Evolution + Christianity, Part I: An Interview w/ Dr. Jim Stump

Are Christianity and evolution compatible? Can a person trust God and trust science at the same time? Jim Stump wrote a book called The Sacred Chain: How Understanding Evolution Leads to Deeper Faith, and we are very much here for it.

In this interview, we chat about the Bible, science, evolution, the soul, afterlife, and many other juicy topics. We actually had so much to talk about that we had to make this a two-parter. Stay tuned!

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Transcript

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Randy 0:06

I'm Randy, the pastor half of the podcast, and my friend Kyle's a philosopher. This podcast hosts conversations at the intersection of philosophy, theology, and spirituality.

Kyle 0:15

We also invite experts to join us, making public a space that we've often enjoyed off-air around the proverbial table with a good drink in the back corner of a dark pub.

Randy 0:24

Thanks for joining us, and welcome to a pastor and a philosopher walking to a bar.

Kyle 0:36

So today on the show, we are talking with Jim Stump, who is a philosopher and also works at an organization called Bio Logos, and recently published a book called The Sacred Chain: How Understanding Evolution Leads to Deeper Faith. Jim and I met a long time ago at a music festival, and then I kind of followed his career since then. And he's done some really interesting stuff. He has a really interesting story that he's going to tell us in this episode. And has, I think, a real depth of insight when it comes to issues of science and faith interacting, but also a bunch of stuff that's a lot even bigger than that. If you've followed Bio Logos at all, you know that they've carved out a space in the Christian world where they try to be kind of an irenic, peaceful presence between people who you know tend to bicker. What's irenic mean? Well, peaceful, peacemaking, really. Um, trying to listen and think of a better way to reconcile things like uh science and evolution. Um, but they've branched off since then to do a whole bunch of stuff. And he's going to describe some of that for us. And this book is really interesting and it was really fun to talk to him.

Randy 1:37

Yeah, Bio Logos does incredible work. They have for a long, long time. Um, it's how I got exposed to people like Pete Ends and even NT Wrights and John Walton is in there. But um a lot of things that gets talked about both in this book and The Sacred Chain, which, if you're interested in just diving a little deeper into the the question of is evolution worth my time? Or as a Christian, how do I contextualize this within the scientific narrative and the stuff that I was told in in church, all this stuff. That's a it's a great resource for it. This book is these conversations that we've had with Jim are just touch on all of these things in a really different and insightful way. It's fun to have a third eye on these things and a third perspective. I really enjoy the conversation.

Kyle 2:27

So one of the things we like to do around here is read reviews when we get good ones. We really appreciate your reviews. They help new people find us. And we got a new one.

Randy 2:35

Yeah, this one's by Drew underscore Flynn. And Drew said, I found myself blowing through these podcasts, going all the way back to the beginning and working my way upwards. They cover so many topics I have questions about and do so graciously and humbly. My favorite podcast I've discovered this year. Wow. Drew. Yeah. Appreciate you.

Kyle 2:54

That's awesome. Well, Jim Stump, thanks so much for joining us on a pastor and a philosopher walking to a bar.

Jim 3:15

Uh, it's my pleasure. I'm wondering which one am I.

Kyle 3:18

You can be both. We have lots of people on who are both. So tell us a bit about your background, if you don't mind. We're going to be discussing your book, The Sacred Chain. Uh, there's a really interesting story that you have about your departure from academia and university life uh and where you landed. So tell us as much of that story as you're comfortable sharing.

Jim 3:37

Sure. So I grew up in the Midwest in Michigan and Indiana in a pretty conservative religious family, uh, evangelicals for sure, and uh went to those colleges. And after I in during college, I was always interested, I would always got drawn to math and science. That was kind of what you did uh for kids like me, especially in high school and small towns, and then going on to a small Christian college. I just kind of did math and science because I was fairly good at it and didn't know what else there was to do. Uh, after I graduated, my wife and I actually taught for a year in a mission school in Sierra Leone, West Africa. And the in the evenings, the electricity would go out, and you just had a lantern, and I started reading. We I never really read like novels very much before. And the library at the school was stocked with 19th century fiction, and I started reading Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky and Herman Melville and these big ideas. And I'm not the first person I've heard to say this, but somewhere in the uh conjunction, the intersection of the analytic skills for math and science and these big ideas of 19th century literature out popped philosophy. And I decided I wanted to be a philosopher. And there's actually a military coup that happened right at the end of our first year in West Africa there and came back and I went to grad school and went to grad school in philosophy. Didn't even really know much about that was, but uh thought I was interested in it. And uh, because of my math and science background, I was drawn into philosophy of science. So I started thinking more seriously about science. And I was a Christian, and so I naturally thought about the relationship between uh my faith and these things I was learning about science. I finished my PhD in the same college that I went to, that my parents went to, that buildings were named after my ancestors at. They had invited me to come back and help start a philosophy major. So I did and had a really good run. We ended up having a nice little philosophy department with four faculty members and a major with students who are energized and wanting to uh wanting to learn and and think about uh serious things like this. And all the way along, I was still interested in in science and philosophy of science and started more seriously thinking about uh how science and faith interact, how science and the Bible are related. And uh it was a so I had been doing some scholarly projects related to to science and religion, and then Bio Logos, the organization I work for now, um, had just undergone a presidential transition and was moving the offices from San Diego, California to Grand Rapids, Michigan. And not very shockingly, not very many staff wanted to move from San Diego to Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Kyle 6:29

I've been to both then I would say, yeah, I'd stay in the same thing.

