Episode 59– Show Notes We had a great time with our guest Paul Thompson of the Skepticule Podcast. Paul has done a lot of research on St Nicolas and his afterlife as Santa Claus which we enjoyed. He also researched scams as part of the UK sceptical community and gave us the benefits by leading us through The Perfect Scam. So all good fun and games for the Christmas season. Links: The Unbelievable? Shows on which Paul has been a guest: 20 Nov 2010 – with Philip Yancey on "What Good is God?" 29 Ja...
Dec 04, 2022•1 hr 22 min
Episode 58– Show Notes Andrew is on a roll again, reporting his research into flat earth beliefs in the Bible. Actually, it is just a component in a whole cosmology of how the ‘heavens’, earth and under the earth fit together. Spoiler – no turtles. This eventually moves on to Ed getting excited over whether Jesus was a flat earther. We can’t help but see how this leads to literalist Bible interpreters becoming flat earthers - as in members of the modern conspiracy theory – and how important they...
Nov 06, 2022•59 min
Episode 57– Show Notes We start with methodological naturalism and whether rejecting can be scientifically legitimate, as this is the next chapter in our 50 Arguments for God book. Chapter title: “The Scientific Status of Design Inferences”. We discuss the argument in the chapter for rejecting methodological naturalism when it comes to the ‘science’ of Intelligent Design. For us the boundaries of this ‘methodological naturalism free-zone’ is the problem. This leads us on to considering if method...
Oct 09, 2022•1 hr 28 min
Episode 56– Show Notes We’re delighted to welcome SkyDive Phil back on the show. Not on vegetarianism as we’d trailed (please be patient) but on his recent work on the Kalam Cosmological Argument. The most prominent form of the argument, as defended by Christian apologist and philosopher William Lane Craig, states the Kalam cosmological argument as the following syllogism: Everything that begins to exist has a cause. The universe began to exist. Therefore, the universe has a cause. The conclusio...
Sep 05, 2022•1 hr 22 min
Episode 55 - Title Suggestions 1. God’s Body 2. Does God have a Body? 3. God really has a Body and we’re not joking 4. The one where God has a body Episode 55– Show Notes The idea we explore is that the Old Testament authors all thought that God had a body. For them He wasn’t an ethereal unembodied universal Being. We look at the evidence for this view and the reasons it seems so contrarian a view to take. There is wonderful history here hidden in the Old Testament and in the story of how views ...
Aug 06, 2022•1 hr 8 min
Resurrection interview with Mathew Hartke
Jul 04, 2022•1 hr 9 min
Episode 53– Show Notes We start with an argument from our series on 50 Arguments for God’s Existence. This time “The Argument from Degrees of Perfection” by Catholic philosopher Peter Freeft. The following link gives a summary. https://peterkreeft.com/topics-more/20_arguments-gods-existence.htm#4 We try our best to do the argument justice while discussing how it doesn’t work for us. Somehow we drifted into mentioning the recent debate “Theism vs Atheism” between Jonathan McLatchie and Alex O’Con...
Jun 06, 2022•1 hr 15 min
Episode 52– Show Notes Andrew’s daughter, Jahannah, has a YouTube channel and she takes seriously the possibility of Atlantis being more than a myth. They held a debate together on her channel which Andrew needed to prepare for with a heap of research and reading. The parallels with research into ancient history of relevance to Hebrew and Christian beliefs made this exercise a great window onto the issues our podcast covers, and so we get stuck in. This drifts in eventually to a brief chat about...
May 05, 2022•1 hr 3 min
Episode 51 – Show Notes We’re delighted to have a British District Judge as our guest. Not any District Judge but Graeme Smith who is a Christian and has written a book on the evidence for the resurrection, which he considers is excellent. We each enjoy a collegiate discussion with Graeme on various aspects of the book and how he concludes as he does. The book is “Was the Tomb Empty: A Lawyer Weighs The Evidence For The Resurrection” Feb. 2014 Here’s a purchase link: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Was...
Apr 06, 2022•1 hr 7 min
Episode 50– Show Notes We celebrate our 50th episode by getting down and muddy in the issue of divine practical advice. Christians celebrate it when ancient advice or OT Law tallies well with modern health advice, but they don’t see the massive misses that there are in the Bible. We spend most of the time diving deep into the example of hand washing with soap, which is simple, within the technology of Bible times and has a massive impact on child mortality rates. Can we expect a loving God to he...
Mar 06, 2022•1 hr 18 min
Text for DA Podcast Ep 49 Episode 49– Show Notes We were delighted to welcome back friend-of-the-show Steve Tomkins to tell us all about the theological debates in late Tudor England which were conducted using, at one extreme, burnings at the stake and, at the other extreme, scurrilous publications akin to a 16thC Private Eye. Much of the material that Steve shared is in his recent book: The Journey to the Mayflower: God’s Outlaws and the Invention of Freedom (2020) If you want to know anything ...
