ASM071 Chiropractors, Exodus, and The Great Commission

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chiropractors exodus and the great commission all that and more on this week's episode of ask sciencemic

[Music]

welcome to ask science mike the weekly podcast where i answer your questions about science faith and life i will let you know that i'll be at the wild goose festival and you can be my guest and get a discount of 25 off your ticket by using goose cast 16 when you buy your tickets learn more by going to ask sciencemike.com but for now we've got a show to do so let's get it started [Music] [Applause] [Music] hey science mike so i wanted to ask about chiropractors because the people i know who have gone have found a lot of healing from chronic back pain and hip pain and just had all positive experiences but whenever the subject comes up online there seems to be a lot of negativity people saying they're not real doctors they're scams things like that so i guess i was just curious what you knew about chiropractors and if it's effective and safe and and good all right well hey thanks this is a great question and one i've wondered about myself i'm a person who has at times struggled with some pretty chronic back pain uh and i've got some problem with my spinal discs and i've often heard that chiropractors can offer relief i've even had doctors tell me i should visit a chiropractor and so i did a little research and said what or looked at what science has to say about chiropractic care so let's first understand what it is where it came from chiropractic care is an alternative form of medicine dating back to the late 1800s and the theory behind chiropractic care is that it's allowing the body's innate intelligence to heal disease by aligning the nervous system especially in and around the spinal column now that sounds pretty different from modern medical theory trying to release a body's innate intelligence to do what it does but there are two schools of chiropractic thought there's the straits who say that all body ailments come down to this misalignment of the nervous system and mixers who say that misalignment in the nervous system and in the bone supporting the spinal column can contribute to discomfort and disease but also prescribed to more modern germ theories and a more broad medical view of human health chiropractic care is incredibly common in the united states the united kingdom and australia to the point that some chiropractors actually want to be their patients primary care providers something that frankly gives me the heebie-jeebies now when i look at actual scientific data actual studies about chiropractic care what i find is inconclusive but also not encouraging in the studies that have been done many of which have methodological flaws chiropractic treatments don't score much better than placebo for treating chronic pain and worse than that people are sometimes injured or harmed in the process of receiving chiropractic treatments now the data here is very inconclusive but it's often enough to be cause for concern more recent examinations of chiropractic care have eliminated some of the methodological falls of early studies but they're still coming in with very inconclusive data and two small sample sizes and most researchers who have done work studying chiropractic care agree that the main thing needed is larger studies so then if we don't have great data to support that chiropractic care is beneficial and we have some data to indicate that it may even be harmful in some cases why on earth is chiropractic care so popular why do people swear by a visit to their chiropractor well back pain can be relieved by exercise and by movement and chiropractors often cause temporary pain relief maybe via a method of action like adrenaline you know you're getting twisted and you're in a strained circumstance and there's some physical discomfort and so your body releases adrenaline and response which lowers your pain response but chiropractors often prescribe what ongoing exercises and repeat visits that involve stretching action and muscle building especially in the core and those things have been demonstrated to be medically helpful for sufferers of upper and lower back pain in fact in my own life the way i ended up relieving my back pain symptoms was to start an exercise regimen mainly centered around low impact core muscle exercises and in my case that was under the advice of a neurosurgeon now let's talk about another reason chiropractic may be so popular humans like to be touched and we experience less pain when we are touched and this takes me to another popular form of alternative medicine massage therapy we've studied massage therapy even more than we've studied chiropractic care and results are not encouraging massage therapy is a very placebo like mechanism but feels good and even more painful deep tissue massage techniques still involve contact with another human being and the west in general is touch reverse and touch starved and we know scientifically that human beings experience less pain and discomfort when they are touched by other people especially in a non-threatening context i mean think about times in your life where you've felt bad or had a headache or been sick and someone close to you has just put their hand on your forehead that creates relief hearing other people talk to us creates relief because we're social animals and so both massage therapy and chiropractic care seem to be working on the social mechanisms of human interaction and the soothing response that's endemic to those reactions so in my opinion neither massage therapy or chiropractic care is a substitute for traditional medicine especially for acute or chronic conditions but there's nothing wrong with seeking out that kind of care if it's beneficial in your experience with one caveat don't allow any procedures that make you feel uncomfortable or seems like it risks injury because