Jim 6:33

Sounds about right. New president was looking for some new um, for some new staff. And I reached out and said I wasn't ready to leave my position. And I wondered if you could do this like remote working thing that wasn't really a thing back then, and things worked out, and I ended up starting to work for Bio Logos halftime and for Bethel College halftime, where I had been teaching, and that was with the full uh approval of the administration there. They said these are important conversations and we want to be involved in them. Well, the broader community wasn't as uh thrilled with that, and when it became more widely known within the community, like the pastors that were part of that supporting denomination, board members and such, uh it became a little controversial and started a dialogue, they called it. And very quickly we realized that many of the faculty were a little ways apart from the pastors and some of the others in that supporting denomination, particularly related to evolution. Age of the earth and evolution was a big flash point. And uh long story short, at the end of two years, I was invited not to return. That's that's a little too dramatic. They changed the documents that faculty had to sign. I could have stayed if I would have quit talking about evolution, if I would have uh not done scholarly work on it and wouldn't have promoted it in any way, and if I would have quit working for Biologos. But by then I was I was pretty deep into it and thought it was important and uh enjoyed it and had a had a platform to do it from. And so Biologos wanted to hire me full-time, and so I said I'm gonna go there. So that's how that story happened. The the one that I started the book with, to just sort of set the stage of this is the world that I came from, and this is still a sizable part of the American population.

Randy 8:32

So in Bethel College, I'm sure, just coincidentally changed their documents and constitution, you know, no, no, no connection, right?

Jim 8:40

To your I mean, to be fair, uh, there's a tension at schools like that. So philosophy was in the department of religion and philosophy, where pastors were trained. And in the constitution of the denomination, the supporting denomination, it said things like Adam and Eve were the first two human beings created by an immediate act of God, not through the process of evolution. So it's it that was part of the supporting denomination. Um, but the college itself didn't hire people only based on that. They hired pretty broadly among even even in that department of religion and philosophy. You didn't have to be ordained or credentialed within the denomination in order to be there. So from their standpoint, it was bringing things in line with what the wider denomination already said. But yeah, it was very much a response to these long dialogues we had. And the opening scene in the book is is uh pretty verbatim true of feeling like I was sitting before an inquisition and uh a bunch of old guys in suits were asking asking questions about Adam and Eve and and uh other literal interpretations of the Bible, and pretty clearly hadn't had not uh not done a lot of homework and seeing the range of of faithful Christian views that were out there. Yeah. So it's uh I mean the community that I was from, and in many ways that was very hard. I felt like an exile. I felt like I was shunned. Um but I had a good place to go. Lots of my friends that this had the same sorts of things happened to did not have that. And being at Bio Logos is the best thing that's ever happened to my professional career. I mean, the the people I correspond with and the things I get to do are are pretty remarkable, and I enjoy every bit of it.

Randy 10:34

So awesome. Can you just tell our listeners who weren't familiar what Biologos is, Jim?

Jim 10:41

Yep. So Francis Collins was the leader of the human genome project back in the early 2000s, uh, world-class geneticist, and then led the project that mapped our entire DNA. Um, not long after that project was done, he wrote the book called The Language of God, which told the story of how he came to faith as this world-class scientist. He doesn't call himself that because he's much too humble, but he's a world-class scientist. And as an adult, he came to came to Christian faith. And so he tells that story and also wrestles a little bit with some of the questions. So this was 2006, um, same year as intelligent design Dover trial in Pennsylvania. And so these topics were were uh in the in the air, as they say. And so when he wrote this book affirming evolutionary theory, but also affirming uh Christian faith, lots of people started writing letters back then, some emails, but letters to him asking follow-up questions. And he pretty quickly got overwhelmed at trying to answer those. And so he got some people together and wrote out answers to the most frequently asked questions and put them on a website and called it by logos. Uh, right when the website was going live was 2009, when President Obama tapped him to become the director of the NIH. So, as he tells the story, he had to meet in the West Wing of the White House around a table full of lawyers trying to figure out what are we going to do with this presidential appointee who has this cute little Christian nonprofit organization that he's just started. And they drew up some very clear rules of how he had to separate himself entirely legally from uh the organization Bio Logos. And that, again, as he tells the story in a very gracious and generous way, really led to Bio Logos becoming an um uh a more bona fide, not for profit organization. Uh, so there's a board that governs us, and uh, we have a mission statement, and we still have a website that gets lots of traffic, and that original part of common questions is still the most heavily trafficked part that lots of people do a Google search about something related to science and faith and land on our site. We also do a podcast that I host that is called Language of God, which very uh intentionally was named after Francis' book. And we do uh in-person events. So we had our our biannual conference in Raleigh, North Carolina, just back this this past April, and do other smaller in-person events like that, and have a speakers bureau that that sends people out. And we have one more program. Uh, there's a high school curriculum, a high school biology curriculum that was designed for either homeschooling parents or Christian schools that want to do legitimate biology, but have a Christian worldview like wraparound or integration to that. So those are the four programs we do. Um, the big news here recently is that our president, Deb Harzma, has just announced that she's going to be resigning at the end of this year. So she's been there at the helm for 11 years. Uh, she was the person who hired me back in 2013, and she is uh stepping down at the end of this year. So there'll be some transitions in our future.

Randy 14:01

Nice. All right. Well, hope that transition goes well. I don't know if we're talking to the next president-elect or something, you know. If so, uh that has not been told to me, so uh that would be news to me.

Kyle 14:12

Excellent. So so Biologos, you just described it very well. It it does things like help Christians reconcile their faith with modern evolutionary science. It did that for me in a significant sense. I remember the same year uh Collins' book came out, I think The God Delusion came out. And I remember sitting in um a church bus on the way to a mission trip in Washington, DC, reading that book, trying to figure out what to think about all this stuff. And for a long time, it was like that and biologos and the young earth creationists and kind of bounce back and forth between those websites, Answers and Genesis, you guys, and Richard Dawkins' blog. Um, and you've been super influential, and and the resources on your site um have done a lot of real good, including in my own life. So thank you for what you've contributed to that. Um, now I should say that I was once really fascinated by that topic, but kind of lost interest along the way, I guess. Um mostly probably due to going to grad school in philosophy. And so it's a little hard for me now to understand people who voluntarily spend their time trying to understand or talk about creationists. Not that that's the only thing that you guys do, um, but I you know I've had some other friends. No, no, no. It's amazing. Well, I've I've had some other friends who like chose that as a research topic, you know, uh in grad school. I was like, why though? So what energizes you about the mission? And do you see a lot of success in it? And what do you consider success? Like, are there still like tons of people like there were in 2006? Are there still tons of people wondering about this science-faith thing?

