Recovering Evangelicals

A world-renowned expert on human memory tells us we’re only fooling ourselves when we insist on saying “I KNOW what I saw.”

Dr. Elizabeth Loftus is a Distinguished Professor at the University of California, Irvine. Her forty years of doing research on human memory has produced hundreds of papers in prestigious scientific journals and over 20 books. She’s provided expert testimony or consultation services in over 300 court cases, including dozens of high profile celebrities.

She shared with us much of what she’s learned about how recalling memories is not like pressing the button on a videorecorder in our head. Instead, those memories are fragile and easily contaminated by context-dependent details brought in later in time. Those changes can be produced by us ourselves, or by other people around us; it can be intentional (beneficially in therapy or research, or malevolently in gas-lighting and coerced confessions) or unintentional and just organic. It can happen days after the event, and is inevitable after years and decades. It’s not at all surprising that eyewitnesses in court cases can so frequently disagree in their testimonies.

Hmmmmmmm …… what might this say about biographies based on testimonies given decades after the events by highly motivated eyewitnesses? I’m sure you know what I’m referring to here!? Scott and I will come back to this question, after we hear from an expert neurobiologist or two.

Stay tuned!

As always, tell us your thoughts on this topic …

Find out more about Dr. Elizabeth Loftus at her institutional profile page at UC Irvine.

If you enjoyed this episode, you might also enjoy our previous discussion about the writing of the Gospel accounts, and a few others that immediately followed after that one.

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Intelligent Design advocates leverage engineering language to make their case.

Daniel J Nicholson — a philosopher with graduate-level molecular biological training — identifies four general characteristics of all man-made machines:

He then shows us how cells and proteins in general do not share these four fundamental characteristics. They may well look like a duck, but they certainly don’t quack like a duck! So why keep calling them machines?

Why should we stop doing so? Because this kind of language conjures up a Machinist … an Engineer … a Designer. And this is the currency of Intelligent Design advocates: we’re playing into their hands. Letting them use Engineering language makes it too easy for them, and allows their audience to take the lazy approach (just say “God did it!”) than do the hard work of researching how things like the bacterial flagellum came to be. In our conversation last week with Jon Perry (Episode #222), and in a previous one we had with three biologists who are world-renowned experts in the study of the bacterial flagellum (Episode #135), we learned about several stages in the evolutionary history of how a sticky bump which made it possible for bacteria to adhere to solid surfaces became the flagellum.

And why is this important? Scott and I have previously discussed why Intelligent Design explanations are not only unsatisfactory, but can also lead to some truly horrific theological conclusions (see Episode#130).

As always, tell us your thoughts on this topic …

Find out more about Dr. Daniel J. Nicholson at his faculty page.

If you’re interested in reading Dr. Nicholson’s full treatment of this, then see his paper Is the cell really a machine? in the Journal of Theoretical Biology 477:108-126 (2019) [https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jtbi.2019.06.002]

If you enjoyed this episode, you might also enjoy several of our previous episodes collected thematically under “Intelligent Design.”

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Once again, we return to Exhibit A in the case of Evolution v. Intelligent Design: the bacterial flagellum.

A highly influential YouTuber with 11.9M subscribers posted a video that gushed over the incredible complexity of the bacterial flagellum, and impressed on his audience that it just could not have come about through evolution … “it just had to have been designed.”

Science educator Jon Perry gently pushed back on that claim, making a few rebuttals and clarifications in the comments section. That ignited a bit of on-line conversation and resulted in Jon creating a whole series of videos that took on many of the main ID arguments and explained how evolution is so fully capable of producing the stunning complexity of this molecular machine.

Those videos in turn caught our own eyes, and motivated us to have our own conversation with Jon. The three of us discussed various aspects of the evolutionary journey of the bacterial flagellum, as well as the stubborn persistence of the Intelligent Design arguments (it seems that, while the flagellum itself has been evolving to ever greater complexity and efficiency, the ID argument plods onward unchanged). We concluded that much of that persistence stems from the compelling influence of the emotion of awe (which triggers input from the “hypersensitive agency detector” and “promiscuous teleology” centers in our Homo sapiens brains) as well as the engineering-laden language that we use to describe the flagellum.

