Recovering Evangelicals

Our responses to a flurry of comments and questions to two recent episodes: one on Open/Process Theism, and the other comparing theology and science as legitimate avenues in the search for Truth. Two of our recent episodes both evoked a tremendous response from our listeners, in terms of comments left at our two Facebook sites […]

An amazing story of a journey into an utterly bizarre worldview, and what it took to come back to reality. Do you ever look back on the things that you once believed with conviction, and now shake your head, asking yourself: “How could I have believed that? It’s so obviously not true.  I just don’t […]

Luke asks two theologians to convince him that theology is a legitimate avenue for coming up with robust models of our reality Science and theology are both human endeavours seeking to explain our past, our present reality, and possibly also the trajectory of our future. Both build elaborate ideas on the foundation of previous scholars, […]

A brief introduction to two forms of theology that are as old as the Bible itself, but have labels that are only a few decades old. One of the biggest problems in Christian theology arises out of the simple belief that God is all-loving, all-knowing, and all-powerful. The problem? … why, then, is there so […]

An expert gives us his insight into this disturbing, embarrassing … and growing … problem in the 21st century church. Spiritual/clergy abuse has been much in the news as of late. Some of the names that have filled religious and secular news feeds in the past few years include large organizations like the indigenous residential […]

Our understanding of Hell has been evolving for thousands of years … and we’re the ones making all the changes! Dr. Meghan Henning (Associate Professor of Christian Origins; University of Dayton, OH) gives a scholar’s view on the historical evolution of JudeoChristian thinking about this … “place?” … state? …. concept? For thousands of years,the [&#8...

A look forward at the ideas and episodes we’ve been working on for this new season. After a four month hiatus, we’ve come back! In this inaugural episode, we briefly re-introduce ourselves to the audience, explain the four month hiatus, talk about our modus operandi, reaffirm the mission or vision of our podcast and our […]

A third and final look back at the last 20 episodes: our “Origin and Evolution of …” series. In this final episode of Season 3, we looked back a third time at the “Origin and Evolution of …” series of episodes that we started at the beginning of the year. That series was a deep-dive […]

A close look at how this is quite different from mere resuscitation of a dead body, and how it’s the crucial evidence for Christianity being “the true myth.” For millennia, we humans have been making myths: stories of heroes, villains, tests-of-character, conflicts, rescue missions, and more. It’s a distinctly human trait, and the foundation for […]

Literary scholars such as JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis see Christianity as not only the fulfillment of ancient Hebrew prophecies, but also the deep-seated yearnings of the human heart, expressed through a multitude of myths and religions. Our previous episodes looked at hominids a few hundred thousand years ago acquiring cognitive abilities which equipped them […]

Paul and John seem to paint a different portrait of Jesus than those who walked and talked with him (last week’s topic). Last week, we looked at the first half of that paradoxical Christian expression: Jesus was “fully human and yet fully divine.” We learned that the people who walked and talked with him found […]

The people who actually walked and talked with Jesus in the first century clearly saw him primarily as a Jewish Messiah. One particular Christian tenet that has been the hardest to wrap my brain around is the idea that Jesus was “fully human, and yet fully divine”. This week, we look at what the people […]

Did decades of apostolic teaching of a cosmic divine universal Savior influence the eyewitness accounts — recorded in the Gospels many decades later — of a very human Jewish Messiah? Over the next few weeks, we’ll be looking at how the first century Christian church evolved its understanding of Jesus. To do that, we’re going […]

Was this religion dropped onto a unified nation that had just marched out of Egypt, or did both the nation and its religion evolve over the course of millennia? We’ve been looking at hominids over the past couple hundred thousand years, paying particular attention to the evolution of cognitive abilities which contributed to the emergence […]

Many Christians will say: “I’m OK with evolution, in general …. as long as you leave humans out of it”. It’s only been four weeks since we summarized our discussions in this podcast series that began four months ago (episode #74). But during the four weeks since then, we’ve crossed that line: we’ve added humans […]

Hypersensitive agency detection and promiscuous teleology in human brains make a powerful religion-making machine Millions of years of evolution have produced a powerful neural reflex within animals: we immediately assume there’s a being behind every rustling in the grass. We see faces in puffy clouds and random patterns on the ground. If we hear a […]

Signs of symbolism, abstract thinking, compassion, and even a religious streak becoming visible in hominids hundreds of thousands of years ago. We talked to Dr. Marc Kissel (PhD, Anthropology) about his work looking at the evolution of higher cognitive functions in ancient hominids — our ancestors  — hundreds of thousands of years ago. They were a […]

Evolution produces organisms who find more and more ways to work with each other to survive: the origin of the agape love we’ve been talking about? As soon as life appeared on earth roughly four billion years ago, its survival was driven by two opposing forces. One was entirely self-oriented, and commanded things like: The […]

A discussion about that point in our evolutionary journey when humans acquired the abilities to experience … “a soul”? At this point in our unfolding story, life has appeared on earth and produced countless different species of increasing complexity, a few of whom are beginning to exhibit characteristics and abilities that would make them good […]

A look back at the last ten episodes and how they unpack a provocative new Christian understanding of how and why we got here. Over the past two months, we’ve been exploring the thesis that Dr. Chris Barrigar brought to us about a year and a half ago (Episode #29 and #30). One in which […]

A geneticist explains to us how we have a common ancestor with chimpanzees, and a more recent one with Neanderthals. As he put it: “Neanderthals were us!” This week, we pick up where we left off last week: someone having the amazing insight to pull out fragments of DNA from deep inside a hominid bone […]

The anthropologist who discovered “Lucy” answers many of our questions on human evolution. The cosmic egg has exploded and produced a universe full of stars, planets, and basic chemicals (episodes #64 and 65). Out of those basic building blocks, life began to appear on earth, from which all kinds of species started evolving (episodes #66, […]

An update on Darwinism and the origin of species. Last week we heard about the mechanisms going on inside the cells … at the molecular level … to produce new species. This week, Dr. Jeffrey Schloss tackles the same subject, but comes at it from more of a whole organism level. We explore general themes […]

Most people don’t know: the genome is a formatted database with read/write memory systems which can reorganize itself to produce new species. Last week, we gave a thumbnail sketch of genetics as most people understand it. We distilled that common understanding into five basic statements, and showed how most people think new species arise from […]

A brief overview of genetics as most know it, and why many don’t buy the Theory of Evolution. Next week, we plan to wade into the deep water of genetics in order to understand the origin of species. So this week we thought it would be good to first give a brief Genetics 101 to […]