Recovering Evangelicals

This is the conversation that motivated me to start Season Six: the book that got me questioning whether “my [liberal] faith was in vain”

Folks, this interview is the one that rebooted the podcast!  The previous three episodes that started Season Six were all a lead-up to this conversation.  It was an article written by our guest today — Dr. Roger Olson, Professor Emeritus of Theology at Baylor University, one of the biggest religious universities in the United States, and the biggest Baptist University in the world — that got me seriously questioning whether I was allowed to still call myself a Christian. That article  — Why I wrote Against Liberal Theology — caught me at a time when I was getting very comfortable in my liberal/Progressive Christian skin, and very disillusioned with the Christianity of my Fundamentalist Evangelical past.  It prompted a deep introspective dive into what DO I really believe (or not believe) … and why?

In this conversation — a very calm, collegial, and respectful one by the way! — we asked Dr. Olson to define liberal Christian theology and explain why he sees it as “heresy.” We also asked him to define orthodox Christian theology (essentially, the Nicene Creed), the gospel message, and the label “Christian.”  We talked about whether Christianity truly has an unchanging core tradition set over a millennium ago by the church fathers, or whether it has always been evolving.  Other stopping points in our conversation included: miracles, the resurrection of Jesus, the Wesleyan quadrilateral, naturalism, and Carl Sagan.  And in the last part of our conversation, I asked for his comments about my very liberal Christian view on the human condition and our need for salvation — a view that, I’ll admit, looks very different from the traditional, “orthodox” view — and about my insistence on using the label “Christian.” 

Truth be told, it was a great conversation, and I highly recommend Dr. Olson’s book — Against Liberal Theology: putting the brakes on Progressive Christianity — to any listeners who “want to hear both sides of the story” on the conservative/liberal Christian spectrum.

Next week, we’ll talk to an equally prominent theologian from the liberal end of the theological spectrum. In fact, one whom Dr. Olson frequently mentions in his book and in our conversation as perhaps the absolute best representative since Friedrich Schleiermacher of the Liberal Christian Theological movement that he was targeting in his book! 

As always, tell us your thoughts …

Find more information about Dr. Roger Olson at the Patheos web-site that now hosts his blog posts, and find his many books at Amazon, including the one we discuss in this episode: Against Liberal Theology: putting the brakes on Progressive Christianity.

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This is the conversation that motivated me to start Season Six: the book that got me questioning whether “my [liberal] faith was in vain”

Folks, this interview is the one that rebooted the podcast!  The previous three episodes that started Season Six were all a lead-up to this conversation.  It was an article written by our guest today — Dr. Roger Olson, Professor Emeritus of Theology at Baylor University, one of the biggest religious universities in the United States, and the biggest Baptist University in the world — that got me seriously questioning whether I was allowed to still call myself a Christian. That article  — Why I wrote Against Liberal Theology — caught me at a time when I was getting very comfortable in my liberal/Progressive Christian skin, and very disillusioned with the Christianity of my Fundamentalist Evangelical past.  It prompted a deep introspective dive into what DO I really believe (or not believe) … and why?

In this conversation — a very calm, collegial, and respectful one by the way! — we asked Dr. Olson to define liberal Christian theology and explain why he sees it as “heresy.” We also asked him to define orthodox Christian theology (essentially, the Nicene Creed), the gospel message, and the label “Christian.”  We talked about whether Christianity truly has an unchanging core tradition set over a millennium ago by the church fathers, or whether it has always been evolving.  Other stopping points in our conversation included: miracles, the resurrection of Jesus, the Wesleyan quadrilateral, naturalism, and Carl Sagan.  And in the last part of our conversation, I asked for his comments about my very liberal Christian view on the human condition and our need for salvation — a view that, I’ll admit, looks very different from the traditional, “orthodox” view — and about my insistence on using the label “Christian.” 

Truth be told, it was a great conversation, and I highly recommend Dr. Olson’s book — Against Liberal Theology: putting the brakes on Progressive Christianity — to any listeners who “want to hear both sides of the story” on the conservative/liberal Christian spectrum.

Next week, we’ll talk to an equally prominent theologian from the liberal end of the theological spectrum. In fact, one whom Dr. Olson frequently mentions in his book and in our conversation as perhaps the absolute best representative since Friedrich Schleiermacher of the Liberal Christian Theological movement that he was targeting in his book! 

