Spirit in Action

Scientists Talking About Spirit (Science & Spirituality, Part 2)

Talks with 3 science profs at UW-EC about their intersection with spirituality. Matt Jewell, Derek Gingerich, and Doug Matthews bring their experience with spirit face-to-face with their knowledge of Materials Science, Biology, and Behavioral Neuroscience, respectively. See the article about the interview linked via the CVPost.

Duration:: 55m
Broadcast on:: 14 Mar 2016
Audio Format:: other

[music] Let us sing this song for the healing of the world That we may hear as one With every voice, with every song We will move this world along And our lives will feel the echo of our healing [music] Welcome to Spirit in Action. My name is Mark Helpes Me. Each week, I'll be bringing you stories of people living lives of fruitful service, of peace, community, compassion, creative action, and progressive efforts. I'll be tracing the spiritual roots that support and nourish them in their service, hoping to inspire and encourage you to sink deep roots and produce sacred food in your own life. Let us sing this song for the dreaming of the world That we may dream as one With every voice, with every song We will move this world along Last week, for Spirit in Action, we listened to a panel convened by and at Eau Claire's Unitarian Universalist Congregation On the topic of science and spirituality And we're going to push a little further down that road today Last week, we heard thoughts from four science professors at the University of Wisconsin Eau Claire About the intersection of faith and science in their lives We finished listening to the panel up to the start of the Q&A session that followed And then, I spoke individually with physics and astronomy prof Jim Rubicki who facilitated the panel The full Q&A session can be heard on the Nordenspiritradio.org site as a bonus excerpt But I wanted to start off today with just a taste of that session This is from last Tuesday's Science and Spirituality panel A question proposed by Jim Rubicki and responded to by Matt Jewell Matt had brought up near the end there about the purview of science And made me think about, so recently there was the announcement of the discovery of gravity waves That hopefully people heard about And if you watch that press conference or read any of the news reports from that One of the scientists that was there was Kip Thorne from Caltech If you saw the movie Interstellar, he wrote the original treatment for that He's also written some popular books on black holes But one of the things he was known for with his students was talking about Encourage them not to waste their time on questions that are not well posed And so just because talking about unanswerable questions and limits of science This brought to mind one of his students was Alan Lightman who's a novelist, an essayist And physicist by his own right, and he talked about his time being a student of Kip Thorne And I just want to read a quote that's a little extended to maybe have a jumping off with what you guys are talking about This is Alan Lightman reflecting on this idea of well posed problems He said, "I've since come to understand that there are many interesting problems that are not well posed in the Thorne sense For example, does God exist? What is love? Would we be happier if we lived a thousand years?" These questions are terribly interesting, but they lie outside the domain of science Never will a physics student receive his or her degree working on such a question Yet they are still fascinating questions, questions that provoke us And bring forth all kinds of creative thought and inventions For many artists and humanists, the question is more important than the answer Science is powerful, but it has limitations Just as a world needs both certainty and uncertainty The world needs questions with answers and questions without answers So I suppose few questions that whatever you guys would like to answer with this Is does the world really need questions without answers? Do you agree about these limits of science? I know Matt you talked a little bit about Where you sense there if you expand it And I guess what are your personal thoughts as scientists about the value of spending time on questions that are unanswerable in this sense? I think it's pretty well said in terms of there are these different kinds of questions And I know my soul would wither if the only thing I could think about was well posed questions Yeah, so for me I have told my wife I need a little poetry in my life I am not terribly poetic but I don't do such a good job of producing it But I need people on the other side of campus to come up with it now and then Because we in science have done a great job of producing technological revolution of curing disease And doing lots of good things for society, but I think what makes us people are the not well posed questions That was UW Eau Claire's material science prof Matt Jewell responding to the first question of the Q&A session The full thing on nerdinspiritradio.org But right now I want to share some more interchange with Matt as he joins us by phone I'm so pleased Matt that you could join me to share a few additional thoughts on spirit in action Yeah, happy to be with you Mark So the presentation Tuesday night, there's so much about it that I liked including the extreme openness of all the presenters And when challenged by one or two of the members of the audience in the Q&A session I thought that your reactions were very compassionate and empathetic Was that at all hard to do since there was at least some pushback? It's like why are you all Christians? No, I don't think so I think we all understand everyone on the panel understands that These are issues that broke strong reactions in people and that's okay in a way that's good Because these topics of our faith and what we believe about the world I mean these are somehow at the core of who we are as people So people should have strong reactions to them And I think from my point of view as someone who sort of had a foot in both scientific community and community of faith for many years I think I just try to show both sides how the other side has some good points to make And no, I don't really mind if people have strong reactions to it I think all of you in that least indirect ways referred to the fact that there's some at least perceived and sometimes actual static going back and forth I mean, you know, you go back and Galileo and say no, you can't say that the earth moves around the sun That's not okay, that that comes from the Catholic Church at that point Over the history, there's certainly been where push came to shove between the two forces Do you experience that at all in your work ever? I mean, do you feel like your religious faith