Wow, I was just listening to Dennis Prager’s radio interview with Lawrence Krauss, the cosmologist and atheists’ darling who wrote A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing. You may recall how Krauss was deliciously taken apart in the New York Times by Columbia University philosopher and physicist David Albert.
If you liked that, you’ll love Prager’s conversation with him. Prager is so gracious, welcoming and even gentle with Krauss — a model we could all learn from, not least including me — but he presses him relentlessly and with a dry humor on the point that many have made about Krauss’s book: How does something come from nothing? Krauss argues that it can, but he defines “nothing” in a way that is not, well, “nothing” after all. It wouldn’t convey the pleasure of listening to Dennis if I simply transcribed some of the interchange, which was an installment of the Prager show’s regular “Ultimate Issues Hour.” The show actually was recorded and aired back in January but you can get it as an audio file here for $12.
By the end, confronted with sweet reason and common sense, Krauss is pretty much spluttering. It’s priceless entertainment — and enlightenment too. You should listen.