Episode 7 - Lost and Found (Part 2)

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[Music] welcome to the liturgist podcast a podcast where we discuss issues through lenses of science art and faith this episode is the second part of lost and found which is really just the story of science mike and i and how we lost and found faith if you haven't yet listened to the first part we strongly recommend that you turn this one off and go back to that episode as some of this one will probably not make that much sense without the first one for those of you who did listen to that one already we left off in our story with science mike the atheist having this profound mystical experience on the coast of the pacific ocean and at this point of the story mike prays for the first time in almost two years to this unknown god that he doesn't know anything about this hallucination or force ground of being whatever it was he just knows he doesn't want to not talk to it anymore so mike what has life been like since the beach for you [Music] everything changed after the beach in my life but it was confusing god didn't make any more sense after the waves washed my feet than he did before and there was an immediate desire to tear apart and deconstruct the experience even the next morning i convinced myself that my imagination had played a role in this single most powerful experience of my life but as i was having breakfast the next day i was at a restaurant and i was sitting on a balcony looking down at the beach and i could see up on the sand this circle of seaweed where i'd been standing the tideline this one wave had gone far beyond it and it was like a sign from god saying here we were and i took a picture of that spot on the beach because i knew doubt would want to come back to me i knew i'd want to take apart this experience and i flew back to tallahassee and i was scared of the bible i didn't want to read it i didn't want those questions to come back but i wanted to understand what had happened to me and how a god who i didn't understand and who i didn't even believe in could move me so who or what is this god and how does humanity relate to it or him or whatever so i started studying anthropology and neuroscience i studied religion and humanity's response to it and when i actually looked at experts in those fields the stories they told about religion their understanding scientifically was different than what i heard from the new atheists a couple books in particular assembled research i'd read elsewhere in really powerful ways one was tanya lerman's when god talks back which is her anthropological examination of people of faith and why we believe what we believe and how we do that in the face of modernism andrew newbergs how god changes the brain told me what was happening in human brains as they encountered god and the changes that those made and this began to give me the confidence that there was empirical merit there was scientific merit to god that when people experienced religion they weren't doing something as simple as fantasy that there was something unique and compelling about that that spirituality was a real measurable phenomenon and so i started to realize that there were some things about god you can prove and if there were some things you could prove about god then god was not some stupid foolish pursuit but instead real and so as i studied philosophy as well i learned about axioms these self evidence statements that don't require further defense assumptions you make for an argument and i begin to craft axioms to keep my own doubt at bay and allow me to continue to learn and grow and explore in this new experience of knowing god personally and i would sort of come up with a possible definition and then i would go to these communities online where i talked to people in various states of faith transition and i would propose a definition for god i thought that was defensible and empirically sound and people would tear it apart but some parts would stick and so through this process of like evolution i'd go online in a lot of different websites and slowly grow and test axioms of faith and i finally got to a few definitions for god for the bible for prayer for jesus that even the most ardent atheist accept now they might say well that that god doesn't impress me and that's fine but it at least gave me the hope that i could know and follow god without being foolish so mike i met you after you had come up with at least the first rendition of these axioms and it was just at a very important time for me i was in a place where i wasn't holding on to any sort of belief any sort of language of faith anymore even though i still would go to church there was nothing i could say that i believed really it was just all kind of ambiguous and so we got into this party and i meet you among these other pastors and leaders and different sorts of people that are kind of from all different spectrums and i was super inspired by this group like there was conservatives and liberals and and you the atheist guy that tells me these axioms and it was uh such a profound experience for me and it really kind of i you know there's a big part of me that is jealous of your story that i wish that i would have jesus speak to me in some sort of miraculous or even if it's just hallucinatory way i'll take it um but i haven't you know i've had amazing spiritual experiences in the past yes i can remember assisi i mean there were times that language that you shared about the veil of reality becoming thin oh man that just so beautifully described um spirit spiritual experiences that i've had and like assisi i can remember this time where i was just like dancing on this hillside like a crazy person just dancing like a kid just in selfless bliss and joy and reality in god and just just being alive i just was overwhelmed by it all and so yeah i've had amazing experiences before but after my full deconstruction i didn't really have any boxes or language