Saving Nature
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An Undeceptions Podcast. Murder! Radagast. It's Radagast LeBron. What on earth are you doing here? I was looking for you, Gandalf. Something's wrong. Something's terribly wrong. Yes? Just give me a minute. Oh, I had a thought and now I've lost it. It was right there on the tip of my tongue. Oh, it's not a thought at all.

This is a little stick insect. That's a clip from The Hobbit, of course, featuring the eccentric wizard Radagast the Brown. Now, Radagast is Middle Earth's version of the conservationist. He has birds living under his hat, stick insects in his mouth, and he spends most of his time caring for the flora and fauna of the land.

In Quenya, one of the Elvish languages, Radagast's name is actually Iwendal, meaning 'friend of the birds'.

Our guest today is the Radagast or Iwendal of the real world. We're chatting with Andrew Gosler, conservationist and professor of ethno-ornithology at Oxford University. Andrew's main area of study is the relationship between humans and birds. Like Radagast, he has a certain man versus wild meets brilliant professor aura about him.

He holds a job as a university professor, but he's spent more time in the great outdoors for his work than I have in my entire life. And not unlike the patron saint of our pod, C.S. Lewis, Andrew Gosselaar came to Christianity well into his academic career. Unlike Lewis, though, Andrew was set on his spiritual course not by a Christian luminary at the university, Tolkien in Lewis's case,

but by a well-known atheist colleague at Oxford. We'll be hearing that story, not your typical science and faith story, a little later. We'll also explore how Christianity has given Andrew's work as a conservationist even more meaning. He boldly claims that it's through faith in a creator that our care for nature makes most sense. I'm John Dixon, and this is the 100th episode of Undeceptions.

This season of Undeceptions is sponsored by Zondervan Academic. Get your free copy of the book,

Get discounts on master lectures, video courses and exclusive samples of their books over at Zondervanacademic.com/Underceptions. Each episode we explore some aspect of life, faith, history, science, culture or ethics that's either much misunderstood or mostly forgotten. With the help of people who really know their birds, we're trying to underseive ourselves and let the truth out.

This episode of Undeceptions is brought to you by Zondervan Academics' new book, ready for it? Mere Christian Hermeneutics, Transfiguring What It Means to Read the Bible Theologically, by the brilliant Kevin Van Hooser. I'll admit that's a really deep-sounding title, but don't let that put you off. Kevin is one of the most respected theological thinkers in the world today.

And he explores why we consider the Bible the word of God, but also how you make sense of it from start to finish. Hermeneutics is just the fancy word for how you interpret something. So if you want to dip your toe into the world of theology, how we know God, what we can know about God, then this book is a great starting point. Looking at how the church has made sense of the Bible through history, but also how you today can make sense of it.

Mere Christian Hermeneutics also offers insights that are valuable to anyone who's interested in literature, philosophy, or history. Kevin doesn't just write about faith, he's also there to hone your interpretative skills. And if you're eager to engage with the Bible, whether as a believer or as a doubter, this might be essential reading.

You can pre-order your copy of Mere Christian Hermeneutics now at Amazon, or you can head to zondervanacademic.com forward slash undeceptions to find out more. Don't forget, zondervanacademic.com forward slash undeceptions.

Birds chose me, I think, more than I chose them. But from the age of four, or at least maybe earlier, but my earliest recollection involving birds was at the age of four when I discovered a blackbird nest in unusually low in a herbaceous border, i.e. low enough for me to touch and irritate. And I

Andrew really is a friend of the birds and his knowledge of the subject is second to none. He's also got a cool bird tattoo. You can see an image of it in the show notes.

More broadly, Andrew loves the natural world. He's written and edited multiple works on the subject, including his most recent one, Religion and Nature Conservation, Global Case Studies, published in 2022. And I remember the chicks had hatched and I had great delight in poking the nest and seeing these little heads come up begging for food, like the original Jack in the Box,

And I was so captivated that I probably caused that nest to desert. But I like to think in my sort of penitential moments that set me on a course for life. And I'd like to think there was some sort of payback in terms of my conservation work. Yeah, exactly. I love it. Do you have a favourite bird? Oh, that's so interesting you say that because I've just written an article about ethno-ornithology, which is basically...

Ornithologists are always asked, what's your favourite bird or do you have a favourite bird? And it's kind of impossible to answer, but...

ask any member of the public and chances are they do have a favourite bird and the reason for their favourites can be really interesting. So it's sort of impossible for me to say what my favourite bird is because it's always contextual. My favourite that I was most delighted to see was probably Pallas's leaf warbler which I finally saw in January this year near Oxford. Been

waiting to see one for over 50 years. It's a very rare migrant from, I mean, it doesn't come migrate to here. It should be migrating from China to India. And somehow every year we get a few in the UK. But this was the first ever for Oxfordshire. And I broke my leg last November.

