Speaker 1: You are listening to the Confront of Christianity podcast and
Speaker 1: I'm here with doctor Sharon Diricks. Sharon is a speaker
Speaker 1: and author whose work focused on responding to the spiritual
Speaker 1: and faith related questions that people ask today. She has
Speaker 1: a PhD in brain imaging from the University of Cambridge
Speaker 1: and today speaks regularly on topics such as science and theology,
Speaker 1: human consciousness, the problem of evil and suffering. Sharon has
Speaker 1: appeared on local and national radio and has written for
Speaker 1: The Times, The London Times, that is for our American listeners.
Speaker 1: She is the author of Why Looking at God, Evil
Speaker 1: and Personal Suffering? Am I Just My Brain? And most
Speaker 1: recently Broken Planet, released just last year. Sharon, thanks so
Speaker 1: much for joining me. You and I got to meet
Speaker 1: exceedingly briefly in the street in Cambridge this past summer,
Speaker 1: and it was it was lovely to kind of put
Speaker 1: a body in a face to a name, because i'd
Speaker 1: certainly you've been sort of on my railar for a while,
Speaker 1: but I hadn't been able to meet you in person.
Speaker 1: Fun fact, for those who don't yet know Sharon, up
Speaker 1: familiar with her work. She has one of the most
Speaker 1: interestingly spelt last names I've ever come across, and she
Speaker 1: just now helped me figure out how to pronounce it. So, so, Sharon,
Speaker 1: your last name is spelled d I R c k X,
Speaker 1: which is just I love that so much. One one
Speaker 1: sort of vowel. It's like the sort of scrabble word
Speaker 1: of choice.
Speaker 2: It is in need of another vowel. And another fun
Speaker 2: fact is that so my husband and I met in
Speaker 2: a brain imaging lab, which makes us sound very nerdy,
Speaker 2: but one of the first things I've said to him
Speaker 2: when I saw his name was that he had too
Speaker 2: many vout consonants and non in the vowels at the
Speaker 2: end of his name. And there's something quite funny about
Speaker 2: that that I now possessed the same name.
Speaker 1: So yeah, that is funny. Did what was your surname
Speaker 1: at the time? Could you could you have opted to
Speaker 1: go for yours or did you just think, you know what,
Speaker 1: it's more fun to go with.
Speaker 2: So it was Gustard, which is custod but with the
Speaker 2: G so it wasn't much true. I never fared well
Speaker 2: with last names. I'll just you know, take smooth.
Speaker 1: When I married my husband, Brian, he I said, I'll
Speaker 1: change my name for yours. If you'll start pronouncing your
Speaker 1: name correctly in my view, because he is Brian McLaughlin
Speaker 1: as I would say, but his family and most Americans
Speaker 1: would say McLoughlin. But I've been on a sort of
Speaker 1: personal campaign to reclaim that, you know, the good sort
Speaker 1: of Scots Irish pronunciation of that name in America. None
Speaker 1: of that is remotely related. Well, actually no it is.
Speaker 1: It is, okay, So right, of the many things that
Speaker 1: we could talk about today, and I know you have
Speaker 1: a real range of interests, I'm actually most interested to
Speaker 1: talk to you about questions rising from from your penultimate
Speaker 1: book or your I am not assuming that your most
Speaker 1: recent book is the Ultimate, the book you published in
Speaker 1: twenty nineteen. Am I just in my brain? My brain?
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, I was thinking it must be am I
Speaker 1: just my brain? But the note I have here says,
Speaker 1: am I just in my brain? Which is a whole
Speaker 1: other thing. Am I just my brain? Because I think
Speaker 1: for many people today, especially those who may not be
Speaker 1: coming from a religious perspective, there's an increasing interest in
Speaker 1: how our brains work, and what we can understand about
Speaker 1: our brains from a scientific perspective relates to our sense
Speaker 1: of ourselves from a kind of human perspective, And I'd
Speaker 1: love to hear you talk a bit like first about
Speaker 1: how you got interested in that whole area of thought,
Speaker 1: and you know, both the science and the kind of
Speaker 1: non scientific questions around that, and then we'll talk a
Speaker 1: little bit about how, as two people who were following
Speaker 1: us of Jesus, how we would think about these questions. So, yeah, first,
Speaker 1: do you want to give us a sense of what
Speaker 1: intrigued you about brain imaging in the first place.