you don't want to take a bad thing and make it worse through further injury and always always consider seeing a traditional doctor and ask about exercise and movements that could help you address the pain or condition that you are experiencing [Music] our next question comes in via email and it reads hey science mike love the work and your heart my question pertains to the christian idea of the great commission in reading here from the book of matthew it says and jesus came and said to them all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me go therefore and make disciples of all nations baptizing them in the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit teaching them to observe all that i have commanded you and behold i am with you always to the end of the age back to the reader's question as i find myself becoming more of a christian mystic how does a christian mystic engage or interpret this passage to mean and what impact does it have in our lives in science and faith thanks mike boaz well the first thing i want to say is we are getting more and more bible questions on ask science mike every week and more and more often those are the questions that get selected by my patrons on patreon the core idea of the show here i'm going to answer whatever questions you want me to answer and i'm always happy to do that because i want to honor that questions are allowed and some of the questions i get about the bible are questions that in some way challenge uh american orthodoxy but i also have to say and this is vital i'm not really qualified to answer these questions i am way better naturally i've studied more in physics and neurology i have read a lot about bible history and biblical scholarship but i have a real hard time discerning what sources are more credible than others what arguments are better made and better formed from archaeology from history and i'd like to remind you all that when you have questions about biblical composition the implications of the bible in society the historicity of biblical events there's better resources pete ends is an amazing resource n.t wright bart ehrman karen armstrong folks like that you're going to get a lot more quality information from them than you would from me so what i'm going to do now is just kind of tell you my impression based on studying the work of biblical scholars um and i'm sure it's going to have all kind of holes in it because you're picking from all these different schools and so i'll start by kind of talking about the two main views on the gospel of matthew as i understand them so the first view on matthew is that it was the oldest gospel like the original gospel that it was written by the apostle matthew a disciple of jesus and this view is what we know was held by church leaders in the second century a d or c e depending on how you like to label those years after the time of christ that's the first view the second view is that matthew is a derivative work that was not written by an eyewitness at all but instead by an anonymous author and that what matthew does is combine mark with a second source which we call q that was uh is lost to history that is shared with luke and then has some original maybe a third source or content generated by the author of matthew and this is a view that's held more often by secular academics by liberal theologians and it comes from analyzing the text itself okay so when you look at the book of matthew an overwhelming majority of mark is included in matthew then it shares some source material and and content with luke and then add some content that you don't find in either mark or in luke and then you get matthew and people who view matthew in the second light generally hold that matthew was originally written in greek by someone with an intimate understanding of jewish culture based on linguistic analysis this is way out of my league to know whether that's a credible claim or not people i tend to i obviously have more affinity with the second group based on you know how i view the bible in biblical history that first view is not like some fringe evangelical view or something that's a credible view among many historians okay either way view one or view two matthew is clearly writing for a jewish audience in his gospel or the author of matthew and that's because old testament prophecies are quoted all the time the lineage of jesus is a major component you don't see the imagery you see say in luke or in john where you're having more hellenistic imagery to denote christ's divinity matthew's very clearly talking to a jewish audience and because he's writing to a jewish audience you have to read matthew from the viewpoint of a jew living under roman occupation so if you look at matthew in that light what do we realize well the romans were going around the world conquering everyone absorbing their faith into the roman pantheon placing caesar as the the pinnacle of the pantheon you could keep your faith as long as your your god was subordinate to caesar and if you didn't agree to join this kingdom you're forced to by the sword by capital punishment the penalty for not going along with the roman empire was steep and in the light of that kind of global conquest the great commission and the gospel of jesus is revealed in a very subversive light because this is a kingdom built on spiritual rebirth instead of military conquest and that is still interesting to me today it's relevant to me today because we may be post imperialism we're we're not conquering a lot of uh nations across the earth anymore but we are still very colonial in our thinking subverting conquest and colony with the gospel seems to be a very very relevant idea to me and one way to look at the great commission a kingdom a kingdom of god built not on the sword not on colony but on love now you can't separate the great commission and its command to make disciples from how you view salvation obviously an evangelical idea of