Okay, I got a bit carried away with Andrew chatting about bird activity, including the mysterious starling murmurations that my darling Buff had recently observed in Oxford. It's a breathtaking, swirling display of thousands of flocking birds. Researcher Al has put a New York Times article in the show notes with some fab video of the process. Seriously, check it out if you haven't ever seen a good murmuration.

Undeceptions Plus listeners get a little more of my chat with Andrew about all that. The rest of us, we can move on.

I can't imagine how exciting it must have been for someone like Andrew to finally lay eyes on a palace's leaf warbler after five decades of looking. And we've put a picture in the show notes if you can't wait that long. It really is a cute little bird. Now, I should probably flag that Andrew talks a lot about evolution.

I know some of my Christian listeners and some of my colleagues here at Undeceptions, Mark, hate it when I just assume the reality of evolution here on Undeceptions. If that's you or Mark, I hope you find this interesting, not too annoying. What about religious input when you were young? Any? Yes. So I'm a Jewish convert. So as a child, because...

Both my parents understood their Jewish heritage to be important, but didn't quite understand it. I think that's fair to say. I think they would both say that. My father later, when I told them that I wanted to be baptized back in 2000, dad said, well, you know, I'm a card-carrying atheist, so yeah, whatever, that's fine. But they came to the service and loved it. And...

I'm jumping ahead a bit. So I did go to Sunday school as a child and learnt some of what in the Christian Bible is known as the Old Testament, the Old Testament stories. And I learnt at Sunday school that Genesis was an allegory.

And it was only actually through reading Richard Dawkins that I discovered that anybody on this planet thought it was literally true. I was taught as a Jewish child that this contains truth about, it has meaning, but it isn't literally true any more than a poem is literally true. So it was never a roadblock. Never a roadblock. And actually, as I came to learn about human evolution...

the resonance of that, between that and Genesis 3, the fall, and the idea that

the evolution of human brain size or human intelligence may have come about through sexual selection rather than natural selection. So that's basically saying, okay, female early humans or proto-humans or hominids, whatever, preferred to mate with intelligent males, relatively intelligent males. And that led to an increase in brain size. Now, there's more than one sort of evolutionary story about

what came about there. But there you've got the sense that, okay, the female of the species gives to the species something to do with knowledge, wisdom. Yeah. And the imagery of Eve as a

Adam's rib. If Adam is understood and theologically Adam is understood as humanity, not necessarily a single person but can be taken many ways simultaneously and all are correct, then if Adam is read as humanity then Adam's rib is the female part of humanity. So what have you got here? The female part of humanity gives to humanity something to do with knowledge, wisdom, intelligence.

So here's an allegory for the sexual selection theory. It's all rather beautiful how that sort of comes together. So no, never a block. Sexual selection in the evolutionary process says that certain traits are more likely to attract mates, even if those traits aren't directly linked to survival.

For humans, it involves things like physical appearance, the sound of a person's voice, and even social status. It was Charles Darwin in the 1800s who argued that sexual selection was just as important to evolution as natural selection.

An interesting area of study within this is the relationship between sexual selection and brain size. Fascinatingly, a 2005 paper published by the National Center for Biotechnology Information observed that bats that practiced less promiscuity were shown to have increased brain mass. I like it. Smarter equals less promiscuous. That's just for free today. As you began to

develop an interest in conservation. Did you face the roadblock of the possibility or the claim that religion has raped and pillaged the earth? And so did your love of nature make you a little bit wary of religion? No, it's humans. I came to understand that the reason I sort of

I wouldn't say I rejected religion. I'd say after bar mitzvah, I ignored religion. Okay, so I talk about my wilderness years from bar mitzvah to baptism, but those were formative years, nearly 30, and really important. But

a period of coming to understand the human place in the world as well as everything else's place in the world. So my earliest decade, so I was born in 58. So between 60 and 70, we had two really significant events.

that came to influence my later perception of things. After Bar Mitzvah, when I said, OK, well, that's religion done with. Now I'm going birding for 30 years. The two things at the start of the decade, OK, published when I was about three, so I wasn't reading it then, but was Rachel Carson's Silent Spring.

talking about how pesticides, specifically DDT in those days, was causing through bioaccumulation deaths of birds and birds of prey. And I knew that when I started birdwatching, the reason I didn't see sparrowhawks in London where I was growing up was because they'd all died out because of pesticides.

Rachel Carson's Silent Spring was released in 1962 under a hail of protest from the American chemical industry. It's now considered one of the most important environmental books of the 20th century. Carson captivated the world with an opening parable of a fictional town in the future.

It was a spring without voices. On the mornings that had once throbbed with the dawn chorus of robins, catbirds, doves, jays, wrens and scores of other bird voices, there was now no sound. Only silence lay over the fields and woods and marsh.

