The One You Feed - Mike McHargue (Science Mike)

Episode Date: November 8, 2016

Please Support The Show With a Donation   This week we talk to Mike McHargue about beliefs Mike McHargue (better known as Science Mike) is the best-selling author of Finding God in the Waves, host of Ask Science Mike and co-host of The Liturgists Podcast. He's a leading voice on matters of science and religion with a monthly reach in the hundreds of thousands. Among other outlets, Mike has written for RELEVANT, Don Miller's Storyline, BioLogos, and The Washington Post.  In This Interview, Mike McHargue and I Discuss... The One You Feed parable His new book, Finding God in the Waves His analogy of our brains being like the government Where God is found in our brains That if you continually analyze your relationship with a person, eventually that relationship will be less emotionally based and more intellectually based That the arts as well as anything looked at or experienced as a whole rather than reductively will help feed your "romantic" wolf in a relationship His journey from the Southern Baptist Church to losing his faith to where he is today His faith today is a posture of gratitude, surrender, an awareness that life is just something that we have that we didn't do anything to receive and it is a rare and precious gift and that he extends that gratitude to God (which is found in our unique human capacity to love) For more show notes visit our websiteSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

We've never been a clean, rational-acting species. We've always been a contradictory mess. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like, garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf.

I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like... Why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor? What's in the museum of failure? And does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. floor, what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to reallynoreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast,

or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really No Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Mike McHarg, better known as Science Mike. He is the bestselling author of Finding God in the Waves. He's also the host of Ask Science Mike and co-host of The Liturgist Podcast. He's a leading voice on matters of science and religion with a monthly reach in the hundreds of thousands. Among other outlets, Mike has also written for Relevant, Don Miller's Storyline, BioLogos, and The Washington Post. Our goal is to get to 5% of our listeners supporting the show. Please be part of the 5% that make a contribution and allow us to keep putting out these interviews and ideas.

We really need your help to make the show sustainable and long-lasting. Again, that's OneYouFeed.net slash support. Thank you in advance for your help. And here's the interview with Mike McHarg. Hi, Mike. Welcome to the show. So glad to be here. Thanks for having me on. I'm happy to talk with you. Your new book is called Finding God in the Waves, and it's your story of being a Christian, losing your faith, and then finding it again, and science's role in that. So we've got a lot of really interesting things to talk about, but let's start like we always do with the parable. There's a grandfather who's

talking with his grandson. He says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops, and he thinks about it for a second, and he looks up at his grandfather, and he says, well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and

in the work that you do? It's one of my favorites because today I mainly view my life experiences and human consciousness through neuroscience. And that very ancient parable does a really good job of explaining a lot of what we understand about the brain today in that we tend to experience our consciousness as kind of this single experience. We feel like we're in control of all our thoughts and our actions and feelings most of the time.

But what is more the case is that dozens, even hundreds of different structures in our brain have competing priorities and impulses that vie for influence over our behaviors. And our actions and feelings are a messy conflict and consensus that arises from all the different parts of our brain. And what's interesting is the agency we have primarily in our higher brain does have a say in what parts of the brain we reinforce and what behaviors we reinforce and which ones we don't. And we really do have two neurological wolves and face a choice in every reaction, what part of the brain we're going to emphasize our response.

And that's not only my approach to life, it's also how I try to help other people approach spirituality. Traditionally, in America at least, faith has been Christian, and that Christian faith has been based on a lot of really rigid theological assumptions that most people today have trouble with, myself included. theological assumptions that most people today have trouble with, myself included. And so I've kind of flipped the script a little bit and studied the teachings of this wisdom tradition more through neuroscience than through theology. And so you talk a lot about this in the book. There's lots of analogies that you use. You use one of our brains being like the government. Can you maybe walk us through that one? Because I

think it's a very useful metaphor for what you just described. We tend to associate most with our identity with our consciousness. And in our consciousness, we mainly associate that with a part of the brain called the prefrontal cortex, and that's right behind your forehead. And the thing about your prefrontal cortex is it only has a very limited influence over your actions and your feelings. And there's a couple ways to illustrate that. One, if I were to toss a ball at you unexpectedly, you'd reach out and catch the ball without thinking about it, without making a conscious choice. Or if someone cuts you off in traffic, you might get angry. Or if someone physically threatens you, you might be afraid. And all those things happen without your conscious choice. And so we can think of our prefrontal cortex as our brain's president or CEO. And the

