I’ve started it on Kindle along with my wife. It has already fostered some interesting discussions, as her mother struggled with depression and had a couple of suicidal episodes, and was in and out of hospitals for that and physical problems during her childhood and teenage years. Guess I should stop there before we get too far along. In any case, a well written book, with good flow and interesting changes.
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I thought it did a good job portraying the predicament of someone in the sciences feeling challenges to faith more for personal reasons (involving her family) but then having to weather the provocations of others in the field who dismiss faith out of hand in a kind of materialist chauvinism. Seemingly a pretty painful place to be.
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Sorry, it’s coming out next week! We have a break this week without a podcast! So if you’re not finished reading, you’ve still got time!
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Phew! I’m only halfway through, but it is very interesting so far.
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Will listen soon.
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Look at you, doing my job for me! 
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I figured as long as I’m not sleeping so much I might as well let you sleep in.
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how generous!
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Christina Bieber Lake: “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.”
Well this quote may seem predictable coming from a non but for the record I also found it touching. Why? Because I’m always touched anytime anyone chooses to recognize the conflicts and challenges to the beliefs they hold dearest and then struggles, triumphs or recognizes the need to reconsider or de- and then re- construct those beliefs back better.
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.
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It’s arguably a lot more work than just throwing it all out and giving up. It’s a worthy journey (if i can say so for myself), and I just hope to come out of the other side better off 
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I have a feeling that, on the other side of that process, your beliefs will be more fully yours than before and that, rather than needing to be shielded from the wider world by you, they will actually integrate you into that wider world as a peer of the realm.
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I confess I still need to read the book, but one thing I related to from the podcast episode was the feeling that you cannot share spiritual insights from nature with either other scientists or other Christians. As a planetary scientist, I often think of how God is working through the planetary processes which I study. I often get the sense that the universe is evolving towards God in the vain of Romans 8:20-22. I do not often share these thoughts since I feel like both most scientists and most conservative Christians I know might find it a bit too out there.
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Half way through the book, but found the podcast encouraging. The bringing in of Robinson’s writings in comparison resonated, as not only the quote of the holiness of creation theme was present, but also a bit of the same style of flowing prose.
I did find it interesting how Gifty used light stimulation in her mice, and when she was struggling at Harvard in her training, she asked for a SAD light to help, perhaps also indicating a bit of genetically transmitted tendency to depression herself.
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I haven’t listened to the podcast yet, but I did really enjoy the book. I don’t read a lot of current novels (due to the size of my to-read pile) unless I hear about them from a trusted source, so it was great to have the recommendation. It was also nice to explore these topics through fiction. I’ve read a fair amount of nonfiction about science and religion, in trying to make sense of things for myself, but eventually the arguments and positions just start seeming tired to me. This book was refreshing as a human portrait.
There are a lot of quotes that have stood out to me, but it’s hard to go back and find them (since I can’t highlight library books). Here the narrator seems to be expressing something of the black-and-white thinking that is often cultivated in religion:
Katherine didn’t understand the gesture, or, if she did, she didn’t accept it. “I think it’s beautiful and important to believe in something, anything at all. I really do.”
She said the last part defensively because I was rolling my eyes. I’d always been annoyed by any whiff of the woo-woo, faux spirituality of those who equated believing in God with believing in, say, a strange presence in a room. In college, I’d once left a spoken-word show Anne had dragged me to because the poet kept referring to God as “she,” and that need to be provocative and all-encompassing felt too trite, too easy. It also went counter to the very concerns of an orthodoxy and a faith that ask that you submit, that you accept, that you believe, not in a nebulous spirit, not in the kumbaya spirit of the Earth, but in the specific. In God as he was written, as as he was. “Anything at all” didn’t mean anything at all. Since I could no longer believe in the specific God, the one whose presence I had felt so keenly when I was a child, then I could never simply "believe in something.”
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Finally finished the book while on vacation. Enjoyed it and like @Laura found lots of tidbits that I did not bookmark. Any further podcasts related to the book in the works? I saw the first one, but thought there would be more.
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There is! We are announcing it next week