Colonizing Mars Anyone? Christian Science Beliefs

Space Exploration is fascinating, especially today as space travel has been turned into big business by SpaceX and other emerging companies. What if we were to find signs of microbial life on another planet? How does all of this impact the Christian worldview? Let’s talk about Christian science beliefs on topics like space travel, quantum physics and more!

Today we’re talking to Zack Jackson, pastor, theology professor, podcast co-host of Down the Wormhole, and advocate of connecting the dots between science and religious thought. We will specifically be discussing concepts like quantum physics, astronomy, and how all of it can connect back to concepts within Christianity.

If at some future state we were to colonize Mars, or even entirely transition to other planets, how would that impact how we think of the second coming of Christ? Join us as we explore the unique aspects of our Universe from a Christian perspective!

Christian Science Beliefs Conversation Transcript:

Brent: Another topic happening right now is us looking for biological material on other planets. As far as I know, we haven’t found anything, but if at one point in time, we did find, regardless of how simplistic it was, some sort of biological material on another planet does that impact our view of how we think about our uniqueness?

Zack Jackson: If you’re okay with the idea that life is spontaneous. A creative God created a creation that can’t stop creating, then that’s great. This doesn’t bother you at all. If you require a sort of uniqueness and, an intentionality to life, then this is going to be a real existential crisis for you.

Brent: Welcome to the Jesus Taught Me That Podcast. Today we’re talking to Zach Jackson, pastor, theology professor and podcast host. He also operates his own Science and Faith blog, is an organizer of his denominations Science and Technology network, and is simply an overall advocate of how science and Christianity relate to each other.

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Zack Jackson, it is a pleasure to have you here. Welcome to the podcast. How are you doing?

Zack Jackson: I’m doing great. We are near Philadelphia over here on the east coast and just got drenched by hurricane Ida.

But I am in the basement and the basement is mostly dry now. So thank you for asking. Thanks for having me.

Brent: Yeah. Oh, that is good news. Glad to hear that everything is dry. There has been a lot of stuff happening with the hurricane and yeah, a lot of people going through that right now on the East Coast.

So glad you guys are good. Glad you’re safe. As we jump into this I love getting people’s input on what Jesus is doing in your life right now. And before we jump into some deeper conversation, let me just get your response on that.

Zack Jackson: I’ll tell you, I just got back from my very first vacation in a very long time.

My wife and I celebrate our 10 year anniversary with our first child free vacation. We went out to a beautiful Washington state and try to hit up all three national parks and. I don’t know if your listeners, my goodness, if y’all, haven’t been out there, you need to take a trip to Olympic national park.

Just the being in the presence of such ancient creatures as these trees, some of them a thousand years old, some of them may be more, we don’t know, cause we’d have to cut them down to find out, but some of them perhaps as old as Christianity itself and carrying within them, this sort of almost inaccessible, mystical wisdom that has just been gnawing at my heart since I got home.

And I don’t quite understand exactly what it has done to me to stand under something that ancient, vibrant and alive, but I’ll tell you, I have spent quite a bit of time in our own modest forest since I’ve been home, just soaking in the life of creation that is all around me and for once.

Cause I’m a pastor, I’m a scientifically minded person. I am a learner. I am the kind of person who needs to pull up my phone and Google something the moment I have a question just to sit in the place and not have to identify what it’s teaching. Just to know that it’s teaching me something is a place where I think Jesus is really drawing me to right now to allow myself to be, and to grow without having to name it quite yet.

Relationship Of Science And Religion Working Together

Brent: Wow. That is amazing. That is a great example of how getting out away from stuff and just really focusing in on the bigger picture can really allow Jesus to speak to you and really unique ways. And I’ve never been to Olympic park before, but it’s definitely on my list now. But I have experienced similar.

Experiences. I appreciate you sharing that with us. You were mentioning some of the mindset that you have about science and you love to just look up things once it crosses your mind. And that is actually an amazing segway into where we’re going with this conversation and to give our listeners a prelude to this, you actually have a podcast as well, and it’s called Down the Wormhole.

