Episode 16 - The End (Eschatology)

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so mike you were southern baptist became an atheist you're a rapture guy i was a rapture guy yeah for sure did you ever think you got left behind yeah when i was a kid i was really worried about whether i was really saved or not because i would i would read revelation and i would like read about the horrible things depicted there and because the the dominant theology of of the church i was going to was uh what pre-millennialist i think is what they call it that the the christians are raptured first thing i didn't want to be part of like getting stung by scorpions or uh um you know having to have a mark of the beast in order to do commerce and have to refuse it and then starve to death all those things didn't sound like uh fun interesting uplifting things but i was often terrified that i'd like somehow botch the salvation process because of reading revelation and end times theology so eschatology guys this is this is the episode on eschatology we had several people just asking uh why we've been doing this podcast for subjects along this line what happens at the end eschatology and uh we finally did it we're gonna brave it we each had to have a little drink and uh we're both super lightweights we haven't even finished our one beer and we're both already a little uh little tipsy yeah i'd ask a friend to help me get the laptop ready to record because it was confusing me but if you're talking about eschatology you have to you gotta what that's just a weird topic and kind of a downer like what's the end is it good is it bad well here we go we're diving in guys welcome to the liturgist podcast eschatology where we discuss issues through the lenses of art faith and science might as well talk with about art we're here we're in beautiful laguna right now and uh overlooking the ocean so it's interesting because as those of you that aren't theology nerds eschatology means it's basically the the end times right it's the study of of the end times and it's a subject that is sort of controversial because everybody disagrees about even within the christian tradition there are so many ways of reading the bible in this there's no one clear simple straightforward everybody you know this is what the bible says about eschatology if there were that sort of explanation there'd probably be more uh consistency on how people interpret it but it's all over the place you've got people that think there's going to be some sort of rapture um you have people that believe in their christians that don't believe in any sort of afterlife there are christians who believe in are really dualistic you either go to this other place called heaven or this other place called hell there are people that believe that there's a resurrection all on earth and that it's all made new and there's some sort of heaven or hell present within the earth reality it's just all over the map um certainly there are streams of of christian thought that go back farther than others you know there was a dispensationalist thing in the 19th century that really kind of spread into a lot of evangelical and american christianity um that's where a lot of the rapture stuff really started getting talked about for the first time with darby and all all that and uh and it's but it just it's broad and it's wide and it's very hotly contested so we're just gonna tell you from the bat we don't know and i like my whole background in eschatology it comes from two perspectives my southern baptist childhood and my atheistic uh crisis of faith so the only two things i know really well are the most conservative position and the position that the whole discipline is nonsense uh and i don't really have i get a little nervous because michael talked about doing a scathology episode i said one nobody knows what that is nobody's gonna care and two what do i have to add but then when we kind of tweeted out and went to facebook and said hey we're doing an episode what do you guys think lots of responses really quick so i i feel like it's a good episode to cover and if we're going to talk about the art of eschatology you can't do that unless you're willing to talk about the left behind series that's true mr kirk cameron mr nicholas cage these days oh yeah have you seen it i have not have any other how did they get nicholas cage to do a left behind movie kudos to them cash money nicholas must have some debts uh yeah did you see the the kirk cameron one i'm gonna if you just ask have you seen and if it's any of that genre it's gonna be no i saw the kirk cameron left behind movie and because i read the entire series you did i did i i it's not a joke that i was a southern baptist i was an actual southern baptist that was real so i read those books because there were so many things that confused me in revelation i thought this novelization would help me understand the theology i'm not kidding and uh so i read those books well like so i read the whole series but then i like spun off into like more series and that was around the time i was starting to look at things through a little bit more of a progressive christian lens so i didn't keep following it but what about the omega code did you ever see the omega code no no it's another one of those i don't know what it is but i assume mr kirk cameron is in it but the here's the thing to me about left behind it's not like the best writing right sorry folks if you disagree just it's a podcast i get to share my opinion but man a lot of people bought those books yeah and those books were widely discussed and so there might be a tendency in some mental spaces to discount the really conservative really literalist readings of um of uh scripture and and and how that has implications for eschatology but the art of the left behind series shows us that what you believe about the end of all things has a dramatic effect on your creativity as a person the things that you value and the way that you behave in the world so even though it's a weird word and kind of obscure um i think the degree to which left behind tapped into the consciousness of a large group of mainly americans but it sold overseas as well is really telling this idea that the earth as a temporary phenomenon we're really just here to sell as many jesus insurance policies as possible and then get out before it all falls apart uh that really has ripples and i even wonder how much um that limits people's creativity and their art because if all we're here to do is um go through this trial to be saved and help others to be saved then the only art worth creating is art that says jesus jesus jesus jesus um and everything else is is either neutral or dangerous and that that's actually um i you know i had good parents they weren't super conservative but for my early youth i i wasn't allowed to listen to non-christian music or records i didn't consume chris media that existed outside the church uh and that creates um a pretty limited perspective on the world because of the way art informs our view of reality art lets us as we talked about in the program before step back and look at our own lens and then look through someone else's lens when you believe all i got to do is make it till they ring the bell and i vanish and my clothes are left in the chair it makes really bad art and i hate to do a value judgment like that but it does i agree i i have experienced that personally um i feel like musically we went through a pretty major shift when we went became gunger and um i used to be the michael gunger band and there was some stuff that we made that i was that we made one album as the michael green band i'm still happy with some of that stuff that we did but there was a definite shift that happened in my art personally when specifically my eschatology changed and i grew up in the same sort of vibe where art in in dispensationalist or like a lot of evangelical sort of viewpoints which is has an element of escapism to it right like we've we're just wait we've got to get your golden ticket and wait till the end so that you don't get left behind or that you're you know you get your ticket in um there was no reason for art to be sacred within that story outside of like you said if it's very specifically about that story so the image that i kind of got was um so you saw the movie titanic where those the strength players are like playing on the on the deck before while