ASM090 Ask Science Mike LIVE in Kansas City

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coming to you live from redemption church in olathe kansas right next to kansas city in kansas and kind of missouri it's ask science mike live

[Music]

welcome to ask science mike the weekly podcast where i answer your questions about science faith in life and this week it's a live episode the questions are unscreened the answer's unrehearsed i'm here as part of my book tour to support my new finding god in the waves and we've got some more tour stops coming up so on november 11th i'll be in costa mesa november 12th glendale november 13th los angeles and mission hill november 20th in portland november 21st in seattle tacoma november 26th going to the big city of thomasville georgia november 30th boston january 21st grand haven michigan you can find out more about tour stops and where you can see me as well as getting tickets by going to finding on the ways.com tour but for now we've got a podcast to do so let's get it started tell me about if you're if you're a follower of jesus how that helps your brain and what goes on in your brain if you follow him consistently what are the things that happen and what's your name jonathan hey jonathan follower of jesus what it does to your brain uh it depends on how you view jesus it's a big part of what neurological activity we would see in association with your faith practice hopefully if you believe in jesus the primary thing you believe about god is that god is loving um but you might think that god is primarily angry why would you think that some uh strong emphasis on substitutionary atonement theology can lead you to focus primarily on god's anger as a wrath that needed to be stated as opposed to god's love being expressed through the life of jesus christ and those two views of god do very different things to your brain if you believe in a god who's primarily angry your amygdala which is the part of the brain responsible for fear and anger becomes more active your stress level increases you become fearful of people you view as outside of your social group or tribe you find it harder to forgive yourself and other people and you get really great impulse control because if you think god might smite you then it actually does help in the short term with behavioral control this is the reason people for example in recovery programs can be really drawn to fundamentalist ideas about god with a strong anger reaction because they need god to maybe be angry to modify their behavior not a really exciting view of god the loving god however creates a dramatically different set of neurological activity number one you get thicker richer gray matter in your prefrontal cortex that's the part of the brain responsible for focus and concentration you get thicker richer gray matter in your anterior cingulate cortex which is the part of the brain responsible for compassion and empathy your blood pressure goes down your stress level goes down you become more forgiving you become less likely to become angry because the increased neurological capacity in your prefrontal cortex and anterior cingulate cortex starves energy from your amygdala so believing in jesus makes you less likely neurologically speaking to flip people off in traffic let's see over time if you believe in jesus for a very long time deeply your thalamus which is the brain's relay center kind of grand central station or atlanta airport of your neurological composition will have a characteristic asymmetry to its activity when that happens some neuroscientists believe that an idea has become essential in your identity formation if that idea is that god is loving you see the world as fundamentally safe when you see the world is fundamentally safe you can take risks on other people and relationships that don't make logical sense because you believe god will work it out so whether that belief has rational empirical justification or not the effect is people who live lives of radical love now what's interesting to me about the repetition of faith practice and brain science is we find that when you first begin to learn new ideas or new concepts including about god it happens in your neocortex which is the outermost layer of the brain the most recent to appear in evolutionary history and your neurons they are slow and they take a lot of energy but as you reflect on ideas over and over and over they get wired deeper and deeper into the brain and in that process quite literally word becomes flesh and when that word is god is love it transforms who you are not only in your behavior but in the very nature of your brain [Music] my name is michaela and i'm an ex-fangelico so i love that term i read a book part of my becoming the next evangelical was reading a book called how god changes your brain by andrew newberg and mark robert waldman yeah are you familiar kind of my favorite book ever okay other than mine so [Music] um so my question is uh you talk very well about all of the changes in the brain when someone follows jesus so how does that compare to people who follow devoutly other religions is there a difference in the brain structure when they believe in jesus specifically versus um loving or angry gods from other traditions uh really really amazing question first of all there are differences in the brain activity associated with religious practice based on faith uh for example the christian faith comes from a very western context and so our prayer and meditation activity tends to heavily involve our temporal lobes especially our left temporal lobe which is the seat of language whereas if you uh brain scan for example a buddhist monk you'll find that their meditation is more involved in the visual cortex of the brain because they don't use word as much to contemplate god they use image the output of that process however is the same a buddhist or a muslim or a person of any faith who believes god is loving gets the same neurological benefits as christians when i say this in some rooms you see a in the audience because people thought i just wrote them like a blank science check for jesus that they could tell their friends jesus transforms your brain science reveals the one true god sorry you're wrong and science doesn't really fit that bucket so when i when i talk about the neurological benefits of faith and religion and god i'm not talking specifically about christianity so what is my scientific case for why i'm a christian and not just a spiritualist or a buddhist i don't have one i don't have any scientific reason why jesus is more compelling than any other faith none at all what i have is in my life and in my experience it is through the name of jesus and the practice of my faith centered around his life teachings and identity as i understand it that opens me up to god or opens god up to me or both i don't know frankly it's quite mysterious because if there's one thing that science really validates for me and the way i approach faith it's the value of mysticism when you scan someone's brain who really believes in god and you ask them to think about god you remember those temporal lobes i just said are active when we pray they're not active when we picture god our understanding of god is not primarily linguistic in origin neurologically speaking your understanding of god much more closely resembles a feeling or an experience which is also true when you love someone so have you ever been in a significant relationship and a third party says why do you love this person and you go um and then the person you're with says what do you mean um and accidentally this third party has created this state of stress it's because the understanding you have of that person is so deep that it transcends your understanding of language and it takes time for your brain to turn that neurological image into language which is why you go uh which is the same reason people who deeply and genuinely believe in god if someone says well what is god anyway what do they say uh because they're trying to take a non-linguistic brain state and express it