ASM087 Ask Science Mike LIVE in Columbus, OH

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coming to you from the broad street presbyterian church in columbus ohio it's ask science mike

[Music]

welcome to ask science mike live the weekly podcast where i answer your questions about science faith or life and this week we're on the road as part of the book tour for finding god in the waves my new book today we're in columbus on october 18th we'll be in atlanta dunwoody georgia we'll be in chicago for the literature's gathering on october 21st the clergy gathering in fruitland park florida on october 25th will be in kansas november 2nd savannah november 6th we'll be in los angeles for three dates in a row november 11th 12th and 13th portland november 20th tacoma seattle november 21st thomasville georgia on november 26th and on november 30th we'll be in boston so if you'd like to see me on the road it'd be a lot of fun go to findinggodontheways.com tour but enough about that we've got a show to do so let's get it started [Applause] [Music] hi science mike i'm sarah hi sarah and i have a question about sabbath practices from the perspective of science so what are the most useful things from like a neurological standpoint as far as sabbath i can think of things like unplugging from technology taking time to play meditating but just how would you structure that as far as like a rhythm that is restful and regenerating for in a useful way really good question thank you uh first of all scientifically speaking one out of seven days is not enough sabbath so we're speaking of a biblical principle here especially a hebrew bible principle in that typically on saturday was the historic day although the modern churches moved it to sunday for all sorts of cultural reasons there was a day of the week where you can't work now what's funny about the sabbath is it became like so legalistic that people would freak out about whether they were working on the sabbath or not and have like really complicated interpretations of what that meant so the sabbath became for many people stressful jesus seemed to get pretty worked up about that so as christians i think we should take some liberty that and understand that man was not made for the sabbath but the sabbath made for man but they did not have iphones or android devices at the time those scriptures were written and we live in an incredibly distracted culture and it turns out that is awful for your brain it is truly truly terrible so you have this uh anticipatory network that searches for validation from your phone and your brain uh every time you hear the little notification or even worse the silent um you're conditioned to expect a potential social reward and by the way you're a social mammal you're actually the most social mammal in the history of animals no other mammal is so dependent on groups as large as human societies even pre-civilization we had 150 people in a given unit of humans which is very high for a social mammal that's not a herd mammal right and so what happens is your brain associates that stimulus with the approval or affection or attention of other people which means our brains are hopped up on dopamine all the time now you might have heard dopamine is a neurotransmitter associated with pleasure and that's wrong dopamine is a neurotransmitter that's associated with craving so effectively what your smartphone is doing and your television and most of modern media is giving you a constant craving like potato chips only make you hungrier your phone stimulates without satisfying does this sound familiar to your lived experience right we all know what this is like and what we're finding is this tendency towards distraction really messes up with how our brains were designed we are not effective multitaskers neurologically speaking women are better at multitasking than men because a part of their brain called the corpus callosum which is a thick channel of nerves between the two hemispheres of the brain is much more active uh to put it in an analogy uh basically the two halves of men's brains talk to each other as little as possible like you have to pick up the toothbrush so we can brush our teeth fine right that's the internal dialogue of male brains and then in women's brains the corpus callosum the two halves of the brain are like besties they talk all the time they know their wants and feelings and desires and what they may do later and and this really results in neurologically speaking women having a more detailed map of the world than men but modern digital multitasking is just as bad for women as it is for men so well i don't know which is worse like drinking and driving or texting and driving right like we're we're decent decent drivers when we're uni-tasking but we're we're just insurance liabilities when multitasking and your computer is training you to multitask all the time because you're in excel or word or powerpoint or whatever software you do the thing in and then outlook or gmail or whatever goes ding and you go oh i gotta see what message that is and that's called a context switch and context switching is really expensive in your brain your brain has trouble switching between tasks and you lose some time and one study showed especially on phones it's bad enough on your computer but when you contact switch on your phone i got an email and then i check facebook and then i check twitter and then i look at instagram and then i play candy crush like this little like what should be a 5 second to 30 second switch ends up costing you as much as 15 minutes of productivity so finally your brain goes oh wait this tps report is due at noon and it switches back to the task at which point what happens so one one way to enjoy sabbath is to not candy crush sabbath every five minutes i have a really strict discipline when i wake up in the morning i don't check my email or my text messages or my facebook my phone automatically goes into do not disturb at night and i have to take it back