ASM094 LIVE in Portland, OR

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coming to you from cascade church in portland oregon it's ask sciencemike

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science faith welcome to ask science mike the weekly podcast where i answer your questions about science faith in life i'm on tour right now promoting my new book finding god in the way which by the way portland is for sale in the lobby and uh i've got several more dates coming up on the tour january 21st i'll be in grand haven michigan january 29th i'll be in mapleton georgia february 2nd san francisco california february 15th at northwest nazarene university in idaho uh february 19th chapel hill north carolina and march 29th in houston texas with my friends at bio logos if you'd like to see me on tour just go to finding god in the ways.com i'd love to see you on the road also if you can't see me on tour but you're interested in a signed copy of my new book just go to finding on the waves.com giveaway how to learn how you can possibly win a copy of the new book sorry the announcements are weird i had red wine we've got a podcast to do so let's get it started hi mike uh so i am one of your atheist listeners thank you you're not alone like 10 of the audience yeah grew up baptist lost my faith in college and found your work a few years ago at a time when the emotional loss of god finally showed up for me and i've tried out the stuff in your book about sort of building god in your brain yes and it actually works it really does and i wouldn't go so far as to say that i have a belief but i have a simulation of a belief and it's pretty close okay and i like it um my question is about non-theism you still use that word in your book and in podcast since then i think i know what you mean by it um but to get to that ask my question is in your opinion if all sentient and conscious life either on earth or elsewhere stopped is would what you call god still be a thing ow okay first of all we're gonna have some fun tonight first question portland brings the thunder okay first of all i don't want to be snarky i'm pretty sure all beliefs are a simulation of belief based on my epistemology but um i understand us all to be like 86 billion neurons telling a story to themselves and we're just building a model of reality with variable fidelity and that's not really plain english so let me unpack that um i used to be a theist when i was a baptist and why was i a theist because i believed in god well here's a problem when people say they believe in god there's just like so many different things people mean when they say they believe in god and this becomes like a thing people fight about just ask some evangelicals if muslims worship the same right and some people will say absolutely we all worship the same god and other people say whoa whoa whoa we don't worship the same god i've learned sometimes i don't actually worship the same god as some of my evangelical brothers and sisters we all mean something different when we say god but if you are a theist if you're into theism it means that you believe a particular set of things about god namely that god is a being with will and consciousness and agency now those assumptions may teeter totter into a gazillion other implications for example in the christian church there are uh calvinists who universally love this podcast and uh and then there's but and then in calvinist there's like four and five point calvinists right like not everybody goes to all five points not everybody's hardcore like that and then you have like arminism right which is like uh boom wesleyan methodist in the house uh and other denominations which makes a different set of assumptions about what theism means what they share in common god is a being with will and agency and a plan for humanity then there are atheists now i've been an atheist now some atheists don't like me saying that i've been an atheist because like you can't un be an atheist once you're an atheist you're always an atheist i'm like have you been talking to my baptist friends it's like it's like once saved always saved once logical always logical um but what it's an atheist the the most broad definition of atheism is a lack of belief in any god or gods well guess what with those two positions we are not covering 100 of the ideas about god go ask a buddhist if they're a theist or an atheist and buddha would say does god exist what a ridiculous notion god can't be said to exist or not exist and an atheist goes that's huey and an evangelical goes that's hui right like it's odd how they both have a similar epistemology so i can't call myself a theist because i can't positively assert all those things i just talk about attributes of god and i can't call myself an atheist anymore because i don't lack a belief in any god or gods what about a pantheist a pantheist believes the universe itself is god some pantheists believe the universe is conscious some pantheists don't believe the universe is conscious either way they are not theists or atheists panintheists believe that the universe is god plus more physicists go whoa whoa you don't understand what the word universe means uh igg theists who i love say these words are so soupy we can't even make a claim of atheism or theism or pantheism so i identify strong with him but a guy named john shelby spong who was a bishop in what tradition i can't remember episcopalian anglican kind of the same so uh he introduced me to christian nontheism now i'd read about non-theism in a buddhist context but he talked about non-theism in a christian context and it's basically i'm not an atheist i have some knowledge of understanding of god but i can't go all the way to theism okay so that's me it's kind of like it's like the ultimate non-conformist religious label like i'm not with anybody right and um now here's the strange thing about me if you if you like try to pin me down like you force me to go with like what my empiricist approach to reality like i'll be like i can totally back that up i'm basically a pantheist right like if you've heard my axioms which i can't believe that's the thing that's popular on the internet but the word the world is weird uh i say that god is at least the set of forces that create and sustain the universe pantheism but i put a little extra on there as experienced via a psychosocial model rooted in human brains and with that definition if sentient beings cease to exist what i identify as god would no longer exist empirically ah but i'm not just an empiricist i'm also a contemplative mystic and uh what does that mean our rational neurological faculty when paired with empiricism and the sciences also called methodological physicalism just to prove i read a lot uh is really good at helping us uncover facts about how the universe operates it's better than any other mode of thinking we have at uncovering facts about the physical universe how fast do you have to go to get out of a planet's gravity well methodological physicalism is your dude or dudette depending on what gender you choose to use in that sentence but it doesn't speak to the entirety of the human experience right so we all know this but science doesn't speak to beauty science doesn't make moral judgment science can't tell you how what to do with scientific process progress science can say here's how you split an atom it doesn't say whether you should use that to power a city or destroy one for that we need other types of thinking now you can have secular philosophies that help you make those decisions don't get me wrong i'm not saying that non-religious people are immoral or amoral not my bag what i am saying is for me when i contemplate a god that reaches back when i reach out my life is different and i achieve a brain state that isn't possible for me to achieve through purely scientific inquiry and through my mystical practice of faith which i justify empirically through neuroscience because i'm weird i come to all sorts of ideas about god that are deeply meaningful to me but i cannot possibly defend rationally things like god is love things like the thing that animates the four fundamental forces of physics the thing that animates the higgs boson is ultimately love and because it's ultimately love there is a christ that is part of god that invites all of creation into reconciliation and healing that is a thoroughly non-scientific idea i would expect if i asserted that as a fact claim to be laughed out of the room it doesn't mean that doesn't change my life it doesn't mean that some of those ideas aren't the most important beautiful parts of my experience it means that when i contemplate a god that reaches back a god whose fundamental character in nature is love sometimes i walk through the atlanta airport on this tour and i just see the light of the divine in every person's face and sometimes i cry walking through the airport and people think i'm crazy because i am but what i'm filled with is a desire to see everyone receive healing and grace and reconciliation what i receive from that is whether or not it affects me personally the way people of different gender and sexual identities are treated is a matter of great importance and not just dignity but honoring the divine right it it and neuroscience back this up this belief that god is love changes the way i see the world in a fundamental way so do i think empirically that god would continue if all sentient life continued that discontinued no does my faith lead me to a hope that that god is something more than sentience reflecting on reality absolutely and those hopes are some of the things i cherish the most hi mike i'm andy zilmerman we met on my podcast a couple of weeks ago um i've been wanting to talk to you ever since the election so sorry to bring it to a downer um when i talked to you on my podcast uh we had talked a little bit about faith wavering and being in that spot and uh since the election my faith it's dropped i don't know what's real anymore and what's not you were talking about finding the divine in every person's eyes and i look in every person's eyes and i see emptiness i can't i can't look at people anymore because i don't know what to think and it's affected me hugely um but my question deals with uh neurology actually i am in education and there are millions of people who believed everything coming their way on facebook or memes or whatever just believed it blindly at first i was saying well it's education you know these people aren't educated uneducated not college degree blah blah blah well that's not true you don't have a college degree you're smarter than me no [Laughter] so what it's come down to is not so much a piece of paper with a college logo on it but more of a growth mindset and so what is it that leads some people to want and desire that growth mindset and other people to not have any desire to want to know more but to blindly take that in i don't understand what it is and i don't know i'm trying to figure it out so is it something in your mind are some minds more you know have more plasticity is it a growing thing is that