ASM065 Ask Science Mike LIVE in Portland, OR

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this week's episode of ask science mike not only contains science faith and life but adult themes immature content coming to you from cascade church in portland oregon it's ask science mike live

[Music]

welcome to ask science mike the weekly podcast where i answer your questions about science faith and life and this week it's a live edition the questions are unscreened the answer's unrehearsed and i have no idea what will happen tickets for the liturgist gathering in denver and chicago just went on sale we'll tell you more about that at the end of the program but for now we've got a podcast to do so let's get it started [Music] my name is caitlin i'm from seattle hi hi it's good to see you um my question pertains to the placebo effect it is my great insecurity that i might be duped by the false or foolish whether it's in science faith or life and the idea that something counterfeit can become authentic or real merely through a thought or belief is incredibly unnerving for somebody who's interested in the empirical so can you explain the physiology of this effect and provide your thought on how to then trust or test the validity or credibility of our own thinking perhaps only certain areas of our brain are susceptible to this response thank you for everything that you do wow that is a phenomenal question a beginner's guide to skepticism and the placebo effect so uh well let's start with an assumption right so because of what i do i have this weird thing where the people who listen to me are a strange coalition so some of the people who listen to ass science mike would consider themselves conservative evangelical christians or catholics there are fairly small slides but they're out there and then you have people who would consider themselves mainline protestants or super weirdo progressive evangelicals and then there's a huge portion of my audience who's spiritual or not but not religious and then finally believe it or not in this coalition there's a significant number of self-identified agnostics and atheists as far as i can tell it's fairly unique in the media landscape for all of these people to hang out and so before i answer your question i want to talk about what what hat we're going to put on and for this hat i'm mainly going to stick over here in skeptical materialist land because it's the most useful reference frame to get to the question so from the aspect of materialism or a science view all of our thoughts all of our feelings happen in the 86 billion neurons of the human brain now here's a funny thing about our brains they are remarkably suggestible remarkably there have were some earlier scientific studies that talked about the power of hypnosis and pain relief and uh later studies figured out it wasn't hypnosis it was literally just suggestibility that if a person while you're about to have a medical procedure sits close to you is calm gives you soothing contact and tells you you hurt less guess what happens you hurt less why because there's an interplay between your thoughts and your pain and your emotions why because they're all electrical chemical reactions so of course our beliefs affect our physiology because our beliefs are part of our physiology so the placebo effect is a documented phenomenon where um you're you're all familiar but for some of the listeners who may not be you can give someone a sugar pill and tell them that it cures the common cold or provides pain relief or whatever and for some percentage of the people it will work it's really remarkable and what you're looking for in science to know if a medicine is effective or not is that it outperforms the placebo effect in trials so here's the kicker for how skeptics weigh claims they look at the evidence something i've picked on a few times in the program is essential oils so scientifically what do essential oils do they smell good and they moisturize your skin and they provide a slight anti-microbial effect like all oils but a lot of people make these very big claims like they cure the common cold or they solve headaches and we understand that to be the placebo effect at work which is why in science we say that the plural of anecdote is not data just because several people tell a story that's not a reason to accept it as fact so that's the placebo effect when we get to skepticism the way to avoid being duped is to say show me your data guess what sometimes there's data and it's not good data which means you have to check the methodology and there's a huge problem in science right now actually where scientists trained scientists aren't very good at statistics so even though they gathered good data they don't understand how to reach an appropriate level of statistical confidence to make a claim and the other people in their field don't know how to review it so how skepticisms always healthy which is why you want to look at a large body of work that's been reviewed by many people and i hate to say it for those who aren't trained experts we have to trust the testimony of people who are but true to skepticism anything i except from a study that i don't understand or i can't measure myself i don't believe with as much confidence as ideas i can fully understand on my own and that's kind of how science works now this is particularly interesting for people of faith because faith claims tend to not have scientifically backed empirical data which is why i always talk about the different roles of science and faith in our lives science is great for learning facts it's not so great for discerning meaning or beauty or aesthetic judgments or morality and for that for people of faith we we adopt that from a more philosophical approach so really good question thank you [Music] hi my name is ryan blanchard here from southeast portland in sam harris's book free will [Laughter] book your seatbelt guys this is going to be good so sam i call him sam admits that even though determinism seems true it's not very useful in terms of our day-to-day lives but one area where you felt like it might be useful as in regards to crime and punishment yeah if we could acknowledge the things people do are not their own choice we could maybe shift from our current system where we we really relish the idea of somebody being miserable in a box and shift to something more logical which is just acknowledging we have to separate this person but that's really all we have to do that's that's all that logic dictates we do so could you talk about the science behind why we like the idea of bad people suffering why because we really seem to like this idea even though if we really thought about it all we really need is for bad people to be away from us we don't need them to also be in pain yeah okay guys brought your a game sam harris we can clap for questions i'm in i'm in uh let's see so sam harris is a neuroscientist slash philosopher slash one of the four horsemen of the atheist apocalypse i