Michio Kaku Calls Genesis a Fairy Tale and Then Explains Why That's Fine

Michio Kaku thinks the Book of Genesis is a fairy tale. A compelling fairy tale, mind you, one that functions as moral glue and community and guidance for billions of people. But a fairy tale. He says this calmly, the way a man says things when he has spent his career thinking about universes frothing into existence from literal nothingness, and the Genesis creation myth is not the most mind-bending thing he has had to reckon with this week.

That framing, the politely devastating one, is what makes Kaku such a reliable podcast guest. He does not perform contempt for religion. He does not perform reverence either. He just places it in a category, religion as social technology, and moves on to the multiverse. Steven Bartlett, to his credit, keeps poking. You’re an atheist then? No, says Kaku. Agnostic. Which is the correct answer for someone who believes empty space is, right now, frothing with tiny bubbles of proto-universes popping in and out of existence.

I think it’s a fairy tale. I think it’s a very compelling fairy tale, but I think that even the people who teach religion realize it is a metaphor.

The Sergeant With Scars

Bartlett asks where Kaku’s morality comes from, expecting, probably, something about physics and universal laws. What he gets instead is Vietnam. Kaku was Army, two years, at the height of the war. Five hundred GIs dying every week. Life magazine running a full issue of just their photographs, no commentary, just the faces. Then Kaku describes learning to throw grenades from a sergeant whose neck was covered in shrapnel scars, because a Vietnamese child had walked up to him with what he said was candy, and it was not candy. The story is brutal and completely unexpected, and Kaku uses it to arrive somewhere genuinely interesting: the enemy also believed in something. The enemy was also willing to die. And that, not scripture, is where he started questioning what right and wrong actually meant.

You have to believe in something. You have to believe in the goodness of men and also the fact that men can do evil. And you have to fight for what you think is right.

We Are On a Knife’s Edge

The existential dread portion of the episode is thorough. Nuclear weapons, designer pathogens, AI. Kaku acknowledges that for the first time in human history, we have actually acquired the tools to end ourselves, and that this has all happened in roughly eighty years. His counter to despair is the decade, which he calls the smallest unit of history worth trusting. Zoom out decade by decade and the line goes up. Zoom in and you get noise and catastrophe. It is a reasonable heuristic. It is also the kind of thing that sounds airtight until someone brings up, say, the 1940s.

Still, the image he lands on is memorable. We are on a knife’s edge, he says. Tilt it one way, world war. Tilt it the other, food and luxury for everyone. The knife image does not resolve into optimism or pessimism, which is more honest than most things said about the future of civilization on a podcast.

We’re on a knife’s edge. You tilt it the wrong way and there’s world’s war. You tilt it the other way, and there’s food and luxury for everyone. And it’s up to us to decide which way the knife will go.

The immortality section arrives late and moves fast. Telomeres shorten every time a cell divides; when they fray, you die. Telomerase stops that clock. The catch, and this is a genuine catch, is that cancer figured out the same trick first. Immortal cells are already walking around inside you and they are trying to kill you. So the secret to living forever is essentially a race between medicine and the disease that already has a head start. Kaku calls it tantalizingly close. Given that he also said we are close to the theory of everything, the man has a generous definition of close. But that confidence is the whole point of him. He is the physicist who genuinely believes the equation is out there, that it fits on one sheet of paper, and that somewhere on the other side of the Milky Way an alien is already working toward the same answer in a different notation. That is either beautiful or insane, and on a podcast about the Bible and the Big Bang, it lands as both.