A Conversation on Science, Neuroscience, and Faith | Veritas at ASU (2018)

so welcome to a Veritas forum conversation on science and faith I'm Jack man sophomore here at ASU studying economics and before we get going and introduce tonight's very special guests I just want to give you some background on what the Veritas forum is and how how tonight's event came about so Veritas as you know means truth in Latin and the Veritas forum is a nonprofit organization dedicated to helping students at some of the world's leading universities confront life's hardest questions by placing the Christian faith in dialogue with other beliefs and systems of thought the first forum was planned by students faculty and chaplains at Harvard University in 1992 since then over 200 universities in North America and Europe have hosted over 2000 forums the first forum here at ASU took place 21 years ago in February of 1997 the next one happened in 2007 the next in 2015 and from then on there's been one every year at ASU so we're on sort of a roll and and you could look forward to many more to come tonight specifically is the result of over of a collaboration of between over 200 orbit over 20 campus ministry groups here on here at ASU you can find a list of those in the program and I I apologize we have more people than I think we were expecting so not everybody received a program now if you did receive something from the ushers you should have gotten a response card if you wouldn't mind we'd really appreciate it if you were able to fill that out and if you enter your email on it you'll you'll get an email from the Veritas forum and you'll be able to enter to win to have a chance at winning an iPad so moderating tonight will be Hannah Parmalee mrs. Parmalee is a campus minister with Oasis campus ministry and outreach of the Tempe Church of Christ she received a bachelor's in psychology from Pepperdine University and a master's in marriage and family therapy from Fuller Theological Seminary before coming to Tempe mrs. Parmalee served as the director of relationship IQ at the Boone Center for the family at Pepperdine University where she helped organization of all sorts teach young adults about how to foster healthy godly relationships she and her husband Jay have been married since 2002 and they have together have three young daughters so without further ado please join me in giving a very warm welcome to mrs. Hannah Parmalee thank you jack I appreciate it well I too want to extend my welcome to ASU Veritas I'm so glad to be with you here tonight and to get to participate in this discussion together a conversation on science neuroscience and faith what a great place to be tonight I'm glad that we're here together tonight we ask neuroscience insiders their meaningful understandings of how the brain responds and impacts us we're going to talk about the mind-body connection how beliefs matter and influence our brains moral decision-making freewill and how we expand rigid thinking to experience choice just a few small topics tonight hmm this is not going to be a theological conversation but rather a conversation about neuroscience with Christians CS Lewis said the world does not need more Christian literature what it needs is more Christians writing good literature tonight we have with us two neuroscientists who have thought deeply about their fields and they are Christians they do not agree on everything I'm so tonight they'll offer you a civil dialogue and conversations about things that they do agree about and things that they don't we hope that you will experience in this conversation freedom to lean into big questions that you will ask the deeper why questions that we have and that you will consider the glorious complexity of our good God so let me introduce to you our amazing speakers and I've gotten to spend a good part of today with them and I am so impressed with these men and I'm very excited for you to get to hear from them I'm as we were sitting and talking earlier today about what they would talk about tonight there was parts of their conversation and dialogue with each other they just get off on one of these topics like just that they're nodding uh-huh but they they have some wonderful things to share with you so dr. William Newsome is a very prominent scientist he's world renowned for his work in neuroscience he's a member of the National Academy of Science he's an honored professor at Stanford University in neurobiology he's the founder of Stanford's Neuroscience Institute and he's and he's been co-chair at the u.s. national brain initiative which was a huge national project in mapping the brain he's also a very kind man I've come to know today he's also a father and a follower of Jesus and dr. Kurian studied civil engineering at UCLA and psychiatry and neuroscience at Stanford Medical School where he's also finishing his residency in psychiatry his research has focused on willpower and top-down control as well as brain imaging of executive function and mental illness clinically he is working on developing holistic treatments and finding better ways to help patients who are depressed thrive with their body and their brain and their soul he loves teaching nonprofit work including a year in Kenya and excessively long conversations over brunch as well as podcasting if you're interested in podcasts you can find them at psych too taught space and so tonight we have the pleasure of hearing from David first and then Bill and then after that I'm going to change the slide so you can see we're gonna have a time of Q&A and so these are some different ways that you can text your questions in or hashtag them on social media are we doing the hashtag Jenna just Twitter okay or you can Twitter what's the hashtag hashtag ASU Veritas so you can tweet or text in your questions and we'll get to those after we hear from David and Bill so let's give them a warm welcome all right well thank you guys for having us out I'm really excited about giving this talk and I'm glad that so many of you are interested in science neuroscience and faith I was just talking to Bill earlier about what a what a strange time it is that that hundreds of people want to hear about these like weird topics about brains and such that are kind of a kind of special interests but um but yeah so but so it is and we'll we're going to give you our perspective on on how these things interact but before we do too much of that I want to give some preliminary comments on science before we talk too much about the neuroscience side of things as this is probably as this is often a barrier for a lot of people before they even walk in the door about neuroscience can can a scientist really be a religious so you know these things are thought to be opposite directions in conflict I'm not going to talk too much about this question other than to say that is a minority opinion you might not get that from listening to two popular sources but the majority of the population majority of a practive scientists that they surveyed in this particular study suggested that these are two independent domains they're two different ways of knowing things and only only 29% were believed that there was a conflict between science and faith fundamentally so that one thing to say like yes it's an interesting topic and Veritas forum has all sorts of topics also you can you can google this there's there's just dozens and dozens of talks on this subject the other thing to note is that while there is a difference in the United States between those who the general population identifying as slightly moderately or very religious and that scientists are lower that number is not zero the other thing to note is that there's some interesting cross-cultural comparisons that in some places scientists are more religious than the general population so the the general conflict hypothesis has a number of a number of points that are not accounted for but I'll put that away bill will say a few more things about that later but let's talk about the the the topic of free will I mean this is this is a gigantic question and one of the things I've been interested in personally clinically in my own life what is it do we have it how do we how do we wrestle with these questions but do we have the ability to make choices in any sort of meaningful sense that is one of the things that we're going to be addressing today so I've got three points to make number one there are several philosophical views on how freewill works there's no neuroscience evidence that that disproves freewill and top-down causality is experimentally validated and I'll say more about what that is but the the basic idea of beliefs or values or things that are on these this this high level of neurological processing those things matter and and exist as experimental constructs as well so first several philosophical views on how free walls okay so let's start off with this question what is I I think that to start off the question of free will I think that trying to find some example of where is this what can we look at and I think that moral decision-making is a great place to look there's all sorts of experimental constructs but from a philosophical standpoint what is the difference between saying that you should love your name and saying that you should eat your neighbor is there a difference between these two things now of course we'd want to say that this is the good person and Hannibal Lecter is the bad person and that we'd want to we want to be more like her and less like him hopefully and that's like what we're what we're going for but but how can we meaningfully make decisions in this area and and what does