Welcome to Ear Biscuits, I'm Link.
And I'm nervous.
Yeah, man this has been
a long time coming.
Actually, my name is
Rhett, but I am nervous.
Just a quick recap,
we've been--
This week!
You know, you gotta catchphrase it.
I'm off my game, man.
I'm gonna be off my game all day today.
This week at the round table.
This week at the round
table of damn wilding,
I am telling my story of how
I kinda got to where I am
in terms of my belief
and why I don't believe
what I used to believe.
And of course, this is
all in a larger series
that we're doing.
The last two podcasts we
called "The Lost Years"
where we covered you
know, all those stories,
filling in the gaps of how we got
from being engineers to being YouTubers
and the path that we took
which was a little atypical
involved being missionaries for a while.
Yeah, if you haven't listened
to those previous two podcasts,
I recommend listening to those first.
But this one and the next one
are gonna be totally different
than the previous two
because they're going to
be very personal in nature,
very singular in nature.
This is your episode and then
next week will be my episode.
But can I just acknowledge
the conversation
that's happened, is happening?
Oh I got--
You gotta put that on.
I got a buzzer on my--
Link usually doesn't do the timer
and so he doesn't
I gotta turn
the wifi on.
know the system.
So I turn the wifi off?
You just turn the notifications off.
Just wanna acknowledge
how so many of you have
joined in the conversation
using #EarBiscuits, just letting us know
how you're processing our process.
It's been extremely
helpful and encouraging
because I mean this represents
what we perceived as, I was gonna say risk
but I don't really
wanna use the term risk.
I just feel like it
was just a big decision
to share something that's of,
to be vulnerable in this way
and to share these things that
no one's begging us to share
and we're not obligated to share
but we just, as we've said
before two episodes ago,
we've already went into
why we're talking about it
I'm glad we're doing it.
Like I said, it's been a long time coming.
We've been talking about you know,
it would just come up every month
or every couple of months for many years.
It's just when are we gonna talk about
the spiritual aspect of our lives
and that in our faith journey?
I guess you will now.
Knowing that we always would so yeah.
Okay, so before we get into that
I do have a couple of
things to acknowledge.
First of all, for those of
you watching the podcast,
yes, I do have my hair pulled back
into some sort of configuration.
I don't know the technical name for this
and I apologize for it.
If you're the kind of person like me
who judges men who do
this with their hair.
I would call it a sad ponytail.
Yeah.
I think you know when you're..
it just seems like it's
such an interesting--
Choice?
The timing is interesting
because this is such a momentous,
I have very specific, there's
two very specific reasons
why I'm doing it today.
This is how much
this episode for you?
Yeah, I'm doing it for two reasons, Link.
Reason number one is my
hair has gotten to the point
where I can do this
and then I started realizing
why people do do this.
Because this podcast, I'm gonna be,
I got notes as you can see,
I've got my iPad out.
I'm gonna be going through notes.
I mean I don't know where this is gonna go
and I don't wanna be distracted
by my big old bouffant
falling down in my face
and having to move it all around.
So it's just, it's tight, it's in place
and I'm not gonna think about it.
Now you might think about it.
But just stop thinking about it, okay?
I wasn't even gonna mention it.
Thanks.
The other thing I wanna say real quick
is that yesterday Link
and I were on the road,
pitching a project that we're
hoping will become something.
And on the way back from,
now Link has been driving,
Won't you wanna say the project is?
Well yeah, we're trying to turn
Lost Causes of Bleak Creek into a TV show
so hopefully somebody will agree to that.
But we're coming back from a meeting
and Link has been driving
because he's got a new fancy electric Audi
and so he drives everywhere.
Eventually, I'll get a fancy
car and then I'll drive too
but right now, we're just
enjoying Link's new car.
So he's been driving around town
and then yesterday on the way back
from the other side of
town, from the West Side,
red at a light and Link
just kind of takes half
and then it turns green.
And then he turns to me he says,
"I almost hit that pedestrian."
Now, first of all you gotta understand.
Yeah, because you guys
didn't, you and Stevie
you didn't see I almost
hit a pedestrian.
'Cause I'm not driving,
Because when you--
I mean I don't have to pay
attention to the pedestrians.
Maybe I do.
When you turn right off--
Yeah, you don't have to explain it.
Okay.
You almost always
hit pedestrians, okay.
I don't know why you're
telling 'em about this
but go ahead.
Because last night, I got
a message on Instagram.
A what?
"Just seen y'all in the
Audi, you almost hit me, lol.
"Love the show."
Seriously!
Yeah.
I almost hit a fan?
Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Yeah, you almost
I almost killed
a mythical beast?
Almost killed
a mythical beast.
Oh man!
Oh my gosh!
So anyway--
Oh my gosh--
He's okay.
I need to process it.
He's a little shaken up.
I know.
Yeah, but not enough
to send me a message.
I wouldn't say a little,
I'm a lot shaken up.
Link, you do this on a,
you do this regularly man.
Okay, back to the task at hand.
Oh man!
Never seen it, this is
when the spiritual stuff
really matters, right?
Right.
It's about life and death.
Exactly.
Okay, my goal today,
first of all, I wanna let
you know just like Link said.
Today's gonna be different.
I'm gonna be doing most of the talking.
Next week, Link will be
doing most of the talking.
And when I say most,
I mean, like I've got these detailed notes
that I've literally been
making for months at this point
in preparation for telling this story.
And so I just don't
wanna get things wrong,
I wanna be able to move through this.
It gets very detailed,
I honestly don't know
how anyone who doesn't come
from a similar background
is going to be interested
in what I'm about to say
because it kind of gets
into the nitty-gritty
of you know Christian
belief and Christian doubt,
about those things and my particular,
what we call "a deconstruction story"
of how I no longer consider
myself an evangelical Christian.
It's very detailed because the things
that were happening in
my mind, in my heart
is sort of a particular thread
that you may or may not relate to.
But it is my story and I'm gonna tell it.
Like Link said, I'm nervous,
I'm anxious about this.
I mean the last two podcasts,
obviously, we were nervous
about talking about those years
and how people might perceive that
because people come from so
many different backgrounds,
they have so many different points of view
when it comes to this issue.
Either you're in it, you were in it
and you're out of it, you're not,
you have no way of relating to it.
And that particular
perspective that you bring
to you know, listening to our stories
as I've seen in these Twitter comments
some people have been making.
People sometimes, they just don't know
what to think about it, you know?
Yeah.
But the thing that I am,
particularly with telling my story,
the thing that I just
wanna be very clear about
is that I am not here to judge
where you're at currently, right?
So when you tell a story in your life,
"I used to believe this and
now I no longer believe that
"and here's why."
If you still believe that,
then you may think
there's implicit judgment
in what you think.
And I wanna say that
that is not my intention
and I'm just trying to be as honest
about my own situation as possible
and approach this with as
much humility as possible.
So, that.
It is gonna get detailed
and I'm trying, I'll
try to condense it down
but this is like a year's long process.
This is, we're going back.
I'm going back basically 20 years
and kind of telling a lot of
different things that happened.
But this is not gonna be as detailed
as some of you might want it to be
and it's gonna be more detailed
than some of you want it to be.
Okay, so--
And I'm here to support you.
Well, thank you, Link,
you wanna hold my hand?
If you need that, sure.
I'm also gonna take notes
'cause I don't wanna interrupt you.
If there's something I'm
thinking, I'll just jot it down.
And if I want you to hold
my hand at any point,
I will just extend it, okay.
Yeah, just do that.
I'll know that's what that means.
First of all, even though
we kind of covered this
in one of the podcasts,
what it meant to me to be a Christian.
Now I believed that
Jesus was the Son of God,
that a personal relationship with him
was the only way to be saved,
the only way to go to heaven when you die.
And this belief defined everything for me.
This was of my worldview, it
gave me purpose and meaning
and I lived with this knowledge
of this spiritual reality.
Right, there's a spiritual reality
that is constantly around us
kind of permeating every decision,
every relationship, every conversation.
And I wanna emphasize how
big of a deal it was to me.
It was a relationship and I wanna say that
because I've noticed that
when I tell my story,
often people kind of conclude
that I was never a true Christian right?
And I'm dressing this upfront
for a couple of reasons.
First of all I understand
why people do this
because this is what I did
for many years when I had friends
who said you know, I don't
really believe that anymore.
And I would be like well,
you must have never believed it,
you must have never really had
a real relationship with Jesus
because according to my
particular theology at the time,
which was eternal security
which is once you're God's child,
you're always God's child
and you can't get away.
Once you have faith, you might
fall away for a little bit
but you're always gonna come back
and you're gonna be, you're
sealed, you're delivered,
you're gonna be saved.
And that's a difficult thing for me now
because I gotta be honest,
it kind of feels very dismissive, right?
And I don't think it really accounts
for what actually the reality was and is.
And so the only thing I'm gonna ask
is that you just don't reduce
me to a theological footnote
as you're listening to this story
because as far as I'm concerned,
Jesus was as real to me
as he possibly could be
without physically manifesting
himself in my presence.
It was a relationship,
we were in conversation.
So with that kind of setting the stage,
I'm gonna get into the story
kind of starting back
with my college years.
But first, we're gonna do an ad break.
'Cause that seems like the
most appropriate thing to do.
Well, because we always do ad breaks.
I mean it's-
I'm not gonna apologize for it,
it's what makes this possible.
Yeah, that's why we're
out doing this, man.
I mean this is not why we're doing this,
it's how we're doing this.
I'm wearing a shirt, you
can get it at mythical.com.
We're drinking from mugs.
Are they still available?
I think that was a
everything gonna last forever
so it may not be these mugs
but it's stuff that you gotta scoop up
when they're at mythical.com.