out in the morning so i get up and i meditate and then i have breakfast with my family i do some things and i get dressed and then finally maybe i look at my email although if it's uh if it's a day that's not a travel day like when i'm home and i'm writing i actually don't look at my email until lunchtime i work all morning i give my best time to my work and then i let other people steal my attention you see what i'm saying so as much as you can narrow your focus not at sabbath is great now here's the other thing i do i take a sabbath every 24 minutes for two minutes so we when we're uni-tasking we can get in cognitive ruts we get stuck so i actually have a timer on my computer that at 24 minutes blacks my screen and i get up and walk or stretch for two minutes and then i return to my computer and when you only work in 20 to 25 minute spurts you don't goof off as much because that timer's running down and you're afraid of running out of work time you're tricking your brain into focus so i'm taking a sabbath like a couple of times an hour for two minutes now when i get to actual sabbath which i do every week now because i do what i do most saturdays i'm in airports so when i get home whatever day i get home starts my sabbath phone goes on the nightstand and stays there i don't keep my phone in my pocket i don't keep my phone with me and we focus as a family my kids know they hate it now i come home because i'm like guess what all your devices in your rooms they don't belong here and you minimize distraction in at first when you take a cell phone sabbath it's maddening like because your phone vibrates in your pocket and it's not even there it's so weird because your brain's like i need stimulation real bad and uh eventually you like finally and that's the best part i've actually thought about getting rid of my iphone except it's such a good camera it's the only reason like i still i'm thinking about just taking all the apps off of it and just but yeah so sabbath is all about returning to a state of focus and intent and you just realize that you don't actually have very much willpower as an organism so the best thing you can do is plan it to make it as easy on yourself as you can and what i think and what a lot of studies validate is the best way to be intentional is to put your phone somewhere else [Music] hey mike i'm april hey april good to know a fellow united methodist woohoo yes so um i have i i have a similar background in terms of having coming come to faith as an adult in a very fundamentalist uh bible study and a few years later i ended up in seminary as god would have it and it was during my time in seminary that i really began to discover god in a new way and it was really through the doctrine of the trinity that really began to break that open in a way to discover a god that was community a god that had this loving relationship and that's really been like the core thing as i've headed into ministry and now i'm preaching about god in pulpits on sunday so my question for you though is as a person who's very logical and thinks about this i mean the trinity could not be more illogical um i mean it is the the thing that i think is so helpful to so many people in my pastoral work and yet it is so difficult to explain um outside of your personal experience so i'm just curious to hear what you would add of how you how do you make sense of that and how do you talk about that yeah and and uh and hopefully you'll give me permission to use whatever you say in my sermon on sunday wow no big deal science mike because you make sense of the trinity [Applause] that's me rolling up my sleeves it doesn't work with a blazer um so i am a christian and i'm an empiricist it's a philosophical term for people who only believe or make fact claims about things they can provide evidence for and specifically empiricist place confidence in a belief directly in proportion to the amount of evidence they have to support that belief the amount of forensic evidence i have to support that god is a trinitarian godhead three beings of a single essence is uh low it's very low so how do i place myself which by the way there's a lot of things essential to christian practice that i don't have a lot of evidence for a virgin birth i don't have a lot like there's some people that wrote it down that believed it very strongly but scientifically speaking that's not a good way to make like no this one time like a woman by herself just brought an extra chromosome well it wasn't by herself it was the creator of everything that no one can see you know brought this extra chromosome and then she had a child who was also god like that's a big claim uh and it's we you know i mean one of these guys in the first century wrote it down you see i'm saying like it's just it's a big for an atheist that's a big big thing uh a empty tomb resurrection like for a while as an atheist i was part of this this this group of people who were called mythicists who were like there never was a jesus of nazareth there's not enough evidence it turns out those people don't actually know jack about history because historians got really mad they're like are you kidding me we have more evidence for jesus of nazareth than alexander the great and there's no alexander the great mythicist right so the controversial thing for empiricists is resurrection and like but people say they saw it and they wrote it down and i get why that's like compelling to some people but then other people wrote down that they saw muhammad fly off from the planet of the earth on a winged horse and we're like nah that one is not real but this empty tomb is i love the really uncomfortable laugh the people that haven't heard of me before they're like i did not know this was richard dawkins night like from the stage where's the tomatoes people don't throw tomatoes anymore do they no now they tweet that's right hashtag um so what's the deal how am i an empiricist who identifies as a christian and actually believes jesus rose from the dead