in which to know how to deal with those memories you know like how to categorize them what to do with them so um when i met you i was first struck by this some of the similarities of our stories growing up in fervent christian households and uh being passionate christians our whole lives and then you know both of our fathers had moral failures both of us had science kind of tear at some of the seams of our faith and start unraveling uh what was so important to us and and so struck by these similarities and then he tells me these freaking axioms and i'm like what and they were awesome and i've never heard anything like this even the science mic just came up with these things are amazing these axioms are not going to be great for some of you that uh haven't gone through this like they don't they don't help you get it orthodoxy necessarily you know they don't help you um they're actually offensive if you are within any remotely orthodox strain of christianity because they're so limited but for somebody who's encountered something of the infinite something of jesus of what you'd want to call god but that you feel like an idiot calling god because of all these other associations that you have with what that word means these axioms can be a lifeline for people that want to have spiritual practice because that was me i really that's why i kept going to church i wanted spiritual practice but i felt like an idiot and b and not just an idiot but that i had all these other entanglements with this language and with these practices that would get me paralyzed and trapped into my own mind uh when i would try to go through them so i just ended up most the time not i just would not pray or would not do any spiritual practices so uh so mike lays this on me you want me to recite the one or you would you got him right there i got him i was time capsulating i'm getting the version i gave you all right so there there's there's a two-part rhythm to them one is at least and the other parts even if and that's an important distinction that that rhythm's important an axiom by the way is a philosophical statement that can be taken as self-evident without further justification they're important for epistemology just for my fellow geeks out there and at least is saying that we my understanding of something is not complete and even if is saying well if there's nothing more to it no big deal right so god is at least the set of natural forces that created and sustain the universe as experienced by a neurological model found in evolved features in human brains even if this is a comprehensive definition for god the pursuit of this personal subjective experience can provide meaning peace and empathy for others and is warranted essentially that's a nerdy way of saying some of the claims of new atheism aren't as airtight as they seem and so then i had one for prayer because prayer is important to me so i said prayer is at least a form of meditation that encourages the development of healthy brain tissue lowers stress and can connect us to god even if that is a comprehensive definition for prayer the health and psychological benefits of prayer justify the discipline so prayer helps people whether god's real or not and in the bible because i struggle with the bible like more than anything like i've only recently like really recently come to a peaceful scripture so the bible is at least a set of writings where a people group describes their experience with an understanding of god over thousands of years even if that is a comprehensive definition of the bible study of scripture is warranted to understand our culture and the way in which people come to know god so basically it's the biggest collection of testimonies about people knowing god even if god is just neurological yeah that's a that's like disclaimer with a disclaimer of the disclaimer but for some people like some people like but some people this is for me what i you hardly need to explain as soon as i heard these immediately like it was just i was inhaling air and then here's the big one because what happens to me is i explain my faith and and god and like skeptics go i get that you've had this powerful experience it's beautiful you're taking it as is but man why christianity like there's why jesus so here we go and this is at the time the jesus one has evolved a lot but i want to give you the the original jesus is at least the idea of a man so connected to god that he was called the son of god and the largest religious movement in human history is centered around his teachings he was very likely a real person even if this is all jesus is following his teachers can promote peace empathy and genuine morality i love these axioms so much we actually uh put them into the end of our album on the eye mountain as you're hearing right now so again these axioms may sound kind of obscure and ambiguous and not orthodox to many people but what they did for me is they started giving me some intellectual permission to reapproach some of the practices that i really missed and that i knew had some sort of value in my heart i knew it i experienced it and then talking to mike and hearing about the studies that of brain science and what prayer does to the brain and social effects on all of this and it like it kind of helped confirm in my analyzing mind what a big part of my heart had known the whole time that there really was something good about faith and again that's why i kept going to church i knew in my gut there was something good about this i just couldn't get my heart and my head aligned all the time and these axioms helped me they gave me some permission to explore what a post-deconstructed faith might look like and help me explore some of the language that i no longer had metaphysical constructs to use uh in the way that i had used to be able to use it but now these axioms and this way of of thinking and starting to talk to mike and it started me kind of on a process and a journey that ended up