She argued that the misuse of the first modern synthetic insecticide known as DDT was causing enormous harm to the environment. It was killing the birds. It had the potential to harm humans too.

Carson got enormous pushback. One biochemist said, Ouch!

I mean, there was no Dark Ages, but still, ouch. Yet, Carson won the argument. Following the release of her book, President John F. Kennedy asked his government to investigate. The final report was handed down in 1963 and it vindicated Carson's work and triggered policy reforms.

60 years later, Silent Spring is considered a landmark moment for environmentalism. It's credited with kick-starting the conservation movement.

That was the start of the decade. The end of the decade was Neil and Buzz landing on the moon. And as a, what was I, 11? In '69, all of my peer group were absolutely glued to the TV watching these people bouncing around. ...peer men from the planet Earth, first step foot upon the moon.

It was just unbelievable that there were people on the moon. And we've learned so much about the Earth, you know, the fact that there's no way we could measure the distance to the moon and do it every year and know that it's moving, getting further away from us without someone landing something there. And that was just astonishing. So in those two years,

events and also the Apollo so that was Apollo 11 but I think it was Apollo 10 the year before or that in fact just around Christmas of 68 that they took that really famous photograph the Earthrise photograph which was the first time we'd seen the Earth as this blue pearl in space and

And the astronauts themselves talked about the profound spiritual experience they've had. And I've read that everyone who's been into space has.

and has seen the Earth, even if they were just on an orbit of the Earth, they didn't have to go to the moon or whatever, just has that sense of its beauty and fragility. And they've all become environmentalists, you know. Like so many before him, Andrew has found himself captivated by the natural wonder of creation. But here's the fun part.

Somewhat ironically, it was the work of a certain British atheist in Oxford that set Andrew on the path from his own atheism to theism and eventually to Christianity. You're having a very happy academic career and somewhere along the line, Richard Dawkins, a colleague here at the university...

His selfish gene affects you, but not in the way Richard Dawkins would have preferred. Well, no, no, no. Can you tell me about that? Yeah, yeah. So the selfish gene was published in 76, which was the year I went up to, not to Oxford, to Aberystwyth in Wales as an undergraduate in environmental biology. And everyone was talking about this book, Selfish Gene. I thought, well, I'd better read it. I got around to reading it in my third year and...

Dawkins' central theme in The Selfish Gene was that genes, not organisms or species, were the basic units of evolution. Genes were merely using organisms, using us, to ensure their survival. He writes, We are survival machines, robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes. This is a truth which still fills me with astonishment.

This struck a chord with Professor Andrew Gosler, but not in the way Dawkins intended. Yeah, we all believed that. But I...

recognized even on my first reading in the 1970s that there was a logical flaw in his argument. So the basic thesis is that selfish behavior, whatever, it's not our fault, it's our genes, and that we are just the product of our genes.

Well, every animal breeder knows that's not true because you measure heritability and you've got typically 50% environmental influences as well. But basically it's saying you are what your genes are and your genes are the main story

through history and we're just a kind of sideshow and genetic determinism is the thing. So his thesis is an argument for genetic determinism. The problem is in the last page or two he says, but it doesn't have to be like this. We can choose to reject the tyranny of our genes. I think that's his exact words or pretty close anyway.

Be warned that if you wish, as I do, to build a society in which individuals cooperate generously and unselfishly towards a common good, you can expect little help from biological nature.

Let us try to teach generosity and altruism because we are born selfish. Let us understand what our own selfish genes are up to because we may then at least have the chance to upset their designs, something that no other species has ever aspired to. We can choose to do that. We can decide to be nice to each other. And the problem with that philosophically is no, we can't. Not if the rest of your book is true.

We are either genetically determined to be selfish, in which case we can't, and in which case where has this desire to be nice to each other come from? Where have you smuggled that in? Or is it actually that the rest of your book is untrue? And we now know that yes, of course it's untrue because genes did not assemble themselves in a primordial suit. We don't actually know how in naturalistic terms

the earliest organisms constructed. You know, that's the biggest hole in our knowledge, but it was not through genes assembling themselves, finding a way to replicate and running the world. That's just not true. So would you say the selfish gene sort of bumped you away from

atheism, agnosticism toward theism? What the selfish gene did, or more specifically the whole series of books, The Blind Watchmaker, River Out of Eden, and all the rest of it, that I was reading as a biologist over the next 20 years, what they did was because he wasn't just talking about evolution. So I was reading these things as a biologist and

And was growing increasingly frustrated that he'd smuggle in some statement about, oh, by the way, Christians don't believe this. Aren't they stupid? And I'm thinking, I don't care.

Why you said that? And I kind of, I think, subconsciously got to a point where I think, you so don't want me to know about Christianity that I want to know about Christianity. And I think that's basically what Richard Dawkins was doing with me. He was constantly irritating me in every sense of the word to reject this thing I wasn't even interested in.