Speaker 2: Well, I ended up so I did biochemistry undergraduate, which
Speaker 2: I loved, and I knew that I wanted to do
Speaker 2: a PhD of some sort in the basic sciences, the
Speaker 2: biological sciences. But biochemistry was a little bit tedious, involved
Speaker 2: for petting tiny amounts of liquid from one test tube
Speaker 2: to another, and not terribly interesting, although obviously generated very
Speaker 2: interesting results. But brain imaging, actually I heard about a
Speaker 2: friend of mine along the corridor was imaging something in
Speaker 2: this slightly archaic machine holding things together with duct tape
Speaker 2: and that sort of thing. Anyway, that got me fascinated
Speaker 2: as to this technique that could look inside the human
Speaker 2: body without cutting into it. And so I began to
Speaker 2: look for sort of PhDs in that sort of area,
Speaker 2: which took me via Switzerland to Cambridge to do this
Speaker 2: PhD in brain imaging. And this was at a time
Speaker 2: when functional I was just getting going. So it was
Speaker 2: the nineteen nineties, mid to late and yeah, and so
Speaker 2: people were studying all kinds of kind of fairly basic
Speaker 2: functions of the human brain and trying to map them
Speaker 2: using FM eye, which basically measures the signal from your
Speaker 2: blood which is downstream of what's happening in your neurons,
Speaker 2: and then you generate a statistical map and you can
Speaker 2: look at it and that sort of thing. So this
Speaker 2: was fascinating. It was a massive privilege to be working
Speaker 2: in that field at a time, as you say, when
Speaker 2: the sorts of discoveries that were being made was really accelerating,
Speaker 2: and it was a privilege to almost have first hand
Speaker 2: kind of experience in that time. I was already a
Speaker 2: Christian by that point. I hadn't always been actually changed
Speaker 2: my views about Christianity as an undergrad while I was
Speaker 2: studying bio chemistry, but by that point I was I
Speaker 2: was already a Christian.
Speaker 1: So go to pause you there, because I can't help myself, Sharon,
Speaker 1: I'd love for our listeners to hear more about how
Speaker 1: you changed your views when it came to Christianity. Did
Speaker 1: you do undergrad at Cambridge as well?
Speaker 2: No, that was in Bristol. In Bristol, right, so yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: so I arrived in Bristol. Well, maybe I should go
Speaker 2: back a little further. So I've known for a long
Speaker 2: time that I wanted to be a scientist. I always
Speaker 2: did my maths homework first. I really didn't like writing
Speaker 2: long essays. I know that's a little different to you.
Speaker 2: And so my A level biology teacher I really looked
Speaker 2: up to, and one day she handed me this book
Speaker 2: called The Selfish Gene by this person called Richard Dawkins.
Speaker 2: And I kind of read this book and essentially I
Speaker 2: didn't I don't know why. I didn't particularly kind of
Speaker 2: question it. I just sort of absorbed at this perspective
Speaker 2: that we were sort of gene machines and that our
Speaker 2: genes were essentially selfish, and that, yeah, purpose of life
Speaker 2: was in you know, the functioning of those genes, and
Speaker 2: not really too much more than that. And I arrived
Speaker 2: at university, I guess kind of agnostic. I had absorbed
Speaker 2: a lot of kind of views like the ones I've
Speaker 2: just espoused from like friends, from radio, from books, and
Speaker 2: so on, and also the view that to be a
Speaker 2: Christian or to believe in God was not compatible with
Speaker 2: being a credible scientist, and so I arrived agnostic. But
Speaker 2: in the first week I was invited to an event
Speaker 2: called Gorilla Christian, which I ended up going to. I
Speaker 2: was fascinated. Lots of people on my corridor were going
Speaker 2: These were all taking place in my hall of residence,
Speaker 2: and I sat through this evening of people asking questions
Speaker 2: about God, and about halfway through the evening, I put
Speaker 2: my hand up and asked my own question, which was,
Speaker 2: surely you can't believe in God and be a credible scientist.