Support your boys, wrap them up
unless you unless something
about what Rhett says
just really makes you never wanna buy
anything from us again.
Yeah.
Then all I can say is I'm sorry.
Okay, I gotta say first of all,
you remember okay, Dennis Rodman?
I don't know, I wasn't planning
on saying this.
Okay, yes.
Dennis Rodman used to have so much energy
when he played for the Bulls
that when they took him out of the game,
he would go on the sideline
and get on it like on an exercise bike.
I remember that, yeah.
I feel like Dennis Rodman right now.
You wanna be on a treadmill?
I just, I'm wired, I'm just, I'm nervous.
Yeah, it's a--
I wanna calm my breathing.
When you talk about it for years,
just the two of us.
When we talk about this moment for years,
you might need to take a breath.
But I'm not gonna--
The fact that you've got
all these notes, I'm freaking nervous
'cause like I'm not, my
story's totally different.
Don't worry, I know
your story's different.
That's what makes it good.
And my approach
is totally different.
That's what makes it good, man.
We're different guys.
So, I'm prepared.
Okay, this isn't about me.
Go ahead.
Okay.
You're back in the
game, get some rebounds.
I've always, thank you.
I'm also gonna marry myself.
Dennis Rodman jokes for days.
Okay, I have always been a
naturally skeptical person
so even in the midst of a
very vibrant Christian faith,
I would have doubts.
I'd hear a little something
about how the Bible came together,
how the 27 books in the New Testament
were kind of put together in the way
that the Canon came together
and I'd be like this doesn't
seem as clean as maybe
I thought that it might have been.
I would think a little bit
about the resurrection of Jesus,
and I'd be like that's a tough thing.
It's a tough thing but
that's the whole point,
it's tough, I have faith you know.
And what I would typically do
is I would have these sessions
where I would sort of re drive my faith
but also, I would do what I
think a lot of Christians do,
is that when you have a
doubt about something,
you go and you read a Christian expert.
We call it apologetics in Christianity.
Somebody who can basically
defend the faith.
These are smart people who have,
they can read Hebrew and Greek
and they've been to seminary,
they've written books
and they spend their
life studying this stuff
and they put out a lot of material,
and they're smarter than me,
and they're more knowledgeable than me.
So what I would do is I would just go
and I would find somebody
who was smarter than me
and they would be like oh no,
it's very reasonable to believe this.
There's very good reason to believe this
and that would kind of
plaster over my doubt
in that particular area for a while.
What time frame are you referring to?
Are you talking about adulthood?
Are you talking about as a kid?
At this point, I started in high school,
was happening a lot in college
and then has happened ever since.
Mm-hmm.
But in college, I met some people
who were really interested
in the book of Genesis
and were specifically what you call
a young earth creationist.
So this is someone who believes
that the book of Genesis
is literal history
and that the implication from that
is that the world is between
six and 10,000 years old.
That's when this whole thing began.
Along with that, comes
the idea that Noah's Flood
like Noah and the Ark is a true story
and the entire world was flooded
a few thousand years ago.
All the animals were on a boat
and then every single layer of sediment
that you see with all the
fossils and everything in it
is a result of that flood.
And this isn't a small group of people.
This is a large group of people
in evangelical Christianity
who believe this, still believe this.
I never thought about this.
My parents didn't really care much
about these particular issues right.
It wasn't something that
like we grew up being taught.
It wasn't taught in our youth group.
A lot was being taught.
Yeah.
On a multiple times a week
as we were involved but we
didn't tackle this issue.
But I was like hmm, I haven't
really thought about this,
let me look into this and again,
I'm gonna do this multiple
times in the story today.
I'm gonna tell you that
I looked into something
and then I'm not going to give you
an exhaustive or extensive.
There's a couple places
I'm gonna go into that
but here's not one of them
because I just don't have time.
But long story short,
when I looked into this,
I basically learned that
no matter what scientific
discipline you start from,
the evidence points overwhelmingly
to a world that is very old.
Billions of years old, to be specific.
And basically, the world
doesn't really make sense
unless it's ancient.
I mean there's so many
things about the world
that don't make sense.
Now to just a couple of helpful books
that were helpful for me,
there's lots of places
you can see all this stuff
but these are both from
a Christian perspective.
First one was "Creation
and Time" by Hugh Ross
which kind of takes a little bit more look
at the astronomical aspect of this.
And then another one that
gets more into geology
is "The Bible, Rocks and Time"
which is an incredible resource
that if you're interested in
this I suggest that you read.
But basically this was learning that
there was all this evidence
that kind of pointed pretty
clearly to the earth being old
and then realizing that
there was a really large
contingent of Christians
who just denied that
and didn't believe that.
It was alarming.
It was alarming for a couple of reasons.
I mean, first of all, maintaining
that young earth view,
it requires sort of
dismissing or reinterpreting
a lot of evidence that
has been gathered, right?
And you got this sort of
this big umbrella of Christianity
and the whole idea is
that we've got the truth.
The whole point is we have
the ultimate truth, right?
As Christians, God has revealed
the ultimate truth to us,
this is what I believed.
But yet, within that camp,
there are these two wildly
different perspectives
on basically the entire natural world.
And I was like something
about this is alarming
because this isn't as
clean as I thought it was.
So I was unsettled but
I was still a Christian
I mean I wasn't.
The core of my Christian belief
was still very much intact,
still believed that the
Bible was completely true
and I believe that there
was a pretty easy way
to reconcile this Old
Earth view they call it
with a literal interpretation
of Genesis in the Bible.
And of course, I still knew
that evolution wasn't true,
knew evolution hadn't happened, right,
because what I knew is that
Adam and Eve had to be real.
Adam and Eve had to be real because
so much comes from them being real.
That's The Fall, that's
where The Fall happens
and The Fall is the reason
that we have original sin
and original sin is why we need a Savior.
It was like you can't
get rid of that story
plus Genesis presents all this stuff
straight from Adam and Eve
and you go through all the generations.
Even the Gospel of Luke,
the genealogy of Jesus features Adam.
So this, if you don't
believe in Adam and Eve
like where do you start
believing it, right?
So I knew that that wasn't.
I couldn't let go of that.
There was definitely a, the
here's pervading thought that I had
that evolution is just
something you stay away from
and if you don't wanna get into it,
don't get into it.
It's a problem so don't and it's not right
so don't worry about it.
And not even beyond that,
I thought evolution just
didn't make sense on its face.
It seemed completely illogical.
In fact, it seemed desperate.
If you did start to think about it.
It seemed like it's so
And again.
It's so non-intuitive to it.
It was so not intuitive to me at the time
that it just felt like a desperate attempt
for someone who didn't believe in God
to try to explain the
wonderful creation that we had.
You got to have something.
Well, if God didn't do it,
you got to come up with some rent.
You got to come up with something
and evolution was the best
thing that they had to offer.
And that was it for me.
And of course I had read all the books
about you know evolution not being true.
I was into that.
In fact, I would sit down
and I would argue with people
and convince people who
believed in evolution
that evolution didn't happen.
I loved doing that, you
know what I'm saying?
I can make people doubt
that pretty easily.
Of course, I had never looked
at the evidence revolution.
I had read books about it
written by people who
didn't believe in it.
That's what I had done and I
could roll those arguments out
with the best of them.
Then in 2006, I read a book called
"The Language of God" by Francis Collins.
Now, Francis Collins is currently
the head of the National
Institutes of Health.
He's a geneticist who headed
up the human genome project
when they mapped the human genome
there at the end of the 90s.
The subtitle of the book is
"A Scientist Presents
Evidence for Belief."
This is the kind of
thing that I lived for.
I loved it when someone
who was a scientific mind,
who was respected by the world
would come out and basically do this,
make it reasonable to be a Christian,
to show you that your faith was reasonable
and smart people believed this.
I ate this stuff up.
So I got into this book, I dove right in.
Now, pretty early in the book,
Collins starts talking
about the undeniable
evidence for evolution,
evidence that humans evolved
from a common ancestor with apes.
And I was like hold up y'all.
What?
This guy's a Christian?
What?
I know that's not true.
And of course because he's a geneticist,
he's focusing on DNA
and sort of that you know the
molecular evidence for this.
So one thing that he talked about
was sort of earth-shaking to me.
And this is gonna get
technical, so please hold on.
And that is this idea that the
second chromosome in people
is a fused chromosome.
So the second chromosome is fused.
According to evolutionary theory,
we're closely related to great apes
and most closely related
to the chimpanzee.
Now all great apes have 24
pairs of chromosomes, right?
But we, if you've ever been
at 23andMe, you know this,
we have 23 pairs of chromosomes.
Now chromosome fusion,
where literally a pair of chromosomes
fuses directly on top of
another pair of chromosomes
is not totally uncommon.
It happens at about one in
one 1,000 births, right?
You can result in some issues sometimes
but it's not always the case.
So if apes and humans are closely related
like evolution suggests,
then it seems that a common
ancestor to both humans and apes
had his or her chromosomes fused together.
Okay?
So all right, do we see this in the DNA?
Like what do we see in the DNA?
Well, in humans the second
chromosome appears to be a fusion
of two great ape chromosomes.
First, there are two
sections of Chromosome 2
that correspond directly
to two separate chromosomes in Apes.
Let me give an analogy
if you're having trouble following this.
DNA is basically an instruction manual
on how to build something, how
to build an organism right?
So let's just simplify this
and just say that this
book is 24 pages long.
And let's say on page
two are the instructions
on how to make a hand and on page three
are the instructions
on how to make a foot.
And so that's what you see
when you look at a chimpanzee.
