Episode 2 - Genesis and Evolution

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an overwhelming amount of scientists believe that life emerged via a process called evolution but an overwhelming majority of christians in america disagree this begs the question am i a monkey's uncle

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welcome to the liturgist podcast everybody i'm michael gunger and i'm lisa pena the really good looking guy with the red beard is me a beard like the sons of the pleiades they're not red though are they they're blue they're bluish well i mean the nice guy everything's bluish because uh you have to sample a lot of photons to get the red light so is there any real red in the pleiades anywhere i mean it's in the spectrum somewhere right yes okay ladies and gentlemen we want to welcome you to the second liturgist podcast uh this is our second take at it we had the good fortune of our first episode breaking thanks to our wonderful co-host lisa thanks good job alyssa i apologize but i have a feeling this one's even gonna be even better well it's so weird uh when we recorded this the first time we were kind of uh not sure how to approach it but oddly enough uh current events seem to favor a new discussion on this topic of where life came from and how that relates to the bible is a bit serendipitous uh for those of you who might be living under a rock um and are unaware a magazine that i've never heard of called world mag uh dug up a bunch of kind of older writings and and interviews uh from our good man mikey g and uh we're really shocked that he didn't believe the earth was formed in six literal days and this is emerged into sort of a massive online freakout where conservative christians and progressive christians have kind of lined up civil war style and are firing muskets at each other and that's actually escalated to the point where none other than bill nye's nemesis ken ham has uh written a post on answers in genesis really kind of taking apart michael's position and effectively equating belief in christ and participation the christian tradition with acceptance of the modern incarnation of biblical infallibility and the liturgist podcast is where stuff like this gets talked about because the liturgist podcast is a podcast where faith science and art and any combination thereof collide and we swim in the chaos and uh here so here we are this week's episode is evolution and we're going to be looking at evolution from the perspective of science faith and art and what a joy it's gonna be it won't be controversial at all well everybody agrees that we didn't come from monkeys mike so what are you talking about that is true we did not come from monkeys so that's a wrap we covered you answered your question the answer is no we did not come from monkeys uh what did we come from mike let's get into science should we get into science a super comic you got to be ready for a theme moment at any given second with michael gunger i have a guitar in my lap it could strike evolution would say that humans and monkeys came from a common ancestor not that humans came from monkeys i don't know mike if you've read a little book called the bible but all that sounds like a bunch of hogwash to me well it sounds like hogwash to like 42 percent of americans which is astoundingly high for a developed nation in fact it's the highest percentage of any developed nation for people who believe that mankind came fully formed approximately six to ten thousand years ago i just have one question michael gunger what do you have to say for yourself oh man i believe in god i believe in jesus i believe he was the son of god i believe that the bible is god breathed in that beautiful way of saying it in the new testament that it is useful for teaching rebuking correcting and training in all righteousness i love my faith and i hold on to it i affirm it i firm our creeds um i just also love science and i love i think it's a testament to god uh as well where did life on earth come from um i believe in the big bang theory okay so i think we're just kind of like something happened in space bam and molecules and atoms formed and kind of here we are so you believe in evolution yes it just makes more sense to me great thank you where do you think life on earth came from it's not a trick god

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where do you think life on earth came from uh creator and science okay do you believe in evolution still pondering yeah that's probably the best thing that's gotten and why are you still pondering because i'm midlife thought i knew it all years ago and now you know thinking twice about [Music] everything

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so do you want to start by maybe perhaps going into a little definition of evolution for those who don't really know that's a great idea yeah and that's a big problem there's a tremendous debate about evolution among tremendous ignorance so let's first say that evolution is something everyone believes in every single person listening to this podcast believes in and supports evolution because evolution simply means change you have evolved since you started listening to this podcast your brain has changed you've lost skin cells you have evolved so the debate we're having is not about evolution nor is it about where life came from life emerged in the world of science through a process called a biogenesis and that's a separate theory and process from the theory of natural selection or what we would call darwinian evolution and that's the idea that the diversity of life on earth is the result of a specific set of processes namely uh genes are reproduced and mutated and then tested for suitability in the environment you may have heard this popularized as survival of the fittest but that's um an oversimplification to the point of being wrong what evolution does is simply favor adaptations that work best in this environment there's no ultimate goal to evolution we're not