ASM093 Ask Science Mike LIVE in Mission Hills, CA

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coming to you from mission hills christian church in los angeles california it's ask science mike live even though he may not understand he'll talk anyway he got problems he won't stop there but he'll talk and talk and talk until he flew in the face science faith in life welcome to ask science mike the weekly podcast where i answer your questions about science faith and life i'm on tour right now promoting my new book finding god in the waves and i'm heading all over the country i'd love to see you on november 26th i'll be at the bookshelf in thomasville georgia for a book signing november 30th in quincy massachusetts for ask science mike live another ask science mike live in grand haven michigan january 21st january 29th i'll be in mableton georgia february 15th northwest nazarene university february 19th chapel hill north carolina and march 29th at the biologos conference in houston texas go to findinggodinthewaves.com to learn more and see if i'm coming near you but for now we've got a podcast to do so let's get it [Music] started so in your book finding god in the waves um you describe that there's this inconsistency between the creation account between um the way the author describes the order of creation and the way science seems to suggest that it was created um which yeah i buy that's fine what do you think the author of genesis was trying to prioritize like why do you think there was an order that this guy listed out what do you think he wanted us to get from that order oh wow yeah that's a that's a really good question like i had predicted where that one would go and then uh it didn't by the way um i'll pay you five bucks after for mentioning the book in the question i really appreciate that fantastic um so genesis uh it depends on what exegesis you take from the text and what hermeneutic you read used to read the text that's me just trying to sound like i know more than i do i'm basically saying how you read the text and with what assumptions and where what i've read is the primary point in genesis is to denote god's character and relationship to creation that's the primary impetus of those documents so the genesis tells a creation account that's pretty similar to contemporary creation accounts from other ancient cultures in that region of the world but those creation accounts typically involved violence so a battle of the gods or a murder of a goddess or something like that led to creation and the genesis god does two things one creates with word and two keep saying that it's good that this god is pleased with creation which are our departures from other contemporary creation accounts um so they're certainly talking about a god that creates with intent and with word instead of violence and who has a benevolent relationship with creation as opposed to an indifferent or oppositional or domineering approach to creation those are big ideas theologically uh but it's also true that the genesis does intend to relay cosmological information the creation accounts are placed within a contemporary understanding of the structure of the world and at that far back in history we would imagine most people understood the earth to be relatively round but not spherical but not flat the earth rested on pillars literal like pillars um like great stone supporting it and underneath the earth was sheol the realm of the the dead and then over the earth was this great vault of heaven which tower of babylon was trying to reach there's this big you know dome that rotated around the earth and it had holes in it and through those holes at night the glory of god of heaven shone through in the form of the stars and when it rained that was the floodgates of heaven being opened and those holes in the firmament allowing rain to follow follow the earth so the primary purpose of genesis was about god's character and relationship to creation the secondary point was the cosmology now the cosmology is wrong there is a flat earth movement on twitter right now um but their their papers aren't doing very well in peer review or reproduction and uh we're very very confident the earth is a roughly spherical mass that the sun is the center of our solar system but not the center of our galaxy oddly enough the sun is the center of our universe just like the earth and mars and everything else because the universe is spatially infinite so it either has no center or everything is the center so if you feel like you're the center of the universe you are so you really are special as long as you acknowledge so is everyone else so why do we value a book that gets its cosmology so wrong and i think that's where we get into what hermeneutic you use with the text using genesis to derive scientific insights is a bad call it's a bad idea because genesis was written before science existed as a discipline well if we make some assumptions that god is personal and a being and communicates with mankind if god tried to offer scientific insights to the authors of genesis what would they have done with it what what in a culture that didn't have the mathematical framework to understand this information how would they have communicated or understood it remember isaac newton had to invent calculus in order to describe the motion of our planets so before newton existed describing the nature of celestial mechanics was impossible so i think the most important thing to understand about our relationship to the bible is when divorced from its cultural context without understanding as much as we can about who the author was the audience the author was communicating to and what agenda that author carried you do a disservice to the bible reading it without filling in those pieces of information you force a beautiful piece not peace a beautiful library of ancient literature about god into the assumptions of modernism one of the most frustrating things to me in my life at this point is the similarity between how most american christians read the bible and how most atheists do and in both cases those groups ignore the methodologies and insights that historians pick up all the time because they're reading the text with the wrong assumptions we don't read plato and say wait there aren't any celestial spheres because we place plato within a historical chronological perspective and i think it's essential that we do the same for the bible in order to learn the most about god from its pages [Music] yeah uh continuing from that commentary on creationism i've got my jurassic park shirt here so uh definitely interested in this subject of origins um and creationism is so often dismissed as pseudoscience which i'm you know ready to do so personally but because considering it comes from such a bizarre perspective you know in terms of our modern approach to science is there anything that creationism has to offer that is interesting to science uh have they gotten some things right man you guys are bringing it tonight that's two questions that just at the last second veered into questions i haven't contemplated before does creationism have anything to offer modern science have they got anything right with their assumptions okay so let's start with one thing young earth creationism is a really recent theological development that's not first century thinking that's not third century thinking that's uh that's popularized in the 19th and 20th century thinking old earth creationism an intelligent design it would have been called intelligent design but religious cosmology has offered science new insights and perspectives um it was a priest who originally envisioned a universe that emerged from a big bang it was a monk who first imagined a spatially infinite universe galileo's work was in part funded by the church today the vatican has an operational observatory that employs real astrophysicists and does meaningful work so historically religious cosmology has contributed to the sciences today modern cosmology does pretty good on its own which i think gets to like a fundamental idea about what theology does and what faith does the only time we find religion and science and conflict is when religious people use their faith or revelation to make claims about how the physical universe is structured so my approach is if i have questions about how the physical universe is structured i just go to science i just skip straight to science i just let science be science because it wins like so let's imagine for a moment that we assembled two teams of 50 people and we give them the same mission land a 12 pound robot on the moon and on one team we take rocket scientists and engineers and on the other team we place people from church prayer groups with no scientific background and we say we're going to run an experiment you guys do science here's we're going to finish your rover and hand it to you just pray it to the moon okay now imagine that i give you 500 and you have to bet on team a or team b i bet every person in the room puts their money with team a i bet the pope puts his money with team a right i mean i bet i bet ken ham puts his money with team a because at what science does science wins right the church's record in battling scientists over scientific ideas is it's embarrassing but science doesn't tell us what