It was a great conversation that we think will lead to further collaborations down the road. And we highly recommend Jon’s YouTube channels StatedClearly and StatedCasually.

As always, tell us your thoughts on this topic …

If you enjoyed this episode, you might also enjoy several of our previous episodes collected thematically under “Intelligent Design.”

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A leading figure in the Open Relational and Process Theistic camp critiques our own new Christology/Theology

We asked Dr. Thomas Jay Oord to comment on the new theology/Christology that we’ve been unpacking on this podcast over the previous two weeks, coming at it from the very non-conventional, non-traditional perspective of Open Relational and Process Theism. A very rich and affirming experience!

Although we didn’t specifically highlight his book — a three volume treatise entitled A Systematic Theology of Love — much of our discussion reflects directly on it. We highly recommend this book: volume 1 is now available!

As always, tell us your thoughts on this topic …

Find out more about Dr. Oord and his book at his website.

If you enjoyed this episode, you will also enjoy our previous interview with Dr. Oord, during which he heard his more complete life story and a much more detailed breakdown of Open Relational and Process Theism.

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A vibrant conversation between Luke, Scott and several of our more engaged listeners generated a lot of heat and light

Several listeners wrote in over the past few weeks in response to the new Christology/theology that Luke unpacked in the 8-part mini-series we concluded last week.  This week, we unpack some of the questions and answers that went back and forth between us and three new listeners who wrote in plus two listeners who have been with us from the beginning. Luke asked all five the following questions:

(1) did they think Luke went too far, or not far enough?

(2) what was your own personal journey through Christianity?

            Does this sound like any podcast hosts you know?

(3) what were your biggest and/or most persistent fears/concerns in that journey?

(4) what were the benefits of having proceeded down “the slippery slope”?

(5) after giving up so much of Christianity, why are you still picking away at it, and why are you listening to our podcast?

In unpacking those five questions, they challenged/questioned back at Luke:

Then we drew comparisons between Religion/Christianity and a meme / mind-virus:

Finally, Luke and Scott described a new direction for a new target audience of this podcast!

Needless to say, it was a lively and practical discussion!

As always, tell us what you think.

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After completely deconstructing the Christian faith he grew up with, Luke answers the question: “what do I still believe about Jesus?”

This week’s episode is the cap-stone on the archway we’ve built up in this 8-part mini-series over the past two months, as well as many other episodes over the past five years that gave deep-dives into some of the main issues that needed to be considered before answering the fundamental question that every deconstructing Exvangelical will eventually need to answer: “what do I believe now about Jesus?”

I won’t summarize here my (Luke’s) answer to that question, nor the ways in which I got to that new Christology …. it’s just too complicated and nuanced. You really need to listen to this episode.

And to help you dig deeper as you make your way through this episode, I’ve listed here the links to some of the episodes we refer to, and which form the base of that Christology, so the interested listener can do their own homework and deep-dive:

If you’re deconstructing your own Christian faith and want a thoughtful, informed pathway towards reconstructing something new, then you’ve gotta’ listen to this episode!

As always, tell us what you think.

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John’s Gospel is so different from the other three Gospel accounts, one might have to wonder …..

This week, we talk to a New Testament scholar with particular expertise on the writing of the Gospels. His most recent book focuses squarely on the Gospel of John.

After asking some basic background information on that Gospel account, we dove head-first into the biggest problem that Luke has with the Gospel of John: how/why it’s SO VERY different from the other three Gospel accounts:

After our guest admitted that “John might have made it up”, we discussed the impact that this kind of bombshell might have on laypeople in the church pews.

There’s a lot of food for thought in this episode, folks!

And …… we highly recommend this book.

As always, tell us your thoughts on this topic …

Find out more about Dr. Mark Goodacre and this book at his website and his YouTube channel.

If you enjoyed this episode, you might also enjoy several of our previous episodes collected thematically under “The Bible.”

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Literary scholars such as JR Tolkien and CS Lewis see Christianity as not only the fulfillment of ancient Hebrew prophecies, but also the deep-seated yearnings of the human heart, expressed through a multitude of myths and religions.

[this is a re-release from our Archive; Scott was not part of the team at that time]

In previous episodes, we looked at hominids a few hundred thousand years ago acquiring cognitive abilities which equipped them to think abstractly, symbolically, and religiously (episodes #75, #76, #77, and #78 ), which they [we] used to create a long list of religions. We also looked specifically at the evolution of two particular world religions: Judaism (episode #80) and Christianity (episodes #81, #82, and #83).