a heart thing and if you know there is a god up there why are some wanting to learn more not wanting to learn more that's my question good question um let's let's start with a disclaimer i tweeted something i think it was the night of the election it said things i am questioning one everything and that has been true uh i've realized one thing just think about this for a second i consider myself a student of human behavior and i realized if i take an evidence-based approach donald trump knows more about human behavior than i do so that's a humbling realization i feel like he's playing some kind of insane five-dimensional chess right now um where like he's he's got us talking about hamilton while he settled a 25 million dollar lawsuit uh and we're just like yeah we'll just talk about hamilton myself included right because hamilton's so awesome and they're like booing you know uh count dooku when he came into the sorry list that's not who i am i'm in a real dark place right now so mike pence if you're listening i apologize for calling you count dooku kind of uh just don't don't shock any of my gay friends with electricity and we'll be fine um i'm serious this is why i'm in such a dark place this is the tension this is the tension trump and pence what they do they tapped into a deep well of fear in this country that is real but to do that they had to make even more people afraid what's happening i'll give you my best shot with the disclaimer i am very sure i'm wrong about a lot right now i just haven't nailed down which things those are i just feel like i'm in good company because all the people smarter than me were even more convinced hillary would win this election um first of all human brains have a remarkable craving for certainty just an over-the-top desire for certainty related to the fact that we daydream you have a part of your brain called the orbito frontal cortex it's right here uh you have two of them because you have two halves of the brain but because brains are mirrored we say you have one of everything you have two of them in your brain so you have you have a prefrontal cortex two people and it does a lot of stuff one of the things it does is constantly try to forecast the future so you're sitting in this room and you're listening to me talk and probably at least one person has thought what they would do if i passed out on stage and they had to take the mic and they thought about that or every question that's been asked before i even started talking they're like i know how i would answer that or when i get done they're like i would have done a better job answering that and that's all the orbital frontal cortex trying to protect you from social fallout because we're a social animal now before we uh we're mainly obsessed with social things we're also obsessed with um surviving which used to be harder like pre-agriculture so if every time it rained you're like is this valley about to flood and you did a good job predicting when the valley would flood you survived and passed on your dna and if you didn't you didn't so of course we like it when our predictions are correct and one thing um conservative political ideologies and fundamentalist religious traditions do well is impart in its followers a sense of certainty a certainty about moral issues certainty about belonging there's a reason democratic and liberal coalitions are much more like herding cats because everyone doesn't have the same strong sense of singular identity so we're not as certain about that and this does not mean people are unintelligent or uneducated they tend to be less informed or even in the case of trump voters misinformed and that's because when we invest in a particular belief system and it starts to tear apart from reality we face an incredibly difficult choice to fundamentally reassess our worldview i'm doing that right now it's scary as hell or go no no no no no and if you have enough social reinforcement that's actually easier and so you begin to take information that reinforces your position but doesn't actually map to things you can demonstrate in reality this is not an odd thing for humans to do any humans as soon as you apply a social label to yourself studies have shown you start to subconsciously filter out information that subverts the assumptions of that label whether that label is christian atheist liberal conservative american whatever the label is as soon as you accept it your brain really tries to defend it subconsciously this would also be true if you call yourself a scientist by the way so what causes people to do the hard thing live with less certainty let reality check your assumptions more often well actually nobody's good at that but allow room for other narratives you get exposed to other stories why is it the democratic coalition is so strong in urban areas because you can't live under the assumption that all muslims are terrorists when there's five in your office and like you wait for them to be done at the microwave and there's nothing to talk about and like what comes out of the microwave isn't c4 it's just popcorn right and so like no matter what assumption you brought into the space it got checked because the exposure of another narrative right what caused me mr southern baptist to start questioning evangelical teachings on gay marriage i had a really good gay friend and all the scripture in the world all the certainty i had about god's will in my life had a hard time accepting the story of a guy who said i hated it when i figured out i liked guys i got married i couldn't have sex with my wife i got divorced she wished me well my parents kicked me out of the house my church kicked me out of the town and the only people who would accept me were in miami and suddenly i discovered like a hedonistic lifestyle right like we like the church created that culture it's exposure to multiple narratives that force us to question ours and if you look at the strongholds of conservative politics in america they're monocultural right they're rural areas and what has hold on urbanites urban areas are very economically and racially segregated we just out of necessity do the numbers encounter each other more often but in rural areas those areas of segregation aren't blocks but miles so it's different schools completely different schools it's different institutions and so no one ever subverts your cultural understanding and when you attach that when you have a marriage between a political party mainly concerned with business interests by the way that's both of them but i mean just one of them the republican party which is more open about it when you attach that to a religion that says will know the end is coming when you see these signs and these signs look a lot like multiculturalism it becomes a self-reinforcing paradigm our existence serves to reinforce the narrative the fact that i'm a for former southern baptist who now talks all the time about marriage equality that's he's a false prophet just like in revelation he's saying what itching ears want to hear right it reinforces the narrative here's the other problem for that group of people their way of life is actually disappearing my family my entire family is from a rural farming community an hour east of the city of tallahassee which of course you all know is a thriving metropolis of a couple hundred thousand people but there's nothing in three hours in any direction of tallahassee it's all rural farmland and i have watched since i was a kid every year less and less people live in that county more and more factories close more and more farms close and my blood relatives in that city are in a state of ongoing poverty they work hand-to-mouth and they are terrified that their kids not only won't have a good life will they even survive so someone comes along and says it's the mexicans and you go you know what all my family used to harvest food from fields for a living and now they don't because immigrants do to them that's a completely valid narrative they see the factory clothes and what was the announcement we moved production to china so in the in the urban areas ago would you people quit complaining and would you get with the program with jobs there's no there's no education access so there's two things that are true one there is tremendous racism there is a tremendous tremendous closed mentality with all that certainty about certain assumptions and america is doing a disservice to those communities for years but instead of saying the problem is we're aggregating wealth the top of the economy the problem is we care primarily about gdp and not per capita gdp we someone comes along as a demagogue and says it's those people and what scares me and i don't want to be alarmist that's exactly how the nazis built their power they told german workers who in a booming economy were suffering it's the jews and the gypsies and today we say it's the mexicans and the muslims what i've learned i've been doing exactly the wrong thing i've said i'm not going to the farm anymore you know i had a cousin of mine call me a hollywood liberal i live in tallahassee by the way this cousin's like 12. so i know what the family says about me now um and i i went oh man i am so superior to my family i see things so much more clearly i'm going to go fight for equality by ignoring my so i invest all this energy in doing podcasts which left-leaning people mainly listen to and thoughtful conservatives don't get me wrong i've learned anything from this election there's a lot more conservatives that listen to these shows than i ever thought but i try to give you all language why don't i use that language with my own family why don't i sit a blood relative and listen to their struggle why is it that i only call my senator to lobby for my friends of color why don't i call and talk about madison county just down the road i'm going to thanksgiving and i'm going to christmas and my mission this year is to listen and to empathize and to understand because i can't expect my black friends to go do that work that's my job i got to go do it donald trump is the president and it's my fault and i should have known better i understand the neuroscience i understand the cognitive science behind the whole thing and i still followed my own pied piper whistle of the inevitability of moral progress my friends progress is not inevitable it comes at great cost and sometimes we take steps forward and sometimes we take giant leaps back and i honestly believe that just happened i didn't tweet it but i was trying to give trump a chance but every appointment i've seen every business dealing i am deeply concerned for the state of our nation and global civilization to point i've never been in my life and the world will not be healed by me naming my family an adversary the world will only be healed if i a christian follow the teachings of jesus about healing which is first i love god and next i love my neighbor as myself and who's my neighbor the one who would never leave me by the side of the road and i'm as useless a liberal as exists in the world if you need a pointed think piece in snl parlance i'm your