Book Club | Transcendent Kingdom

Stump:

Welcome to Language of God. I’m your host, Jim Stump. We’re trying something new, calling it the BioLogos Book Club. Several times this year we’ll announce in advance that we’re reading a book and then a panel of people will discuss it. This is our first attempt. We’re using the novel Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi. If you haven’t read the book, I think this will still be an interesting conversation and even hope it might spur you to read the book yourself. The way the story is told. I don’t think you need to worry much about spoilers. You hear most of the major plot developments in the first few pages. Transcendent Kingdom is the story of an African American girl named Gifty who grew up in Alabama with immigrant parents from Ghana and an older brother named Nana who became addicted to opioids after sustaining an accident on the basketball court.

They were part of a small, mostly white conservative church, which provided the categories through which Gifty understood the world until they didn’t anymore. She was good at science, went to Harvard and then to Stanford, where she worked on a PhD in neuroscience, trying to understand the biological basis of addiction in the brain. The story shifts back and forth from her growing up years to the present at her lab in Stanford. And because of this, we get a constant shifting back and forth of interpreting her life from the theological categories of her youth to the scientific ones of her adulthood. I’m always curious to see where the title of a novel comes from in the text and for Transcendent Kingdom, it comes on page 20. Gifty is in her lab just finishing a procedure that exposes the brain of one of her mice so she can attach some electrodes.

She narrates as follows, “Though I had done this millions of times, it still awed me to see a brain to know that if I could only understand this little organ inside this one tiny mouse, that understanding still wouldn’t speak to the full intricacy of the comparable organ inside my own head. And yet I had to try to understand, to extrapolate from that limited understanding in order to apply it to those of us who made up the species homo sapiens, the most complex animal, the only animal who believed he had transcended his kingdom. As one of my high school biology teachers used to say that belief that transcendence was held within this organ itself, infinite, unknowable, soulful, perhaps even magical. I had traded the Pentecostalism of my childhood for this new religion, this new quest, knowing that I would never fully know.”

Throughout the book, there are themes explored related to mental illness, both addiction and depression, race, the American dream, and of course the relationship between science and religion. Our conversation touches on all of these. Let’s get to that conversation. 

Stump:

Well, this should be fun. I’m excited to have all of you here virtually with me to talk about this book. But before we get there, we should hear who you are briefly. I’m not going to do what I normally do with podcast guests where I go back to your childhood and have you give us a minute by minute account of how you came to be the person that you are. That’s only a slight exaggeration, but let’s at least hear something about who you are after I say something about how you got connected with BioLogos. So going in reverse alphabetical order for no apparent reason, Rachel Wahlberg we have only ever met virtually like this, right?

Wahlberg:

Yeah, yeah. Feels like a lot of folks I’ve met during the pandemic I still haven’t met in person.

Stump:

But we got connected through a mutual friend from your undergrad institution, Bethel University in Minnesota, and you ended up helping Colin put together and host a podcast episode on neuroscience and mental health last fall while I was gone. That was really great, but tell everybody what it is that you do now.

Wahlberg:

Yeah, so I am a PhD student at the University of Michigan. I am in the neuroscience graduate program and I am studying how the brain forms memories.

Stump:

Well, very good. This is a very appropriate book for you to be involved in talking to us. Next is Lynette Strickland, who has also been on the podcast before as a guest, clear back I was looking up in 2019 when we talked about the beetles you were studying and I don’t mean the music group, right?

Strickland:

Right, exactly.

Stump:

That was at the BioLogos conference in Baltimore earlier that year, right?

Strickland:

Yes, that’s where we met.

Stump:

So since then you’ve finished your PhD and what are you doing now?

Strickland:

Right now I’m a postdoc at the University of Memphis, but this summer I will be moving to Boston where I’ll be starting as an assistant professor at Boston University.

Stump:

Well, very nice, my alma mater. I spent a lot of time on Commonwealth Avenue in Boston. Congratulations. That’s exciting.

Strickland:

Thank you.

Stump:

And finally making her Language of God debut on this podcast is Christina Bieber Lake. We met as part of the Creation project at Trinity Divinity School in Chicago. Your talk at the conference on using literature as a new lens on science and faith dialogue was just fantastic. And I’ve been looking for a way to pull you into the BioLogos orbit since then. And this seems like the perfect occasion because in your day job you are?

Bieber Lake:

I am professor of English at Wheaton College where I’ve been for 24 years teaching mostly contemporary American literature, but my research is on biotechnology and ethics of biotechnology as well as just centering on the question of what it means to be human in general. And I do a lot of research into neuroscience, especially as it relates to how we read literature, what happens in the brain when we read literature. So this is a nexus of a lot of different things I’m interested in.