But then when you look at a human,
you see that it goes from
page two to page four
and there is no page three.
But then you look closely at page two
and realize that it's
page two and page three
glued on top of each other
and you see the instructions for the hand
and the instructions for the
foot on this long page two.
Does that make sense?
Yeah.
That's a simple explanation
or a simple analogy for
kind of understanding this.
This is why our feet and
hands are stuck together?
Exactly.
And Apes are not.
Again, this is a grossly
simplified analogy
but it does help to understand it.
Now, but furthermore,
there are these things called telomeres
at the end of chromosomes
which basically are these
like redundant material
that basically protects
the DNA structure, right?
And so think of it
like you've got a header
and a footer on a page.
Right?
So there's always a header
and there's always a footer on a page
and if you were to take two
pages and glue them together,
in the middle of those two pages,
there would be a header and a
footer glued together, right?
If you take two pages and you
glue them on top of each other
like a really long page,
Yeah.
A header and footer would
be touching each other.
Well, we see two telomeres,
two vestigial telomeres
directly on top of each other
in the middle of the
second chromosome, right?
So all the evidence is pointing
to these things being fused.
Now, the reason this
rocked my world so much
is because I was familiar
with the argument
that almost 99% of our DNA
is the same as chimpanzees.
Everybody knows that
because the human genome has been mapped.
But the creationist answer to that is
well yeah, I mean God is making
he's using the same building materials
to make similar things.
It's his prerogative how he does it.
So of course, you're gonna
look at this instruction manual
and you're gonna see that yeah,
it's kind of the same
and then it's sort of
different in some key ways.
It's like God, it's God's
prerogative why can't he do that?
But that doesn't seem like
an adequate explanation
to why it definitely
feels like and looks like
and seems to be very conclusive
that we actually have the same chromosomes
and they've been fused.
That doesn't seem like
consistent with the idea
that this is just God's prerogative.
But that wasn't the only thing.
I was so interested in
this particular thing,
this DNA evidence because
I'd heard about the fossils
and all that stuff but
this DNA stuff just seemed
this is like how we
decide court cases right
and this is how we convict people,
this is how we can find out
if somebody actually committed a crime.
This is definitive stuff.
And then I learned about retroviruses.
So, essentially there
are certain RNA viruses
that when you become infected with them
they actually insert a copy
of themselves into your DNA.
So you can look at your
DNA and you can be like
oh, you got that virus at that time.
And then occasionally, these viruses
they're sort of retrovirus inside your DNA
will be passed down to your children
and that means it's
endogenous, it's in your genes.
Well, we actually see
that we share these
endogenous retroviruses
with the organisms that
we're closely related to
and the more closely
related you are to them,
the more retroviruses you have in common.
Now, let me again take this manual,
this instruction manual analogy further.
Let's say you look at page
19 of a chimpanzee manual
and you see oh, halfway down on page 19
there's a coffee stain
like somebody spilled
coffee on the manual,
but it looks like a copy of a coffee stain
like there was an original
and there was a coffee stain
and this seems like a copy of that,
like somebody ran it
through a Xerox machine.
And then you look at a
human instruction manual
and on page 19, you
see the same exact copy
of the same exact coffee
stain in the same exact place.
Why would God do that?
You're thinking?
And so then you think well,
it seems to me that the
most logical conclusion
is that these two manuals
come from a common manual,
that there's an ancient common ancestor
that is the ancestor to
both humans and great apes
and this is what you see.
And these are just two
small pieces of DNA evidence
and I'm not gonna go into any more details
but let me just say that
the main thing that this did for me
is I had been told a lot
of things about evolution.
I had been told things growing up
and now I was questioning those things
because I'd been told that
there's no real evidence,
this is a desperate attempt
to try to come up with
some harebrained theory
to just explain things.
And I'm like but this DNA stuff
is pretty freakin' conclusive.
I can't imagine another way to know.
I'm not saying there aren't
explanations for this.
I'm not saying you can't
go to a creationist website
and find that, it's not like
they don't know about this.
They have an answer, I've read the answer,
I find the answer to not
be compelling in the least.
But let me just say, this
made me just question
like all this stuff you've
been told all this stuff
like I had been told that
there were no transitional fossils,
there were no transitional forms,
there's no transitional between
this animal and this animal.
Well it turns out, there's a lot of them.
There's a lot of very convincing ones.
I'd been told that there were
really no vestigial structures,
that there's nothing on your
body or an animal's body
that's like a sign of something
that's no longer being used.
There's always a use for it
and we keep finding those use for it.
Well, it turns out there's lots
of examples of vestigial structures.
In fact, there's many structures
that there's no other way
to properly understand them
other than them being vestigial,
meaning that they're from the past,
they're no longer in use.
Essentially, every criticism of evolution
that I had held onto
to justify my unwillingness
to believe in it
turned out to be a misconception
or a misrepresentation of the facts.
And so after reading a bunch of books,
talking to a lot of people,
not listen, I didn't wanna believe this.
I'd spent my whole life not believing this
and not wanting to believe this
but I kind of was just faced with this
that evolution was by
far the best explanation
for what we actually
see in the real world.
If you're interested in any
further reading on this,
there's a really good wiki
entry called Chromosome 2
which breaks this down with resources.
It's very well referenced
and there's a wiki entry called
"Evidence of Common Descent"
that kind of get into this
and I'm gonna make some
more refs at the end.
But let me just say, I
didn't wanna believe this.
It was incredibly problematic
and there were plenty of Christians who I,
very smart Christians, smarter than me
who didn't believe in it
who I could have just stayed in that camp.
But I just in my heart,
I didn't feel like you
I felt like I had to follow the truth.
I thought that the truth
had to be more important
than my commitment to my beliefs.
It had to be more
important than my ideology
and I wanna say that about,
there's these plenty
of Christian apologists
and smart Christian people,
I would say just creationists
who deny evolution.
I don't think that they're
being deliberately deceptive.
I wanna be clear about that.
I don't think these people are saying
"Oh, we see these facts and
we're gonna misrepresent them
"because we're gonna lie about this."
I think that they're good people
but I think that they're so
committed to their belief system
that they have become impervious
to pretty straightforward
information about this subject.
But the thing that did for me is
I had placed a lot of faith
not just in God, but in these people
who helped me understand why
I believed what I believed.
From an intellectual standpoint.
Right, I had a very real
emotional, personal, spiritual
relationship with God
that I was practicing
but there was this intellectual foundation
that whenever I had a doubt,
I would kind of retreat to
this intellectual foundation
and all of a sudden, those
people I'd been trusting in
I began to doubt that I
had been shown the truth
or told the truth about
other things, right?
So get to this answer in due
time as you've planned it
but I guess my question is
when you came to grips with evolution,
was it just okay,
now I'm gonna incorporate
that into my faith?
Yes, it was.
Because I know there's
people thinking well,
you can understand and accept
the process of evolution
and still have faith, I mean.
Well yeah, so exactly.
You're not an atheist
all of a sudden, right?
I was very unsettled but then I was like
well hold up, I mean Francis Collins,
the whole point of the book.
Yeah.
Is that he believes in God
because of what he's seen in the DNA
and he's a Christian, he's
an evangelical Christian
and he believes in evolution.
He presented it as that
was God's creative process
was involved
In all of this stuff.
Yeah.
Not to mention one of the most respected
and revered philosophical Christian minds
of all time, C.S. Lewis was, you know,
was a theistic evolutionist.
And so I knew I was in good company.
I was like this doesn't
mean I'm not a Christian,
this just means that I'm
a little disappointed
in the way that this subject
has been misrepresented
by so many Christians.
But again, my goal was
let's stick with the truth.
All truth is God's truth.
I'm not gonna be scared of the truth.
God's in control,
he's the one who's established
this entire universe,
I shouldn't be afraid to poke and pry
any of this stuff, right?
So that was when I kind
of got into this world
of theistic evolutionist Christians.
There's a good book that I read called
"Coming to Peace with Science:
"Bridging the Worlds of Faith and Biology"
the guy who believes in
evolution but is a Christian.
That was a helpful book for me.
And then I got really involved
or I wouldn't say involved
but I spent a lot of time
at the web site BioLogos
which is essentially a group
of Christian Scientists
and there's a bunch of articles there.
It's still active, I haven't
been there in a long time
but I checked recently, it's still there,
still doing a lot of things.
But things get pretty
complicated at this point.
Like once I started looking into this,
so I'm gonna give you the short version
if you can believe that
this is the short version.
But basically, what you run into is that
there's sort of two camps within people
who sort of accept evolution.
One camp believes that Adam
and Eve are still real,
that they're either a special creation
or they're sort of the
result of the process
but they are actually
real historical people
because they need to
be real and historical
in order for The Fall and then the Gospel
to kind of make sense.
Gotta be honest.
I did not find, all of those
arguments felt really tenuous
and just felt like you guys,
you know that you have
to have Adam and Eve
and so you're sort of inserting them
in a way that isn't,
they're not really fitting
is a little you know square
peg round hole situation.
I remember the Tim Keller
book "The Reason for God"
Yeah.
I remember discussing that
at that time and that being
as I remember it, his position.
Yeah and this is problematic though
because I didn't, basically I was like
I just don't think there's a
way that Adam and Eve were real
as presented in the Bible.
But like I said earlier,
they're presented in
the genealogy of Jesus
in the Book of Luke so
what's the deal y'all?
You know I'm saying?
This is a problem.
But what this did again, I
just felt like this doubt
was kind of creeping beyond
the point of creation
and it was creeping into
the Old Testament itself
because that's the way the story goes.
You got Adam and Eve and then
you got a story that begins with them
and moves all the way
down to Abraham and Moses
and then David you know.