with the liturgists really and and a a different phase and a different stage of the journey kind of for me of my faith journey um [Music] and again i wish it was i love how romantic and uh mystical and magical mike's reconversion was mine's been a little bit what it here's what it's like to me in the book flatland there's these characters that are two-dimensional and i like that idea that we are these limited uh creatures dimensionally scientifically like we we are these tiny little uh specks of dust in the cosmos and we have very limited perspective and ability to understand the great mysteries of of reality and so you know in flatland if you could imagine a three-dimensional character coming into the world of flatland so in other words imagine you know sticking your finger through a piece of paper to a being that lived on the plane of the piece of paper your finger would look like nothing but a line and as it got closer the to you were farther away the line would get you know longer or shorter um but there's no way they could even comprehend of what a finger would be or look like uh in three dimensional time and space and [Music] we know mathematically that our experience of three-dimensional time and space is not the full comprehensive view of reality quantum physics shows us that there are potentially very many dimensions and perspectives that those dimensions could bring to the universe and um so as a flatlander of sorts as a race of beings that lives in a very limited perspective of the cosmos and of all things and reality who are we to know anything but our dimension so here's what it's like for me when you go to the communion table and you experience this thing that so many of us have attested to experiencing the experience of what we would want to call god the transcendent the infinite ground of our being what though all the words the language that we use we talk about what is that metaphysically what is that in its essence i don't believe we can know i think that it's sort of like encountering the line in flatland and you know in flatland if you every time you approach that same line and you experience something at that line in flatland you don't have any way to know if it's just another line of all the lines in your reality in other words you know am i just experiencing some sort of hallucination in my brain am i just experiencing some sort of wonder some sort of emotional chemicals that are flooding my brain or is there actually some sort of metaphysical other that is that is doing this from the outside on some level and i i at this point i don't know that we can know that um because we can't see outside of the paper our senses don't work outside of the paper all we can perceive is the line but what the axioms and a a different sort of post deconstructed faith has started to become for me is i i notice that every time i approach this line in flatland something happens and so my decision as a flatlander is do i approach the line or do i ignore it in fear that it's just a line do i just stay away from the line because there might not be a finger poking through the paper it might just be some sort of internal two-dimensional object that makes me feel a certain way or do i just approach it with a humility and acknowledgement of mystery that that i think there's more than the paper and and that i hope that that line has something to do with that that's more than the paper but at the end of the day what am i going to do am i going to approach the line am i going to come to the table am i going to pray am i going to try to follow jesus's teachings and these are all things that i know when i have approached them and i've engaged in these disciplines and exercises and practices i know from experience and there's plenty of studies and evidence in the world to support it that it's actually good for the world like good religion is beautiful good religion is taking care of widows and orphans and keeping oneself from being polluted by the darkness of the world and and i can attest that that is it's good i've seen it i've experienced it and so i have the decision and to me this is what faith has become actually it's it's not any more about a metaphysical certainty it's not even really a beliefism in the way that i understood belief to be before it's about what am i going to do with my life it's a sort of wager it's a am i going to approach the line what am i going to how am i going to interact with the objects that i see within the page because that's all that i can see and am i going to do so in a way that is open and hopeful and faithful to the mystery that i believe exists beyond the page or or am i just going to get caught up in my own head and ignore the line one more example of how i feel like this is for me at this point helen keller born deaf and blind can you imagine what it's like to be deaf and blind in this world in which we so heavily rely on our sight and our hearing to even understand what reality is like on any level so when i imagine helen keller and what she had to work with in order to navigate through reality it actually becomes sort of a profound analogy to faith to me i mean imagine when she's being taught to use her hands to speak all she experiences are these sensations of touch in her hands she can't see the person doing that to her she can't uh hear them it's it's these just sensations within this blindness and this silent blind universe and but she just notices she learns she's smart enough and faithful enough to go back to those sensations in her hands and in her body and on her skin that she recognizes when she does when she tries to make these certain movements she gets fed she gets water whatever which are just once again other sensations to her but they're good ones they're sensations that make her life better and so she learns how to with very limited senses engage in reality in a way that is totally a leap of faith it's she is i'm gonna reach out my hand and try to communicate as