Ep 21: Science Mike—Losing & Finding God

The Christian Transhumanist Podcast

How to lose your religion, disrupt your life, and become a skeptic with faith! Science Mike describes his faith journey, and discusses brain science, space exploration, cryonics, and the oceanification of Miami.

• Mike McHargue's new book: Finding God in the Waves: How I Lost My Faith and Found It Again Through Science, and the website, including more info about him, and his ongoing book tour
• A photo of the moment when Micah and Science Mike unknowingly crossed paths years ago, as extras in the same scene of Blue Like Jazz
• The weird and winding journey of Science Mike
• as explored on the Pete Holmes show
• Conservative evangelicalism. The great things about it, and its failure scenario: evangelicalism produces atheists.
• The fallout of losing faith, personally and relationally
• What it's like to be an atheist working to uphold other people's faith
• How to navigate a relationship across a faith transition
• Ending up as an Empirical Christian Mystic
• God & the Brain
• Why belief in God is beneficial to your brain
• Brain science confirms the mystical idea that attempting to define God precisely is futile
• How to start rebuilding faith in the presence of intense skepticism:
• Science Mike's Axioms of faith
• and Micah's Minimum Viable Theology
• Richard Dawkins vs Science Mike: is religion beneficial or harmful?
• Richard Dawkins assumes conservative authoritarian fundamentalism is the essence of religion, and progressive religion enables it
• Mike McHargue argues that's not true. Authoritarianism is dangerous, but there is a strong move to remove it from religion.
• "I don't know of any more ardent critics of Westboro Baptist Church than my Baptist friends." — Mike McHargue
• Sam Harris on how skepticism often loses important elements of human well-being
• When authoritarianism is eliminated from religion, the strong evidence is that religion becomes a force for good.
• 3 proven nootropics: Exercise, Reading, Prayer
• Reading the Bible in an age of science. Three different approaches:
• NT Wright
• Pete Enns
• A human book about God
• The future of faith
• The world is not becoming more secular. But America and the West appear to be becoming non-institutional
• The church will adapt to this new context. The history of our faith is the retelling of the story of Exodus, in new contexts.
• The West is not becoming atheist, it's becoming less tolerant of boundaries.
• Secular & Sacred:
• Coloring Book by Chance the Rapper - "I'm a force to be reconciled"
• Last Days in the Desert
• Topics for the supernerds
• The (scary!) ramifications of self-improving AI
• Cryonics, ethics & the question of "Who's going to thaw you?"
• Space travel, and the newly-discovered exoplanet Proxima B
• Benefits of solar-system exploration: LIFE INSURANCE!
• Populating other planets in the solar system is a top ethical priority. Should be a top human priority.
• Why fixing climate change may have to wait until we're evacuating Miami
• Why we need to reorient our faith to universal human flourishing
• Why orthodox thinkers, and NT Wright and Richard Rohr offer a more progressive vision for the future of Christianity
• NT Wright's newest book, The Day the Revolution Began: Reconsidering the Meaning of Jesus's Crucifixion
• The book tour — see Science Mike live!