to do with the insights of science it doesn't make moral judgments it doesn't speak to beauty it doesn't help us provide purpose or meaning or direction among all the facts that it reveals science can tell you how to split an atom but science doesn't tell you if it's better to obliterate a city or power one with that technology and to me that's the role our faith plays is it helps us make sense of all these facts to find meaning to find purpose and to find direction and so if creationism and religious science has anything to inform science about it is the ethical development of the sciences what we research and in what way i find it interesting that some of the most uh verdant opposers of animal research do so on religious grounds right because they believe that life is sacred and in that way informing how science is done i think religion has an incredibly vital role to play hi science mike hi thank you so much for both of your podcasts i find them really amazing um i wanted to ask you a bit you mentioned it in the last question that science doesn't speak to beauty i recently moved to los angeles to pursue acting and i feel like especially as a girl a lot of it is based on how you look and you compare yourself to other people and how beautiful they are and i just wanted to ask you about basically the science of what is attractive how much of it is a construct and how much of it is evolution saying i need my mate to do x y and z and look like x y and z in order to be successful and um just also like if you can add anything about coming to terms of liking the way that you look because i just feel like especially as an actor and especially in los angeles like it's just rough like you're always getting critiqued on like how you look and you go to an audition there's like 20 other girls there that look prettier than you i feel like maybe some other actors in this room can relate to me thank you right on i'm having fun this is this is a good group um okay yeah uh really almost upsetting some of what science reveals about what we find attractive uh universally across cultures body and facial symmetry is highly favored so it turns out there's two ways to build an organism a complex organism almost said something that was scientifically inaccurate there are two ways to build a complex organism that we're aware of using dna you can have bilateral symmetry or radial symmetry right so the way humans are structured were bilaterally symmetrical and the two halves of our body are trying to execute the same playbook with only minor variations to do that successfully you need good genes you need to be free of disease during your developmental years you need excellent nutrition which should mean you have good survival skills so evolution did a good job selecting a pressure into us to look for symmetry that's all well and good unless you have a less symmetrical face the other thing we found consistent across cultures is body ratios so in every culture including cultures that have limited or no contact with western civilization the same ratio between waist and hips in women is favored as ideally beautiful the ratio so if the hips are thick the waist must also get thicker to preserve the ratio and and and the difference so um you know in our we kind of are into relatively or even extremely thin women culturally today but their hip to waist ratio is not all that different than what you would see in a renaissance painting in the ratio men are not free from this tyranny men are assessed by the ratio of shoulders to hips but all cultures are doing are doing the same math there so as i get older i get less and less attractive because i'm like inverting my ratio i'm not a v i'm like uh i don't know i'm like a like a pencil in an apple or something so so that's what we know is like innate the other stuff is culturalized sort of brighter lips are more attractive bigger eyes are more attractive so what we figured out especially no this not just for women um most nights i wear a blazer on stage because it gives me bigger shoulders and it creates this line that doesn't actually exist on my midsection and it makes me look like i have a more ideal shoulder to waist ratio it's just i'm just lying with my clothes but it's funny to me how menswear is designed to universally flatter every possible male body type just like women's fashion that bombed i thought that was a great joke like women's fashion is like a microscope of a woman's body designed to accentuate every feature as accurately as possible like women are being sold on a market and so this is created an arms waist particularly in cosmetics where women's cosmetics is designed to mimic an ongoing state of sexual arousal in a process called super normal stimulus and what we're doing now is we're figuring out you now super super normal stimulus really quick because i've done this on a couple shows in a row and i know people on the internet are getting bored with this answer um but uh if you take uh just make a fake turkey head but it's like a real it looks like a really attractive female turkey scientists figured out what that is i can't tell with my own eyes but apparently turkeys also have a ratio that's idealized so if you make like a fake wooden turkey head and you put it on a stick it doesn't have a body you put on a stick stick it in the ground and then you have actual female turkeys around this stick and then you release a male turkey the male turkey will see the stick and be like hey and he will try to mate with the stick forsaking all of the female turkeys now men make sense right um but like as much as we want to say stupid turkeys our brains make the same kind of ridiculous base assessments at a level below our consciousness and that's why the cosmetics industry is so powerful because once one woman puts on lipstick there is now an implicit bias against natural lips this is why what alicia keys is doing is incredibly brave and important and you multiply that times all the features so that is also running on evolution but then we culturalize that to an extreme manner and for all of its beautiful progressivist values los angeles holds hollywood and hollywood is like maybe the greatest perpetuator of normalizing supernormal stimulus in human appearances but we have good fortune in this case that we live in a capitalist economy because in capitalism dollars are votes and so when you see a film maybe an indie film or something that has taken a risk to represent more natural body types and a greater diversity of facial symmetry symmetry and includes actors of differing ability levels you can reward films like that with your ticket and change the way hollywood operates there isn't like i don't believe like a hollywood illuminati trying to move towards a beauty single singularity there are people who want to make the most money back on what they invested in a picture and they've learned through conditioned response like the animals we are that putting symmetrical faces on screen and doing post-production until they look like something that can't exist in physical reality makes money now how do you learn to love your body can i just be honest i love my body and i mean look at me i mean seriously i'm not just science mike i'm tor science mike i mostly eat in the atlanta airport at like 11 30 at night before that last flight to tallahassee so the only thing open is popeyes so i'm like hey how much chicken you have left mashed potatoes let's do this and so uh you know my waist is probably a solid four and a half five inches bigger than it was when i started the tour you know and uh i noticed that like i've been wearing blazers too much and i decided tonight i was just going to display my body in its full glory although it's a black t-shirt doesn't show shadows but i look at myself and i think i look good um i'm hairy like a gorilla like just a silver back and i mean literally i have back hair my hair is thinning just incredibly to the point that on stages like this if i look down it looks like i have a full-on bald spot here because the hair so thin and my follicles shine through and those are all things i've gone through tremendous shame about because i was a chubby kid and the other kids used to call me water tank because when they would push me and i would run to catch them they said there were waves in my belly and i remember in seventh grade i will never forget this a boy came in he said damn boy you got bigger titties than the girls and that left a scar on my psyche oh man i could think about that when i was an executive vice president of an ad agency on a random tuesday and start crying those kind of those kind of wounds they last the way people judge us based on our bodies at some point i realized i only get this one body and it doesn't matter what anyone else thinks about it i ran a marathon in this body 26.2 miles it took seven hours my feet bled but i ran a marathon i held two little girls close and made them feel safe with these unmuscular broomstick arms of mine this face however it looks i can lean in when i get home and smell my wife's hair and tell her i love her this body does so many amazing things so i've changed my perspective this is not a billboard that advertises who i am this is who i am so i can either learn to celebrate the gift that is my body the truly singular gift