ASM115 Exponential Grandparents, Evil, and the Spread of Christianity

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exponential grandparents evil and the

spread of christianity

all that and more on this week's episode

of ask science

[Music]

[Applause]

welcome to ask science mike the weekly podcast where i answer your questions about science faith and life i'm your host mike mccarg known all over the internet as science mike this week is kind of a weird show most of the questions are about my opinion on something instead of something grounded in scientific facts so we'll see if it's fun or not in a few moments as we get it started [Music] hey science mike my name is travis and i'm calling from austin texas first just wanted to say thanks for all you do your work with the liturgists this podcast and the other avenues uh just been a refreshing encouragement to me and i'm sure others like me so thanks as a preface to my question i've spent the majority of my life in the conservative christian bible belt mostly southern baptists growing up and in more recent years i've been immersed in the acts 29 sort of multi-site church culture i served a two-year term as a missionary in europe and worked at a christian non-profit organization for a while it's all i had ever known and i was heavily invested in it up until recently in the last year or two i've been in a state of serious faith deconstruction i'm trying to lean into it and be comfortable with where i'm at but that's been tough not to sound dramatic but in many ways it's been an ongoing existential crisis i'm the kind of person that sees and experiences most parts of life as interconnected and god faith and church community have been not only a foundational part of my identity but also an integral part of the lives of people around me and close to me friends family and co-workers so this process of deconstruction has thrown me into a state of internal philosophical chaos because i still don't know exactly what i believe and external social anxiety because my friends and family don't know where i'm at with these things and to an extent even my job hangs on my assumed identity as a christian so my question to you is to the best of your ability based on what you know about yourself if you had never had your experience that you've so often spoken about and written about in your book do you think you would still be an atheist today why or why not and secondly though i know there's not a one-size-fits-all answer or solution here and that everyone's experience is different is there any advice you would give to someone who's struggling to muddle through a state of deconstruction and desperately hoping to come into a place of confident contentment in regard to faith and worldview thanks again for your time i look forward to hearing your thoughts okay uh this is a question i've gotten a few times a few thousand times actually uh and i think it's even been on the show once or twice but not in quite this uh spin on it and i think it's been a while and since this comes up so often uh we should go ahead and answer this question not just because it won in the voting this week but because so many people ask it yeah would i be a christian if it weren't for that mystical experience i had in 2012 where i heard this audible voice speak to me in the context of the eucharist and i ascribed that voice to coming from christ and then i a few hours later had a very powerful mystical experience where i saw a bright light and then had some powerful feelings associated with this vision changed my life and i often get questions from people who are in some state of uh doubt or deconstruction that word people use a whole lot some way their faith is transitioning away from what it was and into something new and generally the person asking the question doesn't know what that new thing is yet the answer is i have no idea what i would believe if it weren't for that experience because i think what i identify as me emerges from some genetic propensities that are then molded and shaped by my environment and then on top of all that there comes this emergent property which is my will and my agency that exerts some influence over how this thing called me develops and grows but it's certainly not the exclusive or even primary factor in my thoughts feelings beliefs and actions okay so if i didn't have that mystical experience i'm not sure i would still be me i would be some very similar thing identical in dna similar in physique and uh life circumstances i'd still be an affluent westerner i'd still be considered white by my culture no those things would change but would i be a christian i have no idea because that mystical experience is what got me curious again i was settled on the issue of god before i had a mystical experience i was a comfortable confident atheist and the social stress i felt from atheism was subsiding i'd told a few people in my life that i didn't believe anymore that relationships weren't lost and these were some of the most important people in my life and once i knew that i wouldn't get divorced i wouldn't be um you know ostracized from my family because i didn't believe the social pressure really started to subside and i found that i was very happy not believing and then i saw that light and when i saw that light and i went back and started to examine theology and scripture and all the things we associate with the christian faith i frankly found them lacking just deeply deeply lacking and that's when i started to study science instead and search for the