You are listening to the Confront of Christianity podcast and I'm here with doctor Sharon Diricks. Sharon is a speaker and author whose work focused on responding to the spiritual and faith related questions that people ask today. She has a PhD in brain imaging from the University of Cambridge and today speaks regularly on topics such as science and theology,
human consciousness, the problem of evil and suffering. Sharon has appeared on local and national radio and has written for The Times, The London Times, that is for our American listeners. She is the author of Why Looking at God, Evil and Personal Suffering? Am I Just My Brain? And most recently Broken Planet, released just last year. Sharon, thanks so
much for joining me. You and I got to meet exceedingly briefly in the street in Cambridge this past summer, and it was it was lovely to kind of put a body in a face to a name, because i'd certainly you've been sort of on my railar for a while, but I hadn't been able to meet you in person. Fun fact, for those who don't yet know Sharon, up familiar with her work. She has one of the most interestingly spelt last names I've ever come across, and she
just now helped me figure out how to pronounce it. So, so, Sharon, your last name is spelled d I R c k X, which is just I love that so much. One one sort of vowel. It's like the sort of scrabble word of choice.
It is in need of another vowel. And another fun fact is that so my husband and I met in a brain imaging lab, which makes us sound very nerdy, but one of the first things I've said to him when I saw his name was that he had too many vout consonants and non in the vowels at the end of his name. And there's something quite funny about that that I now possessed the same name.
So yeah, that is funny. Did what was your surname at the time? Could you could you have opted to go for yours or did you just think, you know what, it's more fun to go with.
So it was Gustard, which is custod but with the G so it wasn't much true. I never fared well with last names. I'll just you know, take smooth.
When I married my husband, Brian, he I said, I'll change my name for yours. If you'll start pronouncing your name correctly in my view, because he is Brian McLaughlin as I would say, but his family and most Americans would say McLoughlin. But I've been on a sort of personal campaign to reclaim that, you know, the good sort of Scots Irish pronunciation of that name in America. None of that is remotely related. Well, actually no it is.
It is, okay, So right, of the many things that we could talk about today, and I know you have a real range of interests, I'm actually most interested to talk to you about questions rising from from your penultimate book or your I am not assuming that your most recent book is the Ultimate, the book you published in twenty nineteen. Am I just in my brain? My brain? Oh yeah, I was thinking it must be am I just my brain? But the note I have here says, am I just in my brain? Which is a whole
other thing. Am I just my brain? Because I think for many people today, especially those who may not be coming from a religious perspective, there's an increasing interest in how our brains work, and what we can understand about our brains from a scientific perspective relates to our sense of ourselves from a kind of human perspective, And I'd love to hear you talk a bit like first about how you got interested in that whole area of thought, and you know, both the science and the kind of
non scientific questions around that, and then we'll talk a little bit about how, as two people who were following us of Jesus, how we would think about these questions. So, yeah, first, do you want to give us a sense of what intrigued you about brain imaging in the first place.
Well, I ended up so I did biochemistry undergraduate, which I loved, and I knew that I wanted to do a PhD of some sort in the basic sciences, the biological sciences. But biochemistry was a little bit tedious, involved for petting tiny amounts of liquid from one test tube to another, and not terribly interesting, although obviously generated very
interesting results. But brain imaging, actually I heard about a friend of mine along the corridor was imaging something in this slightly archaic machine holding things together with duct tape and that sort of thing. Anyway, that got me fascinated as to this technique that could look inside the human body without cutting into it. And so I began to look for sort of PhDs in that sort of area, which took me via Switzerland to Cambridge to do this PhD in brain imaging. And this was at a time
when functional I was just getting going. So it was the nineteen nineties, mid to late and yeah, and so people were studying all kinds of kind of fairly basic functions of the human brain and trying to map them using FM eye, which basically measures the signal from your blood which is downstream of what's happening in your neurons, and then you generate a statistical map and you can look at it and that sort of thing. So this
was fascinating. It was a massive privilege to be working in that field at a time, as you say, when the sorts of discoveries that were being made was really accelerating, and it was a privilege to almost have first hand kind of experience in that time. I was already a Christian by that point. I hadn't always been actually changed my views about Christianity as an undergrad while I was studying bio chemistry, but by that point I was I was already a Christian.
So go to pause you there, because I can't help myself, Sharon, I'd love for our listeners to hear more about how you changed your views when it came to Christianity. Did you do undergrad at Cambridge as well?