and all the good and bad that comes with it or i can let culture dictate that i should feel depressed because my waist should be smaller or my legs longer and i admit this is a little bit of [ \_\_ ] because i'm a guy and media throws at me all the time that if you're funny and successful you can be a fat guy with a smoking wife and then we'll use that word smoking smoking hot right you ever hear of a smoking hot man do you ever hear that have you ever seen a piece on a male business executive or political leader that begins by describing his outfit and his figure have you ever seen it the media we support matters and every time i read media that begins discussing a woman of accomplishment or any woman who's not a fashion model in a piece about fashion i write a letter to the editor every time because right now it's a war in the west to love your body but maybe we can work together in the economic decisions we make and the pressure we put on editorial staff to help liberate each other i noticed in your in your book how respectfully you treated richard dawkins as you discussed the selfish gene and the god delusion and my question is um at two parts what did you draw from that book either one of them that blessed or benefited oh wow yeah and secondly um do you see a way that science and or the atheist perspective can also provide some of the things that religion has traditionally offered such as comfort appreciation of the unknown the sense of mystery all of that that we normally accord the religious pursuit those two things first a very personal one how have you been blessed in the role of science in building or responding to those deep religious concerns oh wow thank you well are we question four i think it was like the four best questions of the whole tour thank you the selfish gene which i read in high school helped me understand the true beauty of a theory of common origin the way that our genes equip us not to be the strongest or the fastest or the most brutal but simply the most adapted to a given situation that the reason genes create diversity even in a single species is to deal with different selective pressures that happen at different moments like some of us are naturally kind of chubby and so those are naturally kind of thin and in times of caloric plenty all the skinny people are really good at hunting they live longer lives they tend to have more children in times of famine they tend to die first and so suddenly the overeaters make evolutionary sense and that way that our genes in brutally trying to make sure they get replicated allow the miracle of life to face challenging conditions to recover from multiple extinction events at the time as a southern baptist i felt like i was seeing the eyes of god the god delusion a book which i tried to read at least once per year made me understand for the first time that atheists weren't just like unreasonable angry people that they had really legitimate critiques of the way people who worship god treat others and that was a key insight that i'm careful i try to continue on some level to identify as an atheist to trick my brain into remaining sympathetic with secular philosophies now in terms of can atheism offer the world what religion offers no but that's because atheism isn't a belief system atheism is a lack of belief in any god or gods it's not an operating moral philosophy when atheists gather i love what neil degrasse tyson says it's like getting people together who don't like golf if you can imagine a room full of people who don't like golf what do they have in common we don't play golf there's no point of affinity or rallying or identity or purpose other than we don't believe in god so what happens in many cases atheism becomes a movement by turning into something called anti-theism we all don't like god believing is god is bad let's convince other people not to believe in god and suddenly you have evangelical fundamentalist atheism of who of which like richard dawkins is billy graham right um and i i that is not a judgment in the negative on richard dawkins what i found when i first became an atheist was my immediate moral philosophy became nihilism i got lost fast because i placed all moral value judgments all sense of purpose and meaning and beauty in the sense of my understanding of god and suddenly i didn't have that so i was like why don't i just never go to work again and eat pizza until i die that's a real thought i had and my wife was out of town so i actually called in sick and ordered a pizza as soon as pizza had opened i should have put that in the book and the next one yeah and so uh it wasn't until i kind of grieved the loss of god that i started talking to atheists online i was like hey okay i get it there is no god but why do i feel like kind of depressed and suicidal and a lot of atheists are like what you're depressed and suicidal grow up but some people got it because for them there was a grief and a loss too i remember one guy told me he said atheism is not the answer let me tell you about humanism and humanism is a moral philosophy humanism says that since there is no god there is no savior it's up to humans to create human flourishing it's up to humans to be the savior of mankind not god an intrinsic assumption of humanism is that human life has value that's a beautiful notion and this person told me he said so you used to care for the poor because jesus told you to and now you feel bad because you don't feel like you need to care for the poor what if you just care for the poor because you want to like it blew my mind like it's so obvious but to this southern baptist guy spent my whole life in that that realm it blew my mind and i started to find among humanists an incredible sense of purpose solidarity and comfort right here in los angeles there's something called the sunday assembly have you heard of this this is atheists who get together on sunday mornings to sing songs together usually journey to pass offering plates collecting money for worthwhile charities before a speaker with something very interesting and uplifting to say comes forward and shares a message for 25 minutes and then they end with a song it's a rather familiar liturgy right and these things are quite popular so they're getting this sense of community that religion has traditionally provided so i think that it's possible to have secularist organizations sam harris is a very notable uh public atheist and his most recent book waking up was about the value of spiritual experiences divorced from religion or belief in god so he's advocating the same kind of rituals i talk about my book around prayer and meditation but he's just doing it for brain health in terms of things religion alone can offer i haven't seen a secular answer to pastoral care i understand that sometimes pastors especially men really muck up that office they turn into a power struggle into a mine is bigger than yours thing they just i'm the dominant ape in this troop and some pastors are even more than domineering and authoritarian they're outright abusive physically mentally or sexually and so i don't want to say for a moment i'm ignoring or excusing those things but pastors who do so from a place of love and health are a singular force of social cohesion and comfort what other organization pays someone to wait for your call what other organization will have someone who has a special parking space because they come to the hospital so often and so the church even sunday assemblies we'll see where it goes but if if you're a christian and you move to a new town and you find a christian church that is healthy for you you basically have instant community and uh we're a social species that's powerful so this ready-made community plus pastoral care is so genuinely innovative and powerful i think christianity has forgot that it's maybe its most powerful tool that if we reclaim churches as points of gathering comfort and community instead of base camps to waste wage a culture war maybe there isn't an answer to the church in secularism and maybe the reason today it seems like there is is because we've spent 80 to 100 years doing it so badly [Music] hi this is my uh first time knowing about you and i've enjoyed it so far um well let me know if that changes yeah i know i know it'll end but so for me spirit is energy energy is spirit i i never really saw the difference so i know that science and religion cleave you know those two words spirit goes to one side energy goes to the other side um what i'm seeing in science right now scares me okay monsanto um the oil spills are our need for destroying everything on earth scares me the fracking the [ \_\_ ] out of oklahoma until they have 250 earthquakes every year when do we stop bad science when do we stop outfits like monsanto from poisoning and hoarding seeds i mean and why the science and this irritates me to no end feel that it needs to improve upon nature if if god or the creator of the universe already made corn perfect it has everything in it you know to sustain societies for centuries but monsanto feels the need to put poison in it so that when bugs eat it their little stummies get eaten out and then i don't know if anybody's noticed but every other ad on tv is a tummy medication oh you got an upset tell me take all these pills you got but we don't look