deep state, but then they go back into sort of a mini deep state at Twitter or a mini deep state at Google or at Facebook.
Let's look at a couple of examples.
Here's Aaron Berman.
He spent a decade and a half as a CIA analyst before joining Facebook's parent Meta as, quote, product policy manager for disinformation.
You've probably heard of James Baker, the former FBI general counsel, by the way, happily recently fired by Elon Musk, but he was Twitter's chief lawyer.
And this is what John Solomon kind of amusingly calls it, the spooks to Silicon Valley pipeline.
And he goes, it's not just a typical FBI crime-fighting operative.
He goes, there are all these sort of people who ran psychological operations or psyops in the deep state.
Again, this was all aimed initially at foreign enemies.
And now what are they doing?
They are on big tech platforms turning Americans into enemies, turning Americans into domestic political opponents, and of course promoting not just a deep state, but a left-wing ideological agenda.
Amazingly, some of these characters even post videos online in which they talk about their new job, and how cool it is, and how they now get to decide what gets seen and what gets not seen, what gets spoken and what gets not spoken.
And these are people, once you look at them and check them out, you realize how left-wing they are.
Nick Rossman, former CIA analyst, a current senior manager of trust and safety at Google, was prominently a Hillary Clinton supporter.
And at one point he said that, quote, anti-vaxxers are like drugs.
Jacqueline Lepore, another Hillary Clinton supporter, another former CIA analyst.
She served for 10 years in the CIA. She's now senior manager of Intel Collection Trust and Safety at Google.
And in an interview that she gave, she was basically promoting the Russia collusion hoax.
And she basically said that the Russians were weighing in heavily to get Donald Trump elected in 2016.
So she was part of the lie that Putin was the one who got Trump elected.
Now Trump himself, for his part, has, I think he's become fully aware of the extent of this, quote, spooks to Silicon Valley pipeline.
He's actually proposed new laws that would outlaw that, that would prevent people leaving the deep state, leaving government and For a number of years, say seven years, before they could now reappear on these digital platforms as the sort of censor-in-chief or part of the censorship regime over there.
This is a very disturbing development and it shows that the tentacles of the deep state are not merely in the government but also in the very sector that determines what you and I can say on social media platforms.
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I want to talk about Kevin McCarthy and his move to boot Swalwell and Schiff.
And Ilhan Omar off very influential committees, the Intelligence Committee, the Foreign Affairs Committee, and so on.
Now, we're seeing a new Kevin McCarthy, and I gotta say, it's fantastic.
Now, there are some guys, I actually saw a post by Sornovich, This morning, and he goes, well, I was right.
I told you that Kevin McCarthy would be great, and anyone who said otherwise has now got to apologize to me.
Well, yes, true.
But an important qualification, Kevin McCarthy is on fire.
But why? I think he's on fire because Matt Gaetz and Lauren Boebert and Mary Miller and all the others held his feet to the fire.
So, yes, we have a new Kevin McCarthy, but it's the intrepid GOP resistance that made him that way.
So, welcome to the new Kevin McCarthy.
You're doing great. Keep it up.
Keep the foot on the pedal.
Now, it's very interesting that these guys, Adam Schiff, Swalwell, Ilhan Omar, are all bitterly protesting their exclusion from these committees.
Here's Adam Schiff. For Kevin McCarthy, the cardinal's sin appears to be that I led the impeachment of his master at Mar-a-Lago.
Okay. Swalwell is like, here's a Washington Post article that gives a lot of Pinocchios to the idea that I'm a traitor and that I sold out secrets to China.
This is really not true.
I deserve to be on my committee.
And Ilhan Omar, I've served with distinction on my committee.
It's meant a lot to me as a Somalian refugee to be on a foreign affairs committee, blah, blah, blah.
So all these people are claiming that Kevin McCarthy doesn't have a good reason.
For kicking them off their committees.
Now, in fact, we can argue about this.
I think that there are more than good reasons to boot all these guys off.
Here's one that comes from Glenn Greenwald.
Quote, He goes, but there's no disputing one fact.
Before the 2020 election, he abused his authority as chair of the House Intel to endorse a knowing lie that the Biden laptop was, quote, Russian disinformation.
That alone justifies his removal.
Now, this is a sound argument.
One could make sound arguments about Ilhan Omar and whether she's a security threat.