That sequence of episodes might have misled some listeners to conclude (or think that we ourselves have concluded) that Judaism and Christianity are no different from the many other religions that humans have concocted from large collections of myths. However, some modern literary scholars — including JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis — have concluded that Christianity is separate from all those other myths: in fact, they described it as “True Myth” which not only fulfills ancient Hebrew prophecies, but also the inner yearnings of humans going back tens of millennia, expressed through mythic tales that go back to the dawn of recorded history.

In this episode, we talked to Dr. Louis Markos about what myths are, and how we modern humans in the 21st century are no less prolific in myth-making than our ancient ancestors, and that all those myths draw on common themes expressed through archetypal characters.

We also looked at the possibility that our evolving ancient brains contained key ideas/impulses which we’ve been processing over millennia into mythic tales, which in turn pointed us and drew us toward the Divine in a driven-search for truth … somewhat like migrating birds and butterflies being born with an innate navigational sense and a comparable subconscious drive to fly thousands of miles to a particular destination every year.

And we explored some intriguing questions, like:

As always, tell us what you think …

To find more about Dr. Louis Markos, go to his faculty webpage, his Amazon author page, or his Youtube channel.

If you enjoyed this episode, you may also enjoy several of our previous previous episodes that looked at the origin and evolution of the software in our brains that lead to or produce a religious streak, symbolism, and morality, which can be found at our thematic page “Human Evolution.”

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They were written by GrecoRoman elites in the 2nd century, and Paul radically influenced their writing!?

Christians sitting in the pews have long had the idea that the Gospels were written by four individuals, at least of three of whom were Jews (Luke may not have been), and two of whom were part of Jesus’s inner circle (the other two got their information from an apostle). And those modern people in the pews read the Gospels as if they were written at the time that the events happened: as if those accounts were a transcript of a reporter on the TV news, telling us what happened earlier that day.

Scholars over the past couple centuries, on the other hand, have recognized that many people (authors; editors, copyists) were involved in putting together each of those Gospel accounts, and that the writing took place many decades after the events happened.

Today we talk to a scholar who is part of a growing awareness (consensus?) in the scholarly community that there was a much longer time-line and a greater degree of cultural separation between the events that happened and the authors that wrote them: that the Gospels were not written by blue-collar Jews in the first century, but instead by highly-educated GrecoRoman elites in the second century.  Our guest is Dr. Robyn Faith Walsh, and her book is The Origins of Early Christian Literature: Contextualizing the New Testament within Greco-Roman Literary Culture..

Questions that we put to her included:

As always, tell us your own thoughts on this topic …

Find out more about Dr. Walsh and this book at her web-site.

If you enjoyed this episode, you may also enjoy several of our previous episodes collected thematically under “the Bible“

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Paul and John (and modern Evangelicals) seem to paint a different portrait of Jesus than all the others who actually walked and talked with him.

Jesus of Nazareth as … the Logos? [image created by Andrew … thanks Andrew!]

Last week, we looked at the first half of that paradoxical Christian expression: Jesus was “fully human and yet fully divine.” We learned that the people who walked and talked with him found him to be a fully human, Jewish Messiah who would redeem Israel. But the Apostle Paul and the author(s) of the Gospel of John paint a very different portrait. John refers to Jesus as “the Logos” (a universal, impersonal, cosmic force of reason) and as a universal Savior of all mankind (“the Lamb of God that takes away the sins of the world”). Likewise, Paul also refers to him as something much more than human.

We asked a New Testament scholar — Dr. Christopher Zoccali — to help us reconcile these two different perspectives. We picked away at some unsettling questions:

We ended with a thought-provoking scenario of Paul essentially acting like a time-traveller, in the sense that:

Is this the kind of paradox that always comes up in movies that involve time-travel: someone goes backward through time to influence earlier events, so that now the outcome of the story is changed (sometimes radically!?).

As always, tell us what you think …

To find more about Dr. Christopher Zoccali, go to his personal web-page.

If you enjoyed this episode, you may also enjoy several of our previous episodes collected thematically under “the Bible.”

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