Speaker 2: And I was given an answer that basically opened up
Speaker 2: a whole vista for me of possibility and of asking
Speaker 2: more questions and grilling more Christians. And it was along
Speaker 2: the lines of, you know, if we asked someone to
Speaker 2: choose between these two reasons that that instagram exists, one
Speaker 2: because of the processes and programs that undergird it, and
Speaker 2: two because Kevin's sistrom exists. I mean, you know, you
Speaker 2: think about that for one second and realize we don't
Speaker 2: need to choose between those two explanations for its existence.
Speaker 2: They both work together in complementary ways. And I've never
Speaker 2: it sounds strange, but I'd literally never heard anything like
Speaker 2: that before. This was rocket science for me, if you like.
Speaker 2: And it set me asking a lot more questions and
Speaker 2: really more Christians. And I did that for another eighteen months,
Speaker 2: and about around Easter time of my second year, I
Speaker 2: realized that and I've spent some time looking at the
Speaker 2: person of Jesus Christ and the kind of the way
Speaker 2: that he was really different to anyone else I'd ever met,
Speaker 2: in terms of not just how he treated people, but
Speaker 2: the things he did in the world, and then his
Speaker 2: own death and rising from the dead as well well.
Speaker 2: And so I got to the point where I didn't
Speaker 2: have all of my questions answered, but I did feel
Speaker 2: like I had had enough questions answered to know that
Speaker 2: Jesus was real, that he was alive, and that he
Speaker 2: knew me, and he cared about science, and so I
Speaker 2: decided to follow him. So I was twenty at that point.
Speaker 1: Okay, I love that, I will now let you continue.
Speaker 1: And what you were trying to tell us to tell
Speaker 1: us before? So he was saying, as an undergrad you'd
Speaker 1: sort of been through that change of mine, and then
Speaker 1: as you were pursuing your PhD, you were getting interested
Speaker 1: in how the brain works and what we can find
Speaker 1: out about it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so I so and so in terms of the
Speaker 2: areas of research, I mean I was doing some fairly
Speaker 2: on interesting methodological PhD that you know. I've actually written
Speaker 2: five books, isn't it. But I wouldn't recommend you read
Speaker 2: the first one. It's not really interesting at all. And so,
Speaker 2: and then I went on to do a postdoc in
Speaker 2: the well actually a brief time in pre and post
Speaker 2: surgical mapping, where we look at how brain regions are
Speaker 2: displaced by things like a tumor and how kind of
Speaker 2: function you know, how the brain is incredibly pastic and
Speaker 2: its function can kind of adapt depending on what's happening.
Speaker 2: And then I went on to do a post doc
Speaker 2: in the US the Medical College of Wisconsin looking at
Speaker 2: human cocaine abuse. And then that when we came back
Speaker 2: to the UK, that was for me to study this
Speaker 2: whole area that we're engaging in right now, really of
Speaker 2: how to respond to people's questions and there's sort of
Speaker 2: an irony that you know, questioning and grilling was really
Speaker 2: part of my own journey and it became part of
Speaker 2: what I was then to go on to do as well. Yeah,
Speaker 2: so lots of different areas of neuroscience that I've sort
Speaker 2: of been involved in.
Speaker 1: A few years ago, I was involved in an event
Speaker 1: at MIT, which is just down the street from where
Speaker 1: I live in Cambridge, Massachusetts. And in this event there
Speaker 1: were two Ritian professors and to non Christian professors who
Speaker 1: were talking about what they believed and why, and I'll
Speaker 1: never forget one of the non Christian professors, who identified
Speaker 1: as agnostic, said this. He said, our consciousness and our
Speaker 1: self awareness create the illusion that we have some sort
Speaker 1: of special ego power, some inis, some unique existence, but
Speaker 1: in reality, we are nothing but bones, tissues, gelatinous membranes,
Speaker 1: electrical impulses, and chemicals. He said, we are stuff like donuts.
Speaker 1: And I know that's sort of pulling on various different
Speaker 1: threads there, but I'm curious for your reflections on whether
Speaker 1: those statements are ones that are legitimated by science, or
Speaker 1: whether those statements come from only a kind of reductive
Speaker 1: view of science that says that we it's almost like
Speaker 1: we have a kind of illusion of our own selfness,
Speaker 1: of our own existence that were not actually even individual
Speaker 1: thinking agents in our own right from a scientific perspective.