body ever gives you explicitly or implicitly a message That no, it's not okay to research because that somehow undermines our faith I personally don't experience that, I should be careful and say, you know, in my particular area much more of an engineering background and in material science We're not quite on the front lines of some of these hot button issues that others are Derek Gingrich who's part of the panel is a cellular biologist and he certainly sees it much more The sort of, you know, evolution issues much more at the front of what he does as a researcher as a teacher than what I see So in a direct way, I don't see those issues in my work or have people saying, you know, you shouldn't be doing X or Y or Z I think more broadly, what I would like to foster I think between communities is just a little bit more of a feeling of trust or a willingness to accept that the other side has certain, what's the areas of expertise and can address certain questions well That design community and communities of faith are kind of each in their own ways Well aligned to answer certain types of questions and I guess I would like both sides to be a little more willing to recognize the types of questions that the other side is really well equipped to address and maybe you just be a little more listening to what those sides have to say about that There's something that was said to me years ago, interview I did with a professor who's down in Madison area and since he's science and he's one of the evangelicals who's raising the concern about climate science he has a foot in both camps and one of the challenges that he responded to is some people say, you know, well the Bible says this and that somehow that doesn't match with your science and he said that in his religious tradition they say that God wrote two great books one was the Bible for our religious spiritual moral guidance and God wrote the world, the entire universe and when we study that we're both studying different books of God Is that something you've been exposed to or is that perhaps even how you think? Yeah, I think that's not a bad way to put it I think certainly from the point of view of my faith background the Bible does speak about nature as something that reveals to us God's character and something that reveals to us the sort of being that God is and so from my point of view certainly study of nature helps us to understand God better at the same time I would be quick to say that that being said the Bible is not meant to be a natural science textbook and so we need to be careful to separate the ways in which we use nature to help us understand God's character from the ways in which in my view some people try to use nature to come to a particular position on how the earth is formed or how old the earth is or those sort of things so I would just separate those types of questions but no I don't disagree with the general idea behind that statement You heard me ask a question right at the end of the Q&A session and I wasn't satisfied with my response not because I thought the response of God was wrong but because it didn't engage with what my core question was and I was saying you know for scientific method here's how you measure that you're on the right track you know the whole hypothesis testing feedback loop and my question really was to say well in terms of religion and this took into account that one questioner was saying well you know you're only Christians because that's what you grew up in that's the environment you grew up in but I would say that probably where you are in religion there's been a feedback loop of some sort and so my question was how do you test what you're doing is in harmony with I guess I'd say God how do you know that you're on the right path yeah I think we should think about kind of internal and external feedback loops there in terms of the faith community so I think internally there's lots of built-in feedback loops I mean we as Christians we have the Bible and each of us as Christians should be going to look is my life the way I'm living my life is that aligned with the way Jesus taught us to live our lives that's by definition kind of an internal feedback and there are others too built in with our faith communities people in our lives that we trust and that care about us and can also you know give us that kind of feedback I suppose those on the outside might say well that's all kind of self-referential you know what sort of your external feedback and there I think we need to look at a couple things one I don't think we need to try and set up an approach in fact I would say we should not try and set up an approach like science has with sort of a scientific method and you know hypothesis etc because I don't really think that most questions of faith kind of aligned with what that approach very well I do think that as people of science though we can look to say essentially is our faith rational and here I think that Matthew's on the panel was speaking to this a little bit trying to say that you know he works very hard to not put on one hat as a scientist and a different hat as kind of a Christian to speak to that a little more one of the books that Gary Gingrich highlighted in this book called science and religion what scientists really believe by Elaine Eklund who's a sociologist at Rice University and she has some really interesting statistics in there about people from different faith backgrounds meaning you know Hindus, Buddhists, people of Jewish faith, Christians what percent of those are found in the scientific community versus what percent are found in the general public and was very interesting to me and I'd call this as self-criticism as a Christian that from what I could see in her work a lot of faith communities like Buddhism Hinduism basically scientists were equally represented within the faith as in the general public meaning that if you have a five percent likelihood of finding a Hindu person on the street you have a more or less five percent chance of finding a Hindu scientist but I'm not saying that was a number just as an example. Topher Christians however in particular for Protestants and evangelical Christians the numbers are much lower than the scientific community and I think should raise a little bit of an alarm bell for us as Christians that says to me that somehow however we are framing our messages Christians isn't coming across as compelling to people in the scientific community and I suppose you can look at that as either from the point of view of a scientist or from the point of view of Christian but certainly from the point of view of a Christian I would say there's some way there that we've made it difficult for people of science to find our faith accessible and compelling and I think