How do we engage our friends, family and others around controversial issues, particularly those in science? Why do these controversial issues trigger emotional responses and how do we manage our emotions in these discussions? We’ll discuss these questions and more with our guest, Talbot colleague in philosophy, Dr. Tim Pickavance around some new research he and other Biola profs have been doing.

Dr. Tim Pickavance is broadly interested in the core areas of analytic philosophy, though he specializes in metaphysics. After completing his M.A. in Philosophy here at Talbot, he found himself in Austin at the University of Texas, where he earned his Ph.D. in 2008. He is thrilled to be a part of Biola and Talbot, contributing to the development of Christian philosophers who want to impact our culture in various venues, from academia to their churches to their personal friendships.



Episode Transcript

Scott Rae: [upbeat music] How do we engage our friends, family, and others around controversial issues, particularly those in science? Why do these controversial issues trigger emotional responses, and how do we manage our emotions in these discussions? We'll discuss these questions and a whole lot more with our guest, our Talbot colleague in philosophy, Dr. Tim Pickavance, around some new research that he and other Biola faculty members have been involved in. I'm your host, Scott Rae, and this is Think Biblically from Talbot School of Theology at Biola University. Tim, welcome. Really glad to have you with us. So appreciate this area of research that you guys have been involved in, and very anxious to have our listeners get access to some of this good work that you all have been doing.

Tim Pickavance: Hey, thanks, Scott. I'm glad to be here.

Scott Rae: So this is k- kind of a bit of a narrow research topic.

Tim Pickavance: Mm-hmm.

Scott Rae: But... And obviously there was, there's some backstory to this about what got you interested in this area. You-- It's not something you were doing, but you're doing by yourself. It's with a team of folks. But having the whole team here would be a little bit [chuckles] crowded around the table.

Tim Pickavance: Yeah. [chuckles]

Scott Rae: So what sparked your interest in this area to begin with?

Tim Pickavance: Yeah, thanks for asking that. That's... It's, it's kind of a long story, but I'll do my best to summarize it a bit. There are really kind of two parts to the story. One is just my independent interest in, questions around emotions and what we should do with those as we think about the world and think about God, who made the world. And I sort of backed my way into those questions, through thinking about some problems, both philosophical and theological, that are connected to religious pluralism, and even pastoral, that are connected to religious pluralism. So, like, what do we do with the fact that there are people who aren't Christians, people who don't believe in God? Those kinds of things. And that work turned into a really long project that I've been, you know, working on now for years with, my friend and a Biola colleague named Jason McMartin, who's also part of this team. And Jason and I, so this is the second part of the story, Jason and I have been, for some time, teaching a class called Psychology and Christian Thought with one of our psychology colleagues here, named Liz Hall, and it's about the interface between psychology and Christian faith. And we began to realize that the students in this class, as we're wrestling with issues at the intersection of this scientific area and these theological questions, they're often making moral judgments or theological judgments simply by way, by, of thinking about how certain actions or issues make them feel emotionally. And so Liz, and Jason, and I have been working on these questions for some time, and then, a possibility for a grant from the Templeton Religion Trust opened up because of other work that Liz had been doing. She found another psychologist, who's become a friend of mine, named Aaron Smith at Cal Baptist, and so she's a part of the team, and the four of us together have been working on this over the course of the past couple years.

Scott Rae: All right, so what... I mean, obviously, you see a need for this.

Tim Pickavance: Mm-hmm.

Scott Rae: What's, what's the problem that you all are trying to solve here? Let's sort of cut to the chase on that.

Tim Pickavance: Well, the first and kind of most visceral form of the problem is that there's just division in our culture and even in the church around questions at the intersection of science and our Christian faith, and a lot of times that is expressed emotionally. But more generally, there's kind of contradictory pressures that we find in our culture. One of them I like to think of as kind of coming from this sort of more romantic tradition, which is the follow your heart kind of thing, and then on the other side of it, we have this more enlightenment kind of pressure to follow the science. And these two pressures feel like you can't have them both, but what we're trying to articulate is more of like a third way almost, because scientific issues can't be isolated, really, from religious, and moral, and political issues. And so to treat these questions well, we have to consider all the relevant bits of information and evidence, and that's a challenging thing, especially when these issues trigger very strong emotional responses. And so what we're trying to do is equip people to navigate that space, to think with their emotions, to try to learn from them, but also not be dominated by them.

