Recovering Evangelicals

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

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