Stump:

Yes, it is. This is a perfect opportunity here. And I will confess I’m a little bit nervous running a book club with an actual literature professor on the panel.

Bieber Lake:

Don’t worry, I don’t correct people’s grammar or anything like that. Don’t worry.

Stump:

I was going to say it feels kind of like cooking a meal for a Michelin Star chef, but I’m not actually responsible for too much of the content here as I asked each of you to bring a passage from the book that stood out to you. So we’re going to have you read that and say why you chose that particular passage and then all of us can join in and respond to it. And we drew lots backstage to determine the order or something like that. And first up is Rachel Wahlberg. Rachel, what did you bring for us from the book?

Wahlberg:

The lucky winner gets to go first. Yeah. So the passage that really stood out to me was in chapter 15, and here Gifty is really talking about her evolution of how she has really come to intersect her understanding of the soul with now her studies in neuroscience.

And so this passage reads, “At times my life now feels so at odds with the religious teachings of my childhood that I wonder what the little girl I once was would think the woman I’ve become. A neuroscientist who has at times given herself over to equating the essence that psychologists call the mind, that Christians called a soul with the workings of the brain. I have indeed given that organ a kind of supremacy, believing and hoping that all the answers to all the questions that I have can and must be contained therein. But the truth is I haven’t much changed. I still have so many of the same questions. Do we have control over our thoughts? But I’m looking for a different way to answer them. I’m looking for new names, for old feelings. My soul is still my soul even if I rarely call it that.”

So this passage really stood out to me just as I have really reconciled my own faith with my studies in neuroscience, but even just in conversations that I’ve had with other neuroscientists that don’t share my faith, but we’re still talking about the meaning of life and what makes a person a person and what makes a being conscious. And so to me, it really stood out as this underlying really great description of something that unites both Christians and scientists and just people alike is these questions of what is the meaning of life.

And I’ve been doing a second book club right now as well with some friends, and I have been reading The Orthodox Way by Kallistos where… And there’s a quote in there that says, we see that, “It is not the task of Christianity to provide easy answers to every question, but to make us progressively aware of a mystery.” And so I was really thinking about that as I was going through this book, just about the usefulness of questions to bond people across maybe divisions and what we believe to be the answer really. So I was just wondering what everyone else’s thoughts was on the importance of questions in this science and faith dialogue.

Stump:

Yeah, that’s really good. And I can’t help but ask you back before we all try to answer something like that, whether you have any personal sort of autobiography that resonates with Gifty in this. As somebody who’s studying neuroscience and a person of faith, we learn in the book pretty early on that Gifty abandons her faith or loses it. I think this is one of the really interesting questions, even in the passage you just read there. She’s wondering whether and how much control we have over our thoughts, how much control, so the one of these themes in here of mental illness that she is studying and trying to understand more, it almost turns back on her sometimes and we wonder whether she’s in control of her own thoughts about this. So talk a little bit more if you would, and then I’ll have the others jump in here about some of your own work in neuroscience and whether that has influenced or challenged your faith in any way. What is a soul? Any of those questions come up for you?

Wahlberg:

Yes. No, that comes up often, even though I study memory primarily, I’m also interested in consciousness research. And so a lot of folks, I’ve just been involved in great conversations on consciousness and the soul. So it really has challenged my faith, particularly this idea of monism and dualism and is one correct, is it a central tenant of my faith to believe one versus the other? And I’ve come more to believe that. I don’t think that that’s the case that I have to necessarily believe in a dualist perspective or a monistic perspective, but that has challenged my faith in that way. I will say that there’s also been a lot of beauty that I have seen in being able to study the brain and to ask these deeper questions at the same time when we’re looking at Jesus became human, he lived in a body and that’s really cool to me that we have neurons, that Jesus had neurons and that God can speak to us through those neurons.

And in the way that in the book there’s talk about optogenetics, which is the ability to activate certain neurons with light, I think that that’s a very beautiful allegory as well to just how God can speak to us through neuroscience is just that direct light that can really shine light on our lives and control our movements. So it has for sure been a challenge, but I do feel like as I was reading this book, I really resonated with many of the conclusions that she had, were not conclusions per se, they were just continued questions and continued understanding of the idea that she doesn’t know and that we don’t know. So I found that really beautiful and I definitely resonated with Gifty’s journey.

Stump:

Good. Christina?

Bieber Lake:

Yeah, to my point that I love that you focused on that passage about questions because she is always saying that there really isn’t necessarily a kind of disconnect between science and religion because they’re asking the same kinds of questions and the focus is on the question as a question. And as long as that’s where your focus is, then you aren’t going to necessarily foreclose on a variety of different type of answers, including the possibility for the existence of God.

