ASM067 Waking Up, Pronouns for God, and Abiogenesis

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waking up pronouns for god and abiogenesis all that and more on this week's episode of ask science mike

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welcome to ask science mike the weekly podcast where i answer your questions about science faith and life listen we're getting together in denver and chicago me michael gunger lisa gunger for something called the liturgist gathering we'd love for you to join us uh tickets are going really fast if you'd like more information check out the liturgist.com but for now hey we've got a podcast to do so let's get it started hey mike thanks for all you do i and the group of college students that i pastor have been deeply impacted by your work so look i've got a couple questions related to energy one more scientific one a little bit more theological um so i i know though i don't understand that the law of conservation of energy implies that energy is infinite um and you know i've seen the minute physics video about the singularity where he mentions that the big bang maybe one of many in an infinitely repeating cycle of expansion and compression and this bottles my mind of course um and so i'm curious like how does that work but but i also am curious on the theological side of this you see i don't generally have a problem living with the paradoxes created by a simultaneous commitment to empiricism and spirituality however the part of the christ narrative to which i cling most closely is the idea of universal reconciliation that all that goes out from the divine returns to it but what if the divine has always been and always will be sending out i mean if energy is infinite what does that do to the resurrected christ being alpha and omega if if neither of those truly exist or you know is this just another example of of dualistic thinking run amok uh thanks mike i look forward to your answer well let's start with the easy part of that question which is about the law of conservation of energy which is basically the idea that within a closed system energy can't be created or destroyed and it is fundamental to the laws of physics as we understand them it's foundational for all sciences absolutely essential it's important to understand though in a closed system so for example the earth is not a closed system it gets energy from the sun it releases energy into space so there's nothing closed about the earth that's why for example we talk about entropy increases which is another law of physics the second law of thermodynamics and well people say that evolution's not possible because you have this you know increase in order then that's because the earth is not a closed system so yes the law of conservation of energy is a real law with extraordinary support for it now what does that mean for god um let's let's be very clear for a moment right now when we talk about the singularity or the cosmic inflation the the period of time when the universe expanded very rapidly after the singularity our confidence goes down significantly in those claims what our equations tell us is not necessarily that singularity is an inscrutable mystery but merely that the laws we have don't describe reality accurately enough to make predictions about that kind of state so there's all kinds of ideas and hypothesis floating around in the sciences about where the universe came from and what the ultimate fate of the universe will be and those are open questions in the sciences they are not resolved so there are many scientists who believe it's likely or probable that the universe exists in this state of compression and expansion a cycle that continues well let's think about the theological implications i believe that most of the time when we find ourselves confused about god it's because we're taking god and we're putting god into a human reference frame we're taking an anthropomorphic view of the divine so a beginning and an end in a cycle seems to undermine the idea of an alpha and omega and first i would say i don't make fact claims using my faith i don't use theology to make predictions about the universe so you're kind of venturing into an area of theology i don't really go to but if i did i would look at it this way a perception of linear time like we experience in causality is a localized reference frame it's not a holistic view of the universe i've said it on the podcast before relativity seems to indicate because of the relative alignment of reference frames based on the variable passage of time in a localized reference frame the only constant being the speed of light that all coordinates of space time always exist so if there's a beginning and an end even if they're cyclical they always exist from a more holistic view of the entire space time fabric construct whatever it is now here's the thing about trying to make great theological alignments or predictions on physics we have no idea which model of cosmic origins is going to gain experimental support first there's different multiverse models there are some models that don't require multiverse at all it may be that none of the theories we have today pan out into capital t theories with a large body of work that supports their validity i think the lesson for us is that it's exciting and in fact awe-inspiring to consider our cosmological origins and how that may relate to what we call god but it's also important to note that god is not like us god is not bound in space and time in any reasonable definition of the word god i don't speak of god as a being i speak of god as the ground of being you know i'm more comfortable with pantheism than traditional theism we tend to try to box god in to the universe as we understand it and if science makes anything clear it's that our perspective in relation to the cosmos is you know more limited than the perspective of an ant to manhattan or a bacterium to my neighborhood we are experiencing things based on the