well i cheat uh i'm a mystic now

there's there's mystics in every faith tradition on earth

and the funny thing about mystics is when religions and denominations are in conflict or even war with each other the mystics keep talking to each other really consistently throughout history

back in the medieval ages when uh you know us white people were just going crazy in europe just trying to destroy any sense of progress we'd made as a civilization literally burning down our libraries like for a while uh the arab world held onto the world scholarship for us

that's why it's called algebra or why so many stars have arab names because for a long time the only people who are interested in learning were in the middle east

but during that period of hostility between islam and christianity the jewish mystics and the christian mystics and the muslim mystics would all hang out

they didn't abandon their traditions but they all understood that there was something essential to god that went beyond all of our words

now i knew about mysticism as an atheist and i was like those people are idiots

they're like "i can't explain it so i just won't"

are you kidding me

i'm gonna tell you right now you don't figure out how to turn sand into an iphone just by appealing the mystery right

like you don't put robots on mars with an appeal to mystery

you do some science like you figure out what's the melting point of this and what's its resistance to electricity and oh by the way what's electricity right

like this whole chain of events

but oddly enough it is exactly because i am an empiricist that i am also a mystic because what i know about you that you might know about yourself might not know is that you as far as we can tell in science are 86 billion neurons telling themselves a story

that story is your consciousness and absolutely nothing about your brain was designed to uncover truth

nothing

everything in you is designed to find food shelter uh social comfort and community sex just the essentials

that's what your brain is for and so you build a map of reality that has enough information for you to do those things successfully

most of your brain is actually devoted to guessing how other people feel about you because that's important for human survival right

what does this have to do with god

well in the same way you build a model of a dollar bill right now close your eyes and picture a dollar bill

you can just see it right you can see it

but if i gave you all a sheet of paper and a pen and asked you to draw a dollar bill your drawing would be terrible because you don't actually have a photographic representation of a dollar bill you have a model of it

you also i ask you to close your eyes and think about whoever raised you mom dad a caregiver you can picture that person because you have a model for them

and if i said to you i brought the mic around each person and said why do you love that person over and over and over people would go uh

now listen spouses have been playing this trick on each other on anniversaries for centuries like why do you love me

uh

you're sleeping on the couch

but that inability to articulate that love is not a sign that the love is less real but actually that in your brain love isn't a linguistic experience

when we brain scan you and ask you to think about someone you love your left temporal lobe which is the part of the brain that processes languages doesn't do anything

and oddly enough when we scan the brains of people who believe in god and ask them to think about god guess what happens

in their left temporal lobe nothing

this is why when a skeptic says so who is god anyway you go uh

it's because god in your brain is actually more sophisticated than language

now if given a few seconds you can think and you can start to articulate what in your brain is a feeling and an experience but an odd thing happens when you try to describe an experience that isn't linguistic in nature

you change it in your brain

so neuroscientists say that the only authentic expression of god to humans is to refuse to speak of god

can you imagine all this time the desert fathers and desert mothers who simply said god can only be loved and through the love be known

that's not ridiculous that's brain science

so when i contemplate this linguistic idea of a three in one god one a creator a source of all a ground of being where everything comes from and where everything resides and somehow there's also a christ a reconciling force of god that from the beginning of creation has drawn all of creation back toward god and then i also contemplate a spirit of god that dwells within every person in communion with the other parts of god that the way god exists on a fundamental level is in relationship it actually sounds a little bit like science

you exist in relationship to everything else around you

and i mean that literally

without particle interactions from other gravitational bodies you're in a state of quantum decoherence and don't exist you only exist in relationship to other things right

and i this is nuts because for a while i study quantum mechanics and they have this thing where you can send uh subatomic particles in a wave slit experiment and without an observer an observer doesn't --

this gets really murdered by christians especially people like all consciousness creates reality no observation creates reality and observation is a particle exchange it doesn't require consciousness

but either way what makes uh things act as particles instead of waves is observation but a funny thing happens today in the wave slit experiment

someone tweeted me this this is the way i know and i didn't read about it

scientists not only send subatomic particles they sent atoms and in groups of atoms and then chains of molecules with up to 100 atoms who absent observation enter that state of decoherence they act like a wave instead of a particle

i can tell everyone's 100 with me right now 100 everybody's like that makes total sense

what i'm saying is the stuff that makes you up exists in relationship to all the other stuff in the universe so this mystical idea of contemplation of anything existing in relationship it's very scientifically valid

now the idea of a christ that's constantly reconciling us all back to god it's a little tougher scientifically because in science the moral arc of the universe bends toward entropy yes entropy

sorry something like martin luther king who said justice right to say the moral arc of the universe bends towards justice is a very christ-centered idea but not a terribly scientific one

scientifically speaking the moral arc of the universe bends toward entropic heat death

i really got to make that t-shirt but my point is in this world of science we're given so many facts about reality

and frankly science is better than any other system of testing human knowledge at telling us facts about reality

it's the best the best

if you look at the history of conflict between science and faith it we we lose people of faith when we use our faith to make fact claims that go against science about reality right

the earth is at the center of the universe and we do some math and the telescopes is like right strike that

that's pretty off every time that's been the role

but science doesn't give you any meaning for those facts at all

it doesn't try to

by design science can't make moral judgments science can't speak to beauty science can't tell you what to do with scientific insight all science does is tell you facts so i like to have something other than facts about reality i like to have a sense of like why i'm here and what i'm doing and what i do with all those facts like is it ethical to split atoms in the middle of a population center it's just science now don't don't remember i'm not saying science is evil i'm saying science is completely morally neutral it is utterly free it is not immoral it is amoral it is only through philosophy art and dare i say faith that we can attach meaning to all those facts so the idea that god is constantly drawing back all of creation towards healing and wholeness towards shalom in the hebrew bible is a matter of faith and believing that the moral arc of the universe bends towards justice encouraged people to fight in the civil rights movement against truly impossible odds logically the last thing you wanted to do is be in the civil rights movement from a point of individual survival it was better to keep your head down and martin luther king can prove it because someone shot him but this mystery that lives in a moral arc of the universe that bends towards justice created the inspiration for him and people like him to change the world and my friends i believe that is the best expression of christianity is when we believe god is drawing all towards healing and it gives us the courage and the bravery to against impossible odds stands up for the right and dignity of every human on the planet that's how we become the body of christ that embodies the mystery of the trinity i just made all that up [Laughter] [Applause]

