Episode 39 - Finding God in the Waves

[transcript automatically generated - cleanup in progress]

[Music] can i sit here in church like an imposter she asks am i an imposter i take a moment to collect myself her honesty and vulnerability are too familiar i too have sat in a room full of christians and admitted i don't believe in christ or in any god at all i tell her a story about a man walking along the shore of a lake on his way he runs into two fishermen they're busy working but he tells them that he'll show them how to bring in people instead of fish if they come with him the two fishermen drop their nets and follow the man i tell her one of those fishermen was simon who was also called peter and that he is one of the founders of the church with a big sea when peter dropped his nets and followed the man jesus he didn't know anything about the messiah being a sacrificial lamb or about crucifixion or resurrection he just heard the man's story and believed it enough to follow him the gospels are a collection of stories about peter and the other 11 disciples constantly doubting believing the wrong thing or entirely missing the point about what jesus was saying so do i think it's okay not to know what you believe and still be a part of the church heck yeah in fact i think that's exactly what following jesus is about welcome to the liturgist podcast everybody today is a very special episode because our beloved friend and my co-host science mike is now a published author his book finding god in the waves was just released and in this episode we are going to get behind the scenes of this book and into that vast incomprehensible mystery that is science mike's brain so mike what was it three years ago we're at the rob bell party and uh i didn't believe anything and you were drunk apparently you're kind of oh you did you had a good game face on you barely believed anything seemed like i had a formalized metaphysic and uh you were working for an ad agency the conversation that we struck up uh began with the uh illusory metaphysical constructs that that people conjure up in their brains when they are at one of our shows and they are lifting their hands in the air and working themselves into a emotional frenzy and i enjoyed that conversation very much and we became fast friends and now here here we are three and a half years later and we have a podcast together and a thing called the liturgists and now you're a published author that wrote a book called finding god in the waves yeah today i'm a published author today through the bizarre time shifting capacity of the internet it's not today but it's today it's relativity brought to life yes and even if they listen past the day that you still will be a published author oh man always always and forever how do you feel oh man i terrified i didn't no one told me about the fear i'm really i'm at that phase where i've done everything like i've poured my life into a project a book it's like all my most profound thinking and all my deepest thinking on a particular topic created with the goal of helping people it's done i can't write anymore i can't change any of it and all the work to try to tell people about it has already been set in motion and done and all i can do now is see how people respond will anybody like it will anybody buy it will anyone be helped by it right now it's all just question marks and i did not expect the amount of vulnerability that comes with that i've never in my life created something that people could go to a store and buy or not i've done podcasts i've done these talks but i've never had like dead trees of my thoughts shipped across the country i mean it's really scary and it's not scary in an ego way i'm happy with the book but what will happen will this book connect to people that i have dreamed and poured into for it to do so and i don't know and the response is just fear i actually i'm really curious like what was your experience like right before your first record came out yeah i'm trying to remember i'm sure yeah that's it's it's been a while but that yeah there's a jittery like how are people gonna take this and i'm sure some i mean i'm sure there was some self-doubt in there and some uh i mean i mean it's like mixed with excitement i'm sure you know as we know self-doubt is a somewhat alien emotion for me so the experiencing in the context of the book has really surprised me i mean if yeah it feels a little bit like uh for you know i i made it to my wedding night as a virgin as that good evangelical christian and it feels a little you know like i'm gonna be seen in everything i am tonight and uh i hope it's okay i hope she digs it oh man yeah book is like that but with your like soul soul yeah and hopefully thousands of people it's so weird well it's um it's a beautiful book phenomenal job i wish i could tell you that everybody's going to love it there's a lot of people that are going to think you're the devil um so zaxiums man and there's a lot of people that are going to get a lot of hope there's going to be a lot more people that get a lot of hope uh than people that hate it i think but the you know the people that hate it might have a louder voice at times are the ones that are actually being helped are in circumstances that often they probably couldn't talk about it very much they don't feel safe to tell people how much the book is meaning to them so i hope you do find ways of savoring the people that are bold enough to talk about it um well i've thought a little bit about that because it's pretty easy to check out the liturgies podcast or ask science mike on the dl nobody knows you're listening you could just be listening to the latest praise and worship record right before staff meeting because it's so personal and so ethereal but for people who actually get this book a friend of mine recently told me a story about getting the book love wins and hiding it from all their friends because they were so terrified of being found out that they were both wins and uh you know working for a para church organization i think it's safe to say that there's that element of uh pushing certain orthodoxies in my book as there wasn't love wins maybe even even yeah i was just gonna say like rob took an entire book to like pose the question what if there's no hell and then you just kind of wipe it away like in a paragraph yeah that's just like a starting assumption i remember stepping out on my back balcony and as mike talk to me about the ever expansive nature of the universe [Music] and i remember as he shared with us the stars in the solar system this feeling this sense that he was now grounded and rooted and then mike just started talking about his favorite subject the human brain he shared with us about the role the frontal lobe the amygdala the thalamus as he talked it was fascinating the way he could draw all of us into this conversation and that's where i had this moment within me of like i don't know if i buy this and so i just let it out i said i don't know if i believe this and i remember him just backing up slowly calmly working me through his argument again and what what blew my mind was the way he could quote not only from the top neuroscience research and what it was showing us but then he could simply tell me two practical popular works on the human brain i was so captivated and that's when he started sharing his journey of faith and doubt from atheism to being a believer and i remember that in that living room in my living room michael gongor started opening up about his own journey of faith and doubting and back and forth michael gungor and mike began to open up and dialogue with one another and