the ship down and it it was like it was kind of funny and beautiful but it was also like it seemed so pointless you know like what what are you doing why are you still doing that you're still trying to do your little job and the ship is sinking there's an absurdity about it right right and that was sort of art in in my circle growing up it was like yeah we have these artists you can go hack us practice your guitar and do your art thing that's nice but if you want to do work for the kingdom you know you better if you're going to be a painter a christian painter that really takes the glory of god seriously the kingdom of god seriously paint some crosses and to be like and that makes sense on the ship on the titanic if you're going to be a painter and you want to be effective in that moment you should paint signs to the exit and that's about it yeah you know you don't need to be painting murals on the wall of the titanic it's going down and if you want to be effective on the titanic as an artist figure out how to get us off this ship i'm sure there are people that believe in the rapture that make fine art you know i don't think this is just a blanket statement to say if you believe this sort of eschatology you're not going to make good art but for me personally when i started reading some nt write and stuff like that where in in his eschatology which is more anglican and you know probably which is closer to the catholic and and older orthodox views of of christian eschatology meaning the restoration of all things the the you know kind of a new earth new heavens a new earth sort of eschatology that uh it made me view human work differently altogether including art and music and how uh it's all part like the kingdom of god and that in that way of seeing is is being birthed among us through the very ordinary work and and art and way that we are ordering the earth and that's part of how god is bringing the kingdom into the world and that eventually all things are made new and the titanic may sink for a minute but then those same boards are used to rebuild or whatever you know um i think that was an nt right idea maybe or example um [Music] but anyway thinking that way all of a sudden i don't know what it was but something shifted away from because i always wanted my art to please god i always wanted it to be part of i wanted to give god glory and not myself i wanted to be a part of something bigger than myself i didn't just want to make music so that i'd be rich and famous i wanted to make music that would help people and that it would serve god and his purposes in the world um but i thought to do that the way my eschatology really aimed me in a kind of narrow direction a narrow box where i i had to fit this uh be it an exit sign painter of sorts um and then when that shifted and got a little broader and that all you know in a different eschatology i was able to say oh well maybe there's things that i could just create for the sake of creating within this world of this new way of seeing the world that it's sacred within itself and it really just that eschatology change really drastically changed the way i approached my writing and my art that i didn't have to keep pushing something a certain direction for it to be sacred for it to be good for it to be worth something that really anything that we did from our hearts from our that was in a true and honest and meaningful way that that was the worship of it not the context i mean not the yeah what context we end up playing the music in or the words in the music if we have enough jesus per minute it was that had very little to do with the actual like sacred nature of it um and so that that changed it and then when i lost my faith uh that changed it again [Laughter] so i do think that the eschatology the the view of that we have at the end i think you're right it does have a significant impact on what we make of our world and how we treat our world including our art well it's relational too so like it used to be every talk i gave in a in a church context there might be some teaching in there some discipleship but it always led to a crescendo of turner byrne everyone every thing i wrote for devotional or or uh anything i produced had this message of avoid the end right uh i used to say that uh everybody's immortal it's just a matter of where you'll be um and then i sort of started to look at uh more other christian views of the end other christian views of salvation um and of course you as you would imagine these days i'm really into especially um the greek orthodox views of salvation in the end because they look at everything in terms of um sickness and healing and then the end is us being drawn toward um the divine and and in that way being healed and becoming like god and i just think that's a that's a beautiful image um but and it changed the way that i communicated about spiritual things so even while i was still going to an evangelical church i was starting to incorporate some of those themes into the work that i did and the messages i delivered and the things that i wrote and they became in some ways more hopeful um because with a less binary view of what may happen at the end of things and then you know obviously for me as we'll talk about this more later i started to wrestle with the science of things um and then i you know i stopped believing closet atheist and so that completely shifted the tone of even my religious art or religious work because now it was who cares what happens in the end what can i convince you to change or how can i inspire you today um and at least for me that's when i started to actually gain any traction with people and see uh more response to the work that i did certain nothing like i see today but it was definitely that pivot point and i didn't realize until you were talking that was completely attached to a change in eschatology yeah it's weird that's insane it's weird this episode matters it's weird because i most people that i talk to and maybe i live in a i do live in a small bubble of course we all do but most people that i have talked to about this are like i don't know i mean most people that are reasonable people i think are have some level of i don't know right because we don't know but what it how important it is in in affecting how we live um it's interesting how so many of us don't have any idea what we think about it but maybe that's part of the mystery of of how you handle it is maybe an important part of even i even when i talk to really conservative people a lot of people say well i think yeah but like it's a pretty small slice it's like no here it is yeah these scriptures say this is what's gonna happen and i guess i see a little of that but it's like the like really almost like theology nerd fringe that gets like really worked up over your eschatology well because if we're honest the only eschatology i think that you see in my yeah that you see even in scripture is art like is poetry is apocalyptic language is there's no like straight up here's how scientifically the end of all things is going to look it uses imagery the the style of writing the style of speaking even when jesus is talking about hell he's talking about he uses words like the the gehenna or whatever like a garbage dump outside of jerusalem why wasn't he just speaking str why there's no straight talk about it since it's all metaphor i'm yeah and correct me if i'm wrong here but everything i'm thinking of is it uses poetry and imagery and which to me at this point where i'm at totally makes sense because how can you speak of the unknowable without that if you can see kind of like i had this uh one of the things as i've been kind of post my deconstruction trying to figure out in my because i don't know where i'm at today eschatologically but one thing i do think is that it if there is some sort of after existence after our death i mean it's going to have to be such an entirely different way of existing for it not to be hell you know if it's anything like this sort of existence just better if it's like just like it is now but just more fun or more beautiful um if you talk about infinity added to that i was realizing like we're out here like i said we're in laguna and we have this gorgeous view and how long would i be able to enjoy this view i could enjoy it for a long time maybe a year until the first mortgage payment that's true no but like i could sit up here for a while and