And so I kind of, look, I'm a curious person in every sense of the word. And I want to know about this thing you don't want me to know about. Why mustn't I know about this thing? So how did you...

It's like if you have a button on the wall that just says, do not press, you'd say, well, what does it do? Okay. So what did you do? So what I did was I happened to find myself in a secondhand bookshop, Thornton's in the Broad Street here that no longer exists, sadly, and started looking around the theology section. And I found a lovely book, dense print, no pictures.

by a Dominican, I think he was, Gareth Morris, and it was called Belief in God. I read the preface and I thought, oh, this is the most rational thing I've ever read. What do they want for this? Oh, £1.25. I think I can stretch to that.

So I bought that. I thought, this is wonderful. I want to know more. And then in Blackwell's, I found a whole section of books on the interface between Christianity and, well, it was religion, but basically Christianity is where it is coming from. The interface between science and faith. Books by Alasdair McGrath, for example.

And I thought, okay, so I'm not on a unique trajectory here. By the way, if you want to hear exactly why people like Andrew Gosler find Alistair McGrath so illuminating on this subject, head to our episode 19, Scientific Theology, to hear a terrific interview with him. Link in the show notes, of course. Others have walked this path, and Alistair, of course, is

theology professor, but started off as an atheist molecular biologist. And okay, he's one of the brightest guys I've ever met anywhere. And I think Richard Dawkins knows that. But I've understood a bit more about Richard's sort of psychology and where he's kind of coming from and what it is that he's rejecting. Because for most people, I think, who have

a strong sense of the rightness of atheism, they're rejecting something in their own past, which may be Christianity gone wrong. Andrew didn't embrace Christianity the moment he came to think there's probably a God.

He was a bit like C.S. Lewis, actually. In episode 81, Lewis's Oxford, we retraced the story of how Lewis first found theism and only later came to see that Jesus Christ is the fulfillment of humanity's longings for the divine. So I probed a little further with Andrew. So do you remember a point where you thought, oh my goodness, God exists?

Was there a moment where you thought, I'm actually a convictional theist? I know you were never an atheist, but... So it started with, as I say, Richard Dawkins opening the possibility to me by effectively my response was, well, if your argument for atheism is so weak, then the possibility that God actually exists is real. The possibility is real.

And I did know from my childhood, and I've always known that for me, if God exists, whatever it is that we call God, then that is the most important thing anyone can ever know. You know, we're all searching to understand why we're interested in evolution, because we want to know why we're here. Who are we? What are we here for? And how did we get here? The selfish gene could only say, well, you have no purpose.

So, oh, okay, I'm just here to spread my genes around. Well, I don't actually have children. So that's not really very satisfying. If that's my purpose, then that went well, didn't it? There has to be purpose in people's day-to-day life. Otherwise, you remove all hope. And without hope, and faith is hope. So without hope, there is nothing.

But at what point did you encounter not just a vague theism, but a theism that found joy and faith in the Jesus of the Gospels? Yes, exactly. Exactly. How did that transition occur? A few things, I guess. At school, as a child, I'd learnt the Lord's Prayer.

And it was quite funny that I was reflecting on this the other day with a Christian friend that I used to get thrown out of scripture lessons when I was a kid because I was disruptive. And I was disruptive because in scripture, which, of course, was Christian scripture, I was being taught things that conflicted with what I understood.

You're at home. And I remember coming home and saying, Daddy, what do we understand about Jesus? Oh, well, he was a prophet. Oh, OK. So Judaism regards him as a prophet. Oh, OK. But then, of course, later I encountered C.S. Lewis, who said, well, he's either mad, bad or he is what he says he is. And he didn't say he was a prophet. So you have to wrestle with that one. He's either mad, bad or he is what he says he is. He's not mad. He's the most rational person

ever. He's not bad because look what he did. And he died for it. Therefore, and I do think C.S. Lewis was right in that. I don't think there is another option. And prophet is not the answer because he didn't behave like the prophets. He didn't speak like the prophets. He didn't say of himself what prophets understood. So that's a way of kind of sidestepping it. So

Then we come to 1999. Lots of things sort of happen in life. I spent 30 years in the woods working alone with the birds, which was, as I say, a really sort of formative period. I had a lot of time to think about when you have a little bird in your hand and you have responsibility for that life for that short period.

And you have the freedom, and this was the joy of my work actually, was working alone. You have the freedom to reflect on that relationship between you and the bird and being looked in the eye by a wild creature who's wondering what you're going to do. You're going to eat me. So I was forming my own relationship with nature.

using the evolutionary, the biological, the ecological paradigms that I was being given, but becoming somewhat... There's a lot of evolutionary biology in my... Well, in all my three degrees, but especially in my doctoral work where I was trying to measure it for myself and realising that actually the things I was looking at, genes were relatively unimportant. There was something else going on. And...