president's in charge of a lot of executive function, but doesn't actually know what's happening in most of the government's operations. Imagine asking any president for the bill of materials in an aircraft carrier, or even the pencil sharpener in his secretary's office, right? All of these things would mystify the president, because he only makes high level decisions. And it's just like that with your brain. It's as if you had an organization as complicated as the US government with millions of employees, all their job, going about their business, and mostly without the knowledge of the people at the top of the organizational chart. And that's the reason, for example, we can struggle with conflicting impulses like, I'd really like to lose weight and I'd also like to eat a doughnut right now and that's different parts of your brain

trying to influence your behavior to different ends in the book you talk about this idea that I'm probably not going to say this exactly right but I think you'll know where I'm going that there are parts of our brain that respond to prayer and meditation or to God, as you will. And you make the point at a lot of different points that one of the ways you've been able to get past some of the intellectual hurdles that you face around Christianity is by the felt experience of God, and that that's happening in a particular part of the brain and can be trained, for lack of a better word. That's exactly right. We tend to think of most ideas in

Western society as these propositions, these rational ideas. But when you look at some of the things we value the most, they're not rational and they're not linguistic in origin. So if you have someone you love a lot, you love this person more than anyone else, you want to spend your life with them, maybe get married, maybe just be committed partners. And I were to say, why do you love that person? You might stammer and be confused. And your partner might be a little offended. You don't know why you love me. But what it turns out is that experience is so deep in your brain and so deep in your lived experience,

you don't associate language with it at all. It's in different parts of the brain. So, for example, we understand language happens a lot in your temporal lobes, especially your left temporal lobe. And if we brain scanned you and asked you why you love your spouse, the temporal lobe wouldn't really be involved at first. It would have to slowly try to make words out of this feeling or this experience. And in human brains, God is understood in much the same way. It's more like a feeling and an experience that we come to through lived experiences, through actions in our lives,

and less through rational analysis or debate or inquiry. You mentioned how we feel about our partner. I thought there was a section in the book that was really fascinating where you talked about this focus. I'll just read it. You say, over time, this focus on analytical thinking at the expense of affectionate activity reshapes the neurological image we hold of our partner. So basically you're saying that in this way, you can actually recondition your brain to stop experiencing love for your partner. Can you describe the scenario you were talking about there? Yeah, if you imagine a couple, and when relationships start, they're very exciting.

And we spend a lot of time talking to each other, getting to know each other, but also doing little shared experiences. We hold hands, we take walks, we share meals and do all these bonding rituals. And as people get more comfortable, they do that less. And then conflict enters the relationship because as you learn to know someone better, you find that you don't actually agree on everything. Maybe some things you used to be quiet about that you disagreed on. Maybe the arrangement of the plates on the table or whatever trivial thing it is that you finally can't be quiet about anymore causes a fight or conflict. And our tendency is to go into our

separate corners and try to figure out what happened, to understand rationally what's happening with the relationship. And that kind of thinking happens primarily in your brain's prefrontal cortex. And your prefrontal cortex isn't highly associated with an emotional response. And so we have an expectation that we have this emotional resonance, this shared love and relationships in our society. And if you continually, rationally analyze your relationship, slowly but surely, you will change the way your brain associates with this person away from a primarily emotional experience and towards basically an intellectual only experience. And then you may one day say, well, gosh, I just don't feel in love with this person anymore.

And that's largely been a result of using analytical thinking instead of actual bonding experiences with the person. So it's really important anytime you're in a relationship that's starting to falter that you feed the romantic wolf instead of simply the intellectual wolf because it's the romantic wolf that will keep you invested in another person over decades i think i know where you're going to go with this but do you have any practices or approaches to getting us in touch with that other side of our brain, that side of our brain that's not as rational or analytic? It would depend on the context, but in a general sense, anything you do with the arts is going to create an emotional resonance that's not necessarily

analytic in nature. If you really enjoy music or sculpture or painting, whatever kind of art did you enjoy, you know, even a good novel, anything that encourages you to be kind of swept away and to look at things holistically instead of reductively will push you into that other reference frame. That's a great one. So let's dive into your story a little bit more, and I'm going to condense it. I sort of gave a very condensed version at the beginning, but really your book is about your journey from being in a fundamentalist Baptist church to really losing your faith and your belief in God entirely, and then, I guess, finding what I would call maybe a third way. You know, it's not what you had before, and it's not the atheism, right? It's something new.

