Recovering Evangelicals

Many Christians will say: “I’m OK with evolution, in general …. as long as you leave humans out of it”. It’s only been four weeks since we summarized our discussions in this podcast series that began four months ago (episode #74). But during the four weeks since then, we’ve crossed that line: we’ve added humans to the list of evolved beings. For many people, this will raise all sorts of very unsettling questions. For them, it’s a game-changer. A step too far. For them, humans were “created in God’s image”, so they can’t possibly have evolved from ancestors shared by the chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans of today… as well as the Neanderthals, Denisovans, H. floresiensis (aka “Hobbit Man”), and many other Homo species of the past. So we need to carefully pull together the various threads from the last four weeks. We’ve learned that: the evidence for our descent from those ancient hominids is undeniable: it’s written in our ancestral bones in the ground, and in our genes (episodes #72 and #73); those ancestors began to develop a sense of the future, of mortality, of the afterlife, and became self-aware (episode #77); they evolved a mind and soul, or “soulishness” (episode #75) they began to work with symbolism, abstract thought, and language (episode #77); they evolved a “hypersensitive agency detection system” and a “promiscuous teleology”, which together form a powerful engine for generating religions, as well as a morality and a religious streak (#76 and #78); they began to create statues (of deities?), flutes (music, a deeply spiritual thing), and carry out ritual burials (episode #77); they were showing compassion and a peace-loving nature (episode #77); at the very distant edge of recorded history, we see religions popping up all over the world … Babylonians, Egyptians, Stonehenge, the Mayans, Aztecs, the Asian religions, and the aboriginal peoples of Australia and North America. The evidence for the biological, cognitive, behavioral … and religious … evolution of humans is undeniable! The question is: what should Christian believers do about that? Does this naturalistic explanation for the origin of religion invalidate a religious belief? Three of the four scholars we talked to are committed Christians themselves: they do research in these areas because they see themselves exploring the human-Divine relationship. Who’s to say that this evolutionary journey wasn’t divinely inspired? That our tendency for promiscuous teleology got us looking for the Divine, and the hypersensitive agency detection system helped us find the Divine. Does this scientific view of human evolution impact our “traditional Christian worldview”? Of course it does! I can no longer see the arc of the human story as a downward one: that we started in perfection, and with an intimate relationship with the Divine, but then fell downward from both. Instead, I see the arc as an upward one: humans climbing up towards that perfection and that relationship with the Divine through a divinely inspired search. And we’re still climbing! As always, tell me what you think … To help grow this podcast, please like, share and post a rating/review at your favorite podcast catcher. Subscribe here to get updates each time a new episode is posted, and find us on Twitter or Facebook. Back to Recovering Evangelicals home-page and the podcast archive

Hypersensitive agency detection and promiscuous teleology in human brains make a powerful religion-making machine Millions of years of evolution have produced a powerful neural reflex within animals: we immediately assume there’s a being behind every rustling in the grass. We see faces in puffy clouds and random patterns on the ground. If we hear a sound in a dark room, we cautiously ask: “who‘s there?” Some refer to this reflex as a hypersensitive agency detector. Is this reflex behind humanity’s tendency to find divine beings all around us: gods in nature … demons causing bizarre psychological or medical problems … dead relatives materializing in the corner of our bedroom … anthropomorphizing our pets? We humans also have a tendency to identify meaning and purpose behind events and phenomena. Accidents and diseases are a punishment for some transgression. People suffering a misfortune claim to “have bad karma” and ask questions like: “why did this happen to me?” … as if there’s a reasonable answer to that. Mushrooms growing in a circular pattern are called a “fairy ring”. We see something unusual and we quickly come up with a story to explain it, including who did it and why. This cognitive tendency has been referred to as “promiscuous teleology”. Put these two ingredients together, and you have a very powerful religion-making machine. It explains why humans all around the globe, all through recorded history, and from every demographic slice of the pie, all have different religions. Is this natural built-in mechanism out of control in people who are hyperreligious … superstitious … worried about demon-possession? Is this natural built-in mechanism broken in people who call themselves atheists? Does this naturalistic explanation for religion de-legitimize religious belief? Or were we designed with this built-in mechanism to help us find the Divine? Could God have used these to make agape-capable being in the same way he used the Big Bang … thermodynamics … quantum physics …. stellar, chemical and biological evolution … cognitive development? As always, tell us what you think … To find more about our guest, Dr. Justin Barrett, go to the web-page for his new professional outlet … Blueprint 1543 … as well as to a video library in which he explains a variety of aspects of cognitive anthropology. To help grow this podcast, please like, share and post a rating/review at your favorite podcast catcher. Subscribe here to get updates each time a new episode is posted, and find us on Twitter or Facebook. Back to Recovering Evangelicals home-page and the podcast archive

