Recovering Evangelicals

“Fine Tuning” really means three very different things, two of which are recognized by astrophysicists of all stripes; but one of them … not so much. We have often looked closely at Creationism in all of its various forms, flavors and dimensions.  Two particular aspects of Creationism are foundational for the faith of many Christians (not a tenet of their faith, but a rationale, in the same way that Noah’s Flood or near death experiences may not be tenets of faith, but scientific evidence for both might be a rationale for their faith).  Those two aspects are Intelligent Design and Fine Tuning.  Intelligent Design was at one point foundational for my own Christian faith.  But then we did a mini-series of episodes focusing on that particular idea.  We brought in two of the biggest ID-proponents (Drs. Michael Behe and Jonathan MacLatchie) and they gave their best arguments and used their favorite examples (the bacterial flagellum and the Long-Term Evolution Experiment, respectively).  Then we brought in four world-renowned scientists who actually do benchwork in both areas of scientific study and who have published literally hundreds of scientific papers based on that work, and they gave us completely different explanations than Behe and MacLatchie (both of whom have only ever read about the flagellum or the Long-Term Evolution Experiment).  And what’s more, the story that those experts told was much more believable (being based on evidence, not on rhetoric), more beautiful, and more mind-blowing than saying simply: it was Designed by God.  Both of us have since soured on the idea of Intelligent Design. Now we’ve decided to also do a mini-series of episodes on Fine-Tuning (FT).  And once again, we’re going to bring in experts who actually work in the relevant areas — astronomy, astrophysics, and mathematics.  More on that later: first, we need to build a foundation for our audience, going through a few definitions and basic concepts, so they can better keep up with those experts. One hugely important matter is for the listeners to see “Fine Tuning” as meaning at least three very different things. First, there is FT of the universe to manifest itself.  We talk about how the Big Bang produced a universe-full of energy, which then cooled and pulled itself together into physical stuff (matter is a frozen form of energy).  Without getting into too much detail, the weak nuclear force holds subatomic particles together (neutrinos, bosons, etc.), the strong nuclear force holds atomic particles (protons and neutrons) together to form the nucleus, electromagnetic force holds the nucleus and electrons together, electrostatic forces hold atoms together into molecules, and gravity holds molecules together to form “usable stuff.”  There are lots of other fundamental particles and forces to talk about, but these are enough to explain Fine Tuning.  Astrophysicists, irrespective of whether they’re Theists or not, will widely agree that those particles and forces need to be incredibly “tuned” to a precision that boggles the mind: the analogy that’s often used is of a pencil standing up on its sharpened tip.  If the tuning is too much in one direction, then the particles produced in the Big Bang never come together, and the universe is never more than an ever expanding cloud of dispersed particles.  If too much in the other direction, the particles come together so fast and so hard that they quickly form one super massive black hole.  Either way, you don’t get “usable stuff” … the pencil falls over.  But if the tuning is just right — again to a mind-blowing degree of precision — the particles pull together in a way that produces electrons, protons, neutrons …. all the way up to planets and stars. Second, there is FT of the universe to produce life.  The FT is further refined in a way that we just don’t end up with a few types of atoms, but focused to such a laser-point precision that it produces a bewildering and complex mixture of different kinds of atoms: from small ones needed to make cells (carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen) and do basic cell functions (sodium, potassium, calcium) all the way up to larger and heavier metals that are exploited by enzymes (iron, magnesium, copper, manganese), and even the heaviest elements of all (uranium, plutonium). Sir Fred Hoyle, a world-renowned astrophysicist and ardent atheist, famously said that the carbon atom looked suspiciously like it was produced by some super-Intellect who had monkeyed with the physics! Third, there is FT of the universe to support life.  This is the version of FT that I have little patience for.  It encapsulates a wide variety of arguments which point at the rotation of earth, its axial tilt, its distance from the sun, the positive influences of the moon, or Jupiter or Saturn, the position of our solar system in the galaxy, the wavelengths of light produced by the sun, the presence of oxygen and water in the atmosphere … and a long list of many other parameters like these.  