A retrospective that spotlights a provocative thread with huge theological and existential implications: the primordial cosmic ‘egg’ was fine-tuned, preprogrammed, and front-end loaded!

In this Season Finale, we look back at an incredible series of episodes — most of them in the past few months, but many others from as far back as four years ago — and tease out a thread that’s central to the re-building of our Christian faith.  In contrast to the traditional Young Earth Creationist version of the origin of the universe and life, we look at a narrative that has grown out of on-going work done by scientists.  Millions of scientists, working over many centuries, many of them self-identifying as Christian, pursuing a divinely-inspired search for truth.

The primordial cosmic egg that ‘exploded’ in the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago — estimated to be “the size of a grapefruit” — was packed with an amazing array of ingredients.  Over the past couple months, several world-class astrophysicists, mathematicians, and philosophers talked about those ingredients including quantum mechanics, relativity, string theory, atomic properties, and a couple dozen physical constants (such as the cosmological constant, gravitational constant, speed of light, weight of an electron, and many more).  But we also heard in Season One about other ingredients: thermodynamics, entropy, randomness, probability, order, predictability, determinism, massively large numbers, dynamic complexity, chaos theory, and biological evolution.

Those conversations had us repeatedly using three provocative descriptors of that primordial cosmic ‘egg’, descriptors that have huge theological and existential implications.

(1) that ‘egg’ was fine-tuned.  Among scholars who are properly trained to weigh in on this aspect of astrophysics, there is little disagreement that this ‘egg’ was incredibly fine-tuned to produce a universe full of ‘useable stuff’ … stars, planets, and a Periodic Table full of elements (from cell-building blocks like hydrogen, nitrogen, carbon and oxygen … all the way up to biochemically-reactive inorganic metals like iron, nickel, copper, manganese, selenium and zinc).  The delicate balancing of the various physical constants is often compared to balancing a pencil on its sharpened tip.

(2) that ‘egg’ was preprogrammed to produce life.  Other scholars who are properly trained to weigh in on biology and biochemistry will agree that “life hit the ground running.”  In the cosmic equivalent of the blink of an eye, almost as soon as Earth formed, thermodynamics, deep-sea hydrothermal vents, and inorganic metals began churning out the building blocks of life, forming ever more complex organic structures, biochemical synthetic pathways and “prebiotic entities” which eventually produced living organisms.  The latter then embarked on a journey of inventing and exchanging newer genetic solutions to physiological and environmental problems, until we see the rich, diverse ecosystems of today.

(3) the ‘egg’ was front-end loaded to produce agape-capable beings, and the cognitive machinery in our heads evolved to point us toward something much bigger than ourselves. No one can deny that humans are a religious species.  It’s built into our brains.  Why?

This episode had us reminiscing over the many conversations we had with dozens of scientists and philosophers, and we called out the episode numbers that each of them featured in so that you can go back and unpack the claims they made.

In the end, we feel that in trying to make sense of how we humans came to this point in space and time, it comes down to a choice …. a leap of faith. One either believes in some kind of a Divinity, or believes that we’re a computer simulation in some multi-dimensional hypercosmic experiment, or believes that we are the product of a mind-breaking stroke of luck, a freak cosmic accident.  What’s at stake in that choice? … meaning, purpose, fulfilment, self-actualization.

Once again, this is the end of Season Five.  If you want to be notified when future episodes will start coming out, you’ll need to subscribe.  In the meantime, check out our archive of 170 episodes: they’re listed chronologically, thematically, and by name of our guest experts.  Tell your friends, family, and followers about this rich resource made freely available to anyone who wants to explore aspects of science, theology and philosophy from an exVangelical point of view.

Yet another novel creation by Andrew, to whom we give a huge thank you for your many other contributions over the course of this podcast!

To help grow this podcast, please like, share and post a rating/review at your favorite podcast catcher.

Subscribe here to get updates each time a new episode is posted...

Join our private discussion group at Facebook.