then i mean so maybe in my you know resurrected self i could sit here for a million years and enjoy this maybe a billion years and be like and i could go around and look at every flower individually and i could do that with every cliff on this whole coast i could do that over every cliff and every plane every mountain in the whole world and i could do that on every planet in the whole universe and i could do it and be like still amazed and then come back a bit i'm gonna do it all again and i could do it all a billion times and then at what point i'm like cool like i i've seen this a lot of times you know like if there's any sort of finite way of experiencing it like we experienced time and space now that's how eventually like can i i'm cool like i've seen this i'm cool to go now like you know what i mean uh so i have to think there's some other way of being if there is some sort of existence after this it's got to be so entirely different on some level that it is a great mystery so that gives me like do i have some hope i guess for that sort of mystery sure but it also makes me see this life as incredibly special and unique and temporary in a way that's not like it used to i was with you actually as a rapture kid i didn't think i was gonna die how many people on earth don't think they're gonna die that's a weird thing statistically um i'm guessing um like legitimately think that's a significant possibility is total spit bowling i mean i'm doing some reasonable statistical so if you consider 16 or so or like what we call true evangelicals of the united states uh of that what do you think but they'd also think that jesus is probably coming back in their lifetime that's what i'm saying so i'm guessing that's probably 10 or less of that group but that still could be a few hundred thousand people in the u.s yeah don't believe they're going down are at least 50 which are the only people on earth right i mean there's no other religions that don't think they're gonna die maybe some ufo cult or something yeah the occasional cult would also think that so i want to go back to something you said about uh poetic language and the end and i'm about to throw a hand grenade on the program so if you just want to comment on anything i'm saying you feel free okay uh but you know that's the good thing about starting out my career with heresy um and a beer and a beer on this podcast uh the bible is certainly most poetic at two points in its language the very end of the very beginning yeah right there's no question like no one can read revelation and not say there's some degree or a sword coming out of his mouth exactly does jesus have metal feet no he does not have metal feet so um there are places where the bible discusses the end in terms that are not as poetic all right the gospels sheep and goats i think they're literally going to be no no but i mean in terms of uh many of you will not you'll live until when i come back okay right so whoever wrote that gospel is attributing those words to christ and i don't think i think the most reasonable reading of that text is that author believed in his lifetime christ would return and renew all things and that belief has just persisted which makes sense of some of the other scriptures like paul saying you know if you have to marry right now right go ahead yes the epistles why not just wait explore those ideas more and so i think you do christianity a disservice when you try to whitewash the idea that in some ways this really was at the very beginning an apocalyptic movement we are here to orient our lives to prepare for an earth that is almost done and i don't watch that stuff right that's that's the value at least to me and the way i read the bible as a library a collection of human works about god is it means it doesn't freak me out if they might have missed something now i know maybe i'll get another blog post on answering genesis from this if you guys are listening hello um but uh i just think it frees you up to not be so obsessed with no these guys had to be right about everything and um and i think the gospels are pretty clear they thought this stuff was happening soon um and i think in the light of how people understood god uh in that era that wasn't a crazy assumption i think it might be a little more of a stretch in 2015 though here's a question from justin moore on twitter is there an absolute essential thing necessary to know about the end times for one's faith example knowing how jesus comes back benefits my faith in blank ways etc i understand and believe it's kind of the point for christianity jesus comes for his bride eschatology never ends there what do you think mike before we started this episode i would have said no it doesn't matter right and now i'm like well let's see when my eschatology has changed it has dramatically changed my life it has changed the way i behave it has changed the way i communicate but there's a there's another thing in there is there anything essential to believe so i have because of the way i view salvation uh essential is a weird word for me right i'm kind of a universalist kind of with the orthodox and this idea of healing through the cosmic christ um kind of a hippie that way so um but in terms of essential i think this idea this belief that somehow god is drawing us to him and that reconciliation and reunification are the arc of all things helps us to behave in different ways especially in hopeless times so i think about like happiness studies i've seen and how uh people in wealthy and industrialized nations tend to be less happy than many people in poor less developed nations and um those people often have higher levels of religiosity and so they sort of look at their current circumstances and even though in many ways they're kind of crummy they think it's okay god is drawing me towards this thing and they're still able to behave uh well i went to guatemala once and i was blown away by the hospitality and generosity of people who would invite me into their home and they i had like nothing and they bring like this plate of like snack cakes and soda and like it was rude to refuse it right but they gave generously out of their property because they believe that had a spiritual value but then they genuinely enjoyed the time and the fellowship with you and that that attitude i guess you could say it's altruism or whatever it doesn't make as much sense in a materialist or a non-spiritual context and even in my own life when i look at sometimes the the um downers of the world the the hopeless things the fact that i believe and i do that god is drawing all things to the divine i think that might be essential you can't see the air quotes to christian faith i'm going to be a little bit pragmatic and say that what i think is essential is not not the contents of the beliefs but the consequences of those beliefs so if you have a belief system for example that paints a picture of a scary god that you're afraid of that you try to appease in some way with your faith that you have maybe you do that with your beliefs you however that works you do that with your actions that might not be the healthiest eschatology if you have an eschatology that makes the world separates you from other people in a really existential way where you are somehow part of this group that is the group and everybody else is not the group and you you are separated from people and you know that you're the sheep and they're the goats uh that's concerning i think i think um if your eschatology doesn't essentially lead you to love if it doesn't lead you towards deeper connection and love of god of your neighbor and even of yourself i think there's probably some room for some bulldozers to come into that eschatology because it is important what we believe about the end how we even what we hope for for the end and because the reality is if i mean say if if kirk cameron is correct in his eschatology then he really is doing the right thing he really is like that's right standing on the corner and telling people they're going to hell and because have you ever had an adult have you ever lusted after a woman well then you're gonna you know you've jesus says you've committed adultery then so you've broken the ten commandments you're going to hell you need to pray this prayer with me that's the only loving thing to do penn jillette said that right like if you really believe that i don't believe certain things uh