ASM053 Getting Chills, Proof of God, and Why Jesus Had to Die

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getting chills proof of god and why jesus had to die all that and more on this week's episode of ask science mike

[Music]

welcome to ask science mike the weekly podcast where i answer your questions about science faith and life and this week the show is having a birthday the very first episode of ask science mic came out january 19th of 2015. it's been a whole year already and i couldn't have done it without you it's been so much fun but we've got a big show today so let's get it started [Music] hi science mike i'm wondering about getting chills particularly when it comes to art if i listen to music or hit a line in a poem that just slays me i'll get chills more often than not if i listen to the same part of the music over and over the effect seems to wear off but if i repeat the line of poetry to myself even days later odds are good i'll get chills all over again but a piece of visual art even one that feels deeply connective doesn't give me chills at all it's mystifying is there any kind of connection between the auditory process and getting goosebumps is there any science behind why we experience chills when we encounter a symphony or a poem and not typically in everyday conversation i would love to hear your thoughts this kind of uh pleasant chill sensation not the kind you necessarily would feel uh when you were afraid and you would get goosebumps because you're in a fearful state although that's physiologically similar with your skin it's neurologically distinct in one case when you're afraid when you think something's going bump in the night your amygdala is activating but when you get the kind of chills you get in a symphony you're much more often having activity in your ventral stratum which is a major component of how the brain experiences pleasure that's often called in popular science articles the brain's pleasure center although of course there are multiple parts of the brain that can coordinate pleasure responses but it's important to note one that we can get chills in different ways and two that the kind of chills we're typically talking about with art are the kind of chills associated with activity in the brain's pleasure center now i've got to be honest uh i get chills really easily and not the amygdala kind i certainly get chills listening to music to symphonies to popular music even and there's some songs that you know unless i literally just put them on repeat and beat them into my skull i'll get chills every time certain parts of the music happens but i also get chills in poetry watching films even films i've seen before i've had chills uh when i heard people giving compelling talks i've had chills looking at a good photography or visual art even once in the museum of modern art in manhattan i once had chills looking at a sculpture so let's talk about nobody knows for sure but let's talk about some of the scientific ideas about where these chills come from first of all one study has shown that there are a few feelings that are most predictive in terms of us having chills related to some piece of stimulus and those feelings are when we're sad we feel something's profound we feel something's joyful or we feel something is moving and this study found that being moved is typically most associated with feeling chills now i'm the kind of person who's constantly moving my existential telescope all around and trying to examine reality from different angles and so i think that might be why i'm especially prone to these kind of chills is because i'm very prone to be moved because i'm always trying to see life from different perspectives but most studies seem to indicate that music is most likely to give people chills among all the different types of art out there now this mechanism is unknown but i saw some researchers say that they thought this was related to arts ability to guide our brains toward a conclusion effectively to hijack the brain's future forecasting hardware in the prefrontal cortex but to then present that conclusion in an unexpected moment or reference frame so in a symphony you can feel these chords are moving towards some pinnacle but it may come at a moment or in a musical context that you didn't expect which then surprises the brain and you get that that pleasure response that's rewarding of course once that happens your brain is then conditioned to associate a positive response to that piece of music and so it may help on subsequent listenings for you to have the same kind of response now in terms of visual arts or or more communicative more verbally communicative art like uh you know a movie with dialogue or or a ted talk or something like that that might be moving that can come to the ability for art to take us out of our own reference frame and into someone else's someone else's perspective a story especially is uniquely suited to helping humans view life through the eyes of someone else which doesn't always come naturally to us and that's a remarkable gift in all these situations art is taking components of our brain that have really been there for survival reasons you know food and sex should stimulate a pleasure response because we need to eat to live and we need to have sex to procreate and keep our genes going on but art takes these neurological contexts and can restructure them in ways that aren't directly related to our survival and i would argue make human life so worth living it's our ability to transcend to experience these feelings of rapture from art that really define what it means to be human and that's why even though i'm such a science person in recent years more and more i'm leaning toward and exploring art as a way of contextualizing and understanding reality because truly it takes our brain to places that they can't go otherwise our next question came in via email and it reads i have a background as a christian who grew up in the church as a pastor's kid i believe in god and jesus but have tons of questions about how all this works i searched your site for atonement but i haven't found a good post about it could you explain why jesus had to die and resurrect why does any part of the story matter there are some questions that come in and i don't want to answer them now sometimes it's because i know it's something i'm going to have to either do a lot of research to get a good handle on or something that my understanding of is so complex that it's going to be