through language a funny thing happens when you try to describe non-linguistic brain states you change them in the process of trying to describe them so andrew newberg among other neuroscientists says that mysticism is the most neurologically accurate form of faith people who sit with the experience of the divine but don't try to force it into linguistic containers and the fact is in my life all of my experiences and all my knowledge of christ come to me through mysticism it's through mysticism i've become so fascinated with trinitarian theology the idea of a of a distant mysterious creator god who also is embodied in the form of a a christ a reconciling force that always invites all of creation back into relationship with god and a spirit that dwells within creation not distant and unknowable but within everyone who loves god and that those beings only exist in relationship to each other and we only exist in relationship to that godhead is an incredibly unscientific idea it's just if i tried to get it published in a paper i'd have a real bad time but when i orient my life and my faith around it that messy hack works so again no like scientific compelling reason jesus the only thing i can talk to people about jesus is my need for jesus which i don't know who else it applies to somehow knowing it applies to me is enough this is way out of my comfort zone for asking questions me too but i'm a number nine on the enneagram my name is kent um i don't know if you're familiar with the yamato's water crystal experiments but he's done these experiments with these water crystals and when [Music] he he says a word and it's like okay he says something like holocaust or hitler or something negative that crystal just deforms and it's nasty and then when he says something like holy or jesus those crystals form into a perfect beautiful crystal my question is is that is that scientifically based is that a mysticism um is that um and knowing all of this um another part of my question would be you know i believe in jesus and i and i have all these all all of these thoughts and i always end up going towards negative things and um i always want to turn those things around and it's hard to do sometimes and you know the thing about yamato's crystal is we're made up of water and when people say negative things to you and things like that it affects you tremendously um but when you have positive things coming your way you know it builds you up and makes you comfortable and and encourages you so if you can speak on that a little bit i would be happy to great question thank you we are mostly water that's definitely scientifically verifiable the backbone of science is all knowledge scientific knowledge is correlated with evidence to support it so in scientific parlance you put confidence in a belief which is directly proportional to the evidence you have to support that belief that's how science works how do we make sure we have evidence our experiment and our observation goes to the very rigorous process where we describe not only our observations but how we made them so other people can replicate the finding which increases the evidence dirty secret replication studies don't happen very often because their science doesn't exist in a vacuum scientists need funding you get funding publishing uh positive results not negative results by the way so there's incredible pressure on scientists to only go on to research they think they'll get a positive result for so they can publish it and keep getting funding so they can eat and hire people and they can eat it's literally a can you eat pressure in the sciences so so peer replication studies don't get funded very often but it's important that you at least publish your methodology in a way that other people could test it if they wanted to and we consider a scientific finding a positive result at a certain threshold of statistical significance which also must be published so the the the water crystal experiment doesn't meet that level of rigor and when people have tried to replicate it they haven't consistently duplicated those findings so scientifically speaking we would then say there's not scientific support for the fact claim that language influences crystal formation or the innate properties of water that's the science language does matter a lot the language you use to describe yourself has lasting consequences i have a really bad habit when i do something that i think is less than perfect i have very high self-expectations i'm trying to work through i will say things like mike you are an idiot i will say things to myself my worst enemy wouldn't say to me i do this thing consistently where i lock myself out of my house or my car i mean consistently i actually bought a motorcycle because it didn't have doors and i literally couldn't lock myself out of it until i figured out how to lock my keys in the storage cubby so i could get in the motorcycle i mean on the but i couldn't drive it so when i crashed my motorcycle at great cost to my mental capacity because i got a double brain bleed and stretched my brain stem it's real fun i don't recommend it then i bought a car with those electronic locks so like every almost every time i get home from the airport i put my backpack in the trunk and i shut the trunk and the trunk opens back up and i go this stupid car and i slam the trunk and it opens back up and i go my keys are in the trunk i take the keys out and the car will not lock with the keys inside of it and it's a real good vibe but i get so white hot angry when i realize the car wasn't wrong and it's me and my stupid brain and in the way my psyche forms i'm warping the crystal when i do that and the language we use against other people matters especially for your parents i think what you tell your children about the world is way less important than how you tell them your children are shaped by what you say about them so if they don't do their homework and you say you're so lazy that just became part of their identity the closer someone is to you or the more you think of them the more the words they describe you stick to your identity formation i've noticed that when i study the teachings of christ he was careful with the barbs i could be wrong i read the bible a lot again these days but i think i can safely make a claim that jesus rarely or never uh used insults or harsh language to people whose actions weren't resulting directly in the suffering or oppression of others so jesus would use these bars when necessary to protect people but typically not to tear individuals down so whether or not i would be scientifically skeptical of the claim that the water in us is affected by language but the 86 billion neurons in your skull sitting in that pool of water the story they tell themselves you call your consciousness and your identity is radically affected by the language other people use for you and especially the language you use on yourself so if you have a tendency to be negative i would start listening to your thoughts regularly as a discipline and listen to the way you talk to yourself and train yourself to extend the same grace to you that you so readily extend to others i've learned to say often mike you're doing your best do you know what i say to myself sometimes sometimes i tell myself that i'm proud of me does that sound ridiculous it does a little bit but for most of my life i would have never dreamed to do that because i was an evangelical and we aren't prideful so what do we do instead we foster this shame about our identities about our beliefs about our behaviors we learn to hide parts about ourselves that we think will result in the disapproval or rejection of others and uh it warps the crystal it really does so listen to how you speak to yourself and for people in your life who say things that wound four powerful words that hurt my feelings do you know that if studies have shown that if you create a game environment where people can cheat and get away with it and that it increases the chances of winning if you read the ten commandments before the game goes people are