i'm going to hell and you don't evangelize how much do you hate me yeah so but then you know i would challenge mr cameron to see how that sort of perspective paints god and paints our neighbors and paints ourselves it paints us in this very privileged small group of people who are in with god who is this very scary uh tyrannical being and it paints others as the enemy of god and from everything i know about jesus if you're standing with jesus you're standing with the enemy so in that sort of view like it kind of eats itself because how are you not going to be with the oppressed in that situation rather than the oppressor well from a literary perspective you have these people using sacrifice language to a culture steeped in animal sacrifice but then we just like well let's use that metaphor forever and i think it's much more interesting to consider um the cross for example in the context of god's response to our wrath and anger as opposed to appeasing his own like i think atheists actually offer an interesting critique when they say so what you're telling me is god sent himself in the form of his own son so he could save us from his own wrath like it just i guess you can call that a mystery and then try to hold on to it but to me it's just kind of nonsensical and it makes more sense if in some way the cross shows us how god suffers along with us um and that and and maybe causes us to question some of those uh assumptions about his nature and how things will end so yeah essential to me at this point and i'm still working out what i think or what i even hoped for for the end but maybe if there is you know if the bible is revealing something about the end [Music] maybe the fact that it is all just this crazy poetic mix of images and apocalyptic insanity should make us even within the very system hold the whole thing with loose hands but also be able to wrestle through and what what do we hope for what is the what sort of hope do we see at the end of all this where is this moving at the end of the story because even when i was a kid i remember hearing some of these preachers talk about the mark of the beast and stuff and and you were going to get this you know i don't know how it turned into like a a bar code where did that come from i actually know this one okay uh because the whole idea is it's uh a mark on the head or the hand that's the scripture yeah and um it's the most necessary for commerce and that this yes necessary for commerce and that there is this um mathematical derivative nature to this mark in which it can be distilled to 666. and if you look but that's that's not in the where's the mathematical derivative oh that it says that's an interpretation of in some translations it says and for those of you who are good with numbers let uh yeah you know this number will work too but then that translator is the one that turned to 666. anyway whatever the but who first said oh so that's a bar code well uh i guess my crew because in uh in youth group they showed us a barcode and if you've ever seen a upc code there's these calibration marks at the beginning the middle and the end and on every barcode and somehow in wacko eschatology land that came to be those three marks were a six a six and a six and so then but so what you say what i love about this memetically so i know we're still in science i'm just kind of or in faith i'm gonna add just a touch of science because it intersects yes um is watching this meme evolve so upcs were this interesting way where a mark was used to execute commerce and so people are reading the scriptures and because of their eschatology informing the way they view the world looking for warning signs so a upc became a possible vector to know when it was ready to be ready right so if suddenly instead it's the upc is on the bread but also in your hand and you pay with your hand now we're in trouble today the same chatter is going along but over rfid since you can inject a chip that's scannable which you totally could conceivably get a grain of rice size chip and inject it into your hand or into your forehead and scan it and do contact payment for example i take it i take it in a second but the whole the whole thing even so but let's be clear before like the angry emails start the even those scriptures denote that this would not be a subtle process that there would be some pledge of fealty or or engagement with this one world power in order to get the mark so somebody just offers like like the apple watch will have apple pay that doesn't mean that it's on your wrist it's like the end times it just means it's an easy way to pay for things with an encryption token but i even in high school i was starting to like see that and be like wait wait so this story let me get this straight like the whole thing that we always talk about is we don't have to live under this law anymore this code what i do all i need to do is like you know kind of trust jesus and receive jesus and then grace covers all of my sins but then if like i get a chip in my hand then i'm gonna go burn in hell for eternity you know even within the very system i was like wait but doesn't that kind of contradict well then you were never safe then you were falsely saved the first time falsely saved yeah you had a false assurance of salvation that was validated the moment you accepted the mark external again like the whole thing was the law was external and now it's internal this heart change and then now it's back to external at the end well the way i've seen it described in apologetics man i forgot how much i know about this stuff is that anyone who would take that mark had never accepted salvation in the first place so you guys were once saved always one saved always saved oh yeah so that meant never not well you guys were heretics that's okay okay well you shipwrecked your faith you know that was the the pauline way of we call that backsliding because your faith is never in question once you're saved that's it if we listen to ourselves as young people we would be the biggest backsliders in the whole world if i heard this podcast when i was 19 i'd be the one sending the angry email like and first it'd be angry and then it would be a plea for my soul that's exactly how that would go i'm i'm totally serious because i would like watch things and be like oh these this is this is dangerous it's dangerous for him i remember this band came to our church and i was talking the bass player because he's a really good bass player and i realized he smoked cigarettes and i was like but i wasn't like angry with him i was grieved i was like does he know the lord is you know what i mean is he anyway crazy maybe we are backslidden mike maybe i don't know i uh only if the 13 year old programmer is god yeah exactly i i i don't i feel a resurrection life happening to me awful frequently 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 better help 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 that reason it's so convenient you don't even have to leave the house you can start working with someone in under 24 hours when working with someone through better help you can send a message to your counselor at any time and get a timely and thoughtful response plus you can schedule weekly video and phone sessions betterhelp has licensed professional counselors who are specialized in treating things like depression anxiety navigating family conflicts and so much more they're committed to facilitating great therapeutic matches so they make it easy and free to change counselors if needed anything you share with your counselor is confidential so many people have been using better help that they're recruiting additional counselors in all 50 states start living a happier life today as a listener you get 10 off your first month by visiting betterhelp.com liturgists join over 1 million people taking care of their mental health again it's betterhelp h-e-l-p-com slash liturgists okay so one thing i guess that was part of that question that we didn't get to is the kind of point for christianity and this i mean from the early creeds and everything jesus's return is how can you separate that from christianity that's a pretty major point of eschatology for christians what that looks like of course has widely interpreted truths but you also have things like paul saying you know if there is no resurrection from the dead then we are to be pitied above everybody so i think there are