ASM033 Blood Moons, Handedness, and Disproving God

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blood moons handedness and disproving god all that and more on this week's episode of ask science mike

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welcome to ask science mike the weekly podcast where i answer your questions about science faith and life listen if you are thinking about joining me in new york city at warfront church uh don't let you know there's only a handful of tickets left so don't wait it's almost sold out i've also got a really big event coming up in tallahassee at good samaritan church my home church i'd love to see you at but for now let's get it started hi mike my name is karen and i am from the republic of panama and my question is this what is the science behind being left-handed in history left-handed people were feared and even considered evil we have examples of people like genghis khan and attila hun and jack the ripper but we also have examples of world leaders like julius caesar joan of arc napoleon and four of the last seven presidents in the united states have been left-handed to name a few there's a lot of other world leaders outside of the united states that are left-handed so my question is are left-handed people more prone to be leaders or do they become leaders because they have to overcome the struggle of living in a right-handed world do we know if jesus was left-handed i appreciate you looking into that thanks and keep up the good work oh man that was awesome i'll start with the last question first i i couldn't find any uh any reference to jesus's handedness that's amazing that's oh man i love it okay so let's talk about the weird and fairly mysterious science behind handedness and to do so let's first talk about something really basic in human anatomy humans are a type of animal which have bilateral symmetry we have two mirrored halves left and right now other animals may not have bilateral symmetry dogs and cats do for example starfish don't starfish have radial symmetry worms would also be an animal that has can have a radial symmetry but humans are bilateral we have two mirrored halves but that symmetry isn't perfect by any means your heart isn't exactly halfway across your chest it's toward the left side of your chest and the two halves of your heart aren't equal in size or function your stomach is tilted on its axis so that's why lying on your left side can help relieve heartburn and even your brain isn't perfectly symmetrical the functions of the brain aren't mirrored exactly left and right the easiest example would be your temporal lobes typically the left temporal lobe is responsible for language while typically the right temporal lobe is more associated with rhythm and pitch and other musical phenomenon associated with sound so but i say typically for a reason because sometimes people's language is associated with their right temporal lobe and their uh pitch and rhythm is associated with their left so their brains end up being backwards compared to most people really interesting and that will relate to our discussion of handedness now there are some genetic conditions that can flip the symmetry of the organs so for example someone's heart is on the right side of their body or their their stomach is tilted in the opposite direction from normal and that's caused by genetic markers also interesting in a discussion of handedness the way the bilateral symmetry is flipped is split the wrong way compared to a baseline in the human population now humans are not the only animals that have this kind of asymmetric bilateral symmetry polar bears in chimpanzees for example both show handedness but interestingly enough those species show about 50 50 distribution between right and left side dominance in their handedness although i suppose polar bears don't really have hands uh technically speaking but human populations are closer to 90 10 with right hand dominance being that 90 percentile so we have this dramatic departure from other asymmetric bilaterally symmetric organisms i really like that sentence i enjoyed it creating it a lot so now one study has shown that there is one genetic predictor or genetic correlation with being left-handed and that's that basically so that the amount of mutation the amount of difference between the two copies of the pcsk6 gene showed a positive correlation with being left-handed now of course correlation does not equal causation uh it was merely something that was interesting and it's interesting because that is a gene that is in fact related to body symmetry now alone it is not sufficient to predict handedness and genetic scientists theorize that it's likely that handedness emerges from many more genes working in concert with similar types of mutation disparity the problem is in order to get the kind of statistical data we need to make those findings and data we would need studies not with hundreds or thousands but hundreds of thousands of participants and uh it's tough to get funding for handedness on that scale so it may be some time until we have a definitive answer in our genetic research on handedness i think a more interesting question than the absolute genes behind handedness and again scientists generally believe now that it is related to genes is why do we have this split that differs from other species this 90 10 right hand preference in our species of course our motor cortex is cross wired your left motor cortex is generally responsible for the functions on the right side of your body and vice versa some scientists think that the development of language in the left temporal lobe created this normative pressure for human dna to produce left dominant brains and that's why there are so many right-handed people thought that was interesting it could be linked to language one researcher even thought and had some findings that said that uh an inversion in your language center um having your language emerge from your right temporal lobe was a predictor for being left-handed further studies haven't necessarily borne that out here's what we do know 10 to 12 percent of us are left-handed and two-thirds of left-handed people today around the world face discrimination today 2015 two-thirds of people who are left-handed face severe discrimination especially in china and muslim cultures where there's a particularly hard bias or cultural normative pressure against left-handedness for example china will report that only one percent of its students are left handed in many languages including modern western cultures the word left has a derogative connection in its etymology the origin of that word had to do something with uh clumsy or obscene or or something else but as you mentioned your question there are some really exceptional left-handed people in