statistically less likely to cheat including atheists sometimes our moral supervisor in our brain has to get woken up and saying that hurt my feelings creates self-reflection in the other person it's not an accusation it's just a report of how you feel and people who can't get it that still continue to throw phrases like ninja stars that leave you bleeding those are the people you have to kind of put boundaries around and not include in your life so much or else you can't be the healthy person the world needs the world needs healthy loving gracious people we call that the gospel the bible calls them salt and light a pres we're meant to be this preserving force in the world we can't do that if we poison our own salt or let other people do that [Music] um my name is eric my question for you would be how would you personally explain the holy trinity um what are their unique i know man i'm throwing you under the bus i'm sorry um but also what are their unique characteristics and how are they relevant and interacting in today's world sorry have fun christian theology universally describes the trinity as a mystery and this is the third stop on the tour where someone has said to me describe specifically the holy trinity it's hilarious uh so we've we touched on a little earlier but as a review trinitarian theology denotes god the father god the son god the holy spirit uh the father is the creator the father is here's how the father rolls the father will set a bush on fire but it won't burn and then we'll say existentialist poetry through it like i am that which i am i will be that which i will be now you read the bible it said i am which is like a i've heard a better translation of that hebrew includes different tenses but it's not as punchy as like i am like that's good marketing bible translators i'll give you that so the father's kind of this mystery um and you see that in the arc of scripture that god is distant and mysterious and inscrutable and the further you get into especially the old testament like by you by the time you get to the end of the old testament like god indwells a holy of holies in this one temple in this one town and once a year someone can go into that space where god reaches down to the earthly realm from the celestial a mystery then you have the christ now you most christians in america know jesus christ jesus first name christ last name um and it's not really accurate so the christ when we say that uh the begotten not made son the christ ex has existed as long as the godhead or the father and the christ has always been inviting creation to reconciliation always from the beginning of time before time but the christ became incarnate in jesus okay getting real trinitarian here and so jesus became a human representation of the christ and therefore what understandable and relatable a god that walks around and says the kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed the kingdom of heaven is like a little bit of yeast put into dough uh who wouldn't rejoice over one lost coin being found told these stories we could relate to cooked breakfast fish but still kind of relatable although jesus cooked breakfast after rising from the dead which is a little different than me but well i mean let's get honest i don't really cook breakfast other than pop tarts but what i'm getting at is is jesus with god with a face that we could relate to and then you have the holy spirit and the holy spirit comes and dwells within humanity the amazing thing about the holy spirit is if the spirit dwells within you the thing about the god the creator is it seems very distant this is very mysterious the thing about the christ is it was just incarnate for the 33 years and then took a rocket ship you know to wherever in the ascension and then the the mysterious distance becomes close because god's within that means that the spirit's within you can actually look within and find god now that doesn't mean like you are god don't misunderstand me i'm not speaking heresy at least not right now but you can look inward and the spirit can move you the spirit can compel you the spirit can reveal things uh scientifically again but except trinitarian theology is always centered around the idea that the beings of the godhead only exist in relationship with each other similar to physics so in this room are truly unknowable number of quantum wave functions that collapse into particles only when they interact with other particles that everything in this room exists only in relationship to everything else in this room a process we call quantum coherence so i think it's interesting that this this metaphor this idea of a three-in-one god in relationship accurate reflects not only our physical reality but our consciousness the enlightenment told us that we're all individual rational actors and science reveals that's a bunch of bunk we are a social consciousness how do i know take the most balanced mature person you've ever met and lock them in a five-star luxury hotel room for three years and don't let them talk to anybody don't let them read a book don't let them watch television don't let them communicate in any way and that mature balanced person will come out of that room a raving lunatic because we exist and are defined in relationship to others our very beliefs are formed not by rational inquiry but social identity including skeptics so you either form beliefs uh by what people are around you believe or you're a non-conformist and you form beliefs by rebelling against the ideas around you in either case you're riffing off a social consciousness that exists in relationship with everything else i think maybe one of the problems the church has is post enlightenment we moved away from the trinity we made it a talking point and not an integral part of our theology and i think the mystery of the trinity might be more relevant to the culture we live in than the kind of post-enlightenment post-reformation faith that builds mega-churches that said i literally have no idea what i'm talking about hi mike hi i'm erin good to see you first i wanted to throw a wrench in the system and thank you about a month ago you fielded a question at the end of the podcast from a young woman who had just experienced sexual assault and uh it just totally wrecked me in all the good ways um so thank you for what you said uh and i would say go find it guys it's awesome um uh and i was also appreciative that you didn't end it with even though we all love them oh i definitely don't know afterwards greg that's the end of the question um so uh so my question is about dissociation i've heard you mention it in relation to your own experiences and by the way i'm reading from notes because i will also talk and talk and talk until i'm blue in the face and i've also experienced it in my own life to varying degrees you know partially because of trauma but then also in like you know mundane harmless ways like oh i'm waking up at my desk at work with coffee in my hand how did i get here right um so the term itself implies like sort of this disconnect and i was just wondering if if that actually relates to something in the brain like if there's actually a disconnect that happens when we dissociate um and obviously like our brains don't like fly away from our body right but i wondered neurologically if there's anything and then as a side question um is dissociation like inherently beneficial or detrimental or is it like both but at different times sorry i've never taken my glasses off before answering a question that's the level of bewilderment i feel uh i actually don't think this podcast has any value if i don't admit when i don't know things if it's just a massive propaganda that convince people i'm intelligent then it's just another western ego validation so i think a very important value of the show maybe the most valuable questions are the ones that go that's an amazing question and i have literally no clue i'm almost going there but not quite i have not studied specifically brain imaging studies involving dissociation and as i think about it that's probably