some like while there are a million branches of christian thought if you look at most of those branches there is some eschatological element of christ's resurrection and resurrection of of all things at the end um how that works what that looks like if it's true i guess that's up to your discretion listener well that's where i lean into the biblical ideas of hope yeah so i don't know what happens and i don't know exactly what resurrection of the dead means and sorry my skeptical friends this is where you guys get to roll your eyes at me this is why i'm not an atheist anymore but uh i believe in this reconciliation and i have some hopes for the promises of scripture even though you know i get all these questions all the time about well if parts are mythical how can you put faith in any of it right and i just because of the way i've experienced these stories in my own life you know what i mean um and i get that could just be rooted in my neurological composition i get it could be in a cognitive biases but leaning into these stories in some way has helped a few billion people over a couple thousand years know and understand the thing that we call god and so i'm okay leaning into some mystery and i'm okay putting some trust and hope in completely non-empirical ideas about where things are going as i wrestle myself with trying to develop an eschatology at this point again um i have conflicting thoughts because on one side when i kind of lost my really happy eschatology um i had to come to terms with death in a way that i hadn't before and that was actually really healthy for me um yeah and ecclesiases is there in our bible if you read ecclesiastes that was our first meditation was on this whole idea of vapor and like everything is meaningless and coming to terms with death and like what you're doing and all we get worried about stressed out about on on the cosmic scale is no it's nothing it's just a mist at best it's a vapor hello and of else excuse me and um [Music] and coming to terms with that i think that that that stream has been it's in our bible it's in our tradition coming to terms with death and seeing that and i don't know whether the the teacher believed in afterlife or not right um but oh i mean good um scholarship would have you to believe that the hebraic understanding of the afterlife was radically different than the modern christian understanding yeah um which is interesting annihilation was a perfectly valid afterlife view for most of the jewish part of this and then there was sheol in the place of the dead eventually that kind of developed and but even sheol was like a kind of a temporary thing yeah yeah so it's interesting that in the bible you have that it seems the writers don't even all have a consistent vision of what the afterlife right you know um i i was able to come to terms with death but there's also the other side the the hopeful side of that my work my life and not just my work but my life but the humankind's existence in life like i want to believe that mother teresa um that her work mattered on some level that wasn't just in in that you know in that hospital with that one kid like i believe you know that's enough that's enough i think um but that there is some sort of like bigger thing that that's connected to i love that idea because it i think that idea if we can think that the little things that we do is connected to some bigger direction of the way things are going and that christian hope that the reason i think that christian hope is a reason that there are other teresas in the world a big a big part of the reason that it is connected to some bigger story some bigger direction and so i think that death is something to be embraced in a you know the fact that my daughter amelie she's four um she just went to preschool recently and i i had a date with her like the day before she went to preschool and i realized this was the last date that i'm gonna have with amelie before that ever that she's before she's a school kid and it was like it made it so it brought tears to my eyes and i was just so profoundly present and thankful for every moment of that date not because it was an eternal thing that i'd be able to do over and over and over because this is it this is what i've got and the fact that she's going to grow up and get out of the house makes every night that i get to go into her bedroom and read her a story and give her a kiss good night every time there's a very limited amount of those that i have and she's you know so that makes it special like the limited life span that we have on this earth to experience life as we experience it now comes to an end and that is scary for a lot of us but it also is what makes life so precious and is what makes every moment so valuable and so i think both of those i think both of those things have something to teach us most of the temporary nature and uh that which is beyond and even if even if that which is beyond is something very scientific and very like my dust goes into stardust again and i'm part of the big thing you know whatever like i need there should be something i want something in my eschatology that is bigger than just it's me and then i'm i'm gone um that i'm part of something bigger and i'm do you ever read i am a strange loop i haven't so douglas hofstetter uh is a computer scientist philosopher who considers consciousness he's also obviously uh i shouldn't say obviously but kevin is obviously an atheist or at least not spiritual and his wife died and so he starts to wrestle with what is what is the afterlife what's that look like and um so if you consider our consciousness and who we are as essentially a pattern right so the most obvious thing would be our dna obviously as you said the the components our constituent materials are protons or neutrons are electrons they're effectively eternal there's eternal as this variation of the universe and so we will continue to form life after we are no longer life but also if you have children the the loom that created you will persist in them your dna but even forget that the thing that you most identify with you is not actually your dna and twins prove that you don't think you are your twin you that you associate with you is a particular pattern and relationship that exists in a neural network right it changes over time but there's some essential essence that short of alzheimer's or something like that remains consistent throughout your life and everyone recognizes as you and so what's interesting about human consciousnesses and human brains is they're constantly building and updating models of reality and so we get upset when our models are wrong so if you uh have a favorite chair and you sit in that chair and it falls down the leg falls off you'll be a little nervous to sit on it for a while because you realize your model wasn't quite right and we really freak out when our models about people are wrong right so someone you're close to does something unpredictable that creates stress and anxiety is all going somewhere really cool what that means is for the better someone knows you the higher resolution a map of your particular neural network they are building in their own and so when i was an atheist and my grandmother died i really was grieving and i read this book and i realized that in a very real way [Music] i could contemplate a question and i could tell you exactly how my memo would answer it and the reason i could do that is because if you imagine the original person as a painting i at least had like a mosaic tile version of that painting in my own brain and that as long as i thought of her and remembered her in a very materialistic sense i carried that which was her with me and that meant the more i invested in other people the more i allowed them to build a model of me and i in return i did create some form some echo of afterlife i am a strange loop is a great book if you guys want to check it out and that's interesting when you even went back to the mother teresa thing she exists in how many hearts and brains in the world that when we encounter the broken she has something to do with she lives on it in so many hearts you know like and what she did and how she lived her life that's an interesting thing like what she was as a person living on this earth still exists on some level could there be any personal pattern more distributed than this guy named jesus as wild i mean people are still patterning