at the food source and so we're poisoning ourselves and we're paying them for it and for me monsanto is an enemy of the state so why don't we say something i really don't understand our science silence it's like we've made the a bomb of nutrition and we're dying i have stage four cancer right now i'm sorry and the medication that my doctor gave me is called temploxin and this actually causes uterine cancer so they're trying to kill my breast cancer and give me uterine cancer i'll be carved up like a christmas turkey by the time science is done with me and that bothers me because there is no respect for the human body it's like we're trying to bludgeon it with chemo bludgeon it with oreo cookies bludgeon it with i don't know chemicals that just destroy us in the end that's my question why does science need to improve upon nature and destroy us in the process okay good question i'll start with gmos because you threw a lot there and hopefully i can remember the whole question so gmos are a point of great political controversy they're really politically divisive so we did some peer review studies on on gmo food right and we found that there's not um any health consequence to genetically modified food but we recently found another study that gmo foods aren't any more shippable any more nutritious any more resistant to pesticide so we've done all this effort and it hasn't hurt the food but it has not helped the food we've spent a ton of money not just in montana but other organizations working with this theory could we use less pesticide if we genetically select our food in order to use one species strategy of resistance in a different species or find the genes that the most resistant corn hasn't put it together and it hasn't worked so genetically modifying food in a laboratory has been nowhere near as effective as genetically modifying food through agriculture and this is a big point natural corn isn't all that edible natural bananas are very small and full of seeds so for as long as humans have had agriculture we have been intentionally pollinating different plants with no knowledge of dna but manipulating nature and creating foods that are easier for us to eat easier for us to grow and increase our food supply when we started doing that we had a global boom in population and then we had the industrial age and we took our ancient farming techniques and we executed them with mechanized equipment that allowed food on a scale never seen before in the history of our species in the process we started to burn primarily plankton that has been underground for hundreds of millions of years and in doing so revert the atmosphere back to a more ancient ratio of carbon dioxide to other molecules which is to use a technical term bad right 440 parts per million co2 in the atmosphere is something that has never happened as long as there have been humans on the planet here's the problem so people say well we've just got to go back to local farming it's an incredibly privileged notion if we go back to local farming most of the human population starts to death if we go back to you want a real paleo diet a pre-agriculture diet go eat weeds none of the fruits and vegetables in your grocery store existed because every single one has been modified by humanity through agriculture for over fifty thousand years this is a this is a big deal so this goes back to the question about what does religion have to offer science i don't think most scientists would would uh be pro fracking or oil pipelining now some scientists are literally petroleum scientists or geological scientists and something like they're living but in the academy there is great concern about how scientific knowledge is applied through engineering and in terms of what scientific strategies we approach there are genuine concerns you can place with genetically modified organisms now i tend to be more concerned about a homogeneous agriculture we have very little gene diversity among crops and if a bug learns to make one type of corn sick and that's all you've got you don't have any more corn you get a corn plague basically and corn is so intrinsic to how we eat and you don't have time to raise other crops to offset it you people literally starve [Music] so i think that's this the the important thing is science is not moral or immoral science is a moral and the decisions we make with our actions influence how science unfolds um and we constantly make decisions that reinforce bad behaviors at the institutional level in the sciences every person who buys an eight-cylinder engine when they need a four reinforces bad decisions every person who buys way more beef than they should be eating not only does themselves a health disservice but encourages not only carbon use but excess use of antibiotics which may ultimately be a cause for a big population crash for us we don't have a lot of new antibiotics in the queue to replace what we've got so we've had a technological arms race that i agree with you in a lot of ways has gone off the rails so how do we say enough is enough i think we're so frustrated with corporations and the political apparatus that we feel disempowered and we go to social media to vent which i think we should anyone who says social media doesn't influence the formation of human belief or policy decisions is either intentionally lying or simply wrong but we can't stop with hashtags and facebook posts we've got to write letters to congressmen we've got to organize intentional economic boycotts and i think sometimes i think today maybe three times a week we've got to take our fight to the streets and raise public awareness and let our public officials know that non-action on climate change that non-action on antibiotic research that continued unethical actions on animal research are as vital to our species as other issues we care dearly about that part of the march for racial justice and gender justice and social justice also includes a pro-human application of the sciences technology engineering and industry even even you know cancer treatments they they're brutal they're primitive and one thing modern medicine modern medicine is great at measuring how well something works but its reductive approach to the human body has made its search for statistical validity which it has lose its ability to provide holistic comfort to a patient i was ill recently and desperate for relief and i went to a holistic healing center and for all of the methodological objections i had to their prognosis and treatment the way they asked about my entire life spent a long time with a patient viewed me as an individual person and not as a number on a chart and points of data played a role in my recovery so western medicine needs to learn that there's a reason so many people are turning to alternative health therapies and that's they're tired of being treated as an assemblage of organs i don't want to make the answer too long i'm going to go one more part cancer is complicated it's it's um cancer is a collection of related disorders and there are many what all cancers share in common is uh genetic damage and so when you get a cut your cells get destroyed that sends a chemical signal there's a problem and so your cells have little switches in your dna that say it's time to reproduce very quickly and in most cells there are four of those and then there's a fifth gene that is a break that says don't reproduce quickly it's designed to keep your body from making cells that grow too fast and it's if you think about it it's incredible when you get a cut starting at the bottom of the cut new cells grow very rapidly and fill the cut or the wound and then when they reach the surface what do they do they all stop again and they reproduce at a normal speed and in cancer at least one of the genes to say grow gets switched on permanently which exposure to ionizing radiation like the sun or x-rays can cause and the gene that says don't grow gets switched on and when that happens you have a cancer cell now your immune system is always watching out for rogue agents so it can get a few of them but if you hit a critical mass in a part of your body and those cancer cells outrun your t cells you now have a tumor you have cancer the problem is the probably the ideal cancer therapy is a genetic therapy that puts those genes back where they are but there's thousands of different types of cancer that involve different genetic components and in different people these genes may be in place in different parts of the dna sequence so you almost have to create a gene therapy specific to each type of cancer that can be customized to each person so our approach instead is to use poisons that target fast growing cells this is why chemotherapy causes so much stomach trouble because the cells of your colon and stomach lining reproduce very quickly and so they're almost universally attacked by chemotherapy as much as tumors are and some chemotherapy regimens also cause genetic damage increasing the propensity of cancer especially in people who are genetically prone to it so this is it's a it's a brutal means of treating the problems we don't know other what do we the other thing we do we blast it with radiation which has its own set of problems because other tissues are getting bombarded by design by ionizing radiation increasing their