Scott Rae: All right, so let's, let's be a little more specific here. What, what are some of the issues that are controversial, particularly in science? We'll, we'll apply this more broadly in a minute, but particularly related to science, what are some of those controversial issues, that you are helping people engage well?

Tim Pickavance: There are so many, but I think just to take a couple from recent-

Scott Rae: Well, give me a representative list.

Tim Pickavance: ... Moments. Yeah, so think about, responses to the COVID pandemic, or even COVID vaccines, or even think about the controversies that have come out.

Scott Rae: You mean, that was controversial?

Tim Pickavance: Yeah. [chuckles] Yeah.

Scott Rae: I missed that.

Tim Pickavance: Yeah, exactly. I mean- [chuckles] ... You know, those of us out here in California know maybe, [chuckles] yeah, feels a little bit-- you feel that controversy maybe a little bit harder. But anyway, vaccines more generally have been a controversial issue for a long time. We see even with RFK, in his role now in the government, that's raised some of these things to the fore a bit more. Think about things to do with gender reassignment or treatment in those kinds of spaces. AI. So, I mean, just to home in on the AI thing for a minute, I recently wrote a piece for Christianity Today about, pornography produced by artificial intelligence, and some people believe that that is a path to moral pornography, which what are we supposed to do with that? I mean, that-

Scott Rae: Ethical porn.

Tim Pickavance: Yeah, that's right, and it-- that raises all sorts of emotional reactions in me, but what am I meant to do with that? And then, I mean, another thing, just also recently, I was working on, a piece for, my Substack, called Becoming Human, about a claim that I've seen both Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook and CEO of Meta, and another technologist named, Mustafa Suleyman, who is currently the CEO of Microsoft AI, but he founded DeepMind and Inflection AI, I mean, these are, these are not people who are jokes in this space, about how AI friendship-... Is going to be an important dimension of the solution to the problem of loneliness that we find as a sort of another kind of pandemic in our modern life. And these claims are not merely about science, right? They're not merely about science, they're- but they're being made by people who I think have an outlook on what makes life good that's problematic in certain ways. And to engage with these questions, we have to attend both to the nature of these scientific advancements, but also philosophical, and theological, and biblical questions about what humans are and how we're meant to live. So that's just one example-

Scott Rae: Mm-hmm

Tim Pickavance: ... Of a place where there's an emerging scientific trend that has very clear connections to non-scientific things, and that raises emotional responses, and we want to bring light, not just heat, to these conversations.

Scott Rae: All right. Now, I take it that a lot, a lot of the work you've done on this applies well to other controversial areas besides those in science.

Tim Pickavance: Mm-hmm.

Scott Rae: Is there any difference? How would you think about applying... And we'll get into some of the details of this in a moment, but how would- I take it, does this apply just as well to, say, issues of sexuality, or immigration, or other social issues that might be contested?

Tim Pickavance: So I think so. Now, the focus of our work, because the grant had a sort of limited scope, and because of our expertise, the focus has been on the scientific questions specifically. But all of us are doing this recognizing that this is maybe a proof of concept for some tools-

Scott Rae: Mm-hmm

Tim Pickavance: ... And techniques that we're developing that could be beneficial outside of these spaces, too. And I mean, you might think about it this way: you know, science is sometimes talked about as if it's more or less like isolated from other areas of human inquiry and human endeavor, but that's really just a myth. That's just not true. Science is intertwined with these other questions, and you can't just sort of disentangle what we think of as science from all sorts of other things. And so in some ways, you can't do this kind of work in a way that's specifically and totally isolated to science. It's really gonna be very general. And so I do think that in the end, these kinds of helps that we're trying to produce, can help us think better about politics, religion, maybe even the Bible, you know, all these other things that you mentioned as well. So I hope that it will be very generally helpful to people.

Scott Rae: I think there's... [clears throat] Yeah, if we, if we could do something to turn down the heat and turn up the light, then that would be incredibly helpful in the cultural moment that we're in.

