ASM103 LIVE in Ft. Smith, AR

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coming to you from the first presbyterian church in fort smith arkansas it's ask science mike lives [Applause] science faith welcome to ask science mike the weekly podcast where i answer your questions about science faith and life the questions are unscreened the answers unrehearsed and as always utterly free of any expertise i've got several events coming up in case you'd like to see me on the road i'll be at northwest nazarene university the hawkins road festival in sarasota doing an ask science mike live in chapel hill the iris 2017 conference in athens georgia the blue conference in fairfax virginia and the christ in creation conference with biologos in houston texas in february and march if you'd like to get more information about where you can see me just go to asksciencemike.com and click on events but for now we've got a show to do so let's get it started [Music] [Applause] [Music] why do you think when people go into psychosis or they have schizophrenia they get hyper religiosity or they have the devil's jesus syndrome yeah in your name donna thank you donna i just want the internet to know who you are in case i want to find you so um just kidding so yeah what is with the association of hyper-religiousity and certain types of mental illness that's a fact that is often used by atheists to talk about the folly of religion right it's many atheists describe religious faith as a socially acceptable form of psychosis because if anyone else said they heard voices or talked to someone who no one else can see who would commit them to a mental institution but if they say that they're religious then they're just normal upstanding members of society now to start since that's so often an assumption in conversation today uh mental health experts do not consider religious people mentally ill that's a very bad reading of modern psychology because mental illness one has to create a significant deviation from a bell curve of behaviors that are normal in a society and two must in some way impair in your ability to live a productive life and on both of those metrics religion immediately sets itself aside for mental illness but we do have times where some form of mental illness cause a state of hyper-religious activity or hyper-religious devotion and there's several possible explanations for this phenomenon although science doesn't have it perfectly nailed down one the reason we believe in god according to the university of oxford they did a multi-decadal multi-continent study looking for where belief comes from and they found that there's three factors that contribute to the almost universal belief in a theistic or all-powerful god in societies number one babies tend to believe not tend to babies always believe their mothers are all-knowing so if you do experiments with babies and small children and you place a ball underneath a container while mom's not in the room when mom comes in the room baby expects mom already knows where the ball is and you could do variations of that experiment and find babies think mom is all-knowing as they grow sometimes between three five even as late as seven children start to realize mom's knowledge has limits this is usually when they learn they can lie to mom right and mom won't automatically know but that belief in something all knowing often persists and gets mapped onto an unseen entity that's one number two humans have a tendency to accept purpose-based explanations for observed phenomena that was a mouthful basically if you say a reason why something happened people are more likely to believe it for example polar bears are white because they need to blend in with the snow well the theory of evolution via natural selection would say actually polar bears benefited from a mutation that made them white it just happened to work and that's why it stuck it wasn't that they were designed to blend in with the snow do you see the difference the thing is even trained scientists if they aren't thinking about it including evolutionary biologists are more likely to accept purpose-based explanations for any given phenomena why we need our world to make sense and fit a story the third ingredient i can't remember let's see there's the all-knowing mom there's purpose based uh explanations this isn't the brain thing this is just me forgetting um oh i can't remember the third one there's three things you can look you can google it for oxford i might remember the next answer we'll edit it or not anyways there's three things that come together to create oh yeah great all i had to do was decide to move on the other thing is across all cultures humans have a hard time believing their consciousness ends so even if you look like in secular societies in europe more than half of the people believe in eternal consciousness eternal life of some form so oxford said if you take those three things together and you combine them with religious symbols you formalize three impulses that help a species cope with the fact that it can be aware of its own death right and because we get such tremendous psychological relief from those three beliefs as expressed through religious phenomena some forms of faith can take that relief and express it through an ecstatic feeling your pentecostal and charismatic traditions especially know how to take this this incredible relief you get from god and turn it into a very powerful experience well what do you have in someone suffering from schizophrenia you have incredible angst first of all fear that's amplified by certain overactive areas of the brain and excessive points of conversation in the limbic system as well as deficient connection sometimes towards the front of the brain and towards the outer neocortex and that gets funneled through sometimes ecstatic experiences that provide relief from the symptom well that's an amplified version of the same healthy neurological mechanism that lets you be a person of faith so why is one mental illness and why is one not because those disorders interfere with your ability to live and you might think well gosh that's a that's a condemnation on my faith that there's any neurological similarity between mental illness and how i believe in god but the same circuits in your brain that encourage some people to just eat instead of starving encourage other people to overeat the same circuits in some people's brain that encourage humans to continue happening encourage other people to have sexual addiction so it's not it's not the fact that the neurological circuits exist that uh stand in condemnation of any belief it's a matter of how they get expressed in a healthy way or not the fact is as we understand the brain today everything we know and love and think and feel comes from the brain now one last interesting thing on schizophrenia the voices heard by schizophrenics in south american societies are all friendly people with schizophrenia in south america don't suffer they just hear friends but americans have the same disorder and what do they hear accusations shame insults so yes on the one hand this is a brain disorder but on another thing the role our society plays in mental illness affects the way that it's lived in people's lives and so anthropologists are trying to identify what it is about our culture that makes mental illness more destructive than it is in other societies and as we learn that maybe we'll learn to see god better whether we're schizophrenic or neurotypical [Music] i'm terry hey terry and uh you talk in uh finding god in the waves about prayer yes about prayer uh praying to god for some kind of particular outcome versus prayer as a simply a way to connect with god while one is going through certain circumstances and i'd like you to expand on that a little bit sure thank you finding on the way is available in bookstores everywhere um so the way i learned to pray growing up was you talk to god and there's multiple reasons you talk to god uh which we called acts adoration confession thanksgiving supplication i can't believe my brain gave me that so fast and had to struggle with the third neurocognitive bias for god and that last one was supplication so the idea was like you had to you had to put the change in the vending machine first right so i've got to show god how much i adore him i've got to get rid of all my unconfessed sin by confessing it i'm going to express thanksgiving to god and then i'm going to ask god to do things and that's something we call intercessory prayer we ask god to intercede on the behalf of others that's always how i saw things and to great effect like i would talk to god about everything i would talk to god about promotions at work and then i would get them i remember my grandmother had cancer in her lungs and they told her she was going to die and they couldn't do any more chemotherapy and we all my whole family got together and held hands around her and prayed for a miracle and then she went and got an x-ray and she had no tumors in her lungs like she's she's cured and like baptist mike was like yes god is in the miracle business and then like a year and a half two years later the cancer came back and that time it killed her and we prayed for a miracle again but we just said well you know god already gave us a miracle we got more time with me ma we got to say goodbye we're grateful and that's great for me but what about people who pray for really necessary things and they they get no answer they get a negative answer and that cr that lifts a problem that theologians call theodicy the problem of evil like why do bad things happen in the world this is kind of a a subset of that question why does god answer some prayers and not others why is there bad in the world and this destroys some people's faith now that i do what i do with the science mic thing my email box is full of people saying i asked god for really compelling beautiful thing and what happened was incredibly awful thing and so for a while uh my solution was to be an atheist and not pray at all and when i came back to faith i wanted to pray again but it felt strange to ask god for things so i discovered other types of christian prayer which is a baptist i didn't know that was a thing i thought really all