So I found this book to be so delightful and one of the few books of its kind that is super honest, but in a refreshing way where it’s saying, yeah, it’s still possible that this could be true. I’m not saying it’s not true, it’s just that I have preferred given the evidence that I have to go with something that feels more reasonable to me, I think is the way that she put it. There’s another passage where she talks about I prefer reason over mystery, but by leaving the questions as questions, she enables the dialogue to continue and she doesn’t want to close it down for herself either, which I found super refreshing.

Stump:

And there’s another passage where she speaks to this where… Let me see if I can find it here. “I used to see the world through a God lens, and when that lens clouded, I turned to science. Both became for me valuable ways of seeing, but ultimately both have failed to fully satisfy in their aim to make clear, to make meaning.” I don’t know. Lynette, maybe you can speak to this too also as a scientist, does science have all the answers? What is the role of ongoing and open questions even in the scientific process? Does this resonate with you what Gifty’s expressing about both science and religion, not fully resolving all of the questions?

Strickland:

Definitely. I would say this definitely resonates with me so much, and I sort of agree with her. I don’t feel science has all of the answers. I don’t feel like it can. I don’t feel like it’s the right tool for addressing certain questions. And sort of going back to something Rachel mentioned earlier, this idea that that questioning is something that unites all of us as humans, whether you’re a believer or nonbeliever, this search for truth is something that we all share, I think, and something that we all have in common. We can’t stop questioning the world around us and our place in it and our purpose in it. And I think there’s something really beautiful in that, in this notion that all of us, by constantly questioning, we are loving God with all of our mind, we are really asking. And so I just think that’s something that’s really beautiful.

Stump:

Good. Rachel, any other commentary you might give us on the neuroscientific side of this novel? I just thought it was really fascinating to see these questions coming out of gift’s life, her brother’s addiction, her mother’s mental illness. What are neuroscientists learning about the sort of biological basis of these things and does it make us think about them any differently when we understand the neuroscience of these?

Wahlberg:

Right. Yeah, I mean, first of all, the article that she references and that she bases this book on is a really great paper. The lab that it’s out of.

Stump:

The real thing.

Wahlberg:

Yeah. Yeah. It’s hard to be in neuroscience and not be familiar with the lab that this article comes out of. And so nice. So it’s a really great example I think that she’s getting into, and it obviously ties together with the story well, but certainly I guess what I have found is that scientists are continuing to find more and more answers to more and more questions. We’ve got great resources, great tools, and for me what’s been important has been kind of distinguishing the search for answers with seeing God fill in those gaps per se because we don’t know the answer. Because I heard it described as the God of the gaps theory that, well, we don’t know something yet, and so God must be the answer.

And for me personally, that’s been difficult to tie together with my faith because we might just keep on finding out more and more things. And that’s exciting. That’s the pursuit of science. And for me, I definitely don’t want to feel like science if it continues to do what it’s meant to do, is now a threat to faith because it’s answering more questions that God had stood in before, so to speak. And so certainly as we’re learning more about the brain, I think it really does come down to maybe a perspective thing.

Is that a threat or is that a beauty that we can continue to see more and more of how God chose to put together our brain and how complicated it is. I love the fact, and I think she refers to it as well, that we’re using our brain to understand our brain, which just blows my mind. I think that’s so cool. And so certainly I see all the new studies coming out as tools that then we can apply to clinical fields, we can help those that are struggling with addiction. We can answer tough questions. And I think that that’s a gift that God has given us to be able to use those skills and the minds he’s given us and they don’t have to pose a threat to God’s existence.

Stump:

Well good. Let’s keep moving here. Have Christina read us a passage and we’ll keep our conversation going.

Bieber Lake:

Sure. There’s so many more things I could have said to what Rachel was talking about, but this is completely related. It happens in the book after the church reacts badly to Nana becoming addicted and then losing his prowess on the basketball court. And so much of the reason why she ends up rejecting her faith has much more to do with the way the church acts behaves and fails than a lot than I think she even realizes actually, because the problem is not having these open questions or even a God of the gaps type of approach more the problem is just they stopped loving him because he wasn’t doing what they loved in him. And she’s looking at the mice and saying, what’s the point… This mouse is addicted to ensure, keeps pressing the button. And just like any doomed addict, the mouse says, this time it’ll be different this time I’ll make it out.