And you do this with several different people of a few different spectrums and it’s specifically focused on different aspects of how science and also different religious worldviews come together. And so let me actually just stop and let you explain that for a second. Walk us through from your perspective what that is.

Zack Jackson: Sure. We were a part of a two-year fellowship program called Sinai and synopsis based out of New York city and interfaith, interdisciplinary organizations seeking to elevate the discourse between science and religion and the first day we showed up in that every single person, all 16 of us in that room coming from different faith traditions and jobs and education levels, all have the same sentiment that we thought we were the only one.

The only people who found such life in both our scientific pursuits and our religious pursuits and found this incredible joy in bringing them together because we were in most of our contexts. We were the only ones we’re siloed. And we realized over time and conversations that not only are we not alone, but there’s so many more people out there, there’s just not a good way of organizing them together.

And after we were done with our fellowship program and kind of hungering for more to keep the conversation going. And so a couple of us decided to start a podcast because if you’re looking for a science and religion podcast out there, there’s I don’t know, two, there’s Science Mike, which I think the Cozy Robot show is what it’s called now.

And the Bio Logos podcast kind of it more or less. So we thought we had something to give, or at very least just a platform in which we could form a community. And so it’s myself, I’m a pastor in the United Church of Christ. We have a Rabbi who was a former chemist, a science elementary science education professor and two other professors out in Kansas, who teach religion and psychology and all kinds of facets in there.

And each week or every other week now we go through different topics. We do these little mini series on different things like evolution or outer space or human development. Or we did big emotions.

We’ve done movie series where we’ve done it for two years now. And we’ve got these huge plans for year three and a lot of exciting guests and just meeting all of these people throughout this journey has really been the biggest reward to me, and also getting the chance to explore these topics on the regular.

Colonizing On mars, A Christian Perspective

Brent: Absolutely. I think that is one thing that podcasts really brings to people in a unique way is. Just conversation that you typically would not have, and meeting people that you typically would not meet. I think there’s just so much to be said for really the podcasting community in general, but I’m a hundred percent on board with what you just said.

There’s a lot of different segmented conversations out there that is really neat to bring together. And I really love the way that your podcast does that. I would recommend people to check out your podcast, Down the Wormhole. And actually some of the topics that you guys talk about and that we have over here are overlapping a little bit, which is really cool.

I know you have five segments on artificial intelligence. We have an episode on artificial intelligence as well, sort of two that really cover a few different topics on that. But you guys go really in-depth on it. And I haven’t gotten to listen to all the episodes, but you guys just cover some just some really neat stuff.

That’s actually where we are going to focus a lot of our conversation at today, is just space exploration, where we’re headed with that and really how that fits into the Christian worldview.

One of the things that is top of my mind, I feel like I’ve been reading this for years at this point now, is the colonization of Mars. I actually don’t know how far away we are from that, but supposedly it’s within the next, maybe five or 10 years, actually let me rephrase that.

Not the colonization, but maybe just traveling to Mars, maybe colonization, if we ever get to that point is probably quite a bit further down the road, but I think a neat discussion point to bring up is just how do the things like that really start to fit into the Christian mindset of how we see the world and how we go about thinking through these topics.

So let me stop there and get your input on that.

Zack Jackson: Yeah, I think in terms of just boots on the ground, probably in the next 10, 10, 20 years, wouldn’t be unusual. From a space exploration standpoint, we can do much better science with robots than we can with humans. The only reason to send a human to Mars right now is for the publicity.

This is one of the reasons we sent humans to the moon while the Russians were sending robots was because we wanted the publicity because publicity means people get interested. Public interest means there’s more likely to get public funding, which means you’re able to then do the more space-y, explore-y, science-y things.