it even mean to make a moral decision um so I'm gonna give you one construct of how this could happen and I wanted to use a concrete example this is William F Buckley a prominent conservative commentator who's got a very a smug look on his face in this particular 1957 photo William F Buckley said this in 1957 on segregation the white community is so entitled to it because for the time being it is the advanced race so a rather rather racist comment and we might say that Oh what's it's partly his his dopamine that's doing this that's causing now or maybe it's his uh his mother coming from Louisiana maybe we can say that that there's sort of cultural influences there perhaps it's his white race or or maybe even its his class he was from an upper-class family maybe these things influenced him to be a racist or to make a racist comment um so then the civil rights movement comes Martin Luther King jr. comes and he says one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust loss all right so one way we could analyze this and Bill's going to talk a lot more about this in his talk is that we could go down we could say oh well let's let's just break that down and we can learn more about what Martin Luther King is saying we could look at the word laws how does it sound what is it from what language is it what language does it derive from we could study the physics of it we could study the the physics of the sound vibrations we could study the ear we could study the neural conduction none of these things is helping us understand Martin Luther King jr. we have to go in the other direction we have to go up so one thing we could say is okay well let's study American jurisprudence but there again we come up with a problem because that's exactly what he's saying we should not be doing we should be doing something other than following the law what he's doing is he's pointing to something above the law he's pointing to this thing and expecting people like Buckley to also be able to see the thing he's pointing at um but that's very strange that's very it's a very strange thing to be able to do and the the story has a happy ending William F Buckley does actually change his tune in the 1960s and becomes an advocate of the civil rights movement and a proponent of making Martin Luther King jr. Day a national holiday which successfully so when you when you take that day off know that people have changed their minds and and that's it's a beautiful thing it's a it's a wonderful part of the human condition to change one's mind all right but that's weird how do you change your mind so we agree that there are things like like photons like a photon will start here at the Sun and it will travel and we've got this we've got we've got receptors we've got a retina we've got a brain that's able to interpret photons that all makes sense that we can say that there's evolutionary advantages to being able to see light and photons and be able to detect them accurately that's all that's all great well agree on that but like but what is this like what is it that Martin Luther King jr. was pointing at and then what is how is it that anybody is able to to see that that kind of that kind of stuff we might say that it's evolutionarily is is matter the kind of stuff that can be just that's that's that's a difficult question and so you know we might say that that yes there's evolutionary advantages to being able to talk about justice we can form better societies we can we can build larger we can get together as larger groups of primates to out-compete other groups of primates if we have this concept of justice but it still doesn't answer the question how exactly can matter do that you know we might say that it would be evolutionarily advantageous to be able to teleport like the mutant Nightcrawler from x-men but that doesn't actually that doesn't matter doesn't seem to be able to teleport and so it's it's you know this this is this is a comic book and it's what a great comic book or movie but that's what it is okay so but so this this brings us to the mind-body problem which again is going to have to be treated very briefly as I focus on the actual applications of these things first off most people agree that there is a problem not everybody though this is this is this is also interesting that some people think there's no problem here at all that it's hotly-debated there's all sorts of fun discussions that are happening and it's actually kind of complicated so if there's any quick dismissals of this problem it probably means that it hasn't been thought through very deeply it's a hard hard thing that people have been wrestling with for centuries and continue to wrestle with so let's just start there now what is the mind-body problem I think that it's best illustrated by this comic getup says the mind no says the body who's ever been there has anybody ever been in a position like this before this is part of the human condition okay so it's a joke but it's not really a joke I mean that's weird where it's weird that we can have part of ourself that wants to do something in another part of our self that doesn't want to do things how do we what sort of a creature is it that disagrees with itself it's a it's it's a it's the braises big questions okay so there's some there's some technical words here but physicalism have you a survey there's a fascinating survey done by Dave Chalmers where you actually survey philosophers what do you believe about these things um the answer for almost all questions was philosophers believed all manner of things and that some of them are intuitive them some of them are not intuitive but it illustrates how big a debate is going on right now at very least and so right now a small majority believe in physicalism in other words there's nothing else to the human mind there is no other stuff in the human mind besides matter but a significant minority believe in non-physical ISM there's some other kind of stuff some people will call this dualism or that that's that's one one direction but but a decent number of people believe in that as far as freewill there's much more consensus almost more than most most subjects and in philosophy 73 percent of people believe in some version of freewill and only 12 percent think that there is no such thing as free will so this is where the philosophy Lusaka chol debates dance to elaborate just a little bit more humans seem to have two kinds of properties one physical and two mental physical properties are public equally observable by anyone mental properties are private only observable by the subject so for example a public thing about me is that I am 6 foot tall you could know that I could know that we equally know that I am 6 feet tall how am I feeling right now you could measure you know how much am i sweating how fats my heart going that's not the same thing as my subjective experience standing here looking at at this audience there is something that it is like to be David carry on speaking to a Veritas forum that's different and so this is this is a private private property and so there's a question of like well how do you reconcile these two things they seem very different and how do you as a scientist approach the private ones when in principle you can't this is this is part of the problem now there have been various formulations of trying to solve this problem and I'm just going to list them here to say that this is an interesting thing for further study and in reflection these are example views there's many more than these but I just kind of picked these out as some of the more common ones I've heard reductive physicalism says there is no soul that it's all it's all matter and not just that it's all matter but anything that you say is that is important that's above matter isn't actually real or isn't really significant or is an epiphenomenon some version of that that there's that there is a that the significant stuff that we talked about beliefs values desires those aren't really real in the ability to cause things other than the bottom levels non reductive physicalism says more or less the soul is the exact same thing as the brain it doesn't mean that there's not those things but looking at the bottom level only you're losing information to mystic dualism this is the soul correlates with the brain while on earth so the idea that that anything you do to the brain you do to the mind and anything you do to the mind you do to the brain but it allows for things like disembodiment upon death that you that you you'll be sort of a handicapped human while your disembodied awaiting a resurrection for st. thomas platonic Cartesian dualism is on the other extreme says the soul is separate from the brain but interacts with it that's that's pretty cool but it really raises the problem of okay how exactly does that happen if it's not material but any case these are for example views I encourage you to look into them all right no neuroscience evidence disproves freewill this is Cheryl Whitman in 1966 he climbed a bell tower at University of Texas and killed 17 people with an arsenal he brought up there now a lot of people say wow what a you know what a terrible person what a what a criminal what a what a villain but they autopsy his brain at his request he knew something was up he said you need to autopsy my brain the autopsy his brain and found a tumor pressing on part of the area that has that's involved with emotional control and generating emotions and so we say oh well that's not his responsibility he just had a tumor now some people raise the question ok that's great but don't we all just have something in our brain like a tumor may be a little