It's a new way in which you engage both that scientific part of yourself that you could no longer deny, and the religious or spiritual part of yourself that you also couldn't deny. Can you tell me a little bit about what that looks like for you today? Well, yeah. I think, first of all, it's a really common American journey. People are leaving their faith traditions in record numbers all across the country. So I've told my story, which is very personal, but understanding that it would be something that resonated with a lot of people today.

Anyone in America has some opinion about God. And what I was trying to do in my own life was deal with that longing for mystery and beauty that I kind of tickled a little bit through secular humanism, but it still wasn't the same. And today, my faith is no longer a bunch of fact claims. I'm not trying to use my faith to impose a moral view on others, for example, or make claims about how the universe was formed. But instead, it's much more of a posture of gratitude and surrender, an awareness that life is just something I have, that I didn't do anything to receive, that is a very precious and rare gift. And I have to extend that gratitude for my existence somewhere. And I extend it toward God. But God is not something I try to define so precisely as I used to. God is now a stand-in for what I see as a unifying part

of the human experience. And that's our unique capacity to love. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer.

We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Bryan Cranston is with us today. How are you, too? Hello, my friend.

Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really, No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really, No Really. Yeah, really. No really.

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That's oneufeed.net slash support. Please go and give. We really need your help. We need the people who are listening to the show and getting value out of the show to support the show. Thank you. away from faith completely. What happened was, and again, you can correct anything I get wrong here, but you had sort of a personal crisis in your life that drove you to read the Bible more fervently in a search for answers. And by reading the Bible, I think you say four times in one year, you came up against what the Bible was really saying and what you know to be true based on science, and that was kind of what caused the initial sort of shattering of your faith. And so your way back has been less analytical, right? You're not trying to claim that this is. I'm curious, though, what you think brought you back to Christianity specifically, because you're saying that God is this, you know, as Joseph

Campbell said, you know, God is a metaphor, right, for basically that which is unexplainable. Yeah. And yet, you do have it in a framework of the Christian religion. Do you think that's just because that was the tradition that you were in and it's the best container that you know of for you? Or can you help me understand that particular piece? Yeah, I mean, I spent 30 years developing a very rich network associated with a God belief in my brain. And it's uniquely associated with the life and teaching of Jesus. So, when I would try to take this metaphor of what we can't explain and, you know, approach it via, and I did try Buddhism and Hinduism and even some Islam. It was a very wandering path back to my rough Christianity that I carry now. God only opened up, the mystery only opened up to me through Jesus, which I totally think is almost certainly just based on my cultural context and

my childhood and the unique role that Jesus played in basically getting me through my childhood. I was a really bullied kid. And when I would hide from other kids on the playground and just spend the whole 22 minutes praying, Jesus never made fun of me, right? So I have this lifelong comfort association with that name and that identity. And I basically just quit fighting it on the other side of skepticism that this is for me an indispensable part of how I relate to God. But it's not that I'm claiming that that's the only way for anyone I relate to God. But it's not that I'm claiming that, like, that's the only way for anyone to relate to God. It's just the only way I know to relate to God. Right. And you talk about how you have these two sides to you, this rational, analytic side that,

if it looks at it rationally, can find no evidence for God. You know, it's, it looks at, you know, science paints things to appear as basically a meaningless universe. So you've got that side of you, then you've got the side of you that has faith and has this experience of God. And you've basically said, I'm just going to stop letting those two get in arguments with each other. I'm sort of paraphrasing your words, but is that an accurate way to put that? That's a great assessment. I've learned that there's moments in my life where I pick up the lens of the skeptic, especially if I'm evaluating fact claims or facing a very ambiguous moral issue. How do I make a good ethical decision? I've actually found that humanists offer some really excellent tools through secular philosophy

in making those kinds of decisions. But other times when I'm trying to appreciate awe or beauty or trying to love someone who's relatively unlovable, at those moments it's more helpful for me to lean in more into my Christian identity. And this really confuses a lot of people. But I think it's actually a more true representation of how human consciousness works that in a lot of ways the the Enlightenment has minimized or pushed back on that we've never been a clean but rational acting species we've always been a contradictory mess and I just try to

figure out which way of thinking works best in which situation and then just hold it very lightly. If all you have is a hammer, right, everything becomes a nail. There's different tools for the job, right? You're better off if you can be like, all right, which tool in the tool bag do I want to pull out for this situation, which it sounds like you're doing. You wrote in the book, you said, I've stopped trying to deny, starve, or otherwise do away with either of those sides. And that has led to a longer lasting sense of peace in my life than I've ever had. Because even back when I was a young Christian, I was still a science nerd. And so in those days, I tried to keep the science mind just amped up enough to help me understand things, but not so much it challenged my faith.