All of that was saying Darwin's model of evolution and the neo-Darwinian model of evolution are too simplistic. Life is more complex and dynamic and exciting, and there's a deeper reality to everything. That was an important side of things. 1999, we lost my wife's mother, and we'd already lost her father.

And a sermon at the funeral and the kindness of the vicar and the whole thing around the funeral in the church near Birmingham, that was an experience of a religious community that contrasted with the...

Richard Dawkins spitting bullets about religion. It was saying, well, you know, my experience of this thing that you so hate, my experience is positive. I met some anti-Semitism as a child at school, but that was from other kids. And I saw that sort of thing, but it wasn't motivated by the church or Christianity or whatever those kids' misunderstandings were. So I

It's really about a life lived as well as a theoretical thing. Now, some years earlier, I'd found in our garden, in our front garden, I found a Bible. This is a weird thing. It's a Bible with an olive wood cover with a cross engraved in it. And inside was somebody's name and it said a gift from the Holy Land.

And I actually took this to the police station. I said, I think someone's lost this over the garden wall or something. And I think they might want it. And they said, well, you hang on to it. And if anyone comes, you know, they took the details. Nobody ever did. So that was a bit weird. And then 1999, we extended our house and we had to put all our books into storage. And I'm putting books in into boxes and I have this Bible in my hand.

And I'd several times tried to read the New Testament. I started with the Sermon on the Mount and that spoke to me. Yeah, "Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth." Whoa, okay, that's a good place to start. And a couple of gospel stories, parables that I had

learnt before I got disruptive and got slugger. Every Tuesday afternoon the deputy headmaster would come down the corridor and say, oh hello Goslar, scripture is it? Yes sir. Okay. He'd go, he was lovely, you know. Oh bless him, I know he passed away years ago but I think he delighted knowing that kid in the corridor ended up as an ordained minister in the Church of England.

Andrew's story is one of lifelong, undeceiving, testing, gestating and rethinking ideas, which eventually led him to embrace a whole new life. We've heard how this Oxford biologist came to theism and then to Christianity. But how did all this affect his work? What impact did it have on his conservationism? Stay with us.

68-year-old Tirat was working as a farmer near his small village on the Punjab-Sindh border in Pakistan when his vision began to fail. Cataracts were causing debilitating pain and his vision impairment meant he couldn't sow crops.

It pushed his family into financial crisis. But thanks to support from Anglican Aid, Tirat was seen by an eye care team sent to his village by the Victoria Memorial Medical Centre. He was referred for crucial surgery. With his vision successfully restored, Tirat is able to work again and provide for his family.

There are dozens of success stories like Tarat's emerging from the outskirts of Pakistan, but Anglican Aid needs your help for this work to continue. Please head to anglicanaid.org.au forward slash Tarat.

While the modern synthesists looked at life as if through a telescope, studying the development of huge populations over immense chunks of time, the molecular biologists looked through a microscope, focusing on individual molecules.

And when they looked, they found that natural selection was not the all-powerful force that many had assumed it to be. They found that the molecules in our cells, and thus the sequences of the genes behind them, were mutating at a very high rate. This was unexpected, but not necessarily a threat to mainstream evolutionary theory.

According to the modern synthesis, even if mutations turned out to be common, natural selection would, over time, still be the primary cause of change, preserving the useful mutations and junking the useless ones. But that isn't what was happening. The genes were changing, that is, evolving, but natural selection wasn't playing a part. Some genetic changes were being preserved for no reason apart from pure chance. Natural selection seemed to be asleep at the wheel.

Evolutionary biologists were stunned. In 1973, David Attenborough presented a BBC documentary that included an interview with one of the leading modern synthesisists, Theodosius Dobzhansky. He was visibly distraught at the non-Darwinian evolution that some scientists were now proposing. "If this were so, evolution would have hardly any meaning and would not be going anywhere in particular," he said. "This is not simply a quibble among specialists.

To a man looking for the meaning of his existence, evolution by natural selection makes sense. Where once Christians had complained that Darwin's theory made life meaningless, now Darwinists levelled the same complaint at scientists who contradicted Darwin.

That lengthy reading came from a science report in The Guardian. It unpacks the rapidly changing scientific understanding of evolution. Contrary to cultural perception, evolution, while broadly accepted conceptually, has actually been the subject of heated debate in scientific circles when it comes to exactly how it works. The

The article follows this history and focuses on a new wave of scientists who are challenging the orthodoxy of the widely accepted modern synthesis, a combination of Darwin's theory of natural selection and the principles of genetics. These new scientists, though some of them have been around a long time, claim this combo fails to account for a raft of non-genetic factors, such as how genes are inherited. That's called epigenetics.

epigenetic inheritance, and what can change them, what scientists refer to as developmental plasticity, which are also being found to play important roles in shaping evolutionary outcomes. The picture Dawkins offers of genes controlling the machines is

is being questioned by some serious players in the field. In fact, there's an amazing recent debate between Richard Dawkins and one of his scientific mentors, the Oxford luminary Dennis Noble. We'll link to it in the show notes. It's thoroughly recommended. There seems to be a fascinating revolution going on in evolutionary science.