that requires some introspection so in terms of what's the metric we're using I would point to that as the way we could do better as Christians. Unfortunately there's another ingredient besides the scientific community and the faith community there's also this thing kind of a political community and I would say that most clearly linked in the eye of the public is that people who are self identifying as very religious happen to be of a worldview that for instance is not supportive of climate change science and actually has been advocating for the inclusion of non-scientific science in textbooks so I think that there's a black eye that's been given to Christianity because it was association with certain political candidates do you end up feeling that kind of onus landing on you because you're Christian and science. I think it's a very fair criticism and I would say it's a fair criticism in two specific ways. First as a scientist I would say that it's misguided that obviously from my point of view that those criticisms are pretty hollow in light of what the science tells us but also from a Christian I would say something else which is that the third temptation of Jesus in the desert at the beginning of several of the gospels was to have all this worldly power and just give up who he was as God's son and I would argue that this sort of political power being sought by many Christians is essentially this same temptation if you like. It's the temptation to insert ourselves into these worldly affairs not that Christians shouldn't vote or be engaged in politics but when we try to say and now we're going to require that everyone learn this or everyone teach this or everyone follow this view that we hold that's essentially the bargain that Jesus has offered he turned it down I think would be wise to turn it down as well. And I wanted to also ask you Matt a little bit about your specific religious path so for instance Derek mentioned you know growing up Mennonite and then associated currently with Lake Street United Methodist you referred to being part of a Christian kind of separatist apart from the world type of group and then I don't think you said where you actually kind of landed where you find that fellowship and support for being the kind of Christian you are in the world could you talk anything about that journey. Yeah sure again so this community I grew up with I would say I don't believe they had sort of a denominational affiliation but we're sort of I would say baptistic in their beliefs practices and I don't want to hit them too hard over the head I think there you know there are people that really love God that really look to the Bible for their inspiration how to live their lives and really try to follow the best they could and I think a lot of those things I've taken with me and held with me for my whole life at the same time some of the things I talked about on Tuesday night I would see as maybe I think they don't want to emulate from that community in terms of really separating from the world really not engaging with the culture I think we can do a lot better than that as Christians. My wife and I have a long faced journey I would say we were both Christians when we met and got married it's really been a foundational thing in our marriage and how we raise our kids and that sort of thing. We are right now up at Chippewa Valley Bible Church which is on the south side of Chippewa Falls we kind of live on the north side of Eau Claire and that's also kind of a faith community without denominational affiliation for my point of view they have much I'm saying more balanced perspective on trying to teach what the Bible says trying to live a life according to how Jesus showed us and also really trying to reach out to the community around us trying to engage with the community trying to give both kind of practical help and also what we would see as spiritual help with people around us so really just kind of fell in love with that community when we moved to the Eau Claire area and it's a really good home for us. And I also wondered how it was for you Matt at the University because you have those two identities merged do you feel like in some way you're held in lesser esteem at the University than someone who would be self proclaiming as either atheist or agnostic or Buddhist or whatever. No I really wouldn't say that at all I mean I know there are people there are Christians in academia who report some kind of what they perceive as bias or bias or pushback against them because they're faith here at Eau Claire maybe it's because there are I think a lot of people here in the campus community who are people of faith and maybe it's just kind of our Midwest tolerance for each other I don't know but but no I really I really never feel that I think I can have pretty productive discussions with people who are declared atheist people who have religious views but the difference in mind I think I'm pretty open about my faith here and I really never experienced pushback against it. Well it's all very good from my point of view I again I thought that your presentation your advocacy for the self examination of both Christian and scientific community I thought for me that that fit as the highlight of the evening it was exactly the call that was needed and I want to convey to you how important it is that you said that that you gave that to us that you were serving as a in my view a very valid channel for divine insight there so thank you for that. Yeah thank you Mark let me just if I can just interject there another thing I read in this book that Derek and I are reading the Elaine Eklund book that I thought was really just pretty smart perspective of hers was a lot of people see science and religion being in opposition but actually Elaine Eklund argues that actually in some ways people of science and people of faith are both in some ways kind of bastions of modernity in a postmodern world we live in a culture I think that we're very much we're allowed to define our own reality define what's good for us define what's not good for us but both science and faith in different ways say you know there's an objective reality outside of us and we have to go find the objective reality outside of us and we're better off we do find it and sort of topics or the thing being searched for is different in most cases but actually there's there's a common ground there and I think I would like more people of faith and more people of science to sort of see that common ground and I think that would help us work together yeah you say it also very well and I can imagine you're an excellent teacher as well I'm glad that you're doing that service to our students scientific method is so valuable in terms of producing outcomes and I do think that