thing we all call god and uh if you follow the podcast you've heard me talk about this at length if you've read my book finding god in the waves you've heard me expound on this idea for 288 pages but there's this weird thing there's a lot of people who want to have some kind of faith they had it once and now their skepticism keeps them from it they don't want to abandon their intellectual credibility or perhaps can't abandon their reason capacity their their analytical capacity in order to just believe and they miss it and and they don't have a mystical experience to kind of kick-start this process of faith again well i understand doubt and deconstruction to be a neurological condition and not a spiritual one this when we have doubt when we don't believe in god when we feel distant from god these are things that happen in our brains and so i propose as a very pragmatic person if you want to feel close to god you should do the things that neuroscience suggests increase a human's propensity to have spiritual experiences to have religious beliefs now i can't help you with confidence i am not a confident believer but i am content i'm not very confident in any of my knowledge [Laughter] i've just been wrong too often i just enjoy learning too much to assume any of my answers are beyond being questioned i guess i'm confident in my unknowingness which by the way is the first trick i think you can have a much more contented spiritual life and frankly a much more contented life in general if you learn to let go of a need to be so certain about everything to master the world by making a great map of it in your mind that you call a world view i've learned to view my worldview and every worldview as primarily a survival adaptation for an organism living in a social context and not a means for discerning truth about objective reality that was quite a sentence i think i may have lost some people there every worldview has pros and cons and how it helps you survive in a social context and different advantages for helping you uncover facts about the world there are things in the human experience that spirituality excels at helping you find and discover and experience a sense of oneness with others a sense of connection with the origins of all a sense of meaning and purpose spirituality and religion excels at these things so if that's what you want you need to start by accepting some definition for god so maybe the god you believed in before kind of a personified figure in the sky or in another dimension or omnipresent and this one that made decisions and actions and wrote the bible and raised jesus from the dead maybe you can't you can't go there you can't get all that well okay what about einstein when einstein said the word god he was referring to the orderly way in which the universe operates well everyone believes in the the laws of physics everyone believes in einstein's god so can you accept that you believe in god can you say the phrase i believe in god by talking about einstein's god that's the reason i wrote an axiom by the way god is at least the set of forces that created and sustained the universe as experienced via a psychosocial construct rooted in human evolution and the evolved features of human brains also from the book you find some definition for god that you can accept because then you can say i believe in god and since your cognition since your consciousness is primarily linguistic in nature the words you use to describe things affect how your consciousness operates and what your beliefs are so if you can get to that state where you can say i believe in god that's going to help that's going to be step one then after you set that up then you start to pray to that god or meditate in the presence of that god or meditate you know where you go to that god's presence and as you do that you're going to help your brain foster this thing that brain scans show us is very much a field experience god not a not a noun not a construct a lived experience a lived feeling is god in our brains and prayer and meditation will help foster that and so will aligning yourself socially with people who believe in god but here's the tough thing it sounds like in your context many people aren't comfortable if you explore spirituality using different metaphors about god which is going to aggravate your skepticism and and foster cynicism it's important if you want to believe in god that you find people who can support you through an open and honest exploration of spirituality this is so core to my christian faith this is absolutely foundational to the way i understand christ as incarnated in jesus most christians today are obsessed with patrolling the borders of a worldview with making people feel like if they can't accept certain prepositions or tenets then they are not a part of the faith and this is nothing like we see illustrated in the gospels yes jesus had disciples and followers who were very close to him but there was a larger crowd that followed along as well and when you read the gospels the expectations jesus had for the crowd were very very low and frankly his disciples were a theological mess most of them weren't terribly well-educated jews and they missed what jesus was saying all the time but what mattered is that they followed that was the gospel was to follow jesus paul later came along and had much more emphasis on what you believe but christ himself simply said come follow me come follow me that was it so if you need einstein's god to make a movement towards god great if it's hindu theology if it's