And then she concludes by saying, “What’s the point of all this is a question that separates humans from other animals?” And that is of course, the transcendent kingdom, the reference to the title, our curiosity around this issue has sparked everything from science to literature to philosophy to religion. When the answer to this question is because God deemed it. So we might feel comforted, but what if the answer to this question is, I don’t know, or we’re still nothing. And so it’s that nothing right that is so scary to people. And I think that it’s important to point out that she reserves her most disdain for the people in the church who are trying to say, we’ve got it all figured out, there’s answers to everything, this is the way it should go. This is judgment, this is hell, this is heaven. And with good reason.

Because as soon as they decide that, then there’s, as Rachel is pointing out, there’s going to be another bit of evidence that shows that we understand this in a different way. So you’ve got to, to be an honest Christian, an honest believer, you have to believe that it’s possible that God may not exist and may not be the justifying force and reason behind it all. So I love that passage because it’s like it’s super honest and it’s the people… And you mentioned this earlier, Jim, there’s this woman who preaches at Harvard Divinity School or you mentioned this off-air, and she hears this woman who sounds completely different than the Assemblies of God churches that she was raised in. And she even has that moment of wondering, would my faith be completely different if this is the way that it had been presented to me, that it’s not a question of having all of your questions answered, but a deep mystery, a mystery of the soul.

Stump:

The first time I read the book and got to that passage you’re talking about, I wept. I wept, feeling the dilemma that Gifty was in and seeing her experience something and reflecting that if I had gotten this earlier in my life, I might not be where I am now. And it just makes you think, oh, why are so many people put in this kind of position where they feel like their only choice is to give up on their faith? So is there a way that, the way you’re describing that here, what’s the sort of takeaway for people who are wrestling with questions that feel like they’re being pushed down this path where the inevitable conclusion feels like it’s going the same way that it did for Gifty, where again, she says, “I quit believing in God.” Is there some advice that we give to people that—

Bieber Lake:

I know what you’re driving at. And I think that reading this novel helps you to understand that there is no fundamental tension. That was another passage I thought about bringing up where she says there really is no tension between religion and science because they’re asking the same questions, but they’re asking it in a different way. They’re coming from a different angle. And so she also doesn’t discount the idea of there being a soul. That was in the passage that Rachel read. And so if you can acknowledge the fact that it’s possible that there is a soul and that we really don’t know much about what could be called the soul, which would be consciousness. If you get in deep into consciousness studies, you realize there’s just so much that we don’t know and it’s not God of the gap stuff we don’t know. It’s stuff that’s quantum, what I call quantum weirdness, stuff that we don’t know about the nature of consciousness where it just blows your mind. I just finished reviewing Cormack McCarthy’s new novels, and they’re so much about quantum reality, it’s not even funny.

I mean, he’s just been at the Santa Fe Institute doing all this stuff with quantum physics and talking to these scientists and the question of consciousness is mind-blowing. If you go the Daniel Dennett route and you write a book like Consciousness Explained, I’m sorry, but I have a real big problem with the title of that book just to begin with. But the whole idea that you can explain consciousness is something that I think she’s really resisting here. And that’s the answer to the… Is to keep the question open. And this is Thomas Nagle in this book Mind and Cosmos, said, it’s so weird. Consciousness is so weird that the problem is what he calls Darwin of the gaps that people who fill in scientific naturalist methodology as an answer. So it’s like Darwin of the Gaps is just as bad as God of the gaps. It’s still answering the question, but it’s foreclosing the question. Either way, you foreclose it. So keeping it open is a different issue. I think the answer when people are struggling.

Stump:

Good. So I can’t help but note that this is very interesting that the literature professor is talking about Daniel Dennett and Thomas Nagle books and-

Bieber Lake:

Because I told you this is my area of research. I do interdisciplinary research on bioethics.

Stump:

I’m going to ask these two other science majors here, how reading about these science and religion topics in a novel was any different for you? Have you ever done this before? Have you read novels about the area that you’re interested in some way? And I’m not expecting the sort of science and religion discourse in this book to be at the level of a monograph of some sort, but isn’t there something about these questions coming up in the midst of a story in the midst of somebody’s life that gives it a different sort of feel than if you were just reading one of these monographs? I’m curious, Lynette or Rachel, what your reaction to reading a novel about this stuff is?

Strickland:

Yeah, I would have to agree. I’ve never read this intersection in a novel. I was just thinking about it. I don’t think I’ve ever read a book quite like this one, to be honest. It’s stunning. So definitely I think for me, there are some of the inner monologues that Gifty has that it feels like someone took my inner conversations and published them. And so I think it’s just incredible to be a part of her journey and understanding where she’s struggling with some of these issues. And so I think you put it beautifully earlier that a lot of what challenged her faith is the way that her church treated her brother, and to an extent her mother as well.