And ultimately, that wasn't tenable. And so my appreciation for science ended up kind of killing my faith. But then after a while, that longing couldn't be suppressed any longer. I've learned to embrace both. And in doing so, really not only become more comfortable with myself and more peaceful, but frankly, probably a better husband, a better friend, a better person to be around because I'm no longer struggling with my own sense of identity. Right. You're embracing and allowing all the parts of you to actually be there instead of trying to shut one of them off at any given

time or lock it in a room. And I think a lot of people have this problem in that parts of who they are and how they've grown as a person don't fit cleanly with people they socially identify with. My friends who are skeptics get very uncomfortable with my appreciation for mystery and what I would call the divine. And my friends who are Christians, even very progressive Christians, are uncomfortable with the degree to which I am a skeptic. And it's difficult for social animals like us to not want to bow to that social pressure to fit in. And one thing that excites me about the way our society seems to be growing and the way people are moving away from these strict social camps in a lot of ways, at least in regards

to faith, is maybe we'll finally give people the freedom to figure out who they are and to live into their own sense of identity. Yeah. And you talk a lot in the book about the benefits of church, take away the spiritual piece of it, but the benefits of being part of a community and, you know, having that around you. And, and I think about that a lot. I'm not a Christian, I'm not a churchgoer. I'm a big fan of Elaine de Botton's book, Religion for Atheists. Oh yeah, that one's great. You know, and I recognize this missing thing in society that we seem to culturally be having a hard time figuring out how to fill. You know, we've got this kind of loneliness epidemic right now. And part of that is because

a lot of the civic institutions in this country, including the church, really let people down. lot of the civic institutions in this country, including the church, really let people down. And there's been a necessary reaction to some of the authoritarian and abusive power structures that we've built. But the outcome of that is people who don't have a sense of belonging or community like they used to. So, you know, what I like to think about a lot is how can we redeem the good parts of these social experiences. I cite in the book one study that someone who joins a church where they feel like they belong has a shift in happiness that's similar to someone who moves from the bottom quartile of income to the top quartile of income. I mean, that's a tremendous shift in personal happiness.

It really is. This question fascinates me for a variety of reasons. I mean, one of them is, I wonder, certainly, I think, as you talk about some of the abuses of the church, and perhaps some of the rigidity, and so that contributes, I think, to some degree, contributes, I think, to some degree to why people aren't going as much. But I also see a society wide move away from belonging in those same ways. And I always wonder, will we as a society sort of reverse that trend? If there were better places, would people go given the nature and the pace of life today? But I think you and I probably look at that problem from different sides, because you're part of a community that does go and is there. And I'm more part of a community that most of the people don't do something like that. So I may just be seeing

one of the more isolated sides. But I'm just, this question does fascinate me. Like, if truly we are losing something, is there a possibility of regaining it? I almost worry that we'll regain it with too much enthusiasm. And the reason I say that is, well, let's look at America in particular for a moment. 44% of people will undergo at least one faith transition in their life. That includes people who are non-religious. So about 44% of non-religious people will undergo a faith transition, which looks like becoming religious. And one of the groups with the highest rates of

producing fundamentalist believers is children of atheists. So atheists tend to have had religious parents. They tend to have reacted to problems with religion. By the way, the data tells us atheists are incredible parents, statistically speaking, and yet their children, and if not their children, then their grandchildren, experience something missing. Let's set fact claims aside for a second. I'm not talking about what's right.

I'm talking about how humans respond to environment. And they tend to join very fundamentalist religious sects for that sense of belonging and identity and meaning and purpose that's very unambiguous, is very cut and dry. And we're seeing that especially today in Western Europe, which has been secularized and now a generation and a half later is having this resurgence of old-timey religion in response to an unreligious society. So I think it's better and more healthy to figure out what are more moderate, more healthy ways to engage in community so that we don't have these kind of overreactions that can even be a little destabilizing to a culture. Yeah, yeah, I agree. And that's one of the things that I think about when I look at the

where you've arrived with your faith is a very nuanced place to be. And nuance and contradiction and lack of certainty is something that the vast majority of people don't do well with. And I'm interested in, I think that is the, that sort of sits at the heart, I think, of being able to build these communities is being comfortable with uncertainty or ambiguity or, you know, I think spirituality by its nature has a, there's paradox in it. And I agree with what you're saying. I think that we see a lot of people running for certainty in this world. And I'm always interested in how we can, like you said, find a middle ground. Yeah, you know, I've thought about this a lot. I wish I had a really definitive answer, but I probably just have more questions. But, you know, is it possible for people to appreciate subtlety and nuance and uncertainty without having had their boxes all fall down a couple times? I mean, the reason I have such an appreciation for the limits of my knowledge is