love his work he did significantly contribute to me leaving christianity for a while because he makes really good arguments about things like free will and as a neuroscientist and a determinist a determinist is someone who believes that the universe is so reliable mathematically that everything will unroll unfold in kind of a set way it's funny to me actually how physicists and like calvinists are both really into predestination uh but so he and his book free will argues that looking at the brain our thoughts our feelings are just kind of inevitable consequences of a biological computer doing its thing and as so many people who wrestle with that issue go well that's great i still feel like i have free will in fact i tried this a couple of nights ago in minneapolis to see if i had free will i walked off the stage and left in the middle of the talk after someone asked me about free will and didn't come back for like three minutes and uh illusionary or not it made everybody in the room really uncomfortable so sam arrives at a point where in his personal actions he assumes he has free will that he should be responsible for his choices and his decisions but from a more macro level it's not fair to do that i tend to agree in terms of the way we approach crime and punishment let's suspend the idea of free will for a second because no one has totally free unconstrained will it doesn't exist uh i'll give you a couple examples one you can't choose to know something you don't know you can't do it like right now someone just know a unified theory of physics and tell me okay you can't like decide gravity's not a thing for you if you had truly unconstrained will now those are silly examples but let's amplify them if you grow up in a certain socioeconomic context and i don't mean advantageous or disadvantageous that's going to shape the way your will gets expressed funny enough humans don't like to think about moral transgressions that way we have a strong thirst for vengeance in fact in the old testament there's a passage that says an eye for an eye the crime must fit the punishment which we look at is brutal today but was actually meant to limit violence because it used to be if you gouge my son's eye out i'll go kill everyone in your village so that was meant to limit this this desire for retribution where does that come from you have to remember humans didn't come from apes humans are apes like taxonomically in the animal kingdom that's where we fit and if you measure human beings against other apes what do you find we are by far the most violent species of ape on the planet if you look at small groups of humans in tribal situations and compare them to chimpanzee troops of similar size chimpanzees need a two to one or three to one numerical advantage to wage war on a neighboring troop human tribes will go with a five percent differential and we have the tremendous violence attached to crippling social anxiety because of the great apes we are about the least likely to survive on our own so we want our troop our tribe to be safe that's an evolutionary driven behavior so if someone is from a different tribe and threatens us we want to wipe them out and if someone is in our tribe that is taking more than their share or harming members of the tribe we want to hit them on the wrist hard or maybe just cut their hands off now it turns out in the modern age where we use excel spreadsheets to measure things instead of our amygdala retribution is a terribly ineffective methodology what does it result in prison overcrowding what does it result in higher residuation rates people go right back into prison when they get out and smarter data based societies have made a decision to go to something called rehabilitative or restorative justice where the goal is not to simply punish someone but to try to help them not be a troubling member of society and if you look at countries that do that the data makes a good argument that it's not only a good idea it's actually less expensive both in incarceration costs and overall costs of societies now that i imagine some of my listeners in texas right now are throwing their iphones and i want to be clear this is a data driven idea this is not like a political ideology i'm espousing but this i try not to judge too harshly people who thirst for vengeance-based justice because a few hundred million years of evolution have shaped human brains that way great question thank you linda and i'm from the seattle area and my question is about your journey um about how you view lgbt equality and gay marriage and just how and what the bible says my husband and i have had our own journey of burying a gay child that we handled with um very traditional evangelical prescription didn't work so well and my experience in working with a lot of other parents is that when conservative christian parents have a gay child oftentimes it begins their journey of deconstruction yes after they figure out this doesn't this doesn't work and they don't want to end up burying their child and i guess i'm curious about your journey since obviously you your your daughters aren't old enough to be at that stage yeah and you went from conservative to atheist and then where you're at now and um i'm just curious what has been your experience with it and did you have to confront this question and what was that like for you greg thank you thank you for being honest and vulnerable and thank you for despite what has been a cultural norm for you your entire life caring about how it impacts your child is beautiful thank you um okay so let's wind the clock back a few years it was not too long ago that i was a conservative evangelical southern baptist of the biblical uh in aaronist position and because of that i understood with absolute conviction that it was a sin against god for people to be in a same-sex relationship certainly a same-sex marriage this was a small problem because i worked in the advertising business and before i worked in the advertising business i played in bands and i had a lot of gay friends and i had this tension of like well they're my friends and i like them i even love them but what they're doing is sin that separates them from god and i don't want them to spend eternity in hell this is something that really oh man it ran me through the ringer and we'll just do a cliff notes version of the whole story why not we're all friends the year i turned 21 i got really drunk one time i didn't drink again until my 30s it was so bad uh and i got horribly sick and woke up and started to drown in my own vomit after a show i'd play that was in my rock and roll days not my science mic days i was much thinner and you know the drummer sees me like on the floor and he turns my head and i can breathe but here's the problem i'm too drunk to consistently turn my head luckily there was one person willing to spend the whole night making sure i didn't drown a gay man who had a crush on me and so by his grace and civility i survived the night it was a little uh