more complicated than a tumor that's causing us to do the same things that Charles that Charles Whitman did but with a little bit less dramatic size and I think in a similar vein of argument has ever seen No Country for Old Men oh my gosh like terrifying terrifying movie but this is a I read an article about this is the best the best portrayal of a psychopath in film I'm not sure if that's true but any case Psychopaths so Psychopaths are presumably people who don't feel empathy who have who don't have the capacity to be moral and what about them could it be that there are such people out there and would that disprove the idea that we have freewill aren't we all just differing degrees of sociopath and I think the answer to to both of these questions is know that okay so you you all see but if you get a tumor in the wrong part of your brain you're not gonna be able to see any more that doesn't mean that there's no such thing as vision like the fact that body the brain systems can go awry and then you don't have the functions that were under lied by the brain system that went awry doesn't mean that there wasn't the thing in the first place and I think that there's a leap to say well if you assume that all there that there that that you're a reductive materialist or something then yeah of course you're gonna come up with that conclusion that we're all just sort of versions of sociopaths at varying degrees of a knob but but I don't think that that's true at all and I also think there's all sorts of experimental problems with sociopaths on quite skeptical of the construct but that's for a different lecture all right last but not least top-down causality is experimentally validated so by top-down I mean more or less directed attention so when you direct your attention in a particular way it has consequences and there's different ways to do that and so one of the most I think clever experimental ways of doing this there this is a large literature in in non-human primates in studying directed attention to change parts of the brain but check this out so this is your abductor digiti minimi one of the most easily isolated muscles in the body very small usually not very practiced and usually not very exercised I don't tend to exercise that muscle myself when I go to the gym but ok so let's look at force at the beginning of this exercise regimen you start out with 100 that you start out at a given level of strength and you exercise that muscle 15 minutes a day for 12 weeks and what do you get you get about you get quite a bit stronger now if you do that experiment again and instruct participants to think about moving the abductor to minimize for 15 minutes a day for 12 weeks you get 30% stronger you get a physical increase in strength by thinking about moving your hand so this is a this is there's there's a fascinating literature about how your brain can change as you as you redirect your attention which brings me to my job I'm a psychiatrist and I do psychotherapy psychotherapy is one of the sadly fading parts of psychiatry given the economy and how psychiatrists reimbursement works but again that's another lecture for this lecture psychotherapy is a amazing thing it's kind of radical you think okay on the one hand ok pills make sense that oK you've got a brain disorder I'm going to give you a chemical that changes the other chemicals in your brain and you get better that makes sense right in psychotherapy I'm not touching you hopefully I'm I'm not making physical contact with you other than the vibrations between us in the in this in the air I'm speaking words and over the course of those speaking of words you change you heal you get better which is weird what why is this why is that happening all there is all that's happening really material is an information transfer or information exchange and so you might say okay well you know that drugs work but what about psychotherapy and this is a meta-analysis 52 different studies including 636 hundred people and when you add psychotherapy to pharmaco of two medications you get additive effects it's not just that they're each doing some sort of effect that that they they work in different ways from the bottom up with the medications and from the top down with psychotherapy which is again which is very very interesting to think that these things work together better than they work alone and this is this parts not controversial like there's there's a lot of things that that we might be presenting or saying that are like okay that's kind of out there but psychiatrists the practice guidelines everybody more or less agrees this is this is what we do and believe in psychotherapy and so but just pausing to think about what does that mean now the other thing that this means is that there are there are clinical changes but what about brain changes um this I believe is the first demonstration of a brain change as the consequence of a non pharmacologic intervention in a patient group this is 1996 which is again like this is this is inferred I mean this is within my lifetime that this has been discovered that you actually get brain changes I'll go into the details but but there are places in the brain that before and after change that are indicated on the diagram there and this has been replicated in other this is an OCD but there's other conditions depression and anxiety and schizophrenia I mean there's all manner of changes that you see in the brain and a variety of psychotherapies now okay so this gets us to who cares now I've given you a lot of information but what is why does this matter and and I'm going to turn this a little bit personal in this section okay so one correlational study or a seer a review of correlational studies shows that people who believe in free will are there's more helpfulness better work performance higher job satisfaction increased passionate love higher life satisfaction lower stress levels and a more punitive attitude towards wrongdoers if you don't believe in free will there's more dishonest behavior more selfish behavior more conforming behavior reduced helpfulness less learning from one's misdeeds less thinking for oneself and worst of all less recycling so one thing that and this is a correlational study um so these are this is this is not terribly strong data and there's there's a handful of these things that are that they've done randomized trials that have been challenged and debated it's an interesting question but but the overall idea that that concerns me is are we abdicating our ability to choose if we don't believe we can choose are we abdicating our ability to choose to other people are we outsourcing that are we giving this this thing that we have this treasure up to someone else whether it be a corporation or a mass movement or somebody that's not us and sometimes that's that that can be good or that has advantages but we have to think very carefully about doing that and and switching gears to my own my own concerns and my own work mental health there's mental health consequences too or they're there they're at least statistically some evidence of that this is teen suicide rates or at least attempts in a particular study showing that you get a pretty significant increase in risk of of suicidal attempt with injury if you believe in if you have a low self-efficacy that means I I have a low belief in my ability to change or do things in the world and so so this is not like yes or no philosophically this is a psychological construct this is a psychological experience which I think that another aspect of free will and the ability to choose is and this this fits in with this there's something I deal with regularly this is one construct of what leads to suicide these three I am alone I am a burden I'm not afraid to die and that leads that leads to higher risk for suicide and I think that one of the things that tends to happen is is these things tend to focus it tend to be fixed when you get depressed and you believe that I am a burden and I will always be a burden I am a burden and I have no ability to change I am a burden and that is the only way I could possibly see myself and that's tragic and that leads that that is a belief that's that's sort of psychological sort of beyond the philosophy that really matters but it's connected to it this is a book by by David Burns a influential psychotherapist he says nearly all depressed people are convinced that they are facing some special awful truth about themselves and the world that they that their terrible feelings are absolutely realistic and inevitable but he says you can learn to change the way you think about your about things and you can also change your basic values and beliefs and when you do you will often experience profound and lasting changes in your mood outlook and productivity this is review alum another another Stanford guy who who talks about psychotherapy one of a very influential guy talks about he says this um we didn't talk about psycho II don't talk about freedom in psychotherapy but he says though the word freedom is not found in the psychotherapists lexicon the concept of freedom plays an indispensable role in both theory and practice of all traditional and innovative psycho therapies and more challenging and more difficult for for me as a therapist until one realizes that one has created one's own dysphoria there can be no motivation to change which brings us back to the couch this idea that we can change that we can make changes to who we are and to to what we're doing in our own lives and in the lives of the people around us and that that belief that we can change at least at least some degree of change and that