I've been fundamentally wrong about my worldview twice in a row. And so the third time I said, maybe this time I don't take it so seriously. And I wonder if I would have this posture if I hadn't scrambled my eggs twice. I agree. I think there is something to use your analogy, having your eggs scrambled, that does lead you to finding a more nuanced position. But it is art. And I just wonder about this question in general, because I do think it's a big piece that's sort of causing us society wise to struggle. It comes up on this show over and over and over again. The more people that I talked to, the more this idea of a community around you and how that contributes to a good life is, is inescapable. And it's funny

that I didn't really realize it because the big change in my life, the huge change was going from being an addict to a non addict. And that was accomplished almost solely by community. You know, it was people in recovery meetings, and that that structure that essentially allowed me to make that change. And so I know what the power of that can be. And it's not that I don't attend that anymore, but I don't do it the same frequency. And so that lack of community is something I notice and feel. We evolved in environments where to be alone or even to be in a smaller community was dangerous. It represented real existential danger of death and loss of genetic continuity. Our brains are designed to feel very rewarded and gratified when we exist in a rich, you know, 100 to 150 person community.

And anything less than that really produces anxiety. I'm Jason Alexander and I'm Peter Tilden and together on the Really No Really podcast our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer.

Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's gonna drop by. Mr. Brian Cranston is with us today.

How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really No Really, sir. God bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really, no really.

Yeah, really. No really. Go to reallynoreally.com. And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. It's called Really, No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So let's talk about prayer and meditation. You in the book, you talk about prayer a lot of that's kind of mostly your thing, but you talk about prayer a lot and you compare it to, you know, that it is similar to meditation in a lot of ways. And you say that prayer is the most essential practice for cultivating a God network in human brains,

even for those who doubt God's existence. In other words, if you want to know God, prayer doesn't come after you've answered every one of your nagging questions. It comes before. And I hated that conclusion. Oh man, that was tough for me to write. Because my biggest critique as a skeptic of faith is the whole leap before you look component. But then as I studied, just study after study after study and research and meta-study and secondary research, the conclusion was the same.

There's no amount of rational analysis that can get you to a stable spiritual formation, that it happens through these kinds of experiences like prayer. And that, you know, having defined ideas about God is just not important at all. It's the practice that does it. Well, a couple analogies that I'll make is, one is that idea of, I, for years and years, read about meditation about 20 times more than I ever actually did it. And that did me very little good, except for perhaps increasing my desire to do it. It wasn't until I started really doing it that I got the benefits. And the other thing that you were saying there made me think of is a phrase that I love, which is sometimes you can't think your way into right action. You have to act your way into right thinking.

you have to act your way into right thinking. Oh, that's great. We're storytelling animals. And we tend to deny the animal part a lot. But the reason we love story is it lets us experience consciousness from another's view. But ultimately we have to live our own story, and that happens through action. And I know so many people who say,

I tried to meditate and I failed. You know, you can't fail at meditating, except maybe by thinking you failed at meditation, that might be the only way to do it. And these practices, they're not as mysterious as everyone believes them to be from the outside. They're very easy to pick up and get started with and are just incredibly, incredibly good for your brain. Really, really beneficial in almost every context. They make you more patient, less angry, lower stress, better focus and concentration, just thing after thing after thing after thing. You'll have a more balanced, happier life if you include prayer and meditation. And in the context I speak of prayer, I consider prayer a type of meditation,

so they're not two distinct things. And you say that prayer and meditation work best when you prepare your mind by understanding four core ideas. Could you walk us through real briefly what those are? Yeah, so you want to have intent when you meditate. So you want to have some goal in mind. Even if it's just, I'm meditating. Intention is important. Meditation is based about focusing attention as well. So you have intention and attention. And so you'll want to, in whatever practice you're performing, understand a little bit ahead of time how you're going to use your attention towards your intention. You're going to be non-judgmental. This is the hardest thing

for Americans with meditation, is you don't try to evaluate how your meditation is going. You don't see if you're good at it or bad at it or succeeding or failing. The goal is actually to simply accept what happens. Non-judgment? Non-judgment. And then relax. And that's a big part. So we are a distraction culture. We're always on the go.