[Music]

got a scientific question for you um i think you said something in one of your podcasts about artificial intelligence yes and i think you said that you read the whiteboard wire article about it read what the weight but why yeah of course yeah yeah it's like my favorite blog yes i just wanted to know what's your personal take on it do you ever think there's gonna be something like human level artificial intelligence or even superhuman level artificial intelligence and if yes when like there's a spectrum when people think that's gonna happen and like some say in like 20 years others say it's never going to happen like what's your what's your take on it thanks hey science mike explain the mystery of the trinity hey science mike winter computer's going to take over the world and be specific about the timeline [Laughter] oh man i'm in the wrong line of work let's catch everyone up shall we because i'm assuming we don't have 400 ai enthusiasts in the room right now that is merely a subset of some of us nerds who think passionately about when and how computers will get smarter than us uh okay you are a biological intelligence i mean assuming there's never mind some of you probably know the joke i was about to make and i've just elected not to so instead i'm just gonna say we have a room full of biological intelligences and according to the evolutionary theory which describes how the diversity of life on this planet appeared it does not explain where life came from tell your friends it explains the diversity of life evolution via natural selection according to that it took billions of years to go from single-celled organisms to primates that make iphones right that's a very long arc and there's it is a really good image primates that make iphones i'm super fond of it so that took billions of years and if you look at digital intelligences now you can estimate how much information a given brain can process using different scientific disciplines and estimates and computers started to think they start to process information in with a computer called iniac the electrical numerical integrator and calculator uh back in ww2 right and it was incredible because iniac could calculate the arc of a ballistic projectile faster than ballistic projectile could execute that arc in other words if you told it like we're going to shoot artillery it could calculate the arc of the artillery shell faster than your artillery shell could travel that arc it's pretty awesome but it's actually not very hard math it's not very hard math at all there's a thing called moore's law that basically says computers get way faster way faster than anything we've ever seen and so in since world war ii computers have gone from like literally less information processing than any organism ever to uh beating us at chess and then jeopardy and then alphago or excuse me beating us at a game called go using an algorithm called alphago now if you're like wait chess jeopardy go that's really dumb why is that a high bar in the game of go there are more possible moves than there are atoms in the universe so the way computers like rock out at chess is they imagine like every possible game of chess and so every move you play they're like i've seen that before and they go ahead and make like the ideal counter move right they don't get tricked they know every move you can make in a game of chess but you can't do that and go in the same way you can't imagine every possible jeopardy question do you see what i'm saying computers have had to learn more aptly be specifically taught by us how to be intuitive and go is a game of intuition and last year i think it was last year a computer beat a human at go for the first time which by the way blew all of the most optimistic ai timelines in the world already computers are better at knowing random stuff than we are like google has become our memory you know what i mean like not just like how many calories are in a snickers bar i mean that's one search a lot but maybe not you uh how many how many casual snickers bar to like what time's the piano recital this is like how much we're depending on google to remember things for us and if you look at this arc it just looks like it looks like an exponential growth curve and so it looks like if that's true computers will go from a little dumber than us to like thousands of times more intelligent than us in like a couple of hours once we get there that's what has ai researchers freaked out because think about chimpanzees we're like a lot smarter than chimpanzees i mean kind of no seriously i'm going to take a brief aside because this is amazing do you know that chimps who are known for being like really war-loving primates are statistically less likely to go to war than homo sapiens when they line up on the field of battle and they count each other chimps need a bigger differential in the size of groups for one group to invade and initiate a war than humans humans will go to war with as little as a one percent difference in population sizes which is the thing we call mutually assured destruction where he's like we'll come right and chimps are like wait there's no sense both of us getting wiped out also this is amazing you can teach chimpanzees how to count from one to ten in order like with with numerals and then if you flash up one through ten at random points on a monitor and then cover it with blocks chimps can instantly go and humans can't because we're actually slower at visual processing than chimpanzees and we have worse memory for numbers but in a lot of ways in a lot of ways we're more intelligent than chimps because as you know they don't make iphones and so what happens when computers have the same level of intelligence difference between us and chimpanzees and if this exponential theory is correct what happens when computers are as smart compared to us as we are compared to ants we've never imagined such a thing and it keeps the smartest members of our species awake at night i have some hope here in a friend of mine called physics i'm not sure computers will continue to get faster so quickly in fact they already aren't because as we've reduced the size of microprocessor features smaller and smaller and smaller not only is it difficult to manufacture them but they produce so much heat they burn themselves up heat dissipation is a big problem for you too this is this is crazy do you know that you can't be rational and angry at the same time because it creates too much heat yeah yeah that's why seizures are dangerous they turn on too much of the brain at once and they can overheat your brain so your brain if your amygdala which is fear and anger is really really active your brain goes we better keep the prefrontal cortex which is focused concentration rational thinking off right now so we don't overheat and bird brains we've discovered can have six times as many neurons in a given amount of space as a human brain but because of that that to