#74 – Putting together a new Christian worldview

A look back at the last ten episodes and how they unpack a provocative new Christian understanding of how and why we got here.

Over the past two months, we’ve been exploring the thesis that Dr. Chris Barrigar brought to us about a year and a half ago (Episode #29 and #30). One in which God created a primordial glob of goo almost fourteen billion years ago with all kinds of physical laws built into it so that, when it exploded, would produce a universe full of energy and matter that would gradually re-organize into living beings and eventually produce organisms capable of exhibiting agape love (Ep. #64). That thesis is completely foreign to the traditional Christian/Evangelical worldview that I grew up with for forty years. I think many of our listeners will say the same.

But his thesis accelerated a train of thought that had me re-evaluating every aspect of my previous Christian faith: aka deconstruction.

In this episode, I add a few more lines and broad strokes to more clearly show the trajectory of that great cosmic explosion, and how the last episodes add color and shading to that rough sketch. We’ve brought in a stream of experts … people with PhD degrees in Astronomy and Physics (Ep. #65), Biology (Ep. #66), Genetics (Ep. #70 and Ep. #73), Ecology and Evolution (Ep. #71), and Anthropology (Ep. #72) to unpack that trajectory step-by-step.

And to those for whom it matters: the majority of those experts are devout Christians who are quite vocal about their faith. And their love for science, and communicating both to the general public.

They speak for a very large community of scientists  — again, many of whom have a Christian worldview — who collectively agree with every step on that trajectory. Well, all but the first … some might quibble about whether it was a Divine Being who created the glob of goo, or whether the glob of goo just … spontaneously … created itself.

I now see things quite differently from how I once did in those traditional Evangelical days. And yet I still call it a fully Christian worldview. A revised worldview. One that’s new and imprrr…. well, perhaps I won’t be that provocative.

Perhaps this means I need to also revise a few other aspects of my new evolving Christian worldview? To that end, we also provide a glimpse of what the next five or ten episodes will bring (“five or ten” because we have a track-record of letting episode ideas split into several parts). We’re going to bring in more experts … each with PhD degrees, and who have spent decades in their respective areas of study … who will begin with these evolving agape-capable beings and tell us about the origin and evolution of …

• the human mind and soul
• morality and religion
• Judaism
• the Jewish Messiah
• the New Testament
• the cosmic/divine view of Christ
• the afterlife
• an emergent Christian worldview

Every week I conclude these posts with the same kind of question: “Tell us what you think”. This week I’m particularly interested to hear how this episode and/or the previous ten have impacted your thinking … whether or not you hold a Christian worldview. We all can learn from each other.

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