salvation is that we have a personal relationship with god that is reconciled through a personal sinner's prayer and that's a relatively recent addition to church theology older views of christianity tended to be more communal and judaism is certainly an extremely communal expression of faith that doesn't have much of an individual or personal salvation component now i tend to fall as people who've listened to the show before know into the greek orthodox views on salvation that salvation represents a healing of sickness not a sacrificial lamb to protect us from a violent god not some substitution for god's punitive nature but instead an invitation toward healing and when we look at salvation in that perspective the great commission becomes a call to enlist patients to become nurses for those of us that have started to experience some healing to then serve others so that they can begin to be healed too now obviously i'm not a total depravity guy i'm not talking about the innate worthlessness of mankind but it took me a long time to get this episode done today i've been traveling a lot and i broke my foot and there's all kind of details that aren't relevant or pertinent in the program but even today i woke to news that there had been a slaughter at a gay nightclub in orlando and i've been stuck in grief and lament all day our penchant for violence for division for rage and for hatred to me signal the validity of the idea that there is some sin in humanity some sickness and in my life i have found that the gospel of jesus is effective in helping me heal that sickness in my own life if you know my story you know a lot of that happened or rapidly progressed on a beach in california but the healing i experienced in that moment and following isn't useful if it's just some way i feel better about my life if i just get through my day easier it comes to life to meaning to worth when it becomes part of a great commission where i spend my time and energy helping others to find their own way towards a healing towards a growth towards a rebirth and a renewal to me this is the gospel and even the great commission i'm so thankful to the sponsors of ask science mike who make the show possible and this week i'd like to tell you about two of them first is pinata grams i love pineautograms i've been sending pinatagrams to people you go to pinatagrams.com you type a message you enter your credit card number and they ship a pinata to a person of your choosing it's amazing i got a pinatagram is you've never gotten anything like this in the mail it's this adorable miniature but still you know mailbox filling uh pinata full of candy super festive super fun super original you know i want to be a more thoughtful person every time someone sends me a kind note or a thank you card i think wow i want to be that kind of person i want to be thoughtful but i also like to stand out i like to do things differently and i can't think of anything more different than sending a pinata so i'm starting to send pinata thank you notes been thought pinata thinking of you moments uh and everyone i send a pinatogram and uh they reach out to me and they they say thank you and uh it's a point of delight in their day so check out pinatagrams it's amazing also sanebox if you've been listening well you've heard me talk about sanebox before i love sanebox it's how i manage my email so you've probably heard there's a million email apps out there you don't want to change email apps nobody does with sanebox you don't have to sanebox works with your email app and your email provider and just magically comes in and makes your email better it filters out all the stuff that clogs your email inbox newsletters announcements messages from people you don't know social media notifications stuff that's not spam stuff that still should get to you but that keeps you from finding the messages that are important and pertinent for today sanebox gets rid of all of it it drops it in another folder called saying later that you can review at your leisure and keeps your inbox focused on the messages that matter the most now sanebox is doing something really generous for my listeners you can save 20 percent off a subscription to sanebox by going to sanebox.com science mike i'm telling you there's no better way to get control of your email than sanebox so again go to sanebox.com sciencemike to learn more [Music] hey science mike darin here i have a question about the exodus from what we know now is there enough archaeological evidence to support a literal exodus of a large group of people from egypt into a desert wilderness if there's not how do we as christians make sense of that story showing up in the bible what should we be looking for to understand what is the bible trying to tell us with that story whether or not it's an actual occurrence again thanks so much for everything you do love your show yeah what do we do with history and the bible this is a huge part of me losing my faith is as i learn more and more about the differences in biblical claims on history and what we find in anthropology and archaeology i started to mistrust the bible and eventually the bible lost all value and that was that was the major component of me losing my faith in god becoming an atheist and now i've come back if you listen to the show you know i read the bible again you know that i find value in the bible but i get a lot of questions about how we know what is and is not historical in the bible what is mythical versus not mythical so i've talked about that in the abstract before and i guess today we'll talk about it in the specific regarding the exodus story we understand that exodus was vital absolutely vital to the jewish people of the old testament and even today it's the foundational story of their people their culture and their heritage the story of moses and most scholars believe that exodus as part of the torah was assembled from earlier oral works and maybe some