guy boy i'm good at this but my my fence fell down in my yard and i couldn't let my dogs out unless it was on leash and i was traveling on tour and i couldn't get home do you know who came to my house and fixed my fence my redneck relatives they dropped what they were doing which by the way they get paid by the day and they came to my house and they wouldn't take a cent and he says because we're family solution to the the country's political problems is in this room and in rooms just like it hey science mike my name is caitlin i'm from seattle thank you for the work that you do uh to create the space for the spiritually homeless my question relates to the phenomenon of being starstruck okay a little bit lighter sorry love it no we need it i'm crying i had the opportunity to meet you several months ago and although i had several things i wanted to share i found myself speechless and removed from the moment yeah otherwise a rarity for me what physiology is at play that seems to genuinely paralyze us in these moments and overriding our person and how does one defy it yes thank you thank you man that's a great question it's so real and subverts normal social taboos which is what this is about um so i'm a real weird guy because i'm a nerd so i went through the formative years of my life in a state of absolute social rejection so i never learned to be nervous looking for people's approval i preemptively assume i don't have it oh you don't like me that's cool i can just do my thing and then about high school time came and people were like that guy's so cool he doesn't care what anybody thinks well i don't care anybody thinks because two years ago you put my head in the toilet every day right we're a social species it is critical it for our survival that we find a place in our tribe tribe neurologically for a human is about 150 people it's what we're ready to handle we can handle about 1500 faces which means unfortunately i meet right now on tour four to eight hundred people a week so my my face cash gets flushed really fast um but what we we have an incredible amount of neurological real estate uh devoted to monitoring what other people think about us and that means the people whose approval is most important in a tribe are the people in charge the most socially powerful and dominant they tend to have certain features physically which i have none of other than a quite lovely baritone voice by the way humans defer to deeper voices which is amazing when i used to work in the corporate world if i wanted to say something meaning i would just kind of go well everybody and it would be quiet just because a deep voice male is speaking i wish that was like a like a beautiful motivation it turns out pre-civilization if you talked over deep voice mail that correlates cleanly with body mass and he might hit you with a stick so that's why natural selection does that but so we have all these cues to defer to important people and one thing that denotes someone who has social dominance is what they talk and you listen i'm a podcaster so as much as like i'm trying to foster a genuine deep emotional connection with people who listen to the show their brains in a parasocial relationship get science mike talks and i listen so sometimes in the line we're going to do after this event people stand there and they walk up and they don't talk and i'm like hi and they're like oh yeah i can talk like because they've been trained like that i can't hear them so with celebrities media causes an emulation a super normal stimulus that they are the most high ranking humans that can exist in a tribe right we're always tall because we're either on a screen or on a stage and we defer to tall people i'm above the midline of everyone's vision even mike and he's real tall but i'm on stage i have a booming voice not only do i have a booming voice i have a booming voice of these speakers and all this is sending cues to your brain that i am just like a really dominant gorilla i almost spilled my wine internet i made uh guerilla motions and so what what sorry sometimes i talk to the internet too but they will be listening so so when we finally meet and we turn a parasocial relationship into a social relationship all the baggage of media comes along and as much as i intentionally try to subvert media habits to create a more authentic connection part of your brain resists now to your credit the people that come to these events are unfailingly cool and real and don't treat me like a celebrity and we have very natural conversations in life in line and you have no idea how much i appreciate that i have friends who have platforms and i've watched the dynamic people that come to their events and it's it's it's alienating and you aren't alienating to me but i can't help but notice i've started counting between 18 and 22 percent of the people in line when we have the selfie moment or the picture moment when i put my hand around them they're trembling and i'm just like oh don't tremble so but i understand it's just it's a parasocial relationship it's everything evolution has programmed you to do and so even though on a cognitive level you all get he's not he's just a guy in fact he's he's kind of a nerd he's pretty thick around the middle he doesn't look like a socially dominant person the fact that i'm standing you're all sitting all that forms to get to that moment so you get starstruck when we meet it's evolution which is why even though it's somewhat exhausting i will stay two three sometimes four hours after these events to meet everybody is to get rid of that because this is not an ego mission for me i don't care about being famous i care about people who are suffering and feel alone not feeling that way anymore and i think in many ways american media dynamics work against that instead of for it and that's what i say like i'm really happy you're all here i'm really happy you're all here i'm more excited to see you then you are to see me and we'll figure out how to fight back against evolution together hi mike i'm arthur we share a shockingly similar deconversion experience i was also deacon technically still am i think didn't get officially kicked out um so i however have not uh had the follow-up mystical experience that you have um i'm very content where i'm at i do feel the loss of community um and that probably occurred in the last couple years and that happened for my whole family we went through a lot of trauma including some authority abuse by the church and it was it was really a rough time and so i guess where where i'm at um i'm gonna i'm at a different place than my wife she still has her faith my children still do that are 10 and 12. um but i guess the question i have for you in that place that i'm at in in my contentment as as an atheist or i often prefer agnostic because i'm not really close to the idea yeah i just have certainly rejected what i was grown up being taught is that where would you suggest that i look to explore as somehow um what i kind of describe as my am i not ruling out the possibility of a god in that i feel like i'm doing some sort of due diligence and being open to the idea uh what would you tell someone like me to look for to experience look for in just an overall experience of god or to have a mystical experience either okay because two different things if you want to have a mystical experience engage in a rigorous intense meditative practice and regularly engage in emotionally dynamic corporate worship scientifically speaking those are two things that increase the likelihood for a given person to have a mystical experience bad news we don't all have equal propensity to have mystical experiences it turns out i have a really high propensity probably genetically to have mystical experiences the aforementioned crying in the atlanta airport being somewhat of a signal that i have divine eyes so i like to explain i explain it this way in my book number one best-selling book in the science and religion category on amazon.com um uh you can imagine two people and genetically one is a very fast runner and one is not but if the genetically not fast runner goes to a rigorous training program and the other doesn't and they both try to run a marathon the slow runner who practiced will probably beat handily the naturally fast runner very few people without training go run 26.2 miles it does happen i hate those people because i ran a marathon and it almost killed me i lost consciousness in mile 22. fat marathoners is just a weird thing but the work pays off regardless of your temperament so the worst case is if you engage in a regular meditation practice is you just get better brain health and emotional stability but not a mystical experience um now in terms of what to look for in an openness there's just so many different schools of thought about what god is and if if assigning some value to the label god in your particular model of reality is significant just find one that doesn't make you rich i'll be honest i love my calvinist friends and they're so kind to keep listening even though i pick on them all the time but the calvinist god sometimes i go like it just grosses me out um i so love the world that i'm gonna kill my son to save the world from me it's just a weird vibe to me my son who is me it's just a weird like i can't get behind that but a god who is love who was incarnate in the christ who as the christ was incarnate in jesus who shows a reaction to human blood thirst by offering his life to show the futility of that bloodlust that actually i'll sing a song about that i'll sing great is thy faithfulness to that god so it just comes down to whether the word god matters you or not if you're content congratulations you're ahead of almost everybody in the room so celebrate i care about like are you a part of making healing and peace in the world or not that's the gospel uh you know when i told rob bell at an event that some of these guys were at that i didn't believe in god anymore uh but i cared a lot about the poor you know what rob said to me he said you're already living a jesus life so don't worry about it so much so if you're in a state where you'll lay down your rights and your privilege and your material resources and your time for the healing of others congratulations you're a jesus person i get excited about questions i get excited about learning things i thought were true or wrong we get the knowledge of god we have to get in order to move and act in the world and sometimes that knowledge of god is there is no god at all some of the greatest progress i've ever made in my life a in understanding of science and b learning how to make good ethical decisions was during the period of time that i didn't believe in god at all like what use is a god who is incapable of surviving without our belief that's like an instagram god like if i don't get 1100 likes the puppy gets it right like that's not an exciting god but a god who is uh who is the animating force of all reality who was the initiator of creation and who was creation itself that god's already there whenever you're ready and is ready if you never are [Music] in your last liturgist podcast on suffering a speaker that was brought on i'm not sure who it was actually if we could all see that we are the other we could transcend our unique experiences and understand that we are one this is bigger than one religion and one race so you've touched on this a little bit but i'm curious about collective empathy and how to cultivate that in a society of such division and polarization that we live in and if you have any like daily practices that you participate in to contemplate yourself as the other or how do we bridge this divide okay thank you okay so you want the weirdest answer in the history of science mike no problem i mean i'm mostly honest with you all but sometimes some of the top shelf stuff i just serve at private parties [Laughter] step one this is tough forgiveness forgiveness is essential now i hate talking about forgiveness because some people who are christians by the way i've got to this thing i realized um evangelicals are not my adversaries even the really conservative ones that hate me they are uh in a parable that jesus talked about the prodigal son they're just the older son so i'm a prodigal like i went out and ate with the pigs and spent the inheritance and god still loved me at the end and celebrated my return and they're like [Music] what don't know if you know this new york publishers i've been at church every week i've been tithing i've been giving generously to to genuine need in human society while he was googling like so i recently had this realization the father loved the older son the father was surprised that the older son was even upset he's like what do you mean we work together all the time i'm just happy the little one came back but my older brothers in faith sometimes talk about forgiveness in a way that is abusive because they tell people who have been oppressed and abused that they must forgive and accept and affirm the one who wounded with them obvious is often this means that um we have to share space that's not healthy to share right so even if the abuser hasn't repented you still have to forgive them and accept them so oh you battered wife that's your duty oh you oppressed minority we're all welcome at the table that's not what i'm talking about when i talk about forgiveness i have to give that disclaimer what i'm talking about when i talk about forgiveness is claiming your space in your own mind again it's a really strange thing scientifically speaking when you haven't forgiven someone or a group of someone's it impairs your cognitive function if they if we remind you of that person and ask you to take a test your scores drop if you remind me of that person and then ask you to perform a physical task you give up sooner if we ask you to think of that person and then get you to jump you can't jump as high it's an incredibly expensive thing in your own mind so we have to forgive for our own mental well-being how do you do that first you grieve if if you still have trauma stored in your brain and your emotions you can't forgive someone next if they're still actively abusing you you'll never be able to exercise that grief you've got to get yourself the boundaries and the distance to prevent ongoing abuse and here's where it really gets hard you've gotta be able to imagine their motivation for why they did what they did that's tough it took 20 years for me to get to that point with a young man who went in third grade with me and made me eat dog feces out of a ziploc bag i was in my 30s when i could understand his motivations and then after you understand the motivations it does not mean you accept the motivation it means you understand it and then you wish no ill will toward them and you know forgiveness is complete according to psychologists not theologians when you can wish well to that person confession there are people in my life i haven't gotten through all those stages with and i work at it every day there are certain people who i do a kindness meditation for every day so we forgive those that have hurt us now that otherness sometimes people haven't hurt us they're just alien they're just foreign we just don't understand them they live in a foreign country they live in a flyover state um they live wherever and a circumstance we understand they do things that we we can't comprehend top shelf all right here we go i'm a little nervous uh i recognize i'm an illusion then quantum think quantum theory it's really hard to nail down the boundary between my body and the atmosphere or the floor or what makes my body at all it's a quantum decoherence constantly collapsing into a definitive state that we can't precisely know the location and velocity of any particle in my entire being my entire be i'm just a bit of fuzzy math and then i have this consciousness which is my brain telling a story a process that takes about 80 milliseconds so my consciousness is living in the past of actual reality my senses are relaying things that come to me at a finite speed so all these hot body radiation happening in these bulbs that photons get emitted probably hydroelectric so congratulations these are not directly powered by the sun even through burning fossil fuels got a little lost 186 000 miles per second to my eyes not a big deal in this room but comes at a different rate than the compression waves in the atmosphere allow me to hear things and we think that babies hear echoes because they haven't learned yet to compensate for the difference in time signals coming to their ears we think that babies don't see light the same way we do because they haven't learned to lie to themselves in order to operate in the world they're just taking they're taking the raw file right off the sd card without running it into a jpeg first sorry real nerdy joke i love that portland gets it though so so why do i believe what i believe where do i believes come from social identity mainly uh i believe what people around me believe and then i dress it up in my rational faculties which evolution gave us so we can convince other people that our intuition was correct rational thought wasn't born as a way to uncover facts about the world it was uncovered as a way to hide the fact that we're just making [ \_\_ ] up all the time and that's what everyone is doing now some of us feel especially enlightened because we don't believe what our tribe believes congratulations you're a non-conformist you just believe the opposite of your tribe that's not any more clever you're just like oh you believe x i believe x over one when i realize everyone is just tell every brain is running software didn't write just like me it's a lot harder to otherwise people when i realize we are made of the same stuff and if we get in a room like this we share like 20 septillion atoms with every breath we literally start sharing the same atoms congratulations you're going to take a little science mike with you tonight right oh that's creepy i didn't mean it creepy [Applause] i mean carbon dioxide primarily some nitrogen there is no other we're just like a little film of algae on a rock together and anything that happens that makes them unhealthy makes me unhealthy anything that hurts them hurts me and uh that is not something i struggle with a whole lot at least not until november the 8th but i'm going to get my equilibrium back and i'm going to stop otherizing people uh we are in this together like it or not we all breathe the same atmosphere 400 parts per million co2 will affect us all the same way [Music] i read some fascinating data that in countries with high income inequality rich people get sick more often we are all connected and our consciousness is not even an individual consciousness the story you're telling yourself is one line of notes on a page of a symphony and if you doubt that i would encourage you to go lock yourself in a room without internet connectivity or books for two months and then come out afterward and tell me how you feel i don't care how introverted you are if you have no contact with other humans for two months your software is going to fail because you don't have an individual consciousness the enlightenment lied about that one [Applause] [Music] my question is about vulnerability and trauma i have been reading a book called it didn't start with you i don't remember the author but about how trauma is encoded within our dna micro dna um for three up to three generations at a time so we can literally experience physical sensations from up to three generations back that we haven't actually experienced ourselves and then also thinking about brene brown and her research on vulnerability and how that's sort of the space at which the foundation from which the wholehearted evolve into their wholehearted living and i'm just wondering if maybe well first what you can tell us about how the brain works between vulnerability and trauma and if perhaps there's a point at which those two things intersect that might be hopeful in our current climate okay first of all i don't know the term micro dna that's new to me i haven't read that book i've heard about epigenomics and the way that the environment your parents experience primarily around the time of your conception can influence in ways we do not entirely understand genetic expression in offspring now i've primarily heard this research done in the context of calorie availability for example if your parents have a lot of calories available you get diabetes easier really weird stuff scientists don't know how it works there's some theories there's nothing that i've read that's gotten a lot of peer review and and explain those phenomena um but that does lay a possibility that even separated from culturalization some things carry on molecularly and i'm trying to avoid overreaching because enough scientists listen to the show if i screw up or over generalize they email me so and boy do i love scientific approval um so there is some i get nervous when i meet scientists by the way i didn't remember for your question but like when i meet scientists i was like oh my god like you haven't heard yet but we interviewed andrew newberg for the literature podcast like my favorite neuroscientist and i could not get it together i was like well um dr newberg what's it like being so awesome [Laughter] so uh oh what a life i live i am a very vulnerable person and uh i think it's because i was bullied my mom says i didn't remember this my mom says i would come home and cry and then i would pray for my bullies i was a weird kid when i was 11 i started praying fervently for a couple years that satan would come to know christ i'm serious like if he could just accept jesus into his heart not only would he go to heaven but sin on the earth would stop i just like how has no one thought of this i just i just solved the problem of evil so um how do you bless those that curse you how do you how do you how do you care if you suffer enough you don't want to see that in anyone else so the thing i could see among the kids that beat me up was they were really afraid what the other ones thought about them like if they made a joke and it didn't land and