difficult to distill into simple accessible terms that fit in a five to seven minute answer on this show and that's definitely true of this talking about the death and resurrection of christ in accessible terms in five minutes is going to be tough i suspect this answer will run long but there's another type of question i fear because i know my answers are going to be controversial if you think back pretty recently it might even the last episode of the show someone basically submitted a question where they told me they'd lost their faith listening to my podcast and for me to weigh in on some issues i have to publicly admit how far i am from orthodox christianity on core tenets of our faith system and i hate doing that because i never want someone to listen to my show trying to find this you know open space for conversation and then just have their faith assaulted because i believe something different so before i answer let me say that i'm coming from a perspective a specific perspective i'm someone who has lost his faith to atheism and i'm going to answer as someone who's taken apart all the claims of christianity and rejected them and is still working on what those claims mean and how i relate to them in the context of what i understand about god which is very little that's a big disclaimer saying everything i'm about to say is just my opinion you can take or leave as much as you see fit okay i've got to say that before i talk about the death and resurrection of jesus christ so one of those quips that atheists make that really struck me as my faith was falling apart goes something like this in a conversation with a christian an atheist will say so you're saying god sent himself to earth to sacrifice himself on the cross to save us from himself meaning of course that christ would send people to hell or god would send people to hell and um that really hit me um it hit me hard because although that's like a over simplification of christian theology there there are some pretty significant points there a strong core idea to that statement of god sending himself to sacrifice himself to save us from himself and that comes down to a viewpoint of christ's death and resurrection called penal substitutionary atonement and the idea there is that jesus was sent by god and jesus offered himself as a sacrifice after living a perfect life to take on everyone else's sins so that people could be reconciled to god and not go to hell basically they could be part of god's fellowship again because god is perfect and god can't tolerate sin and so sin has to be punished it's a troubling view of god in my opinion now i also want to say it's not the only historical view of christ's death and resurrection but it is certainly the most commonly held among christians today and here's why penal substitutionary atonement is troubling in my opinion now first of all people don't make themselves and they don't choose to be created there is no volitional action a human being makes to come into the world we suddenly find ourselves here as you know confused squirming pink infants and we slowly grow to learn that we're in a world with no knowledge of how we came here and no choice in the matter and penal substitutionary atonement says that you know someone who commits only minor sins in life you know most people are basically good um so you can imagine someone is born on earth and you know they maybe lie uh in their life or steal a candy bar you know but nothing we would in an earth justice system punish harshly and maybe even you know serve others through charitable acts or whatever and penal substitution or atonement theory someone like that who didn't choose to be created but doesn't accept christ's sacrifice or is it convinced by the testimony of the gospels in the new testament would spend eternal conscious torment in hell for those minor sins in life one how is a person liable if they didn't create themselves they didn't create their supposed sin nature they simply possess it and by the bibles on admission they're unable to resist it so in all those cases we're not creating any any liability in legal systems uh if that if humans were a product the manufacturer would be liable for defects like that and regardless for most people like what crime what crime can you commit that justifies eternal conscious torment what crime is worthy of that now we could we could argue that genocide torture murder that some of these start to in our conception of justice be worthy of something that horrific but what about someone who never did any of those things in life are they worthy of eternal punishment eternal conscious torment that doesn't sound loving or just to me but let's set all that aside for a second let's assume that you know god's understanding of justice is perfect and beyond ours and for reasons we can't understand even that amount of sin is unforgivable but it is forgivable because god in penal substitution atonement does forgive sin following christ's death so why can't god just forgive outright without christ's death i'm not a great person but i can forgive people without my children accepting someone's punishment and i'm just a person we're talking about god my critique my concern with penal substitutionary atonement is it makes god out to be petty or even bloodthirsty why does sin require punishment and not rehabilitation why does forgiveness require death now early in the church there was a completely different idea about the death and resurrection of christ it was called christus victor and the idea here was that christ's death signaled a victory over the powers of evil now christus victor theology itself was an amendment of an earlier idea and that idea worked on by origin among other church fathers was that christ's death paid a ransom to satan now what would we say of a god who has to pay a ransom to satan in order to redeem mankind that certainly doesn't sound like an all-powerful god to me here's the thing contrary to modern teachings the understandings about the necessity of christ's death and resurrection have changed over the course of history just as the church's beliefs about god and christ have changed as well i've said before on this program that i don't believe the crucifixion is about saving god's wrath but instead ours it wasn't god that shouted crucify him in response to a man who taught about radical love and humility that was humanity maybe we're the ones who are bloodthirsty maybe we're the ones who demand punishment but i could be wrong i have