Tim Pickavance: And what we don't want to do, though, is have people ignore their emotions, because we think emotions are actually really helpful.

Scott Rae: All right. Well, let's, let's, let's deal with that for a moment. What- tell-- Let's be clear about this w- at the beginning. What's so important about identifying your emo- your emotions, your emotional reaction as part of the engagement with these controversial issues? 'Cause I think, I think we would all admit, if we think about it, that these all have, pr- they all produce emotional reactions.

Tim Pickavance: Mm-hmm.

Scott Rae: And particularly the way discourse is going in our culture, we tend to sort of skip the reasons-

Tim Pickavance: [chuckles]

Scott Rae: ... And go right to [chuckles] the emotional reag- reaction and try to either, you know, articulate it, or we resort to name-calling or some other sort of ad hominem argument-

Tim Pickavance: Mm-hmm

Scott Rae: ... Where we critique the person-

Tim Pickavance: Yep

Scott Rae: ... And not the position. But reasons seem to have gone out the window-

Tim Pickavance: Mm-hmm

Scott Rae: ... On this. So but let's, let's just isolate the part on our emotions. Why- what's so important about that?

Tim Pickavance: Yeah. Good. Yeah, thank you for asking that. I mean, the first thing to notice is that there's, there's very strong evidence that if we're not careful, our emotions can overwhelm our ability to think clearly about particular issues. I mean, in particular, you might think about negative emotions like anger or disgust. These things tend to short-circuit our thinking and leave us prone to react rather than to reason carefully. But nevertheless, we think that emotions are an important part of reasoning, because emotions open us to the evaluative parts of the world, the parts of the world that are about what's good and bad, right and wrong. And not only do they open us to those parts of the world, they motivate us to care, and they shape our attention. I mean, this is really easy to see when you think about a case of being afraid. When you're afraid in a scenario, you'll find yourself focused very carefully [chuckles] on the thing that's causing the fear. Like, you know, I remember, when my kids were young, we used to go to the zoo, quite a bit. And, you know, San Diego Zoo is fantastic. They've got this safari park, and in the safari park, there's this space where there's, like, a lion, and it's just behind this pane of glass. And if that lion, this gigantic, you know, male lion, were to get up and start charging at that glass, I would find myself feeling very afraid, even though I'm not in any danger, and I think there's something appropriate to that. But I'll tell you, it's gonna be really hard to attend to anything but that charging lion in that moment.

Scott Rae: Yeah.

Tim Pickavance: And that's not bad. [chuckles]

Scott Rae: Yeah.

Tim Pickavance: That's really good. You w- you need that kind of stuff because what that's helping you to realize is that there's a danger in your environment. And emotions, not just negative ones, but positive ones as well, open us to those kinds of-- those aspects of reality, help us to attend to them well, and motivate us to care about the right things when our emotions are working as they ought. The danger is, if they get out of whack, you can go off the rails. And so we have to find ways to use our emotions in the right way, but not be overwhelmed by them.

Scott Rae: So I take it that most people in the broader culture would see emotions on one end and rationality on the other, sort of as polar extremes.

Tim Pickavance: Mm-hmm.

Scott Rae: Hey, why do we view it that way? We'll just start with that.

Tim Pickavance: Oh! [chuckles] that's a long story, Scott.

Scott Rae: Well, give it to me.

Tim Pickavance: [laughs]

Scott Rae: Give me, give me the short version.

Tim Pickavance: Yeah, I mean, there- basically, there's a very prominent philosophical tradition tracing back, you know, a long way, and it's, it's complex, and interesting, I think. But there's this tradition that leads us to think that our emotions are just feelings, and that they don't really tell us anything about the world. They might make something valuable, they might motivate you to act, but they're not responses that can be evaluated for being right and wrong or good and bad to things in the world. And so that tradition has become very prominent in our culture today. And it's, it's the kind of thing that would lead you to think that reasons, and rationality, and thinking well are going to be totally disconnected from your emotional life, from how you feel. And I think in the Christian tradition, and I think you see this in the Scriptures too, that's not the right way to think about it. I think our feelings are given to us by God to help us notice and attend to certain things in the world, and they're broken just like our mind is. And so we have to learn in community to discern these things.