risk of developing cancers so i think in that case and i go deeply into my opinion here i just gave you a lot of very verifiable scientific fact now i'm going to go into my opinion i think we need to be more honest with people about the pain and suffering cancer treatments will cause i think every oncologist should be matched with a therapist and a grief counselor and i think cancer uniquely embodies the problem with western medicine we try to treat a tumor without treating the person and the resulting trauma from that sickness and it makes people feel attacked and abandoned and that is that is not the right way to do science and we're capable of better and the only way it happens is we demand it because here's the ultimate point like everyone else scientists are trying to make it to friday like everyone else scientists are trying to make it to friday they have a busy workload they've got their job they're trying to do it they're not thinking about larger issues none of us spend all our time thinking about larger order issues we think about this thing that's our task we try to do as well as we can and be nice to other people and sometimes the only way to create change in the world is to be a pain in the ass and uh that's new information to me but i've grown increasingly aware of it so i want you to know i value you that we need you that we're happy you're here and if if your doctor is not doing a good job of making you feel loved and known my wish for you is that there are people in your life who pick up that slack um and i bet there's some people in this room who would be happy to do so so thank you for coming you hi science mike um i'm hoping that my question isn't too personal and that people in the room can benefit from the answer okay um just be careful what you ask me because i will answer literally any question okay good um i grew up in a fundamental christian home um i actually went around to lots of different churches my mother toured around sort of in a uh in a musical trio so i was in the car at the front pew you know with my mom singing up there all the time so i'm very familiar with evangelical christian environment my husband and i got married very young i was 21 and he was 20. and that was just a year ago so um congratulations um but little did i know that my husband was going to bring me along a journey that i would have never expected after we got married which is this journey of sort of but i am very grateful because i would have never gone down it without him uh this journey of deconstruction and questioning of what we believed because we never did and um it's been beautiful but it's been hard um and uh i run a little bit behind him because he's very progressive and he's always you know going at it and all his whole life you know revolves around this whereas i have a i have a job i have a full-time nine-to-five job um and my life does not revolve around just being able to think about my existence and you know my faith and what it means so um i guess my question is i keep coming to this this this point of of sort of anger and confusion where i'm willing to accept justifying things and proving things with facts and science i am very aware of the inconsistencies that i was kind of that were shoved down my throat when i was a child i'm aware of those and i've rejected them and i always come to this point where i'm just angry at the fact that i don't know how to come to terms with um being able to bring up all these facts and science and say well this is evidence-based we can see this this is why we believe this and this is why this is not right in the bible and uh but then say well i do have faith i believe in jesus and i don't know and like i believe in god but like there is no fact or science that you can tell someone i'm trying to like give you a good question but like how do you come to terms with using facts and science to back everything except for your faith in god [Laughter] that landed well good job thank you okay my solution is simple i commit to being a weirdo just an incredibly strange person that makes everyone uncomfortable because around religious people i tend to talk about the value of things we can prove and demonstrate via a philosophy called empiricism probably more accurately an epistemology called empiricism and appears in empiricism is the idea that you put a confidence and a belief that is in proportion to the evidence you have to support that belief so you might have a belief that unicorns are the dominant life form on earth right that's a belief you could hold but if you were to test that idea by walking outside and watching nature programs and counting the number of unicorns you see versus other animals you might find the number of unicorns you're able to count relatively low possibly near zero and so you would look at that empirically and say well i believe this idea but i don't have any evidence for it and so i must lower my confidence and belief i'm not saying it's impossible that unicorns are the dominant form of life on earth i'm saying it is extraordinarily unlikely and this is important science does not prove or disprove things ever math can prove or disprove things you can get a proof in geometry or algebra you don't get a proof in science you get to raise or lower statistical confidence in a given hypothesis that's all science does i tend to emphasize that around people of faith why because they tend to not think that way but when i'm around skeptics and i know they accept empiricism i tend to talk about alternate brain states and i tend to talk about mysticism and why that matters to me and i i i thought for a long time that's because i'm exceedingly clever and have insights no one else does and that was a joke but it's also true and um it turns out i'm actually just a non-conformist like i'm just really strongly wired to for a peacemaker politely and with a southern accent challenge everything people hold dear and um but the marriage for me between empiricism and mysticism is actually one of necessity we could say you can't provide scientific evidence to support the idea that there is god that god exists and i firmly disagree with an important caveat what do you mean by god there are some people who are called pantheists and pantheists believe that the universe itself is god i have high confidence that the universe exists not absolute but as high confidence i have in pretty much anything that the universe exists so if you say the universe is god you can with scientific statistical confidence make a claim that god exists and this is the important point we miss in conversations on faith everyone throws around the word god like candy and everybody means something different by the word right so if your god is a sentient bundle of cotton candy that orbits saturn i cannot provide scientific statistical confidence in a belief in the cotton candy god or indeed in the flying spaghetti monster that atheists have made famous so when i am forced to theologically defend a position about god i will be very specific about what i mean i will say god is at least a set excuse me god is at least the set of forces that created and sustained the universe as experienced via a psychosocial model rooted in human brains and uh seminarians universally accept that definition um pastors love it especially in the baptist church um that's a very limited view of god physics einstein's god spinoza's god plus a particular way our brains process that experience but the reason i have that justification for god is simply so i don't feel like a fool when i delight in god's presence because what i've discovered in the mystical tradition of christianity where god cannot be known through language or rhetoric or image that god can only be known through love my study of neuroscience validates the fact that there are things about god that simply cannot be known or discussed but only felt and experienced and those are the most beautiful things of all those are the things that sometimes i walk down the street and start to weep and make people on the sidewalk think i'm pretty nutty but it's not because i mean i am nutty but it's because in a moment i looked around and all i could see was reflections of god's love in everyone's faces including the people who are flicking people off in traffic excluding the people that are tweeting and i'm just filled with this gratitude for it all logically it's a messy hack but neurologically it more accurately describes the way that human beings view the world it turns out we're not rational actors it turns out that we evolved a rational capacity not to learn things about the world but to make fancy language to convince other people our gut feeling was correct imagine that that's the birth of rationalism evolution so i let empiricism do what it does well test ideas including my ideas about god but when i reach the end of the road of what can be tested and measured i've learned to let go and dwell within that that can only be loved and it sounds crazy unless you've been there too and i recognize those people because when i talk about sitting in god's presence i remember i got to sit in a room and talk to richard rohr a few times and one time we were talking about special moments of meditation and i said you get to a point when you just and a tear rolled down his cheek and