Speaker 2: So this whole area, to me is really fascinating in
Speaker 2: terms of how the boundary between science and philosophy is
Speaker 2: sort of crossed all the time, almost without us realizing,
Speaker 2: and what you end up having is kind of philosophical
Speaker 2: statements being made by scientists that have the appearance of
Speaker 2: being scientific, but actually what the science can show us,
Speaker 2: and what is a really important part of this whole conversation,
Speaker 2: is that we don't just have a brain. We also
Speaker 2: have a mind. So you have a brain with all
Speaker 2: of its neurons and chemicals that you can measure objectively
Speaker 2: whether someone wants you to or not, you can measure
Speaker 2: them in somebody. But you also have a mind. This
Speaker 2: thing that the professor that you mentioned was saying is
Speaker 2: a losory. We can discuss that in a minute. But
Speaker 2: you have that internal sense of self that your thoughts,
Speaker 2: feelings and motions, memories, decisions. As Thomas Neagil put it,
Speaker 2: there's something that it is to be you. And I
Speaker 2: guess the conversation hinges around what's the relationship between mind
Speaker 2: and brain. But the most that the science can tell
Speaker 2: you is that they're connected. It can only speak to correlation.
Speaker 2: It can't speak to anything beyond that. You've got all
Speaker 2: these different philosophical theories about maybe the brain generates the mind,
Speaker 2: or maybe mind is its own independent, immaterial substance and
Speaker 2: brain is physical and they interact. Or maybe it's that
Speaker 2: actually everything has conscious properties in it, And these are
Speaker 2: all different philosophical views that people impose upon the science.
Speaker 2: But the science only gets you to connection. It gets
Speaker 2: you to correlation. If you put someone in an MRI
Speaker 2: scanner and give them a task that uses their mind,
Speaker 2: say they're working memory or something, you will see networks
Speaker 2: in the brain light up. So clearly these things are connected,
Speaker 2: and you know, look at child development or neurodegeneration or whatever.
Speaker 2: But in order to impose more than that, you actually
Speaker 2: are stepping out of science and into philosophy. And that's
Speaker 2: what this professor was doing in saying that the consciousness
Speaker 2: is an illusion of our brains, tricking us into thinking
Speaker 2: that there's something that it is to be us. And
Speaker 2: of course there are some people that take that view.
Speaker 2: There are many who are agnostics and atheists that don't
Speaker 2: take that view. They actually think we need a more
Speaker 2: persuasive explanation for the sense of self that it seems
Speaker 2: to be so real. And of course, if you begin
Speaker 2: to say that the very ground of your being is illusory,
Speaker 2: then how can you place a weight on absolutely anything else.
Speaker 2: And in fact, the viewpoint itself is subject to the
Speaker 2: same state of illusion as the phenomenon that you're describing,
Speaker 2: and so it becomes impossible to say anything meaningful. And
Speaker 2: so obviously there are many atheist philosophers that would deeply
Speaker 2: question that that view and say that we're not bound
Speaker 2: to that. I think there are more persuasive views with
Speaker 2: more explanatory power.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I'm sure you've come across Oard Louis who's
Speaker 1: based at Oxford in your travels, as it were, And
Speaker 1: I love how he expresses what sometimes scientists do or
Speaker 1: people speaking in the name of science from a sort
Speaker 1: of atheist or agnostic perspective, which is what you call
Speaker 1: sort of nothing buttery. You know, when you hear the
Speaker 1: words we are nothing but X, Y or Z. Actually,
Speaker 1: often that's going beyond what science can really tell us,
Speaker 1: because science can It may well be the case that
Speaker 1: science can only tell us about these sort of scientifically
Speaker 1: measurable elements of us. But that's not the same as
Speaker 1: saying science proves that we are nothing but these things
Speaker 1: that we can actually have it understanding that, like science
Speaker 1: isn't the right tool for answering all the questions that
Speaker 1: we might have about.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so I would actually argue, and I argue it
Speaker 2: in my book, Am I Just My Brain? That it's
Speaker 2: within science that we see that we're more than just
Speaker 2: on neurons. There are all kinds of really fascinating instances
Speaker 2: in clinical medicine that show that we're actually highly complex things.