buddhist theology if it's a if it's a vague spiritualism i celebrate all movement towards love and peace in the lives of people because i believe that god celebrates it too that every movement towards god's peace is a movement that accepts an invitation extended by christ and so my friend your curiosity your desire both to deconstruct in search of truth and to try to foster some understanding of god for peace in your life i view both of those as an invitation from christ christ who is part of god so lower the stakes don't let the people around you freak you out and get you so upset the thing you knew doesn't work anymore for a reason you have grown and you are changing and so the old metaphor doesn't work for you anymore but guess what there is always another way to understand the world to understand the universe and to understand the source of all which we call god so start with a metaphor that you can believe and then foster a spiritual practice of meditation or prayer and then place yourself in a community that can support and affirm you as you do that and in time you will find that once again god grows a root in your brain becomes a part of your life and as that happens you may find that you become more comfortable with christian language and imagery and then perhaps like me you will reach a point where regularly in times of meditation and contemplation you encounter a risen christ who unselfconsciously you can commit to following [Music] our next question came in via email and it reads hi mike first off i absolutely love the show and what you're doing it is currently helping me a great deal in my faith journey and i truly appreciate the hard work you put into the podcast each week my question is would you be able to explain the science behind mitochondrial dna stemming from one woman aka the mitochondrial eve as i understand this is the genetic commonality all humans share and science points to it coming from an east african woman who lived approximately ninety nine thousand to two hundred thousand years ago i have heard of the mitochondrial eve from a few day creationists and wonder if you could break it down and explain how this fits in with evolutionary biology or just give us your thoughts on the science behind it all i hope this makes sense an answer on the show would be awesome but if not an email would be delightful as well thanks for all you do please keep up the hard work liam well liam i think you can tell that you're not getting an email but you are getting an answer on the show and as a brief aside folks i do get several hundred emails a month that say uh if you can't answer this on the show you know feel free to just send me an email and i can't do that if i answered all those emails there would be no podcast it would i would have time for nothing else because there's so many but always absolutely feel free to send your questions and for the show if you want a higher chance of making sure that you can ask a question make sure to catch me on ask science mike live because i try to answer absolutely as many questions at those events as you can now liam i love this question and let's kind of explore it because we tend to think of our family tree upside down because we think well there's me and then i get a mate or a partner and then we have children and those children have children we imagine this this branching tree of increasing descendants over time but that's not always true many couples don't have children at all or you might have children and a few generations out uh you know your great-grandchildren are a few in number and then your great-grandchildren are non-existent right so we'd always branch uh forward but we always branch back every human alive represents an unbroken line going back to a single common ancestor on earth in fact every living creature on this planet if you go far back has a common ancestor so that means you know a banana is a distant cousin of yours a banana a jellyfish the bacteria that caused your sinus infection it's all happening in one absolutely giant family but let's go back to mitochondrial eve so we don't we don't you know pop off people's skull caps today think about this way right you've got two biological parents now regardless of how your family arrangement is biologically you have uh two biological parents and then that means you have four biological grandparents and eight biological great grandparents you've got 16 great great grandparents 32 great great great grandparents 64 great great great great grandparents and every single grate doubles the number of ancestors direct ancestors that you have which means because this creates an exponential growth curve in powers of two if you go back far enough your ancestral family tree will eclipse the entire current human population to give you some idea if you tack 33 greats onto grandparent the you'll have 8.5 billion ancestors that is greater than the number of people on the earth today now of course 34 generations ago the human population was smaller so it's less than 34 generations maybe as little as uh you know 27 28 generations back and you have more ancestors than there were on people that there were people on the earth at that time which wait how is that possible that means there weren't enough grandparents to lead to you especially not if you go back 200 000 years or even just 99 000 years well [Music] with enough generational distance relative starts to mean less and less and that means uh ancestral branches often merge as you go farther back your your distant ancestors are related to one