ASM083 Mailbag

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well hello everybody uh we're gonna do a different kind of science mic thing this week if this is your first time listening this podcast is called ask science mike and it's a weekly podcast where i answer questions about science faith and life and we generally have a theme song and a format four questions per show submitted by the audience via asksciencemike.com or the hashtag asksciencemike but this week i thought we would just have a chat and just kind of talk about some things um that are in fact based on questions but aren't in the usual format and here's why my travel schedule is nuts and i don't want to take breaks from putting the show out there because i enjoy our time together i enjoy this kind of weekly ritual but even this show is being recorded at six o'clock in the evening on the monday that it usually comes out uh so here's here's what we're going to do from now until december we're going to change the ask science mike schedule as science white comes out every monday and now ask science mike is going to come out most mondays usually in the morning and i think that's the only way we can do this i just have too many stops on the book tour uh and this weekend well last week the book launched so we had the book launch party which went amazing really good all the people i saw there and then we had the liturgist gathering in denver which was amazing we completely sold out of books uh on top of the fact that it was one of the most moving experiences i've had in my life there's something special about this community that has kind of assembled around the liturgist podcast and asks science mike and when we all get together it's amazing and i'd love to tell you could join us in chicago for the liturgies gathering but it's completely sold out but there is a waiting list if you want to get on that in case people cancel and don't come then you'll get an email saying you can buy a ticket but the literature's gathering in denver's already passed we had great uh great attendance it was a full room and the liturgists gathering in chicago is completely sold out man that's crazy now i do have a bunch of stops coming up on the book tour including a couple of new ones so i'm actually going to go to findinggodonthewaves.com tour right now so i can see them because my memory is not that good um so uh september the 27th is a tuesday and i'll be in wayne pennsylvania at something called giving doubt a voice the new copernican empowerment dialogues and that's going to happen in conjunction with eastern university now that's open not just to students but anyone who wants to attend and peter enz is going to be there that'll be a joint appearance with me and peter enz we did that once in california and it was a really good time so i'd love to see you there uh september 30th i'll be at y christian in chicago illinois uh that event is also sold out but if you're already going to be in chicago that's great love to see you there october 2nd i'll be in new york city with trinity grace church for teach us neuroscience to pray a talk i'm going to give with a q a on the science of prayer i'll also be preaching at the sunday morning service at trinity grace tribeca uh so you've been asked about a new york stop yeah it's happening sunday october 2nd uh and then october the 7th i'll be in nashville tennessee for ask science mike live tickets are available right now it's selling great so be a good crowd there uh after that october 14th i'll do an ask science mic live in columbus ohio tickets are selling really well for that as well so i'd love to see you there tickets still available for both of those so go ahead and grab those i don't want them to sell out and you not be able to make it then october 18th i'll be in dunwoody georgia which is right by atlanta that's actually a free event so that's not even ticketed so you can join us there at dunwoody united methodist church on october 18th and october 21st like i said is the literature's gathering that's sold out and then october 25th is the clergy gathering in fruitland park florida for united methodist clergy so if you're a united methodist pastor and want to come hang out with me and some other friends including k money the bishop ken carter and uh my pastor pastor betsy will let zirdin we'd love to hang out with you at the clergy gathering so those are the stops for september and october i do want to let you know one new stop in addition to the la stops we will have an orange county that's just not on the website yet we've added on november 21st just added today to coma washington for you seattle tacoma folks that event is on the website right now tickets are available wow uh so i'll be going a lot of places i'd love to see you i'll actually see all of you more than i'll see my wife and children uh for the next couple of months which is an honor truly uh so let's talk about a couple of things well the book came out last week finding god the waves and i promise this episode is not just a commercial we're going to get into some substantive issues here but i really have to hit the pause button because this has been a crazy week and i have to say thank you if you listen to i think it was last week's show or the week before i don't remember um i it was the week before because of the hurricane i just read from the book and i kind of was honest about the fear i felt leading up to the book and um i just worried nobody was gonna buy this thing honestly i know that's ridiculous you're gonna mike you're crazy i am crazy when it comes to uh things like this because it's a weird space it's a weird space to like try to create a work that genuinely is intended to provide comfort to people and genuinely specifically designed to be extremely honest and authentic and to address some type of human suffering that also gets sold on shelves it's a space i'm learning to navigate right and so i