be even smaller and this is happening to computers we can't keep making computer chips have so many processing features on them and that's a problem for creating intelligence there's another issue and that we don't actually understand where consciousness comes from like we have some really good theories like 86 billion neurons telling a story to themselves i came up with that one and sorry i was really proud of it it's my twitter bio so the question is can we actually make a machine that thinks in a general purpose way like a human brain does because we don't understand the mechanism of action well enough if we can create ai the question is can we create enough computational horsepower to run the code required to do it i have no idea and neither does anybody else so what do i think the right thing to do is i think the effort spearheaded by people like stephen hawking who's a smart dude like i used to say that nt wright not used to i do say that empty right is the stephen hawking of theology stephen hawking is the stephen hawking of being stephen hawking and elon musk who like tesla spacex smart dude they want to actually sign a treaty between governments that creates a legal binding for corporations and countries to be ethical in ai research to communicate significant findings and i think this is like like an issue presidential campaign should actually be talking about you know what i mean like if you let the nerds run presidential campaigning biggest issue co2 count in the atmosphere issue two methane in the atmosphere issue three mapping asteroids in the sky and learning how to manipulate them so we don't get blown away by astronautic dinosaurs issue four a.i issue five like schools or whatever i just i really want to see that campaign and like like what bathroom people use like it's just not a thing nerds care about so give me i don't know there's no data i don't care uh so but i think it's actually important for thoughtful people like write your senator and say we need an ai treaty now they're probably going to delete your email so i mean write them a letter on paper and mail it and then call them because the math they use for like what positions to support emails and tweets are weighted very very little and phone calls are weighted a lot which by the way this is amazing uh i'm a member of something called the planetary society that's right ceo bill nye what up and what's the planetary society believe it means it's important for humans to colonize other planets we're pretty fringe nerd group and we got nasa's funding changed because a few thousand of us agreed to call congress in the same 48-hour period like it's that simple to pull the levers of democracy so maybe coordinate a few thousand people call congress at the same time and we won't die at the hands of the terminator [Applause] hi i'm jim uh first of all i just want to thank you because um i really appreciate you and your work and i think you've made a lot of us feel a little less awkward and lonely in the world um especially those of us who are pastors and agnostics at least once a week um i like that so for my sabbath i'm an agnostic right so um right every monday uh i think there's a dual part of this and one part of it is um i actually wonder how important is belief how important is some of these stories that we tell ourselves do we waste an exponential amount of energy um because the second part has to do with what you were talking about earlier your computer shuts down every 24 minutes you put your iphone away there's practical steps that you take throughout the day to make yourself a more impactful influential person so a are we wasting time with too many of these stories that are somewhat irrelevant to our lives um like why did i spend three months studying troy and then another four studying hell and then just uh not believing it anymore and then [Laughter] fire what are the practical like but this kind of stuff these disciplines these daily practices and rhythms actually make us more impactful for the things we want to care about yes so is it dumb to waste so much time thinking about these stories like religious stories or any stories creating stories oh yeah oh a really good question yeah yeah yeah yeah uh if storytelling is a waste of time hollywood's in big trouble why even in a recession do so many people go to the movies why is it when the economy gets worse people watch more movies why why is harry potter so compelling right it is awesome i don't know if you know this like jk rowling she sold a few books um i remember i went to the launch of uh the harry potter and the cursed child like the midnight release with my daughters it was cool to go like with kids this time and not be the creepy guy at the midnight harry potter release party i was like no i got kids this is legit and i realized like that one night at that one store in tallahassee jk rowling would sell more books than i would at my only book launch party in my hometown and that in like 45 seconds she was gonna sell more books and i'll sell in my life right like a that's awesome enjoy printing money but like why are we so compelled by harry potter right why are we so interested in this story of a boy who grew up without ever knowing his father who you know like then went on to be incredibly brave and loving but still relatable who ended up having an ultimate face-off against the embodiment of evil wherein he sacrificed his life willingly and went to the afterlife only to return and vanquish evil for all time like why is that story so compelling and did jk rowling waste her time writing it no you're a storytelling animal you don't care about facts you don't i don't care who you're voting for you don't care about the facts right like listen we all know trump voters don't care about the facts right and we all know that hillary clinton voters don't care about the facts it's just the gary johnson jill stein crowd who also does not care about the facts how do we make these decisions stories stories stories change you more than anything else step one read a story in the story the protagonists learn something most people within three weeks if the what the protagonists learned was impactful will relay that information to someone else as if they learned it themselves and they won't know what happened oh now we're listening right they did an experiment where they asked people they give people twenty dollars and they asked people to hear a story about tobacco right smoking who knows the fact that smoking is bad for you literally everybody knows the fact and yet people still smoke they had three groups here one group was told all the facts and figures about smoking the health costs the cost and the economy the death rates all these terrible pieces of information group two was told a story about a child whose father died from lung cancer because he smoked and were given no facts or figures and group three was told the story with the information embedded