ASM199b A Look Back

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the next episode about science mike is the 200th episode and gosh what a journey it has been with you all so far it's changed my life and so we thought we'd drop a bonus episode this week kind of looking back um at some of you know the greatest hits i guess of the show so far some of the most popular questions and responses that have happened on this program this is a bonus episode so we're not incrementing the counter and then we're going to take a week off actually maybe two weeks off uh waiting for november 9th when we record episode 200 and then the show will come out the following monday i'm really excited about that it has sold out but the good news is it's sold out several times what i mean is we're regularly you know people are deciding they're not able to come and uh getting there giving their tickets back or donating them um and so we are adding new tickets pretty regularly a few at a time so you can go to mikemcart.com or ask sciencemike.com and click on events and you can see if there's uh any room to get into the event we'd love to see you at the live recording of episode 200. i've got a lot of exciting things happening that i can't wait to tell you about i've got a lot of renewed enthusiasm towards ask science mike right now the patron community is really thriving and really growing it's been fun to watch downloads increasing on apple podcasts again uh we'd gotten a pretty stable audience size for i don't know about a year there which i really enjoyed but we we seem to be on some kind of rally gosh i just want you to know that it's the highlight of my week every week talking with all of you and i hope you'll enjoy this episode looking back at where we've been so far [Music] hey mike i enjoy listening you speak into the the challenges and the conflicts that so many people go through but i often wonder what what are the topics and the ideas or or the elements of theology that you are currently struggling with and then secondarily you know sometimes you will talk about giving yourself just a few minutes to do a limited amount of research about any any given topic or question that somebody asked and i would love to hear you know what's that quick process that you go through to seek and then find the answers and then compose that in a way that that's digestible makes sense to the rest of us all right thanks man well i always love the two for one questions people can sneak in two questions and those neither of those are quick questions so hats off to you for getting that one by both andrew and the patrons uh because when i pick the show questions i always picked the easiest ones which meant double questions almost never made it because it was more work for me um i had zero no intended guilt there it's actually funny to me so i will honestly answer both of those you'll hate my first answer i don't struggle with any theology whatsoever this is the thing about kind of the open-handed nihilist you know ecclesiastical vapor approach to faith what is there for me to struggle with i hold it all so loosely uh i enjoy the search i enjoy studying scripture and reading about theology even theologies i find preposterous because i like to see what role that theology has played in the development of the church and the development of human civilization so there's nothing to struggle with i doubt things all the time but that's not a struggle doubts how i have fun if you think less theologically and more stuff that's i think about a lot uh right now um what's the balance between calling out harm and inviting people to see the world more broadly every time you put your foot down on a topic of injustice some people walk away from the table but if all you ever do is invite people nothing gets done what is the right balance on police brutality and racial injustice in social and economic context and climate change and all these pressing issues in our societies how do i do the most good and the least harm i think about that more than anything else i've been wrestling with uh if human nature and collective cognitive action is compatible with democracy or indeed with civilization for the long term i wrestle with that that's a struggle for me what could we do to make the internet more healthy than harmful for human civilization i wrestle with that one a lot and then something i think about all the time i can't tell you about because it's top secret it's a research for my next book that i'm not ready to talk about yet so the thing i'm thinking about the most you'll probably start hearing about 18 months from now isn't that a bummer now the second question you sent in my process for researching questions i actually wrote out the answer to this question last after watching myself answer the other questions on this episode and here's the process i read or listen to the question that has been submitted and then off the top of my head i make a bulleted list of how i'd answer the question if it was a live show right just three to five sometimes eight or ten bullets there's usually only three major bullets and then you have sub bullets off of that ideas supporting a point if that answer isn't enough that means it's not going to be a quick research question and that means it's got to go into the deep research pile the stuff that sometimes i'll spend hours researching or occasionally on the show a day and a half maybe two days researching the answer to a question those are pretty rare there are none of those for this episode so once i've written out that little outline i check any facts or figures for accuracy against a source so anytime i'm quoting a number or an equation or a scientific fact i look that up or