you could do was acts intercessory prayer and i discovered there was like contemplative prayer there was centering prayer there's lexia davina there's all these forms of prayer whose focus was not compelling god to action but compelling us to be in god's presence and i found that for people who made it through some religious trial or difficulty involving prayer some of them learned to take a redemptive perspective on where they felt god let them down and they discovered a deeper or more meaningful prayer life that was more contemplative and these people tended to be very secure in god's providence to the point they don't really ask for anything and and kind of become content in all things um and so most of my prayer time today is contemplative but not always because sometimes awful things happen and sitting in content silence just doesn't seem to cut the mustard right my old evangelical comes out and i start to passionately speak to god beg from god and the atheists have this thing called the milk jug challenge have you heard about this it's amazing so what christians do to explain intercessory prayer is they say you ask god things and god can answer three ways god can say yes god can say no and god can say wait and that gave me a lot of peace for years until richard dawkins explained to me in his book that that's every possible outcome for every possible question right you want a promotion at work yes no wait there's no other option so there's a challenge in the book called the milk jug challenge where richard dawkins says pray to a milk jug for two weeks instead of god and imagine an answer is yes or no or wait so i actually did that i i prayed before it expired a jug of milk in our fridge time limited trial here and my milk jug gave me a promotion at work so that was like a big moment for me uh that was kind of like the last pillar that was holding me into christianity and so obviously if i pray intercessory prayers now i've solved that dilemma no i really haven't at all now when i pray and i ask so my dad had a stroke and they told us he was going to die and so i got in a car with my mom who's now my dad's ex-wife and drove four hours to orlando and as we drove we prayed the whole time and it's hard to explain but i was admitting my powerlessness more than i was demanding god does something does that make sense like i was i didn't know what else to do but i asked for a miracle first of all i don't think there's anything wrong with believing in intercessory prayer i think that's a necessary building block to have faith especially when faith is newer to you but i think if you live long enough you live to see all the boxes get knocked over and that raises questions and and then that faces you with your own yes no weight like am i going to continue to be a person who believes that god is for humanity that god loves the world or not and i think today most people say no i'm out statistically but i'm encouraged by a church that seems increasingly contemplative i'm encouraged by a church that seems less certain about outcomes and more certain about posture and about grace and frankly the neurology the neuroscience behind contemplative prayer is incredibly compelling compared to intercessory prayer in terms of transforming you as an individual transforming the way that your brain operates contemplative prayer is second to none and intercessory prayer is basically free therapy like according to the research you know people who talk to god about their problems they do get a therapeutic benefit but they aren't radically transformed into people of love [Music] uh my name is greg you i apologize in advance if there's any confusion with the editor ever since i heard you first mention it on one of the podcasts i've been fascinated with the concept of split brain theory and partly i just want you to elaborate on that and talk about that more but if for specifics uh does the science of that theory uh support two separate consciousnesses um or is it because i know that the idea of a consciousness you know the brain is working in different ways i'm ready to talk about that before and also how does that theory accepting that it is true knowing that it you know it's just a theory how does that impact us sociologically and also with our faith yeah great question okay so we're real early in brain science right real real early as as scientific disciplines go this one's hot off the presses [Music] and i tell people often that brain science is fascinating but it's kind of like studying astronomy like during the age of galileo our telescopes are small and fuzzy and therefore a lot of the assumptions we're making are going to be proven radically incorrect 50 years from now but we're still working with the best of what we've got uh split brain syndrome is more observational than brain imaging based and and here's what happens so even earlier in the age of modern brain science they're trying to figure out what's going on with epilepsy because some people have epileptic seizures that are life-threatening and they figured out uh through like eegs the old school stuff that you effectively had a resonance cascade across both hemispheres of the brain feedback just like holding a microphone up to a speaker goes an epileptic seizure was the two halves of the brain feeding back to each other across a structure called the corpus callosum the corpus callosum is a thick channel of nerves that connects the two hemispheres of the brain together so in desperation to try to treat this syndrome they said what if we just sever the corpus callosum and someone is probably going to die anyway and see what happens so they did as brain surgery goes this is a really simple procedure brain's already basically in two halves anyway so you just like complete the job and they did that with the first patient they sever the corpus callosum and the patient wakes up no one has any idea what's going to happen it's totally normal total normal recovery is able to go back to work and doesn't have seizures anymore so they do this surgery more and more to the same effect and everyone's normal everyone's fine to the point that neuroscientists start to wonder like why do we have a corpus callosum if it doesn't do anything and should we in children who are diagnosed with epilepsy just preemptively sever their corpus callosum as soon as we find out luckily scientists are cautious they wait for more data because when the first patients came home from work one day and went to hug his wife and his left hand formed a fist and punched her across the face and she was like shocked and i'm like why did you do that he had no idea he didn't consciously do that so then a woman who'd had the surgery oh this gets way freakier just buckle up a woman had the surgery she goes in her closet she gets picks out a dress with her her left hand takes off the hanger and her right hand shoots across her body grabs a different dress and then pins her hand to the wall until she drops the other dress and then it just returns to her control another woman every time she would go to get dressed and button her right hand would our left hand would unbutton whatever she's buttoning left hand button on button button unbutton can you imagine she going to leave a room right hand open the door left hand shut the door open the door shut the door open the door shut the door open the door shut the door can't leave a room another man came in said he couldn't sleep they said why he's going to sleep one day and his left hand closed around his throat and squeezed as he drifted off to sleep can you imagine this is called alien hand syndrome and it only happens with split brain patients people who've had their corpus callosum severed remember you've got two halves of your brain so your consciousness we understand mainly happens in your prefrontal cortex except you have two halves of the brain and for most people the dominant hemisphere is the left so your left prefrontal cortex is mostly your consciousness you still have a right prefrontal cortex what's it doing over there your left brain has your temporal lobe so it can speak your right brain does not have a temporal lobe and is mute so these scientists start to theorize is it possible every person carries around a fully conscious but mute slave in their brain that has to do the bidding of the left hemisphere master and we cut the corpus callosum for the first time ever the right prefrontal cortex can assert its will without being checked by the left you didn't know what you're coming for tonight did you so so they devised an experiment to test this and they realized you could train a right brain to control scrabble tiles to answer questions so then they realize the way your vision system works each half of your brain gets half your vision in each eye so they'd have people i know that have people stare at a dot in the center of a screen and then by placing questions on different parts of the screen while someone's wearing polarized glasses they can ask a question that only reaches one hemisphere or the other are you with me so i took a young student and they asked him what do you want to do when you get out of school and he said i want to be a draftsman that's super sensible that's a super left brain answer then then they asked his right brown now to be clear i'm making a convenient story in the actual experiment they don't ask one hemisphere than the other hemisphere they ask the questions in random order so you can't game the system so when they asked his right brain later what do you want to do when you get out of school he said with the scrabble tiles in the left hand now remember i didn't mention the brain's wired backward your right brain controls your left hand and vice versa so the left hand answers the right brain by spelling out automobile racer draftsman and those are different occupations i don't know if you caught that now if you've ever wondered like why college students can't declare a major alien hand syndrome and split brain patients helps understand so they ask and they ask a kid later i love this they asked his right brain the question girlfriend question mark and his left hand spells out the name of one of the research assistants in the lab and the kid just turns red beet red because he