like for a second they started to get picked on that's when they attacked me the most it was like oh whoa i'm losing standing look how stupid he is oh he wears hawaiian shirts and he's eight um i did i earned that man what was i doing i had this red hawaiian shirt with parrots on it and i just loved it and i wore it with these like really blue shorts with french fries all over them why why did i think like red parrot blue french fries was a good combo um so those were got beat up a lot on parrot french fries uh but you recognize that suffering in other people and you just don't want it to happen and when you realize as you get older that when you're off like most people are afraid to admit they're paying because they won't look weak so it becomes a self-reinforcing thing where you admit something hurt and like 10 other people in the room go i can remember i man i used to be in management and corporation i hate managing people but people love to come to my office and talk to me even though they didn't work for me because they would tell me something and i'd go man i bet that really hurts and they go that's all people want oh like even if you think the best thing for america is for all the buttercups to suck it up right now saying suck it up buttercup doesn't pull off your objective saying i bet that's terrifying would be actually more in line with your stated objectives uh our suffering doesn't improve when we suck it up neurologically speaking our suffering improves when we grieve so i can't actually cite research other than the brilliant brene brown um on the linkage between suffering and empathy and vulnerability victor frankel talked a lot about this by the way and he was a badass um but when you when you suffer and you see what that suffering has given you if i wouldn't have been a bullied nerd if i would have spent a couple of years in absolute fear that i was going to lose my friends and family because i didn't believe in god anymore i couldn't be science mike that pain is the engine of this work um and i think sometimes when we don't suffer enough what you haven't experienced that self-reinforcing phenomenon if every time you're a little bit vulnerable somebody goes ha ha or or honestly god it still happens in this house are you gay wait so how did that become a cultural thing like are you are you approaching mental health you must enjoy same-sex behavior in that in that way actually like in the south calling someone gay is kind of a compliment um oh you'll express vulnerability and live in community this is just a very odd insult if you think about it it doesn't it's that's the dumbest insult now that i think that i've ever heard um but just think about that from that person's experience what are they most afraid of people think i like other dudes so i i had a moment where i expressed vulnerability and i had the worst reinforcement so vulnerability is not safe so we teach people to especially white straight men to compartmentalize to not be vulnerable and then we're like so why is it that white straight men use the most opioids and kill themselves the most because we're like hey the most important thing for you to be a man is to be incredibly emotionally unhealthy manliness equals loneliness isolation and repression go uh which is why i think it's all the more important that those of us who've been hurt a lot like we don't let ourselves get shamed out of expressing that my dad's a real manly man i've noticed since his divorce and all the suffering he's been through he's become so much more empathetic i've noticed since his brain injury and his sudden inability to be an island he literally needs other people to get through the day uh that there's a tenderness now dad's always been in some way affectionate but there's a tenderness that was born out of that i don't know why we suffer but i do know that if we respond to suffering well somehow we grow all the things in my life have done that are meaningful and helpful and important were born out of a suffering that produced vulnerability that provoked vulnerability in others i mean why is this room work why you want a secret there are trump supporters in this room right now why are those trump reporters cool why can they share the space because they're vulnerable trump supporters why is it we can all get in here in different places atheists agnostics progressive christians my beloved calvinists all of us in the room together because the core value of this room is vulnerability and why are you such a vulnerable people because you've all suffered the common thread among every person that comes to this event is someone has told you you aren't good enough and you don't belong and so you're done saying that to other people and that's what creates this space i was in los angeles one of the la stops and said science mike thanks for creating a space like this i was like what are you talking about you all create this space i just show up and give you an excuse to be in the same room and it's because suffering has produced vulnerability and empathy and i think it's cool as hell okay uh [Music] hi uh i'm a senior in in high school and i just have really yeah welcome all right thanks um so i just have a really quick i think it's like a light lighterish question thank you um so as a senior a lot of seniors experienced this obviously clinically supported the syndrome called senioritis [Music] and i was just wondering like why seniors have that and what we could do to kind of like suppress it man we got a real problem here folks the nightmare of our science mike just came true an incredibly thoughtful question that even letting time for applause and riffing to give myself more time to think i can't think of a single study to cite to give a scientific answer to what is the neurocognitive motivation of senior itis or near in-state apathy i'm googling in my own mind for a second don't mind me so like i'm gonna vamp can we vamp similar thing happens in the corporate world um when a product gets 85 percent done progress like finishing is the hardest thing in the world people think starting is hard what do you start stuff all the time finishing stuff is really difficult uh i can do this in science language matters calling senioritis a thing create senioritis uh so when people say they stub their toe and they say i'm such an idiot like that label calling yourself an idiot turns out to be incredibly detrimental to your emotional well-being it turns out to reduce your performance and standardized testing so language we describe ourselves with matters so we tell people there's this phenomenon when you become a senior you get senioritis we become a senior all we do that's time for senioritis senior skip day here we come by the way i never skipped in high school and on senior skip day i was like i should really skip so in second period in electronics i said mr kramer okay sorry mr kramer i just like mentioned you on the internet um can i uh skip class today like just go to breakfast i've never skipped before and he said yeah i'll give you an approved absence it wasn't until i got back to school that i realized i had just failed skipping in the most fundamental way uh so so naming the thing makes it the thing but i also think um finishing is hard why is finishing hard you get to a point in a project where you experience diminishing returns a lot of your transcript is done a lot of your you may already have been accepted into college like why would you what what the external motivating factors decrease you as a senior enjoy a state of social prestige and dominance like freshman part like the sea as you walk through the halls uh because you're a foot and a half taller than they are and you look visibly like an adult like so if you i wouldn't think you were a senior i don't think you're like 24. so um the fact that you get accepted more um in adult social settings makes high school feel more alien i think it's just a lot of those factors kind of coalescing so how can you avoid suffering the worst of senioritis intention and goal setting and maybe nurturing a little bit of a non-conformist streak most people don't read i said that's a statistical fact so i didn't go to college not a course of action i'm recommending for you but i made sure that instead as i was starting businesses i read six books a month every month because i realized i would actually learn more doing that than my friends who went to college did and the reason i'm good at ask science mike is not because i'm more intelligent than anyone else i just read all the time so i take insights from three different books and stitch them together in real time and people like wow where'd he get that books and uh and if you realize that keeping your foot on the gas through your senior year will give you an unfair competitive and economic advantage going into college i don't know sometimes i like making more than the next guy i certainly did my corporate years and uh maybe not as a podcaster but so focusing on that i'm intentionally going to maintain my effort level because i want the dividends and then visualizing so i wrote a book a lot of people start books not many people finish books because it turns out you get like halfway into a book and you are lost what is the book even about now i don't know these how why did i write a chapter on basket weaving that has nothing to do with god that's just what i thought about that tuesday so at that moment uh there's a real risk of giving up by the way i really wanted to give up several times in the process of writing that book how did i get through it i imagine the book release party i imagine all my friends and all my family all getting here i imagine signing books so when people come up they're like i know this is lame but will you sign my book i'm like what lame i wrote a book finished it it got published you bought it and you asked me to sign it this is literally a fantasy fulfillment moment for me but it was like visualizing that gave me the determination to get through the hardest days of writing so visualizing marching on graduation day with second semester grades that are great and knowing that you persisted when everybody else gave up might give you just enough of a non-conformist energy to finish high school strong [Music] um so my question is actually about the dyslexic brain i'm actually someone who is dyslexic and was illiterate till 13 and have failed through college well like not yeah like i went for six years with no degree um and find myself now in a world that really is very frustrating especially in a christian setting because everyone's got a book club and not everyone is so great to make audio books um and so i was wondering evolutionary like speaking was there any point or purpose to creating a a brain that processed so differently and do you have any insights or thoughts of how to like move forward in a society that doesn't serve necessarily a brain that thinks so differently yeah great question evolution doesn't create anything mutation creates stuff and evolution evaluates it so evolution is the it's just real judgy so if an adaptation makes you