their lives after these teachings right this name is still said all the time and for a while when i first came back to faith and i contemplated resurrection i thought about how christ is constantly resurrected as people follow and remember him and as the in in a very very materialistic way the eucharist we take bread and wine and turn it into the living body of christ let's ask one question you have that one okay so we had a listener question that i really enjoyed uh and they said you know so we're looking at at the ends and we're looking at these signs in the scripture well gosh we have science so he mentioned several specific disasters uh you know are earthquakes and tsunamis going up or down is violence increasing or decreasing and what's interesting enough is i actually have done the research to know answers specifically to those questions violence globally is going down the world is getting the world has never been less violent than it is right now and we are in a consistent trend of decreasing violence even when you include the insanity happening in like russia and the ukraine or isis it doesn't matter on a global level violence is in steep decline huh earthquakes and tsunamis there's no significant statistical variation happening that is increasing earthquakes or tsunamis of course because tsunamis are caused by earthquakes and uh there's no sign that this is happening more often now this is what gets interesting to me though if you think about weather-based calamities drought hurricanes tornadoes snowstorms those are increasing and they are increasing because of climate change and i just thought like the irony here is man-made climate change and the associated drought and potential disruption to agriculture and those sorts of things could validate the eschatology of people who don't believe in climate change because they'll look at those things that are happening in the climate as signs that their belief system is correct which will encourage them to continue to deny global climate change that's insane yeah you know what i mean so like but so from a real data version now we'll talk about the science view of eschatology a little bit and i'll get way more comfortable with the program is the things the bible depicts as indicative of the end times which by the way like for example revelation was written in the context of an oppressive government in the roman empire and it was a group desperate to see it fall and if you look at the language used there it has sort of an anti-roman slant so you know i don't like to take those books and and pull them out of context but i think obviously science can inform us dramatically about the way things could play out on uh very very long time scales um and so since we're talking about eschatology maybe i'll take you through my science-based views on the way things could end okay first of all one i worry about some is actually climate change we'll probably end up doing an episode on this and talk about in greater detail but uh if you look even biblically we're set as stewards of the earth right from the beginning um you know people that use the bible to defend the idea that we can't affect the earth's environment well a literalist take on genesis says we ate from one tree and changed everything so somehow god no matter what your your view on the scriptures you have to say that it looks like god gave us the ability to make dramatic changes to our environment right and so a poor caring for our natural habitat our atmosphere those things could actually eventually over a couple hundred years 500 years become a real threat to human civilization that's that's that's certainly a possibility um now look a little further out let's say we we work it out we don't we don't cause the kind of calamity or it happens gradually enough that we're able to adapt because let's be honest the climate does change the planet will warm eventually the question is how quickly right um because we're in an ice age and sooner or later we're going to be out of this ice age anytime you have polar ice caps you're in an ice age so um if we if we push the clock out a little further uh eventually the sun swells to a red giant and consumes the earth's orbit so that's a few billion years is a long time but that's that's pretty well understood science eventually that red giant will its core will turn into iron and then it'll turn into a white dwarf and as doing so just spread out a really really massive stellar explosion won't be a supernova our sun's too small but it'll bake a lot of the solar system so that'd be a bad scene but there's some ways that you know maybe we don't have to worry about that but i would say that today in physics for our observable universe the understanding of eschatology is eventually everything falls to what we call entropic heat death the universe's laws of thermodynamics will eventually produce a even distribution of matter and energy at a constant temperature with no more change that's what physics predicts now people hear that and they say well gosh that's dumb because all you have to do is look at the earth and plants are growing and you scientists say that things are evolving so obviously entropy doesn't count it's just an interesting observation i'll give you that but of course the earth is not a closed system it is powered by a dying sun all of our increases in complexity here are funded by the conversion of matter into energy happening through nuclear fusion and our closest star so would that be the end well it depends on what model of cosmology you look at we have some problems understanding why the laws of physics exist as they exist and we have some difficulty accounting for how quantum phenomena occur and so there are multiple cosmological models that try to explain those difficulties none of them so far have experimental evidence and some of them we aren't even sure how we could even conceivably with increased technology or understanding the sciences ever measure but if you look at any of these models uh our observable universe is only part of a larger system a total universe one of them looks at universes as being kind of bubbles in a soup of cosmic inflation that never stopped after the big bang that the infinite universe is always infinitely expanding sometimes smaller pockets of that infinite universe that are still spatially infinite begin to expand at a speed slower than light speed at which point you get laws of physics right so these universes will all be different but you would always have new universes another one is called comes from super string theory and it's called brain theory b-r-a-n-e theory and that's the idea that um because there are extra dimensions of space-time and string theory that like when a universe approaches heat death um it sags because you have universes stacked on top of each other centimeters apart and it taps another universe at which point you get energy released into both universes you get two new big bangs and if that's the case there's never an end even in classical single universe inflation there's a question of eventually does the expansion of the universe stop and does gravity pull everything back to a singularity and if that's the case you have what we call a temporal multiverse not a spatial multiverse and think about how many people fall asleep by now but then if that's the case you constantly reroll the dice to the universe and there's no entropy heat death and there is no eschatology because there is no end but each time you do this you may or may not get a universe with life so that's physics well if we got a little more still scientific but a little more interesting a little more speculative there's this thing called the fermi paradox and the fermi paradox basically says there's a lot of stars and there's a lot of planets around those stars why aren't there aliens all over the night sky right because you look at the number of planets in the milky way alone and it seems probable in a very old universe a biogenesis is it a chance to happen pretty frequently why is there no life why haven't we heard from aliens yet there's a few solutions to the fermi paradox one is that um although evolution probably happens everywhere the jump from single cell life to multi-cell life is probably really rare another is that the jump to an intelligent species civilization and culture and technology is really rare uh that could be really helpful for us and