because it's real a relatively difficult brain state to initiate on purpose i could just imagine trying to fund that study and like like what ethical lines you would have to cross to get someone in an fmri scanner or any other kind of brain imaging and then get them to dissociate through what causes dissociation trauma trauma serious trauma so i understand the emotional underpinning of his association your brain is trying to protect you the feelings you have are so powerful they would interfere with your ability to function and so the brain distances your consciousness from your emotional systems you become an observer of your own actions the day i heard jesus talk to me that's a sentence i just said that's real as i walked up to the table of the eucharist i felt normal even relaxed and it was only later one of my friends told me that tears were pouring down my face right because i was at a state of division in my own brain how's that possible you don't have a brain now i don't mean you don't have a brain at all i mean you don't have just one brain your brain is composed of dozens or hundreds depending on how you divide them of structures with competing goals and priorities for your life for example your orbito frontal cortex may realize that on tour you've consistently been eating too many calories and your bottom jacket button will no longer button but when you're at joe's in kansas city [Applause] then your ventral stratum and your basal ganglia go you know what's really good pig on texas toast so at the same time i want to button my bottom button and i want to eat pig on texas toast those are mutually uh exclusive goals but i want them both it's because different parts of my brain want different things now the part of your brain that is generally in charge is the prefrontal cortex it's the brain's president and just like the president of the united states you know whatever you think about any given president the fact is they don't actually know that much about what's happening in the government if you ask them some really specific question about policy in the department of transportation they'll have no idea what you're talking about because every day they get briefings of only the most important things happening and that's the same thing that happens to your consciousness and in situations of threat your limbic system is faster than your prefrontal cortex is better at for example dodging a predator just imagine for a second a bear comes barreling into the room your prefrontal cortex would go about how fast is it moving does it seem angry can i it would go through this whole rational analysis and your limit system would what you would run right you would just run or punch the bear if you're you know going to be selected against via natural selection but good for us that run so we need some of those who will die for the good of the species every now and then um but in that moment your your limbic system just takes over and later your consciousness goes i did that that was me when really what happened is the president got grabbed by his suit jacket and the secret service shoved him out of the way and under a desk right so dissociation is what happens when the limbic system takes over but the conscious brain still has some awareness and that's the uncanny quality i still know what's going on but i'm not really running the show it's a survival thing it's good the bad thing is our response later that trauma gets stored in our memories it gets a high association with the amygdala and if you get any stimulus that resembles in your brain's narrative the original trauma you get triggered people are like trigger warnings are dumb people who like trigger warnings have never had real trauma or have just been lucky in how they've been able to cope with it but it's true neurologically speaking that some things later can take you back to that state of panic and pain and that's why it's important if you've experienced some form of dissociation or even any form of trauma to process through it via grief so it doesn't continue to take up real estate in your brain and show up unexpectedly at dinner and if you're dissociating frequently like that's a clax on in your psyche right see a professional immediately because you could do something that harms yourself [Music] my name is rob thank you so much for the podcast means so much for me so question on the multiverse i'm i'm a pastor who wishes secretly he was a director of science fiction movies so um i'm wondering if any of the theories on the multiverse would actually allow for any kind of direct interaction between the universes so like an interstellar it posited this theory that maybe anomalous experiences that are seen as supernatural or paranormal are actually different universes in the multiverse actually interacting with each other so is there anything to that does for example does light actually travel between the different universes in the multiverse or gravity and is there any theories that would allow for that kind of direct interaction between the various universes at first i thought no and then i realized yes okay first of all should probably talk about multiverses are there are multiple multiverse theories that attempt to resolve a particular problem in physics in quantum physics the standard model which is why is it so hard to mathematically predict what's going to happen at a quantum level you have to use this unfathomable number of equations and run them over and over so einstein got so mad about quantum physics he said god does not roll dice because the only way the world makes sense in the standard model of physics lens if there's literally kind of a random action that underlies physical reality which makes determinists very upset because physics is supposed to follow rules so multiverse cosmology is an attempt to say well there's a reason it's so hard to predict because every quantum thing that happens does it's called the many worlds hypothesis of quantum dynamics in that model no multiverses never interact with each other other multiverse theories are designed to resolve the issues of where the standard model of physics intersects with einstein's theory of relativity i.e the singularity from which the universe began and the period of rapid inflation immediately following that event which has all kinds of problems in physics as we know it so in some of those models universes are bubbles yeah yeah so in some of the bubble universes even if they're spatially infinite some models say that light can't but gravity can pass between universes because for example in string theory gravitons are the only open-ended string in the theory we're getting way in the weeds i'm sorry what this means is some scientists practitioners of string theory think that dark matter is the gravity coming from other bubble universes and in that specific model gravity is being exchanged between universes it doesn't pass information though you can't learn anything about the other universe other than the total amount of mass in it and even you can only estimate because you don't precisely know the distance to that universe and gravity does follow the inverse square law at least in this universe of course if other universes have a different number of spatial dimensions the inverse square law will not apply in their coordinates and only in hours and they might be inverse cube or inverse whatever depending on the total number of spatial dimensions is everybody with me uh long story short sometimes [Music] my name is um let's say alan hi alan hi uh so i've got a question about spiral dynamics that's okay uh but i'm i'm hopefully gonna create a possibility that it'll be relatable okay so raise your hand if you've never heard of spiral damage okay great never heard okay that'll help um so we're here on a wednesday night yes uh i am supposed to be at my home congregation where i'm a youth pastor okay do we do we need to do like a voice work on your voice no okay because my name is my home church it should be fine but if uh if a few of my elders knew i was here instead of