Signs of symbolism, abstract thinking, compassion, and even a religious streak becoming visible in hominids hundreds of thousands of years ago. We talked to Dr. Marc Kissel (PhD, Anthropology) about his work looking at the evolution of higher cognitive functions in ancient hominids — our ancestors  — hundreds of thousands of years ago. They were a lot smarter than many modern people give them credit for: they were skilled at turning flint rocks into arrowheads the controlled use of fire … have you ever tried to start a fire without modern tools (matches; paper; fuel; knives; axes)? they made “superglue” to attach their arrowheads to wooden shafts, through a carefully controlled combustion of birch bark. Envisioning the transformation of a rock into an arrowhead … a pile of logs into a fire … birch bark into glue … requires forethought, planning, abstract thinking, and intelligence. And they passed on the details of their technology to their descendants … and to surrounding tribes. This not only takes intelligence and memory, but probably also some kind of language. And then there are other signs of advanced cognitive thinking that could be the earliest seeds of something even more surprising, and quite controversial: Scratch marks and engravings on rocks, snail shells, or ostrich egg shells: were these also some kind of primitive language? Symbols? Paintings of hands on cave walls: was this their way of saying “Grog was here”? Statues and figurines of little beings … idols? Ritualized burials, complete with jewelry … an early belief in the afterlife? Evidence that flowers were left around the buried body … was this for the benefit of the dead relative moving into the afterlife … or a primitive form of the living relatives grieving their loss? flutes made from bird bones … music? Music has always been deeply spiritual for modern humans. Language, abstract thinking, symbolism, a belief in the afterlife, and music are all key ingredients in all major religions around the world today. Could these ancient hominids have been forming a religious streak deep within them … flexing a religious muscle in their brains … for hundreds of thousands of years before we modern humans descended from them and cultivated those religious buds into full bloom? Marc also told us about his work looking at how ancient hominids were exceptionally compassionate and peace-loving, quite different from the aggressive, murderous brutes that we tend to make them out to be. They took care of their wounded, and of members who were too old to take care of themselves. They worked together, collaborated, and built societies together. Is all this starting to sound like the imminent arrival of the agape-capable beings we’ve been talking so much about? As always, tell us what you think … To find more about Dr. Marc Kissel, visit his faculty web-page or his personal web-page. To help grow this podcast, please like, share and post a rating/review at your favorite podcast catcher. Subscribe here to get updates each time a new episode is posted, and find us on Twitter or Facebook. Back to Recovering Evangelicals home-page and the podcast archive