Her mother was so faithful, fervent is the word I think of when she made her family pull over after the funeral of a man who really had treated her quite poorly the entire time that she knew him, and she made the family pull over to pray. Right then in that moment, I just remember thinking if I could have that urgency that her mom has in prayer. So yeah, I think it just, to me, speaks to the need for diversity because ultimately what you get then is differences in perspectives. And then maybe her faith wouldn’t have been maybe so challenged if there had been other people who sort of related to her in different ways. Yeah.

Stump:

I think you see in a story like this that questions of faith are not just pure intellect. We’re sitting outside of any context and just thinking of ideas and deciding them based on that, as opposed to these lives that we’re part of that so dramatically influence. Rachel, you have any thoughts on science and religion as a novel?

Wahlberg:

Yeah, no, it was definitely new to me as well. And as Lynette was talking and she was talking about how these have been her experiences written on a page, I really resonated with that because I was a hundred percent… That was me as I was reading. And I thought of another passage in this book that she’s talking about scientific writing and how it doesn’t fully capture the idea of what it feels like to hold a mouse, to hold a rodent. And she says, “My papers were dry and direct. They captured the facts and my experiments, but said nothing of what it had felt like to hold a mouse in my hands and feel its entire body thump against my palms as it breathed, as its heart beat.”

And that really captured to me what you can get out of a novel that you can’t get out of another form of descriptive literature is you really get to feel the emotion in a way that you can’t in other ways. And I think that’s often what’s missing in scientific literature is… And I mean it’s there for a reason that it’s direct and it talks about methods and results, but it does miss out on more the emotional aspects of science. And then I think that that’s the beauty of a novel is that it’s allowed to do that. It’s encouraged to do that, and it can really get at once experienced in a different way.

Bieber Lake:

I have to say something about this. This is my area, this is what I work on, how fiction is a world apart from answers, questions in a totally different way. And I just have to direct our attention to page 227 when she, as a novelist is acknowledging, “What I can say for certain is that there is no case study in the world that could capture the whole animal of my brother, that could show how smart and kind and generous he was, how much he wanted to get better, how much he wanted to live, forget for a moment what he looked like on paper and instead see him as he was in all of his glory and all of his beauty. It’s true that for years before he died, I would look at his face and think, what a pity, what a waste. But the waste was my own. The waste was what I missed out on whenever I looked at him and saw just his addiction. The temptation by both the church and scientist is to see just his addiction.”

They’ll explain it in different ways, but it’s the same temptation and the same problem. And it’s evil to reduce him to that, to reduce him to a statistic for a neuroscience lab or to reduce him to, oh, the sinner or those people, there’s a racial element too. Those people are always getting addicted to drugs, that the church then became a representative of. And she knows that’s the sin of both sides is to do that, just to do it in different ways. And so the novelist is the one who will never allow the person to be reduced to an algorithm or a formula.

Stump:

So I said in introducing you that I first met you at the Creation Project, where we were part of a small group, but then the conference where you spoke and had everybody read the Story of Your Life by Ted Chiang, right? That’s the short story on which the movie Arrival is based. It was just fantastic. Can you give us just another quick little apologetic for why fiction like this? Why fiction like Ted Chiang’s opens us up to different ways of seeing science and religion kinds of questions?

Bieber Lake:

Because the novel is of course lived experience and there is no point of doing any of the science… For instance, neuroscience of addiction. The whole point is to try to figure out why people get addicted. Well, everybody’s story’s going to be a little bit different and there are going to be some things that are in common there, but that if you try to reduce people to a number… There’s a great book… A title. The title is the whole book. I haven’t even read the book because you just need the title.

It’s called Weapons of Math Destruction. If you try to reduce people to figures, it’s not only not going to provide all of the answers, it’s not ultimately going to be the healing that is necessary. And fiction is that place where you can work that out on the ground to see what is necessary. That’s just one of the many reasons why fiction is required for us to think about these deeper questions. I mean, there’s a whole long list of them. I’ve written a book about it, so it’s hard for me to just say, here you go. Depends on the story.

Stump:

Have you written a novel about it is what we should… And you should write a novel about why you have to do this.

Bieber Lake:

I wish, Jim. Yes, if I could, I would. I am not a storyteller. I am a literary critic. I’m an analyst, and I do that because I wish I could do what Ted Chiang is doing or what she’s doing here. So yeah.

Stump:

All right. Let’s have one more. Lynette.

Strickland:

Yes. Great. So this passage, some of the background. So Gifty has a population of lab mice that she uses for experiments who she’s trained to pull or push a lever to get a sweet treat. And over time, she introduces a shock, a form of pain. And so over time, only one mouse has continued to pull the lever and he develops a limp.