doesn't even know what they asked him he just knows how he feels about that name and he know there's been a disclosure here i didn't authorize so they more recently they were doing this because we're running out of split brain patients because we don't do this surgery anymore but more recently they were doing a question like this and they asked someone you know do you believe in god and the left brain said no and the right brain said yes so like same brain same skull two answers and i often joke like does that mean half of his soul goes to heaven and the other to hell like does jesus live in the left side of his heart only like what this is theological implications um but it has more implications for our consciousness we experience life as a single observer making conscious decisions but split brain patients and modern neuroscience tell us that we're actually a lot of systems building their own models of reality and lobbying for for what they care about i mean you have more lobbyists in your skull than washington has affecting congress right you've got the pizza lobby that thinks pizza is the next best meal not kale chips right like pizza is definitely the way we should go you've got a much weaker lobby that says we should probably save for retirement you've got you know all these different functions in your brain and scientists today kind of understand consciousness as anything that can build a model of the world and then act in the world and change the world and update its model so by that theory like a thermostat is conscious because it knows the temperature and if it gets too cold it can turn on the air conditioning excuse me turn on the heat and then when it warms up enough turn the heat back off it's responding to reality so by that level what human beings are just lots and lots of thermostats that collect different data points and come together to make this map but it split brain patients tell us your consciousness can absolutely be divided and still function and that it's not really accurate to think of yourself as a you a singular you but you're really a plural you know a we yeah except it's not it's not i don't know if it's a we because all the systems of your brain still identify as you you know like even your gut bacteria are you you you have you know maybe three five even ten to one ratio bacterium to human cells in your body but try to live without those bugs you can't digest most foods you can't process a lot of wastes right so even though those bugs are different than you but here's the other thing those bugs talk to neurons in your gut you've got more neurons in your gut than some primitive animals have in their brains and that relationship between bacteria and neurons in your gi tract affects your mood it affects your outlook we've found that in some experiments that adjusting people's gut biomes can not only make them feel happier or more depressed but change whether they save for retirement or not isn't that amazing so instead of thinking of ourselves as conscious agents i'm much more fascinated by a god who creates an ecosystem in his image i mean wow really great question thank you um hi my name is peyton hey um and i have a question about um bias versus facts um okay just just how does your brain process or interpret i guess facts and opinions or biases how does that come into play in your brain and also in conversations about faith um how does that um how do we get away from bias and move towards fact even though we are all like socialized and um we all come with our own experiences and traumas and all of that how do we move away from bias and more towards fact okay that's uh we just recorded a two-hour podcast for the liturgists on that so i'm going to try to not give you a two-hour answer i'll give you a teaser uh okay biases let's start there what's a bias the bias is something that influences how we make decisions or judgments and there are conscious biases that we're aware of and unconscious or implicit biases we are not aware of so let's see one of the most nefarious and common biases in cognitive science sciences confirmation bias have you heard of confirmation bias confirmation bias means you tend to accept information that supports what you already believe and reject information that goes against what you already believe well if that was the only bias we had it's already really difficult to convince humans to accept new information but that's one of like 160 confirmed cognitive biases there's another one this one's this is a terrible bias it's called the availability cascade effect the more often you hear something the more likely you are to believe it it doesn't matter whether people support the claim or not literally all they have to do is repeat it and you're more likely to believe it and when you connect that to computers who have algorithms who are economically incentivized to show you things you like guess what they do they tell you something over and over that you already believe and so we have this never happen in history massive feedback loop between computers and human brains that let human brains hear what they already believe over and over 2016. this is not a right thing this is not a left thing this is a human thing there's the authority bias the authority bias means we tend to believe what authority figures tell us unless they go against confirmation bias at which point we have something called the backfire effect where we reject information we've learned recently because it makes us doubt how we see the world one thing that is becoming increasingly clear in science is human brains are not interested in or designed for discovering truth we are almost pathologically disinterested in truth what do human brains want a model of the world that helps them find food shelter safety and sex that's the goal and since we're a social mammal a huge part of that process is believing what those around us believe so frustrating because all of you are so biased and i'm objective that's another bias by the way we tend to believe other people are affected by bias and we are not so what in the world how can we create an operating society with a bunch of primates that just want to fit in how do we we didn't just enter a post-fact world that used to be normal post-fact the pre-fact world was has been the norm for most of human history what changed the enlightenment the enlightenment was the end of a pre-fact society because the enlightenment created new systems new epistemologies epistemologies are the study of how we believe things how we uh value things how we build trust it's it's the study of knowledge itself and the enlightenment provided epistemologies that basically said show me the money i don't care what the guy in charge says i don't care what the sacred book says i don't care what popular opinion is give me data or give me death and the enlightenment has done some amazing things i don't know if you like smartphones smartphones are a very enlightenment device you build them with physics and engineering space programs really enlightenment systems but the enlightenment also has a problem it focuses on one type of mental model building what happens in your left prefrontal cortex your left brain which is very reductive which is very systematic the right brain is very holistic um and that kind of thinking leads to poetry in music the humanities and until the reformation religion now the reformation in the church was the invasion of enlightenment thinking into theology that's what happened there and now we created systems and reductive understandings of our holy texts and god and the problem is for many people as powerful as enlightenment thinking it is not a satisfying way to live it also requires an incredible investment in training and education because it doesn't come naturally to our brains and i think what you're seeing right now in a post-truth world is the intersection of bias as well as people who have gotten everything you can get out of the enlightenment world and still feel kind of hollow and empty and like they miss something this is this is the man who stands in the driveway with a good 401k and that red sports car is always wanted and says is this it is this all there is one of these things in my opinion is healthy moving beyond in exclusive enlightenment thinking and how we approach the world and others is beneficial but deciding we can't agree on what facts are anymore that's a problem i'll just lay it on the table i think that's a potential civilization ender right this could completely destroy our capacity to govern and build societies and really build anything by the way the fundamental of engineering is agreeing on units of measurement in fact right you can't you can't land a robot on mars without everyone agreeing on what units of measurement how they're measured in gravity and orbital mechanics and all these systems so i think we have to inspire people to the benefit of enlightenment style thinking and epistemology without making an idol out of it so talk about what in what ways this type of thinking is useful now here's the problem for some popular beliefs or policy positions in america specifically enlightenment thinking is a real bummer thinking will will very easily demonstrate for example that the global climate is changing right there's not really any debate about the fact that global climate is changing you can have a reasonable debate about how much human activity is affecting that climate change that's a discussion we can and should have you can definitely have an informed conversation about what our response should be what policies are most effective i would love it if that was what was happening on capitol hill if it was republicans democrats and independents all talking about what approach would be best how do we best balance a response with the economy with the assumption that we all agree the thermometers are doing something do you see what i mean so but we can't the i think the problem came because for too long enlightenment thinking became the new dogma and was used to dismiss valuable deeply held ideas that should shouldn't be measured empirically in the first place right we shouldn't be making an empirical value measurement on if god exists or not you know we shouldn't be making an