another more more directly that's just uh that's how it works with enough distance obviously that's not incest but it is it is distant cousins i mean technically every single couple if you go back far enough is a cousin somewhere somewhere back in time and so that's how how this happens but it means that as you go farther back in time the amount of of people who are related to you through uh chains of parental relationship increases dramatically and it doesn't mean it's one person so when we talk about uh a mitochondrial eve we're not talking about a single human female who was the mother of the entire human race we borrowed the term from the bible to honor this cultural significance but we are not talking about this one human female some people imagine like this one woman either in a biblical creation context or some people imagine that an evolution here you have this first female rising up from the missing link and now she with a human male spawns the entire species no no no no no mitochondrial eve is the matrilineal most recent common ancestor that's what it's called in genetic science the most recent female that all current humans share mitochondrial dna with now remember mitochondria are the little power factories in our cells they produce the cells energy and many biologists theorize that mitochondria were originally bacterium that were captured within a cell and then partnered with it and ultimately were integrated into a cell's function and so they have distinct dna from the dna and a cells nucleus and what's interesting about mitochondrial dna is it is almost never subject to the recombination that our normal dna goes through you get your mitochondrial dna from your mother and so mitochondrial eve is the most recent individual in the past that we can trace all living humans to it means it's possible to find older mitochondrial eaves but they aren't mitochondrial because they aren't the most recent that also means the current mitochondrial eve could be unseated if we found a later individual whose dna was common mitochondrial dna was common to all people alive so this mitochondrial eve lived in a population of similar organisms but her lineage was especially successful her offspring were involved in the ancestry of every human alive today coming from a population or even multiple populations of humans now of course if we're talking about eve let's talk about atom for a moment there is a y chromosomal atom why why chromosomal well y chromosomal dna goes from fathers to sons so this lets us see the most recent male ancestor of all human males alive today we call that figure the y chromosomal atom remember neither were solitary individuals they were simply people whose offspring were very successful and therefore ultimately merged and were found through the entire human race today and it is extremely unlikely that mitochondrial eve and y chromosomal adam lived at the same time in the same place or that they ever met they could have been separated by tens of thousands or even a hundred thousand years and this fits in perfectly with the model described by evolution via natural selection if you go back far enough all life on earth has a common ancestor but that doesn't imply that all life today came from a single organism evolution does not happen in sudden generational lurches but happens through populations over time there's not you know one day here this species and the next year another is a much more gradual process that requires populations to divide and to be geographically separated for any interbreeding to cease for a significant period of time and now you have a divergence into two separate species this is kind of heady stuff i know so i've got uh three links for you this week in the show notes on asksciencemike.com that will help you explore mitochondrial eve the wikipedia page is actually pretty good i included that i included an article from the smithsonian that has maybe a little bit more accessible language and then a delightful youtube video that will help you visualize how big family trees get and how quickly [Music] dear science mike let's assume for a moment that faith is just a way to contextualize the human need for spirituality and find meaning in the face of morality if the christian movement is nothing more than that why and how then did this seemingly radical counter-cultural grassroots movement that jesus started blow up to become the most represented religious group on our planet some two thousand years later was it a historical perfect storm at that time in history does christianity quench something in our genetics that humans long for which made it so much more palatable and desirable than the religions and gods of the day related to that and you can correct me if i'm wrong but it seems that modern day ethics and human rights namely the idea that we should be caring for each other and loving our neighbor even to a global extent rather than trying to compete with and eliminate our fellow neighbor is a notion that in many ways is attributable to the christian movement hence one could say there's an underlying christian premise behind the unspoken ethic that much of the modern world tries to live by secular and religious people alike can you comment again on how and why such a statistically improbable radical countercultural movement two thousand years ago could still be so influential in behavior of people all over the globe even to this day thank you so much for your important work well at the top of the show i mentioned that this week seemed to be questions about