getting better and better or smarter and smarter we're not becoming transhuman none of those sorts of ideas you may have heard have any validity it's simply that organisms that survive are best adapted to their environment now and you could prove this relatively easily with a time machine if you pulled a tyrannosaurus rex from his time period and set him on earth today he would have difficulty breathing he'd have difficulty hunting food and he would have no ability to deal with the microbial life president of our environment his life would be very brief at the same time if you took a small band of humans without technology and dropped them into the land of the t-rex they would not be long for this world they would be very hot they would not be suited to deal with the microbes of that era and the types of nutrition that they expect and rely on especially in the forms of vegetation didn't yet exist in the environment evolution is not a measure of best it's a measure of timeliness science mike i just like to say you don't know me i mean i could survive if i really wanted i watch bear grylls right yeah so even though that's a joke that someone may be thinking that and bear grylls who is actually uh not that impressive a survivalist in my opinion but he's a very good tv star um the things he's looking for to survive as he scanned the landscape looking for the kinds of plants he knows he could eat he would find none he would only find um you know ferns and very primitive trees um he would have difficult finding any fruit uh all the things he expects to find to survive would be missing and uh on in addition a lot of the animals he'd like to hunt would be the size of a herd of elephants so he'd have a very difficult time bringing them down and he would find predators the size of a bus um that were also very very fast moving so bear grylls despite his phenomenal um camera presence uh probably would not fare all that well with a utahraptor or a tyrannosaur um or even a large sauropod we just lost four listeners because you despair girls yeah you talk about controversy survivor man all the way that's all i'm saying survivor man all the way the authority the bible is one thing science mike it's the end of you i'm sorry hey so hey mike so what what do the creationists say about about that whole period i mean about the past as far as you know huge periods of of time where there are dead fossils in the ground far before humanity ever makes the fossil record do they say we're humans we've got to be clear that there is a diversity and belief among creation scientists in the same way that there are diversities of beliefs and other forms of knowledge that they're they're maybe a little more homogeneous than other groups but they have their own controversies and their own disagreements um and in fact even creationists can be divided uh immediately into young earth and old earth creationists there are people who look at genesis 1 and they take a literal reading but they look at the language and say those six days refer to massive eras of time not literal days after all a day as we understand it today comes from the earth revolving on its axis and at first there was no sun for the earth to revolve on an axis and have a 24-hour day period from so people say it's logically impossible and they become old earth creationists now young earth creationists for those long periods of times number one tend to assert that dinosaurs co-existed with humanity for some period of time and that most of what we see as fossils are the results of a global flood that covered the earth entirely in water and so in that process as the flood uh washed away uh it moved the earth it created a lot of sediment very quickly and in that process you got the fossil record that's the claims i've seen from creationists okay it's crazy scientifically there's a real problem with that and that's radiometric dating as we look back at the fossil record consistent things happen life gets more primitive the oldest fossils are single cells and then they move into colony organisms and they move into very very basic non-diverse and as you move forward in time you get increasing diversity and we can consistently date those life forms through radiometric dating which is a scientifically valid predictable process science fact i just had to look up like 18 of those words that you used do we need can you is there one i need to define i mean no i mean i kind of followed it just by you talking and like defining it well let's let's talk about radiometric dating for a second could we do that sure so there's radiometric dating this doesn't mean radioactive people going out and socializing it's not that kind of dating it means to science jokes it means to know how old something is by looking at radioactivity and essentially any elements that aren't completely stable mainly certain types of isotopes isotopes is an element that has a different number of neutrons in its nucleus or in elements that are actively radioactive they have something called a half-life we know how quickly they break down and that also means there's different times of dating because different elements break down at different rates we can observe that in the laboratory it's not quote historical science we can make those observations now but when we look at the half-life of these elements different elements help you date different time periods so let's look at carbon for example there's an isotope of carbon called carbon 14 and it's relatively rare on our planet but we know how fast it breaks down into something called carbon 12 okay now there's a consistent amount of carbon 14 on our planet because any carbon that's involved in organic molecules on the surface are part of the food chain and they're constantly getting mixed up and at some point they get released into the atmosphere and they get bombarded by cosmic rays in the upper atmosphere at which point some percentage turns back into carbon 14. so we know there's a predictable amount of carbon 14 at