faith is in term so important that we have roots so I think you're encouraging both those wide reaching arms and the rootedness which is I think the greatest position of strength we can come from great well thank you mark was fun to talk to you thanks very much again folks we've been speaking with Matt Jule he's in material sciences at the University of Wisconsin Eau Claire and he was part of that panel that we had passed Tuesday on science and spirituality before we go on to speak to the two remaining members of that panel I want to remind you that you're listening to spirit and action a northern spirit radio production originating from Eau Claire Wisconsin home of WHYS LP radio spirit and action is on the web at nerdenspiritradio.org with more than ten and a half years of our programs free for listening and download loaded with links to our guests and further information about them there's a place to post comments and make our conversation to wait by posting a comment when you visit also consider clicking on the donate button to support and SR it's not by corporations or government but by your generous support that this full-time work is supported but let's not forget to first support with our hands and with our wallets that invaluable alternative source of news and music that is community radio wherever you are start by making sure that community radio is strong and adequately supported right now back to the two other science profs who were part of the science and spirituality panel held at Eau Claire's UU next up is Derek Gingrich in biology at UW Eau Claire Derek I look forward to an extended visit to hear more of your views for spirit in action thank you very much I'm glad to be here as you know Derek I think it was an excellent panel and I think that you spoke really well about the intersection of science and spirituality in your life and your work growing up Mennonite and being involved with Intervarsity Christian Fellowship in college I tend to think of Intervarsity as you know I don't know at least Evangelical if not fundamentalist would you say definitely Evangelical I'm not sure about fundamentalist I'm sure there are individuals involved in Intervarsity that probably a viewpoint that might lean towards fundamentalism but as a larger group I would say Intervarsity is I would identify it more as Evangelical certainly working in the university setting which is of course higher education there have been fears just as there have been in Islam and other religions that there's kind of an anti-intellectual emphasis to some fundamentalist religion did you ever receive any pressure saying you know back off why don't you go into this area instead of into biology that kind of thing you know I really didn't and I was lucky in that my immediate family my parents they really encouraged me in whatever I wanted to do you know the Mennonite community that I grew up in I wouldn't say that they strongly promoted higher education that wasn't still as largely a farming community and I think for many of the families there there was the general expectation that the farm was where the kids were probably going to end up and so a great deal of higher education was not necessarily needed that said there certainly were individuals within that community who went on to higher education many of them going to at least the Mennonite institutions higher education Eastern Mennonite college university a Goshen college for instance and certainly within my immediate family my parents were very strongly supportive of my efforts to continue my education and to do what I wanted to do and for me that was to get into science and to be able to do research and ultimately I sort of figured out that I wanted to be teaching to and when you get into genetics science is opening great vistas in terms of the possibilities both for understanding and manipulating and I do think that faith religion spirituality has a lot to say about what paths we might choose to go down do you find that coming in at all as you do your research as you do you're thinking about DNA and it's possible futures yet to some extent my research itself is very basic I'm trying to understand some basic molecular pathways and processes it is research that may at some point have some practical application because it deals with some plant responses to the environment and the information I find out may inform some breeding that say a company doing crop development might be interested in but you know I would definitely agree with you the tools that we have available now the molecular tools we have available to study DNA genomes their structure their functions are very powerful and what we've learned in the last 30 to 40 years as those tools have become available is really transform biology in many ways in terms of understanding the underlying genetic basis of a lot of function of organisms those tools also can be used to do manipulation genetic manipulation and certainly when you start thinking about doing that then ethical issues arise and for someone who comes from a faith background those ethical views are going to be informed and influenced by their beliefs in terms of their religious beliefs and so that's something that I have thought about just because you can do something doesn't mean it's always appropriate to do it on the other hand there are times when a new technology can be used to address issues and problems in ways that can help people and it can be appropriate to promote and help move those technologies forward if you think that those technologies are going to help the broader world but I would say definitely for a person of faith when you start making those ethical sort of considerations certainly your religious beliefs directly influence that. Could you talk a little bit I think that intelligent design or creationism or evolution natural selection type outlooks are probably badly conceived of by people in general that there's not a real understanding what they refer to so could you talk about the various aspects of how the universe came to exist how you see that in terms of validity with the knowledge that you have so the view held by scientists on biologists is that evolution in the evolutionary processes can fully explain the development of life on earth and so evolution the way it works is actually pretty simple you have a replicating entity and that might be a living organism it might be a single cell that is making copies of itself it might even be something simpler than that that replicating entity has information and that information can change it can mutate it can alter and altering that information can affect the way that that entity replicates makes copies of itself and also the way that that entity interacts with the environment as new variants