if i couldn't recall it exactly i go and get the exact figure off of the internet then i look for supporting documentation research studies articles uh that people can a validate where i got my information and two dig deeper and i'm really good at google so if the very first phrase that comes off my head doesn't give me what i want the first three or five results i amend it and by usually the third search i have the exact thing i was looking for i'm really uh my google foo is strong okay and uh then if i'm thinking about like book length stuff i literally have a bookshelf in my office that's just full of uh the kind of non-fiction books i love to read and i use my spatial memory they're organized by topic on each shelf and i'll just scan the spines to see like which book did i read that told me a lot about that topic and then i include that book in the show notes if i didn't get what i was looking for in google and then i'll usually try to find some studies that push back on what i said and then i just hit record after i have all that stuff so like for example this entire uh answer that i just read to you for both questions is only uh seven bullet points so because i've done so much stage work in my life uh and and anyone who's seen science mike live knows i really do come up with these answers off the top of my head i've studied storytelling enough to try to create an accessible topical answer off the top of my head the first try greg takes out the pauses and the um's but generally what you're hearing is pretty close to what i said the first time off the top of my head that's just sort of i guess my gift you know people say well why do you do this you're not a scientist you're not a pastor you're not an expert all those things are true but i am a lifelong communicator and educator and uh i do think i'm i'm actually gifted at it and i work really hard at it so i think the intersection of those things as long as i stick to communicating and educating people on things i've done the work to study then i'm helping if i position myself as the actual expert or if i try to pass off my nasal gazing as you know credible academic information then i would go off the rails so i'm really careful to tell you when i've ventured off into my opinion and how i see the world and when i speak about science or history or theology i do my very best to be faithful to the good work of the people who came up with that stuff in the first place uh really good questions thank you [Music] okay our next question is also a patron question and it's it's a great one mike i am new to science and i'm not sure if i am a confused atheist or a confused christian okay let me stop you right there you've come to the right place [Laughter] this is the perfect podcast for you i do know that i am a closet non-conformist in an evangelical community and family my question is why do humans exist if you accept a version of creationism god created humans if he knows all things he would have known how terrible we would be that we would turn our backs on god and basically he would have to mass murder us several times to thin the herd why would he create us just to watch us suffer if god had nothing to do with the creation of humans and we are in fact a cosmic accident of good fortune then why would anyone including you believe in that god it seems to me that the god that had the power to create matter from nothing would have had enough power to direct its course therefore we would be intentional creations and we are back to the first point in why let us exist to begin with i feel i am stuck between choosing a god that is a narcissistic jerk or no god at all well boy i think a lot of people feel that way today so you are not alone there you're wrestling with the problem of evil you're wrestling with the idea of theism versus atheism as a result of that dilemma and boy a lot of people have been there here is why you are wrestling with those things you've grown as a person so what once got you through the day doesn't anymore this is a good thing your understanding of the world is growing and so the metaphors that once helped you navigate reality don't fit any more now don't hear me wrong i'm not saying that the way you once believed in god was simplistic or inappropriate what i'm saying is it no longer fits where you are so let's celebrate that when i had the same discussion with rob bell that you're having now and i said i don't believe any of this stuff for very similar reasons he said you're here let's celebrate that well you're here you asked the question let's celebrate that now i love evangelicalism i love who it made me i love the personal god it presents i even love the focus on doing the work of christ to remake the world but some of the theist associations with evangelicalism and indeed with the broader church they raise issues that are hard to answer and uh when i see theologians try to do so uh it's often somewhat appalling so i'm gonna tell you my take which may or may not help you along this is one of many possible views i think when we wrestle with this very involved or very distant or non-existent god we make god too much like us we're viewing god anthropomorphically anthropomorphically if you've listened to the show you know me and pronunciation aren't friends you're making god a person with like awareness and intent agency emotions irrational consideration of cause and effect that's a very reasonable thing to do because you're human if we put a face on something we imagine it has a perspective like our own that's the root of empathy we view animal behavior through a human lens why wouldn't we view the divine as though it were a mirror but where i am today theologically i'm actually much more with