written works in the post-exilic period now what's the post-exilic period that's post-exile meaning after the babylonian captivity and exile when most of the people of israel were removed from their land by the babylonians and so you have a big gap between when we believe either in or outside the church the exit has happened or is purported to have happened and when it was written down and i'll talk more about that in the course of this answer so let's talk about what we see archaeologically in contrast to the exodus story well first of all it is extraordinarily unlikely that 2 million plus israelites left the nation of egypt here's why first of all there's just no mention of anything like that recorded in egyptian history and logistically such a migration is impossible i mean two million people is a huge number of people if you look at the size of that region between egypt and canaan if you had two million people walking say eight abreast from one end to the other by the time uh the leading part of the line got to kanan half of the people would still be in egypt two million is just a massive number to say nothing of the logistics moving a people like that across that desert but that doesn't mean there was no exodus so let's look for another event from the torah which are the battles between the israelites and the people of canaan the canaanites and other civilizations in the promised land what we've seen archaeologically is that the scale of those battles when recorded in the torah they were grossly exaggerated so small regional conflicts were played out to be you know these massive invasions this this genocidal uh power but in this era you've got to understand military might was seen as a favor of your god and so recording that god once allowed the israelites to wipe out most of the people is to say god once had great favor for us you've got people writing again post-exilic about something that happened long ago events that likely became mythicized so what what really happened well one idea is that you had a smaller band of levites the priesthood of israel that broke away from egypt during the reign of king tut king dot like that king tut and and the reason is king tut was undoing a bunch of unpopular religious reforms by his father he elevated one god above the others and it caused great great displeasure among his followers when they left during some chaos they may have taken king tut's battle shrine and turned it into the tabernacle every pharaoh had a battle shrine a movable religious ritual site where they could consult with the gods during battle and the historical description of these battle shrines is remarkably similar to the historical depiction of the tabernacle isn't that interesting and so what you had what king tut's father was doing is he had to build these cities rapidly out of mud bricks because he was depopulating cities centered around gods that he was no longer honoring in his in his sort of religious reform and because of this many followers the old gods said that there would be consequences for example they said that hoppy the god of the nile would make the nile undrinkable that kermit the goddess of fertility would release her frog spawn to swim over the land and osiris the god of corn would not prevent the locust from consuming his cereals and ra the sun god would refuse to shrine do these warnings from egyptian prophets sound familiar so you can imagine levites escaping from egypt after being forced to build these cities and settlements in a short period of time could have described these events of having come to pass and allowing them to escape from egypt and curiously enough unlike other pharaohs king tut's battle shrine was not found as part of his burial according to one source that i found whose credibility i'm unsure of so i put a question mark by that so what i think is likely based on a reading of many different sources and i've included several uh contradictory sources in the show notes to this question on ask sciencemike.com is you had a small band of israelites probably levites who left israel during the reign of king tut and went into historic israel judea and samaria and became a part of the formation of israeli identity became the priesthood and then had great influence in their culture and the recording of the torah because you have to understand the point of exodus is to establish who the israelites are especially following the trauma of babylonian exile and captivity at this time they were ruled over by persia but persia was allowing them to live in their land allowing them to rebuild their temple and encouraging them to create their own written story their own set of laws for inclusion in the persian empire and one amazing thing that happened in this period was the unification of two previously oppositional deities one was l and one was yahweh so in as the process the torah was recorded el and yahweh were now understood to have been a single deity revealed under different names in history creating monotheism for the first time one true god so the value of exodus for christians today regardless of the historicity of the events recorded is the establishment of one god for all of the universe instead of a pantheon of gods or regional gods that ruled over particular patches of the earth of course it also speaks to people in exile people responding to feeling like something has been lost or like they don't belong and for people who listen to my program i'm reminded of john spong's writing of a church in exile people who begin to move beyond and become uncomfortable with claims of western christianity but still feel some place as followers of christ they are a church but they're in exile they're unwelcome in many parts of catholic or protestant christianity and so a story of god delivering people to a closer state with him following the trauma of exile is certainly one i find personally moving and compelling and i i do read exodus often for