this doesn't deny that there's trauma that there's pain that there's cultural influences that there's really bad circumstances that people are in but I think that that old well there is nothing there's nothing I can do that is the thing that that a big part of my day-to-day is is is wrestling with his wrestling through and this ending on sort of my calling to this this is this is a passage from from the Bible that really touched me and really influences my view of kind of what what I see myself as trying to contribute to the prophet Isaiah says the Spirit of the Lord God is upon me because the Lord has anointed me which ultimately gets taken up to be to refer to Jesus the Spirit of the Lord has anointed me to bring the good to bring good news to the poor he has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted to proclaim Liberty to the captives and the opening of the prison to those who are bound and that's what people often are psychologically bound bound by their past bound by their their their their false beliefs bound by all sorts of things and I think this is a beautiful picture from a movie that came out a few years ago of a freedom and and this is something that just is touched me so deeply that people don't people are losing this ability to think that they're free the freedom of the child to ice skate around a frozen lake this is something that is that is profoundly beautiful and profoundly good is human ability to choose and and it's something that I hope for all of you and I hope for for myself and I hope for everybody is that that we would we would choose we would choose more things and take take into our lives and our ability more than we previously had so that's the end of my section [Applause] thank you David for that beautiful talk I think very thoughtful and very moving I've been told that people in the upstairs overflow area are having a hard time hearing so I'm going to try to hold this closer to my mouth but it starts ringing and being unpleasant in here we'll go back to the status quo ante so let's see let's get me up here so I'll be talking about some issues in science and faith and I sort of want to start from this point of view that David has touched on that there's a wide perception and the general public and among students at universities like yourselves that science and faith are somehow in conflict and I want to ask is that true and I want to distinguish between the findings of science the actual discoveries and certain assumptions of science and my argument here is that there need to be no tension between religion and the discoveries of science but tension can occur between religion and working assumptions of everyday science especially when these assumptions are elevated to the status of an all-encompassing ideology and I'll have more to say about that as I go along and then the last part of the talk is going to be about neuroscience I'll get into the brain and talk about causality and more about this freewill problem that David has started us on so elegantly so I I can't really I don't have time to talk about all three of these I'm just going to make a comment on the first one that in terms of discoveries of science things like the Big Bang about the theory of evolution about you know some of you may have heard these things about the anthropic principle I find all of these actually quite consonant with my beliefs as a Christian you may have to be willing to adjust your timescales in the first chapter of Genesis and some of your literal interpretations but you can do that without doing any violence to the key spiritual insights and that's all I'm going to say if anyone wants to raise those issues in the Q&A or afterwards I'd be happy to elaborate on them more so what I think is that this attention can occur between religion and the assumptions of science and here's kind of the notion some some approaches is it's completely true so Sciences experiment based it's precise its objective when it's working well and it's transferable across communities and cultures it has a certain third-person aspect to it that David alluded to in the sense that discoveries made in my lab should be reproducible to anywhere in the world for anyone who has the right equipment and sort of conceptual background in contrast religion is more holistic it has a greater dependence on intuition and it requires commitment in the absence of proof and I think these are in general true I think these are not black and white distinctions between science and religion but in terms of matters of degree I think these are true and so when I discuss sort of my own religious faith and commitment with some of my colleagues or students in my lab or you know as I did one day over lunch with a postdoc in my lab you know he my postdoc winds up saying in the end after we talk about a lot of these things he says why go there yeah you know to the religion but why not just stick with science he said bill this is so different from your normal way of thinking you know which of course he meant in the lab and when I'm discussing scientific results I have extremely high standards of what I admit to the Canon of what I believe to be true about the world he said why not just stick with science and this kind of reflects an extra scientific assumption and I want them really high like this because it's important and that extra scientific assumption which is frequently made is science is the only path or perhaps the best path to reliable knowledge about the world and that's where a lot of tension comes in that's where some people seem to feel like you have to make a choice between science and faith and I emphatically don't think that's true so why don't I think that's true well here's the the core of this part of the talk is that the religious mode of thought or I might just say the personal mode of thought and belief is normal and necessary mode of evaluation and decision-making in real life for all of us scientists non scientists religious non-religious it doesn't matter and the key point is this that the most important questions in life are susceptible to solution by the scientific method the most important questions in life I'll say again you can't go into the lab and do a bunch of experiments and get answers to them so you say well what kinds of questions well here's one that I think is important and most of you will agree is it better to live or to die and in a room this large there will be some people for whom that's been a live issue in David's practice for many people it's a live issue and virtually all of us in the room will have known a friend or a family member for whom this has been a live issue and there is no scientific program or scientific agenda that you can undertake to get an answer to this question yet it's an existential important question that we that we have to answer some of us every day so a second question that I would point that points up to this is this question you know that might be relevant for some of you I don't know should I marry this person okay so I like my life together with this person for what we both hope will be a lifetime and if you sit around waiting for a scientific answer to that question you are never gonna get married okay that's just I hate to be the one to break this to you but that's that's just the truth these kinds of questions you know should I break my family and move from the east coast to the west coast and all of their situations and lives and stages of development of children etc etc you don't get multiple shots of this you have one shot at answering this question and trying to get it right so I would say that this religious quest involves the same sort of reasoning as the marriage example now it doesn't mean I want to say this emphatically also this does not mean that we check our brains at the door okay that's another canard that's occasionally put up by you knows arguing against religious faith you check your brain at the door there are sources of evidence and we have to think about them as hard as possible but in the end this evidence is not compelling in a scientific sense and faith accompanied by commitment is essential and the stakes are high the stakes are high in the marriage example maybe they're even higher in the religious quest example you might get in touch with the most meaningful aspect of reality in our universe or you might make a fool of yourself okay and waste a lot of years in a lot of time the stakes are high so it simply put I think this is the human condition it is life and our most consequential decisions in life have little or nothing to do with science and this is true for everyone including scientists so if I think that for all of us the real question is this is there an ultimate source of meaning and value in the universe and if so what is it so just to summarize there's no deep conflict between my faith and the actual findings of science where attention does occur is occasionally about the assumptions of every day working science and especially when those assumptions are elevated to an ideology about what's possible or not possible to know about the world okay so that's sort of the first part of the talk and remarks that I wanted to make but what about the brain this guy's a neuroscientist up here and he's you know trying to pretend like he's practicing philosophy without a license you know but all of us have to do that just to get out of bed in the morning right we have to so let's talk about the brain a little bit and I'll pursue the themes that David has started to lay down and I think among professional neuroscientists and graduate students you don't ask this question it's usually an