spong or spinoza even einstein i don't understand god to be a being but to be being itself i love the phrase the ground of being or the source of all such a god is the animating is-ness of everything so every particle interaction every sunrise every moment of beauty emanates from god as does every death and every lung cancer isn't that a fascinating troubling view of god now what's interesting about me is uh that is both true and a little bit of [ \_\_ ] because i absolutely experience a more personal god through contemplative mysticism my time and presence with god and meditation very often denotes a personal relationship a god that loves me a god whom i love how do i resolve that oh that's easy i don't i don't use theology at least ketiphatic rational theology to analyze and box in the divine is it possible that what i experience as god is simply my brain responding to reality in a particular way sure it is totally possible even likely and it doesn't bother me a bit it doesn't diminish the miracle or the beauty is it more likely that uh jesus was crucified and stayed in the ground or that jesus rose from the dead well it is way more likely that jesus stayed in the ground or that his body was removed from the tomb but mystically by loving god i encounter a risen christ so i sit with that but i don't master that and i understand this is a very strange place to be most people are deeply uncomfortable with it because we're addicted to certainty and frankly since the enlightenment we have all lived and camped out in our left brain and told the holistic view of reality our right hemisphere offers to hit the road jack or jill or gender non-conforming person i would encourage you to read a book like why christianity must change or die by john shelby spong maybe check out finding god in the waves by that guy mike mccarg [Music] but understand there are more options than the evangelical god and atheism but hey if atheism gets you to a life of beauty and peace and helping others well atheism's just fine if the practice of faith matters to you if the presence of god in your life is important but you just can't go along with evangelical theology hey that's okay what matters where you'll find the gospel is in doing the work to help heal the world and being a good neighbor yes but also in loving god but as we see god in the bible there were so many ways of understanding god across the biblical narrative do you think jesus's 12 disciples all understood him the same way or viewed god in the same way i believe deeply that we are given whatever word image relationship to the divine we must have in order to serve the world if we're open to it and they all point to the same great and beautiful mystery that ground of being and that source of all hey science mike uh my question today regards laboratory black holes um i saw something in passing while i was in an airport on cnn about a black hole that has been successfully built in a laboratory then i googled black holes in a laboratory and kind of found what i found was articles referencing black holes in a laboratory quantum entanglement hawking radiation um all sorts of great stuff but not like the actual mechanism by which these black holes exist in a lab and don't swallow up our existence on earth because that's my primitive understanding of a black hole so please fix it help me understand better what's going on here thanks science mike love you well first thank you so much for a science question hooray the show has turned into basically dear abby uh only dear science mike and i i love that and i'll keep doing that but i really do love talking about scientific concepts and that was the original vision for the show was to to explore science and faith uh and it seems like the science and faith in life has become life life life life some science and a bit of faith right which is fine you guys run the show and i also want to thank my patrons for picking this question for giving me a science question i'm so excited your understanding of black holes is not primitive because you have any understanding of black holes whatsoever so uh let's talk a little bit for get everyone else caught up on what a black hole is in the first place albert einstein had this idea about gravity and space-time einstein thought and put forth the math to demonstrate that space and time where a single indivisible fabric and einstein's theory of relativity tells us that gravity actually warps or bends space-time okay so what a black hole is is when you get mass that's so compressed so tightly compressed its gravitational well becomes so steep that nothing can escape from it including light so if you could imagine for a second if you were holding a towel out in front of you and you placed a golf ball on that towel it would create a little divot that's what a planet does to space-time and if you created if you know set up a bowling ball on the towel you would really struggle to hold the towel up at all and that would be more like what a star does to space-time because stars are much more massive than planets but if you were to set oh i don't know a bowling ball that weighed as much as a car on that towel you couldn't possibly hold it up and if you were strong enough the towel would rip so if we imagine a towel that cannot be ripped you kind of have space time and so you you would try to hold the towel up it would pull your hands together right you'd have two ends of the towel touching and then this towel bubble underneath holding that bowling ball that weighed as much as a car and that would be a black hole right that's an event horizon that's the area around the black hole that light and matter cannot escape now there's a weird thing about black holes they