that's when that's when mike mccarth became science mike because in that moment he shared with us his incredible axioms of faith it was incredible it was inspiring and in that one moment there was laughter and there were questions and faith and doubt seemed to dance with one another there was stargazing and adult beverages early in the 20th century albert einstein demonstrated that matter and energy are made of the same basic stuff and that not only is everything that is solid in the universe made up of mostly empty space but that what actual little mass there is only exists because some particles interact with a universal invisible field called the higgs field the reason you and i exist is that most of our bodies particles create some kind of quantum drag against an invisible higgs field that makes them slow down from light speed and gain mass in the process that's at least as weird as anything in genesis cosmology describes a force that created us and then transformed itself into a system of forces and energy that continue to sustain the universe this sounds at least a little like what paul told the people of athens in him we live and move and have our very being so excellent job at the craft of writing a book this is your first book and it's an impressive one i mean i don't think anybody would have been terribly surprised to get a thousand page treatise on the neurology of um from you that which is how it started yeah that you know people needed a phd to understand but instead you wrote an extremely accessible like 250 page story driven it's a narrative about your experience and you did a phenomenal job with the writing it's i mean it's easy to understand um yet it's still incredibly deep and rich in content uh so first first of all congratulations and well done um but as a person who could have written this book any number of ways why did you choose to write this book like this why an accessible narrative driven book for you who could obviously write more academically or whatever it started as an encyclopedia like my answer to every issue at the intersection of science and faith and doubt so the first my first take at that at making an outline was a 39 page outline that literally didn't explain one thing it was a list of topics organized into sections and uh i was actually going to release the whole thing as a as a ebook for free and i sent sent the outline to my friend rob bell who said that's an outline and he was so gracious and he said you know this is this is amazing and the 12 people who it would be life-changing for would really appreciate it but if it's 39 pages as basically a table of contents it's a set of encyclopedias and if you really want to help people they have to start by feeling known and they have to feel like you understand their experiences and the way they do that is they hear your amazing story and i said but rob like i've told my story on the pete holmes podcast everyone has heard it yeah it does i'm an idiot and rob was like pete's got a big show but not everyone has heard your story and so he said you know i think you should uh keep working and i would try to figure out more like what is the one thing what's the spine of the book and then what topics fit in that one spine and then save the other ones for later which was great advice because now i have like 12 books outlined but i took those things and then i couldn't figure out like how to make them fit another friend was like don't make any of them fit just tell your story and so then i started studying the science of the neuroscience of how brains respond to story and so then i took my story as kind of a narrative device that created solidarity and then carried an information payload of a science friendly way of approaching the christian imagination experiences and so i i sort of set out with the book as an engineering project which was designed to help people who felt at conflict with their desire to know god make peace with it it actually means a lot like when people say it's well written because i've never worked as hard on anything as i did on developing an accessible writing voice because i didn't want anyone to pick up the book and feel like they couldn't follow it but i also didn't want people who were really into science or had gone deeper into philosophy to feel like the book was shallow so the the hardest thing was working with uh with my editors and my publisher and creating that balance of a book that's easy to pick up and feels conversational but actually really deeply explores you know what do we mean by the word god what happens in our brains in physics when we talk about that concept how does prayer affect us physiologically and emotionally what does the bible mean today all these you know questions could be books in themselves but i feel so bad because people like encounter my work right now and they listen to the liturgist podcast or ask science mike or read some blog posts or google and there's all this stuff out there but you can't find it all in one place and by necessity a podcast is limited length and a blog post is limited in length so invariably even if they find all the pieces i have out there related to their question it doesn't go deep enough to satisfy and that's like like why i did a book like a book book like you go to a store and and spent hours with this thing was i wanted to give comprehensive satisfying answers to all these various things the exact road i struggled to go down myself after i became an atheist [Music] i remember i'd just gotten back in town and i'd been hanging out with mike for several days in denver when i got back in town my wife had left our marriage had dissolved and the deal was that when i went on this trip she would pack up and move out and i got home and no one was home and i walked in and i saw a sink full of dishes and i thought i'm gonna clean up the kitchen and do the dishes because i know that'll make her happy when she gets back and then it hit me that she was not coming back [Music] i just was overwhelmed with the fact that my marriage was over and i remember calling mike and i remember spending the next 20 to 25 minutes just bawling and mike just kept saying over and over again this is totally normal this is totally okay just let yourself cry and i know mike's a busy man but he didn't mind staying on the phone with me for 25 minutes while i collected myself and pulled myself together so that i could basically have some semblance of it's okay and that's what he kept telling me it's okay just let yourself cry it's okay that's the kind of guy mike is he'll just let you fall apart and then he'll be there when it's time to put it back together [Music] so for those of you that are not familiar with kind of the main story that we keep alluding to and that this book is about you could go back to lost and found the liturgist episodes that we recorded part one and two that kind of detail this story in in an audio format and of course he gets things in the into things in the book that we weren't able to get into on the podcast but for those of you that would like a version you know an audio uh edition of the story you can go back and listen to like to that aside from mike you know you have an audio book as well oh yeah yeah that almost died recording yeah any newcomers to the show mike was a southern baptist became an atheist and then had this crazy mystical experience on the beach where he felt god spoke to him and spent a lot of time trying to make sense of it when god speaks to you as an atheist that's a bizarre experience um so this story has spread i mean it's around a lot on the internet it's around you know mike has told it a lot