And, of course, if you read all these threads to her comments, they talk about, well, you married your brother, you know, and swore.
Well, yes, you did. Here's a picture of the girl that you were, the Chinese spy.
I don't care about any of this for one simple reason.
I don't think that we need a reason to boot these guys off their committees.
In fact, no reason is needed and no reason should be given.
Kevin McCarthy's real justification for booting the Democrats off their committees is as a tit-for-tat for Democrats.
Remember Democrats invented this practice.
Before Nancy Pelosi, it was considered customary, in fact, part of the kind of rules of the game, that if you have the majority, you have most of the people of all the committees from your party.
And you get, obviously, to name your own team.
But you allow the minority leader to name his or her own team.
I'm going to take them off because I have the power to do it.
So that was Nancy Pelosi's justification.
And so Kevin McCarthy now should be teaching the Democrats a lesson, giving them a taste of their own medicine.
And so it's not a case of, well, you know, you—because otherwise it's going to be, well, we had a good reason to exclude Gosar and Marjorie Taylor Greene, and you don't have a good enough reason.
It doesn't matter. We don't care about the reason.
What we care about is that you abused your power, Nancy Pelosi.
You invented the practice of throwing members of the opposition off their committee.
We need to teach you a lesson.
If you want to restore civility, then this practice has got to stop.
And you who started it, you the Democrats who started this practice, by the way, a practice that was supported at the time by Schiff and Swalwell...
And Ilhan Omar.
They were all for throwing these people off their committees.
And I say now they're bellyaching because the very same thing has happened to them.
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Feel the difference. The left these days, the Democratic left, loves to use the term democracy.
The Republicans are enemies of democracy.
You have to vote for a Democrat because we're preserving democracy.
So democracy and the ancillary slogans around democracy, equality, equality.
And the people.
These are the horses that the Democratic pundits and Democratic elected representatives love to ride.
Now, there's a big fight going on in Arizona about the election, and it appears that all kinds of evidence not only has come out, but new evidence comes out every day about how bad that election was in Maricopa County.
And yet, every time Abe Hamaday or Carrie Lake raises a question, of course, the slogan comes back, not just from the Democrats, elected Democrats like Katie Hobbs in her camp, but also on social media.
Stop doing this.
You're an enemy of democracy.
So Abe Hamaday posts the following, which...
Caught me a little by surprise and got me thinking because I thought for a moment, is this really right?
And Hamadeh goes, those who claim to be saving democracy seem to harbor the most tyrannical tendencies.
And Abe Hamadeh, I think, is thinking specifically about...
Election integrity and Arizona, and you can call it a local situation.
But it got me thinking about this statement in its widest implications.
Is it the case that those who claim to be saving democracy harbor the most tyrannical tendencies?
And the more I thought about it, the more I thought, not only is this statement historically accurate, but it's actually a gross understatement.
So here's what I quote tweeted.
And of course, whenever I make a statement like this, my mind is scanning history for evidence for and against what I'm saying.
Let's think back to the terror of the French Revolution, which may have started all this.
The terror of the French Revolution, the mass guillotining of people, executions of political opponents.
What was that done in the name of?
Well, the slogan of the revolution, of course, was liberty, equality, and fraternity.
But notice that two of those ideas, equality, which of course is something we hear a lot about today, and fraternity is the French version of the people.
So in the name of the collective solidarity of the people, we have to cut off your head.
Socialism, of course, has always marched behind the banner of equality and the people, and therefore the crimes of socialism, whether in Cambodia, whether under Mao's China, whether under Cuba today, those are obviously crimes in the name of equality and crimes in the name of the people. Notice how the most tyrannical regimes in the world love names like democracy.
By the way, they even love the name republic. Think, for example, of the GDR, which was an adjunct of the Soviet empire, the German Democratic Republic. Think of the USSR.
What does USSR stand for?
Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
So the word socialist here is advertising the idea of equality, and the word republic here is advertising the word for the people.
So Soviet crimes committed between 1917 and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991-92.
Tens of millions of people We're good to go.
The Democratic People's Republic of North Korea.
By the way, that is the official name of North Korea.
It's the Democratic People's Republic of North Korea.
What's the official name of China?
The PRC. The People's Republic of China.
And so you find, by the way, not just the word democratic, but also the word republic.
Sometimes people will say, well, Dinesh, stop saying democratic, we're a republic.
