Can there be a materialistic explanation for the soul!? Does the soul have to be immaterial? In the previous episode, we found that scholars  — scientists and philosophers — have long wrestled with the concept of an immaterial soul (and spirit) and come to a fully reasoned conclusion that it doesn’t work. Here, we first look at what the soul “does” for us, and then at an idea that explains all those functions using neurobiology. So could “the soul” be a material emergent property of the material brain? The Bible never speaks clearly on what the soul is (note: it never says that soul and the immaterial spirit have to be one and the same thing). But to get to the bottom line, we need to first define what “material” and “immaterial” are, and then go over some basic neurobiology. With that in place, we can talk about the human soul being an emergent property of the material brain: a very complex and intricately wired region of the brain which represents the “self” to oneself, to other humans, to the rest of Creation, and … if one is so inclined … to the Divine. This material view of the human soul opens up whole new avenues for understanding postmortem resurrection (the topic of next week’s episode). It also opens up a way to bring together the Hebrew understanding of “the imago Dei” (being created in God’s image) with the very different Greek understanding of that concept. Tell us what you think … leave questions or comments at bottom of this page (stir the pot a little bit!). If you want to play this episode later on your device, look for Recovering Evangelicals in the iTunes Store, Podbean, Spotify, GooglePodcasts, or GooglePlayMusic. If you want to help grow this pod-cast, please like and share with a friend. Subscribe here to get updates each time a new episode is posted, and find me on Twitter or Facebook. Back to Recovering Evangelicals home-page

The vast majority of people — whether they be Christians sitting in the pews of our churches, or non-believers outside the church — think that Substance Dualism is a central and core tenet of Christianity. That one can’t reject Substance Dualism and still call themselves Christian. And yet many scholars — both Christian and non-believers — who have spent decades studying this question have reasons to conclude that Substance Dualism “doesn’t work.” Here, we go through a number of scientific and philosophical arguments against Substance Dualism, and Biblical reasons why we don’t have to hang on to this idea. (1) Spirit of the gaps: inserting this immaterial concept into the unknown has no explanatory power, and becomes increasingly irrelevant as science continues to provide material explanations for what the soul does. (2) The mind-body problem: the vast majority of scholars going all the way back to Rene Descartes (and even Augustine) could not conceive how the immaterial soul can interact with the material body. (3) Thermodynamics: the constant intervention of the immaterial into our material universe would massively upset the balance of energy in our universe. (4) Depending on one’s view of when the immaterial soul is “attached” to the material body, there will be very uncomfortable ramifications when a fertilized egg splits into two different embryos (identical twins) or two different fertilized eggs join into one embryo (a “chimera”). If you want to play this episode later on your device, look for Recovering Evangelicals in the iTunes Store, Podbean, Spotify, GooglePodcasts, or GooglePlayMusic. And if you want to help grow this pod-cast, please like and share with a friend. Subscribe here to get updates each time a new episode is posted, and find me on Twitter or Facebook. Don’t forget to leave comments below … stir the pot a little bit! Back to Recovering Evangelicals home-page

Many Christians think they get their idea(s) about the human soul from the Bible. But the Bible doesn’t actually say too much about that. Which is rather paradoxical or ironic given that one would think that the Bible is all about the development of our soul. What exactly does the Bible have to say about this? Does it specifically say that we are made of two very different substances (a material body and immaterial soul … aka “Dualism”), or that the soul and body could both be material (“Monism”)? In this episode, we trace our way through the Bible in a historical fashion and see how the Hebrews and Christians developed their thinking on this question as they encountered other civilizations and worldviews. The Pentateuch (the first five books of the Bible) begins with a very Dualist view, but then wobbles back and forth between Monism and Dualism. These five books reflects several thousand years of ancient Hebrew thinking: beginning with the first eleven chapters of Genesis which closely resemble ancient Sumerian/Akkadian narratives, then continuing with a very Babylonian Abraham bringing his descendants into a very Egyptian worldview. The Prophets (Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings, plus all the books named after prophets) reflect Hebrew thinking when Israel became her own nation, and were then quickly taken into captivity. These show them still wobbling between Monism and Dualism. The Writings (Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes) and several of the Prophetic books reflect Hebrew thinking during that captivity. These show the latter leaning more strongly towards Dualism, and this idea just explodes onto the scene in the writing of Daniel. Is it a coincidence that this is also when Israel encounters Zoroastrianism and Greek philosophy, both of which were overtly Dualist in their understanding of the human soul? After this, we have the books of the New Testament, which reflect Hebrew thinking filtered heavily through a Greek philosophical lens. It is in these books that Dualism is undeniable. Clearly, JudeoChristian thinking did evolve, and did so as it encountered the worldviews of the pagan nations surrounding them. If you want to play this episode later on your device, look for Recovering Evangelicals in the iTunes Store, Podbean, Spotify, GooglePodcasts, or GooglePlayMusic. If you want to help grow this pod-cast, please like and share with a friend. Subscribe here to get updates each time a new episode is posted, and find me on Twitter or Facebook. Don’t forget to leave comments below … stir the pot a little bit! Back to Recovering Evangelicals home-page Leave a comment and tell us what you think …

