How did inorganic chemicals eventually become you and me? For the past three weeks, we’ve been talking about “the cosmic egg” that exploded and produced the space-time continuum of our universe. Out of all that energy, quantum particles were formed, which eventually became the matter that coalesced into stars and planets. Earth itself seems to have taken shape about 4.3 billion years ago. And the moment it began to cool down … life appeared! This week, we had a great conversation with Dr. Stephen Freeland (studied at Oxford, York, and Cambridge; post-doc’d at Princeton; spent four years as project manager for NASA’s Astrobiology Institute) about what ideas he and his colleagues are working with when it comes to the the origin of life. We’ve come a long way from Darwin’s warm, wet pond basking in the energetic rays of the sun, and from flashes of lightning turning that chemical soup into Earth’s first living cells. Now, the money seems to be on deep-sea thermal vents … “black smokers” … which continuously spew boiling hot, highly acidic water at the dark bottom of a frigid ocean. We have good reason to think that primordial life could have originated by tapping into that huge pH gradient, and found a cozy spot nestled between the two temperature extremes at the edges of those thermal vents where it eventually evolved into something that changed the very chemistry of the planet (they produced the oxygen on which all modern life now depends). This would certainly explain why living cells today are powered by “batteries” (called mitochondria) that look like tiny engulfed bacteria which themselves create a tremendous pH gradient to turn chemicals into energy and organic building blocks. We also talked about: how our genetic machinery, which uses DNA as an information storage medium, is an upgrade on an earlier primordial system that used RNA (the “RNA World Hypothesis”), and how that primordial system was itself almost certainly an upgrade upon yet something else; our concerns about Intelligent Design as a legitimate scientific explanation (especially given its tendency to lean on God-of-the-gaps arguments); the relationship between matter and consciousness, even panpsychism; how life originating on other planets is not only a very distinct possibility, but seems to even be a “cosmic imperative”. As always, tell us 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

. image adapted from Pixabay . . Dr. Robert Mann (PhD, Astronomy and Physics; U. Waterloo) shares with us his understanding of what evolved out of the “cosmic egg” that we’ve been talking about over the past couple of weeks … our universe. He has spent his career working on quantum physics and gravity and how they create Black Holes, and his lifetime as a Christian gives him a unique perspective on this. We pursued several threads that pull together scientific and theological ideas: (1) Christians in general over the past century have been quite resistant to Big Bang cosmology and committed to a Young Earth view of Creation, but over the past few decades many have warmed up to a very long view about the universe (although many of these are still quite “young Earth” when it comes to humans). Did they just get tired of resisting? Or finally become convinced by the data? Or did they change their view on the Bible (and Genesis) as a science book? Or all of the above? (2) Where did all the stuff (energy and matter) in the universe come from? Should theists have cognitive dissonance when embracing Big Bang cosmology while at the same time trying to accept the version we find in Genesis chapter one? On the other hand, should non-theists feel a similar cognitive dissonance when accepting the idea that all the energy and matter which make up the universe has always existed (that’s a whole lot of something from nothing), or that it just popped into existence all by itself without something putting it there? (3) cosmologists and quantum physicists are quite convinced that there are more dimensions to our existence than the three describing space (up/down; forward/back; left/right) and time … even as many as ten! Using “Flatland” as an analogy, we discuss how those extra dimensions make it perfectly reasonable to accept the idea that there is a Higher Being who can be/do things that are completely unexplainable to us more dimensionally-limited beings. (4) the Fine Tuning of cosmological constants raises very interesting and compelling arguments for the existence of a Cosmic Designer. As always, tell us what you think … . Learn more about Dr. Robert Mann. 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