live on the podcast i've heard it a bunch of times but it's still always tremendously inspiring and feels like an important story for our time it's just like there's so much animosity between religion and science in the world and mike who is somebody who has dived wholeheartedly into both worlds and who's not only well read within the sciences but is actually very well read um and thought through philosophically and with religion having been such an important part of his life for so long and i find it fascinating that you mike as a nine enneagram a peacemaker it's funny that you find yourself at this strange intersection of science and faith uh how much do you how much do you think your personality uh plays into your theology and where where you've come this far on the journey in trying to make peace with worlds that are so often against one another i mean that's kind of what made me take the enneagram seriously is when i realized i was a peacemaker and every single thing that i find compelling and that i feel called to address involves making peace between camps at war everything now sometimes that's like two camps within one person right you'll notice the the the questions i answer on athletes mike for example are about helping make a person make peace within themselves or with their family or with their community but it's always peace driven the kind of racial justice and lgbtq issues that i'm drawn toward are all about making peace between majority groups and marginalized groups and then this sort of sign of our times this tension between faith especially more conservative religion and the school of thought exhibited by the sciences feels most uh close to what i call a calling or a mission in life because it's a conversation which is completely dominated by the least peace seeking personalities involved in the discussion the loudest voices on the science side are these like really really intense anti-theists who like are not only think there's no god but think it's like immoral or dangerous for people to believe there is a god and on the other side on the faith side what you see the most in the media what you see in the most on internet comments are people who completely reject basics like evolution and cosmology so that they can read genesis in a really reductionist literalistic way and what what what i see is uh both of those groups are pretty content in their antipathy for each other and meanwhile this mass of this majority of people is kind of caught in the crossfire and miserable and doesn't feel comfortable like planting a flag in either of those camps and i think this is why like no religious affiliation is the fastest growing religion in america but also atheism isn't growing that significantly is people are saying if the choice is this or this i'm just going to kind of reject both and find my own way or uncomfortably parse the two and create my own ethic and what i found as i sat down to write this book is not a lot of people have both been a true genuine conservative fundamentalist and a completely materialistic atheist and able to understand those world views and kind of take them on and off at will and that uh gives you an ability if you have a peacemaker's personality to act as a translator and hopefully provide some insights for people about what the other group is up to and the ways in which there's actually many more commonalities than they would expect but it's completely completely driven by that that peacemaker personality which itself is born from my childhood right i mean that talk about that in the book is uh all the bullying and um you know trying to keep people calm so that i could get through the day so i imagine some of your critics might raise the question to you like does that you know come on everybody just get a long mentality um lead you to such a subjective view of an engagement with reality that it actually skews or limits the message that you're saying you know like are you concerned that your subjective view and you trying to build the bridges actually some waters down anything or or makes you steer away from the truth is it does it skew your view of reality too much are you concerned about that at all i should be i think historically in my life i have had a real tendency to water down anything i was saying to make the people i was present with feel most comfortable even at the expense of communicating honestly or truthfully um i think in my teens early 20s i was almost a pathological liar but less about presenting the best version of myself and more about making who i was with feel comfortable but the end result is the same it's broken relationships it's missed opportunities dishonesty has consequences and i think those experiences have made me wary of the cost of needless compromise so i'm i i'm really careful to make sure that any statement i make is empirically grounded that i can cite evidence to support that claim and i mean that not just in like a scientific worldview way but even about like things that have happened in my life i mean people that know me know that one of my favorite phrases is i don't know or i don't remember i don't make significant efforts to even conjecture on things that i have less certainty about so it's less about going too far in terms of what i believe and more about using language that makes people feel comfortable and known and honored so it's one thing to say i understand your position and it's another thing to say i agree with it and i can i can get to i understand your position on almost any topic i can get to i agree with your position relatively rarely but i don't worry about trying to find common agreement as a point of affinity i don't even think in my audience people that listen to me many of them disagree with me on many many many significant issues but they're a part of that conversation because they share that value of trust and respect and genuine listening for the sake of learning from another's perspective and the book is set in that tone my book is not as you know my claim of you know here's what god says or here's what the bible says it's not a set of absolute interpretations i'm not claiming to be a prophet i'm not claiming even to be a scholar what i do is share things i've learned from my experience under the complete assumption i could be wrong about any or all of them where i speak to science i'm careful to stick to well-accepted well-documented scientific theories and hypotheses those have been cited i've asked people who are scientists who i trust to review those claims and make sure i didn't go out of bounds anywhere so i worked exceptionally hard at being well grounded on the scientific points but then on the points of faith yeah absolutely in a lot of ways i depart from the sort of evangelical orthodoxy i grew up with that but i i also immediately disclose that i don't try to you know sell people uh a false bill of goods that they're going to be able to read this book and get back to their baptist faith but this is a book about if you're kind of stuck in nowhere land if you feel like you don't belong anywhere i don't feel like i belong with skeptics completely i don't i have this longing for god that feels superstitious or silly but won't go away i don't believe in god but i do like to pray what's that about that's really who this book is for and it's it's less about making spiritual truth claims than it is helping people work through and process their spiritual experiences uh and finding their own journey in their own way there's no end zone i'm trying to drive people toward with the book i'm just trying to give them the tools to relate to god in a way that is successful