It's all part of a system.
So again, I had been told.
There was something I've been
told about the Old Testament
and that was the Old Testament
is always supported by
archeological evidence.
I'd heard that from so many Christians.
It's like sometimes they
see something in the Bible
and they're well there's
no evidence for that
and then they dig a little bit deeper
and they're like oh we found the evidence
or they find that basically
the idea that the Bible
is always vindicated
because the Bible is
completely true and everything,
that it touches upon.
But when I really looked into it,
I started realizing that that's not true.
That's not really the case.
Just a few things, touching
on some quick things.
Why is there no Egyptian historical record
of the Israelites' captivity?
It's two million people,
they kept great records,
why is there no record of them?
Why is there no archeological
evidence of the Exodus?
Basically, this massive group of people
wandering in the wilderness for 40 years.
They've looked for over 100 years,
they've looked, no evidence.
Why does the modern archeological evidence
call Joshua's conquest
of Canaan into question?
Why is there good reason to
believe that the Israelites
arose not out of conquest or force
but by simply branching
off of the Canaanites?
And those are just a few things
but there are some pretty major events
that all of a sudden I was like no,
this isn't well-supported.
Outside of the Bible, these
things are not well supported.
I was even further troubled, right?
And so I'm I'm losing my
faith in the Old Testament
but I'm also losing my faith
in those same Christian thinkers
who have said all this
stuff that like guys,
this is solid as a rock.
You can stake your entire
life on these truths
and they'll always be vindicated.
So I was in crisis at this point
but here's what I said.
I said does this Old
Testament stuff really matter?
Like is this really
what this is all about?
Isn't the important thing Jesus, right?
If this is about a
relationship with Jesus,
does this Old Testament stuff,
first of all, okay maybe there's
no archeological evidence
for this stuff,
maybe there's no
historical evidence of it.
But you can't really make
an argument from nothing.
It's like just the absence of evidence
is not necessarily an
argument against something.
So these things could have happened,
we just haven't found that.
We haven't found them yet.
But we can still have
faith and believe them
and plus like I said, isn't
this just about Jesus?
Now let me be clear.
I was still living in
North Carolina at the time.
I was still leading a small group
of Bible study at my church
that I had been leading for many years.
And I still considered my
still myself a Christian
and I was slowly letting
people that I loved
including my wife in
on some of this stuff.
And every time I would
bring up a piece of it,
she would just start crying.
And just superimpose that
on last week's conversation,
in terms of timing from
graduation to being an engineer,
to being on staff with crew.
So where I'm at right now
with this whole like losing
faith in the Old Testament
and the archeological evidence,
we're probably talking about
like 09/10 at that point.
So right as we're kind of wrapping up,
we had left staff by this point.
But the early stuff about
evolution that was 06 right?
So that was the year that we left staff.
And then a few years before that,
I was where I kind of
spent most of my time
just thinking about like the
older, the younger stuff.
I spent a few years and about
five years in that place.
Again, so at least not being on stuff,
there's a little bit of
a pressure release to--
We owe.
To be able to at least start
to broach these conversations.
When you're in full-time ministry,
you have absolutely no impetus
to actually explore these things
because that's your well-being,
that's your livelihood.
Why you're gonna threaten that?
You don't wanna consider
to consider these things
because you don't wanna be like
if I actually consider this
I'm not gonna end up having
to not be a preacher anymore.
I'm not gonna have to
drop out of seminary.
I'm not gonna stop being a missionary.
Yep or for us
And it's so
much stuff for that.
It was your full-time job,
Yeah.
And it was as we've talked about,
we were so fully engaged and committed
to working within those
parameters to pursue our dreams,
even not fully understanding
that that's what we were doing.
Yeah.
So subconsciously, you
don't wanna really engage
in anything that's gonna threaten that
but you couldn't help yourself.
I mean it was just your nature
to this concept of truth,
I think is the thread and
and again it started like
you said in high school
but it brought us to this point.
So back to what you're saying.
We had left stuff, we
were making it on our own.
You're still very much
involved in the church,
you're teaching people,
you're having these
conversations with Jessie
and you get into a little bit of it
and she breaks down.
Every time.
This was this was traumatic for her,
every time I would bring it up.
And of course, I would wait
until it had become unbearable for me
and then I would bring it up to her
because I'm trying to respect her
and we're raising these kids
and I know how important
this stuff is for her.
And she was very educated in all this too.
We would argue about the young-earth thing
when we were dating in college
because that was her
perspective, her background.
And it was not easy for our marriage and--
Yeah, because you don't
wanna bring it up early
because it's nothing
It may pass.
It's a tough thing.
It may pass, it's a
tough thing to bring up
so it sounds like you start to bring it up
when you like you said just you can't
not bring it up
When I got separate--
And then it's almost
you've reached a
conclusion about something
and then you're spilling your guts to her
and expecting her to,
she's late to the process
Yeah.
Which is actually even more difficult.
Yeah.
And you mentioned that thing about
like the concern was with truth
and I list I don't know
where this comes from it,
this is my disposition.
My dad was a lawyer and as a law professor
he's got a very specific way
of kind of getting to the bottom of things
and I think so it's kind of in my DNA
to be concerned about truth.
But I think ultimately it was like again,
back to what I said at the beginning,
is the whole point is that
Jesus is the way, the truth and the life.
This is the truth.
You find the truth, the
truth sets you free.
Truth, truth, truth.
The whole point of the Bible,
why people defend the Bible
and say that the Bible is
inerrant without error,
it is from God.
It's you know written
by God through people.
The whole point of all that
is because it being true
is paramount on it maybe
more so than any other faith.
The holy text being true
is such a linchpin, right?
Now, okay.
And just one more thing.
You had mentioned there were two camps
when you were talking about that,
about the Bible being literally
what actually happened
versus Adam and Eve being figurative.
I don't know if you were
coming back to that or not,
but it seemed like again, we're at a point
where there's how you describe,
that's a certain subset of,
Yeah.
Christian faith that believes
those things about the Bible.
Yeah and I think it's pretty fitting
that at this point, we
moved to California.
2011, we moved to California,
we immediately got involved in a church,
an evangelical church,
met some great people,
made some great friends
and this is when I adopted
what I'm going to call
California Christianity
to get at what Link was
getting out here a second ago.
In L.A. even within
the Evangelical church,
I think there is this sort of
because you're in this
incredibly diverse place,
with so many different perspectives,
you really can't maintain
a Christian faith
in a place like this
without at least some sort of realization
that there's a lot of gray.
It's not about having it all figured out,
it's not about being completely certain.
It's about a relationship with Jesus
and this was like a kind of
a breath of fresh air for me,
honestly coming to California
with all these doubts.
I found these Christians
who had these doubts,
Christians who saw the Bible differently,
who were like yeah, man I don't
know exactly what happened.
Evolution seems like
it probably did happen
and Adam and Eve might not have been real
but like that's not my
day to day with Jesus, man
you know and so I have a
relationship with Jesus.
I wrote in my journal, 2011,
"My faith is still weak but it is not gone
"and possibly, God is
revealing a foundation
"that he can build real faith upon."
"Here are a few things
that have hit me recently.
"From an intellectual standpoint,
"I may never have
certainty about my faith.
"That pursuit may be fruitless.
"It's becoming clearer that
the significance of my faith
"or the so called proof of Christianity
"is not found in a well-reasoned argument.
"Rather, it rings true the
way a musical note would.
"It hits my resonant frequency."
And that was very
reassuring to me at the time
when we moved to L.A.
I was like man in this kind of crazy world
with people trying to
be all about themselves
and this place, it's all about making it
an entertainment business,
I've got my faith,
I've got my relationship with Jesus,
I've got my Christian community
and I don't have it all figured out
and it is gray
but it feels so true and it
proves itself out to be true
in my daily life.
I tried living like this.
I ran into a few problems.
The music did not continue to
resonate well in your bosom?
Basically, the foundation
of my faith ultimately
was still the Bible even if I had sort of
a more liberal view or more gray view
of what the Bible might
mean and represent.
And so every time I read the
Bible, I saw issues with it.
Every time I heard a sermon,
I would have an issue with it.
My experience through Christianity
was basically inflaming
my doubts and my questions.
So the closer I got to it,
the more I couldn't quite
shake these questions
that continue to linger.
And the question, the
place that I had sort of
put a barrier around and
said we're not going there
sure we can talk about evolution,
we can talk about the
historicity of the Old Testament
but where I'm not gonna go
is I'm not gonna go to Jesus.
I'm not gonna question Jesus.
But I just couldn't help myself
because I was like my
understanding of who Jesus is
is not just based on my
experience with him personally
but it's also based on what
the Bible has to say about him.
This is how we know what
there is to know about Jesus.
And again, when I looked into this
my world was rocked in a very big way.
I'm not gonna give sufficient detail here.
Lots of people have gone and done this
who are smarter and more educated than me.
But basically, there are
just as many views on this
as there are people who study it.
But essentially, I live
my whole life being sure
that the Gospels were
historically reliable,
almost taking it for granted.
I mean I'd read Josh McDowell's
"Evidence That Demands a Verdict"
and Josh McDowell "New Evidence
That Demands a Verdict".
I had read Lee Strobel's
"Case for Christ".
I could spit these arguments
back out to you on an airplane
and make you think that
well, I must be a Christian.
Why on an airplane by the way?
Because when you're evangelical Christian
you sit next to a stranger,
this may be the only
opportunity you ever have
to share the life-changing
message of Jesus with them.
There were lots of conversations
that involved airplane evangelism
because it was just like
his captive audience.
Yeah.
It's like you're gonna
go this whole flight
and not saying anything.