No, that was in Bristol. In Bristol, right, so yeah, yeah, so I arrived in Bristol. Well, maybe I should go back a little further. So I've known for a long time that I wanted to be a scientist. I always did my maths homework first. I really didn't like writing long essays. I know that's a little different to you. And so my A level biology teacher I really looked up to, and one day she handed me this book called The Selfish Gene by this person called Richard Dawkins.
And I kind of read this book and essentially I didn't I don't know why. I didn't particularly kind of question it. I just sort of absorbed at this perspective that we were sort of gene machines and that our genes were essentially selfish, and that, yeah, purpose of life was in you know, the functioning of those genes, and not really too much more than that. And I arrived
at university, I guess kind of agnostic. I had absorbed a lot of kind of views like the ones I've just espoused from like friends, from radio, from books, and so on, and also the view that to be a Christian or to believe in God was not compatible with being a credible scientist, and so I arrived agnostic. But in the first week I was invited to an event called Gorilla Christian, which I ended up going to. I
was fascinated. Lots of people on my corridor were going These were all taking place in my hall of residence, and I sat through this evening of people asking questions about God, and about halfway through the evening, I put my hand up and asked my own question, which was, surely you can't believe in God and be a credible scientist. And I was given an answer that basically opened up a whole vista for me of possibility and of asking
more questions and grilling more Christians. And it was along the lines of, you know, if we asked someone to choose between these two reasons that that instagram exists, one because of the processes and programs that undergird it, and two because Kevin's sistrom exists. I mean, you know, you think about that for one second and realize we don't need to choose between those two explanations for its existence.
They both work together in complementary ways. And I've never it sounds strange, but I'd literally never heard anything like that before. This was rocket science for me, if you like. And it set me asking a lot more questions and
really more Christians. And I did that for another eighteen months, and about around Easter time of my second year, I realized that and I've spent some time looking at the person of Jesus Christ and the kind of the way that he was really different to anyone else I'd ever met, in terms of not just how he treated people, but the things he did in the world, and then his own death and rising from the dead as well well.
And so I got to the point where I didn't have all of my questions answered, but I did feel like I had had enough questions answered to know that Jesus was real, that he was alive, and that he knew me, and he cared about science, and so I decided to follow him. So I was twenty at that point.
Okay, I love that, I will now let you continue. And what you were trying to tell us to tell us before? So he was saying, as an undergrad you'd sort of been through that change of mine, and then as you were pursuing your PhD, you were getting interested in how the brain works and what we can find out about it.
Yeah, so I so and so in terms of the areas of research, I mean I was doing some fairly on interesting methodological PhD that you know. I've actually written five books, isn't it. But I wouldn't recommend you read
the first one. It's not really interesting at all. And so, and then I went on to do a postdoc in the well actually a brief time in pre and post surgical mapping, where we look at how brain regions are displaced by things like a tumor and how kind of function you know, how the brain is incredibly pastic and its function can kind of adapt depending on what's happening. And then I went on to do a post doc in the US the Medical College of Wisconsin looking at
human cocaine abuse. And then that when we came back to the UK, that was for me to study this whole area that we're engaging in right now, really of how to respond to people's questions and there's sort of an irony that you know, questioning and grilling was really part of my own journey and it became part of what I was then to go on to do as well. Yeah, so lots of different areas of neuroscience that I've sort of been involved in.
A few years ago, I was involved in an event at MIT, which is just down the street from where I live in Cambridge, Massachusetts. And in this event there were two Ritian professors and to non Christian professors who were talking about what they believed and why, and I'll never forget one of the non Christian professors, who identified
as agnostic, said this. He said, our consciousness and our self awareness create the illusion that we have some sort of special ego power, some inis, some unique existence, but in reality, we are nothing but bones, tissues, gelatinous membranes, electrical impulses, and chemicals. He said, we are stuff like donuts.
And I know that's sort of pulling on various different threads there, but I'm curious for your reflections on whether those statements are ones that are legitimated by science, or whether those statements come from only a kind of reductive view of science that says that we it's almost like we have a kind of illusion of our own selfness, of our own existence that were not actually even individual thinking agents in our own right from a scientific perspective.