for them that said i do absolutely take on some theological ideas that i think are troubling and i explain why like substitutionary atonement theory that's probably the strongest takedown in the whole book yeah which i enjoyed very much some people will really not enjoy that they will not but they need to face it they need to face what what the bald reality behind the uh flowery words that people use is so a couple years ago partway through my deconstruction i i found myself in an awkward place as a pastor at a church that i grew up in i've been there for 28 years 11 of those years on staff i felt trapped by people's expectations of me and my responsibilities to them because i was growing and i was changing and evolving and it put me in a spot where i had to choose between one of two betrayals either to betray myself and my growth or betray the people and their expectations i knew i had to go i just couldn't seem to let go of it so i gave mike a call he asked me this question he said would it be healthy for you if you stayed i said no he said then how could it be healthy for them with those two questions he dismantled my story of self-importance and laid waste to my pastoral god complex [Music] hey everybody just wanted to take a quick second and thank those of you who make this show possible through your support on patreon in fact just so you know mike and i don't consider ourselves the liturgists liturgy means the work of the people and mike and i are just a couple of the liturgists cooperating to make this work and these conversations happen we consider those of you who help us in that process you're part of this thing you are the liturgists in our minds and for those of you that don't know what patreon is it's a site that helps artistic endeavors that are often given away to people for free things like podcasts uh it helps those things happen and you may notice that we've always tried to keep this show as free from ads as possible because we want your listening experience to be as focused as possible but at the same time creating a podcast like this takes a lot of time takes a lot of resources to produce and uh like i said this show is free so it's entirely upon the generosity of our patrons that this show is able to happen and do what it does and help the hundreds of thousands of people around the world the people who feel spiritually homeless and frustrated who are finding a place to belong and feel safe so thank you for what all of you are doing to make that happen if you are interested in becoming one of these kind souls who helped the work happen you can go to the liturgists.com podcast and there'll be a link there on the right hand side of the page it says patreon you just click that and anything helps even a dollar a month and all the patrons get little perks like access to the liturgists conversations a second podcast that mike and i host that's sort of a strip back zero production zero editing just raw conversation we release that podcast on the off weeks of this podcast and actually a lot of people kind of like that show just as much some even like it better than this one which is funny because it's a lot less work but you can enjoy that if you're a patron so again if you want to help the liturgist family clean the table off after dinner make this show possible we'd be ever so grateful again you can just go to the liturgists.com podcast and click the link on the right side of the page thanks so much everybody 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 and 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 dot com slash liturgists if you've ever been hurt by a church you'll have to grieve the loss to be healthy the deeper the wound the more time you'll need sometimes sorting out your emotions and reactions will feel like sorting through a restaurant's dumpster without gloves on but all those feelings have to come up the neurological associations with that trauma must be exposed to be healed the more painful a story is to tell the more we need to tell it jesus spoke a lot about the importance of forgiveness a crucial teaching but one that has sometimes been used by religious folk to dismiss people's suffering or deny their own but the science of processing pain grief and trauma is clear when people attempt to shortcut or disavow the sorrow of emotional wounds instead of expressing it they might unconsciously harbor hostility or helplessness instead of forgiveness they may experience more psychological harm experiments show that our intellectual emotional and even physical performance can be affected by emotions denied breathing room i find it fascinating that as a someone who's a peacemaker you're trying to br bring bridges between these two worlds or however many worlds that fight against each other and that's what you know we do a lot what this podcast is about trying to bridge science art and faith and find places of discussion there but i find it fascinating that you for someone who's longing for peace so much and who is so uncomfortable when different people are warring you kind of the role of a peacemaker is somewhat like to take some of the brunt of that yourself which is a weird thing like you hate dissonance so much that you take it into yourself rather than having other people experience it so for you're going to get shit from the conservatives you're going to get shit from the atheists and you know as you have in the past i'm sure this book is just going to amp it up a little bit but like you're not pure enough with your language from the scientific community while you're talking about these god things you're just you know eliciting superstition and these these backwards people and then for a lot of christians you'd be like you're just compromising what the bible says and what god is taught just because you're you know trying to be scientific and whatever so it's like the least peaceful thing for you to be in the place it'd be it'd have been much more peaceful for you just to shut up and be a good southern baptist and not talk about lgbtq issues or or just to switch sides entirely and just be an outspoken atheist but to embrace these two different polarities as a bridge of peace i found it it's kind of ironic but it's also pretty beautiful i think so far it i think most people would be shocked if they if i gave them like my gmail credentials and just let them log in and read all the email that comes into my website i think people would be surprised given the quantity of mail how rare uh what i call nasty grams are that's just really uncommon and even if you like go through and look at um comments on science mike or the literature's podcast it's not that many there either there's these really thoughtful substantive conversations in many cases that have really significant disagreement i'm worried i'm getting a little preview of the future though in this election season contrary to my nature literally because i'm so afraid that donald trump could become president i've actually talked about politics in a specific way on facebook and twitter for the first time and some of those posts are saying they're you know reaching a quarter million or or you know 400 000 people and the tone of the discussion the way it's so different from what i'm used to at that scale really does actually grieve me a little bit and i there is this thing like uh now that the book comes out does does it increase the exposure enough that in some ways the the very beautiful nature of this community that i'm a part of changes that people more interested in just i'm right and you're wrong and i'm gonna spend a few characters telling you that i mean i'm okay if that