Speaker 2: Like you know, there's a small proportion of adults that
Speaker 2: have survived childhood hydron carefully water on the brain, where
Speaker 2: they're basically missing around ninety percent of their brain tissue,
Speaker 2: and yet they are fully functioning healthy adults. Or we
Speaker 2: could look at there's a fascinating phenomenon that's really coming
Speaker 2: through more and more these days called terminal lucidity, where
Speaker 2: people with an advanced state of neurodegeneration have a very
Speaker 2: temporary but very real return to the self towards the
Speaker 2: end of their life, often just before they die. And
Speaker 2: of course there's the phenomenon of near death experiences which
Speaker 2: you know, some might say is controversial, some say is
Speaker 2: really fascinating, where people have been declared dead on the
Speaker 2: operating table and yet have been resuscitated and come around
Speaker 2: to say that they were actually vividly conscious and heard
Speaker 2: them being declared, themselves being declared. So you know, that's
Speaker 2: an instance of you know, when their brain has died,
Speaker 2: what happens to the conscious mind At the very least,
Speaker 2: it's fast. And you know, if we are just our brains,
Speaker 2: none of these phenomena make any sense at all. And
Speaker 2: so perhaps we need a more sophisticated and more nuanced,
Speaker 2: more complex way of describing human beings. That I actually
Speaker 2: think that the Christian worldview helps us with a lot.
Speaker 2: You know, right at the beginning of the Bible, in
Speaker 2: the Book of Genesis, it describes not necessarily literally, but
Speaker 2: the formation of human beings that is not in conflict
Speaker 2: with the science, I don't think. And it says, you know,
Speaker 2: that the Lord God formed the man from the dust
Speaker 2: of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath
Speaker 2: of life, and the man became a living being. And
Speaker 2: so we see, you know, that we are a combination
Speaker 2: of dust and breath, and the word for breath is
Speaker 2: spirit or breath, and the product of those two things
Speaker 2: is a living nefche. And the word nephesh is a soul.
Speaker 2: Now we often get soul think of it a bit differently,
Speaker 2: but actually soul is a very holistic term in Hebrew.
Speaker 2: So human beings are whole, but they have different component
Speaker 2: parts and they're complex, and that seems to match with
Speaker 2: how life seems to work. I don't know, you know, life,
Speaker 2: human beings seem to be hard to box, you know,
Speaker 2: hard to pin down, and they do strange things, and
Speaker 2: we need a model that helps us with that.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, I think one of the things that often
Speaker 1: people aren't aware, perhaps especially if they are not Christians themselves,
Speaker 1: is that the message of Christianity is not that if
Speaker 1: you put your trust in Jesus that you will then
Speaker 1: kind of live in disembodied you know, your soul will
Speaker 1: kind of float off into disembodied bliss in this ethereal
Speaker 1: place called heaven forever, but that actually, when Jesus comes
Speaker 1: back to this earth, that he will call us into
Speaker 1: resurrection life with actual physical bodies. Now we don't have
Speaker 1: all the details of what those bodies will be like,
Speaker 1: because we know, on the one hand, we have the
Speaker 1: example of Jesus's body, which after his resurrection was enough
Speaker 1: similar to his body before that people could recognize him.
Speaker 1: He still had the scars, the nail sort of prints
Speaker 1: in his hands, and the hole in his side where
Speaker 1: a Roman soldier had sort of shrubbed as his spirit
Speaker 1: in there, but he was also able to kind of
Speaker 1: walk through walls essentially, So we you know, I think
Speaker 1: we have so much that we don't know about what
Speaker 1: these resurrection bodies will be like. But we also have
Speaker 1: the repeated sort of assurance in the New Testament that
Speaker 1: we will, if we've trustedes will be raised to a
Speaker 1: kind of physical existence, not just the kind of spiritual
Speaker 1: existence floating off that actually are kind of our soul
Speaker 1: and our body as we belong together.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Absolutely, and often the thought of it being a
Speaker 2: bit ghostly floaty is not a pleasant one people that
Speaker 2: that feels that that's not necessarily somewhere I'd want to be.