the science world both carl sagan and albert einstein were left-handed i suspect that the link between presidents and prominent scientists being disproportionately represented by left-handed people is probably a result of the struggle with adversity because in trials right and left-handed people don't necessarily show um significant differences in cognitive ability or temperament or any any markers although in some cultures left-handedness is a predictor for a shorter life that said knowing that left-handed people face frankly greater adversity than the rest of us every time they try to use scissors or a spiral notebook in our culture or in other cultures where they're actively pressured out of their natural bias towards how they use their hands we may have unclear science but we know we need to hug our southpaw friends and validate who they are and how they were made uh it's really interesting to me that you know handedness is frankly a controversial thing around the world and not too long ago was controversial in american culture we tried to normalize left-handed people by forcing them to write with their right hands and to orient their papers and all those sorts of things in primary education the way right-handed children did and that is rough so today do yourself a favor and hug a lefty about a week ago i had a chance to head down to orlando and be a part of the relevant podcast 10th anniversary live event it was a ton of fun and while i was there i got to meet the famous eddie from the relevant podcast and he actually submitted a question for the show via twitter the ultra rare hashtag ask sciencemic question and here we go is there any scientific discovery or revelation that could disprove god's existence now eddie is a typically a pretty fun guy on the show but he definitely threw down a hardcore question for his first question on science mike so uh eddie i'm going to give it my best shot so to talk about what science proves or disproves let's first talk about what science is and how it works because there is considerable confusion about the mechanisms and claims of science in popular culture and that confusion is probably slightly amplified in christian culture so science is built upon a philosophy called empiricism and empiricism boiled down says one thing you should place confidence in a belief that is proportional to the evidence you have supporting that belief in jerry maguire language show me the data we believe things we have evidence to support that's how empiricism works empiricism therefore minimizes other ways of knowing like revelation or personal experience science wants your data science wants your measurement in order to be confident in a belief now because of that science doesn't actually prove or disprove anything absolutely all scientific knowledge is provisional and dependent on the quality of the data and because we know through data that human beings are not perfect data collection or analyzing machines we understand that any and all knowledge could be undermined by future data even our most cherished assumptions even our best theories could ultimately be shown incomplete for example newtonian physics which we still use to make bridges do most of the engineering work in the world is not a complete description of motion or gravity relativity einstein relativity which we need in order to make gps satellites is a more complete picture but we know even that is incomplete now the process that we get this knowledge from is called methodological physicalism which is a really fancy word for a simple process one you have a hypothesis or an idea that you want to test and then you use observation and experiment to gain or lose confidence in your hypothesis that means your hypothesis has to make some kind of testable prediction in order to be a scientific idea you see many ideas are not falsifiable science can't disprove that i can fly for example it can only prove or give confidence in the claim that i am not presently flying and have never shown any capacity to fly and that no human being in history has ever been recorded flying without some kind of mechanical aid so therefore a scientific idea about my claim to fly is that there is no evidence to support that conclusion that's why science uses something called the null hypothesis which is a statistical model of basis to falsify claims the null hypothesis starts by assuming i can't fly and it must be proven that i can now science is all about uncovering facts about the natural world and because of this there's actually several things that science can't do number one science can't make aesthetic or subjective claims science can't tell you what's beautiful science can't tell you what tastes good science can tell you what percentage of people report something tasting good but it can't make an aesthetic judgment science also can't make moral judgments there's no way to derive a moral ethic from science science can't make claims about supernatural phenomenon because science only measures what happens in the natural world science doesn't tell you what to do with scientific knowledge it's not a moral system so science can tell you how to split the atom but it won't tell you if you should make nuclear power or an atom bomb with that capacity methodological physicalism empiricism science all they do is give us facts about the physical world now these limitations aren't the default victories that many believers and apologists make them out to be for example science doesn't speak to the supernatural because there are no reliable scientific accounts of the supernatural interacting with physical reality ever in human history there are no accounts of ghosts or resurrections or gods in human history that are measured with scientific confidence which is why skeptics tend to reject supernatural claims so god exists is a claim for example an atheist and naturalist would say that it's a claim that lacks the evidence to support it that's not that science can disprove god or that it's its job what they would claim is that it's believers who can't prove god we have a fundamental difference here between presuppositionalists who say god is self-evident and empiricist through the null hypothesis who say nothing is self-evidence all beliefs require evidence in order to be valid now people like me say which god which god doesn't exist because humanity has defined god in countless ways even christianity produces competing claims about god if we just restrict ourselves to western protestantism then you have this ongoing debate about calvinism and how many points of calvinism versus armenianism there are the differing ideas about god's character god's nature and the way god interacts with the world even in the christian faith so no science can't disprove god but science can tell us some claims