happens i'm really comfortable having an opinion and i'm really comfortable with other people having a different opinion but some of the the vitriol of people who are almost terrified of some sort of um reconciliation or shared understanding it does it does affect me significantly and i and i know that because in those those times where i've had like two or three or four day little twitter firestorms or whatever that stuff really does affect me so i'm gonna have to be intentional probably with a discipline to have more reflection time more meditation time more recovery time to process all those things because it you what you said is so true that the as a peacemaker you just pull that stuff in and internalize it and process it because you want to figure out how to diffuse it and then there's the the resisting that impulse to defuse as well and that the but the the the good thing is it's where that book comes from like finding on the ways was literally born from me learning to you know create a harmony out of the dissonance i felt between my southern baptist upbringing and my conversion to atheism and then my experience with mysticism those are some pretty radically different set of assumptions experiences belief systems and this book only exists because i i found a way to have the three different tones of those energies to resonate together so how do you see in the general sort of cultural conversation that's happening between those worlds what do you hope that both sides could kind of get from what do you what are you adding to the conversation what do you hope that a skeptic or that a hardline atheist will hear um in your book and what do you hope that a conservative christian would hear like what do you how how are you adding to the conversation could you boil that down a little bit and and do you have any hopes of what the different sides would take away from it i mean what i want to do with this book is give people understanding and better language to communicate and so for the skeptic i hope i've presented a fantastic science-based argument that there are really good scientific reasons that people believe in god and that in in in many contexts that belief and that practice of faith is healthy and beneficial it serves psychological needs it serves sociological needs and positively impacts human behavior human bonding this and all this stuff is really outlined in the book that that faith is not some fool's errand also that there are more ideas about god than the dominant american depictions of god even inside of christianity but but certainly across all different religions so i hope that the atheist or the skeptic will come away with a deeper understanding that the word god is one of the most complicated and nuanced words in the english language and that there's a lot of science out there that really good peer-reviewed science that undermines some of the popular skeptical notions about religious faith so that's really what i hope the skeptical reader would take away in terms of the the more conventionally christian or or conservative christian reader i hope that they would take away from the book an understanding of the mind of an atheist that atheists are not evil people they're not sinful people they're not angry at god they don't believe in god there's nothing for them to be angry toward that they would understand that there are incredibly compelling reasons to make a claim like i don't believe in the christian god or i don't believe in any god at all and that would understand far from being some um frightening term that humanism is actually a redemptive movement that seeks to improve the conditions of human life its premise is not based on taking down religion but instead that the goal of humanism is to create human flourishing and in that way in my opinion humanism is remarkably like the intent of the gospels and so i would kind of hope that these two groups would understand each other in a way they never have before and also would have a better understanding of the merit of each other's arguments whether that succeeds or not we'll see i've only had a couple of atheists read the book and i've only had one conservative religious person read the book so far so whether it worked or not as a mystery but i sure tried hard at it who is in your mind primarily when you're writing this who's your kind of who are you hoping who are you really hoping this reaches i know you hope it reaches people from all over the spectrum but is there who's at the at the center of who you hope this book can reach it is not the atheist or the conservative christian although i know those people will read it the the the people i wrote it for are the ones who would email me saying i heard your story and i need help i feel lost and some of those people would call themselves atheists some of those people would call themselves christians some of those people would say i don't even know what to call myself anymore but they were in a state of personal crisis they felt at odds with themselves and with their communities and i would literally because i get so many of these emails i can't reply to even a small fraction of them but i read them all and i would take a different email each day and i would print it out and i would put it by my monitor and i would read that person's name as i wrote and i for that day i would write to that person because i understand exactly what it's like to feel like no one else is going through this that there's no one i can talk to to feel like if i were to talk to my friends and family they would reject me i get emails from people who live in in secular contexts who are embarrassed about this this new faith that they have as as often as i get emails from people who are pastors of conservative churches who say i i don't believe in god anymore and i have to go on the pulpit sunday morning or i lose my job i can't feed my kids and this book is written for those people in crisis those people who we call the spiritually homeless and frustrated so they are either in a spiritual community but they just don't feel like they belong there they don't feel safe and they don't feel understood or that frustration has gotten to a point that they're now just wandering through life alone with no sense of spiritual community and belonging and the the terrible irony of that condition is people in that state feel alone but the statistics and the demographics and the survey data tell us that this is a massive group of americans and in fact is the fastest growing type of faith in our society and no one is making resources no one is building bookstores no one is seeking to help people on this journey the way if you call yourself an atheist or a baptist or a catholic or a mormon or whatever label you use as soon as you grab that label there's this support network that's an academic support information support community support but these people this fastest growing faith if you can call it that in america share only one thing in common and that is that they all feel alone more than anything else that's why i wanted to write that book hey mike it's your friendly big bear jeb i'm very proud of you for all your accomplishments and i'm even more proud to call your friend love you buddy hey mike this is your baby sister just wanted to say congratulations on your very first book i love you man congrats hey mike this is jk hey mike it's hidden just gone to say a huge congratulations uh thank you for saying the hard things and for challenging us and teaching us and being a place of safety and comfort and thanks for being our friend we love you so much we're so proud i know that this book i just want to say