undergraduate in a classroom who'll raise their hand you know when we're talking about the brain basis of emotion and visual perception and decision-making and somebody who raise their hand and say well what about free will ok professional neuroscientists don't tend to ask this kind of question my first off kind of flip answer to this is I am NOT a fatalist but even if I were what could I do about it that's a quote from someone I don't remember where I got that but it's that's not original with me but it it's funny ok so what what I think is that we all want to get to some sort of when we talk about freedom and free will we want to get to some sort of notion that we have some level of control over our actions and I would put it this way succinctly I would say that my behaviors caused at least in part by my beliefs my values my memories my goals and my aspirations now I say that acknowledging that much of our behavior is not by those things that we desire much of our behavior is caused by cultural biases that we're not even aware of it by family of origin biases and shaping by childhood traumas that you know we're only dimly aware of if at all but at least some part of it in order to have a meaningful understanding of freedom our choices have to be governed by our highest values and our aspirations so I I want to put a corollary on here is the conscious rational thought plays a causal role in my behavior so there is a tendency in some circles to think of consciousness and the consciousness we have about our reasons for choosing things and doing things it's just fraught it's epi phenomenal is froth on the top of the way that has no Karl no real causal power it's just narratives that we tell ourselves to try to make sense of the world but I actually think that consciousness plays a causal role in my behavior and we can talk about that the most clear example is this matter of bringing unconscious biases into consciousness if somebody shows me papers that I've graded over you know a 10 year period and I'm systematically discriminating against some group whether it's gender or ethnic or regional accent how well you speak English whatever there was a bias in my behavior that I wasn't even aware of presumably but I can't do anything about that bias until I become conscious of it ok and that's really critical it's only when you become aware of the things that are driving your behavior and your choices that suddenly it opens the playing field it opens a degree of freedom to make different choices than you have in the past and that's that's the a key causal role for consciousness and in talking about the self-determination as a neuroscientist trying to puzzle about beliefs and values and memories and goals some of those things we've made progress on in neuroscience especially memory I think but many of the rest of these remain mysterious but the key issue that we need to get down to is what counts as a cause ok and getting into this I think I'll I'll I'll lean on an observation that was made by Karl Craver notably a neuro philosopher who's at Washington University st. Louis but others as well and the observation here is that neuroscience explanation is intrinsically multilevel okay so it's not good enough there is no level of explanation for behavior that's fundamental and when we get to that fundamental level we're going to throw away all the other levels so let's deal with an example right here so I'm gonna just take you into the mind of a neuroscientist or neuroscience just for a few minutes here so here's an example of something that neuroscientists like to study its long-term spatial memory and long-term spatial memory is what you rely on to find your car in a parking lot like this okay frequently I can't even remember which parking lot I parked the car in much less how to find it but many people are actually very good at this sort of thing a long-term spatial memory and neuroscientists would like to know how does that work how does it work in the brain and the very first thing that neuroscientists do is they take this general problem in psychology and they reduce it to a situation that you can actually study in a lab so frequently that is a mouse navigating a water maze so you train you train the mouse to navigate a maze that can be on dry land or it can be the mouse can be swimming in the water and that's your operationalization of spatial memory but then you say well how does the mouse manage to do these tricks reliably and one of the things that we've discovered at the next lower level is that there's a structure in the mouse brain and our brains called the hippocampus that actually functions is sort of a little GPS and it's really critical for this ability to do spatial navigation and some of you will know that Nobel Prize was won for that work or awarded for that work about five years ago but you say well how does this map get formed in the hippocampus and when you put an animal in a new environment how does a new map get formed and the answer in part is that at the cellular level this phenomenon called long-term potentiation is a mechanism for changing the strength of synapses in the hippocampus and elsewhere in the brain so the strength of synapses that is the communication joint between one neuron and the next neuron those can be regulated upward or they can be regulated downward and this LTP phenomenon is critical to the establishment of new long-term memories but how does long-term potentiation actually work well it turns out their molecules at synapses lying in the cell membrane called NMDA receptors and these receptor molecules are really critical for long-term potentiation but you say well how do those in MDA receptors get there and the answer is that that process is controlled by expression of genes in the nerve cells and so you have at least six levels we've identified here in the study of spatial memory and its neural mechanisms and an important thing to realize is that all of these levels are actually essential there is no level that has fundamental privilege now I know neuroscientists who believe that genes are the fundamental level of explanation their genetic fundamentalists okay I know other neuroscientists who believe that the synaptic plasticity is the fundamental level of explanation and they you know they're they have a different one but the reality is all these are important and of course we could go all the way down here to chemical bonds and physics and we could go up higher in this hierarchy up to societies and how we solve traffic problems but I think the heart of the explanation about spatial memory lies right in here but importantly all of these levels are critical and I've drawn these arrows sort of eras of causality in both directions and what they mean is that neuroscience the whole way we can identify mechanism like this and in the first place is because we can manipulate one level like the hippocampus and we can show that long-term potentiation changes or we can manipulate long-term potentiation we can produce knockout mice who have very little long-term potentiation and then the spatial maps in the hippocampus changed quite dramatically so the key is the key point is that we can manipulate at any given level of the system and have effects on downward levels or you can manipulate here and have effects upward and that's how we know that's what we do in the lab every day that's how we know we're dealing with a mechanism if you've been if you like one of these and you affect the hippocampus but you manipulate the hippocampus and you have no effect on long-term potentiation then you start to suspect you don't have a mechanism after all you've been chasing a false hypothesis and this this mutual manipulation between levels is really important I think and this is a little advertisement for Karl cravers book which is conveniently entitled explaining the brain and the he talks about multi-level mechanistic explanation in neuroscience and I have this nice quote here from Carl and he talks about this concept of mutual manipul ability and he says a part is a component in a mechanism if one can change the behavior of the mechanism as a whole by intervening to change the component and one can change the behavior of the component by intervening to change the behavior of the mechanism as a whole and he calls this making a difference and that's what we care about is scientists in the lab is making a difference so I don't think this is sort of philosophical word games I think he's onto something here that maps on to my experience in the lab now I can see some thought bubbles over some heads out there and say you know what does all this mean why is he talking to me about this long term spatial memory stuff I lost track of what's at stake here so let's go back a couple of slides and say the key thing the key meaningful concept of freedom I think is this issue of self-determination autonomy and responsibility and the key issue being what counts as a cause and the core observation is that all of those levels of explanation are necessary to account for something like long term spatial memory there's none of them that are dispensable so how that cashes out for me is that it means that my beliefs my actions my values which I think are higher-order configurations of nervous system their patterns of activity at the highest levels of the central nervous system and they countless causes and I see no problem with believing that thinking that in fact I see every problem - every motivation to embrace that from the point of view of neuroscience so if we can find a way to talk meaningfully about non fundamental causation and I think we have - then we can