my opinion and that was not true of the mitochondrial eve question that was a nice just right down the middle science question but the first question this week was you know do you think you'd be an atheist uh i'm not gonna tell you the next question because that would spoil it but it is kind of a more of a philosophical what's your take on this question and here we have a question about history which you would say well that's not us a an opinion question well um i'm not a historian and i am so much better at digesting and explaining science than i am at history and it's mainly because there are so many competing narratives in the source material we derive history from and then there's so many competing interpretations from historians with different areas of speciality that i can become familiar with like what the different schools of thought there are on a given historical issue but i have almost no ability to discern which one is more credible than the others it's a mystery to me and this is i say this is someone who's becoming very passionate about learning about history but my confidence level just isn't there i've made a commitment on this program i'm going to answer any question that people want me to answer and that i'll do my best to research it i had trouble finding web resources that i could cite with my understanding and in that case i usually will take you to the books i've read to educate myself on a topic but i'm moving so my entire library is in boxes so i can't see my books which means i can't remember what books i've read so i'm just going to have to kind of wing this one i'm so sorry for that this is my best recollection of the diverse scholarship i've read on early christianity and why it's spread and and there's a reason i say early christianity because once you get to emperor constantine it's pretty easy to explain why christianity spreads so far so fast the power of empire once it became the official religion of the roman empire and as the roman empire spread and collapsed and new empires grew out of its ashes christianity was embedded as a significant part of western thought although remember in that process it was deeply hellenized it was influenced by greek philosophy what you see in in post-constantine and even pre-constantine early christianity is an increasing influence of greco-roman thought on uh christian theology it was paul's fault right paul took this religion to the gentiles and the gentiles of course adapted it to their own narrative in the way they saw the world still centering it on the historical figure jesus christ don't get me wrong i'm not saying this is a new religion but i'm saying that christianity has always changed and evolved throughout its history i don't believe that there's some single undying faith unchanging faith called christianity there's just not a great historical case to make there but before constantine christianity had a few features really in its favor one there was a theological impetus to convert people to the faith in christian teaching even before the bible there was a zeal to let other people know the good news to share the gospel and this was unprecedented in the major faiths that surrounded christianity when it formed judaism does not have a zeal to conversion right if anything is quite the opposite a striving for purity um and greco-roman paganism didn't have an evangelistic fervor you didn't try to go create more pagans and in fact the point of the pantheon was you could discover a new god and just add that god to the faith and christianity was weird for saying no no no no no this is the only way to know god and this even supersedes the judaism that it came from okay so that's one thing that that made christianity spread another is that it's an exclusive religion you can't be a pagan and a christian at the same time you know paul goes and he talks to people he says here's this one god it's the only god the one true god all the gods that you thought were gods aren't gods they're not real or they're uh they're just lower beings there's one true god the god of abraham and jacob and isaac and jesus so this exclusivity uh means that as people convert they leave their old religion so christianity gains one paganism loses one christianity gains one in most cases judaism loses one and a third thing that the christian had going for it is that it uh fostered social support among christians christians were supposed to care for each other they were supposed to provide material comfort in times of need it meant that after uh battles or wars or diseases when most people would flee an area christians stuck together and cared for each other and uh as i recall those three things are deeply significant in why christianity was successful in the time period that it was in now it was not the only faith based on this kind of zealotry this intense devotion this desire to spread but you know if it grew at a you know 25 35 45 percent growth rate annually to start a few thousand people that becomes a significant number of people around the time that constantine converts to the faith and once constantine converts to the faith now christianity is a truly major world religion an incredibly in the thinking of people in the west but christianity is not the only faith that has a drive to conversion exclusive claims to god or teachings that foster social support islam is exclusive has a drive for converting others and intrinsic social support for other followers and islam has grown very rapidly since its inception and christianity and islam are you know two