If you listen to someone like Elon Musk, he’ll have you believe that, he’s going to be up there next Thursday, but probably not until much later. And when it comes to colonizing, man, there is all kinds of issues at play there. In terms of making a, even a small habitable space which we did a couple episodes just on Mars itself and the issues with that.

But while I love to think about these things and looking farther out, when I was a kid, I wanted to be a rocket scientist. That was always my dream before God called me into ministry was to do that sort of thing. So my head has always been in the stars, but one of the things that. Especially this sort of billionaire space race has really brought out to me from my friends of color is a lot of their critique has been like, you’re destroying this planet and yet you have your eyes set on another.

Why can’t we put those resources into this instead of up there. And while I think that argument falls apart a little bit because we have the resources and the intelligence and the brain power to do both. It brings home this really important point that we have not proven ourselves to be faithful stewards of this planet where God planted us.

And until we can prove that we can care for our own house, maybe it’s not wise to make a new one, but I do wonder what if going farther out into space might also help us to become more moral people. A lot of astronauts say that when they spend extended amounts of time in space, especially those who have gone out of near earth orbit and gone out further the earth gets smaller.

They experienced what they call an, the overview effect, where you recognize how small earth really is and how the borders don’t exist up there. And you realize that we are all one, people sharing one giant spaceship as it were, and you come back with a sort of global consciousness and they almost all to the astronauts experience this.

 Perhaps if something like space, tourism becomes a bigger deal or colonizing the moon, and you might have these moguls of industry spend a month up on the moon and they spend that time looking at the earth as the small fragile ball, who’s tiny atmosphere that we’re ruining is like the equivalent of a tortilla on a basketball in terms of like its thinness and fragility that maybe they might then go back to earth recognizing our smallness.

And we might by leaving earth and looking at it from the outside. Start to see ourselves more as a global community who then has a responsibility to care for the good earth that we’ve gotten or even seeing how inhospitable literally every other place in the known universe is might help us to see how incredibly precious life is here. At least that’s what I hope I’m an eternal optimist.

Brent: Absolutely. It’s good to be optimistic, I think it can really give you a different way of looking things when you’re looking at a bigger picture. But let me get your opinion from a theology perspective because that’s a lot of where your expertise is just from the viewpoint of, this is where the ministry of Jesus was when we think about some terminology and things that are in the Bible, like a new Jerusalem and some of those things, when you start thinking through it from that route does it, or should it cause any sort of hesitancy or confusion around some of these topics as we look at it from a Christian perspective specifically?

Zack Jackson: We’ve existed as humans for hundreds of thousands of years, and as this as like organized societies for several thousand years. And it’s really just been in the past couple hundred that we’ve understood our place in the cosmos, all of our founding myths, all of our stories, all of our religious dreamings for most of our history have been really localized.

Earth is all there is above us. The sky is as solid candy coating. We call the firmament. The ancients believed that the stars were holes in the firmament in which the light of heaven shown through at night and the rains, which God and the angels literally with buckets would pour out through the holes would come down on us.

And like that kind of imagery is beautiful and it makes us feel like we are special. Like we’re unique. Like we are the center of the universe and the center of God’s care is right here, among me and specifically on my holy mountain and my peoples holy mountain and my God that controls all of these things.

So it’s really no wonder that the few people throughout history who’ve presented ideas of a heliocentric universe. Where we actually are just a planet that orbits another star. Woof, those ideas were challenging because it decentralizes humans and we’re so used to being the center of our own story and our own religion that when you take us out of it it’s really uncomfortable.

I think one of the reasons why one of the 10 commandments and one of the really strong laws throughout the early scriptures is to not make any graven images. Don’t try to turn God into one of you the way that all the gods in the entire world just look like humans. And they have human like characteristics.

When we look at the Greek and Roman gods, they’re just jerks, just like us. They’re just more powerful jerks. And so God defies our anthropomorphizing or like making into a human. God wants to be somewhat other so that we don’t contain and cage God down. And so then, like when Galileo looked up with his brand new telescope, which by the way, had about the same magnifying intensity as like a nice pair of binoculars, you can buy at REI right now and looked up and he noticed there were moons around Jupiter and Saturn and thought to himself, wait a second.