particular scale that we function in ultimate reality as we understand it both cosmological and quantum does nothing to serve our intuition and so i think we have a responsibility in our theology to acknowledge the great mystery of reality so my primary response to god is not one of trying to understand or master but to love and to show gratitude toward that which we call god our next question came in via email and it reads hey science mike i have a question about sleep however the question isn't really about sleep but rather it's about waking up it seems as if many people justifiably place a lot of emphasis on the importance of creating environments for ourselves to ensure that we rest well but seem to neglect or fail to mention very much about the end of that process so i want to know what the science is behind waking up scientifically are there more beneficial or less beneficial ways to wake up in order to get the most out of the first hour or two of my day why does it seem like waking up is infinitely more difficult than actually falling asleep or am i alone in this signed groggy bobby well bobby uh first of all difficulty of waking up versus sleeping is gonna vary by individual and their circumstances some people have incredible difficulty falling asleep some to the point of suffering insomnia other people find the transition to sleepfulness more difficult than the transition to wakefulness i'm going to make um a conjecture that for a majority of people falling asleep is easier than waking up and i'm not basing that on clay any any data that's an intuitive judgment call so uh find some data to that point i'd love to hear it i'll see you on twitter or my facebook page one thing about your question that i have to address is that science is absolutely clear that you cannot view falling asleep sleeping well and waking up in isolation because they are all part of a cycle a feedback loop that influences itself and one of the reasons waking up is so difficult for most people is that we as a civilization are chronically sleep deprived even though science is really clear most people need at least seven preferably eight hours a night of sleep most people feel good if they get sick like that's the goal and some studies have shown that getting six hours of sleep a night over time is kind of like not sleeping at all in terms of your health risks and your cognitive degradation uh sleep is essential so part of waking up is good sleep habits so don't consume caffeine after 4 pm don't eat or drink alcohol right before bed another piece of conditioning advice don't use your bed for anything but sleep or sex minimize your exposure to screens glowing blue light screens especially into the evening and here's why your sleep and wake cycle in the brain appears to be related to sodium and potassium currents when you have a sodium current in your brain according to some studies on flies and mice your neurons are more active and it brings you into a waking state whereas these potassium currents cause a reduction in neurological activity and this cycle of currents is influenced by two things one exposure to light and two when we eat and what size of our meals so when you get jet lagged and i have a lot of experience with jet lag after this spring and all the travel that i did you have a different sunrise and sunset all the time and your body has a hard time catching up now there's a second cycle supposedly related to eating and a 16 hour fast before breakfast in your city of destination supposedly can help reset that clock a lot faster i have not tried it because i'm too much of a wimp to fast for 16 hours but i've heard and i've seen data to support that that's a good practice now waking up is hard because of something called sleep inertia so even if you're getting over time the right amount of sleep which makes waking up easier waking up at the wrong slice of your sleep cycle create sleep inertia every night when you sleep you have different phases of sleep this answer will be too long if i go into all of them that's all over the internet but if you wake up in the wrong cycles you feel very sleepy and very groggy so here's some tips assuming you have good sleep hygiene and sleep habits that will make waking up easier number one open your curtains let natural light into your room and have that be part of your waking process now that's not possible you can simulate that with alarm clocks that have lights on them but sunlight is best in my home i have all these big windows and blinds but no curtains and so the sun is a huge part of how i wake up in the morning you can also make sure you pick alarm sounds that don't stress you out you did mention that some ways are more or less beneficial well if you hate your alarm sound it scares you or it startles you you're going to create a stress and a negative conditioning with the process of waking up that makes you dread it and it will actually maybe even cause anxiety that makes it difficult for you to sleep because you dread the alarm clock so i stick to sounds and tones that i find pleasing and pleasant to wake me up but that's with the big caveat i try to avoid sleep deprivation to the point where i'll sleep through those alarms so you're going to let natural light into your room you're going to get an alarm that doesn't freak you out and then finally i don't have a lot of data on these but the tech industry is all about these smart alarm clocks that using some measurement of your movement as you sleep either by putting your phone on the mattress or wearing a wrist strap figures out where you are in your sleep cycle and then wakes you up at the most opportune time in a window when you say you need to wake up uh so if you'd have to get up by 7 15 and it figures out that you're in the best state to wake up at you know 6 50 it sets the alarm then and you actually wake up feeling more rested than if you slept all the way to 7 15 whatever you do hitting the snooze button makes things worse because nine minutes