Back to Recovering Evangelicals home-page and the podcast archive

After life got a foothold on Earth, it immediately set about to filling the various emerging ecosystems with new organisms.

If you compressed the 3.7 billion year march of life on this planet down to 24 hours: earth comes into existence at midnight, the first fossils of life appear in the wee hours of the morning, the first multicellular life forms at dinner time, the first fish, land plants and amphibians by 10 pm, dinosaurs by 10:30, birds and mammals by 11:30 at night, and humans at midnight.

A lot happened during the last few hours of that day: what was life doing all morning and afternoon? We found out last week, in our conversation with Dr. Stephen Freeland, that it was building things using the complex macromolecules synthesized by non-living minerals around deep ocean hydrothermal vents, integrating together metabolic and genetic networks.  Increasing the levels of complexity.  Building genes, and sharing the information with neighboring bugs.  Writing pages and pages of ideas.  And then, right around the dinner hour on our metaphorical clock above, life hit the ground running.  Combining, consolidating, integrating, experimenting …. producing plants, fish, amphibians, reptiles, insects, birds, mammals … and consciousness.

In this episode, we talk to Dr. Simon Conway Morris about that cosmic terraforming experiment, and some of the mechanisms involved.  In particular, we talked quite a bit about convergence: different life forms on parallel evolutionary journeys landing on the same winning strategies again and again.  I used the analogy of “reaching into the freezer” for solutions to physiological, environmental and evolutionary problems.  That ‘freezer’ was the collective biotic genome that had been building up during the first two or three billion years … between “the wees hours of the morning” and the late afternoon on our metaphorical clock.  Dr. Conway Morris wasn’t too comfortable with my ‘freezer’ analogy …. it sounded too much like Intelligent Design, and he is absolutely no fan of that ideology (nor am I or Scott).  His preferred wording was to refer to the genome as being “seeded with inevitabilities”, which I think resonates perfectly with our overall theme of fine-tuning to produce life.

We also spent some time talking about Simon’s latest book: From Extraterrestrials to Animal Minds: Six Myths of Evolution.  He clarified some of the myths that have been built up around so-called ‘missing links’, mass extinctions, human exceptionalism (how we’re so different from all the other animals), extraterrestrials and the Fermi Paradox.

As always, tell us your thoughts on this topic …

Find more information about Dr. Simon Conway Morris at his university page.

If you enjoyed this episode, you may also like a couple we did three years ago with Dr. James Shapiro and with Dr. Jeffrey Schloss on the topic of speciation, or the many other episodes we’ve released on the subject of Fine Tuning.

Episode image is once again thanks to 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...

Join our private discussion group at Facebook.

Back to Recovering Evangelicals home-page and the podcast archive

Deep ocean hydrothermal vents may have been the stage for the biggest play on earth, preprogrammed into the Big Bang: the origin of life!

Over the past few weeks, we’ve been exploring the fine-tuning of the universe to produce life … complex, intelligent life.  This week and next, we’re going to look at how it seems that the appearance of life was baked into that fine-tuning.  That the moment the universe had presented a platform or stage, life appeared almost immediately on that stage, and just as quickly began to complexify, as if it were all preprogrammed.

We talked to Dr. Freeland, who studied at Oxford, York, and Cambridge Universities, did his post-doc at Princeton University, and spent four years as project manager for NASA’s Astrobiology Institute, leading a team of astrophysicists, astrochemists and astrobiologists, all focusing their efforts on trying to understand the origin of life.

We began with the fact that it took roughly 10 billion years to create Earth itself, but then only half a billion years for life to appear and spread across that newly formed Earth to such a degree that it left fossil evidence that we can now read several billion years later.  (Earlier this week, it was in the news that the same may have been found on Mars!)