And they all share this in common: their values or their influence are said to be ideally suited to life [on Earth].  Proponents of this form of FT don’t realize that they’re not pointing at FT of the universe for life, but rather FT of life for the universe. One of our listeners asked why so many astrophysicists and proponents of Fine Tuning — be they Theist or atheist – say that the values of the physical constants “demand an explanation” or “scream design”?  Scott and I went through a little exercise that we think will give the listeners a really fun insight into what goes on in the mind of an astrophysicist atheist like Sir Fred Hoyle to bring out such conviction.  You’ll have to listen to our conversation if you want to be enlightened. As always, tell us your thoughts on this. If you enjoyed this episode, you may also like our first look at Fine Tuning from three years ago, or a conversation we had with Dr. Chris Barrigar three years ago which looked at the primordial cosmic egg being finely tuned to create agape-capable beings, or a second one a couple months ago looking at biology and evolution being tuned to point those beings towards a Creator God. Or, for a better understanding of how atoms can interact and pull themselves together into molecules, check out our Introductory lecture on how proteins are made. Image by Andrew. Thanks Andrew! 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... Subscribe Join our private discussion group at Facebook. Back to Recovering Evangelicals home-page and the podcast archive

Can we say God used evolution to produce a “good” creation if it involves so much pain, suffering, predation and death? Our listeners asked us to do an episode on how to rationalize Christian faith with all the pain and suffering that is brought on by the process of Evolution.  We spoke to Dr. James Stump, whose recently released book — Sacred Chain: how understanding evolution leads to deeper faith — puts a spotlight on that question. Jim grew up in a very Conservative mid-west American world, but wasn’t personally committed to Young Earth Creationism, and never really encountered anything either overtly for or against the Theory of Evolution.  While getting a PhD in Philosophy of Science, and then splitting his career between teaching at a Christian college and writing for Biologos, he did a deep-dive into what Evolution was all about.  He became fully convinced by the data and made that clear in his writing.  However, this did not sit well with the College, and he was politely squeezed out (much like the story we heard from Joel Anderson a few weeks back, and from Peter Enns a couple years ago). We spent some time talking about the first three quarters of his book, including a bit about scripture, divine inspiration, and Concordance between modern science and the ancient worldview. But we reserved most of our discussion for his fifth chapter: the problem of pain and suffering, which for many people doesn’t square up with God referring to creation as “good” let alone “very good.”  Jim first pointed out that declaring something “good” doesn’t mean that it’s “finished,” and that a baby becoming a full-grown athlete or a young prodigy becoming an Olympic athlete or a concert musician may be “good” at first but will encounter a lot of pain and suffering in striving to achieve their full potential.  God’s command to his new creatures to “be fruitful and multiply … have dominion over earth” reveals that he wanted it to grow, to develop, to change.  Humans could never be created with moral maturity: that needs to be grown into and earned through experience and choice-making. We also looked at the full meaning of the Hebrew word (tov) that gets translated into English as “good.” It doesn’t just mean cute, cuddly, and happy smiley faces all around …. it also carries a nuance that means “something that fulfills a purpose for which it was created.”  With this more nuanced understanding of tov/good, we gain a whole new perspective. Death is tov!  Without death, the world would very quickly be overrun by a seething mass of living organisms: we’d now all be trying to squeeze our way through a soup of insects and animals. Death is also the business end of the filter that selects out the more fit.  Some people find it to be so wasteful that 99% of all species have gone extinct: but another way to look at this begins with recognizing that all the animals and species that have ever existed could not possibly all live on earth at the same time, so this process of species coming and going allows a hundred times as many different forms of life to have their time on the stage.  