Scott Rae: Which is, which is why we can overreact emotionally-

Tim Pickavance: Correct

Scott Rae: ... Or under- or underreact emotionally. Uh-

Tim Pickavance: I think anybody who's parented a child knows that this is possible. We have to train our kids not only to care about the right things and to feel that care-

Scott Rae: I thought you were referring to the, [chuckles] the parents.

Tim Pickavance: [laughs] Oh, well, the parents, too, obviously.

Scott Rae: The parents' emotions on this.

Tim Pickavance: But, but everybody has told their child, "You're overreacting."

Scott Rae: Yeah.

Tim Pickavance: Right? And that's to say, your feelings are out of whack with reality. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't feel at all. That would be a terrible thing-

Scott Rae: Yeah

Tim Pickavance: ... To say to a child. We want to feel the right things in the right moments, and so, this is basically trying to help people learn how to discern what their emotions are actually contributing to the process of thought.

Scott Rae: All right, so let's, let's be really clear about this. Why, why do these controversial issues so often trigger emotional responses? Because it would, it would seem to me that we wanna we-- to resolve these, we need to keep our emotions out of the picture and just concentrate on rationality, but that's not the way it works. What- why d- the... And we-- I've seen, you know, we've seen people on all sorts of issues just go crazy-

Tim Pickavance: Mm-hmm

Scott Rae: ... Emotionally.

Tim Pickavance: Mm-hmm.

Scott Rae: Be- and bec- and the reason for that sometimes is it touches them personally.

Tim Pickavance: Mm-hmm.

Scott Rae: It's, you know, it's part of their own story. But there's some- and, but other issues that don't trigger anybody, hardly anything at all-

Tim Pickavance: Mm-hmm

Scott Rae: ... From some people. So help us understand that a bit.

Tim Pickavance: I think the short answer to this question is that our emotions are designed to alert us to things that matter.

Scott Rae: That's a good way to put it.

Tim Pickavance: Because if you, if you think about what you're taking in, just even in s- looking at a, at a scene or hearing, you're always making choices about what to attend to and what not to attend to. And emotions are... A big part of what emotions do is help us help direct our attention to parts of the world that matter and that don't. And so emotional responses are a natural part of engaging with the world that has good things, bad things, positive things, negative things. So our emotions are meant to open our hearts to those parts of reality, and because of that, it's also connected to things that matter, and that make- that means that when they happen, they can often be very big, [chuckles] right? And sometimes it's good to have big emotions about things. You want to feel well, and if you're confronted with something that is just profoundly good, you want to feel that goodness. If you're confronted with something that's profoundly bad, you want to feel that badness. And so a part of what's going on in these negotiations about these controversial questions is that they're often connected to moral issues or theological issues, things that really matter to people, and that means that the emotions are gonna be heightened. And, and again, just like every part of ourselves, our emotions are subject to the effects of the fall, and so these things can get out of whack. You can feel too much, you can feel too little, and because of that, there's going to be, friction when you're in community in these kinds of spaces.

Scott Rae: Now, I think-- I wonder if part of the reason that we don't take our emotions into account when dealing with controversial issues is because we might be afraid of them.

Tim Pickavance: Yeah.

Scott Rae: We might be afraid of how deeply we're going to feel about something, or we might be afraid of the fact that, [chuckles] you know, we don't feel much at all about something that we should-

Tim Pickavance: Mm-hmm

Scott Rae: ... Actually feel strongly about. I mean, I've heard this repeatedly in the abortion debate. You know, when you see visual images of what the afterproduct of abortion looks like- ... That's designed specifically to stir up your emotions. And I think, you know, if it's, if it's sup- exposing you to reality, you know, rightly so. But there are others who, they just, they shy away from all that, I think because, I think maybe because they're afraid of what is going to be unearthed once they start to think and to feel what's, what may be very appropriate to do so.