for most people is a perfect amount of sleep to create sleep inertia so the final part of waking better is not using the snooze button the thing is all of these waking up strategies are way way less important than what time you go to bed and the quality of sleep you get so there's a reason all those articles focus on the sleep part of waking up because you can't wake up without a good night's sleep hi mike this is hannah i have a question about pronouns what do you use to refer to god it feels really strange to refer to god using a pronoun masculine or feminine feminine because he's see i just did it god isn't a person he's not a man he's not a woman like how what do you do i'm just so used to using he because that's what it's um that's how it's used in scripture and um how i grew up you know referring to him but it also feels weird to say it i don't know like what what has been your kind of solution for that what kind of pronoun do you use or do you just try to avoid pronouns all together and then you just have to be thinking about language all the time when you're talking about god thanks i am so with you this is one of the most difficult things about my faith right now what pronouns do i use for god uh let's talk historically about god you can't get around the fact that the historical depiction of god in a judeo-christian context is masculine although i've understood that pronouns for the spirit are often feminine in the original languages but i'm not qualified enough to discern that claim for myself i don't i don't speak uh aramaic or greek or hebrew or read them so i'm trusting the experts there there's also no denying that more ancient faith traditions appear to have revered god as a goddess or in feminine form and i've seen what appears to be reasonable anthropology and archaeology that says even within historical judaism and christianity women have had greater and less standing in the faith and that even potentially our holy texts and church history have been edited to favor a masculine narrative at different points in our history regardless as i understand god to assign god a gender is pretty ridiculous when we speak of male and female we're speaking of chromosomes biological structures of which i don't think god has any and if the way society is moving we're even realizing the degree to which the very buckets of male and female are constructs that don't perfectly or neatly map to reality and what does that do when we talk about god there's a couple of ways i approach this and i'm not satisfied with either one way is i don't use pronouns for god so god draws people to god's self right and you'll notice i do that a lot on the show and a lot on the liturgist podcast and i think that does a good job of the the reverence and the mystery of god of honoring those things but it's also distant if i said if i if i use pronouns for jenny my wife and i said well you know jenny really wants me to come home so that jenny doesn't have to keep watching madison and macy and you know and i never use a pronoun there's a there's a linguistically distancing effect and part of our faith a huge component of our faith are these personal experiences we have with god and pronouns create intimacy but we don't have singular non-gendered pronouns in english at least not any that have common enough usage to not be weird when we say them and this is an issue also for non-gender-conforming people so do we call god they so what i try to do is when appropriate to acknowledge god's mystery is i don't use pronouns at all and when i want to talk about god's intimacy i mix his and her because even the god of scripture the judeo-christian god is depicted as having masculine and feminine qualities out of habit i don't say an even mix of his or her right our language is not nearly as conscious of process as we think it is uh as you're trying to create a narrative different parts of your brain are engaged and your your left temporal lobe makes a lot of calls on its own that's the reason we often say things we're like how can i say that because our consciousness emerges from dozens of brain structures with competing priorities that cooperate sometimes and and other times don't uh they're every moment of your existence is as ugly a political fight as uh trump versus clinton we're we're a divided organism that's that's why our large network of brains we call one brain uh can be confusing so offer yourself some grace when you trip up and say his and also acknowledge the way that saying his can perpetuate a system of patriarchy and can marginalize people so what you do is you do your best to recondition you catch yourself and you try to find terms that help you describe god in a way that honors god's mystery makes her feel close and doesn't restrict other people from knowing or understanding the divine themselves our last question came in via email again and it says hello mike i've heard of this new darwin guy jeremy england and his theory of life being more or less a given providing some variables as opposed to spontaneous provided some variables this makes my imagination run wild this notion that biological life even consciousness could be a law of the universe the physics would expect it because of some basic properties governing matter rather than mathematics expecting it because of the dispassionate odds what is your take on this a related question is there any possible scientific support to the proposition of multiple biogenesis events on the earth if earth conditions were so conducive to it happening once why shouldn't it have happened twice or a dozen times this is a great question here's the first thing i want to say poor jeremy england and the media calls him the new darwin or could he be the new darwin sometimes i feel pressure of this mantle i've been given science mike which is nothing compared to being called the new darwin so i'm imagining that mr england did not hoist that label upon himself and also of course really important his theory of