or above the surface of the earth right so when you measure something that's buried under the earth we know that carbon 14 has a fat a half-life and i can't remember exactly it's like 5600 years 5700 a year or something like that you know so if you had if you had a kilogram of carbon-14 in 5700 years you'd have half a kilogram right the rest would have turned into carbon 12. so when we look at the ratio of carbon 14 atoms to carbon 12 atoms that gives us some ability to measure the age of something that has been removed from the food chain and removed from the kind of churn that happens above this the earth's surface and and when you imagine that with different elements with um uranium uh which breaks down into other elements that gives you the ability to look farther and farther back in time with very high degrees of accuracy as long as you're looking for an element that has a half-life appropriate for the time period that you're looking for did that make any sense it did but let me just argue this um well just i'm just gonna say it because i've had people say to me or like in i've been in like science class where that one kid raises his hand and being like well how do you how accurate is it like how how do we know that in a hundred years this isn't going to be like the world was flat kind of argument like is this just as sound as it can be this is mathematical and there's no i see yeah okay so there's only one form of human knowledge that can be proven that's mathematics yes the only human knowledge provable is math that's the only thing we have a proof in in science all knowledge is provisional and the idea in science is you place confidence and a belief in a proportional amount to the amount of evidence you have to support it so radiometric dating we're very very very very confident and why because we have hundreds of years of documented science observing this process and our theoretical models we build for this process keep getting validated through experimental results which brings me to another idea people will dismiss evolution because they say it's a theory the popular usage for the word theory has nothing to do with the scientific usage of the word theory in science the word you call theory is closest to the word hypothesis it's an untested idea but in science once something has been so validated by evidence and it's become a large comprehensive model that makes predictions about reality that have been validated that becomes a theory and you'll notice there's not very much debate online about the theory of gravity no one is saying that gravity doesn't exist because it's a theory no one's jumping off buildings because they expect gravity to fail but the fact is we understand more and we have more evidence for evolution via natural selection than we have about gravity in terms of physics we don't even know how gravity works on a subatomic level we haven't found its force carrier it doesn't fit in the standard model and yet people widely accept gravity as fact even though evolution is even more easily and readily observed than gravity so can we get let's do a couple quick pieces of those evidence rather than just claiming claiming that because that's a that's a big claim you know for a lot of people so we've got the dating we've got the fossil record uh what are some of our other big pieces of how about dna can you can we talk about dna for a little second yeah so dna um is uh the molecule of you it is uh common to all life on earth um other than bacterium bacteria don't necessarily have full dna actually bacteria most bacteria do some viruses don't but uh dna is uh digital information encoded in organic molecules and then that's broken into words called genes so you as a human being have about 25 000 genes right and what's interesting is dna shows remarkable commonality and that all life on earth shares greater than i don't remember the exact percentage but it's like 95 or 97 all life on earth shares common dna and so by looking at dna now that we've sequenced genomes for not only our species but other species as well we find that only about two percent of your dna is actively encoded and the rest of it's a historical record so by looking at dna you can see how long ago different species branched off from each other so you can see for example that chimpanzees and bonabos which are two different species haven't been different species very long yes or as they're sometimes called in science boner bows because they're very very sexual apes that's science so dna will tell you some remarkable things for example according to dna science there's never been less than about 1200 individuals in the human species but it also tells you and this is a really critical point that the idea of species is just a construct that if you sort of back the lens out over time there's just these gradual changes there's no clear line where one day uh you have an ancestor and the next day have a different species these are slow drifts and and one way to look at that would be a very contemporary example that you could verify uh if you're if you have questions just with google just look for the peppered moth now this is a a moth that lives in europe and prior to the industrial revolution which we have good history for and we have good observation the peppered moth had a very modeled appearance uh it it looked like a white moth with pepper on it and when the moth like that landed on a tree it blended in with the bark and scientists uh understood that there was a very dark variation of this moth that made up less than two percent of the species why because when it landed on a tree it stood out like a sore thumb and it was easy prey it was eaten it didn't get to to breed nearly as often which is how selection pressures work the black variation of this gene was not well suited to the environment but then you have the industrial revolution and what happens factories start releasing smog and the trees in these forests become covered in soot so they're black and what happened suddenly over a relatively short period of time it was the black moths that were able to breathe and the modeled ones were not able to breed and pass their genes on and this species like you flipped a switch suddenly was a black moth and you can imagine over more periods of time these moths that live in the sooty forests are going to keep breeding while the peppered moths elsewhere will continue to breed and before long each sets of genes are going to continue adapting and they won't be able to breed with each other anymore and you'll have two new species that's how natural selection works