a tear rolled down mine you get to a point where you just it's not a profound statement unless you have been there the miracle to me is a garbage in physics seems impersonal and distant every time in my life i've reached out god has reached back [Music] hey there hi my name is jen and my husband and i like to listen to your liturgist podcast um i've been a christian my whole life and as i get older i'm becoming more spiritual and i believe less and less in hell and it's really interesting to talk about that because if if hell doesn't exist like i thought it did then what do we need jesus to save us from and do i have to believe in health to be a christian and maybe your thoughts on how you've dealt with that okay thank you what a great question hell is not in the bible hell is a interpretation of a set of unrelated ideas in the scriptures the old testament speaks primarily of sheol the place of the dead which in that iris theology they were basically annihilationists um at different points in in jewish history either believe that people went to sheol and then faded away or some people went to abraham's bosom which was not like super specifically defined or they went to sheol and faded away and then you get to the new testament and jesus will speak of a place called gehana i've been there i've been to hell it's really nice this time of year gehan is a specific spot outside of jerusalem where they threw away the trash and they would light the trash on fire and worms would eat it and lepers and the poor would pick through the trash in a place where the fire always burned and the worm never died and as they picked through the trash that was what weeping and gnashing of teeth so when jesus would say to be apart from god is to go to gajana in a modern context it would say to be apart from god is to wander around in a trash dump now there's other there's other support for hell right jesus spoke of a rich man who ignored the needs of the poor and then was sent to a place where he would do anything for a drop of water on his tongue and jesus spoke of a faith like a mustard seed and jesus spoke that the kingdom of heaven was like a little bit of yeast why is that parable of jesus the literal one now later we do see ideas that maybe more strongly resemble what we think about when we talk about hell with a guy named paul paul was a roman who existed in hellenized thought and hellenic philosophy had a hell so i think you make a pretty good reasonable inference that hell is an idea imported into christianity by hellenized people and that it actually is the first major shift tectonic shift away from the primarily jewish centered teachings of christ and towards a hellenized faith so do you can you be a christian and not believe in hell it depends on who you ask um i would say of course you don't have to believe in hell but other people would say that's heresy here's an important caveat i want you to find a christian somewhere in the world who is not a heretic to some other christian give it a shot so you go to the roman catholic church right well the reformed would say they're in heresy right even though they would say what are you talking about you're in rebellion to rome and the greek orthodox are saying you're all crazy offshoots of the original movement we who invented logic are the ones who mutually excommunicated rome because they tried to put logic in terms of the divine which we considered heresy right which by the way we have the oldest churches in the holy city and we would claim we were there before 80 72 when jerusalem was destroyed by rome find a christian who is not some other christian's heretic so what what is where does that leave us well first of all the word heresy has kind of gotten diluted to the point of meaninglessness but a particular religious tradition american evangelicalism has done a pretty good job since about 1946 of presenting itself as the one true orthodox form of christianity and being an accurate representation of first century christianity and historically that's just a very weak claim who's a christian teacher what are the greatest commandments in all of scripture well to love the lord your god with all your heart your strength your mind and your soul and to love your neighbor as yourself but who is my neighbor he tells a story of the good samaritan and we hear that story and we think the protagonist is the good samaritan there is not a jew who would have been alive at that time in history who would have identified with one of those samaritans the person lying on the side of the road was assumed by the listener to be jewish and the people who passed by were the most respected and elite members of jewish society who refused to help one of their own because he was unclean and so it took the good muslim the good atheist the good lesbian the taboo hated member of culture to come show what it meant to be a follower of christ when are you a christian when you are a good neighbor who follows jesus done and anyone who spends most of their energy trying to decide who is in or out has missed the point of those stories this is not a faith about building fences this is a faith about knocking them down the first movement in the church was a fight about whether gentiles were allowed or not and we know how that goes church history has been a move towards inclusivity church history has been about fulfilling the great commission which is not an indoctrination of a certain set of values the most beautiful thing in all of christian theology to me is the trinity the father the son the holy ghost christ was not jesus's last name christ was the part of the original identity of god the part of the trinity that invited all of creation into reconciliation with the divine which means anything that creates peace in the world is a christ's energy jesus incarnated the christ as an agent of peace and so do you every time you create peace in the world anything that goes against peace and reconciliation would then be anti-christ to be a christian create peace in the world how do you do that the parable is clear you treat the wounds of the wounded and you take someone who has been hurt and lacks the resources to protect themselves and you take them to the nearest end and you say take care of everything they need and i will be back to pay the bill who is a good neighbor a good neighbor says black lives matter a good neighbor says i stand with my gay lesbian trans bisexual intersex and queer neighbors a good neighbor says i will not rest until no one is left on the side of this road and a bad neighbor walks by because they are too righteous and none of that has anything to do to do with hell as an eternal place of torment people in america today know exactly what hell is like and we're the ones who are leaving them there [Applause] [Music] so your podcast from kansas city recently came out and there was a young woman who asked a question about female participation and essentially part of your answer involved men making way and making a space for women my question and i realize it's fairly more culturally relevant right now is how do i balance my desire to make space for women for other races for lgbt people with my my own personal desires and my own perceived needs be more specific what do you mean so an example would be my desire to ask a question okay great yeah or or as i alluded to possibly the the needs or the perceived needs or or that of half of this country yeah okay great thank you economies aren't zero sum games we have a belief that in order for someone to win someone else has to lose it's kind of intrinsic to the species it's just not true just not true funny thing about economies the data seems to indicate the more people who win the bigger people win you know we've got great data points that show that uh in cultures with the highest rates of economic disparity rich people get sick more often we're not and then there's no individuals we're a social species to say i got to get mine and they can't get theirs is for a body to say i need luscious hair so i'll cut off my toes it's just it's ridiculous it creates a malformed unhealthy society so when i say creating space i don't mean men should not have jobs we're kind of getting to that point if you look at college graduation rates um in some ways men might be accidentally seating the floor too aggressively and our mothers sisters and spouses might have to provide housing and shelter for us what i'm saying is for those of us that are in social positions where the wind is at our back we have to use that advantage to get rid of our advantage that's what i'm saying there is no way if i was a woman of color my podcast would be as popular my book deal comes easily or as quickly because without 10 times the work so as a white straight male when i said i want to talk about progressive social issues the world went yeah you've even got a deep radio voice right like this is incredible we're all gonna download it so um when my publisher asked me who were authors they should be looking out for um i'll admit there were no straight white men on my list and i'm sorry straight away man you can go get a publishing deal pretty easily with no help just go walk into a bookstore go look at the spirituality section right it's really easy to be a straight hetero guy and get a publishing