about god are more or less likely based on observation and experiment but it doesn't tell us what to do with that knowledge and here's the point in which faith becomes so valuable faith helps us assign moral judgment and personal meaning and societal meaning to the facts and the information we learn from science faith can help us decide it is much better to split the atom to make electricity and power a well than it is to make a bomb to end human life that's the power of faith in my opinion the power of believing in god hi mike eric anderson from minneapolis here so one of the things i've appreciated most about your work is how you're able to communicate in a clear open and non-judgmental fashion even in situations where there is disagreement my question is regarding a specific situation and how i might learn to better communicate and question like you do so i recently stumbled upon the twitter account of one of my friends at church i previously knew that his theological beliefs were a fair amount more conservative than mine but we'd never gotten into details or meaningful conversation about it i started browsing his twitter history and was shocked and saddened by what i saw let me outline a few of the points so he's a young earth creationist completely denies the theory of evolution and he also denies the existence of any scientific evidence that in any way gives credence to the theory of evolution in fact he says that people who hold to the theory are beholden to atheist religious dogma he thinks that all scientists are corrupt and are merely just there patting each other's backs he believes that it's impossible to be a christian if you don't believe in the young earth and all of this is also accompanied by the typical litany of inflammatory tweets about the government taxation the president liberals and planned parenthood ninety percent of this person's tweets are him retweeting various other people that hold similar views and anytime somebody tries to engage in an honest conversation they're shut down it's clear that there's zero room for negotiation or real conversation the activity i see as negative closed-minded judgmental and intentionally inflammatory so my question is not how can i refute his claims about creation evolution etc rather my question is this how can i engage this person in conversation about these things i know i have zero chance of convincing him to change his mind and honestly that's not my goal my hope is to be able to somehow help him understand that one there are many scientists and evolutionists uh in our church and even on the church staff and if given the chance how would he address his concerns to these people would he speak to them the same way he speaks about scientists in his twitter posts and two we're called to extend grace to those around us and not to judge and disrespect them on topics that are very much separated from christian dogma it's a really tough situation and one that i need to wade into with much prayer for thought grace and humility so thank you for any guidance you're able to give i think it's really admirable that you don't want to change his views on something but what if you went further what if you didn't even try to engage him in a conversation that opened him to other perspectives what if that's not your job what if it's never your job to control other people or modify their beliefs i'm not saying that in some absolute sense let's just do a thought experiment what if we all lived our lives in a way where we executed our responsibility for the way we think about things and the way we act in the world above all else that thought experiment led me to change the way i lived i used to be a conservative evangelical christian and through that i held other people accountable to scripture i advocated for moral behaviors for people who were christians even people who weren't christians and i spent a lot of energy trying to control and change others so that they would adhere to what i understood as the will of god and i'm at a point in my life now where i've realized i could be wrong about absolutely anything not only that a lot of people it's counterproductive to try to move them from where they are you see you can't lead people where they don't want to go that's a quote i've stolen from my friend rob bell but it's like just such a freeing understanding of how people operate you can't lead people where they don't want to go you see today i don't spend any energy trying to convince people to believe what i believe or to change their beliefs at all none and you say well mike you host a podcast where you explain what you believe about things absolutely i answer questions from people that ask me i don't really insert myself into conversations where i'm not invited now i stand for the oppressed you know i'm active in a dialogue about uh you know white supremacy in america and the way people of color are treated i frequently speak on topics related to lgbtq equality i always speak for those whose voice are crushed in the weight of modern society but i don't try to change people's beliefs if they're not ready to talk my energy is focused completely on helping people and learning all i can about life and about our universe and here's why what would this man say if he emailed me after reading your twitter feed he would probably say here's a person who believes that people can believe in an old earth and believe in evolution and go to heaven and because of that people are going to hell he would find your beliefs what dangerous and misguided we already know what it looks like when people try to make opposing arguments and dismiss each other's viewpoints it happens all the time we call it the internet have you ever read youtube comments oh it's terrible i don't play that game what i have found is it's best to follow the work that only you can do to heal the world to stand up for the oppressed and to be a good neighbor do what you can to walk after jesus and be like him and what i've found oddly enough is when you do this other people start to walk along with you so sometimes yes jesus walked into the temple uninvited and flipped tables we also call him the son of god so i'm really cautious about when i flip tables the rest of the time i try to live like jesus did and engage people in conversation and healthy relationships that of their own choice and own volition enter into my life i am not the savior of the world and i will never be the savior of the world i am a christian because i believe that job is already taken [Music] our last question this week came from the email box and it reads hey science mike thanks so much for your show i have a question regarding blood moons i grew up in a very conservative evangelical culture where the end times was heavily discussed within my church pastors