within it now a little trick they took blood samples before and after this experiment and they tracked the change in oxytocin in people's blood in the three groups and at the end of the experiment they were offered to give some percentage of their twenty dollars to a charity that helped watch after kids were orphans people who died from lung cancer right on average group one was the least compelled and group three was the most compelled a lot of people gave all their twenty dollars back right and this group was actually closer to group three than group one even though they got no facts or figures at all they just heard a story and what scientists found was the amount of money people gave was directly related to the shift in oxytocin in their blood and the numbers didn't move the needle so is it a waste of time to study stories that's the only way to learn grow or change why are the gospels so compelling because we hear stories of 12 people who simply didn't get it jesus when you take over the world can i sit at your right hand in the in the throne room like they didn't mean in heaven right they meant like when you kicked caesar out of judea like can i be seated at the right hand of you because that's the power right and jesus is like well what you gotta understand is the kingdom of heaven is like a little bit of yeast that's put into bread and they're like jesus it's a real simple question like right hand yes or no like i'm kind of a single issue voter here right um god that was a really low blow i don't plan these in advance so jesus only told stories and if if you want to change yourself or change other people the only way to do it is to tell stories the only way i believe to relate to god is through story like i i got so mad at genesis for being bad cosmology that i was like genesis you're out get out of my life come on a firmament there's no firmament there's not a series of discs or a dome around the earth that the light of heaven shines through his stars at night or water falls through during the day for rain that's ridiculous genesis go home you're drunk we all know that in the beginning there was a singularity that suddenly had a rapid cosmic inflation event and allowed the fundamental forces of physics to exist and eventually allowed hydrogen and helium to coalesce into clouds and discs that had enough gravity to overcome the strong nuclear force and create nuclear fusion eventually create enough iron that those first stars exploded created a supernova created heavy elements and duh earth right but this story about an innocence that starts to go away when you learn there's evil in the world and then really starts to go when you realize you can have a part in it this story of looking at a fruit that you know you shouldn't have but it looks good anyway like boy do i know what the serpent's whisper sounds like i know what the serpent's whisper sounds like because the power of genesis is not as a cosmological model but as the basic understanding of how humanity relates to the divine and struggles to be good instead of evil i think the most valuable thing we can do is study create and share stories because it's the rubber that hits the road and how to live a good life and not only does science tell that but in the new testament when someone said to jesus what's the most important thing in all the law you all know what jesus said love god with everything that you have and love your neighbor as yourself and mr tricky pants goes oh yeah mr rabbi who's my neighbor and what did jesus do he told a story about a samaritan a despised person who intervened for someone in need when the righteous would not and started the largest religion in human history and ultimately shaped western civilization with a story hey mike i'm quincy um my question i'm going to go back to way back in the ass science my catalog uh okay with the follow-up so back you got a question about vaccinations way back when okay and um you responded that there were uh i think three you talked about you know the science was junk and against vaccinations that that was fine i understood all your responses just for the room the science supports vaccinations are a good idea yeah that's yeah yeah right that the anti-vaxxers their science was debunked right yes but that sparked another question for me and this doesn't have to tie to vaccinations but it can if you want i'll do my best if maybe a fourth kind of philosophical argument is that are we as a society do we work too hard to prevent death to oh um all right you know are we fighting are we fighting too hard against you know natural selection so to speak and a part of that is i'm wondering if maybe you have a science mic matrix rubric for how do i handle what technology what bioethics technology is is acceptable and where are we going too far in podcast land you can't see that i lied down on the stage because i was like we were talking before the event they're like how many questions you never get i'm like almost never and then tonight it's like well everyone the ethics of death science does not answer questions of morality science can tell you how to delay death it can tell you how to accelerate it right science both created penicillin and gas chambers so it's not a scientific question it is an ethical one my understanding of ethics as a pragmatist is how do i preserve and respect the consent of others and how do i avoid volitionally contributing to suffering it's as good as i've got you might have a better system i've thought about that a long time that's as close as i can get to a pretty clear way to make ethical decisions most of the time now it's not always simple for all of the political heat around it i actually for example have tremendous empathy for both sides of the abortion debate that's one hot button issue that i'm actually like you know what this is a pretty good debate there's a lot of other things i'm like you guys are being ridiculous but that one i get in terms of life then the question becomes what actions don't produce unnecessary suffering there is some suffering that's necessary i think your first heartbreak is pretty important right i think uh banging your head while you learn to walk is important you know what i mean so i'm not talking about a life completely free of discomfort i'm talking about sometimes my shoes aren't ethical because i wanted affordable shoes at walmart and so children work their fingers to the bone to make shoes and i've just volitionally contributed to suffering so when we talk about extending human life sometimes we extend human life span without extending human health span so we give people 10 years of misery that have never existed before 20 years of misery they've never existed before and i don't think that respects the sanctity of life to to maintain someone in a state of incredible suffering is tough but i also think the burgeoning population in which aging is a part also plays a role in in some environmental