ASM031 Ask Science Mike LIVE! in Ft. Worth, TX

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coming from collective church in fort worth texas it's ask science mike

[Music]

so we're doing things a little differently this week this is ask science mike live instead of recording lonely in my bedroom i'm here with a bunch of dear friends in the great state of texas and i want to warn you guys it's a little different this week i didn't get to cheat and fact check myself on google so if i flub anything i'm sure i'll hear from you on twitter or on the comment section on asksciencemike.com and with that let's get it started well first of all uh thank you for being here in fort worth with us i think it's just great that you came all this way to be here so what's your name my name is chad hey chad my question is is i have uh had a pastor speak and on a few different occasions he's kind of talked about you know god has designed us to be more social relational beings and you know um he's kind of talked about you know kind of the the extroverted people kind of being more in that in that in that area and then from my experience introverted people are a little more judgmental in nature and so i don't want to judge that tonight i want to judge introverted people um my question being i guess my own personality test that i've done i tend to be a little more ambiverted in nature so my question being if you wanted to transition from the more ambiverted to more extreme extroverted what is our ability to be able to to make that type of transition all right great question what does science say about that what does science say about extroversion introversion ambiversion and more importantly how we can transition in between them so a couple of misnomers about introversion and extroversion introverts are not necessarily shy first of all my wife is an introvert and people are like no way jenny's not an introvert she's a social introvert so she can really turn it on for a crowd or for a party but she spends some essential part of her soul doing that and at some point goes i'm done we have to go home and i go okay honey because i'm like an actual extrovert and that when i get done with an event and i go to the hotel room i'm like depressed because there's nobody there and i'm lonely but i i'm an extrovert but lately i've been very quiet because for a living i fly from city to city and talk and i get done talking in front of people and i've realized i don't want to talk at dinner anymore but i still hate to be by myself and that's the key difference between extroverts and introverts extroverts get energy from being with and around people introverts spend energy from being around other people there are actually neurological differences between extroverts and introverts now the third term we had there was ambiverts the thing is there's not like you're an extrovert or an introvert it's a continuum and so you can imagine like with zero in the middle you could be zero to a hundred extrovert or zero toward 100 introvert so my wife is probably really like a 75 percent introvert and i'm really like a 95 extrovert a true hundred percent extrovert would probably be like a psychopath you know what i mean like it's too far but so there's differences so when you're an ambivert it just means you're like between 35 on either side of the scale which means you have attributes in your personality that incorporate both extroverted and introverted tendencies by the way that's most people we call that healthy right most people can be around people for a while but then they've had enough except for me like i consider being alone with my wife and kids right this is how i'm wired but what we found is extroverted brains process sensory information differently namely they need a lot more of it to maintain neurological activity in a very real way an extrovert's brain gets too quiet without the stimulation of other people around the noises the sounds the constant modeling of other people's emotional states and in a very real way that's measurable in brain scans introverts their brain gets too noisy and too chaotic and too confusing with the same amount of sensory stimulation so these are actually kind of neurological predispositions so i don't think it's helpful to think necessarily which one is better which one's worse but i do think we have things to learn from each other to be more healthy as an extrovert my wife has taught me the importance of quiet moments of intimate conversations and deep relationships because my tendency is to go from person to person and have a thousand people i know their name but i don't actually know them really well those are my friends right so that's healthy for me to realize that it's important as a human being to invest in fewer people and go deeper and maybe actually learn like people's birthdays and where they're from instead of like one fresh person to hear this story that i really love to tell but on the other hand my wife learns from me the importance of taking risks of meeting new people and frankly the power hospitality can have inviting lots of people into your home can actually be beneficial for your family and for society to create deeper connections with larger groups of people i believe as a weirdo mystic scientist sort of theist person that in some some way the thing that we call god gave us these personality traits on purpose so that we could reflect a more whole and more healthy society than just extroverts just introverts or even just ambiverts could on their own hi i'm jessica i'm from fort worth um and my question is about carbon dating i went to a church that was really young earth creationist a long time ago and they had a lot of these little cartoon tracks that we may have seen a long time ago and i remember seeing in one of them that there was a study done that said that carbon dating was unreliable and so i would like for you to explain a little bit about how carbon dating works and what that study was and why it's wrong because i'm sure it is right um well in science we typically withhold judgment until we have data to review but i like the way you're rolling um science is also becoming the new dogma which is really strange like there's a lot of people that accept science dogmatically which is unscientific go humans right the funny thing is those studies are absolutely right that say that carbon dating is unreliable and here's why different types of carbon or radiometric dating work for different eras of time and so if you do a study on the wrong type of carbon dating or radiometric dating for the wrong length of time it is unreliable right so the way radiometric dating works is pretty simple it's not simple at all i shouldn't even said that certain elements are heavy elements of course are made of protons neutrons and electrons and they have because that thing's called isotopes and so you'll have elements that are pretty heavy and they have a lot of neutrons and basically that means they're heavy enough that over time their nuclei tend to fall apart very radioactive things undergo a process called fission where they actually break apart into new elements lighter elements just become lighter isotopes of themselves that process a way of measuring that's called a half-life a half-life of an element so we know through astrophysics basically the approximate weights of elements that existed when the solar system was formed and we also understand that under different conditions different levels of exposure to atmosphere whatever elements might decay at different rates and so when we look at something and try to date it first of all we use other means to figure out what kind of era we should be looking at and then we look for the right kind of element that may be