Jim 15:51

Interestingly, there still are. Um, topics have shifted a little bit, and Biologos has has shifted along with that. It was back just about three, what what year is this? 2024. Actually, in the fall of uh 2019, we made a very intentional decision of broadening our topics and and had planned that 2020 was going to be the year of creation care and climate change that we were going to roll out. And then COVID hits, and we instead pivoted really hard toward vaccines and that sort of thing for a couple of years. But I have just started coming back to talking more about climate change as well, because one of the things we did was to uh do some survey of younger people and science and faith, and many of them were saying the things like, Yeah, evolution, Adam and Eve, whatever, but our earth is burning up. Can we do something about that? Yeah, and so and one part it was to say we uh uh want to want to do relevant things for an audience that's going to be growing and and and with us for a while longer. And and so really what we did was to say, we're a science and faith organization, and here are the topics we see right now that are that are particularly relevant and important, and so we're gonna invest in those. So climate change became one of those. What does it mean to be human has become one of those, but evolution is still one, it really is, and particularly in in more conservative churches, um that it's not as antagonistic as it used to be. The the big antagonism, the big sort of culture wars issues have shifted more to sexuality and gender than evolution the way it was 10 or 15 years ago. Um, but there still are people that are in a less antagonistic way, and there are still people who are antagonistic, that's not hard to find, but people who are are curious, and so what when you ask what energizes me about this, we sort of stand in the middle and take fire from both sides. So the people that are the conservative Christians that say, Yes, we think we have the same faith as you do, they're not always that kind, but but we we share a faith commitment, but we don't accept your science. And on the other side, there are sciencey people that say, Yes, of course we think this science is true, but how in the world can you keep being religious people? So with one foot in each of those camps, uh we we find ourselves in this in this interesting space in the middle. And the more energizing side for me is to talk to people over here who who say, I just don't get how you can continue to believe in a god and these fairy tales and all of that. So I mean, the sacred chain there, the book that you have sitting on your table, is much more designed to reach those people than it is to persuade somebody of the truth of evolution who doesn't accept it. There are other books that do that. Um, but I'm much more interested and much more concerned about showing the relevance and the kind of intellectual rigor and satisfaction that I find, at least, in a position of faith within the context of accepting the findings of modern science. So you guys know, I'm sure, the statistics about the nuns that used to be for a long time around, you know, less than 10% of the population, and over the last 10 years has just exploded to more than 30% of the population that say religion, whatever. I mean, some of them are still spiritual, but not religious or whatever, but many of them are just like, I see no relevance whatsoever to faith or to spirituality. And that's the crowd that I'm interested in. I'm interested in showing because many of them have the idea that sheesh, I'd have to, I'd have to check my brain at the door, or I'd have to give up science in order to accept that sort of thing. And so the point of the book is found in the subtitle how understanding evolution led me at least to a deeper faith. So I think understanding the science and digging into the science more, and particularly from a philosophy of science background. So it's not just knowing the facts and the figures and the theories, but understanding how they work, how the enterprise of science works, and uh what the limitations of scientific inquiry might be, and being able to unpack those and put it into a big picture that shows how I think the the faith that you're led to by a deep engagement with the sciences is a better, more authentic, more relevant and a deeper faith.

Randy 20:50

Two quick questions, Jim. Um, you said that you guys are at BioLogos are always doing surveys and trying to figure out what people are talking about. And you mentioned that everyone's talking about sexuality and gender these days. You said it seems to me that an organization that exists in the intersection to call people to the intersection of faith and science might be really well positioned to speak to things like sexuality and gender in an informed way by both. Is that something that you guys have any interest in?

Jim 21:16

That's something that we talk about behind in uh not in the public eye a lot to see. Um so in the same way. So let me let me back up a little bit further. So before that 2019, when we broadened our topics, our board was pretty laser focused on evolution. And the strategy then was to unbundle evolution from all the other topics that that to many people felt like were a package deal. I would speak in in churches sometimes, and somebody would say, You want me to accept evolution? Man, next you're gonna want me to accept climate change, then you're gonna want me to accept gay marriage, then you're gonna want me to vote for Democrats, then you and we'd back then the strategy was no, no, no, no. No, we're just talking about this one thing. Let's just try to talk about this. We're not. Well, after 10 years of existence, we felt like we had earned enough trust and of the church and had been involved in these conversations enough, and enough people were talking about these other issues that we needed to have something to say about them as well. And our board at the time, it was a big debate. It was a big debate to say, is this gonna take us off mission? Is it gonna undermine the trust that we have earned in speaking about this one topic to now start speaking about this other? And so it was a very considered decision when we did that. So now keep fast-forwarding that to other potential topics. The same thing's going on, that it's a very considered and deliberate process, and one that we're well aware that you got one shot to do this right, because if you don't do it right, you erode everything. And we don't have a another another uh interesting uh facet of this gender and sexuality discussion is that Biologos right now hasn't said this is our position on that. Where these other topics, we say this is our position on evolution, on climate change, um, and so on. So we haven't we haven't done all of the the sort of background work there in order to say, and this is the position we're gonna be advocating for. I do hope in the in the coming years there'll be space for us to have some conversations. I mean, a big value of Bio Logos has has been gracious dialogue. And you know, we don't do debates, we've had opportunity to do that sort of thing, but that's not really our our mode of operation. But uh to be able to invite civil discourse around topics like that uh sounds pretty attractive to uh shed a little light and less heat on the topics. But at the moment, uh these are the topics that we're talking about, these are the main foci of biologists.