like so many people in the church throughout history an opinion an interpretation about what the cross means but ultimately i don't think it's the most interesting question for me it's not why did jesus have to die there's so many different ideas about that and these disagreements over history have spawned schisms and denominations and divisions in the body of christ the question for me about the crucifixion and resurrection is what am i supposed to learn from it how does it change my life today how does it affect the way that i live and love other people like christ am i willing to surrender what i have a right to in order for peace and reconciliation for others like christ am i willing to forgo being right to be whole with other people like christ do i eschew systems of dominance and violence and power for simplicity for love and for grace why did jesus have to die i don't know but what i wonder is what do i do in response to that death and resurrection [Music] [Applause] do you ever wish someone would just go through your email for you do you have hundreds or thousands of email messages piling up in your inbox making you dread every tap of that icon or maybe your inbox is under control but it takes a huge chunk of your time every day just to keep up and keep your email organized well my friends at sanebox have the answer sanebox is a service that scans your email for you important messages from friends clients and colleagues remain in your inbox while everything else is set aside in a folder you can review later at your leisure it works with any email program and almost any email service provider and you don't have to switch apps to use sanebox it'll work with whatever you're using today now sanebox is offering twenty five dollars off any subscription to their service for my listeners that's almost half off a yearly subscription just go to sanebox.com sciencemic to learn more and get your 14 day free trial plus 25 off your subscription try sanebox today and you'll find email is easier and faster than it's ever been before thank you so much to sanebox for sponsoring ask sciencemike [Music] hi mike my name's matt i'm from bristol in the united kingdom i've got a question for you i suppose it concerns free will and scientific evidence so my question is why doesn't god provide us with um evidence that could be scientifically verified to to prove his existence um i know that when in the past when i've asked this question people have said well if god gave us categoric proof of his existence we we wouldn't have a choice uh to believe in him but i don't really understand that answer because um my understanding of the way in which god wants us to believe in him is not an intellectual ascent but actually more of a a devoted uh acknowledgement that he is good and worth worth following so it's more about trusting in him uh rather than just believing he exists after all it says you know even the demons believe in it that he exists uh but clearly then they're not counted as being on the on the right side of a relationship with him i just don't get it my uh in every other aspect of life i have relationships with people that i love and trust i i scientifically tangibly know that they exist but i still have a choice my free will isn't compromised i still have a choice as to whether to place my trust in them or not so so why why doesn't god give us more evidence well as i listened to your question i had one of my own what do you mean by god you know when people talk about god especially in this context of what god does or does not do or what evidence god does or does not provide it always seems to put god in a remarkably human reference frame i mean think about the assumptions you have to make to ask a question about god providing or evidence or on the other hand hiding and i don't think either of those things are true about god and obviously science mike i'm not making that based on a read of scripture but instead just some physics think for a moment about you know singularity or space time or really fundamental components of our reality as we understand it the more we learn about physics the more we understand how limiting a human temporal perspective is and how our intuition which was shaped by you know a particular environment a particular scale larger than sand and smaller than a mountain doesn't really work when applied more focused or more expansive perspectives on reality you know we say god created us that god is our creator and if we look far back to what created us how the universe and its current configuration came to be we find something called a singularity and in a singularity space time is compressed so much that all the fundamental forces of physics all matter all energy becomes completely unified into some single thing and thing is even too terrible a word for it there's no word other than singularity to describe this peculiar unified state and what of space-time itself special relativity einstein's special relativity tells us that there's no such thing as now there's no cosmic clock and there's no such thing as universally simultaneous events we know through theory and also through observation and experiment that space time warps and bends and stretches with both speed and gravity and we also know that distance amplifies these effects so for a moment if we imagined an observer say 10 billion light years from the earth very minor changes in speed for that observer relative to our sun could sweep what is simultaneous or now from our shared perspective back and forth across the entire arc of human history now if you've never studied relativity that might be completely mind-blowing but you know i could i'll provide a couple of books in the show notes on sciencemike.com that you can dig deeper this is well understood science there is no such thing as now space time is not a series of moments from our perspective we follow an arrow of time in a particular direction but like a roller coaster the track of space time is both behind us and before us and that track doesn't vanish when we pass see if god is our creator and god is our sustainer if god is what underpins the entire system of reality concepts like consciousness will or agency are so nonsensical and limiting that they don't mean anything both singularity and space-time from einstein's conception give us a view of reality where all coordinates of space-time exist simultaneously just because we happen to perceive time as a single sweep a single arc across the dimension of time in