they make some challenging assumptions about physics that theoretical physicists don't like for one the entropy in a black hole is understood to be a function of the area of its surface and not its volume and uh that runs afoul of physics which that's probably too deep for us to go into without making this like a like a 20 minute or 30 minute answer uh but just just trust me on that entropy and black holes is an issue so stephen hawking came up with something called hawking radiation and basically there's this idea in physics that in the vacuum of space little virtual particles appear at random and every particle has an anti-particle and they're attracted to each other and they annihilate and it doesn't matter right you can create mass in the universe as long as it's annihilated by an equal anti-bit of mass through antimatter and the idea with hawking radiation is that if you have virtual particles that pop into existence on either side of an event horizon and one of the particles gets sucked into the black hole or stays inside the event horizon the other escapes and therefore is not annihilated that energy has to come from somewhere because of the laws of physics and so the black hole just lost a little tiny bit of mass energy so the idea here is actually believe it or not that even though light can't escape a black hole directly black holes do evaporate through hawking radiation now large black holes are generally eating matter all the time they're sucking down clouds of dust and other stars even colliding with other black holes and so they're eating much faster than they're evaporating in fact if we imagine the large black hole suddenly stopped getting any supply of matter it would take much longer than the age of the entire universe for a black hole of any significant mass to evaporate via hawking radiation very slow process but the less mass a black hole has the faster it evaporates so a very small like a microscopic black hole the kind of thing we could feasibly create if we had more advanced technology on the earth in something like a very much more powerful version of the large hadron collider well a microscopic black hole would evaporate almost instantly long before it could consume any additional matter to grow and its event horizon would be so tiny it would be very unlikely that anything would cross it anyway but the experiment in reference did not create a proper black hole with an event horizon instead it produced a sonic black hole a condition in physics in which sound should not have been able to cross the event horizon of this quote black hole unquote that was actually made out of super cooled it was it was called very near absolute zero and then rapidly churned and based on our understanding of fluid dynamics sound shouldn't have been able to escape that simulated black hole using sound instead of light and what this experiment found was that uh there actually was a leakage of information from that black hole as roughly predicted by hawkins theory right hawking's theory that's really interesting and intriguing but a couple points they didn't create a black hole in a lab two although it appears according to the comments of many physicists the experiment was was beautiful and elegant and interesting it may not really tell us anything at all it's super intriguing but it may or may not inform theoretical physics as the data from the experiment is examined more deeply so really fascinating stuff but don't worry our planet's not getting consumed by a laboratory created black hole anytime soon [Music] hi science mike my name is alana and i have a question about something that has bothered me my whole life for most of my life i have remained single despite a desire to be in a romantic relationship i was told by friends time and time again that the cause might be my intimidation factor according to close friends i am generally an intimidating person some have even told me that they were scared of me the first time that we met upon further discussion the conversation inevitably works its way to three characteristics of mine that in combination apparently make me intimidating those three things are my high level of intelligence my self-confidence and my bold outspoken nature we always end up at the conclusion that men are simply intimidated by me and that is why they are not interested i decided long ago that just because men in general couldn't seem to handle me i wasn't going to change now i am in a very loving and strong relationship with a wonderful man that appreciates all of me most importantly those three characteristics previously discussed however a few days ago i was on social media when i came across an article from psychology today describing a study from the warsaw school of economics which made my blood boil here it is again men are intimidated by intelligence to make matters even worse the article states that not only is there a clear point at which men stop valuing a woman's increasing intelligence but women's level of attractiveness actually decreases as their perceived intelligence increases science mike can you please speak to this issue and why it is that generally men don't value intelligent women thanks for all your hard work i look forward to hearing your answer well it's a great question it's a little depressing but it's a great question and uh i went and looked up uh the study and question and the psychology today article uh that you referenced by the way thanks for really uh clear references that made it easy for me to research that's very helpful and yeah there's no methodological flaws i could find in the research it appears to have done reasonably well in peer review well let's all catch up with what we're talking about huh