empirical value judgment on people's personal belief systems and philosophies i mean if you leave it to the nerds they want to tell you what colors are attractive or not based on enough points of data from web pages right i'm sorry even if you like that color the data doesn't support that liking that color is okay you see what i mean that's taking it too far it's too far and i think we've got we've got to learn to balance that and this is somewhere honestly i think the church can take the lead we i think the church should be the masters of the dance the beauty of seeing the world holistically through the eyes of god while also embracing what science and enlightenment thinking can do for humanity and if we learn to do that in the church and we learn to have better conversations i would love if the whole culture looked at different denominations and say wow they are really good at having disagreements so that's one of the reasons i'm so into the church thing to begin with is there was a time when the church led culture and then it started to lag culture i would like to be a culture leading entity again because we are people whose lives are so defined by a right-brained grace and a framed understanding of the miracle of creation [Music] hi i'm juliana i have a friend that has a kindergartner at a christian school and he recently came home and was terrified because he had learned about the passover at school they watched a video where mist went into the house and then the firstborn was killed and he's a firstborn child and couldn't go to sleep a couple nights ago and i want to know if that was your child what you would say to him and i also want to know just in general what you say to young children when they first are introduced to violence in the bible wow great question thank you i have noticed over and over that when i speak in churches all the time like every week and a lot of times when i'm speaking not at a church there's a green room like if you're speaking at a club or a venue and churches don't usually have green rooms because they're not structured for that kind of experience so usually my green room is like a children's sunday school room and i've noticed they so often have noah's ark on the wall because it's like you teach kids about animals and it's very beautiful and there's rain and the sun's coming out but i've never seen thousands of bloated corpses in the water in the sunday school room even though that's a hundred percent in that story so it's interesting how we take like really intense discussions about the nature and character of god and the relationship of god to humanity and turn them into fairy tales when they are not fairy tales the tower of babel is not a fairy tale the noah's ark is not a fairy tale i mean you can probably do the garden of eden in a kid-friendly way to talk about like how sometimes we see i mean i think we all know what the fruit looks like and we've all heard the serpents whisper i think we hear that pretty young but the passover wow how how old kindergarten i'm going to go ahead and say that's neurologically developmentally inappropriate what's the lesson the brain is ready to receive about god that that age god loves you who is god well who do you think god is in genesis he walked and talked with adam and eve now who who here thinks like god like has a body walks around it's like you know how's it going that's not how we view guys we get older but that's actually a very neurologically appropriate place to start with children because children need things to have faces to understand it your toddler doesn't get democracy you cannot explain democracy to a toddler but you can explain presidents judges and congressmen right you can actually explain voting booths to a toddler that'll understand that we we get to pick this person but if you just start with the abstraction well it's it's a system of rule by the people your toddler's like what are you talking about that's happened my kids have heard bible study stories in a context that was developmentally inappropriate so i usually start by affirming god loves them and then i start explaining how like the bible is this library of books and it's full of different stories and perspectives and opinions and some of the stuff in the bible is kind of scary and kind of dark because life is and so there's places in the bible that we shouldn't avoid but that are maybe too grown up for you just in the same way there's some tv shows and some movies you're not ready to watch either so i'm sorry that someone shared with you something you weren't ready for and however you want to talk about it i'd like to answer any questions you have i want to tell you that that story is part of a larger theme and a larger movement in the bible and that the whole thing the bible is telling us according to jesus is that god is love and that the purpose of our lives is to love god and just kind of take the stakes back down and just basically you know they got to watch the bible's version of showtime at 11 pm and they saw a monster on tv and now they have nightmares and kids get through it it's the repeated exposure that creates trauma as well as our reaction to the event that determines how traumatic it is and so i would just kind of you know answer questions be calm and then maybe evaluate who's teaching sunday school and if they stay involved in that you know i a couple of years ago this was after i was doing the science mic thing my wife was teaching vbs at church and she asked me to handle one night and i was like why she's like well read the curriculum we go to like a methodist church they're not like a real turn and burn crowd right like open minds open hearts open doors everything's okay god is love um and the curriculum said that for like this was like three and four and five and six-year-old kids we were supposed to get across a wooden cross and nails and the kids write their names on a piece of paper and nail it to the cross so they would know that jesus was nailed to the cross by their sin and i was like yeah i'm not doing that either so uh i took a podcaster's author's privilege and called my pastor and said hey i'm gonna just write new curriculum today is that cool and betsy was like yeah sure and so i got across and tape there's no nails and i got paper that was red and pink and i caught hearts out of it and i had the kids write their name on a heart and i told them a story about how jesus came to love the world and he loved the world so much that it scared some people and they ended up putting him on a cross but the reason jesus was on the cross was because he loved so much and so then as i came forward i'd have them tape their name on the cross and i would say god loves you and say their name right so none of those kids like left crying that night we got a great picture of like a cross covered in hearts and the kids and so i didn't shy away from the reality of the story but i wasn't like hey you're terrible and jesus died because of something you did timmy like that's terrible um and i think that's the that's the tension uh for people who teach children is that's the hardest work in the church setting people up for a lifetime with god with some grounding in theology without screwing them up give me the adults any day right any day but we tend to take people who are just like good with kids they're like okay go just do it and i mean how much time do we as churches do we spend equipping people who teach children not a lot not well we bought you some books you know have fun so yeah i would just kind of evaluate that and i uh probably not the most fun parent to teach my kids in sunday school now now because my kids are older i'm like well you can handle it like just just ask good questions actually probably i'm a real unpopular parent but um yeah that's that's terrible that's that's terr like don't make kids think church is an r-rated movie and they're going to go home scared let's let's everybody listening right now let's just make an agreement let's not do that anymore the message of the church is one of love especially for the little children [Music] hi i'm luke hey luke hey um throughout history it seems like the church has been particularly interested in humans being the center of everything you know even in the middle ages as you had astronomers finding you know figuring out the earth was round and that we actually go around the sun not the other way around that was tough for the uh religious people and as we see how big the cosmos is and just the math behind it all um how likely it is that there is intelligent life somewhere out there whether or not we were to ever encounter it or not who knows but how would the church deal with contacts with the with intelligent life and why do you think it's so hard for leadership to admit that that might even be a possibility when science tells us that it is great question i think the church is getting more and more open to aliens in all denominations because i hear this so much and i think if we make first contact with an intelligent alien civilization the church will freak out and be in a state of total calamity along with the rest of humanity it will not just threaten our most deep held ideas about god it depends on how we contact them but it's it's relatively unlikely if we encounter civilization it's going to be at our level of sophistication uh most experts tell us it's more likely we find a microbe somewhere oh look a weird microbe and that would cause one set of upheaval i think the microbe scenario is mostly good we're not alone in the universe and doing how close that microbe is to the earth uh it teaches us a lot of immediately about how life emerged on the earth the very first one we find uh if it uses dna we understand that you know we probably were seated from the same place somehow if it doesn't use dna uh it will tell us a lot about how its genesis happened on its planet and therefore how ours happened on this one uh and the only group i think that will really pout about it would be young earth creationist biblical literalists because their their argument will be more cratered than it's ever been but for other people people of faith who are comfortable with a scientific depiction of creation as the mechanics of what is described