come along those variants can compete with each other in terms of their ability to deal with the environment and to reproduce what evolution simply says is that the variants that function better will out compete variants that don't function as well and so the idea is that very early in the development of life on earth there were some form of self replicating structures entities there's some idea that they might be simple RNA molecules though there's a variety of different theories out there but once you get the process going once you get things making copies of themselves and those things be able to change in terms of their information you can kick start an evolutionary process that following sort of the physical laws can ultimately result in more complex organisms and eventually to life as we know as they exist on earth intelligent design and creationist views are that evolution can't do that or at least can't sufficiently do that obviously young earth creationists take a quite literalist view of biblical scripture they believe in a young earth which in terms of scientific evidence is not supported but they believe in a young earth and that all the living organisms on earth that now exist were more or less created when the earth was created in a sort of more or less instantaneous miraculous sort of process by God intelligent design proponents take a little bit different view many intelligent design proponents accept that evolutionary processes do occur that those evolutionary processes can in fact change the traits of organisms can result in sort of changes over time in organisms and can account at least a some extent for what we see on earth now what they argue though is that evolutionary processes are not fully sufficient to do that and at some point or maybe multiple points there had to be this outside intelligent designer that came in and did something whether that's assembling the first replicating cells whether that's periodically coming in and performing what would be I guess sort of considered miraculous acts to sort of kick start certain processes there had to be an outside designer and intelligent design advocates point to certain attributes they see in the living organisms that they claim would be evidence of the actions of an intelligent designer I have multiple issues with that viewpoint one of the big issues is that I think intelligent design is ultimately a gaps argument intelligent design proponents when you read their literature what you see a lot of our arguments that evolution can't evolution can't do this it can't build that structure in arguments of evolution can't really are arguments of well the scientists haven't fully figured out how this structure could be built yet or that particular process could have been put together by an evolutionary process and those are gaps arguments there are arguments that are basically well because you haven't figured all the details out yet I get to insert the possibility of some sort of outside agent doing something miraculous or outside of sort of natural physical processes and the problem with that and many other people have pointed this out is that those gaps get filled and so if you're basing your belief of God in how God works in the world on those gaps over time those gaps gets greased smaller and smaller as we do figure out evolutionary explanations for certain processes certain structures in certain things so I see intelligent design arguments as gaps arguments and I think they're problematic in that way the other thing that bothers me about those arguments is that many intelligent design advocates do accept that evolution mutation natural selection does function right so they accept that God sort of set up these processes but what they're saying is that that is that insufficient that God created a process that doesn't fully work and requires his periodic input to get this process that isn't fully powerful and fully able to account for life on earth that he has to come in and sort of periodically perform miraculous acts to get that to work and I think that's problematic from a theological perspective as a Christian I think if God came up with a process like this that you would have the ability for that process to be fully complete in the sense that that process could account for and produce what is on earth so with that perspective that you've been sharing Derek what do you see as valid scientific commentary about creationism I understand that there are people scientists who support intelligent design or creationism or think that it should be in our classrooms and so on I'm pretty clear that that's not your view that shouldn't be there what do you think of their scientific credentials and the ones that you've been able to examine there are certainly some individuals who have solid scientific credentials who are part of at least the intelligent design camp ultimately the vast majority of biologists have rejected the intelligent design perspective and let me say something you know they raise valid scientific questions when they bring forth say a certain complex structure and they ask questions like is there really a way for evolution to build a structure like that and by the way that's not original to the intelligent design advocates the broader scientific community for a long time has looked at certain structures within organisms and understood that it was probably going to take some time and take some effort to put together some evolutionary explanations for some of these highly complex certain machines that are biological machines that are in cells so in one sense those are perfectly valid scientific arguments and they're not arguments that are unique to the intelligent design advocates I think the issue that I have and a lot of scientists have is again this issue of well because we haven't fully come up with an evolutionary explanation maybe every single step right in the evolutionary process to produce this particular thing that we can sort of short circuit that and we can just say well because we haven't done that yet now I get to make a claim about some external designer some external agent that comes in and again does something that is working outside of that evolutionary process and I just think that's extremely problematic from a scientific process viewpoint right I have pathways in plant cells that I study my research lab we as a scientific community understand some steps of those pathways but there are clearly gaps in those pathways that we don't understand I assume that what fills those gaps is some natural physical process that I can go to my research lab and I can use the tools of my science to discover those natural physical processes to fill in those gaps if I made the assumption that those gaps actually represent