Right, what if it crashes?
But I took a second to go one layer deeper
and to look at the answers
to the Christian answers
that I had been given all my life.
And that was when I realized
that this Jesus thing
was very, very messy from
a historical standpoint.
There's a few books that do a good job
of outlining some of this stuff.
One of them is "Jesus
Interrupted" by Bart Ehrman
who's a professor of New Testament at UNC
who incidentally Jessie was in his class
and she used to come home every single day
and then we would come up with ways
to go back to argue
against him, ironically.
Me and you were actually involved
in a Campus Crusade initiative
on the campus of UNC
to kind of combat what he was doing
because he was having so much
influence on the students.
So I understood Bart Ehrman
had been the enemy for so long
but what I started to realize
is that he had a very similar story
and I thought that he dealt
with the subject matter
in an honest and even-handed way.
There's also a book called
"The Historical Jesus: Five Views"
which kind of runs the spectrum once again
on how you can see this.
But basically what I just saw is that
there's so many people coming at this
with an intention to uncover the truth,
to find the truth
and they're coming to these
wildly different conclusions.
This isn't like science.
Somebody does a scientific
experiment in 1985 in China
and then somebody does the
same scientific experiment
in 2019 in California.
If everything is controlled,
they're gonna come to the same conclusion.
That's not how history works
and it makes it very difficult
to come to definitive
conclusions about things.
But essentially in the end,
by far to me personally,
the most compelling and
seemingly reasonable view
was that the Gospels appear
to be a mix of religious propaganda
as well as actual history.
So there's definitely
some history in there.
I think Jesus was a real
person, so does Bart Ehrman.
But I don't think that
as he is presented there
is completely reliable.
That's what I was thinking at the time.
So what did you believe about Jesus?
You reached a conclusion
about the person of Jesus
at that time when you were
when you're researching that.
I had a picture of Jesus
that was the picture that I had always had
of this person who did these miracles
and died on the cross and rose again
and died for my sins and
was God in the flesh.
All the things that were
important to believe about him.
But I had doubts about
those things being true
but I didn't have
another picture of Jesus.
There was no other picture of Jesus.
So you read all these books,
you did all this research about Jesus
but your conclusion was
not really a conclusion at that point?
Oh yeah, it was some process.
and so this was incredibly
unsettling, right?
This was way more unsettling
than anything that had happened so far
because this was Jesus, this
was the core of everything.
This is who my relationship was with
and all of a sudden,
I've got very serious doubts about him.
And I think that anyone
that you would have conversations with
and you did initiate with not only Jesse
but with me and with other people
that you confided in over this decade
of going through this.
If you were talking to someone
who was it was still very
much committed to their faith,
it was like much more solid,
I think the response maybe it's not spoken
is well yeah, as long as you
as long as you hold on to Jesus
and you know it's like that,
you can't let go of that.
You can let go everything else
but you can't really let go of
what you believe about Jesus
raising from the dead and
and paying the penalty for
your sins instead of you.
Yeah.
Either you go to hell or or he does
which he already did and came back.
Right
Is the belief.
So you can let other stuff
go and maybe not panic
and again I'll share my perspective
on interacting with you more next week
but at times, that was part of it.
Yeah because what you believe
about Jesus is paramount
but what you believe about Jesus
is still based on what is
presented in the Bible.
If not, where else are you getting it?
I mean some people might be like
well I'm getting it directly from God
but that's not what Christianity teaches.
It's coming from God and the Bible
and they don't contradict one another.
So when it became clear to me
that it wasn't something
that I could have,
the same kind of faith
in it that I've had,
I had a meltdown.
I didn't do anything crazy externally
but there was a lot happening internally.
At this point I said--
Do you remember a time
or a place associated with this?
Well I've got a couple of journal entry
in another journal entry that I'd go into
which is sort of the
next stage of this thing
but not particularly.
But I do remember saying this at the time.
I was like "God you are
bigger than all of this right.
"I'm just this little human
"who sees through a glass darkly my
"I got this finite mind and
I'm trying to understand
"the infinite mind, the
creator of the universe."
Seems pretty arrogant actually you know.
And I was like is God just sitting there
watching me do all this research
and eventually he's gonna
give me some satisfying answer
and then all I said I'm gonna have faith.
That just doesn't seem
like a relationship.
That's not how you conduct a relationship.
I don't make my wife
fit a certain criteria.
I don't ask her a bunch of
questions about her past
in order for her to qualify
to be you know I'm saying?
it's like I experience
relationship with her
on a personal level
and I just felt like I was
just completely in my mind
and I made this whole thing
like scientific and intellectual
and also it seemed like
I was being arrogant
because I was waiting for
God to fit my expectations.
I was creating God in my own image
as opposed to creating me in His image.
I had flipped the script on God
and was waiting for him to
like be my little trick pony
that does all the things
that I want him to do
in order for me to believe in him.
There's a verse that kind of gets in.
Which was answers basically.
Isaiah 55 says "For my
thoughts are not your thoughts,
"neither are your ways my
ways, declares the Lord.
"As the heavens are higher than the earth
"So are my ways higher than your ways
"and my thoughts than your thoughts".
So God saying I'm bigger than you.
Right.
There's certain things
you just can't get, dude.
Yeah and at this point, I was like okay
you know what, I think this is
probably where faith comes in
It makes sense to me that this
might be where faith comes in
because I am sitting here
trying to prove this stuff out
but shouldn't I just have faith first
and then maybe these answers
will be given to me by God.
Isn't this what faith is all about?
I mean the whole point is this.
It's evidence of things not seen, right?
And so your next step was
there's no way for me to know
but I'm gonna try a different route
which is I'm gonna maybe
faith needs to come first.
Yeah
And would then we'll open up,
maybe that'll lead to something.
Yeah, I can believe in the
Jesus that I believe in
because that's what the Bible says.
I can believe in the biblical Jesus
even though I have reasons that
from historical perspective
to doubt that I can still believe in it
and overcome that.
And this is when I ran into some problems.
So the first thing was how
does this differentiate me
from any other faith on earth right?
One of the things that
makes Christianity a unique
is that you know it is the
way, the truth and the life.
No man comes to the Father
except through the son right?
You don't get to the son
through somebody else.
You don't get to the Son
through Buddha, right?
But also evangelical Christians
tend to be pretty
critical of other faiths.
Mormonism is a perfect example right?
If you're in an evangelical church
or certain evangelical churches you know,
they teach you that Mormons
basically have it wrong,
that Mormonism is a bastardization
of Christianity, right.
It's not just another Christian group
and they lots of
Christians will write books
that explain how all the things
that Mormons believe about Joseph Smith
and these things that
happened are not true
and here's why in the
Book of Mormon is not true
and here's why.
So they can be very
critical of that faith.
But yet, if you say
those things to a Mormon,
they will say well, I have
a burning in the bosom
that proves to me that
these things are right.
So you can tell me that
these things seem wrong
and you can show me certain things
but I believe them to be true
and you can't change that
because I have this sort
of seal and sign from God,
this indication that this faith is real
and this is all true.
And I was like, isn't that
what I'm doing right now?
Now I'm just saying that
I'm just gonna have faith
that things are real.
Damn the evidence.
So how does that make
me any different right?
And ultimately, this kind of faith
felt a little cowardly
to me, to be honest.
It felt like what I was saying is yeah,
there's some conclusions
that I really don't wanna come to
and the way I'm going to avoid those
is just by having faith.
But ultimately, you just
can't make yourself believe.
You just can't make yourself have faith.
This was a torturous place for me, right
and I was there for a very long time.
There was lots of praying,
there was lots of reading the Bible
which would inflame
some of the same doubts.
There was lots of talking
to Christians openly
about what was happening.
I wanna be very clear that I
didn't go into a cave somewhere
and come to these conclusions
and never run them by.
I didn't wanna leave this thing man.
This was my life.
This was this defined everything for me.
This was the foundation of my marriage,
this was the foundation the
way I was raising my kids.
I didn't want it to go away.
It was the orienting
purpose-driven worldview
that was what was basically
defined everything about me.
But yet, I'm going through this process.
I'm talking with people,
I'm talking to my wife, she's crying.
You're talking to me.
Yeah, I'm talking to you.
I was talking to you the
entire time about this stuff.
You didn't cry, thank you.
I didn't cry.
But the major shift for me occurred
when I asked a question I had never asked.
I'd been very very afraid
to ask this question
and that was what if I'm wrong?
What if I opened myself
up to the possibility
that maybe I have been wrong about this?
I wanna be clear, I'd never done that
even and all these things
that had like shaken me right.
all these doubts that I
had, I still was sort of,
there was this Christian core
that was completely
protected through all this
that I wasn't willing to let go of.
But I was like what if I am wrong?
Can I just live like
that for a little bit?
I'm pretty good at kind of giving myself
over to things, right?
I can watch a movie and get lost in it.
I can read a book, I can get lost in it.
I can read a book from
a different perspective
and I can adopt that
perspective for a little bit
to see what it feels like
and I decided that I was gonna do that.
So let's just consider what it
would mean if you were wrong.
What would that mean about the Bible?
And when I was honest with myself,
the Bible began to make a lot
more sense to me personally
as a product of humans rather than God.
It seemed less and less
like God's message to people
and more like people's
best guesses about God.
And in that, it became a lot
like any other holy text.
And that when I came to
that conclusion, or I was
and I wasn't fully there
I was just considering
what does it feel like to think this?
It led to a few more questions
that I'd always been afraid to ask myself.
I'm gonna read these
'cause I wrote them down.
These are just a few of the
questions I'd always avoided.
"If I don't have to believe
"that God ordered his chosen people
"to slaughter men, women and
children by the thousands,
"then why would I?