in the bible that won't be a crisis um if we encounter radically more advanced aliens i just think it's a bad day it's just a really bad day think about on earth when human culture human culture same species of different levels of technological sophistication encounter each other right the same level of technological sophistication it's like some fighting and then a treaty if it's we have gun powder and you don't genocide just unchecked genocide repeatedly with different cultures across the face of the earth when it was you know we have iron weapons and throwable weapons and you have clubs genocide right one species slight different levels of technology so if we're like check it out we've got rocket ships and they have faster than light travel it would be it won't be like you know the the europeans meeting the native americans it will be like humans discovering a new species of lizard like will immediately be demoted in a way we have never been before we'll have no ability to dictate terms over the engagement or the relationship any species that can travel faster than life can harness enough energy to vaporize our planet in seconds we'd have no capacity to defend ourselves this is why some really smart people say the smart money is not trying to contact extraterrestrials and the reason we don't hear extraterrestrials is everyone got advanced enough to realize we should be really quiet because we ever meet each other one slight accidental breach and contact destroys one or both civilizations um that's big i mean can you imagine i mean just think about amer like every american we sort of has this assumption of might like we can win if it comes down to it just watch out china just watch it you know it might cost us but we'll win we would not win that encounter it would not be a seven days war it would be a seven second war and i think the amount of existential grief that would cause our species i was joking the other day like you know maybe the solution to our problems is to contact an alien civilization and they convert the earth into a zoo and we don't have governments and we don't have jobs they just give us iphones with netflix on it and we sit there and watch our netflix and you know they float down and look at us and then if like one human chase another human they tase it and we fall down and we're just zoo animals um and that's like that's as likely as anything else from us encountering an e.t so does that have theological implications i think so i think so um you know the other the other possibility is aliens are so alien we don't recognize each other as life that's also a complete completely plausible idea there's there's the idea even that here in this solar system you could create life on titan titan is the other planet in our solar system that has running uh liquids on its surface it's just on titan the running liquid is methane because titan's so cold or methane flows like water does here and on titan ice and liquid water play the role lava plays on earth so liquid water will destroy and burn up anything on titan and so one biologist realized you could have single celled organisms on titan based on a hydrocarbon metabolism but a single celled organism on titan would be maybe three feet by a foot and a half this giant membrane floating on the surface of a methane lake so that'd be like their first stage of evolution so what if that got more complex its metabolism biochemistry would be so slow even if it was intelligent we couldn't communicate we just was we'd be incomprehensible and its slowness would be incomprehensible to us and that's a local area code that's in this solar system this is a fascinating question fascinating question totally unanswerable but a lot of fun [Music] hi my name is abby my question is so my mother's reading of the scriptures and thus her image of god is through a traditionally conservative and literal lens and so she doesn't affirm gay marriage so her relationship with her parents and her brother are strained because her brother is gay and he feels unloved and rejected by her and she feels she has to decide between having a relationship with her brother or defending her faith with her which her parents think is wrong because they can't reconcile a god who would reject their son needless to say this has caught us a rift in our family and so i've tried to talk to her about it but it's a sensitive subject do you have any advice on how to invite my mom to have a more inclusive reading of the scriptures and image of god and also invite my uncle and my grandparents to have a more inclusive and loving image of god as well yes great question i don't do that i don't try to convince people to change their theology on a social justice issue because it puts us in a state of debate or like combativeness one of us is going to win one of us is going to lose so you can talk about like inviting people which is better language but i tend to sidestep that whole thing and say okay you think my approach is wrong and i respect that i think my experience has shown me that the way you practice your belief deeply hurts people and divides families i mean case in point so can we talk about instead of how right or wrong this is what's the gospel response to people right and so i would probably look at someone who is theologically conservative like preston sprinkle who would agree with the hermeneutic the way of interpreting scripture but makes an argument for how that belief is lived out relationally and see if you can restore relationship and just push the theology to the side completely and i i that comes down to like a really core belief i have that you can't lead people where they don't want to go you can't convince coerce cajole there's nothing you can do humans are more stubborn than mules you cannot convince people to change their mind often so i'd rather talk about do you care about your brother of course i care my brother like then is the state of the relationship something you're satisfied with no well what what could be better and like ask a lot of questions and she might say well everything would be fun if he just realized being gay as a sin it's okay do you think he'll realize that if every christian in his life won't be involved in his life if they separate him what choice does he have then um which is like it's a little bit of a guilt move but i'll take it um and just encourage like the important thing is continuing in relationship that's not the same as like endorsing the behavior or whatever but like the place people have to get to on this topic which i don't call an issue it's not an issue this is a this is a a matter of liberty and life for people who are gay or who are lesbians right so i don't just call it an issue but people who think it's a sin for people to marry who have the same biological gender have to realize the toothpaste is not going back in the tube this is not a culture war that gets one so they have to learn how to love your neighbor today in a society where this is accepted and increasingly normalized at the same time those of us who are allies or people who are lgb have to understand that this is a huge north of 30 block of the country and this will be a significant position in american culture for at least 25 years so i think mutual shunning won't work especially for christians especially for christians so i try to tell the stories of people who are hurt by the way beliefs are lived out and let people work through their own theology and their own understanding and it takes time and there's grief and there's feeling of betrayal all around there would be some miracle if everybody agreed to go to counseling together but that would help but the ultimate test is like how many years months minutes seconds do you think each of you have left on the earth that's a finite resource the longer you kick the can down the road the more likely it is that one of you dies and the relationship is just broken and never gets reconciled so why put it off and then i guess maybe one other thing in the hermeneutic jesus was always patient with sinners and harsh with the righteous it's really clear in the gospels who got like the sarcastic cutting jesus the people who knew the law who got the patient go and sin no more the common people the people who the pharisees called sinners so the most christ-like thing you can do is be patient and love hi my name is sean hi sean uh my question is about uh what you've talked about before christian atheism yes so i'm in an odd position because i uh after about two years of deconstruction and basically deconstructed out of out of faith almost entirely but because of you and the liturgists i'm uh remaining contemplative remaining uh able to consider faith i'm actually here with my wonderful pastor right and but it's an odd place to be um i have wonderful friends who are affirming of me and where i'm at wherever that is but i'm wondering if you could uh talk a little bit more about that topic of uh christian atheism of being kind of in both places at once yes absolutely by the way if you're not aware christian atheism is a thing what's a christian atheist a person an atheist is a person who lacks any belief or lacks belief in any god or gods that's an atheist what's a christian a person who follows christ so it's a christian atheist a person who lacks any belief acts lacks belief in any god or gods who follows the teachings of jesus you could fit all of them in a small convention center but they exist and uh it was like a time in my life where i probably would have called myself a christian atheist um and then i got to the whole split brain thing saw that research and i realized that it's not that i was an atheist who followed the teachings of jesus it's that i was a baptist for 30 years and an atheist for two and a half three years and i could still see the world with both of those perspectives and i kept trying to pick one and if a guy who had his corpus callosum severed could say both yes and no to do you believe in god maybe i should just stop trying to wrestle this out and i kind of got an image if you would imagine like the baptist faith as a city i lived there like a long time and then i got on a plane and i took off and i was like i'm not a baptist anymore i'm leaving that town i