some miraculous event there would be no reason for me to go up to my research lab and do the work I do right I have to practice what people call methodological naturalism I assume there is a natural physical process to explain something even if we don't have the full explanation yet so from the scientific perspective that's sort of the issue with intelligent design is taking an area where we don't fully know yet in sort of short circuiting the scientific process saying I get to make the claim now that what fills that gap is something miraculous so with all of that background what's your view of God's role in life is if God isn't magically saying abracadabra at this point this is what's going to happen which role does God play I believe in God as an underlying systator a first cause my belief is that if God did not exist or if God were to disappear then everything else would disappear and I think again from my reading of the Bible and sort of my Christian view and my interpretation of the Bible that's consistent with the biblical view is God is the underlying sustainer okay so God is required and he's required he she is required in everything but there is also then those natural physical processes that are also occurring so what that means is that I think when you think about any event in the natural world it's not that there's just one sort of single explanation right and that explanation is either a natural physical explanation or a God explanation my view is both are there there is an unbroken chain of natural physical events that produce what we see happening in the natural world but God is also present as the underlying sustainer that doesn't mean that God is directly manipulating those natural physical events and then in the discussion last week I talked a little bit about this idea free will Christians accept that human beings have free will in other words God is not directly manipulating our decisions so we accept that freedom that we have and I would argue that the natural physical world also has a form of its own freedom right there are these physical events that function according to natural physical laws they produce certain outcomes and God is does not necessarily have to directly manipulate them at least in the way as we would maybe sort of describe as miraculous or something metaphysical but nevertheless God is still an underlying requirement just as I think most Christians would accept that our free will while it does have in one sense its own form of independence from God we truly can make our own decisions our free will also requires God as sustainer it would not exist without God I have my own thoughts on this but I hope this helps to break down the walls between those people who because they hold science think that somehow faith doesn't have a role you make a persuasive case for the proper role of faith in conjunction with science and so I really appreciate you stepping forward to stand in front of a group and with complete integrity sharing those two sides of your life well thank you very much it was very interesting experience I was so glad to see how many people came from the community also I was very gratified to see a number of our students from the University comment and that was probably the primary reason I did it is hope that students might see me as somebody they could come to to discuss these issues if they're struggling with them these topics are not ones that I'm necessarily going to bring up within my own particular classes it's just not appropriate considering that particular classes I teach but you know I would like the students at UWC to maybe see me as somebody they could come to and discuss these issues and for particularly Christian students to see that there are a variety of different ways that these issues can be approached and so you don't have to reject the scientific consensus on things like evolution in order to be Christian and you're certainly showing how to do that with integrity so I appreciate you doing that and I appreciate you're joining me for spirit and action today thank you very much. Derrick Gingrich teaches biology at University of Wisconsin Eau Claire and we have one further science and spirituality panelists to visit with individually for a spirit and action today our last guest is Doug Matthews professor and chair of the Department of Behavioral Neuroscience at UWEC joining us by phone. Doug thank you so much for joining me for spirit in action. Sure thanks for the invitation it's nice to be able to talk with you again. I really appreciated your part in the presentation on science spirituality. How do you connect with Derrick and with Matt and maybe Jim in the course of your typical days at the University or is this just a special one time when you all get side by side. So I had not met Jim and Derrick before that event other than a couple of days before. Part of that is I'm in a different building than they're in and you know some of that is just life structure. Matt and I engage with each other I don't know maybe once a month once every few weeks just in terms of either a time of prayer on campus or just kind of sharing what's going on in each other's lives so I've known him for a bit. Are you in terms of the campus at all do you perceive yourself to be as some kind of minority because you're a person of faith or I think maybe it was Derrick who is sharing some statistics about the number of people in science who are faith also. I think the way that I would phrase it is that I probably am a minority in terms of people that will readily talk about their faith. You know I think it's hard to get that answer in terms of academics you know in terms of how many people that hold a system associate or full professor title and have a practicing faith. But my feeling and this is completely unscientific it's just kind of my feeling is that it's a significantly smaller percentage of people that are comfortable or see the academy as a place to have a conversation that includes faith. You know way back in 1980 I had a discussion I had taken a Spanish course and was talking with a couple people from the class afterwards and one of them told me that her perception of how these things worked she'd done various meditation and spiritual type experiences and she'd had ecstatic spiritual experiences. But her comment about that was that she knew that that was actually she understood the science of it this is firing and this is and you could reproduce that physiologically just like you can stimulate memories perhaps by a little electricity through various parts of the brain etc. So she knew that basically it all amounted to some kind of brain reaction and so therefore it wasn't real. Now you obviously have because of your work in behavioral neuroscience you