This gradual appearance and disappearance of so many different life forms produced a much more dynamic and lavish show. Predatory-prey relationships are also tov!  We talked about how the gazelle and cheetah each influenced each other’s evolution over millions of years: their speed, strength and agility were honed by that tight relationship.  We also unpacked a phenomenon observed in Yellowstone National Park that was representative of other parks all around North America.  For a long while, wolves threatened people and livestock alike, until local people completely exterminated that predator threat.  But then the elk population exploded, in part because so many individuals with diseases and broken limbs were able to survive: the elk herds started to look very sickly!  Without wolves around, the larger herds left the protection of the hills and pine forests, opting instead for the convenience of willows, aspen and poplars next to flowing waters.  The loss of those groves eliminated nesting sites for song birds, as well as the beavers.  The loss of beaver dams allowed the rivers to flow faster: their banks started to erode, marshlands disappeared along with their distinctive wildlife.  Then the wolves were introduced (against much opposition) and all those ecosystem collapses completely reversed. We started talking about meaningless and wasteful suffering (tsunamis; the Holocaust).  This is a completely different question: it’s not about evolution, and humans with their free will and agency bring a whole new dynamic to this problem. And this bigger question has two parts: there is natural evil (kids with brain cancer) and moral evil (kids killed by a deranged school shooter). We finished the conversation with a lighter question: if it were possible to “re-wind the tape” on evolution and let it play out again, would we still get humans.  Stephen Jay Gould famously said no, but Jim explains how he thinks that God had always intended for there to be image-bearers with a moral maturity, which Jim calls “human,” but that those image bearers might not necessarily have been Homo sapiens (perhaps Neanderthals instead?).  Luke pushed the point: could it have been dinosaurs/reptiles that instead filled that role of image bearers if the Chicxulub impactor asteroid never hit Earth?  You’ll have to listen to the episode to hear Jim’s response. As always, tell us your thoughts on this topic … Find more information about Dr. James Stump at his Biologos web-page, and his book at HarperCollins. If you enjoyed this episode, you may also episodes in our mini-series looking at various aspects 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... Subscribe Join our private discussion group at Facebook. Back to Recovering Evangelicals home-page and the podcast archive

Humans have been developing the toolkit needed to fulfill the Divine command: “learn to get along and take care of the planet”! Martin Luther King famously said: “We shall overcome because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”   The popular political commentator and TV host Jon Stewart added something poignant to those immortal words: “That arc may bend towards justice … but someone has to bend it … while other people are pushing it back.” This week’s episode is all about humans climbing up the evolutionary ladder … not just biologically, cognitively, technologically, and spiritually/religiously, but also in the moral/ethical sense … and in the process growing into a role of responsibility: fulfilling the Divine command to “learn to get along, and take care of the planet.” We had a conversation about this with Rabbi Doctor Bradley Shavit Artson, a supremely qualified expert on the evolution of human morality and ethics, taking a whirlwind tour through more than ten thousand years of human history, looking for evidence of the appearance and development of our morality. During the prehistoric part of our history (before 5000 years BCE), humans were hunter-gatherers, migrating in bands of roughly fifty.  As is the case for all hunter-gatherer societies, they were probably mistrusting of outsiders (the precursor of our modern racism) even to the point of murdering and killing any strangers, and probably had a might-makes-right way of thinking (which kept women subservient and males competing for dominance), but with the potential for occasional acts of compassion. Stepping into our ancient historical period (roughly 3000 or 2000 BCE), we find various empires (Akkadian, Sumerian, Egyptian, Babylonian) developing their religions and societies in the Near East, as well as Chinese and Vedic peoples in the Far East.  The development of writing enabled the progressive accumulation of knowledge … as well as of morality and values.  Nonetheless, there was still a might-makes-right mentality, a lot of killing and warring, women were still subservient, and slavery was everywhere and completely accepted.  