Speaker 2: But imagine a reality that's every bit as real as
Speaker 2: this that the one that we have now, but you know,
Speaker 2: a million times more beautiful and more And now that's
Speaker 2: something I can get on board with, you know, rather
Speaker 2: than a slightly ethereal something that doesn't really have any
Speaker 2: bearing on this life. But the thing that's also really
Speaker 2: amazing for the Christian you know, Jesus says, you know,
Speaker 2: that eternal life begins when you turn to him in
Speaker 2: this life. That he says that this is eternal life,
Speaker 2: that they may know you the only God and Jesus
Speaker 2: whom you have sent. In other words, that actually the
Speaker 2: life that will carry on beyond death begins now. It
Speaker 2: becomes more embodied in the future, but it actually starts now,
Speaker 2: and that that's amazing. And yeah, I definitely experience the
Speaker 2: reality of that life being breathed into kind of dead
Speaker 2: places in my own life as a student, even in
Speaker 2: just like really mundane stuff like being a bit of
Speaker 2: a workaholic, you know, and just trusting that God was
Speaker 2: going to get me through something that I didn't think
Speaker 2: I could get myself through the first verses of Psalm
Speaker 2: twenty seven are some of the first words that I read.
Speaker 2: The Lord is my Light and my salvation. Whom shall
Speaker 2: I fear? The Lord is a stronghold of my life,
Speaker 2: of whom shall I be afraid? And I just remember
Speaker 2: really clinging to those that actually, I've entrusted myself to
Speaker 2: a being who is bigger than myself, and that's actually
Speaker 2: incredibly comforting. It's not just all on me to get
Speaker 2: myself through this. There's someone who's, if you like, following
Speaker 2: me or walking with me, or has got me. And
Speaker 2: that was amazing. Yeah, that eternal life is really practical
Speaker 2: and really real.
Speaker 1: What would you say to somebody listening to you who said,
Speaker 1: you know what, this just confirms my understanding that Christianity
Speaker 1: is a crutch for people who can't deal with the
Speaker 1: realities of life. You can't deal with, you know, the
Speaker 1: brute facts of science that are telling us that actually
Speaker 1: there is no meaning and purpose in our lives and
Speaker 1: don't have the courage to make a purpose for themselves.
Speaker 1: That people like you and me are imagining this god
Speaker 1: in the sky who has a purpose for our lives,
Speaker 1: and it's really just sort of delusion and an emotional crutch.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, it's a really valid question. I would actually
Speaker 2: say the argument for crutch works both ways. You could
Speaker 2: also argue that the atheist or the agnostic has refused
Speaker 2: or rather you choose as not to believe in God,
Speaker 2: or has persuaded that God doesn't exist as a way
Speaker 2: to avoid being accountable to a higher being, as a
Speaker 2: way to avoid having to think about those bigger questions
Speaker 2: of life as well. And so whether you can argue
Speaker 2: the Crutch argument in favor of God's existence or away
Speaker 2: from his existence, so that doesn't help us. What we
Speaker 2: need to answer is does he exist or not? And
Speaker 2: for that we need to look at our lives and ask, well,
Speaker 2: where are the most persuasive arguments for why we seem
Speaker 2: to long for meaning and you know, or or a
Speaker 2: sense of purpose? Or you know why science works, or
Speaker 2: why the universe holds together the way that it does,
Speaker 2: why there is suffering and evil in the world. Where
Speaker 2: do the most persuasive answers lie to those big questions
Speaker 2: of life that we have? And my experience has been
Speaker 2: that actually it's the existence of God that helps us
Speaker 2: make more sense of life, rather than throwing us into
Speaker 2: greater confusion and into some sort of intellectual fog and darkness.
Speaker 2: I don't believe science does have all the answers. I
Speaker 2: don't think it can speak to questions of meaning, but
Speaker 2: we do. We are drawn to a sense of meaning,
Speaker 2: even if it's that in the absence of our belief
Speaker 2: in God. We want to create our own sense of meaning. Well,
Speaker 2: why bother if there is no ultimate meaning? And yet,
Speaker 2: if there is a meaningful being behind the universe, then
Speaker 2: there's a grounding for our longing for our lives to
Speaker 2: have purpose, to have meaning because we're made by a
Speaker 2: God who has made us for purpose. That we're not
Speaker 2: here by accident. There is actually reason and purpose in
Speaker 2: each individual life, as well as the human race as
Speaker 2: a whole.