sand in my shoe for a long time and later um i became an atheist and there was like this doesn't make any sense it says what they're not hurting anyone i'm actually hurting them by lobbying to make sure it's illegal for them to be in love with someone i'm the oppressor but i couldn't get past something how can two dudes like each other and i'm being completely transparent i don't mean to be flippant if you're one of my listeners and you are in the lgbtq plus continuum i am telling a story to my straight friends so they can have their own journey and i asked a good friend of mine a dear friend who was gay i said tell me the truth like really like you don't like girls like on no level do you like girls and he said do you remember the first time in elementary school you realized you liked girls and i did i remembered the actual girl i remember the moment the cooties evaporated and there was this incredible creation i couldn't stop looking at and he said for me it was a friend of mine and i was horrified and he went so far as to go into deep denial went to seminary got married trying to bury these impulses was unable to have intimacy in his marriage and got divorced and he said for most of my life i would have given anything to be strict uh he said so let me ask you this when did you choose to be straight oh i didn't he said could you choose to be gay and i was like gross and it was like a light went on now here i am talking to a man as an atheist pretending to be a christian who's curious and so that led me on this study that led to all the stuff i talked about on episode 20 of the literature's podcast which by the way has been downloaded over 1 million times and um we read the bible wrong we read the bible wrong and it stems from an idea that i thought went back to the original church and was actually a reaction to liberal theology in the 19th century we call modern christian fundamentalism a book was written called the fundamentals of faith that for the first time made the assertion that the only way to read the bible was through this particular lens of inerrancy and the early church if you read the writings of the church fathers the idea had never come up that when we turn the bible into a constitution when we turn the bible into uh basic instructions before leaving earth kind of deal where it's your instructions on your new fire insurance policy to escape hell you make the book worse not better it's not valuing the text it's demeaning it because the bible is a library of books assembled by the church written by men mostly men unfortunately that was normal at the time about god and when we read the bible from that perspective what do we find solidarity we find people wrestling with the issues of their time we find people struggling to understand what it means to be holy to be the messengers of god on earth and in fact we see a 4 000 year debate about the nature and character of god and when i read the bible that way it's beautiful and i have to ask even for people who are literalists or inerrantists why did god change his mind on shellfish and not same-sex marriage or how many churches in america today ordain women but won't condone a same-sex marriage what we are doing is using the beautiful name of god in the name of jesus to bully people into elevated suicide rates and i won't be a part of it anymore i believe that every time two people fall in love that every time two people commit to loving and honoring one another god is found in that union and it's beautiful and it's sacred and it is holy and i am on a mission as a straight christian to tell my brothers and sisters who have been abused by the church i was wrong then and they are wrong now i don't think jesus would condone a culture that creates guilty suicide thank you [Music] i'm tony i'm from springfield oregon um and uh i this lady actually inspired me to be a little bit more more vulnerable with my question um i was a youth pastor at a very conservative church for five years um and uh and last may my wife and i stepped down um and in that time we uh we kind of came to this realization that we can read whatever we want and listen to whatever we want and really explore uh the depths of our faith and not have to worry about how this can affect the people i serve on staff with um and since that time we've had a very hard time um with the people that we used to pastor and do life with yeah who who have kind of alienated us um and my wife and i uh serve on wildlife we do young life in our area um and one of the members from that church called the the leader and said that they don't think that we're fit for leadership because some of the stuff that we believe the area director and so now there's just this person that we walked really closely with um and there's just this really ugly thing happening right now um and my question for you is i'm reading brian zahn's book water to and uh and he talks about how when he came into his own theologically it was a very painful experience for him um and uh and when he had to really buy into the new convictions that he had um and i know that you went through a similar process i mean you were a conservative evangelical southern baptist and now you're a christian mystic um and i'm curious what advice would you have for someone like me who's in the process of figuring out where he's at i love jesus i want to follow him um but this is really really hard and uh and i just want to come out on the other side of this okay on the one hand it's a gift this thing you knew to be true fell down behind it was something more beautiful behind it was either a clear or a more vivid image of the maker whatever you want to call it and it's so exciting you can't wait to tell the people you love the most oops so i was an atheist like a hunt for red october running silent and then i had that moment on the beach where like it was just me and god and i couldn't wait to tell the world that we are all so loved and i emailed my best friend in the world i said hey i got to tell you something buddy i've been an atheist for a while and i know i'm a deacon in the church and a sunday school teacher and i play in the worship man but you don't have to worry about it because i found out that god is real and can i talk when i get back to tallahassee in choir practice and just let everybody know like god is real and he says tell me more about that i was like well you know all the language we use for god is really too confining god is bigger than our imagination and i'm not sure god has consciousness or agency or will or anything but there is an immense radiation that somehow we can access when we reach out it may reach back it may be an inanimate quality of reality but either way god is real and my friend jeb was like let's talk when you get back so then i get back and he convinces me maybe my ideas aren't formed enough to talk to the choir yet so instead i started blogging which is what you do so without telling anybody i'd had this faith transition i wrote a blog called