"If I don't wanna believe that
every religious experience
"of any person who is not a Christian
"is ultimately illegitimate,
then why would I?
"If I don't have to believe that anyone
"who doesn't have a
relationship with Jesus i.e.
"the majority of people
who have ever lived
"are going to spend eternity
"being literally tortured in a fire
"experiencing never-ending
pain and suffering
"then why, no pun intended,
"in the hell would I believe that?
"And if I can somehow accept the idea
"that hell exists
because of God's holiness
"why would I believe in a God
"who would choose to create
that particular world
"where people have no
choice whether or not
"they're going to be born
but then once they are born,
"if they don't adopt the
correct understanding of God,
"he will punish them forever.
"Why believe in that
God if I don't have to?"
So where did this leave me?
Because the answer to those questions
are that you have, there's a lot of fear
of what you might lose or experience?
But there are some things to gain um
if you go to the other side.
Well, it's funny because
I had spent a lot of time in my head,
a bunch of light intellectual processing
of all these things right,
philosophical stuff.
But at this point, as I felt
this sort of traditional
faith slipping away,
I started worrying about
some pretty practical things
like how is my marriage
gonna stay together,
what am I gonna teach my kids?
This is what I've been teaching them.
What am I gonna teach them now?
What am I gonna do, where am I gonna turn?
What's gonna replace this?
This is community, this is purpose,
this is meaning, where am I
gonna find something like that?
And a verse came to mind.
John 6 after Jesus has kind of talked
about him being the flesh
and he's kind of basically given
the whole idea of you know,
communion at this point
and it's a difficult teaching
and a lot of people walk away
'cause they're like he's
talking about eating him
and drinking his blood.
This dude's nuts and it
was a difficult teaching.
People didn't understand
what he was getting at
and they walked away.
So Jesus asked the twelve?
Do you wanna leave too?
Simon Peter replied "Lord
to whom would we go?
"You have the words of eternal life,
"we believe and know that
you are the Holy One of God."
And that's what I said.
I was like listen, I
got nowhere else to go.
What am I gonna become?
Now, let me make it clear.
I was in a state of panic at this point
but I was like I can't, I
can't, I can't let this,
I can't let this go,
there's too much wrapped
up in this, right?
But this is where being in Los Angeles
did allow me to ask a different question.
And let me let me explain that.
First of all, I have no
doubt that many people
will probably not even
listen to this story.
In fact, I've seen it on Twitter.
I've already seen people say you know
I don't wanna listen to
their personal stories
because I don't wanna hear
somebody talk about leaving
which that hurts mean that
you don't wanna listen to the story.
I'm just trying to be honest
but I know a lot of people will come
to the very very easy conclusion.
Guys, there's nothing
surprising about this.
You were Christians and
then you went to Los Angeles
and you lost your faith.
It's a story as old as Los Angeles.
This isn't surprising, it's
like what's the big deal?
This is super simple but
I'm trying to represent
that this wasn't this
wasn't something made,
this wasn't some flippant decision,
this wasn't like ah, man
I wanna be cool and
accepted in modern culture
so I'm gonna shed all this stuff.
The reason why it hurts is because--
It's a dismissal.
That assumption is a dismissal,
it's an assumption of
your of your true motives
that you don't wanna state
which are hey you just
wanna sow your wild oats
or you wanna be cool or you wanna be able
to face your friends who
believe different things
or like they have different lifestyles.
And in order to be successful out there,
you gotta make some changes, okay.
I mean watch any award show now
and see how the entertainment
industry is pushing change
in perspectives and changes
in the way people act.
if not belief.
And so it's like, hey if I get it,
if you guys wanna go out there
and you wanna pursue your dreams,
if that's really what's
most important to you
then yeah, you got to give up,
you got to give up your beliefs.
I mean you gotta make a choice
and it seems like that's the easy thing.
You guys made the choice and it again,
it's like no one's said
that out loud to us but--
Oh, I've seen people say it.
They've typed it maybe.
I've seen it typed.
I saw it typed actually
after our first two episodes.
Somebody was like "What's the big deal?
"It's clear what happened.
"They went to Los Angeles
"and they lost their faith."
It happens.
And I'm just trying to
first of all hopefully,
if you've listened to this point,
you at least acknowledge
that this was a process
that was in many ways
independent of where I was at
but also way more personal and torturous
and it wasn't a calculated
business decision.
It wasn't like I don't know,
that particular accusation hurts a lot.
When people say you were never a Christian
and what people say you
changed because of L.A.,
those things hurt a lot
because of how untrue
I know them to be.
So there's an aspect, and I
will get into more of this.
Okay.
So I think we'll come back to it
but your point for now is that
there was an aspect of you
changing because of L.A.
Yeah and this is where
L.A. comes into play.
L.A. did allow me to ask a new question
and that was why am I still doing this?
And I'll be honest, I would
not have asked that question
if I was in North Carolina
because when you're in the Bible Belt,
you're embedded in Christian culture.
There are a dozens of reasons
why you would still be doing it.
I mean why rock the boat?
Why disappoint your parents?
Why disappoint your friends?
Why extra you know get yourself
out of this and community.
I would have been going to the same church
since I was in ninth grade.
I would say technically your whole life
because that church
came from another church
that we both went to.
Right.
Exactly.
I've been with the same
group of believers forever
and now I was leading a Bible study.
I had preached sermons on
Sunday you know what I'm saying?
There's all kinds of reasons not to leave.
Why damage your reputation
because honestly,
in the Bible Belt this can
be as many people know,
if you've left the faith
and the Bible Belt.
It ain't easy.
There's a lot of pressure to
stick around and stay in there.
But what I realize is that I've
been pulling on this thread
for a really long time, right?
Let's call it the sweater of faith
which is not the armor of God.
This is a real offline concept.
The sweater of faith.
I've been pulling on this thread
and it had sort of like turned into a vest
and then a midriff and then a halter top
and now it was a string bikini.
It's not appropriate.
And I was like I'm gonna
take the bikini off.
Really not appropriate.
It's just an analogy.
Okay.
And I was L.A.
Yeah.
Men in bikini tops, there's
lots place you can see--
Go to the convenience store.
And I took it off and I call this--
What do you mean, how did you take it off?
Well I have a journal entry, thankfully.
That's great, okay.
Give it to me.
It has nothing to do with bikinis.
This is from 2014, okay.
"I understand that it is unreasonable
"to expect Christianity to be a set
"of scientifically verifiable principles.
"It is a faith implying
that some sort of believing
"without seeing is involved.
"And more specifically, Christianity
"is a relationship with Jesus
"and relationships are not well defined
"or experienced scientifically.
"However, I don't think it insignificant
"that the deeper I have
dug into Christianity
"with a thirst for the truth,
"the more difficult it
has become to have faith.
"In fact, for me, it
has become impossible."
And that was kind of the
reckoning for me, right?
That was that was jumping
ship to use a better analogy
than taking off a bikini.
You see, I kind of saw
Christianity as this boat
in a very stormy sea.
It's stable, there's a
lot of other people on it,
It's got a destination,
you're gonna get through this.
It gives you something to hold on to.
It gives you stability,
it gives you purpose,
it gives you direction and
it gives you community.
And when I jumped ship, I
didn't jump to another boat.
I jumped into the water
and I pulled my wife
and my children in with me.
I jumped into a sea of uncertainty
and that's where I've
lived for about six years.
And we're gonna spend some
time talking a little bit more
about where we're at now.
I do wanna talk about it now
but we're getting more detail
and like a subsequent podcast,
maybe in a Q&A or something
but I wanna kind of talk
about what this has been like
without getting into too much detail
and I know because we're
already pretty long.
This is gonna be a long one.
Right after I jumped ship,
I kind of went through a period of anger.
I was very mad at the
Christian leaders and thinkers
who I felt deceived by.
I wanna be very clear about this.
No one that I was in
personal contact with,
pastors, Christian friends,
elders in my church,
none of them disappointed
me or let me down.
I did not have a personal like tragedy.
A lot of people have like
a traumatic spiritual
experience in a church.
I didn't.
I only got good things from the church.
We talked about this while
back that like listen,
I'm a straight white dude.
You know you get a lot
of things handed to you
especially within the church
if you fit that profile.
In some churches, being a straight dude
is the only way that you can teach.
There's plenty of churches right now,
churches in Los Angeles
that people would consider progressive
where you better not tell them you're gay
and if you're a woman, you
probably won't be able to preach.
It's 2020 and this is still the case.
I just wanna be clear about that.
But for me, this had been
I got so much out of this.
I was riding high.
I could have ridden this
train to the top man,
you know what I'm saying?
But nobody disappointed me personally
but I was angry at the thinkers.
I was angry at the people
who had written the book
saying that evolution
didn't have any evidence.
I was angry at the people
who had written systematic theology books
who basically made it seem like
this was all pretty simple.
And I kind of, the pendulum
swung for a time into atheism.
I was like this is all bullshit
and I'm gonna be the enemy of this stuff.
I'm gonna be an anti evangelist.
That's what I was thinking at the time.
Of course, we're still
very private about all this
so it wasn't like I said
this to anybody publicly.
And that anger actually
subsided rather quickly.
It's interesting.
I kind of had my moment
of anger in atheism
and then that was replaced with
kind of an openness and a curiosity.
You know it's interesting how liberating
this one aspect has been.
I think the biggest change
that has happened to me in my life
is that I've lost my
appetite for certainty,
specifically certainty about things
I don't think you can be certain about.
I think my struggle with Christianity
for me a big part of it was
I had to keep aligning my
thoughts and being certain
and kind of reader living my faith
and why this was reasonable
and being sure about this
and knowing exactly what
was gonna happen when I died
and all this stuff.