If they are like up there in the candy coating, how can it have something that circles it. And then started to realize the ideas of Copernicus and all those before that was like, oh my goodness, we are not the center of everything. We are actually just somewhat insignificant in the grand scheme of things.

And the Church of course, was not a fan of that. Historically, this has been the source of a lot of the tension between religion and science, but in almost every case. When our religion and our science and our, especially of our own view of ourselves run into conflict is because the science is decentralizing us.

I think this did the same thing with evolution. The big problem. A lot of Christians have with evolution is that it turns us from being God’s special shining creation on the second to last day. And that makes us less special, which then makes us feel bad. And so we don’t like it because we like our God to tell us we are special.

But in reality, the reality is so much grander and so much better, and so much more full of awe and wonder and just like the depth and mystery of God that, I don’t want to go back to that. I don’t want to be the center of the universe because I’m not the center of the universe. When I have been de-centered by science and made to know my place I can then start to listen to other people’s stories, other experiences, other of both human and non-human alike.

I can sit under the world’s oldest Sitka spruce tree in Olympic national park and just Marvel at its beauty and let it teach me something and not just see it as timber because I’ve been decentralized from God’s story. And I can see God’s expansive love that doesn’t just apply to Christians. It doesn’t just apply to humans.

It doesn’t just apply to people who look like me or the animals that are cute, but to all things, all creation everywhere. And so seeing the cosmos for what it really is frees us from the sense of us being too special. And then it also. When Jesus then chooses to become human. When the Son of God chooses to be made incarnate as a human, what an incredible gift that becomes when we were not already the center of the universe, God chose some fringe creature on this tiny blue dot and became one of them like that even then becomes bigger and more expensive and more filled with wonder and all, you just have to look at that and you just can’t help, but be captivated by.

And then at the end of the day, I’m going to die. And my, the pieces of my body, which were forged in the fires of dying stars are going to go off to then form some other living thing that will have its own form of consciousness and make its own decisions and then pass it on to someone else like we’ve done for millions of years.

Like you would just take 10 minutes to breathe in the wonders that modern science and especially astronomy has given to us. And it, how could it not make you more religious than less? At least that’s where my worldview ends up. That astronomy has decentralized humans and the further we get, the further we are able to look back into the big bang, the further decentralized we are and the more of a miracle, just all of life itself is the more I want to take care of it and cherish it and love everything.

Science makes me a better Christian in that way. I think.

Brent: No, that’s amazing. I have never heard it put quite that way before. Just to hear the intersection that you do with your podcast and your background with with theology. When I break down what you just said, things are so much bigger than we even realize. Why would we be limiting ourselves to a smaller train of thought when we could go so much beyond that. And we see our world, we see what Jesus did.

We see the very intricacies of his message and the very intricacies of how we relate to God being significantly bigger than what we can even comprehend really. And so why would we limit ourselves to something that is so much more finite than it has to be? Is that a good way to dissect what you just said?

Zack Jackson: Yeah. And you also make me think that religious people and not just Judeo-Christian Jewish and Christian religious people, but pretty much anyone who has a sense of personal God is like a spoiled child. And that we just take for granted, of course, I’m special. Of course, God loves me. Of course, God is going to go above and beyond to take care of me, like in the same way that a spoiled rich kid expects to get a pony for Christmas.

So too, we might expect that God of course would come and die for me. Of course I deserve it. I’m the center, I’m the apple of his eye. I’m his precious little boy, take yourself out of it a little bit. And you realize just how amazing these gifts are and learn to not take it so much for granted.

 The more we can do to decentralize humans from the narrative I’m in it.

Microbial Life On Other Planets, Would It Even Be Biblical?