it's not about chicken on chick-fil-a day where i said it's not a sin for two people to be in love they're the same gender and in fact gender is kind of a construct we made up and i taught youth sunday school the calls came in quickly hey are you okay i'm great when we talk about what your your blog is about oh well you know i'm just kind of growing on this issue and i've realized we're wrong well that's not what we teach here um so can i take you through why you're wrong sure i'm wrong okay or is it settled no okay can you step down as a deacon now this wasn't church leadership this was just another church member and uh while that was going on i got really wound up about evolution in genesis so i wrote a facebook rant about uh why six day creationism is very very wrong and dangerous and destroying the church and then like staff members at church started commenting and fighting with me in front of the congregation on facebook and then it became like this strategic thing in my church where i would sit down and then like the pro mike mccar group would sit around me like a shield even if they agreed with me or not right they're like you understand oh then i wrote a blog post oh yeah i was an atheist for a while but i'm not anymore like i did that after the other stuff and every time i walked in the building i was like a cyclone in the pacific just loss of life and property every direction that led to the most painful experience of my life after my parents got divorced i went through a divorce with my church now let me be very clear about this little southern baptist church in tallahassee these were the people who were at my wedding these were the people who with tears in their eyes watched my daughter come out of the baptismal waters these were the people who were there in the hospital when a family member got sick these were the people who picked up my broken pieces after my dad's announcement that the marriage was over it was my family and i tried to make it work because i loved them i tried for too long process i hurt myself and i hurt them let's be honest if you are a materialist empiricist mystic who denies a literal interpretation of the old testament and accepts same-sex marriage there is no value under which you are southern baptist the ship has sail and we get to a point where the act of us being our true selves hurts other people i'm convinced i should have come back from california i should have told people i loved them i should have left my church my friend rob says you cannot lead people where they don't want to go for some people if you convince them same-sex marriage is okay they lose god they are not ready and here's the thing we're going to reach this tipping point now where on these hot issues where we're making so much progress so fast that last 20 is going to be really slow because they're going to create a psychosocial fortress around those belief systems at some point the healthy thing is to get a divorce at some point the healthy thing is to grieve so what did i do a couple of years of therapy years not weeks not months years until i could get i could get to the point where i could not be hurt or wish ill towards those people and i mean i had some i had like a bunch of pastors take me to lunch after i left the church and tell me like i had to shut my website down in the name of jesus like like in like some cyber stalking and you have to have people in your life your friends are the people who love you as you are no matter what those are your friends people can't do that they're not your friends they're acquaintances and when people can't accept you as you are the only healthy thing to do you don't have to break the connection but you set boundaries we don't have these conversations i know where you are i you know where i am if we can't agree to disagree you just don't call you don't text and you let it fade that sounds really harsh but i'm convinced it's the only way to be emotionally healthy you have to let go and you have to grieve and don't skip the grieving because i went from like well i'm not at that church anymore we're doing brunch it's awesome now i'm a methodist full steam ahead right and like the way your brain stores trauma if you don't express that it's wired in the synapses of your brain and it will show up at the most inopportune times in my case my unexpressed trauma showed up in a meeting at my office my boss said something i didn't agree with i threw my stuff on the ground said i quit and walked out svp in an ad agency in front of all the people i'm out of here it was not like that big a thing that i like but it was because something he said as my brain turned it into a linguistic structure in my left temporal lobe and it passed through my memories it got too close to that circuit and my brain went whoa danger why we have to grieve that's why we have to take the space to emotionally recover because that's how human brains are built and it's tough and it's hard and you bleed for a while and you have a scar and it's tender for a long time but after a while it's a cool story you tell on a podcast thank you um just as a side note before i get to my question um i listened to your deliverance podcast recently about uh racism and as a person of color myself i just want to thank you so much for the work that you've done um before you continue uh black and white is the title of the episode racism in america is the name of the series that continues in season three so if there's a really valid critique of that episode viewed in isolation two white men discuss racism with two black men that's because we're going to do a womanist episode which talks about intersectionality and then we're going to go through uh the latino and the alien story we're going to go through the native story we're going to go through the asian story and this is going to be a multiple episode series because we thought it was too big a topic to tackle at once and because of the size of our audience we're trying to take white people by the hand through white fragility so it's baby steps so anyway sorry thanks but uh for tonight my name is randall and i also drove down here from seattle and my question is um i can't remember which um podcast he was on whether it was you know your ass signs mike or whether it was the liturgist or the pete holmes pondcast but i remember you said something about how consent is not an adequate sexual ethic for our time so i guess my question is what are your reservations about a sexual ethic based on consent and to bring this back to the realm of science is there a way that science can help the church develop a sexual ethic that is relevant for the world that we live in today okay there are some children in the room uh parents this might get real yeah so the weirdest thing happened to me i started doing these episodes of science mike called ask science mike after dark where i answered questions that i thought would basically freak out my most conservative listeners so i put a disclaimer at the beginning