less likely to produce offspring and survive long enough to help them survive evolution says we're going to cut that if you have a mutation and it makes you more likely to produce offspring then evolution goes we're going to install that in more systems like where the factory line is going to pull a lot of that out if you have a mutation that doesn't affect benign mutation evolution goes i don't care um if you go to our evolutionary context pre-civilization a dyslexic brain like is not really maladapted to hunter-gathering at all um and i say this i have an unnamed learning disability that is remarkably similar to dyslexia a word i have difficulty saying because of said neurological condition like i think it's really i'm being real for a second it's kind of cruel to make a phonetically complicated hard to spell word to describe an abil a disability related to spelling and pronunciation i'm 100 serious so if i'm driving and someone says turn left i'm like what the hell is left i literally have to go in so i write with i could write with that could my oh [ \_\_ ] i hit a car um don't ride with me i can't time my shoes uh i mean i can i just have to do it a lot because they fall apart uh and wait till you see me sign a book holy cow because i start writing a letter and realize i'm turning the wrong way so i turn around and my handwriting is just like random like which way like people are like left l which one's an l they both look like l's to me so evolution didn't screen against that and it still doesn't it still doesn't if you're a female with dyslexia like if if we go to the the genetic forget culturalization if we go to the genetically set traits for how men select women for reproductive suitability facial symmetry because that means good genes good nutrition ratio between hips and waist there's no selection pressure right same thing have a dyslexic male facial symmetry ratio between shoulders and hips it's gotten worse as i've gotten older but i used to have a decent ratio right so when jenny like decided to marry me i had more of a v and less of a pair and um and so evolution didn't select against it so how how do we compensate is what matters well i didn't know i had a learning disability for almost all of my school career so i just got a lot of c's and d's and f's all the time every year and what i was told is i was incredibly lazy and i needed to work harder and i would work harder but no matter how hard i worked i couldn't fill out the worksheet i knew what i wanted to say but when it took me 10 times as long to fill in by hand and then all i got was you need better handwriting written on the worksheet in ninth grade it's incredible disincentive so the summer after my junior year my mom was like we need to take him to a specialist and like have him tested because i don't believe what the teachers are saying so she tests me and she's like okay good news you're incredibly off the chart intelligent bad news you have severe learning disabilities and you've been compensating well so some things about me i don't have any short-term memory so i got really good at committing things in long-term memory uh i have real problems with spatial awareness i can't process auditory information really at all um but believe it or not in terms of incredibly good long-term memory recall you may have noticed uh it turns out i'm really good at articulating things i've learned and it turns out i have like like really genuinely unscoribly high symbolic and abstract reasoning so i learned to rely on that but this specialist told me a couple of tricks one she said when your teacher is talking i want you to look at her face or she's looking at the board look at the back of her head and i want you to imagine it's a newscast and i want you to teletype what she's saying as closed captions while she's talking and that trick and a couple of others took me from c's d's and f's to all a's my senior year and i didn't even have to study like all so the problem is every person's compensation strategies will be different you probably have learned a lot on your own because you're here because you have a job because you know what i mean because you function in society but working with a learning specialist or a support group with your particular differing abilities will help you find strategies like that that let the parts of your brain there's a high linkage by the way between high intelligence and learning disability so if you can learn to let the part of your brain that are quite exceptional take over the parts of the brain that are not typical it it it's helpful and you already mentioned you love audiobooks um have you tried the uh kindle has uh is it it's it's like a text-to-speech yeah um so things like that there's not an audio book for but they've allowed the licensing for digitized speech they don't i know they don't which by the way uh all of us can send a note to amazon and publishers and say we get money is important but damn it this is a society that will honor people of all ability levels over capitalism well we're not buying anything right that's our choice you know what we can all do every single person in this room let's do i'll do it this week let's call a congress person or a senator and say there should be legislation that protects access to audiobook resources for people of different ability levels because if the companies aren't going to do it we can create laws that make them do it because we're all in this together right if we won't do that for somebody with a different ability than our own they won't do it for us so everybody in internet land official science mic homework i don't care if it's state or federal call someone and say you're frustrated that publishers don't universally allow access to text to speech audio books for people with learning disabilities it's really specific which means it will work i'm a member of something called the planetary society and we got nasa's funding changing changed just by getting a bunch of nerds to call in the same three-day period let's be honest there's not that many members of the planetary society but we just coordinated our efforts and the the congressional people were like oh my gosh it looks like three million people care about this no we just hacked the math and this week at science mike 93 i think this is we're all gonna do the same thing we're gonna hack the system for audio books for people with learning disabilities uh and so that aside i have a traumatic brain injury i mentioned that at the beginning i hit my head ever since then this new thing has happened sometimes i can't think of a word for something now i know that's normal it had never happened before and earlier in my recovery things were a lot worse than they are now for me and the only way i got through that was by joining a traumatic brain injury support group are you so if you're not a member of a support group for people with dyslexia which i literally can't say it that's a good place to go share notes they can also help you find people that are professionals that might be able to give you resources uh i guess first i'd like to say my god loves me boom yes i don't know if anybody else knows about that but um if you listen to literature's podcast that meditation has not only saved or helped my marriage but has deepened my wife's faith in a god that is loving and that doesn't judge based on whether you're gifted in the gifts of tongues or faith healing but a god that is impartial a god that doesn't care who you are he loves his creation so thank you for that thank you for that meditation um it's been phenomenal it's it's really helped a lot um already it's been two weeks and we take our sabbath on saturday so oh wow turn off our phones our computers we lock them in a drawer and we read i read your book in two days i just i ate it i devoured it it was good thank you uh my question is um i heard you speak on the um on greg boyd's uh woodland hills yeah church podcast uh that was that was a really good conversation i know him and you probably disagree a little bit on the spiritual warfare motif yeah i'd like to hear a little bit about your take on the problem of evil and yep yep and uh demonic possession essentially okay your basic wiffle ball of a question okay real easy t-ball uh i can't even think of like what a easy pitch means in baseball uh wiffle ball is not a pitch uh okay might take on the problem of evil [Music] uh we anthropomorphized god too much i think most of our thorniest theological issues are trying to force a sequential temporal reference frame onto the divine so don't do that so so we experience life is what moment moment moment moment moment moment moment moment moment moment and it always in one direction and the laws of physics imply no directionality to time at all so you you know if i take this glass and do like this and just wine goes all over you know gallagher style the first couple of rows that's a real dated reference if you applied the same amount of energy to every droplet of wine in the exact opposite direction they would all coalesce and go back into the glass right it's just physics and then if you look at at relativity you understand there is no such time let's sing a simultaneous time between any two points in space that's fixed that the passage the rate of the passage of time is dependent on the differential velocity between any two points as well as the amount of curvature of space time caused by gravity it doesn't matter most of the time until you get deep into the gravity well and then weird stuff happens newtonian physics can't describe the orbit of mercury precisely for that you need relativity because mercury has a relativistic orbit in order to make a gps satellite you have to understand that the tick tock tick tock of seconds on a gps satellite don't pass at the same rate as the tick tock tick tock of seconds on the surface of the earth or else the blue dot on your iphone will slowly drift until gps doesn't mean anything right so gps is one of the few engineering challenges maybe the only engineering challenge in the human experience where both general and special relativity are required for it to work so if you're like well i don't know if relativity is real gps is a pretty good reinforcement gravitational lensing which einstein predicted in the 1930s has been relatively recently observed where a galaxy bends light enough that you can use galaxies as telescopes crazy what else does relativity imply that all coordinates of space-time always exist all past in all future coordinates of space-time always exist you're still getting here you're still leaving you're still being born your grandpa's being born the earth is exploding and it's all just there okay we take relativity and quantum dynamics we put them in a blender we create big bang cosmology we go back to the beginning of all things you get to a singularity in a singularity time and space cease to have any distinction the four fundamental forces of physics become just one unified force matter and energy cease to have any distinction the distinction's already pretty fuzzy e equals empty squared