And so I’ll start with the passage there. “When the wounded mouse finally died, I held his little body, I rubbed the top of his head, and I thought of it as a blessing, a baptism. Whenever I fed the mice or weighed them for the lever press task, I always thought of Jesus in the upper room washing his disciples feet. This moment of servitude of being quite literally brought low always reminded me that I needed these mice just as much as they needed me. More, what would I know about the brain without them? How could I perform my work, find answers to my questions? The collaboration that the mice and I have going in this lab is if not holy, then at least sacrosanct. I never will never tell anyone that I sometimes think this way because I’m aware that the Christians in my life would find it blasphemous and the scientists would find it embarrassing. But the more I do this work, the more I believe in a kind of holiness and our connection to everything on earth. Holy is the mouse. Holy is the grain the mouse eats. Holy is the seed. Holy are we.”

I love this passage. This is one of those moments where I just completely identified with Gifty and her way of viewing the world and her perspective. And so for those who don’t know, I study beetles primarily, and I’ve talked before about how these beetles connect me to God, how I go to beetles when I need to be connected to God. And so there have been so many moments where I’ve touched a little beetle’s head and I’ve watched its antennae twitch in response, and I think of God in those moments. And so I just found this incredibly beautiful, but also the point where she says, “I can’t talk to anybody about this. I can’t talk to the scientist about this, and I can’t talk to the Christians about this.” So I felt her in that moment. So yeah, those are my thoughts on that passage.

Stump:

So that feeling is one of the most often heard things we get from scientists that come to BioLogos, come to one of our conferences or something to say, I can’t talk to my friends at church about what I do because they think it’s so weird and I can’t talk to my friends at work about what I do because they think it’s so weird in a different direction. So that resonates with you of this being a kind of lonely business of a Christian in the sciences.

Strickland:

Absolutely. It does truly. And I mean, honestly, before organizations like BioLogos, before I got involved with this community, there were very few people that I could have these sorts of conversations with. And since some of the conferences relationships have developed, and it’s been incredible to talk to some of the people who also have say, a passion for insect and a passion for Jesus. And so that’s been incredible. And to see Gifty sort of thinking about this relationship with her mice and relating it to servitude is just, it’s mind-blowing to me to see that written in a book.

Stump:

Everybody really should go listen to the interview we did with Lynette way back on episode number 19 where she talks about these beetles and how she sees God in them. Rachel, Christina, does this passage resonate with you as well? Do you see the lab as holy? Do you see—

Bieber Lake:

Oh, I loved it. If you wanted somebody to talk to Lynette about that, talk to a novelist. The whole time I was reading that, I was thinking of Marilynne Robinson’s novel Gilead, where the protagonist is wanting to baptize kittens. Because the whole idea is once you begin to understand that the whole creation is a gift, right? As soon as you begin to understand that it doesn’t lead to a kind of human exceptionalism that says, forget about the rest of the world. Humans are superior. It leads instead to an appreciation of valuing of whole, the whole creation. And John Ames is just an example of a character who really gets that. And Marilynne Robinson is a novelist who really gets it too. So I love that passage too. Absolutely loved it.

Wahlberg:

Yeah, no, I think about the first time I really had one of those holy is the lab moments, and I was reading a paper on grid cells and grid cells are cells that together form a pattern of the entire environment that an animal is in. And so when you make a map of where in the environment these cells are firing, you see the shape of the environment. And that was the first time that I had one of these, this is incredible moments in the sense of the holiness of it.

Because these cells have existed far longer than we have been able to look at them, since we’ve been able to see these patterns, and now we’re getting to get a glimpse of them, but they’ve always been that way. And I think that beauty, the beauty of detail that we haven’t been able to see for so many thousands and millions of years, and now we’re getting to see them. I think that’s just such a beautiful reflection of God’s character, that there’s so much detail that now we’re still learning something new about His artistic abilities just now, just with new technologies and just the excitement of what more we can discover.

Stump:

There’s a sentiment we hear sometimes from people who are a little nervous about science that it’s going to undermine that kind of feeling of awe or take away the kind of reverential feeling that you guys are describing in this. And when I talk to scientists, they’re almost always exactly the opposite. What are you… Coming to understand something? Are you kidding me? That doesn’t take away the awe, it magnifies it. Is that right?

Bieber Lake:

It magnifies it right to the same extent that it opens up other questions, right? Doesn’t close them down. We have not figured out beetles, right, Lynette? There’s so much more, right?

Strickland:

Yeah, I think that’s the beauty of it too, is that you… Let’s say you maybe answered one question and it’s this beautiful, intricate, complex series of events that you wouldn’t have imagined, and all of that did was lead you to five other questions. So I feel like that’s the beauty of it all, right? It lets you marvel at how complex, and like Rachel said, artistic our creator is. It’s incredible.