in that then we literally just count the ratio of isotopes to isotopes or elements to elements and that gives you an approximate amount of time to know how old something is because we know in science that elements decay at a steady rate we know this because the universe without exception when measured makes sense it doesn't do random things except kind of in the quantum world but they're they're random within constraints right so uh it's actually really clever the way that creation scientists try to discredit carbon dating because they produce real studies they don't produce new information they basically kind of misquote science and what's interesting is i don't even think that's a conspiracy i don't think this is some intentional thing because we understand that humans have um a bias towards self-reinforcing identity basically if you assign a label to yourself christian baptist atheist hipster progressive mickey mouse literally whatever label you pick and you make that part of your identity you'll unconsciously filter information that subverts your chosen identity right so if you consider yourself progressive on race for example and there's some form of evidence that makes you question how progressive you really are on race you're just subconsciously filter it out so if you if you identify as a young earth creationist even if you're a scientist you'll filter out information that undermines claims related to your identity because identity is essential to human psychological health so yes carbon dating really reliable really real well understood but it's also not some deceit involved in creation science when they discredit those things it's just a byproduct of human consciousness and cognitive bias [Music] hello i'm also jessica hi jessica uh we're a good breed so um studies show that children who have experienced neglect or abuse within the first few years of life up to three or four actually neurologically don't develop fully um and this is a personal question because um when i was 16 we adopted a child who was four years old and had experienced pretty severe neglect and abuse he's now 21 and he has a very difficult life somewhat by choice but also obviously by creation of other humans what what's the hope what's the therapy for a child that we know neurologically did not get what they needed how do we rewire them essentially fantastic question thank you um so what what we're talking about here is there's a condition called basic shame and basic shame is a neurological condition it's not purely psychological it's an actual the brain structures itself differently when very young children don't feel unconditionally loved especially by their mothers okay and if someone develops basic shame number one it's incredibly difficult for them on a neurological level to develop a healthy self image they also tend to have atrophy or delayed or reduced development in their orbito frontal cortex that's part of the brain behind your eyes that helps you weigh the outcome of the risks of decisions and make ethical judgments teenage boys have dramatically smaller orbital frontal cortexes than teenage girls and suddenly like why young boys jump off houses and wreck cars makes sense because neurologically they actually can't estimate the outcome of risk like other people in fact in men the orbito frontal cortex doesn't fully develop until 25 or 26 and now suddenly a lot of people's dating lives make sense right one day the guys just woke up this isn't like social pressure this isn't social conditioning this is how brains work and in a condition of basic shame that development may never come the ability to see what may happen if i make choices may never develop ever this is why healthy relationships with children is so vital it's not complicated really all you have to do is love your kids but sadly we live in a world where that does not always happen i had a conversation about a year ago with someone who tearfully told me an account like this only it was their own life and she struggled with frequent self-destructive behavior and just a fundamental self-loathing a beautiful talented songwriter seemed to have everything anyone could want and her brain wasn't quite developed science gives us a couple of clues one believe it or not meditation is remarkably effective at increasing thickness and richness in gray matter in the prefrontal cortex including the orbital frontal cortex so five minutes a day of meditation moving to 10 moving to 15 get to a half hour a day six days a week that's basically like strength training for that part of your brain also the anterior cingulate cortex which is responsible for compassion empathy and lots of great things in humans is there the other piece frankly your social world has to encompass a lot of people who love you unconditionally so there's this tendency we have to tough love people especially people that act out destructively but when those people are acting out because of poor neurological development because of very very difficult early childhoods tough love doesn't help boundaries help certainly but boundaries in the context of i love you i am going to be in your life never withhold affection or try to manipulate someone struggling with basic shame by saying if you don't then our relationship is over right so really your the two tools i understand would be meditation and very rich very safe relationships maybe share some of that research and also in situations like these i always recommend the involvement of a neurologically grounded and knowledgeable mental health professional right there's a lot of like family counselors that do good work but don't necessarily have the tool set to deal with things that are truly oriented in brain tissue but someone like that is going to be able to offer an individualized program that can offer coping strategies and tips that could help a more normal life this isn't a death sentence right sometimes the people who suffer the most have the most incredible stories and in doing that are also the most likely to remake the world a young steve jobs probably dealt with basic shame parents you know were adopted folks and he wandered to the wilderness and yet he kind of like reinvented everything as a result so don't stigmatize either make any sense awesome [Music] hey i'm erin i'm from indiana um so okay my question is we have all these space probes out there and hubble telescope and so how do we match that of heaven with people that have had near-death experiences and the stories that they tell how does that all come together and make sense 35-minute answer here we go we're gonna do uh physics neurology the whole shebang how do we make sense of so the christian church has these beliefs number one they believe very strongly that the end of physical life is not the end of life or even the end of consciousness there's typically especially in um pauline and hellenic christianity this idea that there's also a heaven a place that people go after this life and dwell with god and then you have very popular great selling books where people describe kind of brushing against that world and i often wonder part of the reason people listen to me is because i tell a story of standing on a beach where it seems very much like i encountered a world that doesn't quite belong or fit in this one okay so i get this a lot i haven't had it on the show before but at a lot of events people ask me where's heaven because there's this great thing in the in the gospels and richard dawkins is the one that pointed this out not me i'm not this clever but jesus uh is like saying bye everybody it's been fun here's some final wisdom now i'm going to ascend into heaven right which in that world and that model of cosmology where there was a firmament these