so they could tune out and i said basically we're going to do nothing but sex and drugs questions and those turned out to be my most popular episodes by far which is really confusing for me i'm a southern mary i've been married 15 years like i'm not like the cutting edge perspective on sexuality and i learned the reason those episodes are so popular is because there's nowhere in the church that it's safe to talk about sex so i'm like the guy that says yeah you can ask me your question about polyamory and then i don't go oh you're a terrible person for wondering right so i've realized that part of this is literally just creating the safety that the questions are okay now here's what surprised me i did an episode on pornography because oh my gosh do i get a lot of porn questions hundreds of months and i basically said here's my concerns with pornography one um it appears to be neurologically maladaptive for some people and reasonable science has shown that it's linked to erectile dysfunction in teens and 20-somethings today and two i'm not sure what the role consent plays because sometimes the line between consent and coercion and consent and a lack of socioeconomic opportunity it's very blurry and i got more pushback on that episode than i ever got but it wasn't from conservatives it was from progressives who said hey man you were way too hard on porn really surprised me i was like okay i'm learning about my audience and then i said okay i know what i'll do several porn stars have emailed me after that episode i'll just ask them so i i had phone calls with like eight porn performers mostly female and female and they told me horrific stories about the porn industry truly well they've agreed to something in a contract on set they say here's the contract filming starts an act happens and they they say cut cut and then they're told we're not going to pay you unless you do this not consent right none of them would go on record no will go on record because they're fearful of retribution in the industry which by the way i think i'm also the only christian podcaster to have a interview the porn star on the show so i talked to a porn starina sky who said yeah i'll go on record sure and she talked about her experience which wasn't as graphic but she did say nobody enters the porn industry on their best day now porn is easy to pick on but here's my point when we talk about combining economics and sexuality things get blurry well let's let's like step away for a second i left my ad job to become science mike and depending on how far my excel spreadsheet says until my children can't eat anymore my consent on what cities i go to changes right so i've done a couple of churches that were not a fit like really conservative places i knew it wasn't a fit i tried to warn them and i went anyway why because i like feeding my children stuff other than ramen noodles so i don't have this all worked out other than to say my concern with the traditional faith-based approach is it's misogynistic it is hostile to the very nature of human sexuality it treats sex as like a dirty ugly nasty thing as opposed to the primary biological impetus for every organism that reproduces sexually um it engenders a great deal of shame uh it is hostile towards non-normative sexuality and it has all these problems i have less of a problem with the current progressive secular view except say sex doesn't exist so if we're trying to empower people to use consent we should never use that word i'm fine with safe or sex the fact is when two people have sex when they copulate by design customs and border patrol on both sides has to relax a little bit right because the whole thing is the way your immune system works is looking for molecular markers for foreign invaders and in order for someone else's dna to make the transition they have to have like a like an express lane like a treaty between two nations and the problem is bad guys sneak in through that process and that's not just through fluid contact that's from skin to skin contact so there's that and this has serious implications although we have a vaccine that's not widely used for hpv hpv is skin to skin transferred and in women men it results in almost nothing usually but for women it results in infertility uterine scarring and cervical cancer so i don't want my kids to hear put on a condom you're cool it's not true we need a more informed ethic that includes the biological realities of sex and when it comes to sex and economics we can't view these issues in a vacuum economic sex is tied to poverty is tied to marginalization is tied to oppression and we i get concerned with the progressive stance or the secular stance takes an overly idealized almost libertarian view of society where humans are these frictionless economic spheres it's not true so i never want to see sexuality perpetuated as a tool to break and oppress and scar people what's the way forward more information here's you give me a societal ill and i have two answers every time i go to first education and economic empowerment primarily for women tell me a problem in america that doesn't help right so i think the way forward what's the blending of science and faith in a sexual ethic it doesn't treat sex as a completely separate category of human behavior but a holistic part of life which means you can't address sexuality without addressing poverty without addressing equality without addressing incarceration the list goes on probably the least satisfying answer in the history of the program but uh it's an unsolved human issue [Music] [Applause] hi i'm destiny i'm from portland and um i wanted to know your thoughts on the collective human consciousness and how that affects our views on morality and i know um richard richard dawkins has this idea of like the selfish gene and that your morality is based on like your own evolutionary instinct like a mother comforts her sick child because she's biologically wired to protect her legacy and sort of how our evolution reconciles with our own progressing in the ideas of the human moral based on collective consciousness all right i thought you were going to give me some ray kurzweil singularity theory for a second but another left turn in modern western fallout this is like the nerdiest show we've ever done by the way go to portland we had this thing in western thought called the enlightenment and the enlightenment started to shift thinking towards the action of the individual which had some real value has some real value and then we sort of like crystallized that in modernism which is like super individualistic then some would argue that postmodernism is like so individualistic it's collective and but the idea is that you are this uh rational actor that makes decisions and that's what people are and the way you do anything is you convince people who like a rational argument that this behavior is advantageous or this one is not um and i uh just spent some time in the middle east and i noticed that like uh christians and