they did a study with men and women where they would go on on dates speed dates really and then they would rate their uh partners physical traits and and mental traits so they would say you know how attractive on a scale of one to ten they thought someone was and they would find uh how attractive they or how intelligent they believe they were and then how likely they were to go on a date with them again and what we found with both sexes men and women by the way from my friends who don't cleanly identify on a gender binary i would like to apologize if discussed in this research is in any way alienating to you this this study did not uh have the methodological capability to look beyond sort of cis heteronormative assumptions but in that framework of men and women as a binary who are by the way uh they tested heterosexuals in this research um what we saw was both sexes were more attracted to people they found more attractive and therefore more likely to go out with them again right so there was no no diminishing returns on attractiveness you had the best chance at going out with a woman again if you were a 10 out of 10 attractive male and the same was true for females what they found was that to a point increased intelligence could influence women to be more likely to say they want to go out with a man again so if a man was a little less attractive but more intelligent and increase his probability although there was a much stronger correlation between physical attractiveness and a desire to see someone again than intelligence so far more important to be good-looking than smart with the women in the study now when it came to men the same was true they loved the attractiveness of women but they found that on average anything past a 7 out of 10 intelligence actually decreased the chance that men would want to see a woman again so if the woman was a little bit more attractive a man might take an eight out of ten in intelligence and if she was a little less attractive then she actually needed to be a little less intelligent to increase her chances of going out again man what is going on here that is crazy now first what have we learned both men and women are very likely to weigh physical attractiveness as extremely important in the early stages of relationship building we're at least according to this study pretty superficial um but women have uh appreciate intelligence as it increases and men actually start to find high intelligence as unattractive and reducing the chance of going out with someone again i don't have a research based answer for you that there's not a lot of other studies i could find that would help me you know give you a better answer uh which i would call like purely scientific or from the social sciences i would say that when i look at that through feminist scholarship uh it makes a lot of sense actually that men don't value intelligent women the same way we know that that many men report they're uncomfortable if a woman that they're in a relationship with makes more money than they do or is more successful than they are and that is the kind of toxic depiction of masculinity that's offered by our patriarchal social structures and norms we train men from a very young age that they have to be what the smartest the biggest the strongest the most successful they can be in order to provide for women and feminism has made more strides i believe in shaping the imagination of women than it has the imaginations of men i'll tell you if my wife jenny made more money than i do or she was more successful than i am i would be elated positively elated and i've always enjoyed the company of intelligent people but especially intelligent women because they haven't been socialized to spar in the same way so i've actually found you can have better conversations often with very smart women than very smart men um but i also grew up as a nerd who was called a [ \_\_ ] a lot right so i've always i think i i comfortably identify as male i think i have a lot of masculine qualities but i'm very comfortable with what we might ascribe as a an idea of femininity as well i don't have any particular pressure to conform in many ways to male social norms precisely because i've so frequently experienced rejection from men in my life in social context maybe that needs to happen to more men i don't know i do know we need to do a better job when we talk to young boys about what it means to appreciate women as equals as fully human and not as objects right you don't want an object you own to be superior to you but you do want a partner in life to be strong and weak however their life made them to be again i don't have research to back it up but my my take on that data definitely is men have been trained to see women primarily as something to acquire and to control and to own and not as equal partners in life okay so josh on patreon says you've talked a lot about how when speaking with someone you have differences with it's best to try to avoid activating their amygdala my question is how can you avoid this in yourself i sense at times that my defenses get up and i lose the ability to speak rationally and with clarity well first of all i don't always do that successfully i do get angry sometimes on twitter very often because of something our president-elect did also frankly i found that my ability to um respond instead of react my ability to be calm and diffuse anger has diminished since i fell off a motorcycle and had a closed head injury so a lot of some things about me have suddenly changed since that accident and my temper and my patience is one of them that said the techniques i use then and am using now to try to be a patient person who is not unnecessarily anger is a combination