big sheets around the the earth uh with holes in them and the stars were the light of heaven shining through of course jesus like went off the surface of the earth up toward the firmament like probably a trap door opened and then he was in heaven and that makes sense and then you like put the hubble telescope out there or you put people on mars and they look back at the moon back at the moon what did i just say i say mars there's no people on mars i failed at my one job science you put people on the moon and they look back at the earth and you send voyager the spacecraft or new horizons more recently beyond pluto and out into the solar system and they never hit anything and you aim hubble out and they never hit anything and then you think like so if the earth is spinning and it's orbiting the sun and we wound the clock back to when we thought jesus was alive and about when he ascended would he make a straight line to heaven like where did he ascend and how fast was he going because you know what i mean like like there's we've got spacecraft out there now that it takes like nine hours or in the case of voyager like 17 or 18 hours for radio signals from that craft to reach the earth so like is that why jesus hasn't come back is he like is he like relativistically accelerating towards the new heaven and then like maybe he just gets there and be like it worked and then he comes back like is that how it like it doesn't make sense in modern cosmology so this is kind of uh where i live this is how i think this is why i'm a confused and conflicted individual most of the time because i both deeply believe that there is something that we call god and that in a real way jesus was an incarnation of this god but all the ways that we have to understand jesus were written by people who understood that the earth was inside a firmament and that the ascension was a literal moment of transportation like catching the bus so where could heaven be well it could be right here first of all there's an idea in physics the most popular idea in physics it talks about how gravity and quantum physics work together that everything is made of strings one dimensional strings you with me really it's amazing if you're actually with me so this uh this cup is three dimensional it has height and has width and its depth right so we can describe this cup as math in three dimensions really four because it it moves around in time uh but regardless if this cup was two dimensional right it would just be flat and you got it would just be it'd have no side it would just be two dimensions height and width so we're talking about one dimensional like a line but not a line because you're really looking at the edge of a line when you look at a line it doesn't make sense because it doesn't make sense but the idea is these strings vibrate and they vibrate in 11 dimensions well that doesn't make any sense we're in three we can't imagine four and certainly not nine or eleven but the whole idea is if you look at quantum effects particles literally appear and disappear in different spots and don't travel the distance in between them and string theory says they're traveling that distance in extra dimensions of space time so if you'd imagine for me just for a second that we're all two-dimensional so just imagine we're all in a piece of paper there's no up or down there's only left right forward back and we'd all be dots on that piece of paper now imagine that a sphere passed through our piece of paper what would you see you would see a dot a point like us that turned into a circle and got bigger and bigger and bigger and then shrunk back down to a point and then disappeared and you could take that sphere and put it back in the sheet of paper over here and go oh my gosh it teleported no you just picked it up and moved it in a third dimension right so the idea in physics is that's how the world works we're only experiencing a limited number of dimensions why because the other dimensions are curled up like a pig's tail i'm not making this up it's science if that's the case then there could be lots and lots of universes stacked on top of each other in something called membrane theory and if heaven as described in the scripture is actually a separate physical realm from this one then you could actually imagine that heaven is laid over this universe centimeters away in dimensions of space time we can't travel that's one idea to think about heaven near-death experiences can actually be described pretty well in neuroscience if you take a test pilots or test astronauts and you put them in a centrifuge and you spin them really fast they spin and spin and spin and spin and spin eventually the heart can't create enough blood pressure to keep enough oxygen in the brain to keep you awake and those guys have out of body experiences and they see tunnels of light and they pass through a tunnel of light and they see their loved ones and then they fall asleep and they wake up with a terrible headache because the brain hates oxygen deprivation but you can imagine that most of the near-death experiences we encounter can totally completely be explained with airtight explanations by neuroscience you don't need anything magical or supernatural to make them happen even this neurosurgeon who said he like crawled around like a worm and then was a butterfly uh he had an infection in his his neocortex the human part of the brain so all that stuff was shut down and his more primitive literally worm-like brain kept running yeah it felt a lot like being a worm and as he recovered his prefrontal cortex tried to make sense of these memories because our brains don't like it when things don't make sense and we're constantly spinning a narrative in which we are the protagonist and so it becomes i went to heaven and i came back that's the science at the same time i have stood on a beach and i have watched the world stretch thin and i have had a moment where i understood all this tunnel of light light on the road to damascus bush that burned and was not consumed by fire nonsense it made a lot of sense standing on that beach so not as a matter of science but as a matter of being open to and trusting this experience i lean into the idea that these experiences in scripture near death and maybe even in physics are pointing to the fact that there is more even to material reality than we think most of the time i mean here we are a room of like particles and like for some reason trillions of particles are organized here and these electrical signals are happening and causing an air pump that's made of squishy tissue to operate and is shaking the air in pressure waves and that's getting picked up by little vibrating membranes in your ear turned into electrical signals and a logical symbolic thought encapsulated as physics here transports his pressure waves and appears here and we talk about well there's nothing supernatural that's crazy like the stuff we know is miraculous so that's kind of my thing we don't have to wonder what more we already know that what is is miraculous and beautiful and i just lean into that and hope that it's a sign that when we reach out and fear and doubt and confusion towards that which made us somehow it reaches back [Music] [Applause] all right i'm pat thanks for coming to texas right on um if i were to be overly simplistic you could say that there's kind of two groups of believers one who are comfortable saying that their theology can evolve whether personally or as an institution they can look back and say there's things that i once really firmly held but i got that one wrong and then there's maybe another group who would say there are certain things which are our dogma which are uh incapable that we we've decided it and and there's there's