having read it has already changed my life and i can't wait to send like 30 copies of this to a lot of other friends mike congratulations i'm so proud of you the book is amazing because your books my husband might come to christ and that's the truth so love you very much congrats hi science mike better known to me as michael this is your mom your mother and i and the entire family are so proud of the man that you've become i love you bunches you are the perfect seller i'm so proud of your contribution to the faith community through your continued discussion and contributions on faith and science and debunking the best that make the two incompatible we love you son so proud of you hi dad i'm so excited i have an author for a book is going to be great love you hi dad i'm so proud of you and glad that your book is finally out love you hey love we've come a long way since our conversation on the love seat i had no idea what our lives would be like in the four years that has followed but god knew and he had a plan all along i'm so grateful to be your partner on this journey called life it seems like it took forever to get here but launch day is finally here and i know this labor of love will be read by many enjoy this moment i love you and i'm so proud of you [Music] we simplistically teach a single story in our history classrooms of brave rebels who left cultures of tyranny and heroically crossed the atlantic to found a nation built on freedom and justice when we speak of our national sins such as the genocide committed against native americans or the brutal long-term economic extraction of wealth from black bodies via slavery and segregation we seem to dismiss these troubling matters as things that happen in the remote past but have been solved today we often tell ourselves the easy story not the messy multi-party conversation required to view our natural history in its true light complex contradictory sometimes cruel and never quite resolved is it any wonder then that we tend to read the bible this way [Music] so after having told this story so many times and now written about it and rewritten and rewritten i know i was we would chat while you were while you were writing the book and just the amount of times you rewrote is astounding but it's i've written a book i understand it it's just like anybody that's writing a book i i like there's a we have a friend here in town that was she just finished her first draft of her of her first book and she's like she thinks she's almost done she's like i'm finished i did the first draft it's all i mean i just gotta do some edits i'm like ah you haven't you have not begun like you're just starting um but anyway after after engaging with this story so many times you know both live written form and well as the podcast and the other things what is your relationship with this story at this point are you weary of telling it do you ever find yourself doubting deconstructing it do you find um is it is there a sadness that you have at all with telling it you just love telling it or what's your relationship with the story at this point with the and with it becoming like an important story for so many people too it's us it's a source of faith for a lot of other people now too yeah it's not my story anymore yeah i offered it as a sacrifice to this community i believe in i've literally listened to a podcast several times and heard someone else explain my story to a third person as an analogy to help them process what was going on in their life when that happens like it's not my story i love the story i love the way it changed my life the reason i can continue to tell it authentically and with real emotion is because that moment on the beach was so powerful that every time i i sort of i dig into this story there's this resonance this emotional resonance of that moment that happens every time but frankly i've told the story so many times that like right before i go on stage it's more of a here we go we got to do this one more time yeah so there is a there's a weariness i definitely i have to dig deep every time i have to tell it on an interview or a podcast where there's no audience where i can't see the people who are engaging with the story for the first time i have to dig super super deep but one reason i want to put it in the book i want to do one more book tour with it and then kind of tell it less often yeah is because i have other things to say to the world on this matter of reconciling science and faith then the story it would be almost like i feel like if you were talking to a 40 year old man and every time you saw him he showed you his baby picture like it's beautiful it's a great baby picture but a lot more has happened in his life since then and so one of the things that excited me about putting this in a book form is then when people are like oh man i really i've heard you have this great story you'd be like i do and it's in a book called finding god in the waves in bookstores everywhere because i don't know if in with the frequency i tell this story two years from now will i still be able to tell an authentic telling or will i just be saying words on stage i don't know i suspect it would be closer to the latter and what this this book does is it takes that that moment of my life it makes it more ownable for other people and also kind of um it freezes it it makes it a time capsule i have to go back and listen to the story myself every so often to make sure i don't like drift and change the story with my memory and retelling yep and even that's pretty tedious i mean imagine like once a month putting on headphones and listening to yourself talk for 60 minutes on a story you know really well it's a weird dynamic i feel like in a lot of ways like that this most this most powerful moment of my life and it it it was and is and remains so if that becomes my like hit song there's worse things there's worse things than something that was genuinely moving and powerful and life-changing becoming closely associated with your identity i think now i'm saying that as a an inexperienced person uh i have friends who whose identities are closely associated with earlier works especially literary works and they're grateful but also to some degree want to shake it off but that's also why i want to i want to get book 2 out pretty fast as well i mean i think it's always going to be part of why your thoughts will be important to people because there aren't a lot of there aren't a lot of atheist backsliders out there you know that's true that have like come through religion and then gone through all the arguments and said you know what i find no validity to religion whatsoever i don't believe anymore and then go back uh it just doesn't happen very much so to the point that the first times i told the story atheist bloggers were like this guy is not for real because people don't own atheists that's not a thing yeah i think that story will always be part of the reason that how what's moses without the burning bush what's paul without the the road damascus you know i mean like that's it's a turning point in their story that becomes important to what they become sorry any critics i'm not saying mike is a biblical figure that's okay i make that comparison in the book but you know what i mean i mean there's moments of or buddha sitting under the tree or like whatever it is the story of uh the turning point the the light flicking on and so i i think that that story will always be with you and part of why people listen to you but of course it doesn't have to be the only thing you talk about hopefully because you get really sick of that um but i think there's also