gotta land somewhere so i went from the east coast to the west coast and landed in atheistsville and i did the geography on purpose and and i landed in atheistsville and i'm like i'm an atheist now and then that stopped working for me so i took off again and like with that view what i was looking for somewhere to land i need a label that lets me know who my tribe is i just stopped doing that i don't like i'm to the point now that the theist atheism labels and language is completely uninteresting to me i just i just don't care i don't care that's not to say i don't care about people's experiences with those labels i mean in terms of applying to my life i don't think about it at all i know that i'm a skeptical person i tend to analyze things closely i tend to like to have evidence for claims but i am also a person that sees a miraculous beauty everywhere that i ascribe to god and when i point my like skeptical beam at that it kind of evaporates so i don't point my skeptical beam at it um and i just enjoy the embodiment and the gift of a life i didn't create my own so i would say maybe stop trying to land the plane and if the practice of christian faith brings you some form of comfort and peace then just practice it and even if you're like i'm not sure if i believe that that's fine the gospels are full of people saying i'm not sure if i believe this or believing it completely incorrectly jesus after you overthrow caesar i get to sit at your right hand right no the kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed so yes or no on the right hand seats you know what i mean like that's the gospels and fulfills you with joy enjoy it and that includes questions and doubts and taking things apart i think doubt and deconstruction are only dangerous when coupled with fear and anger today i've said it before today doubt is like a good friend of mine doubt's a guy that comes over to my house with a beer and plays devil's advocate and helps me figure out what like is right and wrong and what i believe and i don't fear that process at all because my life is not a 10 million piece jigsaw puzzle that i've got to get all put together before my hourglass runs out life's not a rubik's cube or i'm trying to get like green and blue and red life's a journey we take and god's our companion on that journey and god's the path through the journey itself and some people call that god some people call that the cosmos i call it god i interpret it through christ because that's how the world opens up for me and if you would use a term like christian atheists you probably have some of that longing too so i would just say like unself-consciously lean into it and if you're at an ask science mike live event with your pastor you're probably in a community that's okay with that so usually the problem is if somebody doesn't like cleanly fit the theist atheist divide if you're a person who can say a term like christian atheist or non-theist or mystic a lot of churches go whoa whoa whoa whoa you're a heretic get out of here or they execute church discipline or whatever and i would not hang around in a place like that because it will not help you accept this invitation into living that christ offers us but you're already there so i'd just be like a really comfortable open christian atheist for as long as you need those terms and that's the most biblical thing you can do because we start with a god in a garden who walks with us and talks with us and then that worked so well that we ate from the tree of knowledge got kicked out so then we saw god in this bush that burned with fire and wasn't consumed who spouted existentialist poetry i am that i am i will be that which i will be right and as the biblical narrative unfolds you keep seeing all these new images of god that fit the dominant worldview and context and theology and philosophy of the day and that keeps going through the entire biblical nar art you know a god that is in an ark and then in a tabernacle and then a temple whose greatness emanates over all the earth an infinite mystery by the way like that god the late prophet's god was really hard to understand distant and mystical the holy of holies was painted with scenes of the night sky and mystery and beauty to show god's ultimate mystery and uh we needed god to have a face again so we got jesus and that works so well we crucified him and then a mysterious god returned only now we were the temple through the holy spirit and then we called this whole thing a trinity a little after we assembled the library of books we call the bible today and if you if you say like god is i'm i'm a bushest i only believe in the great i am in the burning bush and that god in the temple that's heresy then you've missed the ark of the bible no no no no no no no i i believe jesus was god but all that old testament stuff that was just prophecy that points to jesus as the only god you just missed the bible so i think some people today they're burning bush their pillar of cloud their son of god is the cosmos but it's the same invitation so yes take whatever metaphor you need to know follow and serve god to live a life of love and peace and beauty but don't hold it too closely because if you do it will become an idol and you will miss the next thing that god shows you to and god invites you to and i don't want my understanding of god my hermeneutic of the bible any of those things to become an idol i put in front of god's true greatness so you're welcome here and uh hooray for the christian atheists okay i wrote this down this morning um is the gaia hypothesis of planet earth scientifically provable or is it just a metaphor uh for like perceiving the world and just because it's fun giving your understanding of consciousness would it be fitting to label the earth as conscious that's a great question much more succinct than i expected congratulations shouldn't have sat down anything is scientifically provable if you stretch the terms far enough [Laughter] so i'm usually careful to define what i mean by terms when i talk about consciousness that's why i say consciousness is as i'm talking right now is a set of feedback loops that build a model of reality so something can operate within it now we know because conscious everybody just says consciousness like we all mean the same thing we don't same thing as the word god you ask any three people what god is you'll get six answers right so the gaia hypothesis is the idea that the earth itself is a super organism is that scientifically provable probably not as defined in that way functionally the earth is an interdependent global ecology and in the same way that if you eat a bad taco even your follicles will hurt even though they don't digest food if you if bad things happen anywhere in the earth to ecosystems it affects the entire global ecology does the earth itself on a global scale build a model of reality that it responds to i've seen some theoristians say yes based on certain interpretations of consciousness but that's not something i think you could answer definitively scientifically one way or another this is that rare moment when i have like a really accurate researched answer to a question that still feels deeply unsatisfying i'm trying to like the whole time rattling off facts i was like get to something poetic and beautiful get to something poetic and beautiful and i don't think i can well i think we should care for the earth as if the gaia theory is correct uh you don't have to save the earth the earth's going to be fine it's a planet if we launch every thermonuclear weapon humanity is ever built the planet won't care it will still be here for billions of years people won't be but the earth will be fine i've often thought our our our environmental campaign should not be save the whales or save the earth or save the rainforest the poster should say save the humans uh because we are on a incredible run right now we're driving the sixth mass extinction event in earth history go humans and we're making a record here uh making history the sixth mass extinction event and we understand that the types of organisms that don't make it through mass extinction events are large bodied animals so we could wipe out a bunch of life and cockroaches are like sweet it's like a buffet uh they're go your cockroach is gonna be fine bacteria are going to be fine all kinds of life no matter what we do are going to be fine we'll just run out of people and so that that underlying ethos of how you treat guy a guy who treats you that is scientifically verifiable and right now man we are we are rough tenants just like you couldn't i guess you could literally intentionally be worse in our behavior like you could i don't know we could just literally like launch nukes as fast as we can build them or burn all the forest at the same time but short of that intentional benevolence human activity couldn't be worse for the planet than it is right now which is ultimately bad for us i don't want to live in a dome on mars because it's the only place in the solar system available to me i'd love to go to mars just for cool points like to visit but i don't want to have to abandon this planet which is not an implausible thing that a thousand years from now that's something we're really talking about so there's one way to look at that if gaia is the language that gets you to take care of the earth talk about gaia if earth care and the stewardship offered by god in genesis i don't care what metaphor you use just stop spewing industrial pollutants at every turn because we're we're just going to run out of resources and clean water and clean air i mean matt you think like you think 2016's been a rough election wait until there's not enough fresh water for everybody people human beings without water and food are the most dangerous animal on the planet they're terrifying and that i'd this is one thing where i get really confused like the the political tension over earth care is it's really not smart projected out even one generation and really really dangerous projectile too like people are alive today who will potentially suffer unimaginably because they're like well i need a big car and i just i don't know i had an idea for a video where like we have people explain to their not yet born great