There are no written records of any opposition against any of these.  But one small tribal nation introduced the idea of humans being made in the image of God. As Dr. Artson put it: “… this is one of  the most subversive and powerful convictions that ever exploded on the human scene … we still haven’t lived up to its implications.” During the Axial Age (~500 BCE), there was a sociological explosion in knowledge, philosophy, and moral codes around the world.  This is the period of Hellenic Greek thinking and Hebrew scriptures, both of which dramatically shaped and altered thinking over the ensuing millennia with ideas about how we might be better people.  And yet we still see lots of murdering and killing, lots of enslavement, women are still not equal ….. and still there are no vocal public protests against war, slavery, or equal rights! The Roman Empire (roughly 0-500 CE) provided roads and ships to spread new ideas all around the world, including those coming out of Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Confuscianism.  And those ideas begin to bloom over the next thousand years.  Although we still see lots of killing and wars, we also see the beginning of humanitarian efforts, hospitals, and schools, even if those were largely directed toward like-minded recipients (Christians helping Christians, Muslims helping Muslims).  The beginnings of greater equality for women, and for other races.  The growing recognition of a fundamental human dignity.  Humanity is now finally beginning to flex a moral muscle. And then we come to today’s world.  Killing and war are still commonplace (although we learned last week that, when you take into account the number of people on the planet during any given war, the death rate due to wars today is no different than when we were building “global” empires three thousand years ago, or killing off a rival hunter-gatherer tribe fifty thousand years ago).  But what are also commonplace today are global humanitarian efforts after every natural disaster and pandemic, and peace-keeping missions in war-ravaged countries. The creation of social safety nets, police forces, judicial systems.  And also commonplace: protests!  General populations rising up against all kinds of injustices, inequities, and wars. We now have it in our heads that things could be better, and we’re demanding those ideals. We may not yet have fully subdued our primal urges for killing and reproduction, but we are certainly adding new urges: to help, to heal, to build and co-operate …. and to get along across social, racial barriers. Which reminds me of the Apostle Paul’s challenge to “put off our old nature which belongs to our former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful desires, and to be renewed in the spirit of our minds, and put on the new nature, created after the likeness of God.” We are changing as a species, but have a long way to go yet.  Give it time! As always, tell us your thoughts on this topic … Find more information about Dr. Rabbi Bradley Shavit Artson at his faculty page and his author page. Episode image by Andrew. He creates some amazing stuff using generative AI and just a few keywords! This time I told him simply: bending the arc of the moral universe, in the style of GIs raising the flag on Iwo Jima. Thanks Andrew! 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... Subscribe Join our private discussion group at Facebook. Back to Recovering Evangelicals home-page and the podcast archive

Human evolution is hard to take for some Christians, especially when we claim that humans have been climbing up the evolutionary ladder in the moral sense. It was only a few years ago that Pew Research found roughly one third of Americans believe that “humans have existed in their present form since the beginning of time” (and in case the obvious really needs to be said, this means they completely deny human evolution) and then went on to show that most of that opinion comes from the Evangelical camp.  If one third deny human evolution, then that means two thirds accept human evolution, right?  But do they? Fully? Probably everyone in that two thirds camp would agree that we’ve been evolving in the biological and cognitive sense.  Our bodies and brains emerged out of the genetic mixing bowl of life, and we’ve got a ton of science to back up that claim. Those are two lines in the sand that we in this camp find easy to step over. And we’ve also been evolving religiously, theologically, and spiritually during that whole time as well.  In addition to the mountain of evidence for biological and cognitive evolution, we also have a mountain of evidence for this aspect of human existence.  