deal and frankly our perspective is so well known it's not that interesting i have found that the authors i'm reading today that just light me up they're a diverse set i have a podcast that co-host called the liturgist podcast and we just made a decision we weren't going to air episodes that only featured white men anymore ever what happened when we embodied not tokenism i'm not talking about tokens you take your tokens to the arcade right like i'm talking about when you bring the fullness of humanity to address an issue you get a better perspective i'm doing this because it makes the product better so in season three and it took a long time it took a lot after the decision it took months and months and months of serious effort to change the way we tool the show it wasn't just like a here we go but we embodied diversity and guess what happened our downloads went like this you know why because media diversity is shitty and people are people are hungry people desire more voices people are tired of the same milk toast white bread media it's not interesting so i'm not saying white men need to leave i'm saying we need to pull other people up on the stage with us and once they're there since we've had the mic for like 200 000 years maybe we could stand in the back of the acceptance speech and do like this maybe for the first time in modern history we could play and support roles on purpose and that does not mean you can't be ambitious it doesn't mean you can't be successful i firmly believe you will actually be more successful in what you do when you partner with all of humanity to do it so i think any perceived conflict is just perceived because you think it's a zero-sum game wait if i get a call for a speaking event and i recommend someone else i'll starve no there's a there's a lot of speaking events and you might actually find that when you have a reputation of giving incredibly solid speaker recommendations from voices they haven't heard before you become more popular and the phone rings more often and you make more it is a self-feeding virtuous cycle it's beautiful i speak from experience and i've just started i've just started we always have to remember that life is not a zero sum game and when we help others win we win hey uh so and previously you brought up um paul bringing in hellenistic ideas into the bible and such so i was just wondering uh if you think that certain parts of the bible aren't god inspired maybe uh in other words just made up or you know thought up by men and um and so with that idea do you just kind of sum it all up and say the golden rule is is the rule no so great question though um the whole bible was inspired by god including the parts about going into the promised land and killing all the enemy soldiers and the women and the children and burning the livestock that was inspired by god in revelation with a multi-headed beast rising from the ocean and a king composed of you know different materials and all these weird that was inspired by god when it says in the beginning god said let there be light that was inspired by god the whole bible was inspired by god i once wrote a song called song for jenny i'm real clever because the song was a song and it was written for a person named jenny who ultimately came became my wife because i wrote that song to propose to her if you listen to the lyrics of song for jenny you would learn so much about jenny because i love her so much and she means so much to me you would learn about jenny about me describing my relationship with jenny my experience with jenny because the whole song was inspired by jenny but jenny didn't write song for jenny that would be some weird narcissism right like if you heard that song that's beautiful and at the end you heard jenny wrote it you would never like the song or jenny again so the thing i love about the bible is that it was all inspired by god and how much people love god and sometimes are really pissed at god every lamentations that's not a real pro-god book you ever read my favorite book ecclesiastes everything is meaningless for the whole book i'm not over right he would just name things the teacher colette and then talk about how meaningless they are and in the end of course he redeems it by saying but the teacher loved and followed god without answering any of the questions that's so real and so where i am in my life reading ecclesiastes every time lifts me up because in the bible is somebody that doesn't get it and considered to be one of the great wisdom writers but that means we can't read the bible simplistically ever there was not a word in the bible in which the author intended as his audience americans living in 2016. there is not one word in the bible intended for americans in 2016. there's not one word in the bible intended for americans by the author the bible is a library of books written by men about god assembled by the church and that makes it more valuable to me and not less because it is through the humanity of the bible that we encounter its divinity it's because the bible is a love letter and kind of a dear john letter to god and because of that because we have hundreds of authors over a period of 1500 years recording an ongoing discovery of who god is in different circumstances wherever you are in your walk of faith somebody in the bible is there too if you think god is as near as the next breath and loves you dearly will rock out with you if you think this is all probably [ \_\_ ] lamentations has your back if you find god so mysterious and distant moses gets it he stood before a bush that was on fire that talked about existentialism and then said take your shoes off if sometimes you feel like you need a god you can talk to the gospels are with you they need an incarnation for god to make sense but in no case do we get to take a sentence out of the bible and treat it like a constitution because constitutions didn't exist when the bible was written and the authors of the old testament meant for the text to be wrestled with that was part of the process wrestled with together by the way they discussed the bible systematically in groups the hebrew bible in paul's epistles let's be honest a lot of times i think paul's nuts but i read it alone and i forget that these epistles were meant to be read aloud to people gathered together as a church and not meant to be perceived through an individualist lens so to unlock the power of the bible we have to do like biblical scholarship and that's hard it makes the bible a more challenging book than infinite jest by david foster wallace right and that's a challenging book have you seen the footnotes it has more footnotes than the bible but at least you can read it with a western content context and that's how it was meant to be read but enlightenment westerners philosophy didn't exist when any of the bible was written or assembled so what is the bible is inspired by god everything what of the bible is meant to be ascribed literally and legalistically through a modern context none of it the bible's a tough book and it's not for babies hey um so my question is about the way millennials are perceived specifically usually by older generations i was on facebook like yesterday and so one of my parents friends had posted a picture from uh like after their election results and it was of this like these young girls like at a hillary rally that were crying and the caption was the everybody gets a trophy generation summed up into one picture and i feel like i hear this a lot older generations complaining about us saying that we're lazy or i don't know so what what's with that divide um is there any legitimacy to what they're saying are we lazy thanks for setting me up with that one uh did me a real solid so the trophy that got all these the trophy that got the generation that got these trophies who gave those trophies who's complaining using that language who gave all those millennials trophies i mean other than me but that was just my kid and my kids a special snowflake but the rest of those millennials just got to get right oh man i am so over millennial bashing oh my gosh i mean i guess if you hate a generation that like accepts friends of diff different ethnic identities without judgment i guess that's kind of a bummer if you have a generation that is capable of both being conservative theologically and accommodating to people of different gender and sexual identities i guess that's a real bummer if you have people who are lazy because they can only find service industry works because the boomers blew their retirement on a stock crash and insufficient savings so they worked longer than anyone else the generation x could advance so there's just no jobs but they have crippling college debt because they were told they needed a degree so they feel economically disempowered but they have low income and high student income debt and that's lazy and not systemic i guess you can make an argument i might be showing my bias here i'm in generation x i'm in generation x and we realized really early that in some ways and let me say hashtag not all boomers right now but um the baby boomer generation said we're going to change the world in the 60s and then said you know what actually a stock portfolio would be quite nice and just started to eat the earth like cake there's no perfect