of the largest and two of the fastest growing faiths in the world mormonism has similar structure and by the way mormonism has grown quite rapidly since its inception and we also have to admit that christianity has been dramatically more successful in western civilization than it has been in eastern cultures christianity's foothold is nowhere near as powerful in eastern cultures and hinduism and buddhism have been much more successful and arguably islam has made bigger inroads in the global east than christianity has especially in the global southeast so the thing is all religions rely on very similar cognitive and emotional needs they all do i think you can make a case that humans have a tremendous set of biases that create a predisposition towards belief in god towards a desire for faith community and spiritual practice and christianity did a great job of satisfying those needs while combining that with a zeal to tell others about it and to care for other people who accepted that faith and i think that makes it much less statistically unlikely now i understand many people find christian's popularity to be a tremendous um piece of evidence supporting belief in god belief in christ and that's fine i would just caution you what do you what will you do if islam becomes the world's most popular religion wouldn't that make wouldn't that provide the same basis for islam being uniquely truthful or uniquely representing a relationship between god and humanity that's why i'm i'm propelled to such humility about my faith why i avoid exclusive religious claims and why i simply tell people that jesus is how i experience god it's it's sidesteps the issue of like which faith is the one single right faith it's not a debate i'm interested in having [Music] i'm interested and caring for people in need the least of these i'm interested in pursuing peace i'm interested at setting aside what i feel like have a right to for the betterment of others this difficult way that jesus spoke about in his teachings a way of peace a way of love a way of mutual submission is it a exclusive historical fact claim not at all but it is the way that i live my life and the way that i find god close to me [Music] i'd love to see you we we we meet on the internet all the time this way and i talk to you and you listen but i don't get to hear what you have to say it's very lonely for me probably i don't know if this is lonely for you but what if we got together would that be wouldn't that be even more fun uh three chances to do so with the liturgists and we're going to los angeles boston and seattle september 15th and 16th los angeles october 6th and 7th boston october 27th and 28th seattle the liturgist gathering we're going to get together uh michael gunger is going to be there a few hundred other people will be there with you we're going to talk about the weird stuff we talk about on science mike and the largest podcast we're going to do spiritual practice together we're going to go to the table in the eucharist if you're comfortable if you're not hey that's okay it's a place that you will not be judged where every question is allowed and you can meet other people who are examining the world as fundamentally as you are you can learn more about that by going to the liturgistgathering.com of course october 21st i'll be in dublin ireland for the rubicon conference that's going to be a tremendous experience and i just thought of the president when i said tremendous that word has been claimed i guess it's gonna be a great experience it's gonna be really fun and so you can learn more about that uh by going to my website asksciencemike.com and click on the events tab and you can find out how to get tickets to the literature's gathering or to the rubicon conference and watch out soon we will be announcing dates and ticket sales for my uh uk and republican republic of ireland ask science mike tour supporting the uk release of finding god in the waves our last question came in via email and it reads hi mike i'd love to hear your thoughts on how to distinguish between mental illness and evil for example it's easy to think of extreme examples of people committing what seems to be incredible acts of evil ted bundy the btk killer etc however these people are people we would likely diagnose with something like antisocial personality disorder which implies the underlying issue is a mental illness that may have been outside of that person's control due to a combination of inherent traits in external circumstances so my question for you is how do we distinguish between mental illness and evil is there such a thing as objective evil or is it just a convenient term that helps us recognize aberrant behavior or are diagnoses like aspd just convenient ways to categorize a certain type of evil what a wonderful question and let's start with something that i think is very important i think we overstate the correlation between mental illness and violence or we inversely state the correlation of mental illness and violence statistically people who are mentally ill are much more likely to be the victims of physical violence than they are to be the perpetrators mental illness is a significant health issue facing our society and we don't do enough to support or destigmatize people suffering from mental illnesses and there's at least some indication that some of the severity of the symptoms of mental illness comes from a societal context anthropologist tanya lerman found for example that the negative association with schizophrenia is exclusive to and pronounced