But some of us in the two thirds camp might be just a little bit hesitant to fully accept that third aspect of human evolution, and to step over that third line in the sand. But then we come to a fourth aspect of human existence: our morality and ethics.  This is where I find a substantial number in our two thirds camp suddenly stop marching with us and say “hold on a minute there.  That’s perhaps a step too far.”  And their explanations often include references to dropping nuclear bombs in the 1940s, or something along those lines. In this episode, we look at statistics and history over the past fifty thousand years that show how the human species has NOT been getting more murderous or destructive over time (when you take into account the number of people on the planet at any given time), but that we HAVE been becoming more compassionate, respectful and helping. As you listen to Scott and I talking about this, open up this link that documents global death rates due to war, this link for estimated global population sizes, and this link for measures of human rights, over the past centuries and millennia. There clearly has been a distinct upward rise in global human rights, in recognition of equality (for other genders, races, sexualities), in demands for justice, and in protests against wars and discrimination.  Yes, we still have that murderous and competitive tendency that millions of years of evolution hammered into us (the infamous struggle for survival), but we also have this growing compassionate and cooperative side (the “snuggle for survival” that we talked about in episode #76).  We’re growing up as a species! Unfortunately, we’re currently in that awkward teenage stage, trying to navigate the transition from childhood to being grown up adults. That’s notoriously a difficult stage (ask any parent) and we’ve been at this stage for about 500 years! We just need to get past that mistake-filled stage of uncontrolled emotions coupled with unlimited powers. And here’s why I’m beating this drum.  We humans are uniquely equipped to not only inhabit every ecosystem on the planet, but to also change all those ecosystems.  And whether you believe that we humans were Divinely-created and placed in charge here, or that we evolved here and worked our way into that pinnacle position, either way it has become our responsibility to take care of the planet and each other. We have it within our means to eradicate other species, and to rescue them from extinction. To destroy whole ecosystems, and to protect them. To divert massive rivers, cause floods, drain and pollute lakes, but also to manage water systems and conserve them.  To enslave and mistreat fellow humans, and to liberate them.  I could go on, but you get the point.  We have this unique ability, which I think then confers on us a unique responsibility. We need to recognize that, and further develop our technology and our societies …. together with our evolving morality and ethics … and step into that stewardship role with conviction. As always, tell us your thoughts on this topic … If you enjoyed this episode, you might enjoy the book I wrote on human evolution and how that impacts our theology or our collection of other episodes that look at various aspects of human evolution. Episode image by Andrew. Thanks Andrew! 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... Subscribe Join our private discussion group at Facebook. Back to Recovering Evangelicals home-page and the podcast archive

Richard Dawkins and Ayaan Hirsi Ali engage in a conversation about worldviews, not a debate about God. They discuss Ayaan's journey from critic of Islam to Christian convert, different expressions of Christianity, cherry-picking beliefs, and the evolution of woke culture.

Dr. Joel Duff, a seasoned scientist, dissects the financial stronghold of Answers in Genesis, their plans for a Tower of Babel theme park, and the lack of scientific expertise in YECist circles. He questions why AiG doesn't invest in credible experts and delves into the controversial world of young earth creationism.

A clash between Evolution and Creationism in Evangelical education system. Discussion on the persistence of Young Earth Creationism in Christianity. Insights from a former Evangelical professor. Challenges of teaching Christian worldview and evolution. Navigating conversations about Creationism respectfully. Examining prophecy in Isaiah and Matthew. Upcoming projects in biblical studies education.

The podcast explores the anti-intellectualism in Evangelicalism, discussing the impact of 'The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind'. Dr. Mark Noll, a renowned historian, critiques Evangelicalism's approach to intellectualism. The discussion includes historical perspectives, challenges in conveying academic insights, and the intersection of faith and science. They also address the evolving relationship between evangelicalism, politics, and societal perceptions.