Next, we talked about the conditions on Earth that seemed to be so permitting for life: there was almost no oxygen, no land, and relatively few free minerals!  But two key ingredients that were present was tectonic activity and hydrothermal vents on the ocean surface.  Those vents began spewing out minerals, heat, and acidity, which in turn began to create oxygen, electricity, and complex macromolecules.  All of those together led to the appearance of life!  And that early life began complexifying.  One of the things that living organisms did was replicate the conditions around those hydrothermal vents: they learned how to use complex lipid membranes and inorganic metals to set up gradients of acidity and electricity, and use those to then generate energy molecules (we now call these mitochondria).  At the same time, they were creating genetic information, and setting up metabolic and synthetic networks.  And they started freely sharing that genetic information, passing it around through horizontal gene transfer (neighbor-to-neighbor transmission, in contrast to the more familiar parent-to-child transmission).

This may be the first step toward solving a few of the biggest questions in origin of life research: how did life originate … was it genes/reproduction first, or metabolism/energy production first, or lipid membranes first.  The answer that Dr. Freeland posits: minerals alone were creating complex macromolecules first, and life then replicated what the minerals were already doing (some listeners might here recall an often used analogy of the wooden scaffolding needed to produce stone archways).  For the past few decades, people have been talking about the RNA World that preceded our own DNA World; but both were preceded by the Mineral World!

Putting all of this together with the past three episodes, what we get is a Big Bang that seemed to be finely-tuned to produce stars, planets, atomic elements, and the periodic table, which in turn followed their own built-in rules and properties to create complex macromolecules and even more complex bundles of amino acids, nucleic acids, and lipids (‘prebiotic entities’, loosely comparable to what we now call viruses), which eventually combined to produce what we would now call ‘life’. 

We ended with what all of this has to say about any possible meaning and purpose of the universe!

As always, tell us your thoughts on this topic …

Find more information about Dr. Stephen Freeland at his current institutional faculty page and his web-page at NASA.

If you enjoyed this episode, you may also like Episode #66, in which we talked to Dr. Freeland three years ago, or the many other episodes we’ve released on the subject of Fine Tuning.

Episode image is once again thanks to 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...

Join our private discussion group at Facebook.

Back to Recovering Evangelicals home-page and the podcast archive

An atheist response to fine-tuning: a super intellect ‘monkeying’ with the physics, a cosmic computer simulation, the multiverse hypothesis, and “the Gambler’s Fallacy.”

So far, we’ve heard from five different university-trained scholars with theistic worldviews about fine-tuning of the universe: a Christian astronomer, a Jewish mathematician/physicist duo, a Christian astrophysicist, and a Christian theologian/philosopher. In this episode, we’ll hear from another university-trained astrophysicist on the same subject, but this one describing himself as a card-carrying atheist … and who nonetheless agrees that the data strongly suggests the universe is indeed fine-tuned. Dr. Geraint Lewis grew up in Wales, was a science junky from the time he could first read, who later found he was good with mathematics and physics, and eventually found himself as a Professor of Astrophysics at the Sydney Institute for Astronomy. And he firmly accepts fine-tuning … but without a “Tuner”!?

We first checked if he means something different than our other five guests, when he refers to “fine-tuning.” He too points to the fundamental constants of the universe: he agrees that scientists have discovered equations which explain various aspects of the universe, through a process of contemplation, reasoning and scratching away on chalkboards, but those equations have certain constants that can’t be derived in any way …. they just have to be measured. 

For example, almost everyone has heard of Einstein’s famous equation: E=mc2.  Reasoning alone drives him (and them) to two conclusions: that energy and matter are interchangeable (we said in our introductory episode that matter is a frozen form of energy), and that the amount of energy (“E” in the equation) in a chunk of matter depends on the amount of mass in that chunk (“m” in the equation).  That makes sense! But the conversion factor between energy and mass is defined by a constant — the speed of light (“c” in the equation) — which can’t be derived from any equation or reasoning.  It just has to be posited, and then measured and accepted at face value. Why? Why that constant?

(As an aside, for me this is an example of a scientific equation that is so elegant and provocative that it makes one’s jaw drop. I mean, energy measured in units of joules or kilowatt hours or tons of TNT being determined by one thing measured in grams  and another thing measured in meters per second!? Really!?)