grandchildren like we show them pictures of what the earth will could potentially be like and just like explain to your great-grandchild like why the hamburger was that important every day and like you know what you know what i mean it's just it's sorry i'm really showing a lot of bias here but this is not outrageous science and that's the thing so there's some people could say well maybe maybe like the some of the further in models are wrong and maybe all we'll have to do is abandon some coastal cities and uh like if if it even if it's a five percent chance of global catastrophe that seems enough to me to like make different choices but i'm a weird guy uh so maybe we should all just get more weird hi my name is nate and several questions i wanted to ask you but let's come down to this one right right now i used to be a young earth littlerose creationist and at that at the point now or you know it's only the last year really um wrestling with the evolution via natural selection process and being okay with it even within my kind view of god and whatnot however i still i mean i've got people in my life who are on one side of the other and my question is is there any real science that actually is used to discuss both sides or is it mostly simply just the bible says the bible says the bible says or there's actually people having honest scientific discussions on both sides okay great question the scientific consensus is easily and comfortably in ancient universe and evolution via natural selection let's clarify something though evolution does not say where life came from darwin's three revolution says nothing about how life appeared on earth evolution says how once life appeared on earth there got to be so many varieties of it okay so the the study of how life appeared in the first time it's called first place is called a biogenesis pretty much a mystery there's six or seven really good hypothesis is out there hypotheses out there and nobody knows has anyone to measure which one's better and it could be none of those six are right so there's a lot of room for healthy debate i think even for creationists to be involved if they come up with good theories on how will biogenesis happen evolution we understand evolution better than we understand gravity uh and i've noticed like young earth creationists aren't like you know what the law of gravity is bunk i'm going to jump off a church you know what i mean they just accept it even though we don't really understand it because we observe the effects same is true of evolution um so there's not like a lot now there are scientists with real phds from real institutions working for evangelical think tanks who work backwards from the text to provide a scientific justification but that's not the scientific method scientific method is to start with the data come up with a model that could explain the data and then make predictions for data you don't have and then run tests to see if your model makes the right prediction starting with the text is incompatible with science that doesn't mean it's bad or wrong just means it's inherently unscientific now that said that's not a debate i have you could not get me to debate someone about young earth creationism i don't care if you're a young earth creationist it's not even that like i think like if i had the chance i would convince you it is so low on my priority things and how we relate to god it believe if if somehow believing in six literal days and a garden planted by hand by god is what makes you feel known and loved by god then i would never in a second try to take it away from you because i would be saying that only my view of the burning bush is correct and your temple is wrong right so what i want to get is past a debate about origin stories and to the point where we talk about the outcome of creation because what both evolutionary christians evolutionary creationists and theistic evolutionists and young earth and old earth creationists all believe is genesis reveals a god who loves the creation and that's different from every other story told in that era it's a waste of breath to fight over how many days it took to make the earth because we could be spending all those breaths re re-making the earth in god's image today and that's the work that interests me um so i go you know i do a lot of stuff with biologos who is i love biologos they're way more theologically conservative than i am but they care about the work of having conservative theologically grounded discussions about creation for people are interested i think that's a great thing and that's why i participate but that doesn't help us love our neighbor so who am i with i am with young earth creationists and evolutionists who love their neighbor and if someone is a an evolutionist and not into loving their neighbor i'd rather go hang out with a young earth creation person you know yeah thank you that's a really good question mike i'm lydia hey lydia uh my question kind of goes back to that guy's question about about the environment but like on a more personal level okay so my home culture is like middle upper class white people yep and um my adopted chur culture now and it's been really cool to see a lot of like really conservative people change their opinions on race because it's really cool to bring people in their lives and and tell them stories and all that but i'm having a way harder time with the environment and it's not like i'm sitting there trying to convince them but it's like you literally talk about how your new year's resolution is to use no plastic bags at the grocery store and they start telling you that the earth is okay and you should chill out so just the way people like negate what is going on about that is hard and so how would you recommend like having a dialogue about that when it seems like i don't know they just are really close to it so a friend of mine catherine hayho is an environmental scientist and climate change specialist like the kind that meets with presidents like that legit and she did a fascinating study that showed um antipathy towards earth care and climate change is not a religious thing that religiosity does not predict for climate change denial or like you know i'm not taking plastic bags that's a hundred percent a political ideology and we are not exactly prepared in 2017 to have good substantive discussions across lines of political division i think we're less able to do that than we were 10 years ago we're less able to we're able to nine months ago that whole line of dialogue is broken down so maybe we should start with a request for mutual respect i'll tell you what i made a new real year's resolution that i'm not going to use plastic bags because i care about the earth that we live in but can we i'm not trying to convince you to do that so we just agree like i can do that because it matters to me if you choose not to i won't say that can we like just restore basic civility first then after that i don't the plastic the bag thing to me like plastic's easy you can google image search a picture of the plastic float in the pacific the size of texas you know plastic is is is bad um so there's there's a pretty small not texas size small compared to texas but large in the middle of a vortex in the pacific of like visible plastic but it rubs against itself and breaks down basically into little invisible plastic beads but in an area larger than texas now you can just take a boat through and scoop out the water and then count the amount of plastic in it and it's so thick that a lot of wavelengths of light can't get through the surface and the plankton's dying off and since the plankton is the foundation of the ecosystem all everything else is starting to die off too we have these dead zones in the ocean i think we like everyone can agree dead zones in the ocean aren't desirable especially texas-sized dead zones surely that's like not good for the earth and then on other things um economics i replaced all my lights at home with led lights and uh in seven months all the bulbs paid for themselves and they last 15 years so not only do i not have to buy new lights my power bill went down that's not an environmental discussion it's economic so i tend to focus on easy wins another thing right now this is question about solar in a lot of parts of the country solar is cheaper than fossil fuels now without subsidies so we don't have to have a discussion in those situations just like would you like to save money put solar panels on your roof done you know what i mean like i don't care if you hate the earth everyone likes more money everybody that's universal that's not true anarcho-capitalists don't like more money but everybody else uh likes more money so i tend to think in easy wins i tend to think in less controversial areas but mostly i think like how do i establish my life in a way that people are comfortable discussing with me things they disagree with and that comes a lot more than how you discuss topics you disagree with and a lot more about how you live life together every day and i tried every opportunity to refor reinforce the idea in others that i love respect and appreciate them and that covers all kind of stuff i mean like i'm like a super these days like really left leaning person i haven't always been that's new but my family is all rural like far right people and we laugh like crazy at thanksgiving because no matter what else they're my family i mean they're the people that were there the day i was born and they're the people who will be there the day i get lowered into the ground and that's just an amazing perspective builder and i think i think this this election seems different i think this is the one where families are just like you know what i've got nothing to do with you and you have nothing to do with me and i can understand how we get there i think that's ultimately bad for the issues both sides care about i think it i think it it hurts everybody involved so i affirmed the basic human dignity of evangelical christians and trump voters and climate people who disagree with me on climate change or environmental issues and they understand that like me they are living a worldview they didn't create that was handed to them i think that's important to recognize none of us