that reason our last question came in via email and it reads why do people become addicted to narcotics both legal and illegal what is the science behind the narcotic addiction i am a narcotic addict who cannot believe this has happened to me why did it happen to me and not to other people i know who have taken the same medicines what is happening inside my brain that makes it feel so good am i somehow deficient in something that the narcotic is supplementing and why is the idea of never having access to it so depressing why does my body fight me when i try to stop taking it i.e withdrawal so far all i can do is take doctor managed narcotic-based substitute medications like suboxone to stave off my cravings and keep withdrawal at bay am i doing permanent damage that cannot be undone similar to how smoking can cause long-term damage does science have a better solution to my affliction one that is permanent and leaves me not craving slash missing these drugs for the rest of my life signed the addict p.s does faith or god or jesus or the bible have anything to say about this well first of all i'm sorry for what you're going through struggling with addiction including today to prescription medications prescription drug use has become more common than illegal drug use and drug overdose recently passed car accidents as a cause of death in our society so you're not alone you're not weird here this is a very common thing that people are struggling with and well let's talk about the brain mechanisms and some of the risk factors and what possible solutions may be when you talk about narcotics you're talking about opiates and opioids opiates are made from opium like heroin and opioids are synthetic manufactured by humans but are chemically molecularly similar to opiates think codeine and when we look at the brain substance addictions be they opiates or not tend to utilize the same parts of our brain's limbic system that behavioral addictions do as well so anyone who struggles with some kind of addiction whether it's to drugs or to food or gambling or whatever it's a similar part of the brain that's being effective now when we look at the mechanism of this deeper in the brain one of the primary mechanisms of action in our brain are neurotransmitters these are chemicals that get released by brain cells that then bind to receptors and other brain cells that are then reabsorbed generally by the cell that originated them in the first place and we've got different types of neurotransmitters over a hundred have been documented so far in the sciences but they tend to fall into two major camps one are excitatory neurotransmitters and what they do is they increase neurological activity things like endorphin or dopamine dopamine gets a lot of press it's a famous neurotransmitter for a reason because it not only has a role to play in uh feeling pleasure but it also creates craving dopamine is a craving neurotransmitter it tells your brain to realize what's happening and maybe try to have it happen again dopamine is why you look at twitter so much or check your email so often it's telling you to check for a reward and then you have endorphins which are another excitatory neurotransmitter and they stop pain and cause euphoria i am a runner i was a runner before i hurt my back and a runner's high that's caused by endorphins is an amazing feeling where all the pain all the suffering from distance running goes away and you're just left feeling really really good i love endorphins everybody does i think then you have inhibitory neurotransmitters whose job is to calm the brain think serotonin think melatonin these are chemicals that tell your brain to slow down they help you sleep they help you be calm they help you be centered a lot of meditation activity is focused on the release of inhibitory neurotransmitters so when you take drugs specifically opiates and opioids you are either elevating the levels of ex excitatory neurotransmitters in your brain or you're replacing them with a more potent substance that binds to the receptors that those neurotransmitters usually do in the brain and this can cause real problems in your brain's functioning it's called a hypo functioning reward system and basically the elevated levels of excitatory response in your neurons creates a long-term imbalance your brain may start to produce less excitatory neurotransmitters or it may start to produce a lot of inhibitory neurotransmitters so that when you take the substance away natural pleasure is harder to attain and people feel down or low or slow and that's the root of tolerance you become it takes more and more and more of this chemical to get the same effect that it once had now in our brains opiates and opioids are very similar to endorphins they bind to the same receptors but at levels completely unmatched by any natural stimuli there's nothing you can do in your natural experience that will create the neurological intensity of euphoria that heroin will or that any other opiates and opioids are capable of then they create this intense euphoria and because of that they are highly addictive and they diminish normal endorphin release over time so things that used to feel good feel less good not just repeating the drug exposure but other things that used to make you feel good don't feel as good and your body naturally of course creates a return to that state of euphoria or bliss and the withdrawal symptoms you experience come from that hypo functioning reward system where it messes up your brain's ability to create and regulate regulate the balance of excitatory and inhibitory neurotransmitters shakes nausea depression all these things are results of that hypo functioning reward system so the idea that your doctor has putting on suboxone and other step down strategies for people on different narcotics is that that substance is going to provide a less intense euphoria or maybe even no euphoria at all while preventing withdrawal