Dr. Lewis agrees completely (as do astrophysicists of all stripes) that when you put those equations into a computer model of the universe and then tweak some of the constants just a little bit, the model collapses — in our metaphor from a few weeks back, the pencil standing on its sharpened tip falls over — and you no longer get a universe with a Periodic Table. And thus, no life.

We asked Geraint to give us an insider’s perspective on Sir Fred Hoyle, the world-renowned astronomer with a deeply atheistic worldview who rejected the Big Bang hypothesis because it “gave too much to the Creationists” but nonetheless also said: “A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a super intellect has ‘monkeyed’ with the physics as well as the chemistry and biology.” Getting a fuller understanding of the context of Hoyle’s words, it seems to me that Creationists may have added a bit too much spin to both stories.

We also asked him about non-theistic explanations for fine-tuning.  He said some non-theists entertain the possibility that we might be part of some kind of cosmic computer simulation, while others opt for the multiverse hypothesis.  We asked: if by definition we can’t get any real-world evidence for a multiverse (because it’s outside of our own universe), can this really be called science, or is it a faith statement?  And also: isn’t appealing to the multiverse hypothesis committing the “inverse Gambler’s Fallacy.” You’ll need to hear the episode to know what that Fallacy is all about … and Geraint’s response to both push-backs.

As always, tell us your thoughts on this topic …

Find more information about Dr. Geraint Lewis at his university faculty web-page and his own personal web-site, as well as his latest book that he co-authored with last week’s guest, Dr. Luke Barnes.

If you enjoyed this episode, you should really check out the many other episodes we’ve released on the subject of Fine Tuning.

Episode image: another prize-winner by Andrew, after giving his AI the prompt “a universe that generates itself.” 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...

Join our private discussion group at Facebook.

Back to Recovering Evangelicals home-page and the podcast archive

It takes an incredibly finer level of fine-tuning to produce a universe that has carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, sodium, potassium, calcium, iron, copper, zinc, selenium, molybdenum and many other trace elements needed for life.

Last week, we explored the first of three meanings of the term “fine-tuning of the universe”: the delicate precision and balance of the fundamental constants and laws needed just to produce a universe full of simple atoms (like hydrogen and helium), planets and stars. 

This week, we look at the second meaning of that term: how that delicate and precise balance has to be even more finely tuned so that a wide variety of different kinds of atoms are produced … including those that are absolutely essential for life.  Not just the lighter ones that are necessary for making the basic structural components of cells (hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, sulfur) and the slightly heavier ones necessary for basic cell physiology like generating electrical signals and causing contraction (sodium, potassium, calcium), but also the much heavier and more complicated atoms that give many enzymes their core functionality that is so necessary for life (the iron in your blood cells, or the copper, zinc, selenium, and molybdenum in your liver enzymes).

We talked to Dr. Luke Barnes (PhD in astronomy from Cambridge University), who continued the conversation that Elie and Aaron started with us last week. He explained how those fundamental constants and laws of physics needed to be so very precisely tuned in order to produce the bewildering array of atomic elements (we have 118 of them here on earth) that are so necessary for intelligent life.  He also told us how that precise tuning is so provocatively disturbing that even the staunchly atheistic astrophysicist Sir Fred Hoyle said more than once to his equally atheistic peers: “A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a super intellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature.” 

Dr. Barnes also talked at length about how the common atheistic response to this fine tuning is to appeal to the multiverse, and how those that do so don’t properly understand that the probabilities do NOT in fact substantiate their belief (that word “belief” is chosen carefully and deliberately), and this appeal is really not much more than a “luck-of-the-gaps.”  Using the multiverse to “explain” the problem is not scientific, since it can’t ever be put to any kind of a scientific test.  And, in one sense, it pushes back the goalposts, since even that multiverse would need to be incredibly fine-tuned in order to be capable of producing a finely tuned universe.

The episode concluded with the “so what?” question … What do we do with this idea of “fine-tuning”?  How does it affect us?  Does it say anything about the meaning of life, or whether God exists?