But when I was like
I don't think I can be
certain about these things,
it's like when a person
I've heard this happens,
I haven't done it yet.
When you stop eating meat, you
lose your appetite for meat,
a lot of people say.
I stopped being certain about things.
I lost my appetite to be certain.
I didn't wake up with a sense of panic.
I thought there would be panic,
I thought there would be chaos
Especially for someone who
that's how you lived your life.
And I thought there would be few.
And so attached to it.
Right.
But it's been the most liberating thing
that has happened in my adult life.
I'm not kidding.
I'm not trying to paint that,
listen, it's not like I'm about
to give you some philosophy
that I live according to now
that's got did the gives
that gives me community
purpose and meaning.
I don't have that, okay.
I think there's a giant sort of shift
that's happening culturally
and I think that we may be
arriving at that some time.
But it doesn't exist right now for me.
But what does exist is an
openness, is this curiosity.
Listen, I still think that
belief in God is very reasonable.
I think that the idea that the universe
is ultimately purposeful,
it's headed towards some ultimate purpose,
not only is that comforting
but it kind of feels
again, it feels right
to me when I just look
at the history of the
world and we're you know.
But I don't know it to be certain
and I don't know anything
about this source or this god
that might be behind all this
and I'm kind of beginning to think that
I don't know if you are supposed
to know a whole lot about it.
So I would call myself a hopeful agnostic
meaning I don't know, but I hope.
I hope there's something.
A question that I've
gotten from some people
who are close to me, love me
is what do you think
happens after you die?
I don't know.
I'm reasonably certain
that you don't burn in hell
because you were intellectually
curious and honest
to put it bluntly.
But honestly, I'm more interested now
in what happens while I live.
It's not so much what
happens after you die
but what happens while you're alive.
And I'm trying to answer that question
but it's one of the
reasons I'm in therapy.
It's honestly one of the reasons
that I get up every morning
and do 20 minutes of back exercises.
Honestly, it's one of the reasons
that I think more about what I eat
because the only thing I know
that I've got is this life.
But the other thing that
has kind of happened
because people ask me about
your marriage, your kids,
will get into this in more detail.
But Jesse has her own story,
there's been a lot of crying
but she's in a similar place now
and this process because we were so,
this whole process ruins
a lot of marriages.
I've seen it a lot
because sometimes people
are like I can't go .
They're not going there, it's over.
This was the whole foundation.
I mean yeah we made vows.
If you read, we wrote our
own vows for our wedding
and they were very much about--
Jesus
Jesus.
But now, it's kind of like our marriage
has hit a second wind
where it's not so much about a structure
that we both sort of assent to
that tells us what our
marriage should be like
but it's like hey, it's pretty cool
that I get to go through life with you.
I love you.
And that has actually been
a pretty good thing to concentrate on.
And with the kids, you know
I think for me the idea
that the purpose and meaning
and sort of like orienting
your life in a certain way,
all came from the Bible and from church.
I actually because none of that went away,
you know I'm saying, like I still
wanna be the same kind of person
that I've always wanted to be.
I wanna be the same kind of husband.
I want the best for my kids.
Meaning like your morality?
Yeah
Still like you--
Yeah.
You know what?
The moment that you jumped ship,
you didn't start looking
to cheat on your wife.
Right.
As an example.
Exactly.
It wasn't like all of a sudden 'cause
I'd always been told that
and I had many Christians who I respected
said "Man, if God wasn't real,
"I would be out doing drugs right now,
"I'd be out sleeping with whoever I want."
I'm like I don't actually think you would.
I think you actually have an innate desire
to be a pretty good person
and to live a life that is good for you
and the people you love.
And a lot of people will
attach it to a structure
and an explanation like Christianity.
But I think very few people actually
find the purpose in their faith.
I think they have purpose
and then they bolster it with faith.
That's my personal opinion.
Or even another way to put it
using the marriage example,
do you think that your
motive to be true to Jesse
was not just out of love for her
but out of love for God you know,
out of respect for you know.
So now you being true to
Jesse is out of love for her.
It's a line like I'm--
Yeah and it's not a fear of God.
It's a love for her
and it's a fear of listen,
there's a lot of shit that happens
when you do stuff like that in your life.
There are natural built-in consequences
to doing the things that are traditionally
considered to be sinful
according to every religious tradition.
It's not like you just...
If I didn't have this I'd be out
doing all kinds of crazy shit.
No, you wouldn't.
It's like first of all,
my best friends now
are not Christians but they're faithful
to their families and--
They're not horrible people.
They're not horrible people.
And I think that's what we thought
was without the Holy
Spirit indwelling you,
you're just going off
the flesh so to speak,
you're going off of your own desires
and I mean that's the
only thing keeping you
from being a horrible person.
I think that's from a young age,
I think that's what we felt.
But I think the thing you
That's a particular view of people
that we had in our particular
like reformed Calvinistic.
Everyone is totally braved.
Yeah, it's--
And anything good that
is coming from anybody
is either because they are
created in the image of God
or they have a relationship with God.
I think too, I wanna get back
to like that being a
subsection and everything
that you've talked about being applied
to the whole of Christianity
or faith or anything like that.
But before that, you were talking about
you were moving to the kids
from your relationship with Jesse.
I kind of went back to the
relationship with Jesse.
So when you were talking about the kids,
you were talking about
raising them in a way
to be whole people, to be good people.
I don't wanna put words in your mouth
but I think you were getting it.
Well, I think the biggest thing about kids
is what I have sort of observed
and being very much embedded in the church
for a very long time
is there's kind of this idea
that it is your responsibility as parents
to make sure your kids turn out all right
and that it's up to you,
you better teach them the right thing.
If you don't, they're gonna be screwed up.
And I'm not saying that
you shouldn't teach your kids good things.
But what I've observed
is that you know what
my kids could actually teach me a lot.
I think that kids orient themselves
in the world much more
readily based on your behavior
than the specific things
that you tell them.
I don't think that having
an information session with your kids
and indoctrinating them
it's what's going to make
them into a good person.
I'm not saying we're
not constantly talking
about issues of morality
and ethical things, philosophical things.
We talk about that every time,
our family is very much always
talking about these things.
But the interesting the
sort of freeing thing
is is that when my kids
have a question about God
or the deeper purpose of the universe
or what happens when you die,
we explore those things as people.
I'm not here as some authority
that's gonna point you
to this ironclad thing
and that's gonna make it okay
because you know what, it's
not gonna make it okay.
Just because I can point to this book
and tell you that you should believe this
I am proof that believing those things
isn't necessarily gonna make
all those deeper thoughts go away.
And so, in getting my kids comfortable
with sort of living intention
and let it being okay
with not having all
that stuff figured out,
but it's like well what
can you have figured out
and what does lead to a
fruitful meaningful life?
Well you know what a
life devoted to others.
A life devoted to
yourself is going to fail.
I can't explain, I don't
feel like I have to explain
the dynamics behind
that for it to be true.
And so--
But you do explain it.
Sometimes you talk about being a parent
as if like just you gonna be
and I know that's not what you're saying
but I think what you just said
is clarifying that you are your--
Well, I am saying that to an extent.
I know you are
I am saying that
to an extent.
I think we have a little
bit of a difference
in approach but that's fine.
Well, I think, I would say
that the latest child psychology
basically suggests that kids sort of
they're gonna be a certain way but--
But you're talking about selfishness
versus self-sacrifice.
You're talking about
what it means to love,
you're talking about who
what type of person do you wanna be.
Yeah.
And also the thing I
try to get my kids to do
is process the consequences
of their actions.
It's just like, "Hey
Shepherd, I just asked you
"if you had mom's phone and you told me no
"but you do have mom's phone.
"Let's talk about why you did that
"and let's talk about what
it means to be a person
"who's willing to lie, who's willing
"to say something that's
false about this."
And so it's like what is going to happen
if you become a person
who can't be trusted?
What's that gonna do?
What kind of life are you
gonna live as a person
who can't be trusted?
And for me that just
is a that tangible like
nitty gritty getting down to the details
of like what does this mean,
what are the ramifications
of your behavior
for me it's in listen, listen.
I know that I've read all
the Ravi Zacharias' books
and I've seen him speak.
I know that the whole idea is well
where's the morality come from
if it's not coming from a
moral lawgiver, God himself?
I think that that argument
is marginally compelling
but I don't think that is conclusive
and I think the point is is
I don't think you wake
up and make decisions
to be a good person because
you've got this moral lawgiver.
There may be a moral lawgiver.
I'm not saying that God doesn't exist
but I think that it's a much more natural
and organic process than
there's a book I read it
and now I know what to do.
I think that's why those core qualities
of what makes a human good
exist in cultures everywhere.
You find a culture in
the middle of the Amazon
that's never been exposed to the gospel
or any sort of religious system
outside of what they believe
but they're gonna think
that murdering is great?
Probably not.
They didn't need Hammurabi or
Moses to tell them that, so.
I guess I'll move on and one other thing.
Whatever his name is, I don't think
that's how you say his name.
Hammurabi's Code.
I don't know how you say his name.
I was curious, personal question.
When it comes to therapy,
does anything to come up?
I know you talked about
anger and you also talked
about how there wasn't
an inciting incident
outside of your own intellectual
exercise and research.
But do you find that there's baggage,
that there's things that you need,
things that you need to heal from?
Maybe now that your
perspective is shifted,
is there any of that?
You know again, and I feel I kind of feel
like an asshole for saying this
because I know that so many people,
so many women and so many
people who don't fit the mold,
and we talked about like the LGBTQ plus
experience of people in the church.