As always, tell us your thoughts …

Find more information about Dr. Roger Olson at the Patheos web-site that now hosts his blog posts, and find his many books at Amazon, including the one we discuss in this episode: Against Liberal Theology: putting the brakes on Progressive Christianity.

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

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Using the modified Wesleyan quadrilateral to summarize my current understanding of the Bible, God, Jesus and the human condition.

In this episode, I explain how my Christian understanding on several key theological ideas has changed. I came from a very Fundamentalist Evangelical upbringing, and all our listeners know that I’ve completely left behind the Young Earth Creationism and superficially literal readings of the Bible that characterized the Christianity of my first three decades. And they’ll also know that I’ve been developing some rather creative transformations of a variety of aspects of my Christian faith. But what about the very basic core elements of Christianity? Where have I landed on those?

Before we get into that, let’s be clear how I’ve modified and used a centuries-old theological tool for clarifying true, meaningful and practical beliefs: the four pillars of the Wesleyan quadrilateral. Many others emphasize the load-bearing capacity of two of those pillars: scripture and church tradition. How many times haven’t we heard Fundamentalist phrases like: “if the Bible says it, I believe it, and that settles it” and “we’ve always thought that way”? But I’ve given full flexibility and load-bearing capacity to all four corners so that, in some cases, reason and experience can bear most of the load, sometimes even eclipsing the explanatory power of scripture and church tradition. In response to those two well-worn Fundamentalist phrases I just quoted, I’m not hesitant to ask whether certain difficult Biblical passages are “just ancient Jews talking” (Psalm 137:8,9), and to suggest that “Christianity has ALWAYS been evolving in response to science, philosophy, culture, and politics.” And I’ve added in that ramp of reason that focuses and re-directs the leap of faith.

Using this tool, I explain where I now stand on four central Christian ideas … the Bible, God, Jesus, and the human condition? For this episode blurb, I tried many times to summarize these deeply nuanced shibboleths into just a few pithy sentences. But I kept finding myself adding more and more paragraphs to each. So …. instead of reading it here, you’re going to have to listen to me unpacking those in the conversation recorded with Scott.

Next week, we’re going to talk to Dr. Roger Olson, a very prominent Conservative theologian and scholar. We’ll ask him to comment on my new found theology, and to explain why I can’t call it “orthodox” … in the literal sense of that word (“true teaching”) rather than the traditional one (adhering to a literal reading of Scripture or a long church tradition). And the week after that, we’ll do the same with an equally prominent scholar on the other side of the theological spectrum, Dr. Douglas F. Ottati.

As always, listen and then tell us your thoughts on this discussion …

If you enjoyed this episode and want to dig deeper, you might want to go to our previous episodes on:

Episode image by Andrew … thanks Andrew!

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Before describing our new Christian worldview, we thought we should talk about the tools and strategies we used to get there.

Our goal, over the next few weeks, is to have two world renowned Christian theologians — one very conservative and the other very liberal — give us feedback on our now very liberal Christian theology. But before we do that, we thought it would be fair to our listeners to lay out that liberal theology.  We’ll do that next week, but this week we feel we need to explain how we arrived at our new liberal Christian worldview. How does one create and revise a theology.

So today, we start off with asking: “how do we know what we know” …. aka, “epistemology.”  The Socratic method: learning by asking questions.  We also get into what the term “deconstruction” really means: it’s not simply breaking apart, smashing, and leaving a pile of scattered rubble.  It’s more like dissection than demolition: carefully taking something apart in order to learn how it works.

We also take a walk through history, looking at how humans in different periods went about finding truth: the Hellenic Greek period … the Age of Reason, or Enlightenment  … the Reformation …. Modernism.  Then a period in which we saw  the erosion of certainty (Wittgenstein and Gödel destroy the idea that everything can be fully explained purely through mathematics; Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle; Einstein’s theory of relativity: different frameworks produce different realities), which crystalized into Postmodernism, which says there is no absolute truth.

Then we see how these ideas apply to constructing, deconstructing, and reconstructing a Christian worldview, which typically involves an appeal to authorities.  This is true not just for the evolution of Christianity in general over the past two thousand years, but also Christianity in each one of us over the course of our lifetime.