In addition to enhancing hominid survival and reproduction, this software equipped us to become aware of and look for the Transcendent. Once again we’re asking the question: “why do we have this cognitive machinery in our head that predisposes humans to having spiritual experiences and religion-making?” But this time we talked to a scholar on the subject. We could have talked to a neurobiologist or psychologist (in addition to the handful we’ve already heard from; #43, #44, #45, #78, #152) … a paleontologist (we’ve had a couple of those as well; #77 and #72) … or a literary scholar who reads ancient texts and clay tablets.  But we chose to talk to a philosopher/theologian.  You see, scientists study the physical, but in the process of being reductive, often include a metaphysical claim that there is no ultimate reality beyond the physical world.  But that’s a metaphysical claim, not something that can be tested in the physical realm, so they can’t / shouldn’t be making that claim.  Philosophers/theologians, on the other hand, take a step back and look at the big picture, and are free to openly and honestly make the metaphysical assumption that there is a God (or not) when trying to make sense of the data.  Both groups can learn much from each other. Our guest, Dr. Chris Barrigar, with a PhD in Philosophy and the pastor of a large church in Montreal, Quebec, has talked on our podcast before about big metaphysical things.  You can hear about his fascinating journey through Evangelical Christianity, then Buddhism, then atheism, and finally back to Evangelical Christianity in Episode #29.  And then in episode #30, we heard him talk about the ultimate meaning behind the universe! This week, we stumbled upon a paper he just published [“Evolutionary accounts of religion within a Christian account of Big History,” in Perspectives in Science and Christian Faith, 76(1): 35-54, 2024] which explored in great detail all the points we made and the questions we asked last week!? Chris first walked us through some background material from two books authored by two prominent anthropologists. One of these (Dr. E. Fuller Torrey, a clinical psychiatrist with graduate training in anthropology) outlined a series of seven or eight different cognitive advances that occurred in the minds of ancient hominids over the course of several million years.  They first evolved through progressively higher levels of intelligence until they eventually became self aware (a sense of self), then morphed that awareness into an ability to step into someone else’s mind (theory of mind, or empathy).  They also began to develop a sense of past and future, which eventually got them thinking about ancestors, and then about the afterlife.  That in turn set the stage for them imagining/creating gods and deities, moral/ethical laws, and finally religion-making. The second author (Dr. Robin Dunbar, an anthropologist and evolutionary psychologist) outlined a different evolutionary time-line.  In particular, he focused on humans as paleolithic hunter/gatherers in Africa fifty thousand years ago, who migrated into Europe and Asia to become neolithic farmers/settlers in large cities ten thousand years ago. The transition from migrating bands of fifty to settled cities of five thousand required massive changes in cognitive ability, as well as a lot of rule-making (morality; ethics; religion). Many “New Atheists” such as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens see religion as harmful, and maladaptive. But Dunbar concluded that, given how much time and energy it took to develop and maintain a religious mind and behavior, there has to be something evolutionarily useful about it.  And being inclined to rule out anything metaphysical, he proposed that it was somehow useful for reproduction and survival.  Torrey, on the other hand, couldn’t identify a clear evolutionary advantage, nor a reason to see it as maladaptive, and so concluded that this cognitive machinery is just an evolutionary spandrel. Dr. Chris Barrigar, on the other hand, remained open to metaphysical possibilities, and found that, in addition to being useful for survival and reproduction, this evolutionary process has been directed toward the appearance of and flourishing of intelligent, agape-capable beings who are equipped for relationship.  For Chris, this interpretation/proposal is far richer and more intellectually and existentially satisfying for explaining so much about humanity, than the conclusion that it was merely for survival and reproduction (or an accident). We discussed how this cognitive machinery is universal in that we see it in all humans across all societies and periods of human history. But it’s also very vague and imprecise: it doesn’t point humans specifically to one transcendent being (for example, the Judeo-Christian God), but to something beyond the physical … “something bigger than us.”  As always, tell us your thoughts on this topic … If you enjoyed this episode, you may also enjoy our previous conversation with Dr. Chris Barrigar, when he explained to us the meaning behind the universe. Or check out our other episodes which focus on the cognitive machinery in our heads: you can find those at our theme page entitled “Religious experiences, spiritual encounters.” 