teaching my teenagers i may not have a job to come back to wow because my congregation is exceptionally blue yeah which is the idea that uh that there are rules and there are laws and that is very easily um attributed to spiritual ideas yep right um i attend a church of christ if you know anything about that i do that corner the thunder thank you jesus um i on the other hand chose to take a vacation day drive two and a half hours to be here because i am falling far out of a blue stage and far into an orange stage of wanting to ask questions and figuring out what life is like yes right i also have a toddler and a baby on a way when i'm at a job that i absolutely love but i don't know if i can fit in yeah so the question comes to this when you start to ask big questions and you don't know where they're going and you don't know when you answer them where they'll take you how do you find the courage to continue to move forward when you know it might have dramatic consequences thank you alan okay spiral dynamics is a theory of how human consciousness responds to the environment how human consciousness modifies the environment through culture and then how the human brain responds to the modifications itself made if you want to know more about it listen to the liturgist podcast episode on spiral dynamics you'll know what it means and probably even more confused than you are now what his question said with the callers is i go to a very traditional church with a conservative theology and lately i've been questioning what i understand to be true and maybe the lens with which i'm viewing the world is starting to change and i don't know where i'll end up and this is especially complicated because my paycheck is attached to the way i used to believe i get at least 100 emails like that a week this is not an obscure thing this is something i'm trying to help my more conservative christian friends realize their pastors aren't with them anymore their praise and worship leaders aren't with them anymore they're seminary grads they're theologians the ship is sailing they're not on it and yet because they pay so many people so much money a lot of people just privately suffer first of all great insight to start out knowing where you don't know where you're going i have terrible news if this continues you will not fit in where you are how do i know there are a thousand people in a baptist church who i love dearly in the city of tallahassee florida who literally could not stand to be in a room with me because i'm the one who rebelled against the tribe now i wasn't paid by that church i was just a deacon and a sunday school teacher but my entire social life was planted in that soil i got married in that church both my daughters were born while we went to that church my oldest daughter was baptized there i lost three grandparents while attending that church so moving on hurt but i didn't worry my family would starve right now probably makes sense to be careful who you tell what that doesn't mean don't tell anyone now you just told some close friends here and they're all going to keep it a secret as well as by the way everyone listening however many hundred thousand is this week nobody mentioned what's going on with alan um especially if you live two and a half hours from kansas city uh but it's important that you you have people in your life that you can be honest with through this whole process that won't judge you won't correct you won't coerce you won't say if you can't get back to x i'm out you need truly safe people because doubt is a corrosive dangerous thing when mixed with fear or shame right tim tim helped me realize it's not just fear it's also shame and if you do it alone that will be an inevitable component here's the other thing this is good the way you understood god that served you for so long isn't working anymore because you're growing we have this assumption in the church that people change their beliefs because of a sin problem or some ridiculous notion like that but i have found it is almost universally in a search for truth in a thirst for justice in a hunger to know god in all three of those often in response to some form of trauma so if the reason you're starting to evaluate is because of a woundedness uh as you search for god and as you rationally analyze god god will start to feel more and more and more distant and that's not actually distance from god that's you becoming distant from yourself because of the way you've been hurt and so part of your discipline and practice of being honest with other people must include talking about that thing that made the wound or those things that reopened the old wound that now are causing you to search by the way whenever a new image of god is presented in the bible what happened something horrible to the nation of israel we learn new things about god when we've been hurt so badly that the old thing doesn't work anymore so i would say get excited because wherever you go next if it's in search for truth if it's in search of love god will be there even if the word you end up using to describe yourself as atheist wherever you go if you're searching for truth and love and beauty and hope god will be there now the paycheck thing six months from now this is still going on or you go to places that you know just are unspeakable in that community context the only thing that will protect you and your family is uprooting yourself from that financial soil and buying a new income stream i'm not kidding when i say if you have a car that's newer than 10 years uber or lyft can pay bills short term while you look for something else i speak from experience i left an ad job to be a podcaster it's not super lucrative but i sleep good but ultimately you may have to find a job in a different church or you might need to work not for a church at all and we do a really terrible thing to pastors we train them in one specific occupation so that they're always leashed to the approval of a congregation um now if you have if you love teaching students maybe a substitute teacher for a while you know maybe become a teacher teacher gosh we could use good teachers in our society if you have a heart for hurting people maybe some of your college credits would apply to a new degree in counseling or therapy just remember you're never as stuck as you think you are there's much more freedom than we realize because we come paralyzed in our context but the paralysis mainly comes from a fear of rejection social animals we die alone before agriculture right can't survive on our own we fear rejection there's nothing to fear i know a few hundred thousand people who think you're great exactly like you are thank you allen [Music] i noticed that the room is about half and half men and women but to every one woman that has asked a question there have been two men that have participated which is statistically very common for professional and educational worlds as well as even more common in religious worlds can you speak to if you notice that happening frequently sorry frequently in all of your podcast episodes as well as the psychological and or scientific causes for how that happens podcast listeners you can't see me dancing because i love that question so much wow fire okay hi my name is science mike i am a raging male feminist [Music] [Applause] it is so consistent especially ask lance mike it's more with than when we do literature things at science mike crowd uh i've had audiences that are 60 women and no questions from women the entire time we record and i wrestle with that what do i do what do i do i'm glad they're here why do i ask questions and if i answer the questions as a male am i just reinforcing patriarchy by putting women in the position of just asking questions so i had an idea at the liturgist gathering in chicago we did a session in the morning where i told the story of paul and how he was kind of the original church heretic bad boy like the first rob bell was paul the mother church in jerusalem like paul would go and like do his thing and they would hear about it and they would send missionaries