Stump:

So is there any danger though, in going down this path further, particularly in the neuroscientific sense of understanding brains that we end up feeling like, oh, I guess we’re just this mass of cells that once you learn how it all works, we’re just in the other machine. One of the other short passages I had highlighted from the text was, “I grew up being taught that God gave us dominion over the animals without ever being taught that I myself was an animal.” Is there any danger of us feeling like, oh turns out I’m no different really now than any other animal. It’s just a little bit more complicated in our brains than it is in a mouse brain, but ultimately we’re just the same. Christina, you’ve thought a lot about these sorts of questions.

Bieber Lake:

Oh, yes, yes. I mean, going back to Marilynne Robinson, she wrote a whole book about this called Absence of Mind, where she takes on this question of the Daniel Dennetts, who she calls the pseudoscientist of the world who are trying to explain away this marvelous mystery of mind, of soul, of consciousness, explain it away by saying it’s just a process of the brain. And it’s such a magnificent take-down that if you read that book and don’t come away with a real sense of the brain is not a machine. I don’t know what it’s going to take for you. And she feels like that is such an important argument to make that as a novelist, she is going to continue to make it. She makes it through all of her novels, but she makes it directly in that essay. And she’s not the only one who’s done it, of course. But it’s so important because as soon as you just assume that it’s all mechanical and we’re just, all these neurons are firing and that is going… You just make that assumption, then the questions become closed, like we were talking about earlier.

Stump:

So let me read this short passage too, that I alluded to earlier about when Gifty lost her faith. And I’d like to hear you talk a little bit about if the process going on in her brain here at this moment is something different than the kinds of processes she’s studying in mice, who are addicted or with her mother who’s depressed. So she says, this is right after the funeral for her brother. She says, “I trembled. And in the one second it took for the tremble to move through my body, I stopped believing in God. It happened that quickly, a tremble length reckoning. One minute there was a God with the whole world in his hands. The next minute the world was plummeting, ceaselessly toward an ever shifting bottom.” What happens in brains when something like that transpires? Do we know, Rachel, at all?

Wahlberg:

I don’t think we could say that we know. Yeah. I mean, the brain is so complex. It’s hard to answer, knowing. I think for me, what it’ll always come down to is we might understand the how, but it doesn’t mean we understand the why or the bigger picture of it. We’ll be able to understand the questions that are within the realm of the scientific method, but we can’t necessarily fully understand the things that are outside of that method. And so to me, we don’t know, and maybe we’ll figure it out, I don’t know. But at the same time, to me, that doesn’t explain questions that are outside of the realm of science to me.

Bieber Lake:

Well, and you also pointed out, Jim, that that moment was not in fact the end all for her. It was still something that she was considering right back and forth, right up to the very end, except for possibly the somewhat tacked on ending with her and Han or Han. We could talk about that maybe later. But the whole thing is otherwise still just very… It’s not a moment where she’s just done with the question.

Stump:

It didn’t seem like that.

Bieber Lake:

And so part of the issue there is this whole world of what is called unconscious cognition. The unconscious, the fact of the parts of the brain that go on autopilot that make up the bigger part of who we are, the lower brain, if you will, and the habits that we have and the ways that we think about the world that we don’t even know where they came from. Those things are as important in these issues about how we walk and taking a step in faith or not in faith or whatever, as this kind of moment in time where you tremble and you’re thinking, well, I can’t believe in God anymore.

Stump:

We’re closing–getting close to the end here. One of the themes throughout here that I wanted to toss out quickly though at least, is the role of women in the sciences. I’m sitting here talking to three women, and I’m going to shut up and let the three of you talk a little bit about how much did the experiences that Gifty tells us about in her story resonate with you as females?

Wahlberg:

That definitely resonated. I’m the one woman in my lab and my lab’s very kind, very respectful of me as a woman. But it is definitely something that I feel, and I think it’s maybe more specific to my specific field of neuroscience as well, which is more computational and more engineering. And there are many other women in other labs that I know and relate well with. But that is certainly something that I do, that I did relate with as I was reading the book. And just that bonding of it’s really great to talk with other women in science and to hear their experiences. And it’s encouraging to see us moving together ahead and contributing our voices to the discussion.

Strickland:

I completely agree. So one of the people in the story that we come to know is Katherine, who is I think maybe one of the only other women in the department that Gifty is in. And I don’t know the exact paths, but at some point, Katherine asks Gifty if she wants to be on the women in science group or organization, and Gifty says something like, I can’t believe she would draw attention to herself in that way.

Bieber Lake:

Steminist.

Strickland:

Was it steminist?

Bieber Lake:

Just steminist. The T-shirt.