biogenesis doesn't really have anything to do with evolution via natural selection let's talk about a biogenesis that's the idea that life emerged on the earth the science of that and it's hard to study you know why because we think life started as proteins and amino acids and other soft compounds that don't fossilize particularly well and so when compared to other life studies we don't have a lot of forensic material to deal with when it comes to biogenesis it took a long time before animals had enough structures or life i shouldn't even say animals since life had enough structures to leave traces of itself other than chemical traces that makes biogenesis really hard to study and what jeremy england has done is provided a mathematically feasible framework for how life emerges and in fact his model predicts that life is not just possible but plausible even likely given the right conditions namely organic compounds with ongoing radiation exposure injecting energy into a system while suspended in a heat bath of some kind we imagine those kind of conditions life becomes likely now could it have happened multiple times on the earth absolutely could have happened multiple times in our solar system absolutely that's why we like sending probes to other planets so much we're looking for possible signs of this process occurring elsewhere in the solar system and maybe some forensic data that we don't have on the earth because what would happen today if organic compounds caused a biogenesis some little bacteria would just come by and eat it [Laughter] this this planet is already covered in life that has been honed by natural selection to explore every exploitable niche to find every bit of energy available for life on this planet doesn't mean conditions are wrong for biogenesis to occur it means that there's already too much life here for some independent strain of a biogenesis to occur it's a fascinating fascinating question now in terms of what this means for faith and what it means for god this is exactly what i talk about when i talk about this mysterious god a creator who is always creating the laws of physics are just it's so obvious to us now how stars happen in galaxies and planets and the fact that life could also be written into the fabric the basic mechanics of how the universe unfolds is beautiful and fascinating it deepens my faith in god not as some being that occasionally intervenes not this theistic god we're also hung up on but instead a ground of being and a source of all that is always creating that never stops intervening it's not that we try to go back to the vine it's that we discover the divine that god is already with us all the time well as i mentioned at the top of the program if you listen to the liturgist podcast if you're one of the spiritually homeless and frustrated that make up that community we're putting on two very affordable conferences they're going to be smaller intimate events in denver and chicago it's called the liturgist gathering and we'd love for you to come and hang out with us we're going to meet everybody there have time to spend with you unlike if you saw us on tour or something like that where we're rushing from city to city this is where we settle in for a couple of days and get to know everybody and the most amazing thing to me having done these events before is by the time the event is over you all tend to forget we're even there because you've met each other people who listen to the liturgists tend to be people who feel like they're the only one or they feel alone and what you'll find at the liturgist gathering is that you belong that you are part of something and there are other people like you you can get more information about that by going to the liturgists.com and if you can't spell literature no big deal a lot of people can't it's l i t u r g i s t s so the liturgists.com you can find all about belong i've got some more events coming up this summer um i'll be at the wild goose festival so i'd love to see you there i've actually got a discount code and that discount code is goosecast 2016 so if you're buying tickets to the wild goose festival if you use the discount code goose cast 2016 you'll get 20 off your ticket for wild goose which is really cool uh that they're doing that for people who listen to the podcast they're gonna be involved so i'm gonna be there doing an ass science mic live and i think we're gonna have a live allergist podcast as well so i'd love to see you at wild goose i'm also coming to saratoga federated church for a village forum on science and faith you can learn all about the places i'm going to be when and where and if i'm coming near you by going to ask sciencemike.com and clicking on the events tab speaking of ask sciencemike.com that's where you can go to get resources for every question on this episode and most episodes in the history of the program uh and that's also we can learn about supporting the show on patreon i have been blown away with how many people are participating with patreon now i don't i don't want to turn into another weepy love fest like last week but just know i appreciate you if you'd like to be a part of that just go to ask sciencemike.com and click on the patreon button uh if money's tight i get it you can rate the show on itunes and that's a huge help too appreciate everyone who's done that there's a lot of funny ones i really like the funny ones some of them are profound and make me cry too so thanks for all of you that are raiding the show uh i want to thank andrew golucky you know he's killing it he's absolutely killing it with these uh questions every week the show just gets better with his involvement greg nordeen has been playing around with different eq settings getting the show to sound even better i noticed i think it's amazing i hope you've noticed too and jeb botteford of course wrote our famous theme song that people now sing to me in airports it's an honor to spend this time with you and i will see you next week