feel really confident when i do things like the podcast and my blog and uh that just kind of go out there and and are available for anyone but there's there's sort of an economic thing involved in the book and well it sold it's did really well it's a good week i don't have sales numbers specifically and when i have them i don't know if i'm allowed to share them but uh the book sold really well it was the number one bestselling book in the science and religion category on amazon among others it's remained you know really well ranked on amazon all week and that's all you um i want to thank everyone who rated that book on amazon already including people that read it like the night it came out that's incredible and reviewed it the next day and obviously i've seen twitter i've seen facebook a lot of you are posting about finding on the ways and telling your friends uh boy i am completely overwhelmed i've literally just been crying multiple times per day because i feel so loved by all of you can you believe that and you know it happened at the launch party it happened at the liturgist gathering people will walk up to me uh nervous literally shaking and nervous to meet me and it's so funny because i am so excited to meet you because i have such an affection for all of you you're my people i'm not a platform building media figure i am finding the people i just want to meet anyway through this work and so don't feel nervous when you come to an event about meeting me if you do it's okay i'll just you know we'll hug it out whatever but i'm so encouraged by all of you that it makes me cry i cried several times at the book signings because people would say kind things so i love you all i really do now one other little thing um what do you do if you go to your bookstore and the book's not there this is something i didn't expect some bookstores around the country and especially in cities where ask science mike or littlejuice podcast gets downloaded a lot have actually sold out of books and sold out quickly so a couple of things one my publisher printed tons of copies of the book so there is no book shortage don't worry about that two bookstores generally restock every single week okay so if you're go it's not on the shelf uh first go ask they might have it on a different shelf because it just came out it might be in new releases it might be in biography and memoir instead of religion and spirituality or christian living or whatever section they have and two they may have some in the back that they haven't brought out yet so don't leave without talking to a clerk or a store associate and finally you can order a book in most bookstores and they'll hold it for you so it could be possible if if people keep talking about the books so kindly that you know bookstores sometimes only order three to five copies at a time and those can go pretty fast so if you want to make sure you have a copy and your bookstores in your town are all sold out no big deal just order it and they'll hold one for you so i have gotten some emails from people upset they can't get the book and i don't want anyone to feel upset because they can't get the book bookstores love people who buy books and they will go out of their way to help you but for that to happen uh you do have to talk to a store employee someone that works there but if you do that they're going to tell you the best way to get that book in your hand as quickly as possible so i wanted to say that we already talked about the literature just gathering okay here's kind of the meat of what i'd like to talk about this week uh because it gets to the heart of what this work i'm doing is um i had two i had a lot of interviews i did for the book i want to first of all thank you to all the bloggers and podcasters who've already shared finding god in the ways of their audiences you'll see me uh sharing all those in the coming weeks over facebook and twitter i'm trying not to do it all at the same time so i don't flood my facebook and twitter page with interviews no one will read if i do it all at once nobody cares if i space it out maybe you'll find they're interesting because there were some really skilled interviewers who got to completely unique pieces of information i've never shared anywhere else as part of this but this week in particular two pieces um fit what i'd like to talk about today i did a piece where i did an interview with the religious news service which they ended up titling something like uh science mike says christians aren't stupid and atheists aren't evil and i really enjoyed that interview because we got into the nuts and bolts of what i care about especially in the way christians and skeptics talk to each other and understand each other one of the main goals i had for my book was giving christians and skeptics a better mutual understanding and better language to use when they talk with each other and and that piece came out today so i haven't seen a lot of feedback but it really went into uh what the book is about and even further in some ways and then the second thing for the first time in my life on sunday an article written by me ran in a major american newspaper and that was in the washington post and you can find it online i'll have it in the link i'll have a link to both of those articles in the show notes this week so you can go to sciencemite.com and read the actual article but this piece i wrote in the washington post really blew up my email inbox which was surprising to me because everyone says newspapers are dead and i got like a record number of email it was comparable to when ask science mike launched and when i appeared on pete holmes you made it weird that level of email so i've been reading all those messages thousands and thousands of messages and they all came down to a few different points and i'd like to address those on the podcast because i can't reply to all of those emails but these might be questions you have uh i kind