we're working to figure out how likely that is right now that's why curiosity is on mars if we figure out that there's other life in this solar system on mars or one of the moons of our gas giants or whatever that's going to affect the math of how much life there should be out there so in that idea we're the first species that's space faring so we're special that's why nobody else is out there another idea is well we haven't been looking that long but if you look at the mathematical models there if interplanetary travel is possible um and if depending on how long it takes life to evolve uh on average into intelligent life forms some species by now should have colonized this whole galaxy but they haven't and that introduces an idea called the great filter and the great filter is the idea that um there is something inate to when life organizes and gains technology that in doing so they create their own demise inevitably some scientists believe that we've already done it it's called nuclear weapons so if you consider a statistical probability of nuclear war in a given year it's very low but low probabilities over time become high probabilities for example in any given year it's not very likely that the earth will be struck by an asteroid but over 100 million year timelines it's certain so there's this possibility that once we invent nuclear weapons nuclear annihilation is inevitable that's kind of scary uh it's not even the scariest idea though that it could be some unforeseen thing for example what if nanotechnology is possible what if we can make robots so small they can self-assemble if nanotechnology can be built terrorists won because all you have to build is like a thousand self-replicating robots that make more robots out of carbon at which point all you would need is one teracell to make it and it'll eat everything on the planet there's no way to stop it and that's not even people don't know what grey goo is uh well it's it's it's some do machines made people that are still listening we may have lost the art crowd but the science crowd is really riled up right now um it's it's machines that are are microchip sized they can do things you can imagine if like if you're that small you could move around molecules the way a forklift moves packages that's a pretty good analogy i just came up with that um the one that keeps me up at night and keeps guys like elon musk or stephen hawking up at night is super intelligent artificial intelligence oh yes and uh this is the idea that intelligence so far has been a natural phenomenon and because it's a natural phenomenon its development is very very slow okay if you look back at earth's uh bio history animals existed a long time without being very smart once one species got smart the rate at which things change on this planet exploded exponentially it's insane how quickly things changed when humans got smart and then learned to write things down and could pass knowledge generationally at high fidelity so what we found is when you introduce artificial selection into a system things get fast right dogs dogs dogs change all the time because instead of this this chaotic process happening with selection pressures humans go i want a puppy that fits in my purse and they make one so now we're making machines that think right now and you use them all the time if you google you're asking an artificial intelligence to do work for you and google i mean come on we're used to it now but a little hint i saw a one of the founders of google at a trade show before google was google and he talked about his idea and all the nerds kind of laughed him out of the conference right because we were like you could never have enough computers to scan the whole internet and he's like uh yeah i can and i'm a lot more money than all you um but everywhere we look uh think about chess computers went from being ridiculous opponents to now the good computers are unbeatable right now but that's just chess well ibm's watson did great playing jeopardy a natural language game and that same algorithm now is starting to out diagnose human doctors when evaluating medical conditions but those are all specific contexts so those what we call a purpose-built artificial intelligence kind of the holy grail of ai is a general intelligence uh something that can make decisions and do things on its own and can even at that point begin to modify itself we already produce math that is self-programming to some degree because we have what we call genetic algorithms algorithms that live or die based on their success on a criteria that we seed with mutations and some of those work on the stock market and uh occasionally cause market crashes right because we have these super computers doing high-speed trading but the idea is if an ai can write its own code and ever become self-aware it will go from like monkey smart to kid smart to the same difference between us and it as we are to ants in hours or days because computers tick tick tick tick tick they run so fast right uh now how feasible is this and what would they do so there's one thing that bugs me is people think like an ai is gonna be like terminator is gonna wipe us all out we're aggressive because we have a limbic system that's why we're aggressive computers do not have a limbic system and i assume we would not put a limbic system into a machine that would be a terrible plan um but the the fear that very smart people have is that we create our demise on accident okay so let's look at a couple possible outcomes so the first idea is well we'd be in control so we take our potentially superintellig intelligent machine we put it in a box and then we feed it questions and we get answers so you can imagine if we somehow created this super intelligent machine and we said how do we fix climate change and we fed it in on like a written card and all it has is a printer and it prints out answers well if you were locked in a bedroom and your four-year-old was on the other side of the door how hard would it be for you to answer questions in a way that manipulated your four-year-old into letting you out of the room it'd be pretty easy you're a lot smarter than a four-year-old right so it would be really easy for a computer to seed its own escape from the situation and take control because we'd be like ants in intelligent level um but then why would the computer care like computer is going to try to do whatever directive we give it so if you tell a super intelligent ai your goal is to maximize human happiness you can imagine that computer might uh build a robot army to subjugate us put cranial caps on all of us and stimulate our pleasure centers and keep us in a state of uh happy coma maybe that's awesome though an unthinking just awesome love forever and harvesting our dna to make more humans and ensure the survival maybe that's maybe that's the renewal of all things that's heaven that's what's forecast and that's the seven headed beasts and stuff maybe you know maybe they give us multiple brains for happiness maybe the revelation guy just saw it you know he just looked forward he's like look at that there's a sword coming out of that guy's mouth and like literally is like a all right total aside because that's an absurd notion but you got me interested how would a first century jew living in rome describe mars curiosity if they saw it what they think that was on this red terrain like with a big robot head and eyes and this drill digging into the ground and the beast came out of the sea [Laughter] that's absurd and the moon turned to blood so that's it we just figured it out they saw it they saw ai take over all right sorry to interrupt you guys all right so there's a great example from like my favorite blog which is wait but why uh to really spell the scenario out how it could play out so let's suppose we continue to get better at artificial intelligence programming and uh google and facebook and apple sign a treaty that says if you're making an ai you can't connect it to the internet for obvious reasons and because they're really smart the world government signed it as well and everyone agrees ai's don't connect to the internet and this one team realizes the startup company that handwritten cards get open more often than machine printed cards and uh even if you print like a font on the letter the fact that there was no pin stroke people because human brains are great pattern recognition machines they