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 retrospective journey through four years of episode releases had us asking this fundamental question. The short answer: of course it is! A few of the most recently released episodes prompted us to think back to about a dozen other episodes we’ve released in the past that focused on the cognitive machinery in our heads, and got us asking: are spiritual/religious experiences a figment of our imaginations? This retrospective line of thinking began with the pair of episodes released a couple weeks back, looking at the emotion of awe (#151 and #152): a uniquely human emotion which always accompanies a spiritual experience (animals seem to experience other emotions like joy, rage, surprise, sadness … but not awe, because they don’t exhibit the other physiological changes in breathing, heart rate or goosebumps that accompany awe).  One of those guest experts had already talked to us a couple years ago about two other forms of software in our head which also contribute to a spiritual or religious experience: the “hypersensitive agency detector” and the “promiscuous teleology detector” (#78).  Those two detectors are behind the human tendency to think there’s a reason or explanation for things that happen and an intention or will or agent behind it (“why did that family have to die in that tornado?”).  This reminded us of three episodes we did a while back that looked at the neurobiology — the “wiring” — behind a spiritual or religious experience, one that can be hijacked by hallucinogenic drugs (#43, #44, and #45), as well as the machinery and molecules that seem to contribute to our sense of having a soul (#8, #9, #10, and #75) and consciousness (#16). I’ve outlined all of this and more in a lot more detail in my third book: Soul-searching: the evolution of JudeoChristian thinking on the soul and the afterlife. That collection of cognitive machinery explains a number of other religious/spiritual phenomena that we looked at in other episodes: humans feeling a special connection to another unseen dimension or being (#147); the “personal relationship” with the Divine (#42); speaking in tongues (#100); prayer (#99); the belief in divine inspiration of scripture (#57, #81, #101) and divine revelation (#115); the evolution of a religious streak and morality in humans (#76, #77).  In fact, it would also contribute to the output of the entire brain in general, and so we might also list the dozens of episodes we’ve done looking at this-or-that aspect of philosophy, theology and science. So again, this integrative retrospective at that string of episodes over the past four years had us asking: “are spiritual/religious experiences all in our head?”  We went back and forth on the topics of: solipsism; the circular logic of Descartes’ famous line: “I think, therefore I am”; where and what is the soul; Artificial Intelligence developing consciousness and becoming sentient; our own reality being a computer simulation (like Neo in the Matrix); the nature of the soul, Alzheimer’s disease and Phineas Gage.  And then we tried to pull all these thoughts together into some kind of conclusion, which kept weaving back and forth between yes and no: of course it’s all in our head … but so are all our other experiences.  I interact with my wife using the same machinery; in fact, I experience everything around me (a mosquito on my arm) or inside me (that bowl of bean and lentil soup that’s stirring things up inside me) using that same machinery.  We don’t negate the existence of any of those … nor should we feel compelled to negate the reality of our spiritual/religious experiences.  what about the fact that we can measure all those other things using science and scientific tools, but we can’t [yet] measure the spiritual realm?  Well, there was a time when science couldn’t measure ultraviolet light, atoms, or radioactivity either… does that mean we have to be sheeple, and superstitiously embrace every claim out there?  No, we’re allowed to question things (something that religion finds to be prohibitively dangerous … the dreaded “slippery slope”). For four years, this podcast has been questioning and testing theological claims.  And at this point, we find that accepting the reality of a God, a creative life force, or even just a Universal Consciousness helps put certain things — like the exquisite fine tuning of the physical constants of the universe, beauty, and life itself — into a framework that makes better sense of our reality.  As CS Lewis said: “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.” We ended the episode off with the question of why we humans have this cognitive machinery in the first place.  Did it evolve, or were we given it?  Was it an accident … an evolutionary “spandrel”? Does it confer some kind of selective advantage?  Or is it a toy that some higher being(s) gave humans to play with?  Or did the Divine intend some kind of divine-human relationship, for the same reason that we might get a pet?  Or all of the above? Let us know how you might answer those questions by email, our by leaving comments at the podcast’s WordPress site, my public Facebook page, or at our private Facebook Discussion Group. If you enjoyed this episode, you may also enjoy …. well … any of the ones we linked you to in the text above! Or some of the other ones listed at our theme page entitled “Religious experiences, spiritual encounters“ 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