Tim Pickavance: I mean, I couldn't agree with you more. It's also true that we carry memories in our emotions as well, and so, you know, emotion is something that connects our minds together in certain ways. And so when we encounter certain scenes-... And feel certain things, those feelings can remind us of other things, too. Now, again, that can be good if something prompts a feeling that reminds you of something very positive that you've experienced before, but it can also be very negative if it prompts a s- a feeling that reminds you of something in your past that is traumatic, right? And so emotions don't kind of stay isolated. They, they bring up other parts of our selves to consciousness, and that can also lead to, you know, these kinds of conflictual spaces being more heated than maybe, they would otherwise be. But, you know, that needs to be worked through. It doesn't need to be avoided.

Scott Rae: All right. Now, let's just, let's say a little bit about, how our emotions-- Let's be clear, so let's be clear about this: how do our emotions affect our ability to reason about a particular issue?

Tim Pickavance: That's a great question. I think we should start by thinking about what an emotion is, and the interesting thing is that that's really hard to say. [chuckles] But the-

Scott Rae: I know it when I feel it.

Tim Pickavance: Yeah. Yeah, you do know it when you feel it, but, you know, carving them out and separating them from other kinds of our, of mental things is hard, but emotions at least involve three things. They involve a kind of feeling. Often, that's a bodily sort of feeling, so emotions are mental, but they're not just mental. They involve, uh-

Scott Rae: That's why we say we feel it in our gut.

Tim Pickavance: That's right, or you feel it in your chest, or you know, you feel it als-

Scott Rae: Yeah

Tim Pickavance: ... In all sorts of places, right? So the feeling is an important part of emotion. An evaluation is an, a, is a part of emotion. Emotions present as positively or negatively evaluating something. Sometimes you don't even know what that is.

Scott Rae: Right.

Tim Pickavance: Like when you wake up in the middle of the night afraid, you don't know what you're afraid of, but there is some-- There, the... If there is nothing to be afraid of, you then know that your emotion is out of whack, right? Or you can say, "I'm afraid of that," or, "I'm happy about this," right? So there's an evaluation. It's generally got a positive or a negative valence, and then there's a motivation to act in some way. So disgust motivates you to move away from a thing. You know, happiness motivates you to move toward a thing. You know, those things. So feeling, evaluation, motivation. So how do emotions affect our ability to reason? I think we can connect that to certain of these aspects. For example, one of the motivations that emotions give is a motivation to care, and it-- that will motivate us to stay attentive. So if you're feeling fear, like go back to that lion scenario, if you're fearful of a lion charging at you, that's motivating you to care about finding safety, [chuckles] right? And it's keeping you attentive. You're attentive on your environment in a certain way, and that will help you reason about where to go or how to avoid or adjust, you know, the situation in certain ways to try to make yourself more safe. So emotions are often focusing our attention on particular things in our environment, and that's really important because what that does is it helps us work through all of the things that we're taking in so that we can come to conclusions that are relevant and important for us as we try to navigate the world. So I think that's a big part of what emotions can help us do as we're trying to think through an issue, is motivate us to care, get our attention fixed on things that really matter, and then work through that, in a way that can be useful.

Scott Rae: And I take it that our emotions can also inhibit us-

Tim Pickavance: Oh, sure

Scott Rae: ... From reasoning well.

Tim Pickavance: Yes. That's right. So, for example, if you are, feeling a lot of fear, you're gonna have a very hard time... So if you're feeling fear in an inappropriate way, you're gonna have a very hard time attending to other things in your environment. Here's an example of that, just as a kind of, a kind of funny example. So I have a fear of falling, not a fear of heights, just of falling. And, there was a time when, [chuckles] my family and I were camping out on an island in the Puget Sound, on Whidbey Island, at, near this place called Fort Ebey, and there's this bluff at, that kind of looks out over the Puget Sound. It's beautiful, and w- and we were there with some friends, and my daughter was very young, and at the time, she was a little bit, prone to tripping and falling, shall we say? And- [chuckles]

Scott Rae: Terrific.