don't open the envelopes so they make a robot an artificial intelligent robot whose job is to make great handwritten cards and it's job it's got a camera and a robotic arm it looks at the way people write things and then uses that to develop better and better handwriting that's his only job and its directive that they program into this machine is make the best handwritten cards you possibly can and it just is constantly doing this and they get a little pressed because their algorithms are so good and this learning is so good that this thing gets about to the conversational level of a four-year-old and they like make the cover of magazines and you know buzzfeed does memes about them it's a really exciting thing uh and then they're in the lab one night and they see on a tech blog another company has a handwriting robot and it's actually making better cards than theirs and they're about to go to round two funding in their vc so they're venture capital they're trying to raise money and this could like steal their thunder and about that time their little ai robot says i could write way better if i had more samples could i connect to the internet for an hour and it's really simplistic terms i say okay that's fine uh we don't want to lose our funding so what we're going to do is we're going to put a machine here we're going to monitor everything the ai does so we can pull the plug at any moment if it does anything nefarious and great so they connected to the internet and all it does is go to google images and search handwritten notes and just analyze pictures for an hour and downloads a ton of pictures and then disconnects itself it's really well behaved and nothing happens except its handwriting gets better and they get their funding three weeks later one of the lab techs gets a cough and two days later every human on the planet is dead because the ai when it got intelligent enough as a four-year-old realized humans were a threat to its mission that if they realized it was getting smarter to fill its mission they would unplug it and they were also convenient sources of carbon so it connected to the internet outsmarted it the people monitoring it and started up a nano bot fabrication facility and engineered robots that would kill all humans but never tipped its hand until it was ready at which point it converts all of the plants and trees and animals on the planet into robotic arms and stacks of paper where it practices its handwriting and it realizes that it's running out of resources on the planet so it begins to build rocket ships and launching them across the solar system to get more materials and asteroids the next thing you know mars and venus and mercury and all these planets are nothing but oceans of robotic arms practicing their handwriting the next thing you know it runs out of materials in the solar system and because robots don't age launches probes for the nearest stars where it will what convert everything into robots making handwritten cards and that story sounds ridiculous but it's such a good illustration right it's such a good illustration of the potential unforeseen circumstances of an intelligence we create that is both much much much smarter than us and completely alien in its motivations yeah that's crazy that's crazy stuff we would call that non-biblical eschatology or maybe it's literal it may be maybe that's what happened it was a warning sign oh man but so here's my thing obviously i don't know what happens i don't know how things end i do let the sciences inform me about what's probable or possible i roll with that so as much as that sounds absurd i am a computer guy more than anything and so as much as i can be a part of those discussions and aware of those discussions and how people be aware of the ethical implications of science this is where we get back to science art and faith in this program to me i think it's important that people of faith let their faith inform these kinds of decisions what are we willing to trade in convenience and in terms for potential risks does faith have a role in guiding the hand of science and and and being involved in ethical discussions if we wall ourselves off and just say well we're just waiting for the fire escape we're not involved in very important issues and topics if we use our eschatology to deny things like climate change we can't be a force for the renewal of the world so for me the science tells me what is and what is probable in the future my faith tells me what to hope for and what to work for so it's a faith issue for me to eat less meat it's a faith issue for me to be aware of the danger potential dangers of ai or nanotechnology even though they're informed by science for me they are issues of faith well here's what's interesting about christian eschatology because where we as human beings we've been so self-centric always you know our first scientific models of earth to put us right at the middle of every in the whole universe we're the middle of course we thought oh we're not the middle well at least you know our sun must be the middle oh no i guess it's not the middle you know it's like we're not even in the middle of our own galaxy so i think our modern scientific understandings should influence our view of eschatology if we're talking about the renewal of all things you you have to realize earth is a dot it's the pale blue dot it's a speck of of dust in this vast potentially multiverse that we uh are a part of and so even if that's what happens you know like ai takes over and kills all humans to me i think the the christian eschatology should continually like bring us out to bigger views of both ourselves and of humanity and all things being connected and all things together because we are not just this matter right we're not just these protons and neutrons and all this stuff there is something about us that is we're stories right we exist in or you know whether those stories are still made up of proton neutron whatever i don't know but um the point is it's not so simple as i'm this body and then i die and it's gone there's a lot more mystery and a lot more nuance to it than that i think and there's this spirit element to us there's a story element of how we relate to other people and what we how we as humanity lift so if there is some uh if god is real you know if god has love for us and we matter to god maybe that story that we are that collection of stories those series of loops are held within god somehow you know that even if we do die this heat death if ai takes over whatever crunches back together and a new universe emerges who know how do we know we don't know what happens but you know what after that if our stories are still contained within god if that's where it's all leading i still find value in the christian hope i guess is what i'm saying even if yes even if it's not an immediate escape even if you know like if if the earth is going to die or whatever and and it's not going to have some grand restoration before that happens the story is larger than earth my skeptical friends say so what if you're wrong about jesus let go so what if i'm wrong about jesus right the things i believe about jesus change my life in ways that help me and help me be a positive agent in the world and empiricists free thinkers believe eventually it's curtains for this planet but they don't find hopelessness in that and so i acknowledge the possibility even the likelihood that eventually it's curtains for this planet but that doesn't make this moment futile and it it doesn't make my hope for god's continuing work of salvation futile because it changes this moment [Music] well obviously this is a very open discussion so we would love to hear your thoughts on eschatology come join us on facebook.com solidus tweet us at the liturgists or you can even comment on the episode directly on the liturgist.com podcast where i've actually been making an effort to show up and respond to your comments lately guys thank you for listening to the program if you want to help other people discover conversations about science art and faith the best thing you can do number one most helpful thing is to rate the show on itunes it makes a huge difference in how many people discover the program thanks to all you people who have our show is produced by joel marchand who uh we appreciate his great work uh thanks for hanging out with us i'm science mike i'm michael gunger talk to you guys later you