Once again, a re-release from the past in anticipation of new episodes starting next week. Here, we look at one idea of how the universe came into existence. This is how we summarized it when we released this over a year and a half ago … When we read a paper1 published a couple years ago by last week’s guest — Dr. Chris Barrigar — we felt his idea was a perfect book-end to our recent discussions about Young Earth Creationism and Intelligent Design. We’ve often referred to an image of God rolling certain ingredients — thermodynamics; entropy; quantum mechanics; biological evolution — into a cosmic egg and setting that on the stage of the pre-universe … and watched with delight as that exploded into the universe we see now in front of us. Our guest now adds more detail to that image: those ingredients might have also included randomness, probability, order, predictability, determinism, massively large numbers, dynamic complexity, and chaos theory. And in the process, he tells us he’s found the meaning and purpose of the universe itself: it’s been front-end loaded (the cosmic egg above) to create agape-capable beings like ourselves. We’ll warn the listeners in advance though: this could be the most intellectually challenging episode we’ve done so far. We’ll be putting some of the most recent advances in science, philosophy, and theology on the table. We still believe you’ll be able to keep up with the discussion, but you’ll need to stay focused! If you’re intrigued by this, you’ll be pleased to know that this is only a shortened version of two chapters in a book Dr. Barrigar has written.2 Let us know what you think, and share this with a friend. Barrigar, C., “God’s Agape/Probability design for the universe.” Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith 70(3):161-174, 2018. Barrigar, C. J. Freedom all the way up: God and the meaning of life in a scientific age. FriesenPress, 2021. . 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

Are certain cosmological constants “too good to be random or coincidental”? image adapted from Pixabay . We’re repeating this episode in anticipation of a couple new ones that will be released in two weeks, after the holiday season has passed (we didn’t want those to be eclipsed by the distractions of the holidays). Those two new episodes in January are part of our “Origin and evolution of …” series, and will focus on the universe and life, respectively. To that end, we thought we’d re-release previous episodes on the Fine Tuning of the Universe (this week) and Emergent Creationism (next week). . Apologies to my high school geography teacher. The only thing I seem to remember learning in that class was how to balance pencils on the end of their erasers!? I’d seen street performers turn the art of balancing odd things into an impressive revenue generator … maybe I could make something of it too? I might have taken an entirely different career path if I’d learned how to take that to the next level by turning the pencil around and balancing it on its point, but no one on earth has ever been able to do that. It’s as if earth’s gravity amplifies an imbalance of even a few molecules to instantly topple even the most carefully poised pencil (air currents are not the problem, because astronauts can do it in the space station). Chaos theory and the butterfly effect come into play here: the very smallest initial event gets magnified into a catastrophic system failure. Scientists have learned that many physical constants that dictate the structure and function of our universe seem to be so precisely tuned it’s as if they were like pencils standing on their points. If the ratio of the electromagnetic force and the gravitational force were off by a decimal with thirty two zeroes in front of it, the sun would burn a million times faster … and any life that ever appeared on earth would be immediately vaporized in that intense heat. If the balance between the nuclear and electromagnetic forces holding atomic nuclei together was off by a decimal with dozens of zeroes in front of it, the universe would have ended up either as one super-gigantic ball of mass like a mega-supersized proton, or as a vastly dispersed cloud of particles that could never form planets or life forms. Those are some pretty finely balanced pencils! And there’s a daunting list of other examples. But is that an argument for design? For a Designer? In this episode, we explore some of the reasons why some answer “yes,” and reasons why some do not. We also look at how some Fine Tuning proponents stretch this idea to absurdity, adding in all kinds of “examples” which … if you think carefully about them … are not examples of the universe being finely-tuned for life, but instead are examples of how life-as-we-know-it is so finely-tuned for this universe. As always, tell us 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

Some ethical/theological perspectives on public responses to the pandemic, and how to prepare for what’s in store image modified from Pixabay . We begin with a look at the public backlash against the authorities who are simply trying to save humanity from this existential threat: vaccine mandates vaccine revolts vaccine passports fake vaccine passports and fake consent forms masks hostility toward health professionals, government, police Even if we can collectively get on board fully with the scientists and health-care professionals, whom our societies have trained and put in place in part to help us through threats like this, and get the entire human population vaccinated, it may not be over. We found out last week that COVID is in the animals all around us, and is constantly mutating, looking for the chinks in the armor of our immune systems and our R&D programs. So we’re going to have to stop deluding ourselves with the dream of “finally getting rid of COVID” and learning to live with COVID: it’s going to become a seasonal thing. Which means annual boosters (along with our annual flu shots). It also means educating ourselves and our loved ones. To that end, Boyd and I look once again at how it is that some people can be so susceptible to science denial and wacky conspiracy theories. It’s wired into our brains: the rational “mammalian brain” (the frontal cortex) fighting against our much older, deeper, and more emotionally driven “reptilian brain”. Perhaps some ideas to help you reason with your crazy uncle at the family Christmas gathering? As always, tell us 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