though there isn't an other out there she has no sight to justify that she knows there's an other she can't hear them all she knows is when she does that good things happen and it could be her own brain i mean how how could she know that there's anybody else but she is god she is the universe and when she does these certain things with her body she fulfills her own desires but she starts engaging with others she learns how to communicate and talk and trust that she's actually communicating to somebody that she's not crazy um that's sort of what i feel like at this point i feel like i i am blind to reality i am deaf to reality in its fullness but i have a couple of these senses and i have a couple of these little tricks that i've learned that when i go to the communion table and when i give myself to loving people to serving people to forgiving to [Music] trying to pray and love my enemy and do all the things that jesus told us and and this whole christian faith um i acknowledge like helen keller that i don't have a firm full grasp of what all those things are but it seems to work and so i keep going back to the table and i keep going back to the line and i keep moving my hands in a way that hopes that there really is an other that can interact and that's my faith for me at this point and it for some people that sounds sad probably for people that have sight blindness sounds really scary but when you're blind you just gotta do what you gotta do and this is what my faith is for me blind movement towards what i hope is good [Music] it's normal at so many different points in our life to feel like something is getting in the way of being present or happy something stopping us from achieving the goals that we have for ourselves or feeling connected to the people that we love betterhelp will assess your needs and match you with your own licensed professional therapist to help you work on all those things you can connect with someone in a safe and private online environment for 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weekend i had this great time with with folks in canton and we're having a conversation last night and this woman says you know i want to believe these things want to believe there's a god i want to believe jesus was his son and special and resurrected um but how do i know any of this is true how do i know any of it's real how do i know that i'm not just wasting my time and i think that's a common tale in the world right now of this testing our faith for factual trueness you know i remember when i was oh yeah a while back i was on the pete holmes he made a weird podcast and i remember i caught a little flag for saying this he said something about a resurrection i said well you know i'm not i'm not saying i'm all in on bodily resurrection because at the time i like i wasn't i wasn't sure what i thought about that and then like it's weird today like i'm all in on bodily resurrection but in a really weird way like i just believe it because i have these experiences and i realize that convinces nobody so i'll just go yeah i believe that but i can't convince you i can't prove it because i can't prove it to myself that's faith it's faith but then i used to think i was such a cop-out but i was thinking about that and it there's two things that made me realize and this is what i told i told my friend last night is first not long after humans learn language created this way to transmit thoughts from brain to brain they started theorizing about why things always fell to the ground um and early ideas had this idea that um you know the gods pushed things towards the earth so he couldn't escape into the the greater realms that was a really early idea or that a little more sophisticated and kind of pre-science but getting towards science idea was that empty space repelled solid things and since the earth was solid and space was empty we were just sort of it's almost like anti-gravity and then this like wicked smart teenager invents calculus isaac newton and comes up with laws of gravity and they were fantastic and they still work like if you want to like build a bridge newton's understanding of gravity is really useful and then einstein comes along and he goes no newton wasn't right space and time are the same thing and gravity can warp it and um you need that understanding of gravity to make a gps satellite like you need it you need that understanding of gravity to understand black holes but then that understanding of gravity is flawed because right after no sooner does einstein finish relativity then we start learning about the quantum world and the only way they can make the standard model of physics which is the law of tiny things work is to ignore gravity and even though gravity is one of the fundamental forces of physics we have no idea how it works it has no force carrier that we know of it's a mystery so the most contemporary understanding of gravity is that it's a mystery like the most dialed in smart people it's a mystery and so is our faith true well newton's laws are wrong but really helpful yeah like in some contexts they are true like relativity not all that useful for engineering projects on earth it's really not unless you need to make something with a gps satellite or you need a satellite to have a very close orbit around the sun that's relativistic to some degree other than that relativity doesn't really do anything even though it's more correct but we already know relativity is wrong and so when i think about how we understand god to say we have these evolving understandings that's just human yeah we have evolving understandings of everything but then this whole true idea i got thinking about um vincent van gogh and all people think about van gogh is like he cut off his ear and he gave it to a girl you know what i mean like that's the but this guy loved the church so much that he became a missionary and he failed the priest test multiple times so instead he just became a missionary and