in the west that in other cultures schizophrenics hear voices that say supportive things and therefore don't have many of the same symptoms that western schizophrenics have so we have this very individualistic culture with a strong association with guilt and shame and motivating social cohesion and behavioral control and it appears to create a chronic stress on our minds and then when you add outright abuse and trauma into people's life experiences and we don't cope well i think without my faith and without parents who loved me unconditionally my life could have turned out very differently i had a lot of anger for many years from being bullied as a child and sometimes i had dark and violent fantasies about achieving revenge but i was lucky my parents loved me was i evil was i evil when i imagined walking into a classroom with a gun to take my own life or was i a stressed organism trying to deal with trauma is there an objective evil i think there are things that all people universally or nearly universally agree are evil genocide we all agree is evil except for those people who continue to commit genocide but then if we all agree genocide is evil [Music] were the people who first settled or colonized the united states of america evil our revered explorers and founders is slavery evil most of the founding fathers owned slaves and yet we would say that's objectively evil if there's objective evil there can be no debate that our interpretation of what is and is not objectively evil has changed dramatically over the course of human history over american history and even modern history the way we view evil is changing i think for the better i think it's good we consider genocide a universal moral evil and i hope that propels us as a society and a culture to take it more seriously the harm done by genocide to indigenous and native people there has in my opinion not been significant restitution is that evil what about slavery if wealth is generational and we built generation generational wealth using slave labor and that's largely been aggregated and passed down among white families how could black families pull themselves up by their bootstraps is it evil objectively evil that we have failed to settle that score is it evil that because of that the circumstances for black children going up in america are so dramatically different than the circumstances for white children is that objectively evil i don't know [Music] i just know that it's wrong that we're learning more and more about the universal dignity of the human person so i take a pragmatic approach we must continue to recognize human rights are truly universal that every person has the same right to life liberty and the pursuit of happiness and that that must include some kind of vaguely fair economic share that allows people the chance to be a part of our economic system that allows people to prevent being ground in the gears of our justice system punished for poverty interestingly enough we have found that the kinds of extremely violent crime ted bundy etc seem to come primarily from who white males the top of the heap i have to wonder if what's happening in these cases in some way is a personal internalized expression of the kind of systemic evil that our society perpetuates every day i can't make a tremendous academic case to that point at least not yet it may someday i don't know what objective evil is but i know subjective evil and i know that mental illness is something we should treat like illness and not like crime now some people yes are so violent so prone to violence that there must be an ongoing restriction of their behavior and access to others to prevent them from hurting people we must do that but we must do it in the most humane way possible but most violence that i see is not rooted in that most violence is rooted in systemic problems and economic problems and the failure of our prison system to rehabilitate people instead to be purely punitive and purely punitive systems simply create a cycle of behavior and i think that's evil i think that's evil is there objective evil i don't know what i do know is our understanding of evil changes over time and what matters most to me as a christian is our understanding of evil is something that propels us to being people of peace and people of justice people who invite the entire world into the shalom peace that we call the kingdom of heaven we'll just call this the soap box episode of ask science mike because i have been on it for almost the entire program you've done it you've listened to another ask science mike episode for those of you who are doing this netflix style over and over how do you not get tired of my voice or the repetition of the structure of this program truly impressed i want to thank the patrons on patreon for both funding the show making my life possible and uh for doing the work of picking the questions that come on the show every week thank you andrew gallucki for your work in pre-production on ask science mike greg nordine for your amazing work in production and sound design and jeb botiford for that lovely theme song i'm going to try to stick to the weekly schedule for throughout my move this summer but i imagine we may miss an episode or two i apologize in advance for that and i'll try to warn you on twitter so that you don't find yourself on the subway with no podcast to listen to which by the way you can connect to me on twitter at mikemccargmchargue and on facebook at facebook.com mike.mcarg thanks for listening everybody i can't wait to talk to you next week