Brent: Yeah. There you go. Actually, I think that brings up another interesting point to talk about the way we think about our uniqueness and things that we think that should only be for us, but let me ask you this.

Another topic that is happening right now is us looking for biological material on other planets. I think that’s something we’ve been doing for a long time. As far as I know, we haven’t found anything. I think maybe there have been some conversations that people claim are up for debate.

I don’t know, obviously this is not my area of expertise, but to my knowledge, there’s nothing concrete out there that we have found. But if we do, if at one point in time, we did find, regardless of how simplistic it was, some sort of biological material or evidence of previous biological material on another planet or in space out there somewhere.

Does that impact our view of how we think about our uniqueness or really just change anything for us at all?

Zack Jackson: Yeah I’ll first give a shout out to Dr. Adam Pryor, who was one of the down the Wormhole hosts. He wrote a book called living with tiny aliens, the image of God and the Anthropocene. I think it’s the subtitle.

Forgive me, Adam. If I missed it up, we did a whole episode on it. It’s, it deals with the issues of astrobiology, which is fancy way of saying life in space. And so it’s a theological work of astrobiology. Astro Theo biology. I don’t know how you would form that that out. I’m sure. They’ll figure it out later.

But yeah, when we’re looking for, and for life out there, we’re generally not looking for intelligent life. If there’s some people with telescopes listening for signals, but more than likely we’re going, if we’re going to find life, we’re going to find microbial life. And just a couple months ago, they were.

Big hoopla about this a chemical that was seen in the atmosphere of Venus, which on our planet is an indicator of some kind of bacteria that is creating some kind of methane or something out there in the atmosphere, something that dissipates on its own normally. So it must have been created recently.

That’s how it works on our planet. We assume if it works that way on their planet, that there might be something living in the clouds of Venus. And so suddenly there’s all this funding to send a couple of new probes over there to see it might be. It might be something we’re going to find out either way.

There’s also chances of finding life under the ice of Enceladus. Titan was another one that there might be some, but if we find life it’s probably going to be that it’s probably not going to be the Hollywood aliens that come down and giant spaceships. Just probably. So the conversation is going to look a little different as if we got little green men that walk out of a spaceship and can speak with us and have intelligence, then that will throw our whole theological conversation out of whack.

Somebody asked the Pope once, if he would baptize an alien and he thought about it and he said, if he asked for it, and I liked that answer, which. I don’t understand, but maybe God can sort it out in the end was basically what it was. If we’ve worded. Like little green men, people that can talk with us that have intelligence and we can ask them about their conceptions of God.

And then we run into some issues of do you have a concept of sin? Do you hadn’t do you, does your people require salvation from your broken relationship with its creator? It’s a whole lot of things we can talk about in there. CS Lewis did a really good job with his space trilogy back in the, I guess that was the fifties or sixties he was writing in which he was imagining life on Venus and on on Mars and beyond.

And what that would look like without having sin involved and out of the silent planet, parallel Andra, and that hideous strength would always recommend those three books to anyone who’s thinking about these topics, but when it comes to. Probably single cell microbial life that we might find. You might not think that would be a big deal and she just like an amoeba on Mars.

No. Whatever. But honestly, I think it would cause the questions that start coming out of that are how did it develop? Did did we accidentally bring it? If so, oops, sorry. I guess life is more. Tenacious than we thought. Did it spread from earth? There’s some theories of it’s called panspermia that life began somewhere and then a comet or an asteroid hit it and sent that bits of life off into space and then were carried on to another planet and then like fire spreading from one tree to another life spreads that way.

And if that’s true, then where did it start? Where are we the first with life? Did God spark life here? And then it spread through comments to other places. Did life start on Mars? And then back when Mars had liquid oceans and an atmosphere, did life start there and then splash on over to us.

And if so, does that further separate us from our specialists? How do we re interpret our creation myths? If it didn’t happen here I think no matter what we find, it’s going to have to, we’re going to have to start that conversation about how did life start and how necessary do you personally find it that God individually created humankind on this place to be special and to be, have this be our home?