take mental causation seriously and I think personal responsibility for our choices seriously so note that I'm not making an argument here about any extra material substance or anything I would put myself in David's category of a non reductionist materialist I'm a materialist I don't postulate any extra substances I think an aspiration a belief a goal as I said is a higher-order configuration of neural activity but I think those higher-order configurations are part of the causal story of our behavior now one other little caveat here this is not to say that bottom-up causes are unimportant I emphatically don't believe that explanatory relevance remember from that figure it runs up and down okay all the way up and down the hierarchy and I'll just echo this slide which you saw before in David's talk which shows that there is overwhelming scientific evidence now that the best treatment for a really serious depression is a combination of antidepressant drugs and psychotherapy which is frequently cognitive behavioral therapy and our patients do better on those two together on average than they do on either alone and I think that the scientific finding that David introduced to you says a lot about who we are as human beings thus the antidepressant drugs are a classic bottom up intervention you're going way down the system several levels down to the level of neurotransmitters and receptors and you're turning knobs there okay and patients get better with that kind of not that that's the knob is on the reality of who we are as humans but cognitive behavioral therapy or other kinds of therapy are top-down interventions they actually aim to change a patient's beliefs or patterns of interaction with the world so here is a knob that's up here at a very high level and we're trying to turn that knob without any regard any particular regard to neurotransmitters or receptor molecules in the brain and the the fundamental fact from this clinical insight that's come from David's field psychiatry is that cognitive restructuring is possible from therapy cognitive restructuring is the goal of cognitive behavioral therapy and it means that beliefs matter in the end that we as human beings are both we it's bottom-up is not sufficient to tell our story and top-down alone is not sufficient to tell our story we are both and your matter and I think that the beliefs beliefs mattering is the key to understanding autonomy and acquiring a scientifically insightful and personally satisfying notion of freedom and I'll say that understanding the nature of human freedom is the most consequential problem facing the nura behavioral sciences I really believe that some days I think no no no hearing Alzheimer's is the most important problem and but for the long run I really think that understanding freedom is the most consequential thing and it's important for obvious reasons of human dignity social responsibility but it's also important for science itself because science is is fundamentally based on the notion that we have a freedom to choose we have a freedom to conclude one thing about what's going on in the world or a different thing depending on the evidence and the quality of evidence and if we if we dismiss that as a scientist and we cut off the very ground the intellectual limb that we're standing on and the result will be intellectual freefall so this understanding that I'm trying to promote here of neuroscience and mind and matter doesn't prove anything religiously this is a Veritas forum you know we're trying to speak truth to each other and it's motivated in part to have a dialogue about Christian worldview and religious worldviews in general and I've had something to say about that tonight but the the freewill business I'm trying to come to an accurate truthful understanding of what we're about as humans and what I've said here doesn't prove anything religiously but and this is important I think that this view is open to a holistic and profoundly religious view of the human person and our quest for meaning in this universe so I'm going to stop there and we will move on to the question and answer session [Applause] I love his quote at the end I just want to read it back as we move on to our QA [Music] understanding the nature of human freedom is the most consequential problem facing the neural behavioral sciences what a rich quote I'm we're gonna go into a time of question and answer and to get us started in that I'm gonna introduce to you I'm doctor jet with the swami if you can come on up where are you there we are I'm jet is a associate professor here at ASU in the school of bye-bye all biological and health systems engineering he is the PI of the neural neurology oh sorry neural Microsystems lab and focuses on developing technologies for interfacing and modulating the function of neurons in the central and peripheral nervous system I'm and so I'm gonna invite you guys to come on back up and I've we've asked yet if he would ask a couple of questions that he he would get from his students frequently related to the talk I'm front billing and David and then as as those questions are being asked if you want to go ahead and send your questions and I will start asking those as well thank you really interesting talk with David and Bill I won a couple of instances and I want to run this by you and see what you think about it and help us perhaps deal with this issue a little better so as we've been doing this science and my lab I've been doing this you know I'm only a neural engineering work and do some science and in every stage of the work whether it's identifying the problem setting up the hypothesis designing the experiments making the measurements getting the data analyzing the data at no stage have I ever experienced a conflict with my Christian faith and what I'm doing yet I have instances when students come up to me and ask very gently you are a man of faith how is it that you do science and to me it's puzzling why that and I saw the data you put up that a majority the scientists I don't necessarily believe in it but there are students on campus who wrestle with this my problem was in trying to first of all it was a surprise to me I didn't know where to start what to say and the content is there in my mind that saying I know the answer but I don't know how to communicate that's 200 I'm I basically asked the student where is this coming from and trying to understand why do you even ask that question apparently in some verbal and nonverbal ways she's got that impression primarily from the labs she's been working in and particularly in life sciences is this this seems to be in a a mindset in some ways that's communicated in a variety of different ways whether it's verbal or not I do not know but it's there and so my question to you is as a faculty how do I effectively communicate the students and even other faculty colleagues and have a dialogue with them I mean I think that's an excellent question and I think that the approach is I think right on which is ask ask the person their story you know what what what is it that led to this particular belief as far as is consciously accessible and then and then I think there's the raising questions about what are things that the person might not have thought about and that's something that of course is is bread and butter to psychiatry's is trying to find what are other causes either from the top say Society or from below of you know maybe fears or subconscious you know things that are that are bubbling up that might that might influence one way or another and I think that's there's it's a it's an excellent question that also has broader societal implications of how is it that we come to believe what we believe I think the the makes me think of the work of Jonathan Hite who wrote a book called righteous mind where he talks about all sorts of non rational influences to how we make decisions about how we make decisions is often influenced by all sorts of things which you know on a day-to-day basis with I deal with but I think that one of the things that's helpful is to is just you know that that whoever it is that said that is in the minority that this is not something that most people believe in as social creatures just that fact alone I think disarms a lot of the fear as well as I think the philosophical things that that are very interesting on the debate is very interesting it very long so if I could just add one word first of all as David says you you've taken the first step already the fact that the student feels free to even ask that question of you is a very significant step in a good direction and I the further step is to try to find out if they're perceiving some conflict between you know the findings of science either the Big Bang or evolution or whatever it might be or whether it's about this pista melodical thing how you know how you accept things to be true and figure out which problem you're dealing with and then sort of address them and the epistemological question you know then I really try to go home to the thing I went to in my talk that this sort of faith and commitment leading to long-term knowledge that that sort of thing is is useful and I'll tell you one other story about this I have a colleague in my department who's a you know gruffy atheist certain antagonistic atheist and if any you have been to Stanford now there's this beautiful Church at the center of campus Romanesque thing missus Stanford built and loved greatly and by colleague said to me one day said that church should be blown up this was this is before 9/11 by the way he said that church should be blown up it's a monument to irrationality and it has no place