of mindfulness an ongoing awareness and attention and focus on my thoughts and feelings and physical sensations and then i use something called bio feedback to counteract my emotions when needed so if i start to get angry when you get angry you get hot you get tense you your breathing picks up so i intentionally breathe slowly i intentionally relax and i listen to my thoughts when my thoughts get revved up and seem angry i say whoa let's examine that for a moment it just kind of brings me back down but on that note i've seen people use what i talk about in keeping the amygdala unaroused in yourself and others in a conversation of differences of opinion and they use that insight to dismiss all anger as invalid or divisive and that's not where i'm going anger is not inherently bad and expressing anger sometimes is part of healthy human behavior remember if you're a christian jesus did get angry jesus was sometimes sarcastic and snarky in the bible so anger has been scientifically demonstrated in fact to have a defensive benefit against oppressors or attackers it's just not very useful for persuasion if you're having a discussion with someone it's best to avoid the amygdala but if someone is actively hurting you or ignoring the way you are being hurt anger can get their attention and it is not healthy to repress anger it's only healthy to process and disperse anger okay so um how i do that is mindfulness biofeedback and trying to understand the other person's perspective but i understand that requires me basically some privilege it's very difficult to have that same dynamic with someone who's actively oppressing or harming you and i take my relative position of gender and racial and economic privilege to give me the platform to listen patiently to ideas that would be personal to someone else even if i find them offensive i try to think about how i might have shared ideas similar at some point i try to think of the motivations and and encounters that may have led to the belief in this person and allow them to express it honor their right to feel as they feel but then provide stories and perspectives and information that may help them see the world through other people's eyes [Music] aaron on patreon asked maybe the nerdiest question this week i just read a brief history of time and learned stephen hawking is now trying to disprove the big bang i think it was over my head so maybe i read wrong i love when theologians like rob bell and richard ward talk about the singularity and how much it sounds like god do you think hawking is right and there was no big bang if so does that change any of your views on god and faith first of all i know and follow rob and richard i did not know that they talked about the singularity so i'm going to have to hear their talks about that and see if they're as good as my talks on the singularity i mean i wish i was kidding but i'm really impressed with my singularity theology uh so i would love to hear rob and richard have to say as well um so big bang stephen hawking let's be really careful with our language the big bang theory of cosmology is not one idea but a collection of ideas that describe how our universe came to be as it is today and uh stephen hawking is not trying to refute the entirety of the big bang theory but instead to address shortcomings in the model so hawking's more recent work doesn't resist or correct cosmic inflation the age of the universe as we know it today or even when and how matter and stars and galaxies and planets and all that stuff form hawking's revised theories hold on to all those things including cosmic inflation which is a big deal what hawking is wrestling with is the singularity and that's a great thing because singularity is what physicists say when they mean no one has a clue yeah what the f is this right so um and if the universe began with a singularity the universe as we know it isn't a universe at all because it's not all that exists because if the laws of physics just stop at singularity or change radically in a way that we can't project from this position then the universe has to have some external mechanism in order to begin something that happens pre-singularity to cause cosmic inflation and hawking doesn't like that so hawking's follow-up work proposes that space-time is finite but boundless now this is a big deal what does finite but boundless mean it means it's uh something limited in volume but that has no edges think about the earth the earth's surface is finite there's not an infinite amount of land and sea on planet earth but there are no edges you can go east and west as long as you want and never hit the end of the earth although you will eventually get back to where you started uh if we were to think kind of temporally what stephen's talking about is if you were to head north toward the north pole you can walk to the north pole and just keep walking you can walk past the north pole at which point you are going south but you never hit an edge and so hawking's kind of attempt which has not been verified but is incredibly clever is a multi-dimensional model of a finite boundless space-time where instead of the universe emerging from an infinitely dense point our universe emerges from a perfectly typical point of space-time that sounds complex i get it it's a big deal because if that's the case there is no singularity the laws of physics state the laws of physics then how do you explain cosmic inflation in the universe as we see it well it's proposing that somehow in physics thanks to the behavior of a finite boundless space-time at some point the universe basically borrowed energy from gravity to make matter and in doing so gravity was dramatically weakened and you had cosmic