We're always on the go. We're always on the move. An important part of any meditative practice is stillness. You will actually find when you first start meditating that it's hard to relax. You don't even know what it feels like. You know what it maybe feels like to plop down on the TV and watch Game of Thrones. You might know what it feels like to, you know, have some other self-medicating behavior. But to be truly still and truly get into a relaxed state of body that can facilitate a relaxed state of mind is something you might have to practice on its own as you move towards a meditative practice. I agree with that. That's definitely

true. You talk about that several factors determine how predisposed someone is to spiritual experiences. You talk about some psychological ones, but you mention a genetic factor and you say such as the God gene. And I've heard that phrase before, but I don't have the foggiest idea what that means. What is the God gene? The funny thing that happens so much in science research about God, or honestly, really, a big pressure on scientists is to not only publish positive results, but to publish results that get some press. So there's nothing that grabs the attention like God and science. I say this with irony, giving my own work. But I try to avoid the kind of non-scientific sensationalism. And so there is a gene that's a real gene,

VMA-T2, that controls someone's propensity to produce certain neurotransmitters that are associated with spiritual experiences. So if you have a high expression of this gene, studies have found, you're more likely, for example, to be clergy or to be religious because the world, I've heard it described basically like you're walking around on a low dose

of a psychotropic drug all the time. And so the world, of course, does seem more magical and more mysterious. The danger of something like the God gene, or another person talked about the God spot in the brain, is you're talking about one contributing factor to how people form beliefs about God and reducing it to the only factor which is not accurate. Yep, yep. Well, it's like, you know, a happiness gene or a depression gene. There's so many factors that go into those conditions that to boil it down to one is a vast oversimplification. Right, exactly.

So we're near the end of time. But before we wrap up, I wanted to read a section from the book that I thought was really good and then allow you to say anything you'd like to about it, and then we'll wrap up. Okay, thank you. So you're kind of talking about your approach to both faith and science. You say, be it Moses's burning bush or Carl Sagan's cosmos, both propel me to a posture of worship, an understanding that I did nothing to get here on this planet at this time and with these people, Understanding that I did nothing to get here, on this planet, at this time, and with these people. And yet, I get to enjoy it all.

Every sunrise, every breakfast at the table with my kids, every skinned knee, and every kiss from my wife. Every song, poem, and yes, every loved one I lose is a gift. To share the joys and sorrows of my friends, to see little ones born and old ones die, all tie me to an incredible cycle of unspeakable beauty that I am part of and the only possible word I have for it is this one God I'm a real sap I just well it's a beautiful passage and I like how kind of what you ultimately what I really liked that you did was you brought both science and faith back to this ultimate mystery. Like even with everything we know about science, we still have no idea really what's going on, like why or how. I mean, there's so many unanswered questions and faith takes you to that same place. It's that openness to the mystery. I think that we talked about

fundamentalist religion, like that in a way can kill all the mystery itself right there. You can lose the mystery on either side. Yeah, you really can. And something beautiful is lost when that happens. And I just wonder what would happen if instead of trying to convince everybody that our little individual brain hack for making it through the world and seeing beauty and mystery and things, if we could just learn to celebrate each other's perspectives and learn from one another how the world would be different if we didn't have wars based on religion and public policies of religious persecution, then that goes both ways, by the way. And if instead we just learn to appreciate the beauty of the fact that we all look at the same night sky

and we all feel small and that we all long for not only connection to each other, but something even greater. Excellent. Well, Mike, thank you so much. This was a lovely conversation. I really enjoyed it. I was very honored to be here. Thanks for having me on. And we'll have links in the show notes to your site, to your new book. How much longer is the book tour going on? All the way through March. So plenty of chances to see me. Just head to

findinggodinthewaves.com slash tour. Excellent. And the book really was very well written. It was one of those to see me just at the findinggodinthewaves.com slash tour. Excellent. And the book really was very well written. It was one of those books that I just, I love when I've got a book to read for an episode that I have a hard time putting down. It makes life easier for sure. And your book was one of those. So very, very, very wonderful.

Thanks. Okay, Mike, take care. You too. All right. Bye. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a donation to the One You Feed podcast. Head over to oneyoufeed.net slash support. You can learn more about Mike McHarg and this podcast at oneufeed.net slash science Mike.