Feb 05, 2022•1 hr 11 min
Episode 48– Show Notes This month we discuss Open Theism which is based on the idea that God doesn’t know the future choices that free agents will make. It is a relatively new idea within the history of Christianity and it has received increasing attention in recent years with thinkers such as Greg Boyd promoting it. The narratives in the Old Testament tend to indicate this view of God’s knowledge as God is a more human type of character when compared to the ‘omni’ God of classical Theism which ...
Jan 03, 2022•1 hr 20 min
Episode 47 – Show Notes It is a delight to welcome back John Nelson to the show after his time with us back in Episode 3. We got to know John in the London Unbelievable Discussion Group when he was an undergraduate at Nottingham studying theology. He has since moved on to post doctoral research at Oxford University and now Edinburgh. He has tended to concentrate mostly on the gospels, a topic of enduring interest to us. We chat about research into the historical Jesus, the genre of the gospels a...
Dec 04, 2021•1 hr 16 min
Episode 46– Show Notes We start with the Gospel of Thomas as it the next chapter in our 50 Arguments for God book. Why do people talk about it? What is it? What is its history? What do we learn from it? This all raises the issue of lost early Christian documents - the surviving ones are the ‘winning’ ones, those which scribes chose to copy and keep preserved. Thomas also raises the issues of Orthodoxy, Heresy and Diversity of Beliefs. We continue that discussion for the rest of the show. The tow...
Nov 06, 2021•1 hr 22 min
Episode 45– Show Notes We discuss the New Testament Book of Revelation using Andrew’s research and knowledge, as we did for Daniel last month. Things are more complex than for Daniel and we leave things a bit more open. The issues of when it was written and by whom are more straightforward perhaps, but what the author is trying to achieve with all the strange imagery and use of apocalyptic genre is not clear. We discuss that along with the massive use of the Old Testament in Revelation, the way ...
Oct 04, 2021•1 hr 15 min
Episode 44– Show Notes We discuss the Old Testament Book of Daniel using Andrew’s research and knowledge. The main controversy surrounds whether it is written by Daniel himself as it purports to be (6thC BC) or someone claiming to be Daniel in the 2ndC BC. As it turns out this is only a controversy when conservative scholars are around. We discuss the reasons why the mainstream date Daniel at the juncture when the ‘prophecies’ suddenly turn from accurate to hopeless. The significance of this of ...
Sep 04, 2021•1 hr 1 min
Episode 43 – Show Notes It is a delight for us to have a long chat with Ed’s friend Krish Kandiah, a Christian author and leader in the UK on adoption, fostering, social action and welcoming the vulnerable to our shores. He has written a successful book ‘Paradoxology’ which covers a lot of ground that can cause doubts for believers and has been significant in our journeys. In particular the narratives seeming to describe genocide of Canaanites at the command of Yahweh. He sees this as a paradox ...
Aug 03, 2021•1 hr 23 min
Episode 42 – Show Notes After promising this for a while, at last we tackle Mythicism which in our context is the idea that Jesus never existed as a historical human being. None of us subscribe to the idea but we find it an interesting idea and movement to learn from, both in what they use as evidence and what kind of person believes in Mythicism. It leads us to question what we can actually determine about Jesus of Nazareth that isn’t myth, either from Jewish or Greek/Roman stories and tropes. ...
Jul 04, 2021•1 hr 26 min
Episode 41 – Show Notes It is a delight for us to have a long chat with our friend ‘SkydivePhil’ - Phil Halper. He’s best known for his YouTube channel and has twice been on Unbelievable discussing cosmology and also, for his first appearance, animal suffering. Phil is a vegetarian and sees how the issue of animal suffering is a much more powerful argument against theism than is generally realised. It is that subject that we were keen to discuss, especially because Phil and some of his contacts ...
Jun 06, 2021•1 hr 26 min
Episode 40 – Show Notes It is a delight for us to have a long chat with our friend Justin Brierley, the founder and host of the Unbelievable Show (search “Unbelievable?” in your podcast App) where Christians and Atheists meet for respectful dialogue. The show is how the rest of us met each other. We discussed in particular chapter 3 of Justin’s Unbelievable? book, written in 2017: “Unbelievable?: Why after ten years of talking with atheists, I'm still a Christian” Eg: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Un...