nothing i personally can can do to to change um what an institution or what a book or or what have you speaks uh about that you've kind of taken up a career path building bridges between those two groups so i guess what tips or advice do you have of how to get those two groups to to talk to one another wow that is a fantastic question first of all the career thing was on accident it wasn't too long ago that i told large companies how to sell things on the internet and fixed computers and then i sort of stumbled into this because people kept downloading my podcast and that's the whole story how do you build that bridge one i start with a basic respect for every person and i hold whatever they think and grace because i understand that human brains are running software and that each brain didn't design most of its own software it was received from an environment and then decisions were made on top of it i also understand as i've studied more and more scientifically that all kinds of different belief systems have advantages in different social contexts different survival situations for example my like really open mystical scientific way of viewing the world would not be particularly effective if society collapsed and had to gather my own food and fight predators for survival i'd be the first one dead right so i think there's a great gift in knowing what you know and experiencing true certainty because i've done that and then losing it because there's a humility you can't let go of when you have come to the end of everything you know and found it lacking and so i realized that right now there are a bunch of things that i think are true that aren't and i don't have any way to figure out which is which other than time and looking at evidence right so for example let's see what's a what's a beautifully controversial topic today uh i'll go there so i'm like all for same-sex marriage i'm in no problem and i have a lot of gay friends really good friends and i also have friends who are close to me who think it's a sin for my other friends to love each other and the choice a lot of people make is i've got to cut ties with somebody and i don't one because what if it was actually talking to a gay friend that opened my eyes more than anything and what if he would have cut me off because i thought the way he expressed love was wrong guess what i'd probably have a podcast like a really popular podcast where i talked about why it was not okay for gay people to marry you see what i mean so without relationship we shut off our ability to help each other grow so really i think it's all about humility openness and respect and i found i say some really off the law controversial things if you go read the reviews of both my podcasts on the internet people say i love the show there's so much i don't agree with but i love the way he talks about things right and anybody like you know very progressive people have things i say they're like woo scientists everybody has something i said they don't agree with but because people hear that i genuinely respect them as a person and am open to hearing their story of how and why they believe what they believe they will generally return the favor now some people can't handle it and to those people i say go with grace i hold nothing against you the only time i step in and make a hard line is when people are being actively harmed by the actions of another and that's when i get pretty serious and have difficult conversations but short of harming another person i respect people's right and autonomy to believe and act as they please and i've found generally people will do the same for me [Music] [Applause] okay so first you should know i'm very nervous so if i'm incoherent i'm so sorry um i definitely fit in the introvert category you spoke about earlier okay so my question actually isn't that scientific i guess but it is a follow-up to something you spoke about on an episode a few weeks ago you talked about daily prayer and kind of what your routine is for that i know you talked about that for you a lot of the time daily prayer involves like awareness and gratitude and scripture reading and surrender i think um and that is something like the place i'm in right now i that's what my prayer is like but i grew up southern baptist and so the way i was taught to pray yeah the way i was taught to pray is a lot different than the way i pray now and one thing that was just huge growing up was intercessory prayer and with all the changes i've been making lately with my deconstruction and reconstruction and my faith experience i'm having a hard time figuring out if i want to ask god for anything really or just how to have any of the intercessory prayer part of my life back and i know in that episode you mentioned that you prayed for i think your friend's son on a regular basis and so i was just wondering with your current faith experience like what does intercessory prayer look like for you like what's your thought process what words or phrases do you use i just would really appreciate getting a picture of what that could look like great question thank you also seriously thank you for reminding me what i said because nobody is less familiar with the show than i am because it's like i talk to a microphone and then i like go somewhere and record another show and i forget like what i talked about intercessory prayer is a pickle so i'll just be totally honest theologically and logically i have huge issues with the god who intervenes in the universe like sort of intellectually i want to put god in this like platonic box like he's this emanating animating force i'm saying he again all the time that you know that that's old habit uh but that god is god even consciousness aware those are temporal conditions isn't god beyond time like all these things just blow my mind and actually can lead me to moments of profound transcendence and then there's like my mom and my pastor and my grandmother who like very much believe in a god who intervenes in reality in response to prayer and i go that has huge logical consequences why is god answering your prayer not somebody else's well you know every football team is praying that god delivers them the magical trophy or whatever you call it when football teams win the whole whatever you call a whole set of football games i don't know about sports i just revealed a little a little bit of inadequacy that i'm not embarrassed about how little i know about football even though it was a big deal when i was a kid in the south sorry digression that was free so what's the deal like there's this god that makes sense that i can get behind that is timeless and is basically what you talk about uh in the initial singularity before the big bang or in a black hole like that's god that physics but then there are these moments in my life where god responds to prayer now there's the milk jug thing raise your hand if you heard the milk jug thing okay new material this is an atheist thing basically they say that all answered prayer is proof texting that uh you know we base and the christians literally have heard christians say this god has three answers yes no wait okay those are the only possible outcomes to any event there is no other option and so when i was losing my faith i read the god delusion and richard dawkins had this challenge pray to a milk jug for three weeks and so i prayed for a raise at work to two percent milk in my fridge and i got it and at that point theologically intercessory prayer died for me here's where i'm at now i've set up the tension how do i resolve it i'm no longer the guy that has to know everything i'm no longer the guy that has to have it figured out i'm the guy who loves the journey to know more and i never stop trying to learn