There's also an article published back in Nature that touched on all of this, with 15 scientists debating the question, does evolutionary theory need a rethink? According to eight of the co-authors, the answer is yes, urgently.

It's in this scientifically charged and shifting landscape that Andrew works. But as he tells us, each new discovery only serves to strengthen his scientific imagination. And it's never been a problem for his faith. A very early memory of mine, probably about the same time that I was poking the blackbird's nest, I remember colouring in a dinosaur book.

kiddies coloring book and dinosaurs and Say mummy there aren't any dinosaurs anymore. No, it's alright. They were they all went extinct a long time ago. Oh, well, that's right So I learned about extinction early on but then discovered late not so much later that actually we were causing extinctions not the dinosaurs obviously and

We, a couple of times, when I was probably about seven or eight, we went to Jersey, Gerald Dowell Zoo in Jersey, in the Channel Islands. And they had the dodo as their logo. So dodo, an extinct bird driven to extinction in the 17th century.

probably by rats introduced by Portuguese sailors. But, well, anyone's sailors. I mean, there's nothing about them being Portuguese. Any of those ships were crawling with rats, and if they put in even for water. I think it's unlikely that they killed off the dodos, the sailors, because their reports of it were that it was greasy and oily and very horrible to eat. As a kid, you're discovering...

You're trying to make sense of the world around you. Your parents are giving you a certain amount. And for me, because neither of my parents are biologists or were, I should say, biologists or naturalists or had a scientific training, but I wanted to understand nature in a more scientific sort of structured way. And the idea of evolution, that actually we're part of a great

river of life, if you like, that there's so many nice metaphors, analogies for life, you know, it's a beautiful thing, but that the tapestry is itself evolving, is changing. And it has to change because the universe changes.

We know that the Moon, for example, which was part of the Earth, moves away from us at, what is it, something like a centimetre a year or something? And we've known that since Apollo 11 put a mirror on the Moon and they've been firing a laser at the Moon since then and measuring the distance minutely. And so it's gradually getting further away and that

changes day length. Our day length now is not the same as it was when the dinosaurs were around. Let's press pause. I've got a five minute Jesus for you. Actually, I've got something much better.

My Undeceptions colleague, Dr. Laurel Moffat, recently had a beautiful reflection on birds for her show, Small Wonders. I couldn't match it if I tried. So with her permission, let's press pause. Laurel Moffat has a five-minute Jesus for you. A recent article in the online magazine, Bloom and Birds, suggests how a birdwatcher can, and I quote,

Go beyond binoculars and field guides and ramp up their game with the coolest new birdwatching gear and birding supplies, such as smart touch gloves for those cold days when you still need to use your phone, a harness for your camera or binoculars, a smart bird feeder so you can record birds as they eat, a portable mosquito repeller, or a smartphone telephoto lens. You could spend a lot of money and time acquiring the best tools for birdwatching

without ever laying eyes on a single bird. Isn't the point of birdwatching birds? More often than not, it seems the topic of birdwatching is actually an invitation to other subjects relevant to the birdwatcher, such as well-being, attention, or mental health. It can take you places. Some birdwatchers travel long distances to see species of birds found only in far off places and counterpoint to this

The slow birding movement is all about looking for birds in your own neighborhood or yard. Regardless of the locale and irrespective of the presence or lack of accessories, researchers have found that those who watch birds have improved mental health, restored attention spans, less anxiety, and a greater sense of well-being than they did before taking up the activity. There was a definite uptick in birdwatching during the pandemic.

Some bird enthusiasts thought that the rise in birdwatching during the pandemic would be a blip. The numbers don't seem to be dropping that quickly. And it makes sense. Birdwatching is surprisingly accessible. Birds are everywhere, in every habitat. They are equitable creatures, available to all. Whether you live in the country or the city, in a high-rise apartment, or on some remote acreage, you don't need any special gear to watch or listen to a bird.

You don't need expensive gloves or feeders or smartphones. But you do need one thing. You need something much harder to come by. Something more precious and costly. Time. And the willingness to sit and wait and watch and listen. If you're tempted to start watching birds, you'll find yourself in good company. There are some pretty famous bird watchers.

President Jimmy Carter, the novelists Margaret Atwood and Jonathan Franzen, Paul McCartney, the theologian John Stott was a birdwatcher. Even Jesus encouraged a bit of birdwatching. In the most famous sermon ever given, Jesus' Sermon on the Mount, which is a fancy way of saying a talk he gave outside one day on the side of a hill, he encourages his listeners to go birdwatching. He says this, Don't worry about your life.

what you'll eat or drink, or about your body, what you'll wear? Isn't life more than food and the body more than clothes? Look at the birds of the air. They don't sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? Can any one of you, by worrying, add a single hour to your life? Don't worry. Don't be anxious. When you're in the throes of worry, this can feel like an impossible task.