May 03, 2021•59 min
Episode 39– Show Notes We discuss the issue of some New Testament letters that have strong evidence to suggest that the author was not who they claimed to be. This practice was not uncommon in that period. We dig a bit deeper on the letter 2 Peter in particular. We took the opportunity to quickly discuss another chapter from our “50 Arguments for Faith” book: chapter 47 on the NT canon. What does it say on this issue? Links: The academic Bart Ehrman book is “Forgery and Counter-forgery: The Use ...
Apr 04, 2021•1 hr 12 min
Episode 38– Show Notes We try to be sensitive as we discuss the recent scandal of Ravi Zacharias’ behaviour as a leading Christian apologist and communicator. This was not just a preaching getting into a sex scandal. There were many victims of abuse by his behaviour and his organisations forceful cover up. We seek to cover the aspects and implications of interest to atheists and where we have a more personal take on the story, such as Ed’s involvement with Ravi’s ministry in the UK (RZIM in Oxfo...
Mar 04, 2021•1 hr 3 min
Episode 37– Show Notes We continue the discussion from the last episode which had launched from the chapter in our favourite Apologetics book - "How Darwinism Dumbs Us Down: Evolution and Postmodernism". This time we discuss the theists’ side of deriving confidence in our knowledge (quoting the book): “an absolute mind as the basis for trust in human cognition”, i.e. being in God’s hands when it comes to what we can know. So what does happen when theists face their own source for determining tru...
Feb 06, 2021•1 hr 22 min
Episode 36– Show Notes We started with the next random chapter from our favourite Apologetics book "How Darwinism Dumbs Us Down: Evolution and Postmodernism". The idea is that knowledge arrived at for survival purposes is not likely to include metaphysical truth, so evolution undercuts any confidence in concluding naturalism or atheism. This quickly morphed to the more well-known presentation by Alvin Plantinga, which he called the Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism (EAAN). We discussed it...
Jan 04, 2021•1 hr 11 min
Episode 35 – Show Notes Andrew continued the long story of hell, picking up with St Paul. The various twists and turns (and torments) were related up to today. We frequently mentioned Chris Date, he was our guest in episode 9. Then Ed talked through his material on the apologetics of defending hell, based on a paper he wrote with Josh Parikh, find it here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Zq-BQro4qIaVMQNX6t4tMGRWIm5uVNc5/view?usp=sharing Finally we became festive and Frances provided some Season...
Dec 06, 2020•1 hr 25 min
Episode 34 – Show Notes We started with a quick update on our Atonement series from 2018 with a discussion arising from the recent Unbelievable Show https://www.premierchristianradio.com/Shows/Saturday/Unbelievable/Episodes/Unbelievable-Debating-Wrath-Sin-and-Penal-Substitution-William-Lane-Craig-and-Greg-Boyd We applaud WLC for giving it a go to explain Penal Substitution rationally, but Frances’ legal mind unpicked his arguments based on precedents in US/UK law: employer’s liability and legal ...
Nov 06, 2020•1 hr 19 min
Episode 33 – Show Notes We discuss how morality really is in human society and whether that fits better with an evolutionary outlook or typical theism. Theists usually appeal to morality as coming from God and expressing His moral nature. So what is morality like ‘in the field’? Some links we mentioned: That famous experiment with monkeys and fairness using grapes and cucumbers’. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=meiU6TxysCg And the video of a monkey trying to revive a fellow in the group at an In...
Oct 04, 2020•1 hr 12 min
Episode 32 – Show Notes We complete our Summer of Miracles with our guest Robert L White the ‘common sense epistemologist’ and the kind of Christian apologist that we get along with. His podcast is ‘The Robert L. White Show’ https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-robert-l-white-show/id1438270488 Robert also blogs on his website https://www.robertlwhite.net/ Robert is keen that we take the data seriously on miracles and he does have a case with the study done by Dr Candy Gunther Brown with hea...
Sep 05, 2020•1 hr 20 min
Episode 31 – Show Notes We continue giving our Overview of Miracles ‘in the field’ as the claims really show up in the world. Then we use our latest chapter from the 50 Arguments for Faith book to launch discussion on Jesus’ miracles: “The Credibility of Jesus’s Miracles” (Chapter 28, see full book details at bottom) The links we mentioned along the way … Frances was on Unbelievable discussing Ken Fish who has a healing ministry and came along with his best stories https://www.premierchristianra...
Aug 04, 2020•1 hr 31 min
Episode 30 – Show Notes We start another summer mini-series, this summer on miracles, in response to a letter from Christian in Germany. This episode, we focus mostly on actual miracle stories as presented by people seeking to provide the most compelling cases. The video from Lee Strobel who had done 2 years of research:. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y57VUN2TO5M&feature=youtu.be&t=2077 The most striking case is clearly that of Barbara C Snyder here is a link to it we discuss: http://s...
Jul 01, 2020•1 hr 18 min
