Recovering Evangelicals

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

A brief overview of genetics as most know it, and why many don’t buy the Theory of Evolution. Next week, we plan to wade into the deep water of genetics in order to understand the origin of species. So this week we thought it would be good to first give a brief Genetics 101 to get us all on the same page, and then explore the reasons that so many people push back on the Theory of Evolution. Most people — non-experts and experts alike — have an understanding of genetics that they were taught in high-school, college, and undergrad university. The five main ideas on which this understanding is based are these: it’s all about DNA: who/what you are is all completely determined by your DNA; 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; cells do everything they can to protect those genes from any change; accidents happen: UV light and mutagenic chemicals cause random mutations in the DNA, which can alter the function of the proteins they encode. those random mutations accumulate over time, producing individuals with new characteristics (e.g., blood type; hair color) and eventually … a new species. Next week, we’re going to hear from 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 all five of those statements are not just outdated, but deceptively wrong! Stay tuned! During the rest of today’s episode, Boyd and I explored some of the reasons why some people push back on the whole idea of evolution (in some cases, because they just don’t properly understand genetics and evolution): “if humans evolved from monkeys, why do we still have monkeys?” “if we evolved from monkeys, how are we created in the image of God?” “if evolution is true, why do 100 million year old fossils of ancient turtles or snakes look the same as those animals today?” “what about all the missing links?” “you can’t trust science because it’s always changing” “evolution is only a theory” “it conflicts with a plain reading of scripture” “God made everything with apparent age and apparent common ancestry” “evolution raises difficult questions regarding Original Sin and Atonement” 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

Is there a transition of power in play within the YEC movement? Think about Young Earth Creationism (YEC), and you probably immediately conjure up a mental image of Ken Ham: he’s been the figurehead of that movement for decades. One can critique his scientific credentials and his way of interpreting anything scientific through his dogmatic worldview, but say what you want, he had long been the face and voice of the YEC movement. Dr. Joel Duff has long been interested in the intersection between faith and science, and for that reason has been watching the YEC movement. In fact, Boyd and I interviewed Joel Duff on how it was actually YECism that was a bigger threat to his young Christian faith than science (see episode #26). In this episode, Joel comes back to tell us that he’s sensing a change in the YECist world. The perception that there might be a “transition of power” in play crystalized in Joel’s mind when he went to watch a major movie documentary — Is Genesis History? — that was released in major theatres across the USA a few years ago. This documentary had seven scientific experts exploring various lines of scientific evidence which support a YEC view of the origins of the world and life on Earth. As Joel put it: “I expect this film to become one of the most effective apologetics tools the young-earth movement has ever produced both because of who produced it—a group outside of the major creationist organizations—but also because of who is not in the film—AiG president Ken Ham.”  These seven experts, although fully YECist in their worldview, appear to be much more open to the advances of science, and are open to finding ways to harmonize the two rather than take Ham’s approach of misrepresentation and even frank denial of the science. Joel tells us more about these seven leaders — their bona fide scientific credentials, their areas of scientific expertise, and their very different demeanor: they’re more accessible to outside critique (Ham and his AiG experts won’t interact meaningfully with properly qualified experts outside of the AiG or YEC fold); they engage in more gracious dialogue; and most importantly, they’re quite willing and able to say “I don’t know” when raw data and science conflict with their YEC worldview … something which goes completely against the grain of Answers-in-Genesis and its current leader and figurehead who find ALL their answers … in Genesis. Not only are YECists possibly updating their leadership: their understanding of the origin of species seems to also be in flux. Instead of the traditional view that God made all the different species of animals “each according to their own kind”, they’re now working with a model in which Noah didn’t take hundreds of thousands of different animals onto the Ark, but rather only a few thousand proto-animals. One pair of proto-cats which contained all the genetic diversity of our present day cats (from the house cat to leopards to the sabre-toothed tiger). Same for proto-dogs, proto-apes, proto-birds, proto-insects, and so on. And once all those proto-animals stepped off the Ark, they underwent a process of rapid hyper-speciation: devolving into all the different species of animals within the course of only a few generations. In other words, for proponents of this idea, it might be more believable that all the species evolved over the course of a few hundred years than over many hundreds of millions of years. As always, tell us what you think … To find more about Dr. Joel Duff and his blog site and YouTube channel, go to Naturalis Historia. 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

Global warming, pollution, biodiversity loss, and humans. image adapted from Pixabay. . It seems like every week there’s another record-breaking weather event: never-seen-before temperatures, rains, or winds. Weather-related devastation at scales or in places that were unprecedented. Floods, droughts, tornadoes, wild-fires. Earth is developing a fever. Even the ocean is getting warmer and more acidic. Dr. Adam Fenech (PhD, Environmental Science) has spent three decades at the front-line of this problem … writing climate policy speeches for federal environment ministers … representing Canada in front of United Nations climate panels (remember COP26?) … and speaking to intergovernmental panels and universities around the world. He knows climate change. And what causes it: humans … well, humans producing greenhouse gases. After getting the 101 on climate change (definitions; how it’s measured; what are the root causes), we talked about four worldviews or ideas that need to be adjusted: (1) “the solution for pollution is dilution” An old saying, but how many people still get rid of waste by flushing it down the toilet, pouring it in the sewer drains, tossing it into a river, or burning it? (2) “GDP growth is necessary”. Much of the pollution in the world is a by-product of capitalism, convenience and consumerism. You convince yourself that you “need” to have the newest phone or computer, so you have Amazon courier it from China to your front door step … within three days. (3) carbon trading. This doesn’t reduce the problem … it just prolongs it. We need to reduce. (4) apathy. “The problem is too big, and I can’t do anything to make a substantial dent in it”. As Boyd put it: “Well, we may be going to hell in a hand-basket, but I can’t do anything about it, so let’s just enjoy the ride”. But tell me, what’s a bigger number: one times a billion, or a billion times ten? Sure, we can point to this billionaire or that country who are making the biggest dent on the environment (or who need to make the the biggest cash infusion to solve it); but if a billion of us nobodies each made a small dent (or paid a small price) we could collectively make a much bigger impact. Don’t quit making those small changes. At the end of the show, we barely scratched the surface on high-tech approaches to solving the climate crisis problem: seeding the skies with particles to create a mini nuclear winter … position giant sun-screens the size of tennis courts somewhere between Earth and the sun to reduce solar input. But this is like solving a weight control problem using liposuction rather than a lifestyle change. As always, tell us what you think … comment below or at our Facebook page. . Learn more about Adam Fenech and his work. 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. See our podcast archive for a complete listing of our episodes.

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