Randy 24:09

Blessings to you guys as you talk about talking about that. Um in just jumping into the book a little bit, there's a point in which you say uh the term creationist is an unfortunate term. Now, Kyle on this podcast has laughed at me for calling myself a creationist, probably justifiably so, because I believe in evolution. I just think that evolution was the process by which God created the world. So I consider myself still a creationist. You say that's a problematic term. It's uh it's it's an unfortunate term. What do you think? Why do you why is it an unfortunate term? And what's a better term to describe someone who believes that God created the cosmos through the process science describes as evolution?

Jim 24:53

So when I say it's unfortunate, I do so from the standpoint that we don't get to make up what the meanings of words, the meanings of words emerge from a culture, emerge from a community. And the term creationist has a lot of baggage in our community. Biologos has, you know, we have very intentionally tried to shift that conversation so that the term evolutionary creation. Some people go further and say, I'm an evolutionary creationist. Um, but the term creationist just has so much cultural baggage that means something that you can say, no, no, no, no, that's not what I mean. But if everybody around you means that, it's kind of hard to not mean it, right? But I I'm with you, Randy, in saying, so I believe that God's a creator. I believe that creation is not an instantaneous snap your fingers kind of event. So I'm not particularly scared of the term creation. Um, it's just when you put that ist behind it, it sounds like an ideology that means something that I don't really want it to mean about me.

Randy 26:03

So evolutionary creationist?

Jim 26:06

Yeah, so you're we usually say our position is one of evolutionary creation. God's the creator, we affirm the creeds, God's the creator, but we think evolutionary creation is better than theistic evolution, which probably still has more cultural cachet. Theistic evolution is very broad, and I mean, there are people who would call themselves theistic evolutionists that don't think God is a personal being, for instance, and definitely those that are not Christian. So biologos tried to identify as we are Christians in this historic creedal sense, and so we tried to say evolutionary creation is a subset of theistic evolution, and it's those people who identify uh more closely with creedal Christianity.

Kyle 26:57

Yeah.

Randy 26:58

Real quick question, if you can keep this to a really brief answer, because we've got a yes or no questions going. Do you still get a regular influx or messages from pastors saying, I think I might get kicked out of my church or I might get kicked out of my denomination, or I have because I publicly said I believe in evolution. Is does that does that happen?

Jim 27:19

That still happens. I I think the peak of it was probably back 2010 to 2015. Okay, but it still happens. Yes. Thank you.

Kyle 27:28

Uh that's more recent than I would have expected, even that. Yeah. Um, so another kind of soundbite-y length answer, if you can. Um, what is your and I know that's gonna be hard. What is your general take now on the relationship of science to faith? How they can be reconciled. Do they need to be reconciled? Sound bite answer. I know you second. I know you have a prepared version, like elevator version of that, and that's the version I want.

Jim 27:54

Um, science is our attempt to understand nature. Theology is our attempt to understand the divine. And some people want to just say that the Bible itself is the sort of raw materials, the way nature is the raw materials for scientists. But the Bible's already a pretty theological document. And the human authors, no matter what your view on inspiration, the human authors are already doing theology, which means they're already trying to understand something of the divine, whether that was God specially revealing to them or them just under trying to understand their culture and their surroundings. So they're doing different things, right? Science and theology are doing different things. And most of the trouble comes from when you try to press science into giving you theological answers, or you try to press theology into giving scientific answers. So there's there's definitely uh a part of my approach to this that's stay in your lane, and neither of them tells the whole story. That's part of my elevator speech related to the the way science and theology interact. Neither of them is a complete explanation of reality. So I want to hear from both of them. I want to understand both of them in order to get a better, bigger picture of reality.

Kyle 29:26

Yeah, cool. If you said that to me on an elevator, I would stay in the elevator. Yeah, I would push the button to close the doors and we'd talk more. So that's good because we've had I think two episodes on specifically about science and religion and evolution. Think so. Um, and in the last one, I pretty much just defended Stephen Jay Gould's view, um, which sounds very much like what you just articulated. And it was a view that pissed off a whole lot of things.

Jim 29:47

I'll take a little objection to that, though.

Kyle 29:50

Please do.

Jim 29:51

The way Gould describes it in NOMA, non-overlapping magisteria, is that science gets the facts and religion gets values, yeah. Which always sounds to me like religion's getting the short end of the stick here a little bit. If science is the only one that gets to say whether something's true or false, and religion is just how I end up valuing it, that's not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is that both of them make factual claims, but they are in different. So the the magisteria business can can be a little bit tricky. But for most, and this must be what you're saying, Kyle, that for most of the time, the questions scientists are asking at they when they sit at their bench in the laboratory, it doesn't matter one iota what they think about religion as to when they're trying to figure out whether this stain on the slide is cancerous or not, or when they're trying to, you know, understand the speed of light in a vacuum. You know, most of these questions that scientists are working on do not impinge your theology doesn't impinge on that except in a very, very indirect way. And the same on the other side. If I'm trying to understand the nature of the Trinity or the nature of the atonement, it doesn't matter which interpretation of quantum mechanics I hold to. That's not going to be relevant. So the vast majority of the questions that are being asked in those disciplines are happening independently of each other. So that's where I'm on board with the non-overlapping magisteria. But there are some questions. So if I want to ask, what does it mean to be human? I'd sort of like to hear from both of them. But what I want to say is that it's like they're speaking different languages. I use a I use an analogy of different styles of art. And if I'm doing a presentation, I have on a PowerPoint, I put up two different Picasso pictures, one that are both of somebody playing the guitar. So one of them is the old guitarist from the blue period that's you know the guy that's hunched over that looks, you can tell what it is. But and then also from the cubist period, there's there's a uh what's it called? La Mandalanista, that you can't tell that it's a guitar player, but but it's abstracting something from a guitar player. If I understand cubism, which I probably don't, but but they're trying to abstract the most fundamental shapes that go into something, and so you put those up next to each other, and they're giving you very different interpretations of the same thing. And I don't want to say they're in conflict with each other. I mean, that doesn't even make sense to say, like, could you take out one portion of one of the paintings and put in the other one as though you're blending them together in some way? That doesn't make sense, but they are both relevant. So, in the same way, when we talk about these questions like what does it mean to be human? I want to hear from the scientist, I want to hear from the theologian, and I want to try to integrate that into a bigger, more coherent picture without blending them in ways that don't make sense for the integrity of their own disciplines.