Speaker 1: One of the questions you listed there that it would
Speaker 1: be worth us sort of looking at is why does
Speaker 1: science work? I want to double click on on that
Speaker 1: one because of your particular background and expertise. So for
Speaker 1: many people, I think their assumption is that science has
Speaker 1: really been a project of offering an alternative hypothesis to
Speaker 1: believe in a creator God like you know, the more
Speaker 1: that science explains of the world, whether it's of the
Speaker 1: universe rit larger, whether it's what happens between your ears
Speaker 1: and my ears, you know in terms of our brains
Speaker 1: that the more science explains, the less need there is
Speaker 1: for God. So help us help us understand that question.
Speaker 1: You know, why does science even even work? Which is
Speaker 1: maybe a question that people often aren't asking, as they
Speaker 1: sort of stand on on the sup is it lee
Speaker 1: solid ground of science to justify their disbelief in God?
Speaker 1: Help us understand what God has to do with the
Speaker 1: question of why science works completely.
Speaker 2: And it's really important to say at first that the
Speaker 2: very question why does science work is not a scientific
Speaker 2: question that science itself can answer. It's again it's sitting
Speaker 2: in the realm of philosophy and theology. And you know,
Speaker 2: I think that science works because of two things, Because
Speaker 2: there is order in nature and there's order in the
Speaker 2: human mind. And without those two things, no study would
Speaker 2: be possible. And so, you know, if you were to
Speaker 2: set up a study over in Boston and we know
Speaker 2: that we're onto something, we know that there's a theory
Speaker 2: that we're pretty sure that if we can just collect
Speaker 2: the data, it'll come through. And then we come over
Speaker 2: to Oxford and we repeat the same study exactly what
Speaker 2: we ought to see the same results. And the reason
Speaker 2: for that is because there's an underlying order to the
Speaker 2: natural world without which science can't operate. Now, what's the
Speaker 2: most persuasive explanation for that order? And the order kind
Speaker 2: of yeah, is it is the most persuasive explanation that
Speaker 2: there's a kind of accidental, kind of random process over
Speaker 2: a long period of time has sort of somehow given
Speaker 2: rise to order. Or is it that there was an
Speaker 2: orderer undergirding the cosmos, which is more persuasive. Secondly, that
Speaker 2: the order in the human mind, the fact that we've
Speaker 2: already talked about this a little bit, the fact that
Speaker 2: we can reason and make sense of things that we're
Speaker 2: curious about the world. Where where did the most persuasive
Speaker 2: explanations for the human mind come from? Is it that
Speaker 2: you know that we live in a universe of time
Speaker 2: plus of matter and a chance, but it's non conscious,
Speaker 2: it's just molecules. Or is it the case that actually
Speaker 2: there's a mind behind the cosmos that has somehow given
Speaker 2: rise to human beings. Well, the first explanation is not impossible,
Speaker 2: but it's kind of surprising. Why would a mindless universe
Speaker 2: give rise to mindful humans. It makes a lot more
Speaker 2: sense that there was a mind in the beginning, which,
Speaker 2: of course the very first words of Genesis say, in
Speaker 2: the beginning God and then this God created the heavens
Speaker 2: and the earth. Personally, scientifically speaking, I'm more persuaded by
Speaker 2: the second explanation. In other words, you could make a
Speaker 2: case that it's actually the very existence of God that
Speaker 2: gives us the grounding for why science even works in
Speaker 2: the first place, which is kind of a crazy place
Speaker 2: to be given that we spend a lot of our
Speaker 2: time responding to the view that science has disproved God,
Speaker 2: and because you now have mechanisms, you no longer need God.
Speaker 2: He's being squeezed out of the picture. But my earlier
Speaker 2: example about Kevin Sistrom and in Instagram show you know,
Speaker 2: shows that that need not be the case. You know,
Speaker 2: you can perfectly well study the mechanisms and also know
Speaker 2: that the reality of the creator behind it, and actually
Speaker 2: both are needed for a more complete understanding of Instagram.
Speaker 2: If you try and just understand it in terms of
Speaker 2: whatever the programming script is, I'm a bit out of data.
Speaker 2: I don't know what the us is it Java or something.
Speaker 2: If you just try and understand Instagram in terms of
Speaker 2: Java and you leave out Kevin Sistrom, you are left
Speaker 2: with an incomplete understanding of Instagram. It's actually to the
Speaker 2: two together that give you a more complete picture of reality.