Tim Pickavance: [chuckles] Yeah. So we were out watching the sunset over the Puget Sound, and my daughter is running around toward the edge of this bluff, and I know in my head that from where I was sitting, it looks like a pretty sheer drop-off down to a rocky beach that's like, you know, hundreds of feet below. But I know that she's safe because actually it's not as sharp of a cutoff as it looks like from where, my vantage point. But at the same time, I have a fear of falling, and I care very deeply about my daughter, and so I found myself afraid that she would trip. And, like, I think I was being a good parent in this moment because I avoided intervening because she was completely safe, and I wanted her to enjoy the joy of just running around, you know, in this field on this beautiful island. And so I didn't intervene, but trying to watch the sunset was an impossible task for me-

Scott Rae: [chuckles]

Tim Pickavance: ... Because all I could attend to was her feet because of my fear. Now, that's a place where what I'm-- I should be taking in, what's really valuable, given the reality of the situation, I was distracted from by this emotion that I was feeling that was not appropriate to the world. So that's a case where I'm being distracted from something that matters by feeling a certain thing about something that I shouldn't be worried about, and I... We have to be honest about that, too.

Scott Rae: Mm-hmm.

Tim Pickavance: That's, that's possible, and it happens all the time, I think.

Scott Rae: Don't feel bad about that. I had a child that almost fell into the Grand Canyon, so-

Tim Pickavance: Oh, heavens. [chuckles] Don't-- I don't wanna hear about it.

Scott Rae: It's a long... It's, yeah.

Tim Pickavance: That's not gonna help my fear of falling.

Scott Rae: You don't wanna know about that.

Tim Pickavance: My irrational fear of falling is-

Scott Rae: All right.

Tim Pickavance: Yeah.

Scott Rae: So I take it you have some sort of advice or some-... Sort of practices to help people from either over-emphasizing or under-emphasizing emotions? And that's just sort of in general, not just related to these controversial issues, but how do, how do, how do you help people keep those in balance?

Tim Pickavance: The process that we've developed has six steps, and I think I can describe them very briefly. So the first step is to just pause, and this is especially when you find that your emotions are heightened. And pausing creates space to respond thoughtfully rather than to just react. The second thing is that you actually have to feel. You have to learn to identify-

Scott Rae: Right

Tim Pickavance: ... And understand your emotions. And I think for certain people, this is very easy, and for other people, this is very hard. So some of us repress, some of us, you know, just react, and so, different people will have to f- learn how to feel, to different degrees. Third, you have to actually reflect. So this is meant to prompt us to appreciate what our emotions are telling us about ourselves and the world around us. So pause, feel, and then reflect. Take, take stock. The fourth thing, when you're trying to answer a question that raises an emotion, you don't want to ignore that emotion. That's why you pause, feel, and reflect, but you also need to investigate. You have to, you have to consider whether there might be information or evidence about the question that's independent from your emotions. And fifth, you then need to kind of organize all of that together. You need to take stock of the information and evidence you have about these questions, including what's coming from your emotions. And then sixth, you form a judgment. You decide. And this is where you sort of say, "Okay, given what I've taken stock of, given how strong my evidence is, given how, you know, I think I've, I've gathered as much as I can," you say, "This is the judgment that I'm coming to about this question, using that evidence as a guide." And then you stay open to kind of moving back through that process when new experiences, new arguments, new information, even new emotions come to the fore when you're, you know, encountering that issue again. So that process, pause, feel, reflect, investigate, organize, decide, that may sound intimidating, but it's actually meant to be something that we're kind of constantly running through as we're trying to learn what the world is like and the God who made it is like, and that-- I think that's, that's, the sort of short version.

Scott Rae: All right, let's take a hypothetical case to apply that, to apply that to. Let's, let's say that you're in a, you're in a conversation with one of your neighbors about their, you know, a kid in your school that has, is- has transgender types of issues.

Tim Pickavance: Mm-hmm.

Scott Rae: And the issue is, say they're, they're 14, 15 years old, and the issue is, should this adolescent, we'll, we'll say it's an adolescent girl, be allowed to have gender-affirming hormones and surgery, while she's a minor? You know, sh- w- should that be allowed or should that be prohibited?

Tim Pickavance: Mm-hmm.

Scott Rae: Okay. Take us through how you would go through each of those steps to apply it to that particular issue and the... You know, and just imagine what that conversation might look like.