on college campus a university campus so you know that was my little car in the hallway right and you know I'm grasping how do you sort of deal with this in a short succinct way and I said look you know if you want to get rid of irrational behavior you should first bomb my home because you know getting married and having children was the most irrational thing I've ever done in my life you know that's a little flippant but it's there's a point there too right sequestering off religious faith into some prohibited area of human activity and knowledge while not realizing that all of us have to make those very same steps and commitments and use non-scientific ways of knowing that's just a really egregious mistake and and that I keep you know I keep coming to that over and over again do you want ask your yeah so the other question is again an application question here among students the one common denominator that's not just students among everyone the common denominator is suffering different kinds and they you take a feeling of it could be guilt or pain and I know religion offers in our Christian faith offers a way up in the person and the message of Jesus Christ but when a student has a experience of guilt or a pain or a rejection of some kind if they are animal poses in a slightly awkward way in a bit but nonetheless the point is that the student sometimes has to think twice about taking a religious pathway saying well this is not scientific itself sounds a little weird to me even though ideas such as confession or repentance or changing ways or sound a little strange oh it's not scientific do you think there's any evidence yet or that in neuro scientific research that would actually contradict or conflict with any of these religious experiences so there's sort of student that would prevent a student from actually considering that as a religious way it's also a great question I think there's that that assumption that there there is some sort of conflict practically about believing in that and and something else there was a thread there of that that the religion will sort of palliate the the pain or that that everybody suffers but those who's maybe if you if you sort of go to religion you'll suffer less or if you go to a Christian you'll suffer less but I think the first comment I'll make is theological which is I mean it seems like Jesus talks a lot about suffering more that you know you're going to experience persecution and just you know get ready for it because it's going to be really hard and so so there's through sort of okay there's that aspect of it but I think the evidence that we have in at least epidemiologically looking at people who are religious it's pretty good I mean it's pretty the outcomes are pretty good it does seem that people who are religious have better you know are better higher rankings and neighborliness and they donate more money and they donate more blood and more acts of random kindness and their emotional the rates of depression our risk of developing depression is lower the rates of suicide are lower three fold for Protestants and I think something like 15 fold it's gigantic lower for for Catholics that there's there's just really but these are all correlational studies because I mean we don't randomize people to church and you know there are some people who are talking about that why not randomize people that we randomize people with all sorts of you know caustic chemicals why not church like you know what's the worst that could have I don't know so it's an interesting question of you know do we have direct evidence that religion is against mental health no it seems like the correlations are in the positive direction but it's hard to interpret those but I think the more profound question is that no I think that I don't I don't think that this is that there is a conflict even practically between religious faith there is no reason neuro scientifically or psychiatrically why you would though of course there's all sorts of bad reasons why people would religion - - you know to escape or you know in fact everybody goes to religion for bad reasons everybody goes to everything for bad reasons we're all a mixture of motivations so I think that's the other aspect here - all right thank you so much so we have our first question I'm from from you and it's how do we distinguish mental illness from something spiritual how do we distinguish mental illness from something spiritual that's a really good question that I really wish we had more research on I mean honestly I don't know of collaborations between there's not much collaboration between the chaplain and the psychiatrist and that's a problem so I really wish we did have more exploration of that and I think that you know there's all sorts that question can go a lot deeper in terms of how to help people who believe that their suffering is that way that that also is another thing there's plenty of people from a religious background that are told well you're not depressed you just don't have enough faith you need to pray harder it's like well look this is a this is a neurobiological condition called major depressive disorder and okay okay maybe there are spiritual components but let's try prozac I mean there's so I mean there's it doesn't mean that some things might not be because like look I'm not losing my faith and there's there's I could tell you all sorts of stories of patients that there's a that the religious loss of faith or believing something new is a really significant component in the depression of the anxiety or the the the suicidality I mean this is this is these are enormous questions but I think that there does tend to be a tendency on both sides on the one hand to say spirituality doesn't have anything to do with it and on the other to say you need to pray or mental illness away which you know by all means pray about it but don't forget that we also have medicines and psycho therapies and such I just make one comment on that I mean there are some data out there that that David knows much better than I do from clinical practice but there there are brain diseases like temporal lobe epilepsy where a fairly common concomitant or symptom of that is hyper religiosity so people who have had no particular religious involvement before suddenly become deeply convinced that they have a personal relationship with God and they can't actually avoid telling you that even though they know it might seem a little weird or suspicious so I you know there are some brain conditions in which you can which religiosity can probably go awry but as David said in his talk there are also brain conditions in which vision can go awry and their brain conditions in which love can go awry and their brain conditions of which nationalism and patriotism can go awry and the fact they can go awry in disease is no indicator of the truth of the matter in brain health and that's that's a critical thing to keep in mind excellent thank you I wonder with your your image of the medication and the psychotherapy couch if you would also say as those have an interaction impact if how a spiritual life might also be another factor in the top-down/bottom-up as well I mean it's it is really interesting that some of the emerging psychotherapy some of the newer psycho therapies are more influenced let's say by an Eastern perspective or by a more contemplative tradition so mindfulness is being incorporated more explicitly into things like dialectical behavioral therapy or acceptance and commitment therapy so so I think that that's being woven in to to certain therapies but but again it's a I really wished that I really wish we had more people working on that more more experience in that domain I'll be quiet next question and the next question how do you explain feeling the presence of God with neuroscience so so just just first of all an observation and I'd be interested in actually here David's comment on this because this might be a place where David not diverged it you know what I call the central dogma of neuroscience is that all of our experience mental emotional spiritual is inextricably linked to the biology of the brain and I think that anything that's real in our behavior and in our experience is definitely going to have brain concomitant sand brain causation just like that sort of up and down pathway that I drew up there so I I think that it's almost a foregone conclusion that things like powerful conversion experiences or things like a transcendent sense of God's presence there will be changes in the brain in there now how you interpret that is a different question altogether you know I have I do have colleagues I study vision by the way that's been my virtually my entire career and I have I have colleagues who talked about you know illusions of conscious will conscious control in careful experiments where they can show that they can fool subjects into believing they have conscious control over the movement of a cursor but in fact the experimentalist is moving it subtly and they talk about the illusion of conscious will and write books about it but you know we have illusions and vision - we have visual illusions but we don't go writing books about the illusion of vision I mean we might write books about visual illusions but not the illusion of vision so again I think that there will be brain concomitant of spiritual experience I have no idea on what they are no idea somebody asked me in audience two weeks ago you know to explain the conversion experience and neurobiological terms and I was like well you know I'm still working on visual motion and so you know simple forms of decision making but you know I don't