but i'm okay if somehow different parts of my brain hold different ideas and they don't perfectly mash up and here's why what if god is just an emanating force and i pray intercessory prayers well number one we understand that language in the human brain has incredible power and i don't mean this in a wishy-washy like you know name it and claim it the universe will give you what you want here's the secret way i mean literally the things you think about shape your actions and so if you pray for someone every day because you love them and they have life circumstances are difficult guess what your subconscious brain is doing all the time working on solutions if you pray to god that you want things in life that you have goals guess what science tells you you're going to more effectively pursue those goals there is no scientific downside to intercessory prayer right so even if all you're doing is self neuro linguistically programming your gray matter it's a really effective way to do it but if my mom and my grandmother my pastor are right and in some way prayer really does tap into that same creative energy that made a singularity expand rapidly and create laws of physics and galaxies and planets and people well that's that's like icing on the cake isn't it so i don't ever question that god is real i just question like the fidelity of my understanding of who or what god may be and i just learned that that's fine that god doesn't need me to understand god right i just need god full stop [Music] [Applause] uh thanks for coming out um it was your your life story um april of 2014 that actually helped transform me back into the believer i am now um it felt like you were uh your story actually was actually my own as well except for you know my dad didn't cheap oh my mom um which is terrible i hate that for you um my question is i speaking of prayer uh in that same vein the bible speaks of speaking in other tongues this god language i wanted to know your opinions on that and what the neurological science is behind that because first corinthians says that basically you're speaking directly to god when you speak in tongues so just wanted to get your your opinions and and uh what the science is behind it man you like ask the perfect question because i've been waiting to do my tongues routine for months seriously i've researched this uh i have never spoken in tongues and as a southern baptist like southern baptists like believe in the supernatural and they're also very uncomfortable with it you know what i mean so somebody like gets a little too free in the spirit of southern baptist church it's like hold the phone is there interpreter that's not biblical right like just shut it down so it wasn't really i didn't start thinking about tongues a lot until i became friends with uh michael gunger he's a musician if you listen to literature's podcast we co-host together and he grew up like also conservative but conservative charismatic and like he literally can speak in tongues like actually speak in tongues and i'm like hey man that's super weird so i had to figure out like what's going on because people speak in tongues and they feel like like someone else is speaking through them and that's that's pretty weird so i understand from an evangelical context where like you feel like god is speaking to you in your mind in your native tongue and i've seen the research that explains that but that's not what you asked so i won't go there instead i will tell you that most prayer in most faith traditions looks very similar in the brain the same parts of the brain are lit up whether it's a buddhist monk or a catholic gun or a baptist preacher the brain scans are remarkably similar the big difference is western religion tends to involve the left temporal lobe where language happens eastern religion tends to involve the visual cortex where visualization happens but otherwise god in those brains is very similar that's not true for speaking in tongues or charismatics their prayer they're speaking in tongues is the most neurologically distinct form of prayer or worship we have yet encountered in science and here's why most prayer involves the outermost regions of the brain the prefrontal cortex the anterior cingulate cortex was a little deeper in the brain but still in a pretty nice neighborhood and uh that's a brain joke i really i was into it and uh you know the the parietal lobe and then left temporal lobe or visual cortex and all that stuff's off when you speak in tongues so like the part of your brain that you associate with being conscious and aware and in control just kind of takes a nap when people speak in tongues and instead the limbic system the most ancient most visceral powerful part of the brain literally takes control over the left temporal lobe and goes make sounds but the limbic system can't it can't form symbolic language like the prefrontal cortex to feed to the left temporal lobes the temporal lobe goes all right well i know these word sounds is that cool and what makes this whatever man this is exciting and then it's like i can't do it i can't even emulate speaking in tongues but this something that sounds like a language that's not a known language emerges and that language is the language of the most ancient part of the human brain and so in a very real way it feels like something other than you is talking because it's not the you you associate with listening to me right now it's a part of your brain that's not actively involved in your conscious experience unless you're very afraid very angry or very excited so that's why it's such an amazing and moving experience now does that mean it's the voice of god does that mean i don't know is that like is consciousness literally just a thing that emerges like software from the fabric of our brains or as some people believe our brains kind of like very elaborate antennas that tune into the spirit world or some quantum reality beats the heck out of me either way what i know about speaking in tongues is cool enough that i wish that i could do it too [Music] hey i'm matt and i'm a worship leader uh and i'm wondering other than the fact that people tend to enjoy music what are some benefits of communal worship for the people involved fantastic question that is the first question that uh rob bell asked me the night i met michael gunger believe it or not as a way to like uh let michael know i wasn't some idiot fraud which i kind of am but i fooled michael so basically music is incredible neurologically like music engages more of your brain than almost anything you can do uh your brain has to create a neurological symphony in order for you to experience an auditory symphony right the association cortices of your brain the thalamus the not only does your left temporal lobe have to engage to analyze the pitch and timbre of music and the rhythm but the right lobe has to engage in order to engage the lyrical content that all has to route through the thalamus go to the prefrontal cortex for you to make sense of it and analyze it and yet at the same time you are stirred emotionally it's one of the few circumstances where we have pretty significant activity in both the limbic system and the prefrontal cortex i mean it's beautiful and that's just alone with some earbuds or a really nice stereo something different happens when you bring in social identity as human beings we have an incredible amount of neurological real estate devoted to understanding how other people are thinking and feeling especially about us and yet in narrative situations when you're hearing a story or music situations when you're enjoying perform music you don't actually think about yourself very much it's one of the most neurologically pure social experiences you can have because