that i regularly listen to constantly assert that we are living in the end times and that the blood moons are an absolute symbol of this this topic has always provoked such great anxiety in my life but i'm beginning to realize that this fear is not of god what does science say about blood moons is this phenomenon something christians should be conscious of i have great news you have nothing to worry about or be anxious about when it comes to blood moons and here's why i'm sure you've noticed that at the end of the day the sun sets and when the sun sets it goes from its yellow white hue during the day to a brilliant red and the sky goes from a sky blue to shades of gold and purple and deep red as the sun falls lower and lower onto the horizon why do you think that happens because our atmosphere is composed in such a way that it scatters blue light our sky is not blue but we see the blue light being scattered by the atmosphere that's why the sky appears blue to us and because of that any object that's beyond our atmosphere and is near the horizon the light that comes from it passes through more atmosphere than something directly overhead right because you're on the surface of a sphere and near that sphere there's more air between you and whatever you're looking at and that means more blue light gets scattered away that's why sunsets are red now blood moons are times when from local position the moon of full moon is very near the horizon and that means more blue light gets scattered and what the moonlight appears more red than normal now interestingly enough this is a local phenomenon on the same night you have a blood moon on one part of the earth's surface you have a normal moon somewhere else because it's not close to the horizon from that vantage point so blood moons aren't some global phenomenon the moon's not actually turning red all that's happening is like the sun the moon the full moon is getting near the horizon and because this is an astronomical phenomenon they're incredibly predictable we know when blood moons are coming because we understand the relative position of the moon's orbit to the earth's surface and where a blood moon will appear from different points on the surface of the earth blood moons are completely predictable completely normal astronomical phenomenon but they are really fun to watch so i think christians should be conscious of blood moons because it's a beautiful show in the sky and part of this beautiful creation that we've been gifted they are not a sign that the end is near but they are a sign that it could be a fun time to go out and look at the night sky [Music] another week and another episode of ask science mike is in the books i want to thank you all for listening i have been really shocked by the recent increase and growth rate of a show that was already growing really quickly i i actually had a moment where i i don't know i felt had this overwhelming emotion when i looked at the numbers from episode 32's first day it was a new record for the show and really surprised me thanks for listening thanks for sharing thanks for rating on itunes doing all the things to make the show successful i want to see you in person like i mentioned at the top of the show i'll be in new york really soon just about a week and a half from when you hear this episode there are like a handful of tickets left for that event so when you're hearing this if you're thinking about seeing me in new york stop thinking about it take action go to ask sciencemike.com click on events and you'll find a link to where you can buy tickets while you're there you can see other events i've got coming up we're doing a peacemakers weekend at my church good samaritan in tallahassee i've gotten word already that friends from surrounding areas are going to travel in it's going to be a friday night saturday morning sunday morning thing completely free we're going to talk about the science of peacemaking where i have breakout sessions with a lot of my friends and and people who do interesting compelling work i'd love to see you there this would be a great opportunity if you've been thinking about coming to tallahassee to see my church some of you email me and say that you are so this would be a great week to do that also i'm going to be doing something with the sandbox cooperative in september that's an organization that puts on events not only in person but they're also streamed online so if you've never gotten to see me live you can see me live on the internet including the ability to ask questions live so there'll be a live q a and internet questions will come in with the liturgists we have an event called belong we're doing early in november all this stuff is at ask sciencemike.com on the events page so just go there you'll see it we've started uh episodes of the liturgist podcast again i was amazed at the the numbers there too it's quite a thing we've got going on talking about science faith and art and culture it's pretty amazing that what i would have considered not too long ago to be relatively fringe or controversial topics in america and certainly in christian america are a couple of the most popular podcasts on itunes and spirituality so thanks for that guys uh we need your questions for the show to keep going so you can use ask science mike on twitter soundcloud or youtube an overwhelming majority of people just go to ask sciencebike.com and submit a question that way and of course this show is listener supported and my full-time occupation for all of you who are helping me live my life by donating to the program i appreciate it and in deference to john oliver i am not a non-profit and you are not sending seed money if you send me a donation all you get is my gratitude and a podcast that keeps going now every single dollar helps there's people giving five dollars a month a dollar a month every single dollar helps me eat so thank you for that you can cancel or change a pledge at any time financial hardships hit i get it reduce your pledge or stop altogether there's absolutely no commitment of course ask science mike is still free and will always be free i'll never charge for the show the show is produced by greg nordin he actually does a lot of podcast producing so if you're interested in working with greg you can find a link to him on sciencemic.com and of course my boy jeff buffer wrote the theme song that people sing to me an airport it's a very interesting ritual that you guys have come up with to greet me practice me up every time so he wrote that song if you'd like catchy music people will sing to you in airports a link to jeb can be found on sciencemike.com guys thank you so much for listening thanks for having a conversation with me about why science and faith are not enemies every week and i can't wait to see you next week