have a much better understanding of the brain and how these things function. What do you think about the reality of our experiences? Since you became a follower of Jesus at the age of nine I'm kind of assuming you've had your own intense experiences. Right yeah so I think some of what we need to keep in mind is that if we're talking about the idea of brain stimulation or something like that and that creating particular traits at best probably what we can say happens is that brain stimulation produces a vague sense of knowing. The science there is probably not as concrete as we might want to present it to be. What I would say is that there's often referred to it as tension. There's a tension, there's a mystery that exists that the UU even when I talked about we're all people of faith. I've had intense interactions that are deeply spiritual for me both inside the laboratory and outside the laboratory and I believe that those are encounters with God. A naturalistic scientist might say well okay I don't doubt that you self-report that you've had that event but science continues to develop and we continue to understand cognitive neuroscience and we continue to understand cognitive science we'll be able to explain those events. And that's a conclusion of the data. It's not a conclusion that I would agree with. I think there's a face statement inside of that that eventually we'll be able to figure that out. You know but for me instead it's much clearer it's much more rich in terms of the idea that you know these are interactions since it's the board. I mean one of the things that someone asked at the event the other night was have I never seen anything in the laboratory that just was an awe inspiring or spiritual moment. And there has been times you know when I was first doing electrophysiology and I saw something that the function of individual neurons and it just was a moment of clarity that you know this is a system that's designed. This is a system that exists and you know Romans 1 just screaming at me the glory of the Lord and the glory of the Lord's creation in that sense. You know so I think that that makes for really I think you know this is a long answer to your question but I think that makes for really interesting conversations. I think that's the excitement in this conversation of exactly how does a naturalistic worldview interact you know how would it answer that. How would a theistic worldview answer those questions. What are the limitations and what are the strengths of each one of those. I think that's part of what I would hope at the university we would always be wanting to explore and always wanting to ask those questions. I assume even though you're very much connected with this addiction research and brain science of it I assume you also have a very strong background in terms of therapy that kind of work. So I mean you've got both sides of this to your background right. So I know that there's a prejudice that has grown in this country that says basically religion only does bad things to people you know it brings along the crusades or it's the inquisition or people grow up with deep guilt complexes because they've repressed part of themselves etc. I think the true picture is much more balanced at the very least but I think that you must have sat or must be sitting in a place where you get to see more of the true picture the true spectrum. What can you say about the spectrum of religious beliefs faith and the pros and cons of it in terms of behavioral outputs? It's a great question and I think people really can struggle through that question. It's obvious it's beyond doubt some absolutely atrocious things have been done and the name of religion. I think one of the things that's key to keep in mind is simply because someone calls themselves religious doesn't necessarily mean that they are. So I think that's one thing that we want to keep in mind but I do absolutely feel you know that it's important to balance out those things and I'll speak on two different levels one on a professional level one on a personal level. You know on the professional level just when it comes to addictions while I personally don't give therapy I track that feeling quite closely as it relates to addictions and you know one of the things that's difficult for us to understand is how can we develop treatment options so that people don't relapse because frankly relapse rates one year after a person in her treatment are not great. You know we got a lot of work that we still have to do there. It is true that there are some pharmacological therapies that are beneficial for people to be able to have less of a craving episode of being engaged less than an addictive behavior. That said that's not the only answer. You know 12-step programs which often they don't have to be but often engage at some level of theist equal view work the data are quite convincing that there is a therapeutic advantage to that and the question has to be well why is that the case. It can't simply be a placebo effect that I've engaged in something because it is better than other types of therapies that an individual might engage in. You know so I think that in terms of good behaviors we can see that faith does play a role in generating that and a second one and I mentioned this just briefly one of the things that I find fascinating you know as we lived overseas for several years as I said at the beginning of this question you know there is definitely you know bad things that have happened in the name of religion but there's also amazing things that have happened in the name of religion. You know the vast majority of hospitals that have been built around the world have been built by religious organizations schools that have been built by religious organizations tremendous amounts of facilitating people you know with micro-businesses to be able to leave the bondage of poverty work inside sex trafficking work inside of marginalized people groups. You know there's just a tremendous amount of individuals that do things positive things for the nature of their faith. I think that if we only focus on the negatives we do ourselves a disservice. Now industry if we only focus on a Pollyanna approach that faith makes everything great and everything is rosy or people who have claimed faith have always done great things. We're not being honest to the situation I think we have to look at history and we have to own history but I think you're absolutely right a balanced approach is the correct way to go about it. Your time is spent in Singapore for more than five years I think I recall. I think that kind of experience gives you a much better view on the world. I mean if you grew up in the United States you certainly will see a minority of people who are identified