There's a lot of stories of trauma
because as people were sort
of developing their identity
and self actualizing,
they're doing it in an
oppressive environment
and that's damaging.
But again, because of who
I am and what I look like,
I pretty much just benefited
and so I don't look back at
my experience with the church
in a traumatic way.
I just feel like, ah man, I was very lucky
and actually, we talked
about it last week.
Professionally, I got a lot out of it.
I was able to develop
professionally and do
and live my dream out.
For me, most of my therapy
is related to you know
just sort of the realization
that everyone's personality
is essentially constructed
over their child,
their inner child and it's
a way of sort of navigating
and moving through the world.
It's a protective shell and so for me
it's like why is that your shell
and what is that child
underneath saying, feeling?
Do you sort of like
It's just more
of your early childhood stuff
and it's not trauma,
it's just figuring out.
But do you feel like everything
that you having constructed that shell,
the belief system that you had
became a part of that,
became another layer?
I haven't processed
it, but definitely yes.
I haven't gotten today
I have got again an area
Again, it's like the
thing that you're taught
your whole story is so much in your head
you know it's like when you talk about
Well, yeah.
You'd be devastated and like those moments
of there's being a crack in the dam
and then when when you decide to jump ship
like I mean, you allude to
it being a torturous time,
you said that there's moments
of like being really scary.
But it does seem like the
story is very much in your head
you know there
Yeah, yeah in--
So maybe there's stuff under there.
And I understand that's one of the reasons
that a lot of people won't
relate to what I'm saying
because they're like why is this?
There's Christians that I know and love
who when I talk to my telling this story,
I just kind of see them just
look off and quit listening
'cause it's just like why
is he spending all this time
talking about the second chromosome?
Right.
Like why is that important to him
and what does that have to do with God?
Yeah.
And for me it has everything
to do with my story
because it's all related, you know?
Again, the whole idea is
that this foundation is truth
and so but in terms of I
I feel like my attempts
to like focus on the
relationship and focus on faith
was my attempt to get out of my own head
and get into my heart when it
came to my perspective on God.
And to lean into the relationship.
But again, it's the it's that
inextricable relationship
between facts and feelings.
It's still, you can have
an incredible experience
with somebody relationally
and it can feel completely
emotional and physical
but yet, there is sort of a
scientific representation,
a naturalist understanding
of what's happening
between the two of you.
And I think that there's this foundation
that I just kept coming back to
and every time I came back to it.
An interesting thing is,
it isn't like the Christian
apologists are saying
that they don't make the argument
that I was trying to make them ahead.
They don't say don't worry about this,
just have faith.
They say because they know they have to.
Know this is defensible.
Here's why.
Here's why evolution didn't happen
and here's why you can trust,
and I can even prove to you.
I know a guy who wrote
a term paper in college
on why the resurrection is an
undeniable historical fact.
Those things being true
are sort of what the
founding fathers of the faith
you know especially those
guys in the early church who
were like figuring out how to
think about all this stuff.
They were doing intellectual work,
it wasn't just happening in the heart.
They were laying a philosophical framework
that we've built our faith on
and I think that we've got
more access to information
about that process than we've ever had.
And it deserves some scrutiny
and I actually think it
doesn't stand up to scrutiny.
That's my personal opinion.
I could be wrong.
But that's where I'm at.
So two things.
I wanna come back.
I wanna end on your label
that you apply to yourself
but I did want to ask,
how do you process the
anticipated criticism
of everything you shared?
I don't know yeah.
I know I'm a three on the Enneagram
and one of the characteristics of a three
which is an achiever is you
wanna be liked by everybody.
And being misunderstood or misrepresented
is a direct assault on my ego
and I know that that's gonna happen
but it's just part of the growth process,
being okay with it
being okay with people mis characterizing
the things that I've said,
people dismissing the things that I said.
Obviously there's gonna be a lot of people
who say that oh well it's
clear he was never a Christian.
He didn't really, he had an
intellectual understanding
but he was never in a
relationship with Jesus
because he couldn't have been.
It's not consistent with my theology.
That again, I like I said that's tough.
But I think it's only tough
because I'm an egotistical
asshole sometimes.
I think if I'm truly humble,
then I shouldn't let
those things bother me.
It's just like yeah, that's gonna happen.
But I don't know how I'm gonna process it.
I don't.
I actually, I've seen that
you've engaged a little bit
with people on Twitter and for
some reason I just haven't.
I just haven't had the emotional energy.
I've been thinking a lot about this story.
I think I will engage with
people if they have questions.
I think we will engage with
people if they have questions
and you know after you tell your story
which I'm excited to hear your story
because you're so different than me.
Yeah, especially for
this type of experience.
And I think--
But it's very much intertwined
and I think it's you
know we made a decision
for you to go first and I think
that's gonna be very helpful for me
for people to understand my story second.
Yeah.
But go ahead.
I mean I don't know.
I don't know how.
I'm definitely because I
want everybody to like me
which is a flaw.
It's not something I'm proud of.
I know that some people won't like this.
A lot of people won't like this.
A lot of people are gonna be offended,
a lot of people are gonna say
that I misrepresented the facts.
A lot of people are
gonna say because listen,
if you agree with everything I said,
then you know how could
you still have faith?
So it's like I understand that
I remember we had we had a good friend.
We had a good friend who
had a bunch of doubts
and I remember how we treated him.
And I loved him but I remember
when he started talking all this stuff
about how he was doubting certain things
I was like I remember asking
I was like what are you
gonna teach your kids, man?
I do.
I remember that now.
And I remember thinking things like man,
I guess he just never knew Jesus
because the Jesus I know I
would never think those things.
And I know that's how,
I know how I would have
processed hearing this story.
As side note--
And again,
it's difficult for me.
I'm glad that we still have
a relationship with him
and that we've talked
through it since then
and that he was patient with us
in a way that now we're
asking for people to be,
you're asking people to patient with you
and I'm asking for people
to be patient with me.
Yeah.
Patient not in waiting for
someone to change their mind
but just to still be loving.
He was still very loving to us even though
it had to have been written
all over every everything we said
and our faces, you know.
Yeah, for sure.
Do you--
We should wrap things up.
Okay, I think my last,
in a desire to put a bow on something
are you happy with the label
that you've given yourself
of hopeful agnostic?
I mean is that, are you happy with that?
I don't know how to answer
if I'm happy with it.
I mean you just who
It's just where I'm at.
I am happy.
I am happy.
Is it a destination I guess is?
For me, I am open to revelation from God.
like I haven't lot
it's like listen, there's some things
Should I step back?
There's some things that I am
I don't think I'll ever believe again.
Like I'm not ever gonna believe
that the earth is 10,000 years old,
like that car left the
garage a long time ago.
I don't think I can have a worldview
that doesn't embrace the
reality of evolution,
that every living being on the earth
is related to every
living being on the earth.
And I actually think that's beautiful
even from the perspective
of there might be a creator.
And I know that I could go into the desert
or I can go into the office
and have a crazy religious experience
that all of a sudden I come back
and I'm like I got something for you.
And I'm not closing myself off to that.
I'm not some pure Naturalist
because listen, if anything that
if my story represents anything
is that I'm willing to change my mind.
I had a faith that was so solid.
This was so deep, this wasn't
the Sunday morning thing man,
this was a lifestyle.
This was in my blood and I let it go
because I did not believe it to be true.
I'm gonna follow truth
wherever it leads without fear,
without fear of uncomfortable conclusions.
And if that means that
oh and you know what,
you're gonna have an encounter with God
that is going to send
you to some new place
or send you all the way
back, then so be it.
But the thing I don't wanna
do is I don't want to...
I feel like the curiosity and the openness
that characterizes my life right now
is something I don't wanna let go of.
And I don't wanna be, in fact
quote from Ravi Zacharias,
that I used to say, I'm
gonna butcher the quote,
but he essentially talked
about you know being,
you don't wanna be so open-minded
that your mind is like a sewer
just letting everything in.
Eventually, you gotta
bite down on something.
So I recognize that you
just can't be passive
but actually, I don't know.
I have had some experiences
and come to some conclusions
but I'm not ready to share
all that at this point.
But I would say that, if anything,
it's just sort of confirmed
the direction that I've been going
kind of away from the
faith of my childhood.
That's my story.
Thank you for sharing.
I do have wrecks.
Make a wreck and then tell me
it feels good to get it out.
First of all, it does feel
good to tell your story.
You have to wait a little bit.
Yeah.
I'm gonna sleep well tonight, Link.
I didn't sleep well last night.
I've already mentioned
a couple of these wrecks
but I'm gonna say it again
because they relate to
what I just told you about.
Again the Wiki entry on "Chromosome 2".
Read it.
It's a short one, it's
super easy to understand.
It's a better explanation
of what I just said.
The Wiki entry entitled
"Evidence of Common Descent"
which is a long one again.
People might be like
why are you pointing people to Wikipedia?
Well, Wikipedia is
actually a great reference
for these kinds of things
because it's footnoted and referenced
and you can go to those
resources if you wanna dig deeper
but it's a great
comprehensive up-to-date list,
sort of a living list of
the evidence for evolution.
But if you're a book person,
whether you wanna read or listen to it,
I do recommend "Why Evolution
is True" by Jerry Coyne
which is a pretty sort of
easy to read explanation
if you've never kinda
dug into the subject.
And I was already on that
train when I read that book
but I just thought he did a great job
of putting it together.
So those are my wrecks.
Thanks for listening to this long podcast.
Hopefully, Link will go even longer.
We'll see.
#EarBiscuits, thanks for being
a part of the conversation
and for hearing us out.
We'll speak at you next week.
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