Before we look at what the Bible has to say about the soul, we take a look at how the Biblical authors obtained their scientific understanding on things in general. Luke first introduces his understanding of “phenomenological science” — the science of their day — and then goes through several examples of science reflected in the Bible, and the human origins of that thinking. the sun orbiting a flat Earth a solid dome above the earth, holding back a cosmic ocean the creation of the first humans the invention of agriculture, music, metallurgy, and languages human infertility always being a problem with the woman God “doing” the weather by kicking over pails of water, opening closets full of lightning, and blowing across the land Some of these examples are still held to varying degrees by Christians today … simply because they’re found on the pages of the Bible. Then, we look at how the Biblical authors saw the soul as residing in the chest … in the heart, kidneys, and liver … and how they seem to have come to this way of thinking because of the surrounding ancient Near Eastern culture. Some listeners might resist the idea of scripture being so heavily influenced by human (even pagan!) thinking. But one would think that if God was micromanaging the writing of those texts, he would have corrected the authors on these and other ideas. Luke then takes us through several reasons why God might have chosen to use this process for giving us the Bible. If you want to play this episode later on your device, look for Recovering Evangelicals in the iTunes Store, Podbean, Spotify, GooglePodcasts, or GooglePlayMusic. If you want to help grow this pod-cast, please like and share with a friend. Subscribe here to get updates each time a new episode is posted, and find me on Twitter or Facebook. Don’t forget to leave comments below … stir the pot a little bit!) Back to Recovering Evangelicals home-page

Very few of the believers sitting in the pews of our churches have a solid understanding of how we came to receive this collection of writings that we call “the Bible.” And most of them don’t realize how “Biblical thinking” evolved over the centuries during which those books were being written. Before we get into detail about JudeoChristian thinking about the soul and the afterlife, we should get a better idea of the evolution of that thinking. In this episode, we trace the journey of the group of people who gave us the Biblical writings, and see how their thinking evolved as they came into contact with various other cultures around them … the Sumerians and Akkadians … the Egyptians … and then the Greeks and Persians. We also look at how Christian thinking evolved in response to Greek philosophy … and more recently, science. It’s not that those Biblical authors blatantly plagiarized or “borrowed” from those other global superpowers; but they were certainly “influenced by” and always “responding to” the latter. In the same way that we Canadians (Boyd and I are proud Canadians) are always “influenced by” American culture, American media, American economics, American politics, American … If you want to play this episode later on your device, look for Recovering Evangelicals in the iTunes Store, Podbean, Spotify, GooglePodcasts, or GooglePlayMusic. If you want to help grow this pod-cast, please like and share with a friend. Subscribe here to get updates each time a new episode is posted, and find me on Twitter or Facebook. Don’t forget to leave comments below … stir the pot a little bit!) Back to Recovering Evangelicals home-page

In this episode, Luke goes out to do “on-the-street” interviews, asking people three questions about what it means to be human. Since the three main words used by the Bible in this context are heart, mind and soul, he asked students during Frosh Week, people from my church, and professors at the university their ideas on those three words. Not surprisingly, he found a complete mish-mash of ideas. One might think that a clear answer to “what is the soul and what does it do?” would be found in the Bible. Think again. Boyd and Luke talk briefly about how that’s just not the case … how “sometimes it takes 90 degree turns, and sometimes even 180 degree reversals.” And those changes in direction always seem to occur when the writers of the Bible come into contact with a global superpower. We’ll explore that in a lot more detail in the next few episodes. If you want to play this episode later on your device, look for Recovering Evangelicals in the iTunes Store, Podbean, Spotify, GooglePodcasts, or GooglePlayMusic. If you want to help grow this pod-cast, please like and share with a friend. Subscribe here to get updates each time a new episode is posted, and find me on Twitter or Facebook. Don’t forget to leave comments below … stir the pot a little bit!) Back to Recovering Evangelicals home-page