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yes in in reference to god and the creation yes sure okay and why do you believe in evolution wow well because i think that the term is self-explanatory i do believe that god created us but in this world and everything but i also believe that evolution is a part of the ongoing process

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there's a lot of people today in our society that don't know precisely what they mean about scripture or how they can relate to these ancient stories and yet they're still compelled to be a part of church and this particular story of this particular man who was god compels them and and i certainly know the reason i got involved in the liturgist to begin with was to help create spiritual christian community for those people who felt like they were forced to choose between science and god that i think that's a false dichotomy and that also if we're talking about god being infallible and perfect and beyond us that a lot of the theologies we use to encapsulate god into a particular systematic understanding are in fact ways of constructing our own idols i'm with you on that i that that was my experience as well i mean in college i came up against some of the science you know showing the age of the earth showing um evolutionary principles and it really kind of rocked me a little bit because i was a i was an arguer online you know i was i would get on and debate in the creation chat rooms and the evolution chat rooms i would go on and try to convince people because i was i was raised in christian school and i i learned in my christian school textbooks how you know carbon dating was flawed and the scientists of the world that were more mainstream scientists were all very biased and trying to sway the science towards atheism because they didn't want to believe the bible and so they were biased and you have to do unbiased science and the unbiased science always would come up in favor of biblical creationism and i had plenty of arguments under my belt to go into that and then when i got into college and had to cite my work for my papers and i was trying to argue that against my professors i kept seeing that my sources were the biased ones and uh in my you know that's what it seemed like to me anyway and that created a lot of tension for me and that created a lot of it had this dichotomy of what team am i going to be on this team that believes the bible or this team that you know makes fun of the bible and finds it worthless and and you know that dichotomy created so much tension and pain and doubt and struggle for me and it took years to kind of come to terms with reading the bible in a way that didn't have to create those sharp divisions michael do you think it's possible for a reasonable person to believe in a literal six day creation sure there are lots of reasonable people that believe in that and i think i mean i think you know i used to believe in it and i felt like i was being reasonable in believing it and you know i do i feel that's correct no um do i feel like there's good science for it no absolutely not um but i know that there that it's a complicated issue for people because it gets into how we read the bible and how we treat the bible for a lot of people they want they need you know to have a cohesive view of scripture and they don't they're not willing for good reasons to throw out the whole thing um and so go to great lengths to try to uh figure out creative ways of being reasonable and believing six days you know but whatever it would be believing that god created a mature existence already you know six thousand years ago um the problem with that is it's you know you could take that line of thinking and say god maybe god created the universe right now and just with all of the memories in our heads and none of us have lived any time um that's theoretically possible you can't just that is actually a remarkably um sophisticated way of thinking in this particular epistemology this is uh something that has been coined in uh specifically answers in generations as observational science versus historical science the idea that observational science lets us make computers and vaccines and robots on mars and it's valid but historical science this idea of looking back in time is based on flawed methodologies obviously as a science-minded person i have great trouble with that delineation it doesn't exist in the sciences other than um the sort of creation scientists and that line of thinking would make it impossible to validate the legal validity of the united states of america because in order to verify the declaration of independence or our constitution what do you have to use this so-called historical science so it's kind of a troubling line of reasoning on the one hand i appreciate the attempt to be rational and to have a intellectual rigor about your ideas to test them and to propose possible solutions i also really appreciate the way that answers in genesis asserts that many things in creation were made old in order to explain what we observe through science you know the the sort of bubbles and glaciers and tree rings and the immense scale of our sky and the ability to kind of look back in time using telescopes uh they've they've tried to create plausible answers but to do so they've needed to fracture science needlessly and as michael just alluded to that process undermines