Randy 32:54

Yeah, okay, again, I'm in I'm staying in the elevator. Yeah, man, that's that's good stuff.

Kyle 32:58

And I think I think Gould would totally agree with you. I don't, I think he gets um misunderstood a lot. And um the value part of religion, yeah, misinterpreting the I think he's more focused on methods than factual claims or anything like that. But yeah, he uses a similar artistic metaphor, even so I think everything you say is well within the spirit, but we could argue about that later. Um good, fascinating. I'm very tempted to ask you another stupidly huge question, which is what is human nature? But maybe maybe I shouldn't do that.

Randy 33:28

I don't know. Um for part two with Jim, we'll just focus on that question and that question alone.

Kyle 33:34

Yeah, it gets very sticky when you take evolution seriously, what human nature could possibly be. Um you're not gonna ask me that question.

Randy 33:42

I don't think Randy's gonna let me.

Jim 33:43

Okay.

Randy 33:44

Can you can you answer it in like a minute, Jim?

Jim 33:47

In one minute. So I think the really interesting part of that, uh, part of the answer to that when we bring in evolution and we bring in theology is to ask the question do we differ in degree from other creatures, or are we a difference in kind? And the insights that I have gleaned from from the sciences and from theology is that both of those are kind of true. We are in continuity with the rest of creatures, and the cap the capacities that we have came from somewhere, right? So there's an evolutionary story. You pick any one of the any one of the supposedly distinctive traits of humans that you want to, and there's increasingly an evolutionary story about how that developed, and you see hints and precursors of that in other species. So there's a continuity between us and the rest of the rest of creation, but then there's something in the human context that makes that amazingly different, amazingly different. So the chapter in the book there was the the metaphor of if everything was a rose bush and then you come across a redwood tree. Well, yeah, there are kind of differences of degree, but the difference of degree is so huge you can't but say we're dealing with something very different here.

Kyle 35:08

Yeah, but still different in degree. See, this why I didn't want to ask, because now I want to argue about it. Like differences of degree can be vast and very impressive if you just encounter them in that fashion, right? I I want to quote Darwin, but I'm not gonna do it.

Randy 35:23

You're just now you're making moving on. Now you're making it my fault if we move on. All the listeners are like, come on, quote Darwin.

Kyle 35:30

I will ask that, I will ask this. Is there is there any religious significance for you to there being a difference of kind? If it turned out that there weren't, would it would it beological?

Jim 35:41

I think that's the right question to ask. And so we're on our podcast just just about to come out with a series on extinctions. So there's going to be a three-part series about extinction, and we go through some of the history of it. And but it ends with uh asking about what if humans went extinct? Would that disrupt the the gospel story? And would God have to enter into relationship with octopuses or something in order to become image bearers? Uh I think that's really fascinating to ask. Um, I think our answers are wildly speculative. So I don't think that uh a lot rides on saying, yes, we are a difference in kind, in the sense that no matter what direction the story goes, my view of sovereignty is high enough that the good guys win in the end, that God is going to have God's way to and that it may come through tragedy. So I mean the creation care stuff, the climate change stuff. I'm sheesh, the the more I read in that, the less optimistic I am that things are going to end well for our species. But I continue to uh believe and I'm committed to that God can do pretty remarkable things out of bad circumstances. And if we do something really, really stupid to our species and we cease to exist, I think God has a way of uh redeeming even that.

Kyle 37:19

So kind of related to that a little bit. At one point in the book, you use enough I've heard similar metaphors before, but you do it particularly nicely. This metaphor, the creation week, but you put it into an evolutionary time scale.

Randy 37:32

I like that.

Kyle 37:33

And it turns out that the like the humans come into being at like the last 13 seconds or something of the last hour of the last day of the week. On a week, right? Yeah. Um what do you think that metaphor suggests about the significance of humans in the universe? Anything? Does that have to be a little bit more?

Jim 37:51

Well, I used it to try for the for the shock value of saying if you think we're the main characters of this story, you don't know the whole story, right? Um the problem is there are uh all sorts of issues with induction of looking at what's happened and trying to predict the way things might go. I mean, maybe the universe is going to exist for a hundred billion more years and we are there for all of it. Because then if you do the the same sort of metaphor, we'll have been around since Monday rather than only since 1159 and 47 seconds on Saturday night. So a lot depends on how much longer things go. But the point of that metaphor was to try to show that we're certainly not the only thing God's concerned about. And if most of God's time has been spent fusing heavy elements in stars, maybe God likes that in some level. And we need to not denigrate the the creative process and think that the only thing that matters is is what pops out at the end of the process. So I don't think I mean that metaphor too is to try to show that all the other parts of creation are not just for us, for our sake, that God can delight in the rest of creation for its own sake and that it's it's good irrespective of us.