Evolution produces organisms who find more and more ways to work with each other to survive: the origin of the agape love we’ve been talking about? As soon as life appeared on earth roughly four billion years ago, its survival was driven by two opposing forces. One was entirely self-oriented, and commanded things like: kill or be killed steal in order to survive fear and hate “the other” think only about self The second force was other-oriented. It found strategic value in cooperating, and promoted very different outcomes: live in symbiosis (at the cellular level [mitochondria; chloroplasts] and at the whole organism level [far too many examples to cite here]) mutual interdependence  altruism and compassion “it’s better to snuggle for survival than to struggle for survival” These two forces were operating long before living organisms developed a level of self-awareness that we would call consciousness, and continued as those life forms progressed into higher and higher cognitive levels. Dr. Jeffrey Schloss will talk about how these two subliminal driving forces rose to the conscious level in our emerging agape-capable beings … the newest branch on the evolutionary tree of life … hominids. We’ll also look at hominids as inherently teleologists (we see a purpose in/for everything) with a twitchy agency detection (we sense beings lurking everywhere) and pattern recognition (we connect dots that aren’t there). More importantly, we’ll see how those characteristics, together with some powerful cognitive abilities (language; memory; abstract thinking and symbolism), helped us hominids begin to develop a religious streak. As always, tell us what you think … To find more about Dr. Jeffrey Schloss, go to his webpages at Westmont or at Biologos or at the Faraday Institute. To help grow this podcast, please like, share and post a rating/review at your favorite podcast catcher. Subscribe here to get updates each time a new episode is posted, and find us on Twitter or Facebook. Back to Recovering Evangelicals home-page and the podcast archive

A discussion about that point in our evolutionary journey when humans acquired the abilities to experience … “a soul”? At this point in our unfolding story, life has appeared on earth and produced countless different species of increasing complexity, a few of whom are beginning to exhibit characteristics and abilities that would make them good candidates for the endpoint we’ve been anticipating all along: beings capable of abstract thought, a sense of the Divine, and agape-love. One step in this evolution involves the acquisition of something some people call “a soul”. We talked to Dr. Warren Brown, a clinical psychologist and Director of the Travis Research Institute, about how the complex interconnectedness of the human brain sets the stage for the emergence of what he calls “soulishness.” He prefers this term over “soul” in order to avoid endorsing a world view referred to as Substance Dualism: the idea that the soul is an immaterial “thing” that rides in our material bodies. We’ve talked at length about this worldview and its limitations in a previous episode (#10), and won’t repeat that here. Dr. Brown first defines soulishness as the property of experiencing relatedness to other people, to ourselves, to our pets … even to God. He then tells us about the neural mechanisms which enable that experience of connectedness, how infants grow naturally into this experience, how we develop tools and resources which extend that sense of connectedness beyond our own bodies, and describes a variety of brain injuries and diseases that he’s studied which interfere with this ability or property of feeling connected. All of this discussion sets the stage for a little bit of wild speculation about what might have needed to happen in our evolutionary history to open up the possibility for our hominid ancestors to begin to experience soulishness. Others might say this is the point in our journey when humans acquired a soul. As always, tell us what you think … To find more about Dr Warren Brown, see his faculty web-page, and at the Travis Research Institute. To help grow this podcast, please like, share and post a rating/review at your favorite podcast catcher. Subscribe here to get updates each time a new episode is posted, and find us on Twitter or Facebook. Back to Recovering Evangelicals home-page and the podcast archive

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. Subscribe here to get updates each time a new episode is posted, and find us on Twitter or Facebook. To help grow this podcast, please like, share and post a rating/review at your favorite podcast catcher. Back to Recovering Evangelicals home-page and the podcast archive