our ability to make any assumptions about physical reality you have to examine historical evidence in order to operate in the world including trusting the bible the bible is a historical document and so by their own measure you would be using historical science to validate and trust the scriptures which i find deeply troubling now i did want to ask one other question michael some people online have asserted that to reject the historicity or the the valid of the creation account of genesis historically is to reject genesis completely do you agree with that do you see value in the book of genesis and the creation myth i do see value in it i i think that is another dichotomy that's just completely needless it's like to me that would be like asking if romeo and juliet is not historically verifiable and it's not based in history does that make it lose all value it's like that's not even the primary value at all it's not even the that's not what it is like to to make it that is to lose its value actually um its value is for the genre that it is for the intention that it is for you know it's it's beautiful a piece of music it's it has nothing to do with the math of the music or the it's a it's not what it is like it's it's not aren't you amazed how these numbers added up and balance each other out at the end that's not what music is it's an aesthetically driven situation so to take the poem of genesis 1 for instance and to try to make it into a science textbook is to just is to kill the thing is to to remove any beauty that it could possibly have in my in my perspective now um and i say poem because that's actually what it is it's a the way it's lined up and divided in in with repetition and uh the days how they're ordered it is a poem um so i think it absolutely has amazing value and it has for from billions of people for thousands of years um and for thousands of years or at least hundreds of years people have in christian history have been saying things like hey you can't try to read the bible as a science book when science conflicts with the bible and your reading of the bible namely re-read the bible like change that because you're probably the one that's wrong and if you if you don't do that you're going to look like an idiot i mean that goes all the way through augustine and all sorts of all sorts of early church fathers i mean even even uh luther would have said let science speak and and reread the bible because because the church made pretty big mistakes in the past without thinking the world was flat and confusing that with a biblical view and uh and there are plenty of scriptures that you could use to support that if you really wanted to try to make the psalms a science book rather than a series of songs and poems and whatever you know laments and all the different things that they do in the psalms well right right in genesis 1 it speaks of a firmament and a firmament would be a massive globe in the sky uh it's firm it's it's a physical material and the idea of a firmament as we understand the writings of those days was that it had holes in it and the light of heaven shone through and that was the stars and when it rained water fell from the heavens through those holes and nurtured the earth now obviously the voyager spacecraft is very far from the earth indeed and it has yet to run into the firmament and furthermore our telescopes and especially our radio telescopes and other probes can look very far into space and there just is no sign whatsoever that stars are small holes in a firmament instead like our sun they are balls of gas and nuclear fusion um so yeah i guess i'm just saying i agree in a very nerdy way it's a very good science mike science bike that's why we call you science one other idea michael um and this is something i've thought about a lot but i'd like to hear your take on it um in many discussions with my friends i actually had a rather lively discussion with some folks from the church i used to attend this morning on facebook don't you just love uh facebook discussions of substance um and they repeated a theme i've heard often that jesus himself spoke of the writings of moses as if they were historical fact and therefore to reject any of moses's words as allegorical is to reject the divinity of christ what would you say to someone who holds that position i think you're making a lot of assumptions based in a perspective that was handed to you from our culture and that it's the way we think in the modern world is very different than how people thought in the pre-modern world and to just see a few words that somebody said that jesus said about noah and to assume that you can get into jesus's mind and know exactly how he thought about the whole situation and how he considered history versus myth versus whatever how do you know and even if he was wrong even if he did believe um that noah was a historical person or adam was a historical person and ended up being wrong i don't understand how that even would deny the divinity of christ the whole idea of the divinity of christ being fully human and fully god that god lowered himself to become a human being with a human brain in a human culture with human language and human needs and human limitations well the scripture seems to indicate at least in some degree that uh christ is not as as omniscient as god the father because if we take if we just take scripture at face value uh it seems to indicate that the only being if we would even use that word with knowledge of uh how and when things will end is god the father that not even jesus knows good one and that seems to imply some limitations on the scope of knowledge and insight for christ incarnate versus the source of all you know that of course will freak a lot of people out and i don't think you need to go there necessarily to say that jesus was wrong about it um but the point is it wouldn't freak me out if he was wrong about it in his human human side um but i you know i don't i still don't see yeah the issue because if noah