you're not fixated on self this effect is so powerful that research has shown that bands or choirs or other groups that are either very professional and play a lot or just have played a lot together as they perform music they enter a rate of cardio synchronization their heartbeats actually start to line up together like it is the most transcendent experience you can have and so there's this bit we do i shouldn't call it a bit there's this thing we do in liturgist events where i come out and i explain that and then we play a heartbeat and we ask a group of people who think there's something special about a guy named jesus if we all worship together in this room could the heart of the resurrected body of christ be as one right now and that's got actual scientific basis it's crazy so i've it's brought this whole new thing in me because i got really cynical about worship music and thought it was manipulative and exploitive while i was a southern baptist atheist so that was kind of conflicted like i don't believe in god but i play in the worship band i remember we would just sing this stuff and i'd be like i am literally indoctrinating people right now and this is sick but i'm also pretty good at the bass guitar and this is fun and i'm not even kidding i actually really like the way i played this guitar but uh but at the same time as i like returned to faith i had this whole new appreciation through science that there may be no moment when we are more an eye and a toe and a mouth and a body together than when we worship together in song it's really beautiful [Music] [Applause] so i'm a theist i'm not a christian but i want to believe in god and i have had a personal experience with god uh my atheist friends when i try to explain to them they say that's just god of the gaps or your brain was doing some weird thing as someone that uh you claim to be a man of science and so i'm assuming that your beliefs will change based on evidence that you evaluate and gather are there things that you're afraid to learn or things that would be scary for you fantastic question um i love that you you just thought after you claimed to be a man of science that's scientific like skeptical about a claim of science that's science like rock on man um yeah i follow evidence where it goes which will really surprise you when i say there's absolutely nothing i'm afraid to learn because i don't have like a set of rigid propositions by which i am a christian right like there's no like essential creed for my faith um have you ever heard of my faith axioms you ever hear that okay so it's a thing i wrote a series on doubt for people like me who are kind of incredulous about this whole thing but also kind of into this whole thing and basically it's a set of science-based propositions that justify christian faith and practice irrespective of the truth claims okay so for example when i described god in these axioms i would say god is at least the set of natural forces that created and sustained the universe as experienced via a psychosocial construct rooted in human brains rolls right off the tongue at least meaning my idea my definition is incomplete which is okay in science our definition of gravity is pretty incomplete right if we like the standard model works really well except it ignores gravity and yet we know gravity not only exists but exists on a quantum level because photons are quantum objects who are heavily affected by what gravity so we already have an at least definition for gravity so if it's good enough for gravity it's good enough for god so this is like the floor like i would accept evidence that disproved that there are a set of forces that create and sustain the universe but like like the higgs boson makes me pretty confident that's a claim i can defend and i would accept information that said that there is no way of understanding the universe in human brains it incorporates god but i feel pretty confident that people believe in god you see what i mean my idea of god is already wide open and so then the second part of this action is to say even if i see even if that's a comprehensive definition of god belief in god can still promote lower stress healthy brain tissue greater social cohesion and increased social action toward good in other words even if there's nothing more to god than physics and a shared mental experience that's enough to make christian faith worth it or at least faith in general so i have axioms that go through kind of all the things that the christian experience meaning when i have a dark night of the soul i can at least go to the axiom and go i'm not wasting my time right i believe there was an actual guy named jesus who walked the earth and i also understand that that is an academic consensus that the the mythicists about christ are a minority position they may amass more data and become more popular in the future and as that happens believe me i'm listening closely but there's no significant academic controversy that jesus was a person in fact richard dawkins caught quite a bit of heat from secular historians for asserting that there's no jesus that's a myth it's all made up and you know like we have more textual historical information to support that jesus is a actual person than alexander the great and nobody is like alexander the great was a myth so the real like point of controversy is was this guy god did he like get crucified put in a grave and was he resurrected and that's a big hinge point in the faith like paul says if that didn't happen this is all folly we're wasting our time i accept that the resurrection happened i don't actually accept it fully scientifically i have these moments in my life that make me understand that resurrection is a pattern of this universe that we in this room are nothing but resurrected stars a star a son in fact with a you had to die for us to live in fact the sun has to die right now for us to live the sun is falling into chaos and the process flooding this planet with electromagnetic radiation that we steal from other plants and animals literally life must die for us to live and so then i think about an older christian idea of jesus jesus christ that's not just like a catchy last name the christ was this idea in christian theology that in god there is a unifying and reconciling force an aspect to god that draws us towards the divine and it does this through rebirth and resurrection and i would argue that today the church might be in a minor state of idolatry over jesus because we ignore the christ and that jesus is the physical embodiment of the christ and to focus only on the christ or only on jesus is to miss the whole point of this story and so if i learned one day that the man was a myth i still experience the christ you see what i mean so there's very little i'm afraid of i want to be very clear i absolutely accept a bodily resurrection of christ as a matter of faith but i also totally understand why atheists go are you kidding me dead people don't wake up and i just go dead matter does we are here um hi my name's alyssa i'm from i live in denton and um i'm a big fan of your show and the liturgists and i appreciate what you do um so my question is about the church so it's about um specifically the way the church deals with mental illness so in my experience i have a lot of mental illness in my family and i came from a church that is a mental illness denying church that says it is all a spiritual thing and it's all demons that are trying to attack you and that if you just spray away the demons then you will be better and so we get things like exorcisms and really nasty stuff like that and so my question is how do you deal with a church that does not believe and illness is a real thing and how do you like how do you talk