It, if you’re okay with the idea that life is spontaneous and. A creative God created a creation that can’t stop creating, then that’s great. This doesn’t bother you at all. If you require a sort of uniqueness and, an intentionality to life, then this is going to be a real existential crisis for you.

And maybe it might be good now to start thinking about these questions because in your lifetime, we might find microbial life on some other moon, or maybe even in the clouds of Venus in the next couple of years. And if we do, you’re going to have a lot of existential problems, but I would offer to you that that little thing that I just said that I believe that there is a God who for whom creativity is not just something that he’s into into. God’s into creativity, the way that I’m into woodworking or something. But that creativity is one of the essential qualities of God. And so it creation created by a creative God that carries the hallmarks of that creative god must then continue creating because it is expressing the nature of the force that created it.

 And so that creative universe takes stars and takes atoms and smashes them together and creates heavier elements and has supernova and create solar systems based on these increasingly complex molecules and that life itself can be spontaneous that, when given the right amino acids and the right charge.

And we don’t know exactly how, but that these things just happen because life cannot creation. Can’t help, but create because it is created in the image of a creative God. And if you can sit with that and allow that to blow your mind for a minute, Then I think the idea of extraterrestrial life then just gets more exciting and not a threat.

Brent: When you said that, the perspective from which you personally wrestle with one topic or one problem or another is really something that, that you can think through individually.

Quantum Physics Define With Christian Worldview

And I think that goes back to something that I’ve thought about a lot is, are we asking the right questions for ourself in our life? Are we asking the right questions that are really helping us develop in the right way? I think it’s probably a whole other topic, probably a whole other podcast topic. Sometimes we just have to catch us off and say, hey, in what I believe. What is really important, and really flushing that out of yourself. Let me ask you this.

When we look at theoretical physics. The name of your podcast is called, Down the Wormhole, and when we look at things that are just really far out from even where we are in science right now, so, a worm hole is probably a good example of that.

But when we look at black holes, when we look at different dimensions. When we look at dark energy or even quantum physics. From your perspective of your theological background, do you see some really cool overlap and some really cool consistencies with that and the Christian worldview?

Zack Jackson: So I like to consider myself a. Scientifically minded Christian mystic. It’s where I placed my flag. If I had one scientifically minded, because I know that science is not a body of facts that you either believe in, or don’t, it’s not just spreadsheets and textbooks. Science is a way of thinking.

It’s a way of moving through the world in which you are open and excited about being. I’ve heard somebody tell me that science is just being wrong productively. And when somebody comes up with a really great idea or something that seems like it’s true. Every other scientist in their field then tries to destroy it.

And the person who came up with the theory also tries to destroy their own theory. And when it gets, when it falls apart, they go, yes, some more interesting question and they follow that until they make another hypothesis. And then everyone tries to destroy it until they get to a place where it’s very hard to destroy.

And at that point, we start calling it the theory of blank, right? It’s something like the standard model of physics or quantum mechanics is something that seems so counter intuitive, but has been tested so many times since the 1920s that it’s one of our most well tested theories. And we test it so many times because it seems so bonkers.

Nothing makes sense when you get down to the quantum level. And yet it all a lot of it seems to work. And we develop technologies that then enable us to test something that was only theoretical before, like the the Higgs field and the Higgs boson particle. That was just a couple of years ago was finally, we have the technology to.

Discover and showed, oh my goodness. Look, it reacts the way that the math said it should. Wow. Okay. We were right about that. Actually. I had heard some scientists did an interview on NPR really sad when they proved the Higgs field, the Higgs boson because it re it acted the way that it was expected to which meant, oh there’s no more questions.

Oh, that’s a let down. We found the thing. We’re like a dog chasing a car. We caught the tire now what? Huh. All right. I guess I’m going to go back to art school or something, I don’t know what to do with myself with something that actually worked. That sort of wide eyed excitement about discovering the natural world is the same sort of spirit that we see within the Christian mystics of our tradition.