jews and muslims over there don't have any individual sense of faith it's a collective identity completely different lens for thinking and evaluating in some ways that might be a higher fidelity view of humanity as much as the enlightenment kind of helped us understand a particular brain function related to cognition a lot of our behaviors are emergent from the interaction between our genes and the environment for example i am fat i get fat easily i actually really enjoy getting fat it turns out that there is this gene expression it seems for fatness and that in any population you have some people that naturally as soon as calories are available just eat and eat meat and eat and you have some people who naturally are like no i'm good and here's a funny thing happens you would say this is unhealthy and should be weeded out by natural selection except for most of human history sometimes calories go away for a long time so even though when calories are plentiful the skinny guys are more effective warriors and gatherers and whatever when things get thin famine wise us chunky folk can literally last longer and work longer because i don't know what i'm 30 pounds overweight 30 times 3 500 calories that's like a lot of days of food right here but we recently have this obesity boom this is where i'm going and this obesity boom is not related necessarily just to my individual decisions though they play a part my individual decisions are affected by macro systems in the environment interestingly enough we found that lab animals who get controlled amounts of calories are increasing in obesity rates as the general population of humans so uh the composition of our food is changing we have a lot of plastic that's degrading and intermixing with our biology in ways we don't entirely understand and by i hope that disclaimer we don't entirely understand we'll keep you from saying i'm espousing pseudoscience my point is this collective consciousness this response to the environment drives our behaviors more than we think this is actually one of the main reasons i am not generically religious but am a christian did you see that coming there's this terrible beautiful thing and we are wired to watch out for our kids and our tribe first it's great it's beautiful when a mom defends her child from a bear or whatever but it's less beautiful when societies wage war or economic injustice to make sure their kids are better off than those kids which is a completely natural thing so what fascinates me about christianity memetically it used to be that belonging to a tribe was based entirely on birth identity or blood and that's how you decided who was in your group and who wasn't and then you had this move ladder in human civilization towards belonging that was based on identity so you have the emergence of nation states that even though we're not blood related we're all this group and the people i consider in my tribe who all work for their well-being grew and then we switched it even further and we had systems of which christianity was one of the first where identity was based on belief so we may have been enemies very recently but if you convert to christianity i now work for your flourishing sometimes it's quite beautiful and other times it's the crusades and now we're reaching a point where we're seeing more and more for example in the science mic audience that the sense of belonging is not belief but behavior what do you do so if you're a christian that same sex affirming and works to relieve poverty and you're an atheist who does the same we can hang i actually feel more in common with you than the other people who profess to be christians but i think at its healthiest belief in the teachings of jesus is an invitation to consider all of humanity your tribe and that is certainly the case for me that is absolutely the case for me so i go to the middle east i look at the israel palestine situation and i say who here is my brother who here is my sister yes it's the palestinian it's the israeli it's the christian it's the jew and the muslim these are my brothers and whose flourishing am i for all of them so that's what gets me excited about the way i think the gospel is moving which by the way what we call the gospel has a documented historical shift can we all just admit that and i think the way the gospel is being drawn now is an invitation to a universal acceptance of humanity i would dare call christian humanism um yeah thank you a couple five christian humanists in the house my people and uh i think this collective identity this gene we just have to learn to hack humans so we have a need for certainty i'm certain about uncertainty i'm certain that i don't know everything and okay if i have to have a tribe if my genes say i need to try my tribe is everybody [Music] hi my name is matthew i did a study at evolutionary biology in college um are you about to take me to school is that what's going to happen i was to contextualize your answer uh i would say common descent and evolution by natural selection and random genetic mutation are probably the best explanations for the origin of species natural selection is an intensely competitive brutal and cruel process and that's fine however it seems to me that jesus is predictably selected for the weakest poorest the unfit does jesus use natural selection as his mechanism for creation and if he has how can you do that that was an amazing question uh i wish i could say this is unrehearsed i think i've done this question on the show really early on this is tension between this god revealed in jesus who says you want to fir you want to bring the kingdom of god near love your neighbor who's my neighbor those samaritans you hate the poor the orphan the widow and the alien i don't know why republicans always leave that last one off and i i don't get too tribal there are republicans that listen to the show so love them um so you have this tension between natural selection what seems so brutal and the words of jesus now i want to be very clear about something people this i hate males coming from this question i'm cool with it i don't think jesus knew anything about natural selection i don't think he was like well one day charles darwin my christology my understanding of jesus is that jesus was a fully human and limited in knowledge although i accept incarnation that that the christ this part of the trinity gosh we were getting so theological inside baseball that the christ that was part of the trinity it was indwelled within jesus and jesus was god that is by far the least scientific belief that i hold and i'm always very clear that i hold that as a belief and not a fact claim right so somebody's like hey how can you justify with evidence i can't which is why i like when people go i think you're pretty nutty for believing that i go cool that's really reasonable um so you have this tension here's the thing i don't think an oak tree knows that when it spreads its branches there's a grass genocide below still does it i