Speaker 2: And that's what I see it being with science and God.
Speaker 2: It's actually, you have a diminished view of the natural world,
Speaker 2: even a diminished potentially you know, not diminished kind of
Speaker 2: a framework for even the conduct of science if we
Speaker 2: leave out the one that started it all and continues
Speaker 2: to pulled it today.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, that's really helpful. Fun fact, I was today
Speaker 1: years old when I found out that somebody named Kevin
Speaker 1: came up with Instagram. That's news to me, but I
Speaker 1: appreciate it. Yeah, And I think what you've said there
Speaker 1: is really helpful, Sharon. I think people also often don't
Speaker 1: know the kind of Christian origins of what we now
Speaker 1: call science, and the way the Revolution was driven by
Speaker 1: people who believed that the God described in the Bible
Speaker 1: was the god behind the universe, a god who is
Speaker 1: orderly and lawgiving, and who created humans in his image
Speaker 1: so that we might actually, among other things, be able
Speaker 1: to discern the underlying kind of principles that the regular
Speaker 1: laws and principles that He's created his universe on the
Speaker 1: basis of. I love the sort of history of science
Speaker 1: behind that that often gets lost, I think, especially especially
Speaker 1: when we listen too much to our fellow countrymen like
Speaker 1: Richard Dawkins and those who want to make want a
Speaker 1: sort of pro the idea that science by definition is
Speaker 1: a project that's going to draw your way from Christianity,
Speaker 1: or that the story of science and Christianity has always
Speaker 1: been a sort of story of scientists victorious defeating ignorant Christians,
Speaker 1: when so often Christians have been involved in some of
Speaker 1: the great discoveries of science over the last sort of
Speaker 1: four hundred years.
Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely, Sharon tell.
Speaker 1: Us probably last question, because I'm sort of intrigued what
Speaker 1: your answer is going to be on this. What is
Speaker 1: the most fascinating thing about the brain that you have discovered?
Speaker 1: I didn't just mean in li like in your own
Speaker 1: personal research, but that you've come across, Like, what's your
Speaker 1: top kind of fun fact about our brains that you
Speaker 1: like telling people about, if they, like me, are less
Speaker 1: steeped in the science of brains.
Speaker 2: At any one moment. There's enough electrical activity to power
Speaker 2: an LED light, if that's of any use to you
Speaker 2: going today, which brings new emphasis to the notion of
Speaker 2: having a light bulb moment, right. But perhaps on a
Speaker 2: slightly more serious note, I guess the more that I've
Speaker 2: thought about mind and brain and human consciousness, the thing
Speaker 2: that fascinates in me is the amount that we don't know,
Speaker 2: that we don't understand, and that, yeah, the complexity and
Speaker 2: the anomalies you know, where something very different most of
Speaker 2: the time this happens, but occasionally this happens, and how
Speaker 2: we make sense of that? And yeah, I just think
Speaker 2: human beings are fascinating and they resist the boxes that
Speaker 2: we sometimes try and put them in.
Speaker 1: Well, thanks so much for being with me, Sharon, and
Speaker 1: for sharing some of your own story as well as
Speaker 1: some of your research and thinking over the decades that
Speaker 1: you've been thinking about these questions. And for those who
Speaker 1: want to know more, you could grab a copy of
Speaker 1: Sharon's book, Am I Just My Brain and learn much
Speaker 1: more from there as well. If you would like, you
Speaker 1: could follow the Come Friend of Christianity podcast on Instagram
Speaker 1: apparently invented by a guy called Kevin and Twitter slash
Speaker 1: x who knows I mean a relation to Bob and Stewart,
Speaker 1: or you can leave a review on iTunes and that
Speaker 1: you can mention if there's a topic or question that
Speaker 1: you would like to see explored in a future episode.
Speaker 1: Until I talk into your earphones next week, I hope
Speaker 1: you reflect on your brain and whether if you're a Christian,
Speaker 1: perhaps you could praise God for the brain that he's
Speaker 1: given you and the opportunities he's given you to use it.
Speaker 1: And if you exploring Christianity or skeptical of Christianity, maybe
Speaker 1: ask yourself the question of whether you have bought two
Speaker 1: simple answers when it comes to what our brains might
Speaker 1: be and how they might relate to our sense of
Speaker 1: who we are