of got pushed back from two directions primarily i got pushbacks from atheists and skeptics and i got pushback from conservative christians uh those were by far the two largest groups who uh were had pushback now contrary to what i get from all of you the regular listeners of these podcasts this feedback wasn't all thoughtful so the people who like sent me crazy conspiracy theories or told me only bleeping idiots can believe in god uh or sent me 20-page conspiracy theory filled notes i'm just not gonna even reply to those even through the podcast what i'm talking about i want to address is people who seem to be about as thoughtful uh in their responses as what i'm accustomed to with all of you and that makes me think since they're intelligent like you you may have questions like they do which is why i'm going to answer these so point one really common from atheists was saying that i was never an atheist that i don't understand what an atheist is and so i was never an atheist i was maybe agnostic as something people said a lot this is very common and not the first time that's been a refrain on the internet that people would say uh scientific you are never an atheist because many atheists have a hard time believing that someone could do the processing work of just truly believing there is no god and then believing in any form of god again so i'd like to address that i was an atheist that's not a marketing gimmick that's not a misunderstanding the accepted definition of an atheist is a person who lacks any belief in a god or gods and when i was an atheist i lacked any belief in a god or gods there's something called the dawkins scale that richard dawkins came up with to describe atheism uh and i'm actually gonna i can't remember the calibration of it so i'm googling it right now to remember what is the maximum value towards atheism i think it's a 7 but i want to be sure yeah it was originally a seven point range so on the dawkins scale you can be someone who's like i definitely believe in god which would be a one or i'm absolutely convinced there is no such thing as god i'm a hundred percent uh 100 percent convinced that there is no god and on that scale i would have been a 6.9 not a seven because i think a seven is not a reasonable position um and i think richard dawkins actually agrees with that he's also i think a 6.9 atheist on his own scale there's always a chance further evidence could appear so when i was an atheist i was really an atheist which is why my faith is so different than the faith of my childhood because i remain a skeptic so i thought maybe that would lead me to an another piece of feedback and i'm going to quote a sentence from the article that i wrote and it says but while skepticism has offered an essential critique of religion at its worst it doesn't answer the human need for purpose and connection the way faith does and a lot of of uh email came in including that line and even some atheist friends of mine quoted that line back to me and said that you know i don't understand what's you know what i'm talking about because skepticism is a worldview exactly so let's let's describe a couple of terms here that will be helpful in discussions between people of faith and skeptics an atheist is a person who lacks belief in any god or gods a skeptic is a person who tests ideas using evidence right that's what a skeptic is a skeptic doesn't take any claim at face value skeptics evaluate claims based on evidence and a humanist is a person who believes that humans are responsible for the good of humanity and that there is no supernatural deity safeguarding the species okay atheist skeptic and humanist are different things and when i wrote that piece i intentionally used the word skepticism and not humanism and some of my friends say that's not fair but i think there are people who are skeptics but not humanists or are humanists whose primary means of relating to the world is skepticism and in that context i actually would defend my sentence skepticism does offer an essential critique of religion and it's worse but the people whose lives are solely devoted to tearing down religious belief but not to advancing the human species through humanism i think clinically are demonstrated to live less fulfilled lives and to have less connection with other people so i think that's reasonable there's more nuance that could have been there but when you only have 800 words there's not a lot of room to kind of kind of tease those things out so another thing i got tons of pushback here was on this sentence i also discovered that belief in god affects the human brain in profound ways believing in god can lower your stress levels boost empathy and compassion and even improve concentration and uh atheists say i was misleading with that sentence because studies have also shown that uh buddhist meditation mindfulness meditation and other forms of expression can have similar effects which i totally agree with and had no intent to mis mislead uh just because i specifically called out belief in god and not every other thing um that can affect the brain in a similar way does there was no intent to mislead there i've never made any exclusive claim in fact most of the time when i have more space including in the book i tell people that all kinds of meditation can improve the brain now there are some unique aspects to religious meditation neurologically speaking and especially in relation to the parietal lobe but in terms of empathy compassion and concentration and lower stress levels absolutely buddhist meditation completely effective just as effective as christian meditation and the kind of atheistic meditation that sam harris would advocate in the book waking up has similar benefits remember i don't make exclusive religious truth claims that is not who i am i'm not trying to market myself that way but i do specifically talk about the scientific implications of christian faith in practice