don't think a tiger has enough capacity in its orbito frontal cortex to empathize with the suffering of an antelope and if it did what a head trip tigers aren't omnivores i mean that if you feed them anything other than animal protein they get really sick really fast they're the purest carnivores on the planet in this natural order this evolutionary system everybody's trying to get their share of the photons it's just well it is the sun is chaotically dying giving us free energy in the process for eight to ten billion years it's a good scene and the only way we can get that energy on the earth is to steal it from something else that's it no other way to get the energy to run a metabolism on this planet otherwise and there is this one poor species who understands it this one species is not only models consciousness in a series of loops in the brain but models its own loops i mean i think that's kind of where consciousness comes from we're aware of our own model of reality which is like a terrible existential head trip and that creates unique considerations for this species because we're so knowledgeable about how we manipulate the world we can do it on purpose we can like build drills and exhume algae that decomposed hundreds of millions of years ago and just burn it and throw the carbon in the atmosphere chimps are clever they can't dolphins are brilliant they can't we seem almost uniquely suited to understand the suffering we can produce and i think when the scripture when genesis speaks of made in the image of god it is talking about the ability to create or destroy with intention which calls us into a unique responsibility as the children of god which calls us into a unique capacity to with intention care for creation including and maybe even especially each other that what the message of jesus does is invite humanity from its bases instincts that arise in the limbic system and the basal ganglia and the rat brain and invite jesus invites us into neocortical thinking that's what the gospel is about can we use our rational capacity our compassion and our empathy to live lives that create peace on earth the old testament and the new testament are obsessed with that word shalom god's peace over and over god's peace over and over and i think that's why we're invited to co-create the world now we have to be very clear for a second i'm a mystic so i experience a god that i talk about wants us to or directs us to or invites us to but i also understand through science you can make a much better case for a god that is uh like a singularity or the higgs field which doesn't know anything and even what i understand from physics based on how time works relativity seems to make a pretty convincing argument that the past the future and the present all exist all space-time coordinates are there at all times and that in a singularity there is no then now later there's no true classical physics or causality and anything that can embody or possess or be a part of a state like that you throw words like being consciousness will agency you're anthropomorphizing a mystery so what i do the way my faith works is i don't resolve that tension if i do the whole house of cards comes down i allow an acknowledgement on understanding of the mystery of our origins and what keeps us going now while embracing that a personalized divine experience and the teachings of christ can help me create shalom another thoroughly unsatisfying answer hey my name is kenny um i thought you were going to address this earlier with free will but you didn't quite get to it because well the left hand took the left turn yeah i answered the question uh so mine is coming at free will from somewhat biblical perspective is there any signs to support romans 7 15 what i'm doing i do not understand for i am not practicing what i would like to do but i'm doing the very things i hate yeah absolutely absolutely science is all over that here's why your consciousness presents itself as an observer where you're like uh some detached thing that looks through your eyes and controls your hands and has these thoughts and feelings and that's an illusion i'm going to go to my favorite example sorry frequent listeners i'm lactose intolerant pre-diabetic and 30 pounds overweight eating pizza puts me in severe pain and shortens my life and if someone put dominoes right here right now i'm all over it and i can hold a piece of pizza and go is this minutes or weeks that you don't spend with your grandchildren you know what i mean i do what i hate or i'll go you know what i really need to do i need to spend no time with a family and cut back on the travel schedule and the phone rings my booking agency goes hey i'd like you to come to tulsa oklahoma next week i go yeah let's do it and then i love it but then i also there's this conflicted thing why does that happen because you aren't a you you are 37 trillion human cells and over a hundred trillion bacteria wrapped in a thin layer of epidermis and 5 million hair follicles you're a colony organism and the bacteria in your gut affect the way you think and feel why because there are more neurons in your gi tract than any other part of your body but your brain did you know that your gut thinks and bacteria get a vote now your consciousness comes from 86 billion neurons in your brain that compose hundreds of structures with directly competing priorities and they have an ongoing debate more severe than any congress or parliament about how you're going to think and feel and act at any moment and when a vote is called and someone wins the dissenting people pout right and this is why you know you're not saving for retirement but you're gonna start right after you pay off the car you can't afford because of this tug of war paul tapped into a modern scientific truth we are deeply conflicted organisms we are deeply conflicted organisms and that's why grace is so important we are literally at war with ourselves is by design it's by design because sometimes the way you think things are going to go is wrong so you have you've been shaped as a species over millions of years have trouble arising at decisions to deal with the incredible uncertainty this life so we do what we hate and i'll give you the most poignant example i can think of i was at the holocaust museum in israel and our tour guide took us through and with great empathy she spoke of the german death squads jewish tour guide speaking of empathy why because when they went through the records guess what happened you had the blitzkrieg go through and following the blitzkrieg were the death squads and the death squads they had to requisition more more and more alcohol to keep them going because even though they've been indoctrinated as hitler youth looking in the eyes of people as they kill them took a toll but they did what they hated so there was this emergency meeting in berlin bullets are expensive and our troop morale is falling so if we build gas chambers we'll preserve troop morale and save money because