Doubts Aloud Podcast

Show Notes Friends of the show John Nelson and Josh Parikh return as guests together. They introduce Josh’s new term to the world: McGrewvianism, which is the apologetic approach of partners Tim & Lydia McGrew.  They are scholars in their own fields but do not use the methods of modern NT scholarship when arguing for the historical reliability of the gospels. Potentially this can be seen as fr...

Show Notes Tom Holland’s book ‘Dominion’ has caused quite a stir in Christian apologetics circles over the last few years and we’ve been reading it. We also attended a church leader’s evening where he was the speaker.  So we thought we would start a “Doubts Aloud Book Club” with Dominion the first book covered. We introduce Tom, his current faith position and the book, we discuss his style and how...

Show Notes We are excited to have guest Rev Michael Roberts with us, he’s an Oxford geologist who subsequently became an Anglican vicar. He is extremely knowledgeable on the history of geology and the age of the earth in science, Christian academic thought, theology and the modern Young Earth movement. Did you know that Darwin was a geologist at the start of his career? Neither did we. Links:Micha...

Show Notes his month we return to that different form of Apologetics - Presuppositional Apologetics. Please see Part 1 - Episode 70 - where we gave a more social and historical background to it. Here we look at the basic argument made: the Transcendental Argument for God, “TAG”. We set it out and discuss implications and objections to it. Links:The Debunking Christianity material on Presup: https:...

Show Notes We deal with the current conflict in Israel and Gaza by looking at the influence of religion, in the minds of the Israeli leaders & the settlers taking land in the West Bank and also in the minds of the Evangelical Zionist backers in the UK and US.  The UK evangelical influence is more of historical interest but the US is very current and is influencing events now. Links etc: The vi...

Show Notes Merry Christmas one and all and what could be more festive than digging into the historical reliability of that Census? The one Luke uses to set up his nativity narrative. We make our case as to why this matters, after all, Luke is said to be a great historian by many. Then we get to it dealing with the 3 main historical issues with the census as presented by Luke:he says it covered the...

Show Notes This month we (in our view) bravely jump into a completely different form of Apologetics - Presuppositional Apologetics. It can be a bid disorientating as in Andrew’s words it can be summarised as “God’s word says you are wrong so you have no case to make". Frances is more measured with her summary: “the only proof of the Christian position is that, unless its truth is presupposed, ther...

Show Notes In this episode Andrew shares his research on the origins of the Book of Mormon and the early roots of the Mormon church. This includes discussing the belief that gold plates were discoverd near New York in the early 19th century that gave the purported story of jews emigrating from the holy land to the americas in around 600 BC. Andrew also covers aspects of the character and backgroun...

Show Notes Andrew has been following a story about a ‘Curse Tablet’ found at an archaeological site in Israel which proponents claim should up-end Biblical Archaeology in such a way as to confirm the conservative evangelical view of the Torah – the first five books of the OT. We look into it and hear from both sides. This led on to Ed introducing the chapter in the ‘50 Arguments for God’ book on B...

This episodes is Part 2 of a 2 part show with just with Andrew on his own and and he recounts in detail his own de-conversion story.

This episodes is Part 1 of a 2 part show with just with Andrew on his own and and he recounts in detail his own de-conversion story.

Show Notes We continued our discussion with friend of ours Josh Parikh - a Christian Apologist who has always thought deeply about the issues and maintained intellectual integrity. There were two Old Testament case studies that Josh included in his talk “A Tumultuous Period in Apologetics?” to the Discussion Group in London, and we were keen not to miss these out: the famous story of bears mauling...

Show Notes Josh Parikh is an old friend of ours having contributed to our Discussion Groups over many years as a Christian Apologist who has always thought deeply about the issues and maintained intellectual integrity. He has been on a journey, especially having engaged with Biblical scholarship. This has overlapped with his time at Oxford University and continued since graduating. Like many, he h...

Show Notes For Part 2 of our discussion of same-sex relationships, sexual practice and the Bible, we start with background and origins for the OT Law (we covered its interpretation in Part 1). One scholar has identified an evolution in the laws in Leviticus from a more lenient view to the harsh one found in the final text. Frances has researched reactions to these laws in Jewish writings and that...

Show Notes We do a tour of the Bible and its material on same-sex relationships and sexual practice. We find that the story of Sodom isn’t the place to start and the OT Law has issues with interpretation. Jesus didn’t directly teach on the subject and so we spend more time with the references to it by Paul, in a long passage in Romans 1 (v 18-32) and a shorter one in 1Corinthians6v9. 1Tim1v10 is s...

Episode 61 – Show Notes Occam’s Razor shows us how simple explanations are superior to complex ones and so simplicity is a concept that might lead us to believe in God as this one simple concept – a supernatural personal agent – can explain all the complexities of the world. We try to assess this line of thinking, especially using the work of the Oxford Christian philosopher Richard Swinburne who...

Episode 60– Show NotesJohn Nelson returned as our guest to start off 2023. He’s been monitoring the debate about what literary genre we should consider the gospels to be and what the implications would be if they are taken as biography in the Greek & Roman tradition. The question fits with his studies for his PhD at the University of Edinburgh in Christian Origins. John maintains that understa...

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?...

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 interpre...

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...

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 t...

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...

Resurrection interview with Mathew Hartke

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 dri...

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 th...