to correct paul's teaching and then paul will get really mad and write a letter we call them the epistles and then paul said this thing one time that has been echoing through the centuries i permit not a woman to teach or have authority over a man now there's several hermeneutics you can apply that passage some would make it a very local context wherein there were priestesses in the church who came from a very female domineering culture and his text was for that local congregation saying give the men some space i mean they just got done being temple male prostitutes give them some space in jesus right but then other people would say no that was probably an equally valid hermeneutic given paul's cultural context was no he was pretty much a chauvinist so in chicago i looked around the room and more girls and guys way more comments and questions from men so i said here's what we're going to do after i told my paul story for the next hour i science mike permit not a man to teach or have authority over a woman michael gunger and i sat down and were mute for an hour and all the men in the room had to sit silently while the women talked and had questions and shared and it was amazing women have so much to say they have such wisdom there more of them are christians than men by the way the rise of secularism is a uniquely male phenomenon and yet we've got to let the men preach so they can have an existential crisis and leave the church and the most amazing thing was after an hour one hour 60 minutes of sitting quietly i just looked at the men's faces and they all had so much they wanted to say that they learned this experience was pouring out and i knew because i was one of them and so when i stepped back up we were opening the room to men again i said you have an hour's worst of thoughts you'd love to share women have 200 000 years of thoughts they'd like to teach us so as we continue in this day can we remember guys to intentionally create the space for women to speak more now why does this happen why is it that women ask those questions part of it is actually biological neurological men interrupt women a lot women interrupt women a lot there's a couple things biologically we look for in people not to interrupt height shoulder width depth of voice why you take civilization away if you interrupt the taller broad shoulder deep voice male he will at least beat you up and maybe kill you if you take civilization out of the room we are a particularly brutal species of primate that's gotten reinforced in a cultural context we call patriarchy wherein women are affirmed and valued when they are compliant and socially shunned or pressured when they are assertive studies have shown over and over and over and over if men and women engage in the same behaviors women are judged harshly when they do the same things that men do i don't want to get political it would be very difficult to make a credible argument that hillary clinton and donald trump have been measured by the same standards of behavior and temperament during the election and in the debates and i have to talk about hillary she's the first female nominee in the history of our nation right we've been around a while we finally are like you know what i guess a girl i mean i really wanted uh i really wanted sanders but i guess a girl i mean she won like it's like we're even dragging our feet it's like everyone you know my my my oldest daughter stayed up to see hillary accept the nomination and uh she said dad could i be president and then my youngest daughter said is bill clinton related to her [Laughter] oh man that was good so there are some small biological reasons that women defer but it is far more cultural and it's why men need to be feminists we're the thing in the way the glass ceiling is made of our elbows um emma watson who is flawless started a campaign called he for she he for she hashtag he for she and it's the idea that men need to make the space for women that women have been trying i don't know if you've ever studied women's suffrage not that long after the union was created like affluent educated women of power and privilege fought for universal suffrage it took until 1920 just to get the right to vote uh jesus was a marginalized person of color who lived under an oppressive empire the gospel involves the liberation of the oppressed the scripture is not ambiguous and in my hermeneutic today i don't identify with the jewish people i identify with the romans if i want to know how jesus would relate to me i look for encounters when jesus or paul or whoever talked to a roman centurion look it up by the way guys actually white people look it up like the the the energy of the conversation between jesus and a roman was undeniably different and hesitant and reticent compared to when he discussed things with his peers and i think for roman christians such as myself we have an obligation to stand alongside those who are oppressed so they may be liberated to take up your cross if you will what is to what is to to take up your cross to sacrifice for the freedom and healing of others um so on the pre-recorded shows you may notice there's a better ratio because girls questions go straight to the front of the line in live environments it's harder to engineer until someone like you asks a question like that and we realize that in this room patriarchy is not welcome my name is abby and i kind of have a twofold question here so i'm a modern history major spent my entire um they don't call me history mike just as a warning so spent most of my college years studying the holocaust and modern european history and um decided to go over to poland and kind of do some work over there and visit auschwitz which totally wrecked my theology and i'm so very thankful for podcasts like yours that have helped sort of piece it back together so my question is is one how do we avoid ever being that numb as a culture again and neurologically how does somebody rise to power in such a modern a modern culture at the time who possesses such evil and the rest of us kind of sit aside and let it happen sorry i know that's a lot but that's it it's a good question man will it get emails when i answer it i went to the holy land with a group called the telos group and talos is weird for holy land groups because most places that will take you to israel are very like pro-israel like even israel funded some groups a little ragtag quality to them or pro-palestinian and then telos is pro-palestine pro-israel pro-peace they call it the pro-pro pro model and they're real jerks because they take you to the holy land and they introduce you to all these compelling stories that directly contradict each other and they don't tell you who you should be for so you meet with people who survive different points of uprising or shaking off depending on who you ask in that country's history and you also meet people who came in as refugees from world war ii to settle the land and people who were alive then and were displaced and all that little intro to go to one point jews who lived in germany were shocked at what happened because jews who lived in germany and poland and france fought along other soldiers for their countries in world war one they were patriots who loved the nation of their birth and hitler rises to power and germany's not the only country that lost its mind other countries willingly selected assembled and shipped off their jewish populations to the nazis in your brain the amygdala wins fear and anger trump your reasoning trump your compassion i didn't mean to say trump i honestly didn't a hundred percent not a loaded statement i used to say that before this election and that guy ruined the word okay fear and anger defeat your other emotions defeat your rational capacities and i mean let's be honest there's not like a lot of trump fans in the science mic audience but there are some and uh i'm always fascinated by people who are like trump supporters and listen to my podcast that's amazing so they are actually interesting thoughtful people who support donald trump so hence the fascination