I don't doubt that it's there but I don't feel threat by that but I only here with david sisters yeah so I think that I am of the opinion that I think I agree on the the correlation while on earth I mean that every time there's going to be something that we experience on earth there's going to be some sort of brain signal there and I think that to go beyond that is gonna take Scripture or some sort of revealed textures some sort of experience beyond that I mean there's some people working on the out-of-body experiences so I mean I don't know that would be an example if that research actually proved that you could have some sort of extra perception without a brain working or something that might be something but I don't know like I I don't I think that I am inclined to believe that there is a perfect correlation while on earth but it does seem like there is a my reading of Scripture is it seems like there's some sort of disembodied State before you know between death and the resurrection but I wouldn't go there with neuroscience and I wouldn't even say that that would ever actually happen while you know before death but you know what what about that middle stay like I don't have I don't have a lot of confidence about what that's going to be you're like or if that's you know if I'm reading scripture right when it comes to that interpretation in terms of the experience of God I'd say that there is some interesting stuff that was maybe not too surprising when you know imaging people while they're praying or imaging people while they're speaking in tongues or imaging people on these various states and I mean more or less goes what you'd expect like you know if you ask somebody when they're speaking in tongues is this a rational state or are you very emotional as well I'm very emotional and sure enough like the emotional centers in the brain are more active than the rational center is less active like I mean that's what else would it be like so I I mean I think that this is of course the person is using their brain or maybe of course to me the person is the brain is at least present for the event whether or not there's some other thing that's happening I don't know but at very least there's correlations in the brain with what's happening that makes sense on a superficial level thank you next question does science require faith why yeah so that you know I put that contra stop there between science and religion right and I emphasize that religion requires more faith or commitment in the absence of compelling evidence but there certainly are major examples of that in science so I mean just a common place for all of us who do science we have to have faith and the regularity of the world the general regularity otherwise we'd have no reason to take an experiment we do this month can be replicated in our own labs next month so that basic level of faith is there but there's more than that so if you look at the history of Copernicus you know who had a fundamentally revolutionary view of the organization of the solar system and believed it all his life emits great persecution and convinced very few people during his lifetime there was a lot of gut-level faith there that he was right and that he had that he was on the truth that most people just weren't picking up on and there are examples of this in the modern era there was a colleague of mine a neuroscientist Stan prisoner at UCSF who basically validated experimentally the prion notion of infectious transmission of disease prions are little proteins and the dogma before prisoner is that disease was transmitted by you know by bacteria by viruses but certainly not by simple molecules like proteins and yet he proved over the course of ten or fifteen years that that prion infection was a real thing and he won the Nobel Prize for it eventually but he was roundly ridiculed I mean he was mocked at at scientific conferences about proposing that these proteins you know transmitted disease so he had a real gut level conviction you know that's a good religious term for you conviction you know that that he was that he was right that he was wrong the truth and and it does require faith like that and I really admire scientists I don't I don't know that I've ever I don't think I've ever been like that in my career I've never been that far on the outside of the consensus and been proven to be right thank you doctor that this is a I think it was JP Moreland in one of his books sites I forget the name of the person but there's at least 10 assumptions that science makes in anything they study that's foundational to science it's not provable by science but those are assumptions that we make that one of them bill mentioned was there is a natural order out there in the world that has to be discovered that there is a truth out there that's an assumption we make and so there's ten such assumptions that science makes process thank you thank you next how does science deepen your faith and understanding of God well I think that'd be i think cuz it's fun i mean i think that there's a makes me think of Eric little Chariots of Fire out God made me fast and when I run I feel as pleasure and then there's something okay like what is the brain of Eric little doing when he's running is it like this is soul go somewhere else and like his body's no he's like it's the it's right there he's like he's running a race and he's just but there's this this degree of pleasure and I've always liked that I think that's the Westminster Confession that the the you know what is the duty of man or something like that and it's to to glorify God and enjoy him forever and that that pleasure is is very center very very close to the center and I think that finding something that God has made us to do or something God has made me to do and there's certain things that you know partly that science and partly that's other things but when I do that that's that's great and you know is it like a transcendent experience not usually I mean not that it was science no it hasn't been some sort of supernatural thing or something that I would say oh that's a transcendent experience for sure but it's fun and not only is it fun it can be really beautiful and again that doesn't prove anything religiously but being fun being impressed with beauty being awestruck at grandeur those are experiences in science that have very close concomitant religious faiths and they can be I think very close cousins to each other and enhance each other constantly be wrong we take simple things and try it out in lab and it doesn't seem to work the way we want it to work and there's always a very different explanation than what we started out with and that's the wonder and beauty of science that constantly seen the labs being able to be proved wrong through science if you don't want to be proved wrong do not sign up to be a scientist we probably just have time for one last question which is how do you deal with doubt in your faith some of you may be familiar with the writings of Frederick beginner and if you're not I highly recommend him he's probably my favorite Christian author the last name is spelled bu e CH n ER and a good starting point is this little book called wishful thinking which is a series of essays on sort of religious topics and he has an app for rendering them true in experience sort of outside the religious trappings so he has a little essay on doubt in there and I think I can remember most of it forward forward or at least parts of it but he says doubt is not the opposite of faith doubt is a part of faith doubt is the ants and the pants of faith it keeps it alive and moving and I think faith without doubt has a real danger to drift into smugness and it's that tension that keeps it real and vibrant for me it's a so it's it's a really profound question and I think that the the some of the best deepest most inspiring work ever produced is people in the throes of doubt and I think that there's there there's a deep truth to that that like that being with God and the tension and a lot of people right about right about that and I think that the psychological experience of I'm not sure God exists right now isn't isn't one that I've personally had that much and I know that I'm I'm pretty uncommon in that or you know is God good I and I don't quite know what to attribute that to but you know there's a hundred thousand other questions about like what is God doing what does this mean was Jesus saying what does that mean is there a soul does it exist like I mean they're wrestling with with these you know a thousand two other questions while having while having sort of a core and I think that that picture of of marriage is a good one of faith being much more like marriage than then sort of affirmation or you know I'm 90% sure I should be married and 10% sure that that's like it's not quite the right way to approach it it's like I've got a relationship and yeah I mean sometimes it's hard and sometimes it's not but you know but the the doubting should I be with this person is not something that I've I've done with God though profoundly respect those who are wrestling with that and and I think the answer practically is there's all sorts of good resources as bill said I mean talk to somebody about it you know have a conversation build a relationship I mean those are that's a that's a very important deep place to be and and I have the utmost respect for for those who are in that space well thank you so much let's give him another thank you you

Channel: The Veritas Forum

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Length: 83min 19sec (4999 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 18 2018