So this whole area, to me is really fascinating in terms of how the boundary between science and philosophy is sort of crossed all the time, almost without us realizing, and what you end up having is kind of philosophical statements being made by scientists that have the appearance of being scientific, but actually what the science can show us, and what is a really important part of this whole conversation, is that we don't just have a brain. We also
have a mind. So you have a brain with all of its neurons and chemicals that you can measure objectively whether someone wants you to or not, you can measure them in somebody. But you also have a mind. This thing that the professor that you mentioned was saying is a losory. We can discuss that in a minute. But you have that internal sense of self that your thoughts, feelings and motions, memories, decisions. As Thomas Neagil put it,
there's something that it is to be you. And I guess the conversation hinges around what's the relationship between mind and brain. But the most that the science can tell you is that they're connected. It can only speak to correlation. It can't speak to anything beyond that. You've got all these different philosophical theories about maybe the brain generates the mind, or maybe mind is its own independent, immaterial substance and
brain is physical and they interact. Or maybe it's that actually everything has conscious properties in it, And these are all different philosophical views that people impose upon the science. But the science only gets you to connection. It gets you to correlation. If you put someone in an MRI scanner and give them a task that uses their mind, say they're working memory or something, you will see networks
in the brain light up. So clearly these things are connected, and you know, look at child development or neurodegeneration or whatever. But in order to impose more than that, you actually are stepping out of science and into philosophy. And that's what this professor was doing in saying that the consciousness is an illusion of our brains, tricking us into thinking that there's something that it is to be us. And of course there are some people that take that view.
There are many who are agnostics and atheists that don't take that view. They actually think we need a more persuasive explanation for the sense of self that it seems to be so real. And of course, if you begin to say that the very ground of your being is illusory, then how can you place a weight on absolutely anything else. And in fact, the viewpoint itself is subject to the same state of illusion as the phenomenon that you're describing,
and so it becomes impossible to say anything meaningful. And so obviously there are many atheist philosophers that would deeply question that that view and say that we're not bound to that. I think there are more persuasive views with more explanatory power.
Yeah, yeah, I'm sure you've come across Oard Louis who's based at Oxford in your travels, as it were, And I love how he expresses what sometimes scientists do or people speaking in the name of science from a sort of atheist or agnostic perspective, which is what you call
sort of nothing buttery. You know, when you hear the words we are nothing but X, Y or Z. Actually, often that's going beyond what science can really tell us, because science can It may well be the case that science can only tell us about these sort of scientifically
measurable elements of us. But that's not the same as saying science proves that we are nothing but these things that we can actually have it understanding that, like science isn't the right tool for answering all the questions that we might have about.
Yeah, so I would actually argue, and I argue it in my book, Am I Just My Brain? That it's within science that we see that we're more than just on neurons. There are all kinds of really fascinating instances in clinical medicine that show that we're actually highly complex things. Like you know, there's a small proportion of adults that have survived childhood hydron carefully water on the brain, where they're basically missing around ninety percent of their brain tissue,
and yet they are fully functioning healthy adults. Or we could look at there's a fascinating phenomenon that's really coming through more and more these days called terminal lucidity, where people with an advanced state of neurodegeneration have a very temporary but very real return to the self towards the
end of their life, often just before they die. And of course there's the phenomenon of near death experiences which you know, some might say is controversial, some say is really fascinating, where people have been declared dead on the operating table and yet have been resuscitated and come around to say that they were actually vividly conscious and heard
them being declared, themselves being declared. So you know, that's an instance of you know, when their brain has died, what happens to the conscious mind At the very least, it's fast. And you know, if we are just our brains, none of these phenomena make any sense at all. And so perhaps we need a more sophisticated and more nuanced, more complex way of describing human beings. That I actually think that the Christian worldview helps us with a lot.
You know, right at the beginning of the Bible, in the Book of Genesis, it describes not necessarily literally, but the formation of human beings that is not in conflict with the science, I don't think. And it says, you know, that the Lord God formed the man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath
of life, and the man became a living being. And so we see, you know, that we are a combination of dust and breath, and the word for breath is spirit or breath, and the product of those two things is a living nefche. And the word nephesh is a soul. Now we often get soul think of it a bit differently, but actually soul is a very holistic term in Hebrew. So human beings are whole, but they have different component parts and they're complex, and that seems to match with
how life seems to work. I don't know, you know, life, human beings seem to be hard to box, you know, hard to pin down, and they do strange things, and we need a model that helps us with that.
Yeah. Yeah, I think one of the things that often people aren't aware, perhaps especially if they are not Christians themselves, is that the message of Christianity is not that if you put your trust in Jesus that you will then kind of live in disembodied you know, your soul will kind of float off into disembodied bliss in this ethereal place called heaven forever, but that actually, when Jesus comes back to this earth, that he will call us into
resurrection life with actual physical bodies. Now we don't have all the details of what those bodies will be like, because we know, on the one hand, we have the example of Jesus's body, which after his resurrection was enough similar to his body before that people could recognize him.