Randy 39:15

It's interesting because I enjoyed that metaphor for the reasons that you guys are talking about, the you know, putting on display how we have been around, humans have been around in creation in the universe for a blink of an eye compared to everything else. But I thought it was really effective at putting on display how the creation story itself in Genesis 1 and 2, but particularly Genesis 1, was told. And it seems very similar. I mean, I'm I don't know if you meant to do it, but saying, well, let's imagine that this happened in a week and here's how that played out. And it's not obviously a one-to-one apples to apples comparison that that chart that you laid out, but it reminded me remarkably of the poem that is the creation story in Genesis 1, talking about how God brought order and function to the world and to the to the earth, and how God put all these things together and human beings are the last. It just re- it's all I read it and I was like, this is similar to Genesis 1, and I like it because it shows in some really just kind of a really fun example. This is a poem that's talking about something that happened over the course of billions of years, perhaps, right? I liked that.

Jim 40:25

It was intentional. I've I've seen the same thing done on the scale of a year and even on the scale of a day, but I picked the scale of a week very much for those resonances from good. Well done. Well done. It works. Genesis one. And I should say I did some of the math wrong during that part. Uh the calculation of when the dinosaurs were around was off by about two hours. There's like two people who might notice. I was gonna say, we'll never forgive you, Jim. So but it's deeply embarrassing because I was a math media.

Randy 40:54

Now everybody knows. Yeah, yeah, there you go. Um, if we could fast forward in the book quite a bit, um, I really um loved when you started talking about the matters of the soul, um, because the philosopher to my right has disrupted some things if uh in listeners talking about he's a materialist and I think he's a hair terrible person because of it. But um, but uh I liked the way you kind of scientifically a little bit talked about maybe if a soul's real, this is possibly how it came into existence, how God brought that about. Can you for just just for the sake of our listeners who haven't read the book, which you guys should read the book, um can you talk about your theories, your your imaginings on perhaps how a human soul, but I'm just gonna calling a soul, you can call it whatever you want, Jim, came into existence.

Jim 41:47

Yeah, so my uh further elaboration of it might uh be more to Kyle's liking than to yours.

Randy 41:58

Let me cut you off, actually, because I want to read this quote. I'm I'm pissed that you just said that, Jim. Um, I'm kidding. Uh I'm gonna I'm just gonna quote Francis Crick because I really like this quote in as we talk about is a soul real and how did they come into existence, all this stuff. Francis Crick, for those of you who don't know, he's a molecular biologist who helped discover the double helix structure of the DNA molecule. Big deal. And he wrote this, and I'm quoting from your book where you quoted him You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their attendant molecules. You called that scientific reductionism. And I find it deeply unsatisfying because of because it is incapable of doing justice to our experiences as subjects. This is what you said. And I completely agree with you. So now you can go to my bubble, Jim.

Jim 43:00

Well, maybe we're gonna find a way to all ag agree here. I doubt it. Agree with me. Um I want to go back to to the way I was describing the way science and theology are related and to use to lean in a little more heavily into the metaphor of language here, that it's like we're using different languages to describe the same thing. So the the quote that you just read from Francis Crick there is the language of science. If you look with microscopes, that's what you're gonna see in us. Yes, you can put our body up on the operating table and treat it like an object that follows stateable laws, right? Yep. But that language doesn't describe the reality of our experience of things like love and beauty, and I would say even truth and rationality. We have to shift into a different discourse. Course to talk about those things, to talk about those parts of us. So I lean heavily in my own thinking of this from the old Jewish philosopher, Martin Buber, the I and the Thou, where he he says, we can treat somebody like an object, but as soon as you reduce it away, you reduce away the humanness of them when you use just the scientific language to talk about them. So we shift into talking about intentions and desires. And I'm not willing to reduce those to just an effect we don't yet know about how atoms interacting with each other bring something about. So that's the part that I'm agreeing with you, Randy. Yes, yes. Where I'm probably agreeing with Kyle is I'm not so sure I have to change my ontology in order to accommodate that. I'm not so sure that I have to say, and therefore a soul is this immaterial substance that's what, like hovering around me somehow. I I'm I like to think I know the arguments and that sort of thing. And particularly to theology, I think the biggest question is talking about eternal life and how is this me. But I'm not so sure that we have to invoke a different sort of ontology in that regard to say there's some other thing then that is the soul. So this chapter of the book you're talking about, I say what I mean is that me, that first person experience, that hope, that desire, that love that I can't use scientific language for without missing an awful lot of what I take to be real. So uh some people argue against uh Crick and that kind of reductionism by calling it nothing buttery, nothing but ism or something, to say, am I nothing but a pile of atoms? I mean, that's that's where I want to say the language of science is true, but it's incomplete. It doesn't tell everything there is to know about me, to just give here's how many atoms that make up your body, and here's the relationships that they are to other atoms. You could you could tell that, and I I don't think you're getting at what it what it means to experience the world as a human being or whatever, right? So there is something else. There is the the soul, if you want to keep using that that word. I'm happy to keep using that word, but to mean I I'm talking about this first person aspect that needs a personal language to describe and to talk about. A pile of atoms doesn't have intentions. I have intentions.

Kyle 46:51

Yeah.

Jim 46:52

And I think it's really fascinating, and I'm I'm working right now on a on a follow-up to this, that the the mere fact of life is not just some happy coincidence that atoms get in the right relationship to each other and then poof, something else happens. There's something there's something different, it's an it's an ontological difference for something to be a living thing. And I'm not sure you need another ontological difference or a different substance at least to say that it's a conscious thing or that it's a human or that it has a soul.

Kyle 47:26

That's interesting. I would think it would the more common view would be the opposite of that. That there is a if there is any ontological distinction, it's most likely on the side of the consciousness rather than on the side of the biological life.

Randy 47:40

That's an aside. Um I've got more questions about the soul. Do you want to follow up on that?