he felt so drawn to the plight of the poor that he gave away all his money that he was paid to be a priest and he slept in a haystack behind a bakery and ate the baker's bread for free and his congregation his parish was so mortified by his behavior that they would like raise money and give it to him so he could get like a house he would take all that money and he would give it away he'd just give the money away and after he did that a few times they got so ticked at him that they hadn't removed from the church like this guy was being like so christ-like because he showed up to preach with like hay in his clothes they they ditched him so then he becomes an art dealer and he was so disenfranchised with the way art dealers treated art as a commodity that it just broke him and in his grief of failing as a minister and failing as an art dealer he devotes his time to painting and he paints the starry night if you look at the starry night right in the center of a picture is a church and all the other buildings around the church they have lights in the windows the church is dark but if you look at the starry night it's beautiful there's these swirls of color this light mixed with dark and when i look at the story tonight i have to say is the starry night true well it contains no facts whatsoever but somehow this painting conveys what van gogh felt as he looked upon this town in a way that physics can't and neuroscience can and so when i think about what it's like to fall in love what it was like to fall in love with my wife you could describe that chemically and biologically and physically and quantify but not fully unless you get a love song and so when we talk about the grandest parts of the human experience the the ultimate forms of awe and reverence and humility and grace we have no other word but god and is that word true i think it's true in the same way that the starry night is true and i'm okay with that the opposite of faith is not doubt it's certainty because what need do the certain have for faith so we choose to make this crazy bet on faith that there's a guy jesus he's the son of god and we're gonna devote our life to following him yeah at this point like why jesus for me um jesus adds this small element to god i think to me that like that whole idea of you were with me when you were with the guy in the prison or you know with the sick the guy in these water i heard this i don't i think was on npr i heard this guy um he was a guy that was in he's a catholic now but he was he was in the concentration camps i don't know if he was auschwitz or but one of them and he said when people ask him these morality questions like this point about god like how would an all-powerful god allow such a thing to happen as the holocaust he said to me that's a very juvenile uh model of god that you're trying to question the god that i love is the one that hung and bled on a cross and that like what an what a shift like this the god the god of christianity is the one we find in the poor and the broken and the small he's the one and he loses you know you have jesus why my god why have you forsaken me on the cross and that's the clearest picture of god that we have that's amazing and that's flips it from like why would god allow this in darfur and right now why would god allow this what's happening in iraq and all over these places in the world syria and and maybe the christian god is the one getting beheaded i don't know it's it's a different you know rather than this like grand puppet master it's like in christianity you find this god who is with us in the smallest and most kind of absurd ways oh man they were so pissed when jesus came and was not the conqueror right like that they were shocked the disciples the the people that started to follow him the people who sang hosanna when they came into the city they were pissed that he wasn't the big mighty messiah deliverer and then like modern evangelicals get pissed if you make jesus not the same thing that was in the story that he wasn't you know what i mean when you start talking about broken god limited god god of the poor people get conservative evangelicals get angry because they want the god who's coming to conquer everything the god is going to come deliver the nation we all want that don't we on some level we want big conqueror to come in mark and that's what's so amazing about jesus the whole story of jesus is this jesus wasn't caesar right the whole story of jesus born in a manger to a teenager unwed teenager in this like oppressed people group it didn't come as blazing in with chariots he wrote a donkey like the whole thing is scandalous to the human desire for what we want god to be and what we want our religion and our lives to be and that's what that's christianity is amazing like to to say god god you know you have caesar saying he's lord this jewish guy that got that you crucified he's lord that's that's like revolutionary that's like sticking it to the man as hard as it can be stuck it made the man pretty angry too yeah it still does and then the man became religious and ironically of all the worst ironies and in history turned jesus into caesar [Music] oh man we were so positive for a while it was then when you said that that's what i was like so there's our story lost and found whether you can determine whether we're found i guess to us we are i feel awfully found yeah i've i just i've never god's never been more real to me than he is now well that's the crazy part so we want to hear your story um is god lost to you is he found again was he never lost um you can tell us just head over to the liturgist.com podcast we've got a comment section on this episode you can head to facebook.com the liturgists we'd love to hear from you there or you can hit us up in 140 character chunks on twitter at the liturgists um but we'd like to hear your stories we'd like to hear about your faith found lost and found i'm michael gunger i'm science mike see you guys next time you