something i know for me personally and i've heard mystics talk about this and i've experienced this in my own life where high spiritual points um especially when you talk about them when you try to put words to them can actually become a stumbling block to your own spiritual growth in the future and i've experienced that where i i've remembering what it was and kind of longing for what that was can actually become like a trap and any any method any um practice any belief system any that that kind of gets stuck at one point and doesn't allow you to keep moving forward into more and more truth and more and more beauty and love and wonder like the the beautiful things the beautiful story that we've the beautiful stories that we've experienced can actually become traps for us have you felt any of that tension yet or do you what do you think about that idea uh it's a good idea it's got neurological validity like there's there's some really great uh brain scans that back up that idea for me that's been kind of the gift of surrendering this experience to other people yeah i have integrated it and kept moving and the amount of my communication bandwidth this several year old story takes means that subsequent experiences have remained mine some of the most intense moments i've had since in my meditative practice or in spiritual experiences have been things i haven't told anyone about and i'm pretty i'm pretty reticent too because what i have now of the beach is more a memory of telling the story of the beach than the beach itself um and what i have of those ladder experiences is just those experiences i've never written a word about them i've never talked about them on stage and i think that's essential because in 40 years if my faith is nothing but i saw god on this beach one time yeah i just don't know that's a very life-giving life-transforming thing you know what i mean it would be like if all i did was think about the time my wife lifted the veil off her face which was wow a great moment but so was lunch today now you're married which i've done in my past like my and i didn't really talk about this in the book because i didn't realize it until you asked that question but a lot of my baptist faith was about i would have some great experience and then spend two or three years trying to replicate that experience and i think that's been a good thing mysticism was my only road back to faith right without without the mystics i have no way to to do this that idea of surrendering of presence of accepting but also releasing has been really essential to my faith being a thing that continues that's a part of my life that changes as i do that grows as i do it's that it's that discipline and i talk about this a little bit in the book of not trying to hold on tightly to everything but instead just kind of surrendering and enjoying and that that posture a posture is my way of honoring those ways every day hi my name is sarah heath and i am lucky enough to be one of mike's uh really close friends so um i do want to tell a story that is a little embarrassing that i think you guys might enjoy so a couple valentine's a day uh ago our friend science mike decided that him and his beautiful wife had two perfect children and they didn't want to add to that flock and so he decided to go and have the surgery that some men do to prevent that from happening but unfortunately he had some swelling issues and so he had to carry around a bag of frozen peas now at some point you just have to laugh when you realize that you are walking around with your poor friend who has just had a vasectomy and it's valentine's day and it's like a beach and you're surrounded by couples enjoying valentine's day and there you are with science mike and a bag of frozen peas about three years ago mike and i decided to meet up in nashville and it was the very first night we got there we had dinner and then we decided to go out on the town for a couple hours and we came across this uh bar that was doing karaoke so we went in and um you know i had no plans on doing any karaoke and i don't know that anyone else in our group did either and uh but mike slipped away and i saw him go over and talk to the the guy running the karaoke system and then he came back and then a few songs after that he called mike mccarth to the stage in which mike proceeded to do sir mix-a-lot baby got back impeccably wealthy [Applause] i mean he nailed every note word for word rhyming and rapping with sir mix a lot and included a little bit of twerking you have not seen someone karaoke until you've seen mike mccarthy twerking while singing perfectly baby got back i think one odd thing about us and what we try to do with this podcast even though it's called the liturgists which is an old church word and from the beginning we've said you know we acknowledge our christian roots and leanings while wanting to remain open to people of any kind of heritage or thought or whatever but we don't care about trying like you you had mentioned before we're not trying to push you over uh some sort of line to say be a believer be a whatever why do you think that is how do you how would you articulate why why it is that you're not trying to use your science to justify a belief in god or trying to argue with atheists about a potential you know potential viable model of god try to get them to use the same language as you or try to believe it how is doubt a friend to faith because it seems like that's sort of our mo on the podcast is like embracing wherever you're at and being okay and just keep moving forward how did those two the interplay of doubt and faith and how do those happen in this book and in your own heart and head and why is it you're not evangelical with your beliefs about trying to get other people to think exactly the same way as you doubt was the boogeyman when i was baptist it was this dark and nefarious thing that crept up when you failed to be vigilant and attacked you and weakened you and maybe even killed you and it was to be avoided and combated and defeated through prayer and bible study and christian fellowship doubt was the great tool of our enemy the devil as i feared doubt and doubt set into my faith all those predictions turned out to be true i lost everything i had of god everything i valued everything i loved about my faith withered away with this adversary and i was defeated and so i found a new way to combat doubt and that was the beautiful tool of science where i knew exactly how confident i was with any given belief i had evidence to cite my claims and i even had a belief system now that could accommodate new information and changes which meant i would never have to struggle with doubt again i would never have the rug pulled out from under me and i became just as certain an atheist as i had been certain a southern baptist and then there was that light and as beautiful and as moving as seeing god on the beach was and as hearing jesus speak to me was it pulled the rug out from under me again and i was so heartbroken i was so heartbroken can i never know anything for sure and then i realized no you can't so what you know we have these moments where we can't fit in the place we were then it's almost like we get an airplane and we take off and before we run out of fuel you know we want to land in the next place and one day i just asked myself like what if i stop trying to land because the plane doesn't exist this is a metaphor [Laughter] i don't have to land this is just like my internal monologue and from there doubt became my daily companion only now it wasn't the boogeyman doubt was a friend because doubt became the foundation of a true humility