so if someone can provoke a social anxiety and channel it through fear or anger you'd be shocked how fast social systems fall by the wayside if you study the rise of hitler it's really terrifying his party never won a majority of the election he elected an extremely vocal minority who caused so much trouble that to appease them hitler was appointed to a ceremonial role in the government with no power which they leveraged into a parliamentary majority which they coerced other parties into going along with and the next thing you know and modern democracy germany fell to fascism how you rile up fear and anger and guess what hitler pointed out real social ills the lot of the german worker really was bad but instead of pointing to the legitimate economic forces and presenting possible solutions he said it's those jews and it's those gypsies and if we assemble and fight for the right of the german worker and get rid of the evil jew and gypsy will make germany great again right that's basically a translation of the propaganda now i'm not comparing any contemporary political figure to hitler non-politically frankly i don't actually think trump's as like as smart as hitler or engineering something but what trump scares me is not actually trump i think he's he's going to be a lot less relevant in like seven days but that thing he's revealed to me that even america with the most powerful military in human history is not immune to a riling of the amygdala and an alienation of the other it's no longer gypsies and jews i mean sometimes it's jews today anti-semitism's not gone but it is mexicans and muslims how quickly could america's social systems be circumvented by very legitimate beefs a lot of the political base of this country on both sides of the aisle have been manipulated into voting for the interests of people who aren't like them so the gop is reaping a whirlwind it's talked about economic empowerment through small government for decades and what it's mainly done is help out financial markets and large corporations and its base is angry where are all our jobs you've been saying for 20 years we would have jobs and my way of life is literally dying my children have no education opportunities they're starving it's the great social i mean i'm starting to study history too now you i've been studying history for like 12 months so i'm real new but i also am a little obsessive when i study things and it's amazing how frequently in human society those with the most power and resources convince those beneath them to fight each other it's a really consistent feature of human societies and i don't even think it's like an illuminati conspiracy i think it's a manifestation of the power law and metapolitics occasionally it's it's intentional but mostly it's systemic the problem is um rational voices lose thanks to human cognitive bias if someone shouts loudly and with confidence something and provides no evidence and someone else offers you a reason considered position with evidence and then because they are being honest also tells you the limitations of their perspective people believe the shouting confident person overwhelmingly climate science we believe these things for these reasons here's the holes in the model there's holes in the model it's a chinese conspiracy that's it's just human psychology how do you circumvent that how do you prevent that first question tonight what happens when over time through jesus you believe in a god of love remember what i said about it biases against your amygdala and how you respond to stimulus if you have a consistent meditative practice you're less likely to get riled up over stuff like that if you believe that god is loving you're less likely to get riled up if you take another approach it's pretty hard to rile up atheists they're skeptics they have a feeling and they go why did i just have that feeling i'm going to analyze the feeling and see if it has a grounding in reality that's another approach that minimizes so on the one hand you have like what i would call a contemplative posture you can have a skeptical posture if you're me you have a skeptical contemplative posture but in all those cases you're less likely to get swept up in that stuff but not impossible if you follow me on twitter sometimes i lose myself in social identity i mean quote hamilton i'll go nuts you know what i mean i'm in and it's not just that hamilton is the greatest art in generations it is but it's also that there's a social identity piece at play this is also true sometimes when i talk politics i i tweet something i go i really have no empirical basis for that claim i've just lately started thinking myself as liberal like like nine months ago right like it's a real new thing so it's new to my identity so i get over excited but it's that awareness it's that reflection of self the problem is it doesn't come as naturally so it's a smaller group and the thing that concerns me and i think concerns you too is uh history shows oh gosh there's one historian what's his name a really captivating paper he basically shows out how often humans go into a self-annihilistic fervor and he says we're basically like 22 years overdue and it's only after it's when it's when two generations have passed since the last one no one has a direct memory of the trauma of the last let's all kill each other that we go you know what we should do we should show them we're right with guns and i don't know can the species escape that pattern for the sake of my kids i hope so [Music] hi i'm alicia and my question is back regarding you talked about the word becoming flesh and i was wondering if you could expand upon that outside of the brain in any way that you would like to but if you feel that it's appropriate and would fit in a framework of esthetology did i say that right i would eschatology yes hey i'm a champion at mispronouncing words eagletarian anybody science minecraft did it none tonight sometimes people make t-shirts with an eagle on it says eagletarian no one says eagletarion in tallahassee florida it doesn't happen uh okay word becomes flesh is the book called the body keeps the score anybody heard of that one oh go get that book after you get fighting on the waves uh go get that book our body stores trauma not just our brain the crystallization idea as as all our physical processes happen our emotional state deeply impacts them you have two brains you've got more neurons in your gi tract than some animals have in their main brain those those neurons are in contact with the flora and fauna of microbes that live in your gut your body's various systems are deeply impacted by your emotional makeup which is deeply impacted by language because we're storytelling animal so the story we tell ourselves and the story others tell us about us impacts not just our neurological makeup but our whole bodies through the lens of eschatology what's my eschatology other than entropic heat death or ai taking over the world to make handwritten letters another inside joke for people listening to podcasts a lot what's that in the essence of forever yeah yeah yeah yeah the the well s uh is the end of all things or i guess it also means eternity word may flesh what eternal significance does it have i have no idea i have no i you have you have met few christians who actually do believe in a resurrection of christ i'm not that kind of christian who thinks so little about the afterlife or the end the more i think about jesus the less i think about what happens when we die and the more i think about what happens when we live yeah the words you make the word that becomes flesh is incredibly important because you're not an individual consciousness so the words that you describe yourself and others and the actions you take as a result get stored in the neurons of people that know you the better someone knows you the more accurate their neurological simulation of your neurons are what does that mean have you ever had a dear one die and you know exactly what they would say about a situation have you ever had a dear one die and you feel like