It’s easy to say that God would be the ultimate authority.  But few of us get to hear from God himself … directly.  So we then defer to hearing from God’s spokespeople:

In the course of this exploration through Church history and Christian epistemology, we learn about a useful interpretational tool or exercise: the Wesleyan quadrilateral … shaping and refining ideas through a lens or prism or filter that has four corners or pillars: scripture, church tradition, reason (science; philosophy), and experience (culture; historical events and crises).  Many Christians would prioritize two of those poles: scripture and church tradition.  We advocate for having more flexibility between the four, even allowing science to question scripture (which we now see as a very human document).  “Discovered truth” (science and philosophy) versus “Revealed truth” (theology).

Finally, we add one other feature or strategy to that Wesleyan quadrilateral: running the ramp of reason before making a leap of faith.

Next week, Luke’s going to use this modified Wesleyan quadrilateral — with full flexibility in all four corners, and a built-in ramp of reason —  to present his revised Christian worldview, one which was very Fundamentalist Evangelical but is now quite liberal.  And then we’ll get those two world-renowned Christian theologians (one ultra-conservative, the other very liberal) commenting on that.

As always, tell us your thoughts on this topic …

If you enjoyed this episode, you may also like previous ones in which we’ve done a deep-dive into the human fingerprints all over the Old Testament (#57) and New Testament (#81), Divine Inspiration (#101), and an egregious example of people using God and scripture to justify crazy ideas (#98).

Episode image by Andrew. Thanks Andrew!

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A sneak-peak at what’s in store for S6 …. and why!

Season Five ended rather abruptly, in part due to practical reasons (the Fall is always a busy time … teaching, hunting, shutting the property down for the winter). But there was also very much an internal, philosophical/theological thing going on: getting increasingly disheartened and disillusioned by things going on in the world. Western society seemed to be increasingly in upheaval (and that was months before what descended on us in January!?), the Evangelical world was getting more and more weird, social media becoming toxic, and we were struggling with re-evaluating what we still believed. Or didn’t believe. As we started the New Year, I [Luke] was resigning myself to the fact that I’d given up most of the Evangelical faith that I’d grown up in for fifty years, and was becoming more comfortable with the label “Liberal Christian.”

And then my social media offered up to me an article written by a highly-credentialed conservative theologian who had been THE Professor of Theology at the biggest Baptist university in the world, introducing his new book: Against Liberal Theology: putting the brakes on Progressive Christianity. Dr. Roger Olson described Liberal Christianity as not only unorthodox, but even heretical! It hit me like a slap in the face! Well, call me a sucker for punishment, but I felt I needed to talk to this scholar to see if my reasons for embracing Liberal Theology were solid and defensible. While preparing for that conversation, I discovered an equally highly-credentialed liberal theologian — Dr. Douglas F. Ottati — who wrote his own book: A theology for the twenty-first century. Well didn’t that title catch my eye!?

I contacted both scholars, and within hours … literally … both said they’d be happy to talk to us.

And thus, Season Six was birthed!

This episode sets the stage for that conversation with two titans on either end of the Christian spectrum. Scott and I discuss whether we need to re-brand: do we need to change the title of our podcast, given that we’ve given up on Evangelicalism? We polled our private Facebook discussion group about this and got a clearly decisive answer …. m’eh!? We also discuss whether the mission and trajectory of the podcast will be different in Season Six: we shared comments from our listeners, who see the podcast as a community, a support group, and providing role models, tools, and ideas. We’re going to lean more heavily into that.

We close out the episode with a sneak-peak at what’s coming down the Recovering Evangelicals pipeline. After we hear what Drs. Olson and Ottati have to say about Liberal Christian Theology itself, we’re going to hear from several people who themselves made the transition out of a Fundamentalist/Evangelical faith into something more liberal/progressive, but did so from very different perspectives: one as a professor in the Academy (Peter Enns) and the other as a pastor (Brian MacLaren).

As always, tell us your thoughts on this episode in the comment box below.

If you enjoyed this episode, you might also enjoy several previous ones we referred to, covering the Gospel (#12), Atonement Theology (#19 and #20), a new understanding of Easter (#112), Jesus as the Jewish Messiah (#82) or Cosmic Divine Being (#83), as well as a collection of personal stories from listeners transitioning out of traditional conservative Evangelicalism.

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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!

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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.

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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.

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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!

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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! 

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