and adam were mythical ideas the point of what jesus was saying still applies to me the point of them still being in the scriptures still applies to me it has it has very little to do in my perspective with jesus trying to lay out a history of the world for a historical minded people or or trying to try to explain the science of how things came into being to a pre-modern people you know even if jesus knew that noah and adam were mythical but knew he was talking to people that may have thought they were real that's another possibility he's just referring to to the story that he's part of he's just jewish to these jewish people that know that story and it speaks of a million things when they hear about noah they have a whole world that's that that has been created around their story and that speaks to a hundred things to them so for him to use that story um of course he would he's using their language you know he's speaking human language and he's speaking within human culture um and i think that's a lot of times what we in the modern world we like to try to imagine the bible uh at least at least for like modern evangelicals especially americans it seems like we like to imagine it as without context without culture but just this sort of objective pure source of truth that all you have to do is read it and it's clear and you just believe it and because i think there's so much to why that has happened but in a nutshell i believe that the modern um the modern mindset you know post enlightenment thinking which is which was very reductionist and very you know you can know things to be true if you break them apart put them under a microscope and dissect them and you know come up with propositions that are true verifiably that sort of thinking by the way is very effective in a lot of ways and we can see what it's done in the world it's given us modern science and it's given us medicine and it's given it's sent people to the moon and it's made it's made life a lot better for so many people so that kind of thinking is extremely valuable but when you try to apply that sort of thinking to god and to faith it can get dangerous because you can really reduce infinity to something manageable i think that's why if you ask a lot of these people that would argue that dichotomy what is the center of faith they would probably say the bible where if you ask somebody pre-enlightenment uh what is the center of the christian faith everybody's going to say jesus christ and we would have to acknowledge that there was a time in history where there was a christian faith but was not a bible yeah in fact one of the most interesting discussions i've ever been a part of online was during the period of time in my life where i was an atheist and didn't believe in god at all and uh there was a conversation on an internet forum between evangelical christians and atheists about the validity of scripture and a secular historian weighed in with great frustration that both the conservative christians and the atheists were examining a historical document with an incorrect lens that they were as michael said looking at it through modern eyes and that was a very poor way to read that document that in those days to separate the the story of the people and their cultural context and the social identity they had was impossible to to extract that from the text and that no civilization at that time in history made any attempt to have a dry recollection of history history was always viewed through the lens of the identity and culture and history of that group it was obviously and even intentionally biased um and i i thought that was quite remarkable because i was an atheist and i felt rebuked because i was doing a poor job in evaluating the bible academically and that that was one of the things that started me to to reconsider what belief really meant and what these stories really mean

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all right listen i think we're we're getting close to needing to get into our art phase but we don't have a jingle for art right now i think you should probably create one for us art art art art if you didn't hear that that was the really artsy way of saying art or very creative i don't know how much evolution has to say about art um i mean there are maybe some interesting theoretical discussions to have about memes and the evolution of human society and how art has reflected that but uh as an answer that i just edited out pointed out it's not very interesting [Laughter] but i just know even the reason that i was excited about doing evolution as a second podcast um it's a little obscure and i'm even trying to understand why myself because as an artist yeah why does natural selection matter to me outside of the somehow it does um it just does and some of that's my my makeup i'm sure as kind of the person that wants to wants to know um that's just kind of my personality i just i want to keep digging and get to the bottom of it um but it's also for some reason gives me just as a human being a certain humility to think of the universe in this way rather than the very human-centric and very small and very young universe that i grew up with the older and the bigger and the um more out of my control that the universe has become as i've learned more about it and is more inspiring to me it's like i am now this i'm part of this glorious beautiful thing that's unfolding and something that's so crazy um of just this these just millions of species over billions of years and i'm this like little like little punctuation mark at the end of this novel like of history that happens to have eyes to see and and a brain that lets me wonder and feel transcendence and and it's just like to see all to see truth i think how can the artists not want to see truth because isn't our art like playing with reality it's it's forming reality and forming truth into new beautiful ideas and to see what happens in the universe around us as species evolve and as life broadens and as the universe continues to just move away from us at unfathomable speeds and like all of that it's just to me super inspiring to as a human being how do we not respond with art to this and um and how is god not so much more magnificent and i guess that's what evolution does for me as an artist is it uh it's like if god is the creator and you get you get a chance to check out his paintbrush why wouldn't you just like look at it as hard as you can and get everything from it that you can't um so list does it not does it not matter you said it doesn't matter to you what evolution does it still not matter to you i mean do i have my mind set on what i think is true yes would it matter if i met god tomorrow and he was like you know what