as Buddhist or Muslim or Jewish certainly but in Singapore you were the minority if I understand what this environment is like there. How did that change your perception of your faith and in particular related to science? Yeah in some ways it did. Singapore is an interesting country in that it's a multi-religious country it's majority Buddhist and then it is Muslim after that and then Hindu and Christian faith largely defined or third and fourth. So you know it was interesting to be in a minority country where as a follower of Jesus I was in the minority and a real small minority. We learned to I don't want to say this we learned that there are good people in a whole variety of different faith backgrounds whether it be Chinese free thinkers, Hindus, my secretary in Singapore was a follower of the Islamic faith in seedy and I had a wonderful relationship she was really a fantastic person to work with and that was an aspect that was good to understand. We would you know fundamentally disagree in terms of the nature of our faith but it was quite eye-opening to interact daily with people from a wide variety of different worldviews as it impacted my academics. You know I think what I would say is that often science became a common ground for people of different faiths to be able to interact with one another. What I found frankly was that overseas people of different faith backgrounds were much more comfortable with a unified worldview in terms of how they approach their faith. It wasn't as much of an issue so science became a common ground upon which we got to know one another and talk to one another. I spent a weekend in Hyderabad India given a lecture at a neuro chemistry conference and most of the scientists that came were the subcontinent and one of the things that struck me about that was the notion that they were people of faith was just part of who they were so you know I think some of that notion is that duality of life that I have a spiritual life and maybe I have a scientific life and the two don't intersect and then on a secondary match is a little bit of maybe a concept of the West. I don't necessarily have any data to back that up that's just my own opinion but yeah it was a great rich environment to be in the apartment I was in there had I don't know there's about 20 of us and I think we represented six or seven different countries in it so it was a really really rich environment. I too have noticed the dichotomy the difference between East and West in terms of approach or thoughts about religion but I think that in part comes and originated maybe in Europe and then manifest somewhat in the United States because we've embraced multiculturalism or multi ethnic and multi religious identity to a greater degree I mean in India you still think Hindu indigenous Muslim and Buddhist I mean they're all part of the ethnic mix but ethnic identity is so much stronger than in the United States we we merge and do the public sector one of the rules is you don't talk about politics religion or sex in public and I think that's very much different in those countries where they're so woven in the identities of these things are so woven in to their day to day lives. Yeah I agree with that completely when I spent some time just on holiday in the United Arab Emirates the universities you know in the UAE you have called a prayer it's five times a day and you know that's part of identity that's part of life that's part of their adherence to their worldview you know so it it was an interesting experience and then coming back to the US after being gone for that period of time was also interesting because you know we were I suppose out of the country long enough that it seemed like things had changed a little bit you know so it made for an interesting year to catch back up into you know the American world view the American lifestyle. There's a phrase you've used it a couple time during the senior year you used it as you were part of the panel map that is you refer to yourself as a follower of Jesus you became a follower of Jesus at age nine and that's a term I tend to identify with personally in part I contrast that to being a Christian which has a whole another definition and there's layers there's two thousand years of accretions of definitions I tend to go back to Jesus and feel pretty comfortable I tend to think about a lot of what's been added on since then and be probably less attracted to it. Is that a phrase that you use particularly consciously to differentiate yourself from some other thing? Yeah it is one of the things that I've I guess I've learned over the years is the term Christian means so many different things to different people it harkens to someone's background it harkens to someone's family of origin it harkens to somebody's general life. When I use the term you know if I use the term Christian you know essentially what I mean by that might be different from the way that they would take it. I've attempted over the years to adopt you know I just I just attempt to follow Jesus I'm just a follower of him I find that to be much like what you just said you know it's essentially the root of what I like to ground my life inside so I try to be very conscientious of that. Well Doug I thought your part in the panel was really helpful it really opens some eyes I think I really appreciate the fact that you're combining your scientific work making such a difference for people with addictions etc the lives of students inspiring them to go forward and of course your willingness to join me here today for spirit and action. Yeah well thank you very much it's been a great conversation and I appreciate all the work you're doing. Doug Matthews of the behavioral neuroscience department at UW Eau Claire was the third of the folks exploring with us today on the intersection of science and spirituality a follow up to the panel we heard them speak at just last week. It's all immortalized on northern spirit radio .org plus some excerpts we couldn't fit into this broadcast including the Q&A session that followed the panel thanks for joining us today and we'll see you next week for spirit in action. The theme music for this program is turning of the world performed by Sarah Thompson. This spirit in action program is an effort of northern spirit radio you can listen to our programs and find links and information about us and our guests on our website northern spirit radio .org Thank you for listening. I am your host Mark Helpsmeet and I welcome your comments and stories of those leading lives of spiritual fruit. May you find deep roots to support you and grow steadily toward the light. This is spirit in action. With every voice, with every song we will move this world along and our lives will feel the echo of our healing.