Kyle 47:44

Go for it, go for it. I mean, I I think this is just a really good illustration of NOMA. That I mean, the problem with Krick's view is he violated it. He's he's doing metaphysics under guys that sounds value laden.

Jim 47:56

So he's forcing one language, one discourse to answer questions that are in a different discourse.

Randy 48:04

When you speak of NOMA, what are you talking about?

Kyle 48:05

That note non-overlapping thing where they have their lands and they should really kind of stay within their methodological distinctions.

Randy 48:11

Got it. Okay, I like that. So in fleshing out maybe how a s a soul or that part of you know the the object, maybe, or whatever whatever part of a human has this capacity to love and see beauty and truth and goodness and all that stuff. Um, you have a chapter about how language kind of facilitated maybe there's a process of a soul coming into an existence or us humans having that capacity to relate to the world around them and themselves in that in that capacity. And you highlighted Helen Keller in her store in her story, which I didn't know very well, but I loved this. I found this really interesting, this quote from Helen Keller's autobiography. I'm gonna read it to you and then ask for you to just flesh this out for us, elaborate on it. Helen Keller in her autobiography said this before my teacher came to me. So this is can you fill in the precursor to this quote, Jim? Just who is Helen Keller?

Jim 49:10

Yeah, so Helen Keller from a very young age had a disease that rendered her blind and deaf. And um, so then her teacher comes to her and teaches her sign language by making signs in her hand, because remember, she's also blind. Yes. So she's growing up, I forget what age she was, nine or something, by the time the teacher comes to her and she starts to learn a language that uh go ahead and finish the quote and then we'll finish my story.

Randy 49:40

She says, Before my teacher came to me, I did not know that I am. I lived in a world that was a no-world, not a world. I cannot hope to describe adequately that unconscious yet conscious time of nothingness. I did not know that I knew aught or that I lived or acted or desired. I had neither will nor intellect. I was carried along to objects and acts by a certain blind natural impetus. My inner life, then, was a blank without a past, present or future, without hope or anticipation, without wonder or joy or faith.

Jim 50:18

That description is fascinating to me when I first came across it. And as part of this uh chapter, I read a couple other books on feral children, so children that somehow got separated from parents and were in some cases literally raised by wolves. There was an example in India of two girls that were living with a den of wolves from very early on and never formed language. And there were some other fascinating ones in Europe that people were found like in their teens, or one person even later, that had been completely outside of all human community, and then human community discovers them, brings them into, but they never learned language after that. If they were of such an age, if you don't have it by this point, you never get it, and you never become this functioning member of our community. So Helen Keller was young enough that she did learn language, but was able to reflect back on what it was like not to be a linguistic being. And you, I mean, her words were I wasn't a self.

Randy 51:28

Yeah.

Jim 51:29

Talking about the self is the way I talk about the soul. This is me. I'm not saying the soul is some part of me, but it's an aspect of me. It's a different way of talking about me. And she's I she said, I what and the description you get there, you can very easily see this must be the way it is to be an animal, and maybe even a fairly advanced animal. And maybe there's a scale, maybe this isn't just a simple either-or. And I just got to hang out with an octopus at the Boston uh aquarium, and man, are they remarkable creatures? And chimpanzees, dogs, wow, it feels like we can like suck them into our community in a sense. That they become beings that maybe have some glimmering of food. But but this description of Helen Keller, it was no, I'm just acting by instinct. I just act by instinct until she becomes a linguistic being. One of the one of the parts of that that it wasn't in here was when she said, It was remarkable when I learned that things had names. And our our sort of basic understanding of language is just sort of that that we call this a book and this a computer and this a chair, but that's the most basic level of of language that then it it just ratchets up the more we're drawn into the world that is created by language. So another philosopher I like to read on these things, Ernst Kassier has some quote of we live, we who have a symbolic language. So note this is different from communicating. Trees communicate, everything that's alive communicates in some way, but to have a fully symbolic language the way do we do, Kassier says that puts us into a different world. We live in a different world because of that. And think about how much of our interaction is mediated through symbols. Right now, the react the physical reality of what I'm staring at are these little pixels on a screen that light up in just the right way. That's the physical reality. That's not what I'm looking at, though. That's not what I see. I see you guys. I look at text on a page, I don't see little splotches of ink, I see concepts. Yes, right, that draws us into a very different world. And that's what my claim was. So that that section of the book about the soul was language is like the last step that of us ratcheting up. And I think the rest of our bodies are important in that regard, too. So that that section started with standing upright and walking as bipeds and what that does to our way of being. That's pretty remarkable, the embodiedness of our way of being.

Kyle 54:23

Yeah, can you maybe briefly just describe some of that a little bit about you know, really pragmatically, how you know having opposable thumbs made such a huge difference, sort of like brain size and stuff like that. Because that was a really fascinating part of the book.