But the truth of it is tyrannical regimes abuse the idea of being a republic.
They claim to be a republic also.
And then we come, of course, to the fascists who did all their crimes in the name of the people.
The Nazis called it the Volk.
In fact, when the Nazi auto company was started, which by the way exists today, it was called a Volkswagen.
Why?
Because Volk means people.
So Volkswagen is the people's wagon.
And one of the slogans of the Nazi era, Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Führer.
So one Volk, one people, one Reich, one society, one community, and one Führer, one dictator, one leader at the head of it all.
So I think Abe Hamadei is not only on firm ground, but...
His statement could be put even more strongly when he says that those who claim to be saving democracy harbor the most tyrannical tendencies.
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Use discount code AMERICA. The philosopher Charles Taylor has a book, kind of a massive tome, and I'm blowing my way through it, and it's going to be probably several weeks before I finish it.
But in any event, the book is called A Secular Age.
And I've been thinking as I read this book about what it means to live in a secular age.
Now, Taylor's argument, I think, is very simple and in a way quite elegant.
His argument is that until pretty recently, in some respects, you can say this is even within our lifetime, but perhaps it goes a little further back, but until fairly recently, the West was defined not so much by Christianity as by Christendom.
And what does Christendom mean?
Christendom means that we're living in a society where the whole architecture of the society, the way it is set up, its institutions but also its norms and practices, society is inextricable.
It's not just of the Constitution as a Christian foundation, it's that Christianity is, you may say, baked into the warp and woof, the structure, the operations of the whole society. And this was true of European societies. It was also true of American society.
It's something, for example, that Tocqueville noticed. And what Charles Taylor argues, and I think this is by and large right, is that we no longer live in Christendom.
Christendom has died.
It doesn't follow by any means that Christianity has died.
But what Taylor's getting at is that it means something totally different to be a Christian now than it did, for example, for yours.
I won't say mine because I grew up in India.
The situation's different.
But let's say for your great-great-grandparents and their...
So now we have a Christianity that no longer dominates the institutions of our society.
On the contrary, some of us would point out that some institutions, powerful institutions of society, appear to be anti-Christian, certainly removed from Christian foundations, don't accept Christian premises.
Christian premises are no longer taken for granted.
And even courts have read a constitution which might have had a Christian foundation have sort of tried to sort of move away from that foundation.
So now we're living in a society.
So living in a secular society means that It means that Christianity is now one option among others.
People can see alternative ways of life and see those ways of life not only as worthwhile, as contributing to human flourishing, but also as moral.
In other words, they're embracing an idea of morality that seems detached from perhaps its original Christian foundation.
Now, Taylor's point is that this has happened.
It can be seen as a loss.
In fact, Taylor admits, and he describes in some detail, a lot of the great things that Christendom produced.
I mean, it's only the tip of the iceberg, so to speak, to say that it produced the Cathedral of Notre Dame and the Cathedral of Chartres.
And the magnificent work of Michelangelo and marvelous Christian thinkers and philosophers and artists.
So that was the great manifestation of Christendom.
And it's not surprising that some people will say, in effect, I would rather live in the 18th century or the 14th century than Or even the 5th century.
In other words, I would rather live in an age where Christianity consumed and dominated the whole society, in which it was almost unimaginable to live outside of it.
Taylor's point is, however, that we can think that way.
We can be nostalgic for an earlier Christendom, but we have to live in the world that we live in.
And so we have to devise a Christianity that is for today, for the 21st century, a Christianity in a secular society.
And he goes, look... It's not all that remarkable or even new.
He goes, first of all, look at people who grew up in other cultures.
And here, of course, I think of myself, but many others.
Even in Venezuela, where Debbie grew up, yes, you have Christianity, but you also have other options.
Different forms of Christianity, people who are lapsed Christians, and then, of course, people living in the Amazon rainforest who have a completely different cosmology and a different worldview.
In India, where I grew up, Hindus are the majority, Muslims number two, the Sikhs, the Jains, the Buddhists, so many other types of ways of being religious or in some cases not religious.
And so Christianity has to sort of make its way in this broader pluralistic and to some degree even unfamiliar and alien territory.
And then Taylor also gives the example of the early Christians.
Before Constantine converted to This was in the early 4th century AD. The early Christians were a minority.
They were living in Greece.
They were living in Rome.
They were scattered across the ancient world.