i'd never known before i always know i could be wrong and if i could be wrong what's the point in me trying to convince someone else to believe exactly what i believe that could be wrong so what's left once you've embraced this doubt in your life what what do you believe what do you do with that and i think this ancient teaching of love your neighbor and creating a world where people love their neighbors means that as we all are wrong about stuff there's grace it means that we have the space to be wrong because we're not killing each other and if we reorient our lives not to be around certainty and i know things but service and helping people love each other you don't have to be certain about that because you just kind of see that it works doubt is only dangerous because of the fear we place in it and the iron grip we have on our ideas we make idols of our ideas about god and they replace god they stand in front of god and the gift of losing all my certainty even my scientific certainty was a crash course in this lesson of the mystics and the desert fathers and the the the spiritual leaders of humanity is surrender there is no battle if you surrender there's no battle with doubt there's no battle with fear there's no battle with hate and all these things i can surrender and accept what is within me and then when i look at the world the actions i make are simply about desiring a world in which people are treated as i wish that i was treated and it's a lot easier way to live the the the trick the reason i think let you know more people don't live that way is we have this addiction to certainty we have this addiction to knowing feeling like we have things figured out that comes from evolution and our orbital frontal cortex but once you learn to kind of rock that baby to sleep doubt stops being the enemy doubt is uh doubt's your friend when you scan the brains of believers you find that their understanding of god is non-verbal more akin to a feeling or experience than a set of ideas this is why christians are usually stumped if someone asks them what is god contrary to what some skeptics say it's not because these people's belief system is unsophisticated or simplistic instead it's that their experiences with god aren't primarily associated with the language centers of the brain trying to describe god is a lot like trying to describe falling in love and that's a serious problem for people who doubt that god is real it's also why christian apologists have such a difficult time reaching those who don't believe while believers when asked to focus on god demonstrate a rich elaborate neural construct atheists presented with the same request show neurological fizzle the unbelieving brain has no god construct no neurological model for processing spiritual ideas and experiences in a way that feels real this is why bible stories and arguments for god's existence will always sound like nonsense to a skeptic for the unbeliever god is truly absent from his or her brain okay so finding god in the waves is out now it's about your story what else tell us a little bit about the structure your book give people a little picture of it little cliff notes for us yeah so the first part of the book the first half really is this telling of my story and reflecting on the good and the bad of my evangelical upbringing and how i responded to that and then the second half we kind of take things topically and how i rebuilt my faith in this science mysticism hybrid and we kind of explore you know where do we find god in science a god that's plausible scientifically we look at prayer practice what does science say about prayer and how to best practice it we look at this issue of who is jesus what does jesus mean to us uh we look at the church what role does the church play how do you find a good church how do you deal with the ways church may have hurt you and then probably we've run up my favorite chapter of the whole book is talking about the bible and how we relate to it and what value it may have for people today it's literally those chapters were selected by counting the numbers of emails i got about different questions and those were the things i get asked about the most often and so i wanted to give these really comprehensive responses to those questions in the context of faith doubt and science okay so everybody listen up because we have a culture where the the books that are about god that are on the bookshelves the big selling ones no no offense to any of these people but you know i mean it's either joel osteen and joyce meyer on one side of things or it's dawkins and hitchens and and people you know it's kind of this uh those are the big god selling titles and i don't know about you but i feel like this book and somebody's voice like mike needs to be in the cultural conversation about god not just for the fans of the liturgist podcast not just for mike's tribe or mike's family and friends in church like this this is an important book those of you that are about to read it will know that but we need those of us uh that really get why this is important and a lot of you are the people that listen to this show get why these ideas are important for people uh let's make this book happen let's like share about it talk to people about it buy it buy multiple copies of it give it to people share about it on social media um you can get it finding god in the waves you can get any bookstore amazon wherever wherever get it get the ebook get them all because this is important i really think that it is um it's gonna be important for your you individual people and you're gonna find hope but culturally in religion in science in philosophy mike is a rare bird there's not many scientifically literate christians it just doesn't exist very much especially not uh scientifically literate and very philosophically and religiously literate so let's make this voice let's speak to the culture and and try to get this thing on the bestsellers list let's try to get this thing out there and heard about because i think it will do a lot this is an important step in the conversation of our culture towards wholeness towards shalom towards understanding camps that are so warring against each other um so i've already pre-ordered my it's not out yet right now i've pre-ordered my amazon copy but i'm gonna try to find other ways of buying it and get go put it on you know what a fun trick go like find it in a bookstore and like if it's not real prominently displayed just go ahead and put it out [Laughter] i do that all the time for people literally every time i see rachel of evan's book i put it face out instead of spying out yeah do that that helps every little thing helps so congratulations mike on a very well written and beautiful and important book it's going to help tons of people it's an honor to watch it happen and be part of it with you yeah i got nothing sorry crying on the podcast well as always we would love to hear your thoughts on this episode there's a lot of ways you can do that you can go to the liturgists.com podcast where you can leave comments on this episode you can hit us up on social media at the liturgists on instagram and twitter or slash the liturgists on facebook of course the liturgist podcast is made possible by some wonderful people first of all our patrons on patreon make the show financially possible and we want to thank two people for help making this show possible greg nordin helps us with production and sound design and corey pig handles project manager and production needs as well thanks for making the liturgist podcast happen i'm science mike i'm michael gunger thanks for listening [Music] everybody you