because i place myself within the christian tradition okay so that's uh the pushback from skeptics the questions from skeptics you were never an atheist do you misunderstand skepticism and do you um are you misleading people about meditation pretty fair i'm gonna all those are really fair critiques um and then here's some things christians said when you take such a scientific approach to faith aren't you dismissing the importance of faith and perhaps even are you dismissing god it's a totally fair critique the reason i talk about scientific justifications for religious faith and for the christian faith are for whom people faith has lost any meaning if you have looked at the world skeptically long enough you have basically eliminated your brain's capacity to experience god independent of a truth claim that god exists i know from my own experience from sociological data and from talking to literally thousands of people that that sometimes that's a painful process that some people want to believe in god but can't and for those people my scientific justification of the the practice of christian faith can help them find comfort find community even find some form of faith in god again so if you're a very conservative religious person and you're troubled with my theology i hope you would at least understand that i helped many people enter into some form of fellowship of jesus that would otherwise not be able to because the leap to you know calvinist theology is just way way too far from the ledge of empiricism but it's also important to understand that in my work i don't have a place i'm taking people you know i was on uh the life after god podcast with ryan bell which i highly recommend but that upset a few of my christian followers because they heard me say i'm perfectly content if people find my work and end up as atheists and that's true i'm not an evangelist i'm not an apologist i'm not a pastor i am a person who tries to help people make peace and for some people the only way they can make peace with god is to let the idea of god go completely and i i'm fine with that i don't think that's bad or unhealthy i think if there is like a personal intelligent god if that would be a way that we describe god that turns out to be accurate i don't think that god is threatened if people have trouble believing i don't think that god would be in that god would be insecure about that and i also think that you can make a reasonable philosophical scientific case that there's not enough evidence to believe in a supernatural god that's a totally reasonable thing that i accept and i have found frankly that i'm more successful in not only having conversation but relationship not only having a relationship but continued community with a diversity of people by holding that posture i'll be honest i love jesus like i am nuts about jesus and i believe in a bodily resurrection of jesus i believe that jesus was an incarnate uh chart part of a trinitarian god who was incarnate of the christ who rose from the dead but i also know that's an unscientific belief i can't prove that i can't prove that at all so i don't try i admit the absurdity of my position the the grounding and rooting it has in mysticism and i admit that i can't say that's a better faith claim than any other faith thing but a funny thing happens when i stop trying to make jesus an argument i'm going to win more people are open to the conversation now to be clear that doesn't mean i'm intentionally misleading people to have a conversation i'm some kind of evangelist what i'm saying is i want to learn as much about the world as i can from as many people as i can and it seems like today people appreciate that kind of posture and humility and when they figure out you really want to know about them and you really want to learn from them they repeat that posture back you know i think i think we spent too long in american protestantism especially trying to sell people jesus and you know i don't think jesus was meant to be sold door to door i think jesus was meant to be followed now certainly we have biblical examples of really in uh profound conversations between the disciples and the apostles and people in their society um but and i do try to have those conversations i of well i i do it every week on a podcast called ask science mike uh but i have a basic respect for the dignity and the humanity of everyone i talk to and the validity of their beliefs their beliefs are just as valid as mine now that doesn't mean all ideas are equally valid uh when we want to test ideas we use an arbiter called evidence and that's exactly my point evidence you know tends to equally disfavor all faith claims all types of revelation so that's the heart of not only the book finding god the ways but the heart of my work entirely is meeting people where they are and having honest agenda-free conversations which is why i call my work the creation of a safe space if you believe that there is no god i'm not going to try to convince you that there is one if you believe that there is a personal spiritual intelligent god you're a strong theist basically i'm not going to try to convince you that there is not if you're a pantheist if you're a spiritualist wherever you are i want to know you i want to talk to you and i want to learn from you and i respect you it's interesting to me conservative christians and atheists make up about the same percentage of my audience and i think sometimes i can't tell which group gets their gears ground more by what i say uh but you have my commitment i'm always going to one offer the best science i can two be open to critique and correction and three host a conversation that is as safe as it can be for as many people as possible hopefully we'll have a normal show again next week thanks for listening to i guess 30 minutes of just a conversation about the book launch and some of the feedback and i can't wait to talk to you all next week