Myths, misconceptions, and conspiracy theories surrounding COVID-19 image from Pixabay, adapted . Last week, we focused on the science around COVID. Today, we’ve got pseudoscience in our cross-hairs. The misinformation, myths, science denial, and conspiracy theories that are put out by internet trolls and circulated through social media. Or which are simply a product of well-intentioned people who don’t have enough scientific training to be correct, but just enough to be dangerous: TV/radio news reporters and overly self-confident internet surfers. Ivermectin is a perfect example of misinformed science. Pseudoscience actually. COVID anti-vaxxers have latched onto this compound, marketed as a de-worming treatment, because a small handful of scientific studies seem to have shown some beneficial effect. But those few studies have design flaws in them. On top of that, ten times as many studies have been done which show no useful effect with ivermectin, and even show harm being done. This is like someone trying to get you to invest in a strange new cryptocurrency, citing examples of people who have made tons of money on it, but when you look at the details, you notice that those people used some very questionable accounting practices, and many other investors have lost a ton of money on this new thing. Would you still buy? And then there are the conspiracy theories … COVID and the vaccine developed against it both being used to take over the world, and the players behind it all range from Bill Gates, to various world governments and military organizations, to Satan himself. We look closely at the claims that COVID is a biological weapon created in a lab, and that medical doctors are being coerced to falsify death records in order to hide or inflate the problem. And the proposal that the best way out of this pandemic is to just let COVID sweep through the global population and let Darwin sort it all out. As always, tell us 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

Comparing the R&D programs of humans (vaccines; drugs) and of COVID (variants) image from Pixabay, adapted . This is our third update on COVID (also see #28 and #36), pulled together right around the time that COVID rolled out its latest disguise: the omicron variant. Here, we look at some of the scientific advances, including the large number of diverse treatment strategies we now have, thanks to science and technology: vaccines containing a piece of mRNA for the spike protein (Moderna; Pfizer) vaccines containing a harmless adenovirus stuffed with RNA for the spike protein (AstraZeneca; Johnson&Johnson) vaccine containing the actual COVID spike protein itself (Noravax) vaccines made up of killed or inactivated COVID (Sinovac; Sinopharm) antibodies made against the spike protein (made in a Petri dish or by llamas!) drugs that block the enzyme COVID uses to reproduce itself (remdesivir; mulnupiravir; favipiravir) All of these came about so quickly … not because a global cabal created COVID to bring the world to its knees, all the while keeping the remedy in its back pocket until we were ready to pay a steep ransom for it … but because the science and research enterprise of the entire globe was for the first time ever all simultaneously focused squarely on one target and collaborating in relative openness. We brought together a diverse array of tools and technologies that we’d been working on for decades, and created something new. In this episode, we also look at COVID’s own research and development efforts. Through random mutations and natural selection, it’s not just creating more and more copies of itself, but better and faster versions of itself: the alpha variant, the beta variant, the delta variant, and then, just last week the omicron variant. We’re in a race against COVID. Will we win because of our own science and technology? Or will we lose because of our stupidity and selfishness (anti-vaxxers; anti-maskers; rich countries withholding the answers from poorer countries; science deniers; conspiracy theorists)? Finally, Boyd and I once again examine why this is even an “Evangelical problem”: “my body, my choice” “religious exemptions” “the vaccine contains a special ingredient made by the devil himself” As always, tell us 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