A geneticist explains to us how we have a common ancestor with chimpanzees, and a more recent one with Neanderthals. As he put it: “Neanderthals were us!” photo: Knut Finstermeier and Michael Hofreiter (MPI EVA) This week, we pick up where we left off last week: someone having the amazing insight to pull out fragments of DNA from deep inside a hominid bone and sequencing the genetic material. Genetics provide a powerful tool to explore our evolutionary origins.  We talked about how comparisons made between DNA samples from living humans and living great apes (chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans) clearly show that we have a common ancestor.  Our own species diverged from theirs several million years ago.  The data are just undeniable. One of the most compelling findings for me has been what we’ve learned about one of our chromosomes.  It turns out that we humans have 23 pairs of chromosomes, but all the great apes have 24. That shocked scientists for decades: how could we have descended from a common ancestor and lost a whole chromosome in the process: that’s a lot of genetic information thrown away!  But when we looked more closely, we found out that one of our chromosomes is a head-to-head fusion of two smaller chromosomes … kind of like Siamese twins. No information lost; but a first-step toward genetic isolation (another word for speciation). Another line of evidence is that we humans have the exact same genetic scars of ancient viral infections. But the recently discovered approach of pulling out DNA from ancient hominid bones now allows us to explore a much higher (more recent) part of the family tree: the smaller branches that appeared only during the last few hundred thousand years.  This is where we find Neanderthals, Denisovans, and H. floresiensis (aka: “Hobbit Man”).  We also learned that … well … how do I put this? … that we’ve been having sex with them all through that evolutionary trajectory!?  Chances are that a few percent of your DNA came from a Neanderthal! If we have their DNA in us, that means they were our ancestors, not our cousins! As Adam put it: “Neanderthals were us!” As always, tell us what you think … To find more about Dr. Adam Rutherford, go to his faculty page or his personal website. To help grow this podcast, please like, share and post a rating/review at your favorite podcast catcher. Subscribe here to get updates each time a new episode is posted, and find us on Twitter or Facebook. Back to Recovering Evangelicals home-page and the podcast archive

The anthropologist who discovered “Lucy” answers many of our questions on human evolution. The cosmic egg has exploded and produced a universe full of stars, planets, and basic chemicals (episodes #64 and 65). Out of those basic building blocks, life began to appear on earth, from which all kinds of species started evolving (episodes #66, 70 and 71).  Now we’re at a point in this story when species with the potential to exhibit agape love are just coming into view: humans. In this episode, we talk to Dr. Donald Johanson, the anthropologist who discovered “Lucy” almost 5 decades ago.  He’s examined bones from almost every hominid ancestor that anthropologists have discovered.  If you want to know about human evolution, he’s definitely the one to talk to. We learned quite a bit about the hominid species represented by “Lucy”, and how she fit into the overall hominid family tree, including relatives like H. habilis and H. erectus, as well as more recent ancestors like H. heidelbergensis, Neanderthals and Denisovans (yes, these are ancestors … many of us carry some of their genes). He also helped us understand why fossils … especially hominid fossils … are so rare: they only form under very specific and exceptional conditions in areas that are not prone to geological disruptions (like erosion, earthquakes, volcanoes). We also began to look at a recent major development in anthropological research.  Someone had the brilliant idea of digging deep into certain of the ancient hominid bones they discovered and pulling out organic material … including the DNA of that hominid!  Now, we’re building up a whole genetic database of our distant evolutionary cousins and unpacking the details of how our species diverged from theirs as well as that of the apes. More on that next week. As always, tell us what you think … To find more about Dr. Donald Johanson, go to his faculty page. To help grow this podcast, please like, share and post a rating/review at your favorite podcast catcher. Subscribe here to get updates each time a new episode is posted, and find us on Twitter or Facebook. Back to Recovering Evangelicals home-page and the podcast archive