one direction doesn't mean that's the way reality is actually structured so more expansive perspective in physics questions like why doesn't god offer more evidence is like asking where are the corners of a sphere we're trying to take the infinite unknowable mystery of god and turn god into a being in the sky now i found most doubts at least most of my doubts come from trying to project human notions of time and space onto god of course it makes sense that humanity has created theological systems in just such a way we can only operate from our perspective but to speak of god is to speak of something far beyond human conception and i believe when we study physics and cosmology we catch a glimpse of the way god actually works but i'm never so bold to think that either theology or physics will offer me an all-encompassing view of god because i don't believe it's possible for human brains to have such a complete view this is why i'm drawn to mysticism christian mysticism specifically i understand that all i can do is find a metaphor that points me to god and to allow those metaphors to open my mind to the experience of knowing god more directly beyond language and beyond words of course the reason i'm a christian mystic and not just a you know new age spiritualist mystic is because i believe the power of the story of jesus and the incarnation is the ability to have a god with a face a god whose story we can relate to who we can understand and who can show us a way of living that's more compatible with peace and justice and with love but if jesus was fully god there is always a character an essence to divinity that will be forever beyond my knowing [Music] [Applause] final question this week comes in via email and it reads hey mike love your work you talk often of how the inner workings of our brains reflect our spiritual experiences like personality spirituality is a manifestation of neuroscience it's how we relate to god my question then is how spirituality applies to the cognitively impaired particularly those with alzheimer's disease i like to believe that god draws near to those who suffer can this not occur when one's ability to appreciate god and interact spiritually is reduced by a disease such as alzheimer's it's hard to watch someone progress in the disease when they were once so full of life and spirituality even when believing they have spiritual restoration in store for them after death are those affected by alzheimer's rendered mentally and spiritually dormant until their suffering ends here on earth well first i'd like to address the very real suffering that you're going through if you're watching someone who was once full of life and spirituality enter into the later stages of alzheimer's and watching their personality and personhood dissolve i am so sorry for what you're going through years ago my wife's grandfather had a stroke that left him incapacitated and he had to go and live in a home for people that retired uh or needed full-time care and in the ward he was in there were a lot of alzheimer's patients and i can remember it being very dark to spend a lot of time with them their alternating moments of childlike joy and intense frustration unmoderated by reason understanding that they were somebody's sister or brother mother or father husband or wife cherished colleague and we're now reduced to such a state but something in your question speaks to me the idea that god draws near to those who suffer and i would say if spirituality has any merit it will inform how we relate to people with alzheimer's and other debilitating conditions that drawing near from god should happen but it happens through us when we people of god choose on a beautiful saturday afternoon to not just go to the park with our kids or watch a football game but go sit in spaces less pleasant to be with the ones we love or those who've been forgotten that's god drawing near to those who suffer it's when we weep with those who weep and mourn with those who mourn that the body of christ moves on this earth there may be some other element there may be moments in that person's internal life where years of spiritual conditioning do bring them peace but as the brain breaks down as its internal narrative becomes incohesive god's ability to draw near must move external and it moves in shared meals in times of difficult conversation shared reading bath time moments of tenderness moments enduring frustration and sadness but always doing so present i can't answer those larger questions of where is god in the soul or mind of that person but i can say that you'll find god in your own heart when you enter those situations with him that the reality of god's presence is never more convincing than those moments when we suffer with other people i never see god as real or as powerful as i do in a hospital room near the end or after that surgery or yeah in a home where people struggle with alzheimer's the little jingle seems out of place when i end a question by crying that's really weird i don't know if it's weird for you but it was weird for me putting it together maybe i need like a somber sound cue to transition out of questions like that um this is another episode of ask science mike in the books it's been a year guys and girls and non-gender conforming people thank you for listening thank you for being a part of this program thank you for your questions uh your support your critique of my answers your presence and our slack group there's a few hundred of us that hang out on slack and talk about the show thank you patrons thank you sponsors like sanebox we want to thank also the wedgwood circle for a grant that keeps the program on the air so many people contribute to the program i want to thank andrew gallucki who is now doing pre-production on the show of course greg nordine is producing the show as always jeb bottaford uh did the music and i'm so thankful for all of you who participate and also last week i mentioned we weren't getting that many questions in over the holidays you've more than rectified that there are tons of questions coming in both recorded questions and spoken questions just keep that going i love it when the questions that come in are 50 50 between men and women i love that i just oh it's amazing um so keep keep doing that so the weirdest close of the show ever but i just suddenly contemplating a year of ask science mike and completely overwhelmed with gratitude to you so thank you thank you for this life that i live it's impossible without you