catastrophe also millennials aren't nuts about the previous population boom from the boomers and the other generation x because there's so many people that all the good jobs are taken and there's not enough boomer savings so they just keep working and we keep like you know making coffee or whatever and uh it's just a tough dynamic you said these are complicated issues i would say in general i'm for anything that creates flourishing i think i think insulin is a great thing you know what i mean uh i have gout and if i have a really bad gout flare up i can take like this pill and like i don't have really bad gout pharaoh i think that's awesome like that's that's good stuff but we're gonna face these issues like we've never faced before like right now we're working on these technologies that let blind people see and deaf people hear which is amazing but remember moore's law what happens when fake eyes are better than realize who gets them then they're pretty expensive so what happens when rich people can afford better eyes are you kidding me they already have better cars and bigger houses and now they can read a novel lying on the floor across the room just because they have more money that's ridiculous okay deep brain electrical stimulation really good at presenting the symptoms of parkinson's also appears to have the potential to help people focus with us effort and for longer periods of time brain surgery is expensive so what's my simple answer to oh gosh i don't know especially when my way of making ethical decisions isn't everybody else's i am deeply concerned across the globe right now we're losing the ability to carry on conversations with people who make different fundamental assumptions now that's historically normal that's historically normal you look at most of human history they disagree with us what do we do kill them like that was just that wasn't controversial like you know what i mean like somebody like wore the wrong pants to a royal ball and now europe is engulfed in conflict right that's a slight exaggeration but only slight but but we went through a period where among power groups there was dialogue and discourse and as long as the people under the heel didn't complain everything was fine and so right now we have this like simultaneous movement of marginalized and oppressed people have had quite enough thank you at precisely the same moment when traditionally powerful or privileged groups have lost the ability to have civil discourse it's pretty scary right so i think what we have to work toward in health issues and environmental issues and all these things is how do we dismantle systems enough to let the disadvantaged groups reach equality but not so much that we wipe out 99 of the human species which is something i think about a lot something i think about a whole lot like what's the correlation between the rise of trump the brexit and nuclear proliferation that has the potential to render moot all sorts of things uh so hopefully your problems will only wrestle with what how do we distribute food how do we deal with advances in health care and not how do we deal with radiation fallout um but i don't i don't have like so part of my part on my platform is like when you stump me you stump me and you stump me i don't know how to make those decisions other than if we're reducing suffering i say let's go but we always have to be aware that sometimes when we reduce suffering in one context we end up creating it somewhere else through unintended consequences right the industrial revolution amazing like it raised everyone's quality of living everybody and also might wipe out the species you know what i mean so we've always got to be aware that our actions can have these long trickle effects and we are really famously a short-term focused species we think about the next couple of years next couple of minutes i mean honestly like who's wondering what they're gonna eat afterwards like eat right like like here i am one of the most talented communicators the world has ever seen and you're thinking about like second dinner and then we but if we really if we really think long term what do we think about our grandkids after our grandkids forget those people just forget them you know what i mean but health advances uh asteroid prevention the most substantive nuclear proliferation global climate change all those things are more than three generation problems if we don't learn to fundamentally the way human cognition functions we're in real trouble [Music] hi mike my name is beth and i have a question that's along the similar vein of ethics but different so my question is about the ethics of animal research in labs yeah so i work at the university of pittsburgh in a lab where we study molecular mechanisms of chemotherapeutics and we breed mice as is very common in my field that have genetic mutations that cause cancer and i'm very i'm deeply about this because it enables us to do experiments that we would have no other way of doing uh that could potentially prevent all kinds of suffering and pain right um but at the same time we're breeding animals sentient creatures that we know will have short painful lives so how how do you approach that from an ethical standpoint okay no seriously seriously what's the deal with columbus like wow no you gotta no no no you don't get to clap because here's what i expected i'm in the atlanta airport last night getting ready to come here and i do this all the time it's a really familiar procedure and i get to the gate and instead of calling like we're going to start pre-boarding now the guy gets on the mic and just goes h and right the whole the whole exit the whole gate just goes io and i'm like what like like the moon io like is that is this like an astrophysics conference and then he still hasn't called for boarding he goes just so you know if you're not a buckeye you can't get on this plane and i'm like how are they going to check is there like do you carry like special buckeye identification so you can board flights to columbus like this is a real weird thing so i'm thinking like i'll get here and it's all football questions and instead you're like hey what's the mystery of the trinity when are computers gonna take over like what's ethical about the preservation of life and also can we test on animals when that produces suffering in order to prevent human suffering real simple football kind of stuff come on columbus wow i am not thinking about anything as much as i've been thinking about that we are really anthrocentric so we've done this amazing thing uh and that humans throughout our progression of civilization have made incredible moral progress do you know it used to be a fun thing at a pub to boil a cat in hot oil that was just a thing like friday night what are we going do cat boiling yeah and today you do that and people like some people laugh because laughter is like an emotional stress release valve that's kind of where we think it