Jesus tells us to take our eyes off of ourselves and the worries that can consume us, and instead do something very, very simple. Look at a bird, any bird. The one right in front of you is just fine. Birds are always hungry. In order to stay light enough to fly, a bird stays very close to starvation. And yet, it doesn't worry. It eats. It flies. It sings.

Researchers have found that listening to birdsong and being in nature can alleviate stress and fatigue and restore energy and attention, and these are all good things. While I have no doubt that Jesus would have known that it's good for us to be outside, to be in the world we were made to be in, there's more to it when he mentions birds.

He wants more for us than a new hobby, or a leg up on our mental health, or a longer attention span, as good as all of these things are. He's not advocating a new form of therapy or way of getting by. He's encouraging a whole new way of seeing, a whole new way of being in the world. Jesus mentions birds in the context of the one who created them and supports their life, providing everything they need for living: God.

or as he calls him, your heavenly father. In that phrase, Jesus invites his listener to the best place to see things as they are, the best vantage point. He invites the listener, now birdwatcher, to see the birds and themselves, not merely in relation to one another, but in relation to God, the creator of birds, the feeder of birds, the carer of birds.

And he invites us to use a personal pronoun and call God our own, our Heavenly Father, our feeder, our carer, our creator. How beautiful was that? You can press play now. I want to take us to a question that you say you've asked a lot of your colleagues in the sciences.

And they don't really have a coherent answer. And it's a simple question of, is nature intrinsically valuable? And they say, yes, of course. And then you ask, why? On what grounds? And you draw a blank. Yeah. What is your answer to that question?

Well, it's interesting, isn't it? Because you ask anyone, does life have intrinsic value? And they say, yes, or even yes, of course. And you say, well, where does that value come from? And sometimes people will say, sometimes very intelligent people

People who are professors will say, well, I value it. And so, well, that's not intrinsic value. That's contingent value. That's your placing value on it. Intrinsic value is it has value in and of itself, independent of how anybody else views it. So let's start again. Do you still think life has intrinsic value? And they say, yes. OK, so where does that come from? Don't know.

Now, it may be satisfying for them to leave that there and just say, okay, I don't know, there's more in heaven and earth. But that's not satisfactory for me because actually the value of life underpins everything that I do and am interested in or believe in as a conservationist. Yeah.

If life has no value, if it is just an expression of genes which are just molecules and chemistry, then chemistry is only of value or the molecules are only of value in so much as they contribute to a life. So going back to Richard Dawkins, trying to put the value on life,

genes is absurd because they're just molecules. You might say, oh, there's intrinsic value in H2O. Well, there is because it has beauty, because of what it can do, because it's an awesome molecule with the most incredible properties. But that value must lie somewhere else. And if you believe that life or anything has intrinsic value, then actually that is the strongest value

argument for God, there could be, for me anyway, because there has to be a locus for that value to come from. And so therefore, has your Christian faith changed?

solidified and even energised your conservational passion? Yeah, because it's coherent. That's the thing, is that I think if I take all the components of my life, what I'm interested in or what I was interested in, of course, those interests have broadened and become more holistic. But whether it was birds or conservation or ecology or even buzz and kneel on the moon, whatever, there is no coherent...

pattern without a metaphysic, a theology. And atheism is a theology, but it fundamentally fails because it doesn't give a coherent, satisfying explanation for things. To say,

to say that we can explain life through because of evolution so well yeah up to a point you can say life is the way it is because it's evolved this way but that does not answer the question

We've heard this a lot on Undeceptions, and it never fails to excite me. Top-tier scientists, leaders in their fields, insisting that far from any facile conflict between science and faith, science only really makes sense, the universe only really makes sense, because of the God who stands behind it all.

There is no God of the gaps here. These experts remind us that knowledge of the physical world, not gaps in that knowledge, is what points to the rational mind behind the world. And studying this material world as the outcome of that great mind only inspires and guides their research, never hinders it.

If you want to hear more on that, I'd recommend episode 88, Beautiful Science, with Professors Ard Louie and Andrew Briggs. And check out the Undeceptions YouTube page as well for some brilliant Ard Louie video content about this very subject, including a clip where he explains why evolution isn't random. I love this job. Back to Andrew. Faith is coherent. It gives an explanation.

But to understand what that means, you need to explore God. And that means exploring because we are part of this creation. We cannot pretend as scientists, we sort of are trained to do, but we can't actually do it, to be observing the universe from outside.