through that you know like how do you process that and how do you talk to a church that doesn't believe that the person you love who's dealing with an illness is really ill and that's my question okay fantastic question i'll first start with disclosure i don't get invited to a lot of churches where they don't believe in mental illness and they do believe in demons and exorcism those guys tend to give me a one star rating on itunes that's a joke i actually don't have any one star writings on itunes i will after i said that but at the time this was recorded i had no one-star ratings on itunes but they do send me nasty emails um i got boy i got a humdinger today it's like you know like the like the 25 page email of like i need to explain in detail why you are going to hell so this is the real thing it's a noble impulse so the whole demonology thing and the possession thing rolled the clock back a few centuries and we don't really understand what's happening here in fact we think consciousness comes primarily from the pump in the center of our chest and the guts lower why because when we feel things that's where we feel them you ever feel an emotion right here other than like really confused when you listen to my show other than that everything's much more visceral in fact we have more neurons in our gi tract than any other part of our bodies except for our brains i don't know if you knew that it's pretty amazing some really cool research related to depression and the gi tract for example but when you don't understand that schizophrenia and you don't understand the neurological mechanisms what else could it be besides supernatural agents acting in your person and then you have these rituals these elaborate rituals like exorcisms which can bring a state of focus and exhaustion into a human brain and actually relieve these symptoms for a while and so you get this like actually pre-scientific idea when we make an observation we did this thing we took 12 hours we exercised these demons and the person was better for six to eight hours but like if you're like the traveling exorcist they're just better and you go to the next town and then because people experience social pressure like i'm better remember we reject information that subverts our identity so maybe when the schizophrenia returns in small measures they're able to suppress it more because they believe they are healed this is what we talk about when we talk about the power of positive thinking so i start by as always offering some grace to the position and then i follow that up with a question that's sincere but occasionally kind of jerky how's that working for you oh you've had 41 exorcisms on this person so that demon's really in there huh like the matchless name of jesus christ is meeting its match like what's happening here what if we keep trying the exorcisms and we just try a therapist as well like i'm not even going to go into there's no such thing as demons but maybe maybe for some reason this person wants to hold on to the demon and so maybe with some therapy they could really let go do you see what i mean or maybe maybe let's say okay so cancer seems to get better when we use chemotherapy drugs maybe there's a maybe there's a neurological predisposition that makes demon possession easier that we could treat with drugs like i don't i'm such a pragmatist i don't feel like i have to correct everybody on everything if we can make an inch of progress towards making things meaningfully better see what i mean so i don't have to like convince them demons don't exist all i have to convince them of is we could do maybe something else that might also help this person because some of the most hurtful and harmful things that fill up my email box are people who have genuine mental illness and the hurt they have received by every and i mean every christian denomination it's not just the hardcore conservatives my beloved united methodists can say some pretty messed up things about mental illness and this is not unique even to religion we have a stigma against mental illness in society we have a mass shooting and we say that person was ill they're mentally ill there's something wrong in their head and when we understand statistically is it is far more likely for someone who's mentally ill to be a victim of violence than a perpetrator it's not even close right the crazy homeless guy walking down the street he's going to hurt himself or get mugged he's not going to go after your wallet so education is powerful you know some people because of their epistemology because of their social identity won't accept statistics as a point of persuasion there's not a lot i can do but the people who will listen i make a case based on data that the approach to mental illness is not correction it's not punitive it's not persecuting that they don't have enough faith but to offer them not only grace but more grace than our more mainline neurologically functioning brothers and sisters [Music] [Applause] hi my name is thomas i was reading er recently about the quantum zeno effect uh how particles behave differently when we observe them okay and i was wondering if you could explain to that maybe what that means for like the human experience yeah it's a great question um that i'm actually shocked i haven't been asked in the history of the show so there's this thing you hear all the time that consciousness does something to the universe guys quantum physics tells us that quantum effects only happen with an observer and that's true but oversimplified okay and here here's here's explain so this is basically some kind of wave slit experiment is one way you do this you take a box and some film and you let a photon into that box one photon it's pretty tough to do but but we got some pretty good engineers out there so you let one photon into the box and without an observer one photon will travel every possible point it could from the entry point in the box and put a line on a piece of film a line like a wave would if you have an observer of that one photon then this photon picks one path instead of going every point it could in a wave it takes one path and it puts a dot on the film now the head trip here is if you take a photon that was emitted by some star millions of light years away and you capture that photon without observing it and you let it into the box it does the same thing and as stephen hawking says that means by observing you get a photon to make a decision billions of years ago right or millions excuse me it's hard to get light from billions of years redshift is a thing but millions of years away comes and makes a dot or a wave what that's weird god is real like that's kind of how the internet discussion happens checkmate atheists right here's the here's the uh scientific rock in that shoe of belief how does an observer observe with a particle interaction right so everything that happens between atoms and physics involves the exchange of particles for example the reason you can see oh that this is blue and this is green is because we heat up with electricity a filament and a light bulb and then that makes the atoms jiggle more and they have hot body radiation hot body radiation they um you can't see on the show i made a sexy dance for everybody for those of you listening just imagine it so you have a photon that emits from hot body radiation right it jumps out of the atom because an electron moves to a higher level and then collapses down and it emits a photon and that photon through light speed comes to the air and it strikes an atom in this cup and depending on the structure of that atom it makes an electron the atom absorbs that energy an electron jumps out into a higher electron shell and then falls back down and the difference between where