for a reason the kind the consciousness we talk about is nonsense from those perspectives so anything that we could call being itself or the ground of being or the source of all doesn't experience a sequential linear consciousness by the way go see the film arrival if you want to get a little clue of what a non-linear consciousness might be i can't say anymore i'll spoil it i will say i got out of that movie and for like four hours couldn't get my illusion of self back so even as i started that night's ass science mic i felt like i was reading from a script i was reading in real time like i couldn't see ahead but i was like i'm just going through the motions is real weird and so i think suffering is uniquely linked it's a cause and effect and a temporal perspective at some point suffering ceases to be suffering does that mean god architects suffering i don't know maybe god just protons and neutrons um so i don't know if suffering has like an ordained reason that makes me uncomfortable i know that suffering has a response and i know that some of the most beautiful things we see are when people respond to the suffering of others and address it or when people in response to their own suffering seek to alleviate the suffering of others i think we call that the gospel [Music] so i don't have like the problem of evil solved other than to say it might be the philosophical equivalent of who would win in a fight between superman and batman superman [Applause] only this crowd with conviction batman um spoiler alert superman and batman don't exist they exist within an imaginary reference frame kind of like human consciousness um and so i wonder if sometimes like where does suffering come from is our equivalent of who would win in a fight you know what i mean it's it's one of the notes of our perception of time that is incredibly illusionary what was the second part of your question i got so fascinated with the first part demons okay yeah i don't know i i i get really into renee gerard's memetic satan and memetic evil i got kind into memetic demons for a while like demons are basically uh memetic software running on civilization somebody went ooh so this is heady crowd my mom thinks demons are like beings and i've been watching i'm afraid to say this because some people in the industry listen to this podcast i've been watching i don't watch a lot of tv but i can't read on flights anymore since i had the motorcycle accident because i will like throw up in the little bag so and i can only stare at the back of the seat for so long it turns out i can watch um as long as i'm on my phone if i use my ipad or my laptop i can watch video stuff so uh i fly enough that i've watched everything in the delta in-flight entertainment every film so i just started watching stuff i don't even like just to watch things and i came across this tv show called lucifer on usa and at first i was like this show is terrible but then like they kept wrestling with like existential ideas about demons and and satan and i was like let's be honest i'm really into this stuff so it's like a police procedural where like satan is on vacation like he left hell and he like helps a cop solve crimes i've watched all of season one and i just downloaded season two to watch on my flights and uh it's so some parts of it so unbearable but then other parts like our brains the story is better if the mimetic has personhood so sometimes like my guilty pleasure is to imagine a world in which angels and demons aren't memetic and sometimes empirically it doesn't describe the universe any better describes the universe worse in my lived experiences sometimes the problem of evil seems more solvable if evil is not just memetic now that has really interesting frankly terrible theological implications it's also my history you know i one of the la people stood up and said i know you don't have an axiom for demons he said but for some of us that have grown up in marginalized groups the only answer we have to some of these problems is to think about demons in a literal way and it's like it's pretty privileged for you in an enlightenment context to dismiss demons with a wave of the hand when that that describes my life really well and uh so my empiricist goes [ \_\_ ] and then like the greater part of my being that is primarily concerned with empathy and the suffering of others says ah i'll watch another season of lucifer and and yeah that's all i got i'm not i'm gonna put a bow on that one i think we're just gonna leave that where it is and give a really unsatisfying [Music] uh okay let's my name is mindy and i've actually listened to one of your podcasts ever but um a buddy sent it to me and he said you're going to cry you got to listen to it i did and he kept texting me i was like goddammit okay i'll listen to it was it the liturgist or science mike um the liturgist the lyricist okay yeah it was the one about our slogan is you gotta cry sometimes yeah you cry i cried but um it was the one about church and the magic show if i can change my life listen to it if you haven't my parents are listening to it steve rollins is good miracle i'm going to start stop cursing um my question is actually around this election and women and one of my highlight moments was beth moore questioning the church leadership in this country and then my worst moment was all of them doing this and voting for trump um i want to ask about consent and kind of where that fits in your evolutionary thinking of the dialogue around consent and the idea that like boys will be boys and and kind of sociologically where that has landed us today and i'm shaking because it this is a it's so personal yeah and it's so personal for the women in our country right now the women are churches who have just been [ \_\_ ] over yeah um i am so proud to be episcopalian i'm so proud to have female priests in my life and there's a lot of people who can't handle that so i'd love to just hear your perspective on it evolutionary but then also the future of the church and women's voices and pray god give me hope yes thank you uh evolution is no help in this one evolution is no help at all evolutionary speaking honoring consent not all that helpful uh we look at the animal kingdom very typically the way males prove suitability in reptiles and mammals is to be the biggest most aggressive male who frightens injures or kills all the smaller males and then proves his worthiness to mate in species where males have higher mass than females non-consensual reproduction is common many bird species females are larger than males so in that case the bird first wins to either display or trial a battle and then still has to serenade the female because it comes down to it she'll whip his ass right so um sorry i got a little southern for a second uh but evolution rewards behavior civilization does not which means behavior x is natural is never an ethical defense if you want to go natural rape is a perfectly natural animal behavior and this is an instance where it's actually good we don't consider ourselves animals because we have the ability to model empathy we have the the an uncanny ability now dogs have it too to imagine what another's perspective is like and this has created ethics now we're not the only animals that have culturally considered non-genetic ethics chimps have it bonobos have it apes have it a lot of large brains social mammals have learned ethical behaviors we have a higher responsibility than other animals because of our greater ability to model reality in our minds we've made incredible moral progress as a species it's actually unprecedented evolutionarily speaking bonobos are lovely animals behaviorally compared to chimps but it's just because they developed in a resource an environment where there's just a lot more food and water there's no reason for bonobos to resort to blows and violence to eliminate conflict there's plenty of food for everybody which is why they resolve their differences with sexual behaviors um evolution rewarded chimps when they were more brutal because food's more scarce there's a lesson in there by the way those are our two closest relatives genetically speaking so arguably the most dangerous mammal on this planet is homo sapien and our nearest relatives have radically different behaviors primarily described by access to food and water maybe there's something constructive there in geopolitics and political machinations how do you domesticate humans you keep them well fed so when it comes to consent the way i make ethical decisions protecting the consent of others protects my own consent so uh i'm a beta male if it came to a serious fight i would lose to almost everyone in the room right i mean i have these look at my just look at my arms there's it's bone and skin right i have no upper body strength um so it behooves me to cultivate a civilization in which just because you have bigger biceps you don't get your way we make ethical decisions by people's consent is honored to the point where it violates another's consent and what should our consent be permitted to do it shouldn't produce suffering for others um and that is actually remarkably self-serving moral philosophy because if i work hard to protect women's right over their body autonomy and consent i'm also protecting mine if i say what we should all do is make a contract together that just because someone's bigger than me they don't get to take my lunch that ends up benefiting me it ends up benefiting the biggest guy in the room because that means three people who are stronger than he is can't turn around and take his lunch the problem is the store senioritis we describe senioritis as a thing and it becomes a thing we describe male sexuality as an uncontrollable force and what does it become an uncontrollable force an amazing thing when we brain scan men and women there's no difference in their response to visual imagery and arousal there's no difference it's completely made up men you have every bit as much control over your sex drive as any woman the language we use matters so the first thing [Applause] i can prove it if what they say about male willpower is true i would be in in jail right now i've been arrested why i would walk by a pizza buffet and just started grabbing pizza i really i'm 38 years old i don't remember uncontrolled sexual desire that's way in the rearview mirror but when i see pizza something happens to me you know what i mean like last night i'd already had dinner i was at a youth camp and then at 9 30 they sent out pizzas and i was like damn it right i just so we start by telling men you have agency we told women they have agency they believe it do you know what's funny you go back to the victorian area era do you know what the normative understanding of sexuality was men are prudes who have sex to reproduce and women are uncontrollable sexual fans and we have to keep them under control or they'll just mate constantly that's history i didn't make that up and then we just like reverse those roles both are bad maybe it's worse to convince the larger bodied primates they don't have control over themselves so we