generation the greatest generation executed one of the biggest cons in the history of white supremacy with the gi bill after world war ii they created white wealth and the income disparity we deal with today they could have solved it then or made huge progress just by giving the same benefits to black gis and they didn't but they were at least civically minded the boomers just decided to eat the world who built that national debt and then they want to call millennials lazy or cry babies i'm sorry if the suffering of people differently than me moves me deeply oh so sorry i guess i'll grow up and stop caring for other people contrary to the banter millennials fill me with hope because at some point the boomers will make like moses and they won't make it into the promised land is die off first and honestly thus generation xers we're so cynical we refuse to act so we believe like millennials but we don't think anything can happen i have great sympathy for your generation the one that follows you you've been handed a world that is nearly mortally wounded so here's what here's my advice my younger friends what we think about you doesn't matter the world is yours time will do what time does death will be the change agent that it is and then you will face the same task every proceeding generation has been given to make a world and admittedly most generations have been extraordinarily thoughtless about this activity but you are armed with a new set of scientific insight you are armed with a global communications grid that lets you experience more different perspectives than any other generation in human history by the way you're welcome generation x built that so uh that's our one mark on human history the internet um the world is yours to make if you want to give everybody a trophy give everybody a trophy but don't lose this fire you feel right now don't lose this sense that something in the world is wrong that there is a sickness that needs to be healed because i think millennials more than any other generation in american history have the potential to actually be salt and light to actually be a preserving force in the world now maybe my idealism is misplaced perhaps not only the american experiment is drawing to a close but evolutions experiment with homo sapiens i don't rule that out as a possibility but i choose instead of cynicism about future generations hope i choose instead of hoarding to invest in you because by the numbers you're great by the numbers you don't treat each other the way we've treated each other by the numbers you talk about sex more but have it less often by the numbers you have lower rates of teen pregnancy drug use alcohol use i mean you smoke a lot of weed but don't let them lie the boomers do too and the generation after you statistically is even better and the thing that gives me hope about millennials is the only time historically speaking humans are capable of positive change is when it looks like we've reached the end and that changes the way our brains work what i'm hoping is you're inheriting a world just bad enough to inspire you but still good enough to be saved so um yeah i have not read your book so most people have it i don't know if you have covered maybe anything that relates to my question and it's not as intellectual as some of the other questions but i wanted to know how do you think would an official announcement or a confirmation of alien life forms impact christianity um in your opinion yeah that's a good question so i started ask science mike because people on twitter told me to that's true i didn't actually come up with a show but once i started this podcast my goal was that like christians who grew up without a science background i could just help them catch up that was the goal for ask science mike and it became like kind of a combination between like dear abby like science mike what do i do and like hey science mike here are unanswered questions in theology philosophy and the sciences so what's up can you answer it and that's tough that is exactly the kind of question i just wait for what would a discovery of extraterrestrial life do to christianity what would it do to humanity i don't think there could be bigger or more significant news i really don't because there is not a person alive who hasn't spent a significant amount of their life trying to figure out how did this happen and by this i mean everything where did we come from are we here on purpose are we an accident you know what i mean like this search for belonging in our origins is universal and the biggest problem we have is a scarcity of data we've got all these theories religious scientific philosophic ethical plenty of different plausible ideas we have no way to know which ones are right and which ones are wrong so if we found one microbe on mars living or dead it would be the greatest scientific discovery in human history here's why we found it on mars mars is close life is probably really common is that microbe based on dna it's based on dna is that dna similar to dna of life on earth or not and by what percentage if it is in any way similar are we all martians and now life is rare again but if it's dna based and dissimilar is dna a universal framework for how life develops that would tell us a lot about the conditions under which life develops that's a microbe on mars that's not intelligent life if we find a microbe 200 000 years from now when a faster than life probe enters a star system very far away and we find one microbe that tells us life is probably a lot less common but if we hit the big one if we hit a signal from another intelligent species in the universe then we are not alone what do they know about their origins we can compare notes how did they come to be and i'll be honest if we encounter a civilization in some other corner of the galaxy that has one word in common with us and it's jesus i'm gonna freak out i will probably go back to the baptist church and be like hey everybody 6 000 years for reals right that's the level of impact a discovery like that could have if they're like no man passes to the father except by me i'll be like what so what impact can extra life have on our theology absolute for for my evangelical friends what if we mean aliens that don't sin are they heavenly beings no they die they just don't sin they don't commit moral transgressions of any kind they don't need a savior well i guess we can we can work that out what if we meet extraterrestrials that do sin do they need jesus do we proselytize them one of my favorite books is called the book of strange new things it's a book about a missionary who's sent to an alien planet to spread the word of god to aliens it's incredible it's science fiction obviously uh but it turns out this these aliens are the only ones that can grow food on their planet and we've destroyed ours so we're hoping to settle there and the only way they'll let people act on their planet and give them food is if we give them a missionary because the first missionary who went there they got really excited about jesus and all professed faith and became christians and then the priest went missing so they needed another missionary sort of cost of billions of dollars they send a second missionary to the planet to how advanced another civilization is compared to us will influence that if we meet a more advanced civilization i think it's probably bad news for most religious faiths in most theologies because a lot of the questions we find pressing an existential they will teach their toddlers it's possible another civilization if like if you can travel faster than light you can channel enough energy to just make planets go right so in the event that they we wouldn't have a war of the worlds you know i mean any more than like an ant colony wages war on a city it would change everything it would change everything for my faith i wouldn't change it at all i wouldn't change it at all it would be at the heart of my faith the mystery we call god so delights in creation that god can't stop creating sounds about right to me a god that invites the creator to partner in the ongoing process of creation has done that multiple times in the universe and that's a big validation but i'm a weird christian i don't make like exclusive theological claims or really any fact claims at all i would just be fascinated but i have absolutely no hesitation that if you think trump is big news the amount of social upheaval following first contact will dwarf anything that's happened in the history of this species so you've done it you've listened to another episode of ask science mike and i'm so glad you did i want to thank greg nordine for his tireless work making the show sound like something professional instead of the absolute horror i commit to tape i want to thank andrew golucky for his work in pre-production and coordinating our together groups if you're in a city in america and you think it might just be you we build groups on facebook so people can find each other go to asklandsmike.com and click on the together logo to learn more i want to thank my patrons on patreon who make this show financially possible and when the show's not live get to pick the questions we'll be back to that kind of schedule later in the year thanks for listening everybody and i'll talk to you next week