it is and where it went is emitted as a photon of this wavelength green or blue it's a particle exchange so the only way you can observe anything is to send a particle so when you have an observer something sends a quantum object that hits that photon and causes its wave function to collapse from a probabilistic event to a specific event it literally goes from being a wave to being a point a particle so that's how observation works so your observer doesn't actually have to be conscious your observer can simply be a machine that makes an observation an instrument right so it kind of throws a wrench and the universe needs consciousness to exist which i got really excited about for a while and then i kept studying physics to your point it's nothing i'm afraid to learn i just integrate new findings into my world view yeah so it's all wave particle duality minute physics is a great thing on it the whole idea of like the uncertainty principle heisenberg's uncertainty principle you can't know both uh a particle's position and its velocity the more you know about one the less you know about the other and it's literally because you imagine like a water molecule in an actual wave so you either know the position of one particle and where it is exactly but that doesn't tell you anything about a wave because the wave has what a trough and a crest and it's hard to know exactly what a wave is so the more you look out the less you're looking at one water molecule you're looking at a wave instead that's wave particle duality just that fast man great physics questions tonight [Music] hi my name is tanner from fort worth so uh my question is with different religions um how i guess with your axiom of of what god may be he's at least this thing is there really any difference in your mind between the way that different beliefs approach god the way that buddhists approach kind of existence or spirituality the way that christians approach that the way that that really any any person does and i guess kind of the second part of that is does it really matter from a moral standpoint you know from traditional standpoints we say well we have to meet these moral principles somehow but then god came and and saved us from our faults but ultimately if um if that doesn't matter if god is it's kind of kind of a universalist question you know how would you approach like a traditional view versus a universal view all right so let me repeat the question make sure i got it are all religions the same and what does that mean for how men are saved kinda or if or if if there is any saving to do yeah so that kind of gets into soteriology or sodorology i've only read it i can't pronounce it um like i've mentioned it on one show someone asked about it i literally went to youtube and listened to a clip of someone saying it over and over and over to make sure i pronounce it right but it's the problem i have a learning disability specifically related to recalling the way things are pronounced or spoken so the more i listen the more i question what the right pronunciation is and that's why i say things like arab on the show so it's terrible it's arab it's arab it's arab and if i don't think i say arab every time god so sorry to my arab listeners like now you understand i'm not actually insensitive i'm just stupid so there's this thing there's absolutely theological differences between religions not all religions are the same not all sects within religions are the same not all views of salvation in christianity are the same my evangelical brothers and sisters want to know if you had a moment in which you believed and professed and said a sinner's prayer and one of my main line friends said to me once show me the sinner's prayer in the new testament i went what what we're the people of the book you don't think we thought of that i mean it's in our name we're baptist right the reason we immerse is because the word in greek means to immerse the sinner's prayer is in there somewhere i'll get back with you and like i couldn't find it right there were these moments where there was a call to action to be born again but like there never was like the the admit believe confess i learned in vacation bible school and then you go to like a wesley in a more mainline view of salvation where it's this journey of followership with christ where you have this continual sanctification and this ongoing salvation and then baptists go but you use eternal security to believe or you can't gain and lose salvation and the orthodox go you westerners messed up the whole thing like that's why we excommunicated the catholics to begin with and the catholics go hold on we excommunicated you it was called the great schism how do you know who to believe about salvation and what salvation means and what heaven means and i have no idea i have no idea like the more i study the history of the church and where these beliefs came from and where they emerge like i know the ones that came earlier like if you want you can get a historical record of a claim then the greek orthodox have like a pretty good thing like they have earlier writings of what it meant to be saved than anybody else and they say that to be saved is a call to being healed in god that the world is somehow sick and god heals it that's their sodorology that there is inevitable drawing from god to us that pulls us towards this healing and reconciling i think that's beautiful but if you take these salvation ideas and you like pull out the clipboard and the oscilloscope and you try to measure them there's no fact claim like there's no ability to reconcile salvation claims with science because you can't prove people get saved in the first place so when i look at salvation i have one of those axioms for it right and it's really stripped down and it's really basic basic it's essentially that there's a tension between the social parts of the human brain and the primitive parts of the human brain the social parts the newer parts of our brains want us to get along and to co-exist and the inner brain wants to look out for this organism above all and there you get what we call a sin nature and to be saved is to be delivered from this conflict i happen to believe that the story of jesus is a fantastic way to instruct people on how to resolve this conflict but when i lean into my faith my experiences with god here's what i know i have legitimately tried to be a buddhist i have legitimately tried to be a muslim i've legitimately tried to be hindi i i i window shopped but as i became an atheist like and for me it's the jesus story is that social conditioning yeah but it probably is i don't know but god responds to me through christ and the story of christ when i look at scientific studies a focus on others and a sacrifice of needs of self are neurologically demonstrated to help resolve this tension so science says it's okay it's not it's not destructive and after that i just kind of do the thing i always do which is allow the parts of my brain that so believe this rabbi was the son of god that i just try to follow after him i literally just try to walk like he walked and talk to people like he talked to people and just do the full-on student of a rabbi thing and i just try to be like jesus and i've stopped trying to treat salvation and theology and christ and the holy spirit the trinity and god as this rubik's cube where i'm trying to get green on all one side and instead try to let my life be the evidence that resurrection is a thing okay so that does it for this week's ask science mic i think it's probably the longest episode ever so if you've had to listen on multiple commutes in your car i'm sorry but i'm gonna be honest i've had a good time in texas thanks everybody and we'll see you next [Music] week