chose where we were born none of us chose what we were taught as children none of us chose the encounters that we have each day those were all things that were handed to us we'd not say we don't have any involvement we choose how we respond to events as we get more agency we choose where to direct our life but ultimately we're all just trying to make it to payday right if we maintain relationships respect and love it actually enables us to talk about those issues that are important enough to talk about because they impact other people you know what i mean so at some point if this is true about co2 your 10 cylinder engine actually does affect the rest of us but you'll never have that discussion with somebody whose humanity you don't recognize hey mike my name is campbell hey campbell in all the evangelical circles that i spent time in growing up you were called a baby murderer if you use the word abortion and ambiguity in the same sentence yeah um as i grew up i started to think of being pro-life as a more all-inclusive thing so it included jesus nonviolent ethic capital punishment all of those things but the more that i read feminist thinkers i start to care more about women's rights and bodily autonomy um and so i was wondering how might one reconcile women's autonomy a non-violent ethic um with the quote-unquote issue of abortion a nice easy one thank you um well if i figure that out i'll let you know because i don't know i don't i don't know i drive everyone crazy on this issue when they we did a whole podcast pro pro live pro choice on the allergies podcast which people who are open to civil discussion really enjoyed but people who were firmly in either camp hated because we didn't come like to a conclusion because we haven't uh when i grew up i was the guy that stood on the side of the road with the abortion kills children poster that was just me when i considered the issue as an atheist it's not that i went all the way pro-choice or women's autonomy because i always thought well like that there's a child that did it choose to exist so to me like the the complex the complication to me is at what point do those cells deserve autonomy and legal protection themselves and that is probably at some point where they're housed in another person and i tried to look at like the the biology around uh infant and child development um most embryos are non-viable so if a soul if a soul is a thing and souls are given at conception most people most souls don't get to be born the majority of souls ever created don't make it past a couple of weeks maybe six so then what does that tell me i remember i read one piece by a scientist an atheist who said if god exists he's the world's leading abortion provider and i was like oh man that's rough um so when i hit that kind of ambiguity i punt to use a football term and i go to pragmatism i think we all agree that if a woman is in a situation where she has to abort a fetus it would have been better if she didn't have to abort the fetus and even the woman would prefer that so by scientific measurements what causes less fetuses to be aborted easy access to birth control universal sex education educational and economic empowerment for women and legal abortions those four things have been demonstrated to cause less abortions to occur and so as a pragmatist i go what's the shared value of people who are for women's autonomy and people who want to protect the rights of the unborn as early as conception both of those groups would like to see less abortions so let's just create policies that make less abortions and so this is another topic where like i don't understand the fight in the political realm so we already know what works let's just do that and so like on the right some people say and i don't mean the political right i mean the religious right those are distinct things okay they would say you know we don't want to encourage people to have sex because that's immoral and i would just say so which is worse people having sex or abortions if they're not equal if you think an abortion is worse than people having sex then let let's just provide birth control everywhere you know what i mean like so if we knew that i'm going to go ridiculous but let's say we figured out in a study that if people wash their hands with dial soap the murder rate went down would anyone be against like using government money to put dial soap accessibly everywhere no why because we don't like to see people get murdered but let's put it more questionable if we figured out that if we allowed people to speed 10 miles an hour over the speed limit traffic fatalities were reduced now if we if we if we if we didn't enforce if they will we go 11 15 they go back up but if we lower the speed limit five miles an hour then let people speed 11 up fatalities go down speeding's a moral transgression but it's not as bad as people dying so we would probably just do that but somehow on this issue everybody gets so passionate we don't look at what works so i think if you're pro-life or you're for women's autonomy you should support and tell your policy makers i want easy access to affordable birth control i want universal sex education i want economic and educational empowerment for women and the one we would disagree on is whether abortion is safe and legal now again what i'm saying the data seems to indicate that when abortions are safe and legal you have fewer of them i don't understand that how that plays out but across cultures all over the globe safe legal abortions there's fewer i think that might be because if you have a society that values autonomy those other three things are easier to get and so what i've challenged my friends on the right to do is take the lead on those three and maybe we already have to worry about number four maybe that it becomes a non-issue is is you go into certain parts of of europe and like teenage abortion is just not a thing they think about that is such a statistical rarity and even elective abortions are are much lower in those countries than they are in the united states so let's aim for that so like i can't resolve and believe me i've tried that thorny mess of women's autonomy and the right of an unborn child but it almost you almost don't have to because we already know how to fix it either way hi um my name's caleb hi caleb and my question is people with disabilities um so often and sometimes have abilities that regular people don't have why is that okay oh great question first of all tuesday uh that's tomorrow and for those of you on internet land last tuesday oh i hate that temporal mix we're releasing a podcast or did release a podcast on ableism which is the way many people tend to respond to folks with disability with pity or indifference and so we've talked about ways to deal with that now in terms of why people with disabilities often have other abilities we would find exceptional i think has to do with a phenomenon known as compensation so many people don't realize that i'm severely learning disabled i don't have any abilities on my right from my left and i have trouble with the orders of letters not when reading but when writing and uh i have almost no short-term memory i have no understanding of chronological time how long ago things happen or in what order and i have a hard time understanding things i hear versus things i see and no one knew i had a learning disability until i was a junior in high school and i got tested by a learning specialist who said my compensation strategies were so good it hid the disorder but i still didn't do great in school and so she gave me like five tips on learning styles and i went from like being a cd student to straight a's and it didn't even take effort it literally just took different ways of approaching things with my brain so because i have no short-term memory i can commit things to long-term memory faster than anyone else i know so when i read a book when i close it i pretty much remember everything in the book forever that's how you become a science mic you read eight books a month and you remember all of them right and so you can imagine that if someone doesn't have the ability to see they devote a lot more attention to what they hear and we found that blind people use their visual cortex which has a ton of neurons to analyze what they hear and in fact some people who are blind use a primitive version of echolocation like bats or dolphins to form an image of what's around them now some i've seen a couple people are blind who can literally click with their tongue and not run into anything like they can go through a maze without a cane right um but other people who haven't learned to do that at least are so in tune with the differences and delays coming between the their two ears that they create a map of their surroundings that's interpreted by their visual cortex and that's because human brains are amazing and that's why people with different abilities or disabled people have so much to teach us because often they see the world in fundamentally different ways and the fundamentally different perspective is one of the most valuable things you can get i've learned in my life that my life is richer when i talk to and learn from people's whose life experiences are the most different from my own so for a long time that was people with different racial backgrounds ethnic backgrounds or economic backgrounds and it's in the last couple of years that also means people with different development and ability backgrounds because they offer me a gift that i could never through any amount of effort find myself and that seeing the world from a different perspective or hearing the world from a different perspective and that's all about compensation and neuroplasticity you've done it you made it through an episode of ask science mike live congratulations we will have t-shirts at the exit no i'm just kidding there are no t-shirts but thank you have been uh lovely to be with uh i want to thank greg nordeen for his work editing the show andrew golucky for all the work he does in pre-production my patrons on patreon for making the show financially possible and all you in internet land i hope to see you in person soon thanks for listening everybody and i'll talk to you next week [Applause] [Music]