Because as Heisenberg told us, the observer influences the outcome of it because we are part of this creation. So we explore that through our own lives, through our own relationships and through the relationship that we build with God. Something Andrew's pretty clear about is how he's seen the world's climate change, for the worse, through the lens of bird populations.

Andrew's concerns are being echoed across the ornithological community. The 2022 State of the World's Birds report, released every four years by BirdLife International, found 49% of the world's bird species were in decline and one in eight species under threat of extinction. That sucks.

Five sparrows are sold for two pennies, Jesus said, yet not one of them, he insists, is forgotten by God. According to Juliet Vickery, chief executive of the British Trust for Ornithology, these numbers signal a biodiversity crisis and send, quote, a strong warning about the health of our natural world. We've linked to the report in the show notes. It makes for sobering reading.

Of course, to some, this just sounds like lefty speak. So I finished by putting just that to Andrew. In the increasing culture wars of our moment, even a word like conservation is seen as just a lefty cause. But of course, you see conservation as a far more basic and profound expression of reality. But can you give that words for us? Can you

explain why it isn't just left right? No, well, it's not left and right anyway. I think there's a bit of the conservative in all of us and a bit of the socialist in all of us. And it's our cultures that sort of try and squash one or the other or whatever. And the middle way, which is the British way, is because we're kind of moderate. We want everyone to be able to

express themselves and the middle way is somewhere with a bit of each, I suspect. There's got to be a balance between powers of business and the state and all of that sort of stuff. I think that preamble is necessary to understand, to put conservation in the context, because what conservation is, how it's turned out today, is trying to prevent extinctions.

But why do we want to prevent extinctions? All of life on this planet depends on having a functional biosphere. You know, when the astronauts are going around the Earth and looking back and they see the blue and that thin envelope of the atmosphere that everything depends on, but it works together with life.

not humans. Humans could go extinct today and everything would heal itself and it would carry on. And because of this sort of process that's been named Gaia, which is the interaction between life and the mineral, chemical, gaseous elements of the earth, and it all works together. And every extinction represents another brick in that

or just being removed. So whether we frame conservation as saving whole ecosystems or individual species that may be keystones for those ecosystems functioning, what we're actually about is protecting all of life on the planet. There can't be anything more important than that. And it has to be said, you know, in terms of left and right, I was really impressed with COP26.

And I was actually impressed with Boris Johnson's speech that he made at COP26. He had been very well briefed and well informed and he was talking about the right issues. The tragedy is this is not a movie and the doomsday device is real and the clock is ticking fast.

to the furious rhythm of hundreds of billions of pistons and turbines and furnaces and engines with which we are pumping carbon into the air faster and faster, record outputs, and quilting the Earth in an invisible and suffocating blanket of CO2, raising the temperature of the planet with a speed and an abruptness that is entirely man-made.

What they do about it is another matter, but he was singing from the right hymn sheet at that. So does that make it a right-wing thing? Because a conservative government can get that message right? What they do about it in terms of business and...

and all of that stuff. I mean, this whole business with the war in Ukraine and gas prices being and everything, fuel prices, the cost, the price of fossil fuels, this should be the incentive for

to decarbonize. It doesn't seem to be being seen in those terms. I don't hear politicians saying, well, we should be insulating people's homes. We should be helping everybody to do that. We should be putting solar panels on everyone's roof. That would reduce their costs. That would all help to get us off fossil fuels, to some extent. I don't see them joining up the dots in that simple way. So it's not left and right. It's actually about saving all of us

And then any argument can be reframed in a selfish way. You know, you can choose to see it altruistically or you can choose to see it selfishly, depending on your own mindset. So why do we want to conserve? Is it just to save humanity? Well, there is no humanity without every other species on the planet. And what the COVID pandemic served to do is

horrible though it is and has been and you know, I've lost relatives and friends to it and

But it should be a wake-up call that we are not independent of the rest of biology on this planet. Wherever that virus came from, all of this serves to remind us that we are not independent. And I think part of the problems are going back to a faith perspective, and specifically a Judeo-Christian or Christian faith perspective. The misunderstanding of Genesis.

The misunderstanding of Genesis is to think that this planet here for us is our playground. Before anyone gets any sense of that in the Bible, in Genesis, the human is put into the garden to look after it. If you want to find a purpose for humanity, that sounds a pretty good one. You know, that's biblical. You're here to look after the place. How are you doing? Bloody awful.

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Undeceptions is hosted by me, John Dixon, produced by Kayleigh Payne and directed by Mark the Warbler Hadley. Sophie Hawkshaw is on socials and membership. Alistair Belling is a writer and researcher. Siobhan McGuinness is our online librarian. Lindy Leveston remains my wonderful assistant. Santino DiMarco is chief finance and operations consultant, editing by Richard Humwey. Special thanks to our series sponsor, Zondervan, for making this Undeception possible.

Undeceptions is the flagship podcast of Undeceptions.com. Letting the truth out. An Undeceptions podcast.