symptoms and providing lower health risks than other opiates and opioids the idea here is not no health risk but less health risk suboxone is less dangerous than whatever drug you were dependent on before but that doesn't mean there aren't long-term health risks with suboxone including depression there are it's that your doctor has made a choice that for now the lower risks are preferable to withdrawal symptoms and the corresponding increase for risk of relapse that comes with withdrawal symptoms now when you talk about what science can do what strategies is it recommended the fact is the science of addiction and recovery are evolving rapidly today so early in our modern history with drugs there were very moralistic approaches that emphasized a punitive response to drug use because drug use was what it was a moral failing it was people being weak willed and indulgent and what we have found is those responses are very ineffective at changing behavior and they're pretty much been invalidated by modern science and there's more recent ideas that show that neurologically addiction eliminates personal choice and more nuanced studies are showing that picture is oversimplified as well research undermines the claim that you lose your ability to make choices when you're an addict what actually happens is your decision making matrix is tilted so when they've taken people for example that were addicted to cocaine and put them in uh multi-week studies these are people with no intent to quit cocaine if they're offered either some amount of cocaine or five dollars they pick five dollars and then over time five dollars becomes less effective but then if you offer them twenty dollars they'll take twenty dollars over even a significant amount of cocaine so it's not that they can't make choices it's that they've become biased towards the choice to use drugs and that's a more complete picture of addiction today and the reason i tell you that is the stories we tell ourselves the language matters it affects our behavior so if you've been told that addiction has taken away your ability to make choices that's not true but but drug addiction does affect the way you make decisions here's the key what we're finding in science is that a balanced reward and penalty approach will be more effective now notice when i say penalty i don't mean punitive action for the sake of punitive action i'm not talking about jail time here's what i mean one study found that doctors who were caught in substance abuse and therefore became at risk of losing their license who are tested often randomly at random office visits have really high success rates at kicking addiction over time because they have something to lose if they mess up but something to gain if they don't they continue being doctors we found that parole programs that result in a clean record after a year being off drugs are more effective at long-term addiction recovery rates incentives change the way the brain makes decisions so why you and not someone else why i've taken prescription painkillers and i don't i've never struggled with that kind of substance addiction but i struggle with pizza and other people don't what what are the risk factors here what makes us different well there's genetic factors and we're identifying a lot of those today primarily in mice and rats and fruit flies but ultimately we'll do uh studies to find that in people as well there are genetic factors that make us at risk for different coping behaviors but there's also social factors isolation depression loneliness poverty even boredom are significant risk factors for drug use so a rich social engagement and social support helps people avoid drug use especially drug abuse and this has been echoed in some studies if you get rats hooked on drugs in their water and you offer them untainted water and drugged water and you lock them in a cage alone well they'll dope themselves up forever but if you've then put them in an enclosure that is enriching that has activities and other rats in it most rats naturally stop using the drug water and drink regular water because now they have normal stimulus a normal life so often drug use is linked to isolation depression loneliness poverty and boredom so what does that have to do with faith if christianity has anything to offer us it's a healthy community in the form of the church it's a place that we can be accepted and loved and affirmed a place that we can be unlonely a place we can be accepted known and heard at its best church communities that offer inclusion to those people struggling with substance abuse offer them a scientifically validated mitigating strategy for their use over time so what do you do what should you do struggling with this addiction one continue to see a medical professional communicate your questions and concerns honestly including about step down programs with other medications and finally immerse yourself in a community that helps you avoid feelings of isolation depression loneliness or boredom well there's another episode of ask science mike in the books as i mentioned at the top of the program i'd love to see you at wild goose also uh andrew gallucki has been putting together the together program if you're feeling lonely spiritually in your city we've started launching facebook groups centered around communities we'll have a link to that on the show notes on this week's show just go there and click on the together link and you can get together with other people who are figuring out the balance of science and faith and doubt in their own lives i'd like to thank andrew for his work on the program i'd like to thank my patrons on patreon for not only donating to keep the show going but also for picking the questions for this week's show and of course i'd like to thank greg nordin for his work producing the program making it sound so great and my boy jeb for writing the ask science mic theme song thanks for listening everybody