sometimes you talk to them and they talk back because the neurological echo of their identity that lives in you if they were originally a photograph douglas hofstadter says maybe you have a mosaic but a photograph and a mosaic are still a representation of the same thing at different resolutions i've heard it said that we truly die the last time someone says our name the words that i try to make flash i want to make a lasting impact the words that i make flesh i want future generations to be happy that i did the words that i make flesh i want my kids to tell their kids about and i want my daughters to say this is ridiculous i wanted to tell her kids maybe even their kids kids he loved god and we can tell that he loved others i can imagine no more fitting lasting maybe even eternal legacy than that i understood in my actions the two greatest commandments [Music] my name is adam and uh i have a question for you i'm not sure what it is exactly i've been wrestling kind of the whole time and everything you say actually makes me have a question that's how i roll so like i don't really know where i'm going with this but it's a solid question so hang with me let's do it like i'm a former pastor i was raised in church and like my entire identity was wrapped up in like being a pastor there was never any other question about that's what i was going to be i've also experienced a lot of trauma and i know a lot of people have you know so i'm not alone in that right but it did happen and a lot of it when i was doing what i found my identity in that stuff didn't bother me as much right but now that i don't have that identity anymore some stuff's just real hard you know and i i get what you're saying about like this idea of a loving god and and i never really understood the depth in which the neurological stuff matters to faith and i also i was born with cerebral palsy and uh i guess my question is like are there people especially people maybe who um have like brain injury you know when when i i understood my faith completely and i i was doing all the things i was supposed to be doing and not doing all the things that i wasn't supposed to be doing or whatever this wasn't an issue but but now it is i mean like are there people who just can't they just can't because of a brain injury or because they're the way they're neurologically wired are there people that just can't find like peace with god you know um that's my question have you had thank you an additional brain trauma um no that's that's the big one i mean physical yeah brain brain trauma probably not you know okay yeah thank you why does it hurt so much when we lose god if you end up not believing in god why does it hurt so much to lose a god that doesn't exist why if you don't lose god but you lose what you once believed about god and find yourself displaced from community why does that leave such lasting hurt whole brain scanner thing ideas about god are uniquely associated with personal identity identity formation is the foundation of ego formation is the foundation of what self-worth how long were you a believer of that kind super conservative at church three times a group that week knew was gonna grow up and be a pastor it's like more than two months oh yeah yeah okay so think about how many neurons created networks in your brain related to seeing the world through that understanding of god what how much energy how many calories how many oxygen molecules went into forming those structures and then your belief changes and you don't use those neurons anymore so here i was an atheist in a room full of pastors and i stood up and told a pastor that he was wrong about atheism and skepticism and i knew that because i was a southern baptist atheist and i said how can anyone who understands anything at all about how the universe works believe in god and then he challenged me to think about god differently he said what if you just took the questions you can't answer and you put that in a bucket in your brain and you call that bucket god and when he said that a very strange thing happened to me for like a half second i felt total trans transcendence and the presence of god again do you know what happened by triggering the word god in conjunction with a worldview a bunch of neurons in a network that hadn't lit up for a while went whoa yeah that's what it's like the stored latent neurological energy came back one thing you can use the word god with a different understanding and your brain can start to reassociate with that old network and when you do that you might find feelings of faith come back faster than usual unless said the lorax unless you have trauma that's causing situational depression how do you know depression is not feeling sad feeling sad is feeling sad depression is feeling useless depression is feeling nothing depression is pizza doesn't taste good anymore depression is everyone feels distant i don't feel like i love my family anymore if that goes on long enough depression feels like it would make a lot more sense to die than keep on living i had some unresolved trauma from when i was bullied as a kid my faith helped me through it but a girl broke up with me the first girl i ever went out with it brought up old feelings of rejections and my parents weren't home and i snuck into their closet i pulled out my dad's shotgun i put it in my mouth it was cold and it tasted like smoke and a nickel i couldn't reach the trigger with my hand so i put my toe in it i pulled the trigger i remember that clunk i don't do this work because it's a first world problem the pain people have of losing that community and that belief it breaks us and it can take us to some very dark places so the first thing i would say is if you feel like you're bleeding out tell the people that love you because the world needs you and if you can start to deal with that pain just deal with the pain god will wait god will wait and god is there in that pain because this is a god that hangs on a cross this is a god who gets suffering and hurt and i don't know where you are and i don't mean to project my experience on you but whether it's happening to you or not i imagine people in internet land hear your story and they are in a dark place so the world needs you and the world needs them get with people who will just love you and invest your time in them get with people who can hear over and over and over your trauma and birds of a feather help i was so and i don't want to compare my situation with yours but after my brain injury i felt lost because i would i would not have a word i wanted to say and do you know that had never happened to me in like 30 something years i've my whole life words have come to me you might notice like a fire hose and suddenly i couldn't find words anymore suddenly i couldn't handle crowds i'd have panic attacks suddenly i didn't feel like me i felt like a stranger and all my friends were so sympathetic but the only person who got it was my dad who just had a major stroke and when i realized that dad could understand i started talking to other brain injury survivors sometimes our suffering is so unique it takes people who suffered in the same way to walk a mile with us so start with a hurt you probably can't go back where you were but you can go forward how do you make peace with god you understand who god is and the most biblical thing in the world that i can tell you is that god is love and every time someone loves you and every time you love someone else you cannot get any closer to god than that love love itself delight in being loved and then loving others and i don't know any better way to know god i'm so glad you're here uh the show is supposed to end with announcements and stuff i don't think we'll do that this week i think i think we played the theme song at the end of the show would mess it up right so my friends i'm so glad you all came but wow kansas city can i tell you the most amazing thing about this tour i feel less weird i feel less alone you thought you came to see me but i put these on so i get to see you thank you for being jesus to me [Applause]