Jim 54:37

Standing up on two legs matters. You have hands now that are free. You have hands that you can grasp things, and lots of people think it's important that the opposable thumb part that we're the only, I mean, chimpanzees and bonobos can't do that, they can't touch each finger to their thumb. So we have this remarkable ability to manipulate things, so that immediately brings you into tool use that brings you into a very different way of being. There are other animals that use tools, but not nearly to the extent. This is another one of those difference of degree versus difference of kind. So yeah, chimpanzee can pull down a stick and take the leaves off of it and stick it into a termite mound. Is that it the same? I mean, building a computer is a pretty huge difference of degree in terms of tool use than sticking a stick into a termite mound. Another aspect, though, of standing upright that I just think is really fascinating is how it forces us to become a more cooperative species. So uh when chimpanzee babies are born, only the mother touches the baby for about the first six months of its life. It's a very intensive sort of uh experience that you're on your own there, mom. The others might come around you and watch, but it's not like they're helping to care for it. And the baby grabs the hair on mom's back, and mom walks away on four legs, and it's fairly stable. If you don't have a hairy body and you're standing upright, how are you gonna keep hold of baby? You got to use an arm. One of your arms now is used to hold this baby for moms. And if you're gonna climb a tree, if you need to go out foraging, that is a massive, massive, you know, liability to have to account for. And you'd think that natural selection wouldn't be very favorable to creatures that operate that way. But what if instead of mom not being the sole person responsible for that baby, that she can hand it off to somebody else when she goes out to forage or needs to climb a tree? And the communities that started to cooperate like that were the ones that became successful. And that cooperation ratchets up even further. It's remarkable how many of the fossils of ancient humans have injuries or disease that would have been debilitating and yet somehow they were kept alive. Probably lots of them happened when you're out trying to hunt the megafauna of the day and you get injured. But then those people weren't just cast away, they were cared for by their community. So you you go from this cooperation to this caring and community, that that's what made us so successful. Almost certainly, Homo sapiens coming up into Europe and encountering Neanderthals, Neanderthals were not nearly as cooperative, they didn't live as an in as big of societies. That I don't I don't think the the standard view now is that we outcompeted them as much as we out-cooperated them. And that leads to a very different kind of life, and I think one that's consistent then with talking about faith. That these if you want to get if you want to get creatures who are capable of love, before you can love, you're gonna have to be able to care. And before you can care, you're gonna have to be able to cooperate. And so again, there's a there's a natural story that can be told about that, but that doesn't mean that that's all that it is, right? So you you can see that this is a way that that uh the desired kind of creature might come to be. This is how you'd create a being like that.

Randy 58:26

So in these conversations about a soul, about you know, a species developing to a point where they are sentient and they are um can communicate. You this is you know, direct quote from the book is you say it is language that gives us a soul. As I'm reading this, I'm thinking, what's next? What's next in the evolutionary kind of you know journey? And also what's next seems to be in our moment artificial intelligence. And so when you speak of language giving us a soul, it makes me think about AI. Can you imagine a future in which sentient AI, if that even is a possibility? So do you think that's a possibility? And if so, do we need to start having conversations about uh computers and artificial intelligence and souls?

Jim 59:12

I think it's a possibility. So philosophers use words like possibility in a fairly precise way that doesn't indicate at all how probable I think it is, but I I think it the probability is not zero. Um, I think also that if they became sentient in in that way, that it would be different from humanity.

Randy 59:35

Saying that word the wrong way, is that right?

Kyle 59:37

I don't think you were. I think either one is fine.

Randy 59:39

What did you say? I said sentient, you said sentient, and now I feel inadequate.

Jim 59:44

I would say sentient, but then sentients. Oh one is a noun, one's a one's an adjective. It does not matter. Okay, all right, sorry, I cut you off. Good luck trying to find where artificial intelligence would be human intelligence, okay, in the same way that octopuses are really intelligent, but they don't have human intelligence. Okay, and the mode of being, the body, the embodiment is is crucial in that regard, in my in my view. Um, what can they become? I mean, so the language part is tricky in this rebuk in this regard, because right now they're really good parrots. They're really good. I mean, artificial intelligence is really good at grabbing language and even mixing it up a little bit and spitting it back out in ways that that is remarkable. I'm not persuaded yet that they're doing the same thing we're doing when we do language, though. Um could that become could that become intelligent in the the sort of general intelligence way? I I'm not gonna say it can't. Um But you are asking about the next stage in our own evolutionary development. No, no, more just in reality.

Randy 1:01:02

Related to computers, or if if there's a future where artificial intelligence can develop a language like we're talking about here, does that mean that they're it's its own being, that it has it could develop a soul? What were there any consequences for that I idea that says language gives us a soul?

Jim 1:01:19

Yeah, so in the way I'm using the word soul, they would have a soul if they became sentient beings, sentient beings, sorry. Yeah, that's that's they would have a view on reality.

Kyle 1:01:35

What do you how do you think about the the necessity of the evolutionary process and the formation of a person then? Because it seems like we've short circuited all that. If if we can just invent a person, maybe we're imitating processes in ourselves that we don't quite understand, and we through brute force of computing power are able to create something that's beyond us, but like we've just skipped evolution entirely.

Jim 1:01:59

Does that mean that it was never Yeah, we're already doing that with ourselves in some degree? I mean, medical care is a short circuit of the evolutionary process. CRISPR and being able to edit our genome is a massive short circuit of the evolutionary process. So that in itself um maybe doesn't worry me. Uh the way the way that it's going with with uh AI is a little troubling, um, depending on the kind of controls that are put in place. I mean, how much whether it's sentient or not, if I give it instructions like increase my financial portfolio, and it knows enough of the code to understand what I mean by that, and says, Well, uh, looks like these stocks that you own would benefit if there was a revolution in this country in Africa where you have stock in the neighboring country. So I'm also connected to social media, so I'm gonna start a revolution there. And I mean, that stuff's not wildly unrealistic right now, and you don't need sentience for that. So, my concern is more along those lines. The I just recently read the transcript of the guy from Google that got fired for saying that their AI really might be sentient now. Yeah, and it was the conversation he was having with the AI about a soul. Did it have a soul? And I've seen enough AI now that it so to me looked like it was just regurgitating other other words that it had come across on the internet related these things rather than persuading me somehow that it did have a soul. But if it did, would we give it rights? Would we give it my my big question is would we get would we assign moral responsibility to it? Right now, we would not hold the car, so self-driving cars, we'd we wouldn't hold the car morally responsible for running onto the sidewalk and killing somebody. We would hold the programmers responsible for doing that, right? So that's the test in my book to say if we get to the point where we say nope, it's morally responsible, then I'm happy to say that it has a soul.

Kyle 1:04:20

It's morally responsible. Yeah, that's way too soon for me. That's that's fascinating. Yeah. Whole other conversation though.

Randy 1:04:28

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