An update on Darwinism and the origin of species. Last week we heard about the mechanisms going on inside the cells … at the molecular level … to produce new species. This week, Dr. Jeffrey Schloss tackles the same subject, but comes at it from more of a whole organism level. We explore general themes like: agency in selection: the organisms themselves participating in their own evolution through gene swapping and living together niche construction: organisms changing the nature of their environment in order to better compete, survive, and reproduce (they direct the differential transmission of genes) symbiosis and cooperativity come up this week again, but this time also in the forms of cooperative mutualism, reciprocity, kin selection, group selection and even relinquishing autonomy and committing to obligate cooperativity purpose (telos): whether evolution can be simply goal-suited, or even goal-seeking. There’s a huge philosophical difference between the two. Jeff talks about how all these things  — symbiosis, cooperativity, even love —”have all increased over phylogenetic history”. It seems that Nature is bending toward simply getting along: instead of a “struggle for survival”, there might be more to gain in a “snuggle for survival”. This resonates with the idea that Chris Barrigar got us started on: the universe being designed to produce beings capable of agape love. Finally, we also get his perspective on four responses to these changes in thinking: evolutionists “circling the wagons” at the infamous Royal Society meeting that Dr. Shapiro mentioned last week; the evolutionists tolerating Steven Jay Gould’s quasi-tolerance of Creationists because “at least he’s still on our team”; the public losing trust in science and scientific expertise; Christians feeling that Evolution has put their faith on the rocks. As always, tell us what you think … To find more about Dr. Jeffrey Schloss, go to his webpages at Westmont or at Biologos or at the Faraday Institute. To help grow this podcast, please like, share and post a rating/review at your favorite podcast catcher. Subscribe here to get updates each time a new episode is posted, and find us on Twitter or Facebook. Back to Recovering Evangelicals home-page and the podcast archive

Most people don’t know: the genome is a formatted database with read/write memory systems which can reorganize itself to produce new species. Last week, we gave a thumbnail sketch of genetics as most people understand it. We distilled that common understanding into five basic statements, and showed how most people think new species arise from genetic mistakes and accidents. And we said we would be talking to Dr. James Shapiro, a world-leading geneticist with 60 years of experience, who co-leads a large group of world-leading scientists who collectively want the world to know that most people are misinformed on both points. The common understanding is not just outdated, but deceptively wrong! Here’s what he told us about those five basic statements. Fasten your seat belts! (1) it’s all about DNA: who you and your children are is all completely determined by your DNA; Your brain cells, muscle cells, blood cells … and all the other cells of your body … have exactly the same DNA. And yet they’re so very unique in many ways. What makes them different from each other — and you from anybody else — is determined largely by another molecule: RNA. (2) DNA is a long molecule which gathers together many genes, like beads on a string, which code for the proteins that your body is made of; Only a very small fraction of your genome (the total collection of all your genetic material) codes for proteins; perhaps just a few percent. Most of the rest of your DNA codes for RNA molecules which regulate the entire genetic machine. Any given “gene” (discrete chunk of information) has bits and pieces scattered all over your genome. (3) cells do everything they can to protect those genes from any kind of change; Your cells have built-in mechanisms which do the exact opposite of that: they actively change the organization of your DNA by: – moving large chunks from one position to another, even between chromosomes (recombination and reorganization); – moving large chunks between completely different species (“horizontal transmission”, in contrast to the standard “vertical transmission” from your parents); – combining the genomes of two different related species to produce a new third species (hybridization) or produce an entirely different kind of organism (the origin of the mitochondria and chloroplast); (4) UV light and mutagenic chemicals cause random mutations in the DNA, which can alter the function of the proteins they encode; Cells have very good error-correcting mechanisms which undo those kinds of mistakes, as well as those made when the “photocopier” (the DNA-duplicating machine) goes on the fritz; (5) those random mutations accumulate over time, producing individuals with new characteristics (e.g., blood type; hair color) and eventually … a new species; The occasional random mutations which might make it through the error-correcting mechanisms referred to in #4 above are completely unable to explain the origin of major changes in a given species (new “phenotypes”), let alone the origin of entirely new species. How much more wrong could we have been? This new and improved understanding of genetics and biological evolution open up new ways to defuse the debates which keep coming up when creationists push back on the Theory of Evolution. As always, tell us what you think … To find more about Dr. James Shapiro and the group of scholars he co-leads seeking to bring awareness to this new understanding of genetics, go to The Third Way of Evolution. To help grow this podcast, please like, share and post a rating/review at your favorite podcast catcher. Subscribe here to get updates each time a new episode is posted, and find us on Twitter or Facebook. Back to Recovering Evangelicals home-page and the podcast archive