Tim Pickavance: Yeah. I mean, you know, for people like you and me, and I'm sure a lot of our listeners who have, sort of orthodox views about gender and sexuality, these kinds of cases raise all sorts of m- emotions, many of them negative, as we consider this kind of question.

Scott Rae: Such as?

Tim Pickavance: So, for example, you might, feel disgust as you consider the possibility of these things. You might feel angry at a healthcare provider who would even consider doing this to a child, right? Those are the kinds of things I have in mind.

Scott Rae: Okay.

Tim Pickavance: Um-

Scott Rae: On the, on the other side-

Tim Pickavance: You also might feel compassion for this child who is wrestling with some serious issues, and you might feel, sad for your neighbor who is walking with a child through these kinds of things. And, you know, other people with other sort of ideological views, they might feel different things. And this is part of what makes these kinds of questions so fraught, is because the emotions often push in different directions, right? So-

Scott Rae: That's why I picked it. [chuckles]

Tim Pickavance: Yeah. Well, I figured.

Scott Rae: Okay.

Tim Pickavance: Thanks for giving me an easy one. So the first step, again, is just pause, and so when your emotions are heightened, you wanna just say, "My emotions are heightened. What are they trying to tell me?" And so then you have to feel them. You have to say, "What are the emotions that I'm feeling, and how should I think about them?" And that's a reflective process whereby you try to say, "What about this makes me feel disgust, or sadness, or anger, or compassion, or whatever it is? How-- What is that showing me about the world when I reflect on that emotion being present," right? And sometimes you'll find that these things are directed in ways that are very helpful, and sometimes you'll... Like, you know, the case where the lion's running at you and you feel fear, that's a really helpful emotion-

Scott Rae: Mm-hmm

Tim Pickavance: ... And it's apt. Sometimes you'll find that your emotions are inapt, like when I'm looking at my daughter running across, in a completely safe way, this bluff, right? And so that's part of what the reflect thing helps you do. Now, depending on who you are and the particulars of the situation, the emotions that you feel might be pointing you at different things. So what exactly makes you feel angry? Why are you angry about it? And that question can then open up a more careful consideration of whether your emotion is apt or inapt. And then you have to consider, in a case like a transgender question, when you go to the investigate, you wanna know, well, what do the scriptures have to say about these kinds of questions? It's not gonna speak to it in any kind of direct way, but it might help us get a picture of gender and sexuality on the table. What are the sort of risks and possibilities in these kinds of things? I think that's a question we have to ask- ... Even if we think at the end of the day, you know, this shouldn't happen. You have to know, like, what shouldn't happen exactly. [chuckles] So what-- we have to actually investigate that stuff, and then we use all of these things together to-... In an organized way, decide what we, what we judge about these questions. And hopefully, even doing that ourselves will help us navigate the complexity. I mean, take this kind of case, right? A parent in that situation, especially if they're some kind of conservative-ish Christian, they're going to be going through a lot in that process. And if it were me, I would guess I would be back and forth, right, on thinking, "Is this good or bad?" I- knowing that it's, on my view, I shouldn't think it's good. However, you can imagine a parent feeling differently in those situations, and I think in order to navigate that pastorally with someone, we have to recognize that that's understandable, and have tools by which we can help people navigate those feelings, too, even in a pastoral context.

Scott Rae: Yeah, and that the emotions by themselves don't short-circuit-

Tim Pickavance: No

Scott Rae: ... Our thinking rationally about it a-

Tim Pickavance: Correct

Scott Rae: ... As well.

Tim Pickavance: That's right.

Scott Rae: And bringing evidence to support the belief that we, that we actually come to form-

Tim Pickavance: That's right

Scott Rae: ... On this.

Tim Pickavance: And our emotions can be part of getting us that evidence. Yeah.

Scott Rae: That's... I think that's really helpful. My guess is that most people, when they engage a controversial issue like this, that they re- and they find that they respond emotionally, don't stop to take stock of what's going on inside of them. It's just-

Tim Pickavance: I mean, I think anyone who's been online ever knows this. [laughing]

Scott Rae: [laughing]

Tim Pickavance: Yeah. I mean, I think I- that's an understated thing, is what I'm saying. You've stated that very kindly. I think very often we're not really taking stock of what we feel. We're just acting out of those feelings.