Strickland:

Yes, the T-shirt. I just giggled at that moment. I loved that moment I felt for them in that moment. And two, I think being a woman of color, I totally just really… She really resonated with me in a lot of ways. There was just one passage, it was just a quick sentence, but it summed up a lot of my academic social life where she goes to a party and she says something like, I wasn’t cool anywhere else except for these parties. As one of the only black people in science fields, you don’t have to do anything to be cool. And again, one of those times where they just wrote something that was in my brain and published it.

Bieber Lake:

And also ultra honest, super honest.

Strickland:

So honest.

Bieber Lake:

There’s a weird privilege that she had in that moment. I’m cool. It’s just bizarre.

Strickland:

It is.

Stump:

Christina, the world of literary criticism isn’t quite as male dominated, but in the group where-

Bieber Lake:

No, but theology is.

Stump:

I was going to say the group where you and I met, I think you were about the only woman in the group.

Bieber Lake:

Yes. I was at the Henry Center all last year. And the men that I was with, they were all analytic philosophers or theologians, and literary studies is kind of the other end of analytic philosophy and theology. So the ways of being a woman were not so much the issue as just the ways of thinking about these problems, the approach to asking and answering questions. I just felt like we were often talking past each other, but I was trying to be an ambassador for literary studies, and I don’t know. My foray was getting everyone to read Ted Chiang’s story, and I was hoping that that itself would be its own argument. And I don’t know, you’ll have to tell me, but I hope it succeeded. I thought it succeeded.

Stump:

Worked on me. I’ll tell you that.

Bieber Lake:

Yeah, these questions have to be answered with the imagination, not just the mind and not just reason. So that’s why I was so interested in that passage where she talks about, well, I didn’t want mystery. I wanted reasons for these things, and you are just not always going to get reasons. And that doesn’t mean that that’s a God of the gaps. It just means that the world, consciousness, reality, the truth of the way things is just much, much bigger than we’re ever going to get our minds around.

Stump:

Well, very good. Let’s maybe go around one more time. Is there anything else that you’d like to say about this novel that we haven’t gotten to? There are, of course, lots of other wonderful things we could say, but in a kind of concluding way. Anything else you’d like to draw attention to from the novel that stood out to you?

Strickland:

Give it a read.

Bieber Lake:

Give it a read. Yeah. I wanted to point out that I would recommend a nonfiction book that is just as honest and just as interesting in dealing with these issues by Megan Olin. I’m not sure how you pronounce her name, but it’s called God, Human, Animal, Machine. And she had grown up at Moody Bible Institute, really was a faithful person, and then just began to feel like the faith wasn’t answering the questions that she wanted answered, and I just reviewed it for the American Science Affiliations Journal. I don’t remember the name of it, the ASAs Journal, because it was—

Stump:

Perspectives in Science and Christian Beliefs.

Bieber Lake:

That one. Yeah. And it’s such a powerful accompaniment to this novel that reading them together and it would be a great opening for conversations with non-Christians, particularly those who are on the science end of things. So those two things together would be my recommendation.

Stump:

Nice. Rachel, any final thoughts?

Wahlberg:

Just finding the quote. So one last quote that I did really love from this book was when Gifty watched the mouse refuse the lever, she wrote, “That saving grace, amazing grace is a hand and a touch, a fiber optic implant, and a lever and a refusal, and how sweet it is.” And I thought that was really beautiful just in how God uses us using science to reach out to those that are hurting, that do need our help and need God’s help. And I found that to be a really beautiful description of that.

Stump:

Yeah, thanks. Well, I’m anxious to see how this episode is received by our audience. I hope they have at least some degree of the fun I had in talking to you about all of this. We think we’re going to try some more book clubs in the future. The next one on the list is Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass that I have sitting on the top of my pile back here. But thanks so much, Rachel, Lynette, and Christina for the time you put in reading this book and the time you gave here this afternoon to talk about it with us.

Strickland:

Wonderful. Thank you.

Wahlberg:

Thank you.

Bieber Lake:

And it’s great to have an excuse to read it again. Yeah.

Wahlberg:

Thank you.

BioLogos:

Language of God is produced by BioLogos. It has been funded in part by the Fetzer Institute, the John Templeton Foundation, and by individual donors and listeners who contribute to BioLogos. Language of God is produced and mixed by Colin Hoogerwerf. That’s me. Our theme song is by Breakmaster Cylinder. BioLogos offices are located in Grand Rapids, Michigan in the Grand River Watershed. If you have questions or want to join in a conversation about this episode, find a link in the show notes for the BioLogos forum, or visit our website, biologos.org, where you’ll find articles, videos, and other resources on faith and science. Thanks for listening.