He still had the scars, the nail sort of prints in his hands, and the hole in his side where a Roman soldier had sort of shrubbed as his spirit in there, but he was also able to kind of walk through walls essentially, So we you know, I think we have so much that we don't know about what
these resurrection bodies will be like. But we also have the repeated sort of assurance in the New Testament that we will, if we've trustedes will be raised to a kind of physical existence, not just the kind of spiritual existence floating off that actually are kind of our soul and our body as we belong together.
Yeah. Absolutely, and often the thought of it being a bit ghostly floaty is not a pleasant one people that that feels that that's not necessarily somewhere I'd want to be. But imagine a reality that's every bit as real as this that the one that we have now, but you know, a million times more beautiful and more And now that's something I can get on board with, you know, rather than a slightly ethereal something that doesn't really have any
bearing on this life. But the thing that's also really amazing for the Christian you know, Jesus says, you know, that eternal life begins when you turn to him in this life. That he says that this is eternal life, that they may know you the only God and Jesus whom you have sent. In other words, that actually the life that will carry on beyond death begins now. It becomes more embodied in the future, but it actually starts now,
and that that's amazing. And yeah, I definitely experience the reality of that life being breathed into kind of dead places in my own life as a student, even in just like really mundane stuff like being a bit of a workaholic, you know, and just trusting that God was going to get me through something that I didn't think I could get myself through the first verses of Psalm twenty seven are some of the first words that I read. The Lord is my Light and my salvation. Whom shall
I fear? The Lord is a stronghold of my life, of whom shall I be afraid? And I just remember really clinging to those that actually, I've entrusted myself to a being who is bigger than myself, and that's actually incredibly comforting. It's not just all on me to get myself through this. There's someone who's, if you like, following me or walking with me, or has got me. And that was amazing. Yeah, that eternal life is really practical and really real.
What would you say to somebody listening to you who said, you know what, this just confirms my understanding that Christianity is a crutch for people who can't deal with the realities of life. You can't deal with, you know, the brute facts of science that are telling us that actually there is no meaning and purpose in our lives and don't have the courage to make a purpose for themselves.
That people like you and me are imagining this god in the sky who has a purpose for our lives, and it's really just sort of delusion and an emotional crutch.
Yeah, yeah, it's a really valid question. I would actually say the argument for crutch works both ways. You could also argue that the atheist or the agnostic has refused or rather you choose as not to believe in God, or has persuaded that God doesn't exist as a way to avoid being accountable to a higher being, as a way to avoid having to think about those bigger questions of life as well. And so whether you can argue the Crutch argument in favor of God's existence or away
from his existence, so that doesn't help us. What we need to answer is does he exist or not? And for that we need to look at our lives and ask, well, where are the most persuasive arguments for why we seem to long for meaning and you know, or or a sense of purpose? Or you know why science works, or why the universe holds together the way that it does, why there is suffering and evil in the world. Where do the most persuasive answers lie to those big questions
of life that we have? And my experience has been that actually it's the existence of God that helps us make more sense of life, rather than throwing us into greater confusion and into some sort of intellectual fog and darkness. I don't believe science does have all the answers. I don't think it can speak to questions of meaning, but we do. We are drawn to a sense of meaning, even if it's that in the absence of our belief in God. We want to create our own sense of meaning. Well,
why bother if there is no ultimate meaning? And yet, if there is a meaningful being behind the universe, then there's a grounding for our longing for our lives to have purpose, to have meaning because we're made by a God who has made us for purpose. That we're not here by accident. There is actually reason and purpose in each individual life, as well as the human race as a whole.
One of the questions you listed there that it would be worth us sort of looking at is why does science work? I want to double click on on that
one because of your particular background and expertise. So for many people, I think their assumption is that science has really been a project of offering an alternative hypothesis to believe in a creator God like you know, the more that science explains of the world, whether it's of the universe rit larger, whether it's what happens between your ears and my ears, you know in terms of our brains that the more science explains, the less need there is
for God. So help us help us understand that question. You know, why does science even even work? Which is maybe a question that people often aren't asking, as they sort of stand on on the sup is it lee solid ground of science to justify their disbelief in God? Help us understand what God has to do with the question of why science works completely.