inflation as well as now an arrangement of matter and this is an attempt not to refute the big bang but to take the singularity out of the big bang theory and replace it with a a better or more complete understanding of physics that can describe everything we know about the universe and possibly in the process help unify gravity in the quantum realm and relativity with the standard model of physics if you have no idea what i'm talking about you just have to do a lot of reading i've heard it said once if you can't explain a theory to a six year old you don't really understand it and by that metric i do not understand stephen hawking's uh revised theories of big bang cosmology [Music] occasionally i let good friends get a question on the show they have to submit them just like you do but when i see them i'll pull them out of the queue and i'll be honest this is one of those times where somebody gets unfair access to skip to the front of the line this question is from madison and she's my oldest daughter so you're about to get a sneak peek into my home life with this question and the question is how do i listen to god i've heard from god so many times in my life when i was seven i heard god telling me i needed to accept jesus just as clearly as i heard someone talking to me only this voice came from somewhere inside of me but it didn't seem to be me it seemed to be someone else and i heard that voice as god other times in my life i've heard god tell me to pray for people even ask people if i could pray with them and i've done that i once sat in church and heard god telling me i should go to guatemala to meet people there and i did as i got older i started to wonder if all those times i'd heard from god were just things that were happening in my own head and for a while i believed that that there was no god at all and everything that i thought was god was just my brain sometime later i heard from god again and it confused me because i didn't think that god was real at all and this time i heard from god more powerfully than i'd ever heard from god before and as i've grown older i've realized that there's a problem of thinking about god in this way that god is somewhere else and sometimes we listen and hear and other times we don't i've grown to understand that god is everywhere all the time it's less about listening to god and more about becoming aware of god's presence all the time i don't try to hear god tell me something specific as much anymore or listen to god speak in words but instead become aware of the way that god is around me all the time the way that god is making life possible and the universe possible so here's how i listen to god today one i pray every day i talk to god every day and in my time of prayer i spend some time in silent contemplation silent listening silent awareness that i didn't bring myself into the world but instead god brought me into the world that i did not do anything to create the air that i breathe and instead that air is just a gift that every moment i am sustained by something else and i call that god when we talk to god that's called prayer but it's not the only way that we can pray there are other forms of prayer we call meditation that involve mostly quiet and stillness and a growing awareness that god is everywhere i also read the bible now i stopped doing that for a while because it confused me but these days i read the scriptures again as the stories of people who like me have wondered what god's like and what god wants with the world and in those stories i find a reflection of myself i find people who want to serve god but are often confused about how to do so of course another way i listen to god is by going to church and being around people who love me and love god now church can be difficult i've learned that different churches are comfortable with different ideas and that not every church is for every person and the reason we have so many churches and so many ways of approaching god is so that everyone can find some group of people who will both love them as they are and invite them to become who they can be by doing that what we hear god i hear god when i listen to pastor betsy preach from our pulpit at church and i hear god in the love and encouragement that all these people share for each other when they pray for each other when they show up to the hospital to care for one another god speaks in that time of course i also find god in science when i study how things work i see the ways that god moves in the world just as clearly as i do at church or in the scripture i find god in nature when i walk through the woods i become aware of the complexity and intricacy of life on this planet and i see myself as part of a larger drama unfolding all around me all the time in a way i can't hear sitting in my house or in the middle of a city and yet sometimes in crowded cities i also find god on subways or airplanes when i see people moving through their lives and doing their best to do good to be honest most of all i find god here at home with your mom and with you and macy because when i'm with you i feel a love so powerful that i cannot explain it i don't have any words to explain how much i love you and i love my family and i'm really good with words and in those moments when i sit with you and your sister and hold your hand when i walk across a parking lot or we say our prayers i hear god most powerfully that this is why there is a world that this is why we are here to express love and caring and compassion in a universe that is otherwise fairly cold we are in our own way a light a reflection of god's creative spark so i do most of my listening to god by loving my family i'm so proud of you thank you for sending a question