start by telling a better story about sexuality second i could be wrong but my intention is to never go to a church again where all the pastors are met i'm voting with my butt in a pew my pastor's name is betsy she is a light in our life uh my favorite thing in the world i love being here with you all but if i could be drinking a glass of wine at my pastor's house right now let's party and what i've noticed is like women pastors aren't there to dominate everybody they're not there to be the church's ceo they tend to actually just want to nurture and heal people it turns out a maternal energy is a beautiful thing maybe one reason i'm so into it is when i take psychological assessments of masculinity and femininity i tend to be more feminine and masculine and why do i say that on stage just so guys can quit being scared of being identified as feminine just because i'm feminine doesn't mean i'm attracted to men and if i was attracted to men okay i don't care you know what i mean like let's get rid of all these taboos that are around our identity and our sexuality they're not helpful this repression creates violence so i voted for a female president with pride i have a female pastor with pride in my life i am intentionally going to subvert patriarchy by supporting women in every possible position of leadership now some people say well whoa whoa whoa whoa we have got to fill leadership positions based on merit so are you telling me that only straight white men have merit you're telling me in a country that's mostly female it's logical that corporate boards and politicians are mostly male that means your worldview is inherently sexist if you think it's normative that through merit primarily white people are in leadership positions that means your worldview is inherently racist if merit is truly the driver of our decisions in placing people in occupations and leadership then our occupations and leadership should be representative of the population from which it's drawn otherwise i'm sorry you are failing to acknowledge your implicit bias it's just statistics the last thing i'm going to do is cheer on people like beth moore who in the let's be honest what's it do to my podcast numbers every time i say i'm for feminism i pick up 5 000 listeners because of my audience but when beth moore or gin hat makers stand for social justice issues they're actually putting their ass on the line in a way i'm not i mean if i drink a glass of red wine and say an f-bomb during the podcast people cheer i have a different audience people on the other side of this stuff but when my older brothers and sisters faithful servants within those political religious and spiritual traditions stand up for justice i am going to affirm them more loudly than anyone else i am never going to say what took you so long i'm going to say welcome and we are so glad you're here because we are in this together it does mean no good if only women in progressive urban areas experience equality it does be no good if only gay men and lesbians and people of color in progressive areas experience equality none of us are free until all of us are free including in conservative rural america [Music] thanks for taking my question i was like bouncing up and down in my chair i have like 25 questions but um i'll limit it um so first of all thank you i uh suffered church abuse at three consecutive well not consecutive three churches out of four and um and then and also um was raped in the on a missions trip um and praise god god brought me through it and i live in rural tanzania and part of what my husband and i do is teach pastors and lay leaders how to do trauma healing counseling for people in their congregations and i so appreciate your context your contextualization of suffering as part of a spiritual experience and that has certainly been true for us my husband is kenyan and what you described as uh the white heterosexual male experience also really describes him well as a dominant as the dominant racial representative in a male-dominated society he has the exact same experience so the question i want to ask you some of the work we also do is with maternal health and my husband works with people who have albinism and one of the things that we consistently encounter is that particularly in rural africa the everything is spiritual mentality still prevails and like my brother here was talking about the demonic and and like you were saying the the like animation of evil in the form of demons and such so prevalent um but some of the things that we encounter so we're really education oriented we want to teach people scientific truth i guess is the best way to describe it some of the things we run into are like traditional birth attendance in a tribe that we work with who believe a pregnancy can go for 22 months or um something like that and it's there are reasons there are evolutionary reasons why they've developed this belief for kind of the protection of the health of the mother from what i understand but also with albinism obviously they don't understand the genetics so of course it seems like a spiritual curse or like this person is not really human um so par in some areas it seems very clear-cut that we should counter these traditional beliefs with scientific truth like in the case of albinism when it's lowering a person's value and victimizing them but in other cases like with a pregnancy situation we decided not to argue about it and we just say well a typical pregnancy is 40 weeks and move on um so as a person who is science oriented and also mystical how important is it to uh land one way or the other or what should what would you see as important factors to consider when you're trying to decide how to counter someone's traditional beliefs man uh sometimes i like to begin by stating my ignorance and the degree to which i feel utterly unqualified to weigh in on that at all i've been doing all this studying lately about uh the colonial nature of western thought and the way we think that the best thing to do is to civilize the whole world and i want to start by thanking you for not assuming the best thing to do as westernized kenya yeah i think in some ways the a lot of the troubles on that continent are literally rooted in colonialism with people sitting around a table and deciding like which country literally on a map this is yours this is mine forget the fact that people been living here since before europe was a thing i am pragmatic in where i push scientific insight so when i have friends who think the world was created in six literal days but they spend most of their time volunteering at homeless shelters your six days sound pretty awesome to me um when people say anyone who is attracted to someone of the same sex is an abomination now science would like to have a word with your religious beliefs why because your religious beliefs produce suffering and harm in others and violate their right of consent and autonomy to live their lives uh so that's generally the rubric i would use but i have a deeply americanized westernized work it actually scares me a little bit that afternoon spike and literally podcast are often downloaded in south america africa uh all over asia places where post-enlightenment western philosophy isn't normative because i'm not trying to export my assumptions and i don't have any authority to speak uh so i think the the pragmatic approach you're taking so this 22-month belief in this cultural context results in protection for women let's just let that be this belief about albinism produces real intense human suffering maybe now is the time to introduce genetics and dna and those ideas um but i would also think on those problems is there an argument that is culturally normative are there you know if it's a if it's a christian culture for example and they've accepted the authority of scripture maybe the way that a lot of us in the room don't and you can find a biblical example of why these birth conditions aren't results of a curse let lead with the bible lead with a culturally normative example the way people change their minds about things is primarily story so give them narratives that that subvert those assumptions um can we can we highlight people who have suffered from albinism in a cultural context and still contributed tremendously to social good whose parents were indisputably morally upstanding within the culture and use narrative to subvert the assumptions and then science as support but i i agree and this is probably where a place where i depart a lot from my more skeptical friends um a lot of skeptics really want to science eyes the whole world and um i don't know i've done enough reading from some pretty compelling researchers and academics that that tends to be a very violent and destructive process our belief that enlightenment thinking and civilization are the best probably the engine of climate change right science is like hey guess what we know how to get a lot of energy you just burn plankton that fossilized oh you know what else you can use split atoms and then all the only side effect is like radioactive waste that will last for tens of thousands of years no big deal you know what i mean uh oh we can feed a lot of people with industrial scale agriculture all you've got to do is cut down all your forests and raise cows who will just spew methane in the atmosphere it's awesome uh i think maybe before we start exporting science we should learn to use it more responsibly maybe then when we've learned to create scientific insights that help us live in a symbiotic state with our ecosystem now we can talk about check this out this is awesome but right now we're just like you know what what if we just blow everything up it's gonna be cool it's not so bad on venus you can melt lead on the surface of the planet it's awesome who don't want to melt lead our bodies right i'd be a pragmatist i'd focus on story and when science helps reinforce a story that protects human life use it otherwise i'm done being arrogant that western thought is best thought you [Music] well oddly enough uh we actually ran out of recording time in this episode so there were several more questions in portland man portland had a lot of great questions but the fact is we just ran out of time so this is kind of an odd post-recorded ending to an ask science mic live i am still on tour as i mentioned at the top of the show so go to finding on the waves.com slash tour to learn more about that i'd love to see you at ask science mike live i'd like to thank greg nordine for his work producing this program andrew golucky for all of his pre-production work as well as organizing our together groups if you'd like to find science mike listeners in your area just go to asksciencemike.com and click on the together icon and of course i want to thank my patrons on patreon who make the show financially possible by donating every month thank you so much for that and finally i want to thank my friend jeb for writing the beautiful and obnoxious ask science mike live theme song thanks for listening everybody and i'll talk to you next week [Music] [Applause] [Music]