came from evolutionarily speaking but most people go like the fact that i even referenced it makes me some kind of monster like it's that level of just moral disgust and so you know we keep we keep expanding rights we keep expanding basic human dignity uh we went from monarchy here to we hold these truths to be self-evidence that all men are created equal if you don't know what i'm doing i'm sorry no i'm not sorry that i did it i'm sorry you don't know because your life needs to expand that's from a musical called hamilton and it is good like it it intersperses like the the the energy of an upstart country with like hip-hop culture man i love that telling of american history anyway i also i don't know if you know this i recently learned that james madison wasn't black so uh sorry it's a really inside joke but it's it's just go see it because they sing the declaration of demons but we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal except like not all men i mean you know not all men not slaves not like poor immigrants by all men we mean we hold these truths to be self-evident that all wealthy landowners are created equal right it's not as catchy i'll admit it and then we say no no no no no no no no no no no no no it means it means all men just not black men and listen listen do you hear that do you hear that sound in the room right and then we're like no but wait it took a little while but uh then we did the 19th amendment which some people want to repeal um that's a twitter joke but then we decide you know what women can women can vote it's not all men because the constitution says what we the the people not the men it doesn't say we the minute says we the people but like not all the people because we got jim crow and then we realized that was really stupid and so when you look back at where people are you're like those backward oppressive mouth-breathing idiots obviously the right to human dignity is universal to all american citizens but not those mexicans right obviously our security as a nation is much more important than schools in the middle east you know i mean they've got like they've got terrorists in that school we've got to keep the country safe like what is the future going to think about us when so far the overall movement of civilization has been to greater and greater personhood but here's the problem neurology has a terrifying insight humans aren't that smart i saw one experiment where if you show people the works of a single painter and then let them try to guess of two paintings which painting is by the painter whose three works they've seen humans are way worse at that than pigeons i'm it's not even close you're terrible pigeons are the greatest art critics the world has ever seen they're like that's a monet doofus that one's a forgery like they're they perform better at that test than trained art critics this this is real stuff i didn't make this up pigeons see more colors than you do and they have finer grain vision they can see the individual brush strokes and so they judge the painting based on the painters technique which they can see and stupid humans can't you heard me talk about chimpanzees right chimpanzees are better remembering numbers than we are dogs are better at reading human body language and emotions than people are right which by the way i don't know if you know this like your dog is like a zen buddhist master meditator your dog knows nothing but presents you know what i mean your dog's not like thursday there was something thursday no your dog is in this moment like if you and your dog are outside your dog just this is awesome and then like when you shut the door and you leave the dog's like we're doomed and just present it's not like they'll come back eventually it's just like they're gone forever what's forever anyway pigs have a consciousness that incorporates space time pigs can think about future events and experiments pigs think what else pigs are bacon so my daughter macy when she was little her favorite animal was pigs and i made the horrible mistake of one saturday morning telling her bacon was pigs and she quit eating bacon for like weeks and then one sunday morning it was so funny and so tragic she looks at a piece of bacon and she says pigs i'm sorry you're my favorite animal but you're delicious it's the most human thing i've ever heard someone say mice and rats grieve when they lose one of their own mice and rats grieve the loss of family members or friends they grieve but that's their mammals they're smart they're smart lobsters fight like hell when you try to put them in a pot of boiling water if given the chance lobsters will literally grab the top of the pot and fight with all their might to avoid being put in the boiling water and once they arrive in that watery grave many of them scream what's ethical what's moral who and what deserves legal protection is it moral that mice die so that i can have chemotherapy and live longer i bet many people go you know what i'm not sure let me rephrase the question is it moral that mice die so that your children or your grandchildren get chemotherapy do you see how that changes the math for you you've been given an impetus by your dna at all costs protect those offspring and it's beautiful it's beautiful it's beautiful the way i take my daughter's hand across the street it's less beautiful that i don't mind so much if someone else's kids are bombed so mine can be safe and i'm starting to wonder if maybe it's less beautiful that i care about animal suffering until it involves the betterment of my children there are no easy answers to these questions but let me tell you as we end tonight i think the church has lost its way that the church in america is known mainly for engaging a cultural war and a fight for political dominance instead of offering healing to the world and in fact instead of trying to decide what is moral and ethical and helpful in the most difficult questions facing the species what if that's what we were obsessed with what if we admitted that most situations are complicated and messy and difficult and that somehow we have to learn to live lives of love and meaning in a universe that is bent toward chaos if we did that would every news article be about how quickly young people are leaving the church and for that matter would we care would we care what if we were so willing to offer grace and healing to the world as christ did that we didn't even care if it cost us our churches because the mandate of the gospel is to die so that others may live to lay down our lives as a source of healing so columbus you have quite genuinely brought me the hardest questions in the history of ask science mike so in return that's right so in return i offer you the hardest benediction go ye therefore go ye therefore and make jesus known in this world by doing exactly what he did may you columbus be broken and poured out so that others may be healed thank you [Music] [Applause] [Music]