we can create distance between executioner and the execution one person loads the gas one person ushers the people in another person presses a button without ever seeing anyone and you create distance so on the one hand our capacity for consciousness is beautiful and moving and incredible and on the other hand i'm sorry there is a merit to this ancient christian idea of sin there is merit to the idea that we need help against our darkest instincts and i just see real evidence of it every day that might be one of like three instances where me and paul agree [Applause] yeah my name is dave from portland um and this based on your last answer changes a little bit of what i'm going to ask but this is about free will but also tying in uh sexual ethics uh i noticed people make some of their poorest choices during sexual arousal and i was wondering and and now it seems almost obvious evolutionarily that conflict gets eliminated in order for reproduction to be aided but i'm wondering is there any sort of way that you know of to make better more rational decisions while still lacking some of our mental faculties oh really great question especially oh look out mike the feminist is walking on stage in a rape culture that's like the most one of the most important questions we can ask ourselves today guess what neurologically your beliefs shape your behavior we have a narrative today in society almost universally held men have overwhelming uncontrollable sex drives that once they are aroused they are unable to control their decisions and smart women cover up as much as possible to keep the beast from coming out meanwhile women have much weaker sex drives they practically have to be begged for sex they could they mainly have sex to have kids because they love babies and to keep their partner around but most of the time they're bored or unsatisfied let's look at history and then the victorian era it was totally understood that men were almost completely disinterested in sex that it was a thing you did because you needed children kind of gross and messy meanwhile women were uncontrollable sexual beasts who had to be kept under control all the time or they would fall into their wild instincts and just copulate with everyone this is in the west in recent history and i bring this story up for a reason our beliefs affect our behavior when men believe they cannot control their sex drives guess what happens they can't so to everyone in this room who is male and to everyone who is listening who is male congratulations you are in complete and total control of a human sex drive and at every point from initial attraction until the moment things start and even during you are in complete control of your cognition and you can stop any time if you don't believe me tell yourself over and over because guess what the science reveals you know who really likes sex human beings human beings love sex now we're not chimpanzees those guys are kinky but gorillas another near relative i mean they get it done um but we're kind of in the middle and when we find with measurements and tests uh like who responds most to visual imagery actually women women respond more universally individual imagery than men and women will report in studies that they don't experience a state of arousal even as measurement equipment indicates that they do the societally enforced cognitive divide is that deep so i believe strongly that our modern tale about binary gender duality and sexual preference does harm to men and women not only in engineering and creating a rape culture but also destroying healthy sexual flourishing among couples this is why i talk so much about shame this is why i'm so open to having conversations about sex now so that step one we can make better choices by understanding we can make better choices two let's also admit that as you enter a state of arousal your gonads vote in the brain gets more and more like they take over the house and the senate and the executive office and the post office uh but at any point your prefrontal cortex still has veto power fellas veto power now how do you well if you're making like uh destructive sexual decisions male or female you have a sexual addiction this is less true for you that's neurologically driven you need professional health and counseling if you are really lonely you make different sex that we have like a huge sexual compulsion problem in our society about both partnered sex and pornography consumption you know one of the reasons and this is nuts touch aversion in the west is a huge problem and it actually drives them into all situations we we don't touch each other very often we're weird about it and because we're so weird about it when we do touch each other we're kind of creepy about it you know i mean like we're so desperate for contact it's like i just want to give you a hug mmm that's nice that's real nice your hair smells real i'm sorry well pleasure doing business with you like we just gotta relax as a culture um and the kind of loneliness and isolation we feel is not healthy uh this applies to me because it's not a simple narrative it will probably happen tonight i go city to city to city and there's this incredible thing where after i talk a multi-hour line of people waits to talk to me and 50 percent of them cry because something i've done just by being honest with my life has meant something to them and they start crying and i'm a hugger and i want to hug them so bad but then i don't want to be like hey i don't want to think i was like come to my hotel afterwards right it's like no i just feel a need for human but then i also know some people are touch a verse for good reason they've been abused or traumatized so what almost universally happens is the person is like sobbing and then goes can we just i was like yes of course um and that's how like weird and detached we are about physical contact in our society which also drives that whole narrative boy i've been really down on the west lately i mean we we did the internet it's good but the the core of the idea is by believing you can make better choices that takes you the furthest down the road to making better choices you are not a slave to your sexuality and your sexuality is not evil or wicked or sinful [Music] well thanks for listening everybody i can't wait to see you next week i do want to remind you of a couple things one if you'd like to see me in your town go to ask sciencemike.com and click the events tab there's a lot of stuff coming up i definitely would love to see you this fall in either denver or chicago for the liturgist gathering it'll be me and michael gunger and lisa gunger and you hanging out talking about doubt and faith and science and certainty and also there will be the gungers flag music if you're into that it's cool i want to thank greg nordin for producing the program andrew golucky for his pre-production work and as always my bff jeff bodiford for the groovy theme song thanks for listening everybody and i'll see you next week [Music]