Scott Rae: Right. Right, okay, one final question on this, Tim. I... This is, this is super helpful, it seems to me. But how would, how do you want people to use this material as you engage st- controversial stuff? And this is assuming, actually, that you will actually engage controversial stuff-

Tim Pickavance: Yes

Scott Rae: ... From time to time-

Tim Pickavance: That's right

Scott Rae: ... Rather than just say, "I'm out."

Tim Pickavance: Yes. Well, and this is a big, this is... Our heart is that, especially within the Christian community, but in our culture more broadly, there's been a lot of fracturing around these kinds of questions. There's a lot of hurt and a lot of challenge that church communities have experienced that... I mean, you know, we saw churches split during COVID over these kinds of things, and I'm not saying that was always the wrong move. I just, it's often acrimonious, and it's, it... You know, we talk about the peace and purity of the Church, and the peace of the Church has been upset by some of these things. And so what we're hoping for is that groups of Christians, and this is what we've built, we've built a kind of workbook and a, and a set of tools that groups can use to walk through this six-step process together around questions that are of interest to them. And the hope is that in that process, the hurt and the challenge and difficulty that these groups of Christians especially have experienced can, be mollified, that some of the past hurts can be healed, that future rifts can be avoided, that we can grow in understanding, even as we disagree and continue to disagree about these things. There's... At the end of this process is not agreement. At the end of this process-

Scott Rae: Right, we're not, yeah, we're not seeking

Tim Pickavance: ... Is mutual understanding, we hope, mutual understanding, and a, and a kind of more reasoned judgment, drawing both on our emotional life but also on the other things at our disposal, like the Scriptures, s- the scientific, you know, investigation of things, and so on, of these very difficult questions. And so our fundamental goal is to see Christ's Church edified, even as we wrestle through new and controversial issues and ideas, and we're going to be posting these things online. We're actually grateful that part of the grant says we can't monetize these tools, and so, we're in the final stages of putting the finishing touches on these things, and we'll be posting them, online for anybody to use, and, um-

Scott Rae: Wonderful

Tim Pickavance: ... Available to help people think about them.

Scott Rae: Well, and I think what we can do here, too, is once that's available on the web, we'll include a link when we post this parti- this particular session, a link to those materials-

Tim Pickavance: That would be

Scott Rae: ... So that our folks-

Tim Pickavance: We would love that

Scott Rae: ... Our folks can a- can access that easily.

Tim Pickavance: Thank you. Yeah.

Scott Rae: Yeah, I hope, I hope our listeners appreciate sort of the wealth of wisdom that's gone into this, and I think how potentially incredibly helpful this could be in defusing what are these really charged, conversations-

Tim Pickavance: Mm-hmm

Scott Rae: ... That don't have to be. And that doesn't mean that we're always gonna agree or come to a resolution that everybody's happy with, but at least we can, we can walk out of these conversations without having alienated each other and h- maybe set a stage for some further discussion about many of these issues.

Tim Pickavance: That's exactly what we hope for.

Scott Rae: Well, this, I... This has been super helpful. I'm so grateful to you, to you and the rest of the team for the work you've done on this, and I think just getting people to identify and to come to grips with what their emotions are around many of these issues, as that's... If that's all that happens, then I think we would take the win on that and call it a good day.

Tim Pickavance: Definitely.

Scott Rae: So, Tim, thanks so much for being with us and for your really good work on this.

Tim Pickavance: Thanks, Scott.

Scott Rae: This has been an episode of the podcast Think Biblically: Conversations on Faith and Culture. It's brought to you by Talbot School of Theology at Biola University, offering programs residentially in Southern California and online, including master's degrees in Christian apologetics, spiritual formation, philosophy, theology, Old and New Testament, marriage and family therapy, pastoral ministry, and there's probably one or two that I'm missing. [upbeat music] visit biola.edu/talbot in order to learn more. If you want to submit comments, ask questions, make suggestions on issues you'd like us to cover or guests you'd like us to consider, please email us at thinkbiblically@biola.edu. That's thinkbiblically@biola.edu. In the meantime, thanks for listening, and think biblically about everything. [upbeat music]