As always, tell us your thoughts on this topic …

Find more information about Dr. Barnes at his university faculty page and his personal web-site, and check out his book A Fortunate Universe: Life in a Finely Tuned Cosmos.

Episode image: once again a work of genius from Andrew! I asked him: “How about taking the iconic image of Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam, and have God manipulating a machine with buttons/dials/knobs etc., and that machine producing living animals?” And this is one of many images he came up with using his generative AI! 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...

Join our private discussion group at Facebook.

Back to Recovering Evangelicals home-page and the podcast archive

Getting twenty five fundamental constants and physical laws just right to produce a universe full of electrons, neutrons, and protons … all the way up to planets and stars

Last week, we learned that “Fine Tuning” can mean three very different things.  Today, we’re going to explore the first of those three: the exquisite precision needed to produce a universe made up of “usable stuff” … electrons, protons, and neutrons, all the way up to planets and stars. Our guests today — Elie Feder (PhD in mathematics) and Aaron Zimmer (physics, mathematics and philosophy) — are the hosts of a podcast which focuses exclusively on that question.

Scientists have long been looking for a Grand Unifying Theory: something that would explain everything.  What they’ve found are a variety of physical laws and a collection of 25 different fundamental constants.  And there’s something odd about those constants: they’re not straightforward numbers that derive cleanly from any equation … they can only be measured. And when measured, they’re not simple numbers: they’re unpredictable and often involve long strings of digits.  They look strange, contrived, and … “ugly.”  In our metaphor from last week, it’s like trying to explain why there are 1760 yards in a mile: … why 1760? … why not 2000, or 1500, or even possibly 1750?  Why?  Who came up with this number?  This was puzzling to astrophysicists.  A big mystery.

But as those astrophysicists continued to put a microscope on those constants, they learned something new; something very provocative.  As they developed methods to better measure the constants, they found the constants were tuned to an exceptionally high degree of precision. And if the constants were changed by a little bit, the equations wouldn’t work.  The analogy that’s often used is balancing a pencil on its sharpened tip.  It was as if we learned that it’s not 1760 yards to a mile, but rather 1759.4691269378 yards.  And adjusting that by even a few per cent was enough to make it so that global distribution networks like Purolator and Fedex would no longer be able to function.  Getting back to cosmology, changing these 25 constants by even a few percent means the universe can no longer make electrons or atoms …. can no longer make planets or suns …. can’t make the variety of types of atoms needed for life!

And then some highly educated people began to wonder if this exceptionally high degree of precision — this Fine Tuning — is actually the key to the Big Mystery referred to above.  There’s a future purpose to those constants: to create a universe full of “usable stuff,” including life.  Those constants aren’t random, but have to be precisely tuned in order to achieve that goal. As if those values were selected!  Some, for ideological reasons, opt for explanations that involve chance and luck, like multiverse theories or infinite iterations of a single universe; but Aaron and Elie show how those “explanations” actually fall flat when you look at them more carefully. Verbs like “selected” and “tuned” suggest agency, and intelligence. Of course, this is where theists will point to God, while atheists — again, for ideological reasons — might suggest we’re living in a computer simulation. 

We guarantee that if you listen carefully to what they say, and keep an open mind that doesn’t automatically discount logical inferences that have ideological consequences, you’ll see that this is not a mere God-of-the-gaps explanation intended to replace the reigning luck-of-the-gaps explanations.

Let us know if you think differently (we tell you how to contact us at the end of the episode).

Find out more about our guests Elie Feder and Aaron Zimmer at their podcast: Physics to God.

If you liked this episode, you might also like the one we released three years ago on the same topic, when our guest was an astronomer: Dr. Robert Mann.

Episode image by Andrew: it’s amazing what he can come up with when I simply ask for “something with knobs and dials that produces galaxies.”

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...

Join our private discussion group at Facebook.

Back to Recovering Evangelicals home-page and the podcast archive

“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...

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...

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...

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...

Join our private discussion group at Facebook.

Back to Recovering Evangelicals home-page and the podcast archive