And it's really important to say at first that the very question why does science work is not a scientific question that science itself can answer. It's again it's sitting in the realm of philosophy and theology. And you know, I think that science works because of two things, Because there is order in nature and there's order in the human mind. And without those two things, no study would
be possible. And so, you know, if you were to set up a study over in Boston and we know that we're onto something, we know that there's a theory that we're pretty sure that if we can just collect the data, it'll come through. And then we come over to Oxford and we repeat the same study exactly what we ought to see the same results. And the reason for that is because there's an underlying order to the natural world without which science can't operate. Now, what's the
most persuasive explanation for that order? And the order kind of yeah, is it is the most persuasive explanation that there's a kind of accidental, kind of random process over a long period of time has sort of somehow given rise to order. Or is it that there was an orderer undergirding the cosmos, which is more persuasive. Secondly, that the order in the human mind, the fact that we've already talked about this a little bit, the fact that we can reason and make sense of things that we're
curious about the world. Where where did the most persuasive explanations for the human mind come from? Is it that you know that we live in a universe of time plus of matter and a chance, but it's non conscious, it's just molecules. Or is it the case that actually there's a mind behind the cosmos that has somehow given rise to human beings. Well, the first explanation is not impossible, but it's kind of surprising. Why would a mindless universe
give rise to mindful humans. It makes a lot more sense that there was a mind in the beginning, which, of course the very first words of Genesis say, in the beginning God and then this God created the heavens and the earth. Personally, scientifically speaking, I'm more persuaded by
the second explanation. In other words, you could make a case that it's actually the very existence of God that gives us the grounding for why science even works in the first place, which is kind of a crazy place to be given that we spend a lot of our time responding to the view that science has disproved God, and because you now have mechanisms, you no longer need God. He's being squeezed out of the picture. But my earlier example about Kevin Sistrom and in Instagram show you know,
shows that that need not be the case. You know, you can perfectly well study the mechanisms and also know that the reality of the creator behind it, and actually both are needed for a more complete understanding of Instagram. If you try and just understand it in terms of whatever the programming script is, I'm a bit out of data. I don't know what the us is it Java or something. If you just try and understand Instagram in terms of Java and you leave out Kevin Sistrom, you are left
with an incomplete understanding of Instagram. It's actually to the two together that give you a more complete picture of reality. And that's what I see it being with science and God. It's actually, you have a diminished view of the natural world, even a diminished potentially you know, not diminished kind of a framework for even the conduct of science if we leave out the one that started it all and continues to pulled it today.
Yeah. Yeah, that's really helpful. Fun fact, I was today years old when I found out that somebody named Kevin came up with Instagram. That's news to me, but I appreciate it. Yeah, And I think what you've said there
is really helpful, Sharon. I think people also often don't know the kind of Christian origins of what we now call science, and the way the Revolution was driven by people who believed that the God described in the Bible was the god behind the universe, a god who is orderly and lawgiving, and who created humans in his image so that we might actually, among other things, be able to discern the underlying kind of principles that the regular laws and principles that He's created his universe on the
basis of. I love the sort of history of science behind that that often gets lost, I think, especially especially when we listen too much to our fellow countrymen like Richard Dawkins and those who want to make want a sort of pro the idea that science by definition is a project that's going to draw your way from Christianity, or that the story of science and Christianity has always been a sort of story of scientists victorious defeating ignorant Christians,
when so often Christians have been involved in some of the great discoveries of science over the last sort of four hundred years.
Yeah, absolutely, Sharon tell.
Us probably last question, because I'm sort of intrigued what your answer is going to be on this. What is the most fascinating thing about the brain that you have discovered? I didn't just mean in li like in your own personal research, but that you've come across, Like, what's your top kind of fun fact about our brains that you like telling people about, if they, like me, are less steeped in the science of brains.
At any one moment. There's enough electrical activity to power an LED light, if that's of any use to you going today, which brings new emphasis to the notion of
having a light bulb moment, right. But perhaps on a slightly more serious note, I guess the more that I've thought about mind and brain and human consciousness, the thing that fascinates in me is the amount that we don't know, that we don't understand, and that, yeah, the complexity and the anomalies you know, where something very different most of the time this happens, but occasionally this happens, and how
we make sense of that? And yeah, I just think human beings are fascinating and they resist the boxes that we sometimes try and put them in.
Well, thanks so much for being with me, Sharon, and for sharing some of your own story as well as some of your research and thinking over the decades that you've been thinking about these questions. And for those who want to know more, you could grab a copy of Sharon's book, Am I Just My Brain and learn much
more from there as well. If you would like, you could follow the Come Friend of Christianity podcast on Instagram apparently invented by a guy called Kevin and Twitter slash x who knows I mean a relation to Bob and Stewart, or you can leave a review on iTunes and that you can mention if there's a topic or question that you would like to see explored in a future episode.
Until I talk into your earphones next week, I hope you reflect on your brain and whether if you're a Christian, perhaps you could praise God for the brain that he's given you and the opportunities he's given you to use it. And if you exploring Christianity or skeptical of Christianity, maybe ask yourself the question of whether you have bought two simple answers when it comes to what our brains might be and how they might relate to our sense of who we are