A new mutant of COVID-19 which is more transmissible than delta, and may evade our immune system Image from Pixabay . The W.H.O. tells us there’s a new COVID variant out there, one with numerous mutations on the spike protein which not only make it easier to spread, but it may also evade our diagnostic tools (the COVID tests we take to identify infection), our treatment tools (the vaccine), and even our own immune systems. Boyd and I had just three days earlier recorded a COVID update episode which discussed this as a hypothetical possibility, in the hopes of encouraging more people to get fully vaccinated before such a mutant could appear. My jaw dropped when I heard it this morning. We’ll release that pre-recorded episode at the normal time next week, but we thought we’d do a quick pre-update to give our listeners the heads-up. This is truly something that should be shared. As always, tell us what you think. Send in your comments/questions … we may be able to deal with them in the next two episodes focusing on COVID. 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 first in a series of episode exploring the strained relationship between the church and science Isaac Newton’s monument in Westminster Abbey . The church has long had a reputation for being anti-science, even though it was people of faith who built the foundations of the scientific enterprise for millennia. Even in the story of Galileo being tried by the church over the relationship between the earth and sun, there were Christians and scientists on both sides of the debate. The same could be said about the response to Darwin’s new idea about evolution, in The Origin of Species. However, things changed dramatically when Evangelicalism and Fundamentalism arrived on the scene. That debate over Darwinian evolution was played out again on a global stage in “the Scopes Monkey Trial” in Tennessee in 1925: that incident may also have had Christians and scientists on both sides of the argument, but the loudest and most vocal among the Christians were mostly on only one side. This episode pits Luke’s science against Boyd’s ethics and philosophy on many points. But we also have theological training, and at one point, Luke starts feeling like he’s playing the role of a Bible-thumper (a rather uncomfortable feeling, I have to say). First, we talk about how Christianity compared to many other world religions when it comes to its attitude toward science/technology, and four reasons why many Christians can be hesitant or even hostile toward those human endeavors. Next, we look at whether it’s right to attribute disasters caused by human technology to Genesis chapter 3 and our sinful nature (as many Christians so quickly do), or chalk it up to Genesis chapter 1 and our pathetic inexperience at the job given to us by the Divine. We were left in charge of the planet: commanded to “… subdue the earth and have dominion over all creation …” (or “steward” the planet, for those who prefer that translation of Gen. 1). But we were absolutely unprepared for that grandiose responsibility. We have always been subject to the elements … always lived in fear of things that scurry around at night … were always vulnerable to disease, earthquakes, starvation … have long been mystified by the things that happen all around us, even on a daily basis. If we humans were going to even begin to be able to subdue, have dominion, or steward the planet, we needed to get started on a very steep learning curve. We had to learn more … everything, in fact … about the planet, its inhabitants, and how to apply that knowledge … aka, science and technology. So: science and technology are part of the Divine plan. And mistakes are part of the learning process. As always, tell us 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

Dr. Peter Enns gives us the first in this new “Origin and evolution of …” series of episodes. Image from PixaBay This week, we’re starting in a whole new direction.  Well, two different directions, actually. One theme that we’ll be pursuing we’ve entitled “The origin and evolution of …” series of episodes.  You’d probably expect that we’ll fill that blank with things that fall inside the scientific realm. Material things like: “The origin and evolution of life.”  Of humans.  Of the universe.  And you’d be right in that.  We will look at those things, and others. But we’ll also look at the origin and evolution of things that fall more within the theological realm.  The origin and evolution of the Bible.  Of our concept of the afterlife … of God!?  Or, at least, of our understanding of God.  These too have all been evolving over the past many centuries, and often in response to science. Today, we’re going to look at the origin and evolution of … the Jewish Bible.  Our “Old Testament”.  And we’re going to get none other than Dr. Pete Enns to tell us his understanding of that origin and evolution.  We’re guessing that many of our listeners will be hearing this perspective for the first time.  But hearing this, from a world-class expert, might help you over some serious speedbumps in your faith journey.  It certainly did that for me. We’ll hear that the Bible was not dropped out of heaven or whispered into the ears of individual authors (you probably knew that already … but did you have a coherent alternative explanation of where/how it did come?).  Instead, it was written, and re-written, and revised, and re-revised by teams of authors over the course of many, many centuries.  Yes: re-written and re-revised.  And not just by the individual authors, but by multiple teams of editors who worked on the texts centuries after the authors had died. Those later editorial teams took the liberty of not just changing words, but even deleting whole sections, and inserting entirely new ones.  Sometimes in response to things they’d learned from other cultures. A perfect example of this would be their understanding of the human soul and the afterlife, which we talked about previously in episodes #6, #7, and #8. Those editors could be just as divinely inspired in what they did, as the authors writing the first drafts of the text. And the life experiences which shaped those authors and editors  — as well as the cultural zeitgeists which informed their thinking — would also be part of that divine inspiration process. Learning about these things over the past 5 or 10 years has given me a new understanding of the Bible.  I no longer see it like the “User’s Manual” for a car, written by the Manufacturer [God] to the User [us] to help them [us] know how to use the Product [us].  Instead, I now see it more like a diary or a notebook, written by humans who captured their thoughts, experiences, the lessons they’d learned, and their personal growth on a subject that was incredibly important to them: God.  As always, tell us what you think … For more about Dr. Pete Enns, go to https://peteenns.com/ and Bible for Normal People Podcast 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