And I think specifically I am drawn to the medieval mystics Julian of Norwich being somebody who I feel like near and dear to my heart. The way that they approached their faith, their spirituality was one of just opening up to very strange experiences of the divine and saying I am anchored to my faith to the way that I described God to the ways that my forebearers have described God.

But my goodness that is more like a a tether that you’ve tied to my waist while I go spelunking down this dark cave that’s just going to keep me safe while I go explore the unknown. And that spirit of adventuring and that sometimes the Church got a little scared of, and maybe called them heretics from time to time, because when they deviated too much from the established doctrines of the time.

 I see that mentality of being the same and yeah, there’s a lot of examples of times when crazy discoveries in science seem to be really good illustrations about doctrines we have of God, like the famous double slit experiment, which showed that some subatomic particles like electrons and photons can act both as a wave and a particle can act both as a point and also as a realm of possibility, a thing which should not happen.

 Something should only be able to be one thing, but we find that they are multiple things at the same time. And your head instantly goes to, oh, look, it’s the Trinity. Oh, Here we go, father, son, spirit, different, same it’s contradictory, but I can hold on to that.

And like sometimes science will come up with something that proves to be a nice illustration, but we have to be careful to hold on to the scientifically minded, mystical mindset that says that is still an illustration. And if one day we explain that experiment in a way that does a way with that. Then it doesn’t work for your illustration anymore.

We have to let it go. When the medieval church had their idea of different levels of heaven, different spheres of heaven that went up and we could purchase came around and said, no, that’s just air. And then there’s outer space. They couldn’t let go of it. And they held on down too tightly.

And the rest of the world left us behind. So we need to learn how to hold loosely onto our theologies, our precious ideas about God and not because we’re losing God, but because when we can let go of things that are not as true, I’ll say there might be some truth in them, but there’s another thing that’s more true waiting for us on the other side.

Scripture teaches us that all who seek will find if you knock the door will be open to you. That God is a God that wants to be known. That wants to be seen, that went through all of this pain and effort to become human, to go hang out with us. So if we’re able to let go of some of our theologies that prove to be unhelpful or untrue, there’s something better waiting for us on the other side.

And I believe that wholeheartedly because that’s been my experience in my life. And if you look through Church history, any time, we’ve had some debate, some argument about some esoteric bit of theology that just had to stand. After we’ve let it go. There’s been more life on the other side. Honestly, there has been a lot more life on the other side and we’ve been willing to hold our beliefs a little bit more loosely.

And that’s something that I have learned from science and that I think the two of them really helped to inform one another in. This is another reason why we don’t talk in our podcast about the intersection of science and religion, because intersection makes it seem like there’s one place where they hang out.

Yeah. That would be like my illustration of the double slit experiment and the Trinity, like that’s an intersecting point. And I, we think of it more of a relationship between science and religion, the strange and fascinating relationship between science and religion, because it’s interpenetrating.

It is all over. It is like a vine on a tree or a tree that has grown around a fence. You ever have one of those that grows around a, like a a metal fence, and then you can’t separate the two anymore. I think of it more like that.

Brent: That’s a great way to put it, everything is interwoven. I think something else that is really neat in these types of conversations is a lot of different people can participate, which is exactly what you do in your podcast.

But a lot of different people are number one, interested in these types of conversations, and number two, just simply a lot of people can engage in build off of each other’s viewpoints. Even if you disagree on something, even if you disagree fundamentally on something, you can still impact each other and you can still learn from those conversations and a great deal. I’ve got a lot out of listening to the podcast that you guys do. Zach, this has been good. Thank you for coming on, this has been a really great conversation to have a really inspiring and just a unique conversation to have with someone that has a completely unique perspective on some of these subjects.

So thank you so much for coming on. Really appreciate it.

Zack Jackson: Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me. This was a lot of fun.

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