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i created the universe and adam full grown and everything else too i would be like cool that's cool you wouldn't be like why did you trick us i don't feel tricked i feel like we have we can make guesses in us like try to get to like what we know and what we're given this is the best answer that we can come up with but that doesn't mean that i'm all knowing i'm again we weren't there i'm not all knowing i don't i'm doing the best i can for what i'm given and this is the best answer that i can come up with and if someone comes up with something better then at that point we'll like i'll take that into consideration but is my world gonna shatter if god looks at me and is like list genesis was like that's exactly how it happened like i'm gonna be like wow cool i guess i was wrong it's not gonna be like i'm not gonna be in any less wonder of him either way well apparently we should have just had you do the whole episode because that was better than anything we've said the entire time but i want to i want to add one aside right there if i could because this is this cuts to the heart of something for me what's important about our faith what really matters what is vital because one thing that grieves me and concerns me is the constant back and forth and bickering between what we would call evangelical christians or fundamentalist christians or progressive christians or mainline christians or even protestant christians and catholic christians we have these tendencies to take our ideas about god and elevate them above the idea uh that we've all chosen for whatever reason to follow a particular historical figure who is jesus and that we've all decided that that decision is going to be a decision of incredible importance in our lives and we take issues like how to best approach genesis and we turn them into ways to divide ourselves apart let me be very clear i absolutely support discussion and debate and dialogue about how to approach genesis that's healthy what's not healthy is our tendency to demonize each other if you're a person who believes the earth was created in six literal days i have no qualm with you i would be happy to attend a church function with you i would be happy to go to a homeless shelter with you to serve food to people in need i would love to pray with you i would love to study the bible with you but i just wish that we as a people we uh who who it's part of our understanding of christ believe that humility is very important could all take a step back and understand that all of our ideas about god are simply that they're ideas i obviously think my ideas about god are best that's why i've chosen them but i'm always open to listening to someone else's perspective and i always admit that anything i say or know could be wrong now there are those people that say that that's theologically dangerous but i think that's the only way to be intellectually honest if we believe that our read of scripture or our interpretation of god is perfect or the best or dare i say infallible i think we are in real danger of elevating ourselves to intellectual gods that in fact questioning ourselves questioning even the scripture is not an act of elevating ourselves but instead a way of humbling ourselves amen and amen i think if not only jesus and the early apostles and early fathers but that most christians if they you know pre-1500 if they saw what a lot of us have made christianity into it would just break their hearts into these splintering a million sects of different people that have made faith about these different propositions and ideas that they disagree on and you find your own little camp that only you agree about and that's what we all do and it just i think it would break their hearts it was uh you know they used to talk about words like the cloud of unknowing i just saw this prayer this morning this old saint and this great cloud of unknowing and the whole idea of belief um to a pre-modern person it was not this uh you know certitude about how the universe works and the certitude about the past and the history of the fossil record there was there wasn't a certitude about what exactly the trinitarian doctrine of this i mean they took four to six hundred years to to come up with the language for the trinity um and to even like think of those implications and what would that mean it was all it was about mystery and it was about trust and faith and hope and love and this great cloud of unknowing we come into something greater than ourselves when we come to our faith and we come to god and i feel our fear that in the modern world we we just tend to reduce it so so unfortunately to to little ideas and little propositions that we allow ourselves to just divide over um and i would imagine that it would break the heart of the one who prayed in the garden that we would be one as him and his father were one i don't think uh i don't think we could end any better than that so everybody want to thank you for listening to this episode and for being a part um and we'd love to hear your thoughts and reactions on twitter or in the discussion comments below on our website at theliturgis.com podcast this is science mike i'm michael gunger and i'm melissa pena thanks for joining [Music] us [Music] you