#4 Boyd’s story Boyd Blundell describes his journey through Christian faith, including the experiences which seriously challenged the traditional form that he grew up with, and which now motivate him to present a faith that evolved through facing those challenges. In particular, he found an intellectual rigidity within Christian communities as well as within intellectual/academic circles in the university setting which he found stifling and hypocritical. He also describes a formative period in his university life at a Christian College in which questioning of his belief system was encouraged. Surprisingly  — or perhaps not so, looking back in hindsight  — this did not threaten his faith, but greatly strengthened it. If you want to play this episode later on your device, look for Recovering Evangelicals in the iTunes Store, Podbean, Spotify, GooglePodcasts, or GooglePlayMusic. If you want to help grow this pod-cast, please like and share with a friend. Subscribe here to get updates each time a new episode is posted, and find me on Twitter or Facebook. Don’t forget to leave comments below … stir the pot a little bit!) Back to Recovering Evangelicals home-page

#3 Luke’s story – Reconstruction In this second half of his story, Luke describes why he didn’t go the whole way in becoming an atheist when his Christian faith became too uncomfortable to hang on to, but instead found a new Christian faith that was much more compatible with the 21st century. Part of the solution came from giving up on the idea that the Bible is essentially a direct dictation from God, and therefore inerrant and infallible; the Bible never makes any of these claims, but many Christians have long insisted on these points. Another part of the solution came from understanding that divine inspiration does not mean divine dictation/utterance (the same point made above), but can also include God inspiring humans to search and ask questions and share ideas. What’s more, those humans don’t only have to be those within the JudeoChristian camp …. God can also reveal truth through other surrounding cultures (in a later episode, we’re going to see the profound influence that Greek philosophy had on JudeoChristian thinking). Other reasons for not going full-atheist include scientific ones: our pathetic inability to fully grasp all the information that would allow us to declare there is no God … our limitation to only three dimensions (when many more are “out there”) … fine-tuning of the universe … and the completely unexpected beauty and elegance of the reality we live in. If you want to play this episode later on your device, look for Recovering Evangelicals in the iTunes Store, Podbean, Spotify, GooglePodcasts, or GooglePlayMusic. If you want to help grow this pod-cast, please like and share with a friend. Subscribe here to get updates each time a new episode is posted, and find me on Twitter or Facebook. Don’t forget to leave comments below … stir the pot a little bit!) Back to Recovering Evangelicals home-page

#2 Luke’s story – Deconstruction Luke describes the first half of his journey in which three things kept eroding his Christian faith to the point that it finally became too hard to hang on to it. The first of those three eroding influences was science: a Fundamentalist world view that forced a six thousand year time-line on the origin of the universe, of the world, and of humans, just became too difficult to embrace. Adding to that was a growing discomfort when he read certain stories in the Bible — especially in the Old Testament — that just had too much slaughter of innocents, offensive laws that dealt with the “proper” treatment of slaves, women, and children, and values which just didn’t feel right from a 21st century Western perspective. Finally, encounters with believers of other faiths who I had been taught to demonize and see as “all going to hell,” but who I came to see were genuinely good people trying to understand God from the perspective they grew up with. Something had to give. Either I continue to close my eyes to those problems and compartmentalize my belief, or give it up. Or maybe there was another solution? … maybe I could reconfigure or reconstruct it (see next episode). If you want to play this episode later on your device, look for Recovering Evangelicals in the iTunes Store, Podbean, Spotify, GooglePodcasts, or GooglePlayMusic. If you want to help grow this pod-cast, please like and share with a friend. Subscribe here to get updates each time a new episode is posted, and find me on Twitter or Facebook. Don’t forget to leave comments below … stir the pot a little bit!) Back to Recovering Evangelicals home-page

#1 Inaugural episode This is the unveiling of our new Recovering Evangelicals pod-cast. In it, we introduce you to the hosts — myself and Boyd Blundell — and tell you our motives behind teaming up to give you this, our academic credentials, and history, and a bit of a sneak peak into the two series of pod-cast episodes which will follow this one. Enjoy! If you want to play this episode later on your device, look for Recovering Evangelicals in the iTunes Store, Podbean, Spotify, GooglePodcasts, or GooglePlayMusic. If you want to help grow this pod-cast, please like and share with a friend. Subscribe here to get updates each time a new episode is posted, and find me on Twitter or Facebook. Don’t forget to leave comments below … stir the pot a little bit!) Back to Recovering Evangelicals home-page