Introducing Season 3 of Undeceptions
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What won't make sense to many listeners is that regular church participation has physical health benefits and that actually you're likely to live longer if you go to church. How on earth? Yeah, so that's another very good question. And we do find that although religious service attendance doesn't

affect the incidence of physical disease all that much, maybe a little bit, but not all that much. It does seem to increase the likelihood of survival.

Hey, I'm John Dixon, and we're back next week with season three of Undeceptions. We're chasing down facts and exploring the best arguments to explode some of the myths about history, science, psychology, and the good life, and how it all relates to the Christian faith. And there's no dodging the tricky stuff. In fact, the reason why I am a climate scientist is because I'm a Christian, not in spite of it.

Even though most objections to climate change are couched in science-y sounding terms, if you have a conversation with anyone about it that's longer than one minute long, the conversation will, nine times out of ten, take an abrupt right turn into "I don't want to..." fill in the blank. "I don't want a carbon tax." "I don't want to destroy the economy." "I don't want the government telling me what to do." 99.9% of our objections to climate change have nothing to do with the science.

Whether you believe every jot and tittle or doubt the whole thing, join us for Season 3 where I talk to world experts on climate change, public health, why belief in God is natural, how music points to the divine, mistakes in the Bible, and the end of the world. Ha ha!

I've always kind of been partial to zombies. I don't know that I want zombies to actually be there at the end of the world, but I think zombies make for really interesting stories. Yep. We've got zombies and robots.

So it's very much in the air that we are going to produce gods. AI challenges theology because it's saying, look, we know what human beings are. You don't. There is no God dimension. And if we construct God,

in the end something that functions exactly as a human being, that will exclude God. And of course that's nonsense because if the human mind can construct life, that simply shows that life can be constructed by a designing intelligence.

We desperately need theologically, ethically trained people who can take a sane and not a crazy look at these things and guide humanity into sensible decisions. But one really does fear with the rate at which governments are getting away with highly intrusive uses of AI that it may be completely unstoppable.

But don't worry, we're not just examining all the ways we could destroy ourselves. We're looking at the data that tells us exactly how we can put ourselves back together, body and soul.

have tried to empirically study forgiveness, the consequences of forgiveness, the consequences of lack of forgiveness, and how to promote forgiveness. And the evidence has increased over the years that forgiveness certainly contributes to mental health. It lowers depression, it lowers anxiety, it promotes hope.

Every culture will have something like what we would call music today, yes, definitely. Because it's a unique form of communication, a unique form of human communion, I think is the word I would use. That it can do things and make things possible between human beings that nothing else can. Huh. I think I might have almost shed a tear recording that one.

Almost. Join us for Season 3 of Undeceptions. Episode 1 drops next week, Monday, October 19. Sunday the 18th, if you're in the US. Subscribe now by heading to undeceptions.com. See ya real soon. Brought to you by the Eternity Podcast Network.