But these were societies dominated by pagan religions.
The Greek and Roman religions were fairly similar with different names.
But of course, Christians were in no way the dominant society.
And so Taylor's point is that, look, we shouldn't be too depressed over the way things are now.
We've been here before Christianity actually found a way not only to survive, but to thrive in pluralistic societies.
And there's no reason to believe it can't do so now.
I'm discussing a chapter in my book What's So Great About Christianity that's called God and the Astronomers.
And we've been talking about the Big Bang, how it came about, but also how it was discovered, and what the implications are.
The implications specifically for the notion of a created universe that was...
Produced, brought into existence by an omniscient and all-powerful creator.
Interestingly, Robert Jastrow, who was a professor of mine at Dartmouth, also head of the Mount Wilson Laboratory, wrote a book called God and the Astronomers.
That's where I got the title for this chapter.
And he notes that when the theory of the Big Bang was first put forward and it was being discussed, a number of leading scientists professed a kind of strange emotional I find it hard to accept the Big Bang Theory.
I would like to reject it.
Here's Alan Sandage of Carnegie Laboratories.
He says the idea, quote, is such a strange conclusion that, quote, it cannot really be true.
Notice that these are people who, like Einstein, are resisting the idea that the universe has a beginning.
And what Jastrow notes very shrewdly, he goes, this is not really the language of science.
Scientists don't say things like, this appears to be the case, but I'm not happy about it.
No one says things like, well, you know, hydrogen and oxygen combine to produce water and this is a very distressing finding.
No, science is really about moving, looking at nature as it is, and kind of keeping your emotion out of it, attempting to have a sort of objective approach.
But Jastrow says the reason that these leading scientists were troubled by the notion of the Big Bang is that if true, it would imply that there was a moment of creation in which everything, not just the universe, but this is the important point, the laws of the universe also came into existence.
Think about this. Outside of our universe, these laws don't operate.
And not to mention the fact that if The universe was brought into existence at an instant and the laws came into existence at that time.
Then whoever brought the universe into existence didn't use those laws.
They weren't operating themselves or itself or himself according to any laws of nature.
So... So, the laws of nature can be understood as a kind of grammar that explain the order and relationship of objects in the universe.
And just as grammar doesn't have any existence outside of language or outside of the words and sentences whose operations it defines, so too the laws of science cannot exist outside the universe of objects Now,
scientists call this Big Bang moment, this sort of dot in time, 14 or so billion years ago, when the universe sort of sprang into existence, this is called a singularity.
It kind of implies like a one-time creation event.
But we should not think that this is the only theory about the universe.
In fact, for a number of years, even a couple of decades, the 1930s and 40s and even 50s, it was not the dominant theory.
The dominant theory was something called the steady state theory, the steady state universe, which was developed by two astronomers, Herman Bondi and Herbert Gold, Fred Hoyle also, sorry, three astronomers.
And their theory was that the universe was infinite in age.
It had always existed.
And they argued that even though the universe was expanding and energy was burning up in the universe, they argued that somehow new energy was simultaneously a new matter being created.
And so there was new energy and matter being created to balance out the energy and matter that was, according to the second law of thermodynamics, kind of burning down.
And interestingly, as late as 1959, this theory, the theory of the steady state universe, commanded the support of two-thirds of astronomers and physicists.
Now, in a way, the steady-state universe, this idea the universe has always existed, was nothing more than a kind of modern modification of an idea that went back to the ancient Greeks.
The ancient Greeks, for the most part, believed that the universe was eternal.
Why? Their view was, listen, in fact, this is kind of a famous Greek phrase, ex nihilo nihilo, out of nothing comes nothing.
And therefore, if you had nothing, you couldn't get a universe out of it because nothing comes out of nothing.
So the idea was the universe must have always been there.
It couldn't have arisen, quote, out of thin air, so to speak.
And so, these astronomers who advocated the steady-state universe, these people like Bondi and Gold and Hoyle, thought that they were doing nothing more than building on the ancient Greeks and also taking the ideas of Galileo and Newton, the idea that, look, we've got a lawful universe that operates according to, like, a clock.
But they were arguing that this is not a clock that somebody made.
This is a clock that's always existed.
And this is a clock that functions, you may say, autonomously or on its own.
So the implications of this steady state theory were largely atheistic.
Because after all of the universe has always existed, well, then obviously no one created it.