Recovering Evangelicals

A retrospective that spotlights a provocative thread with huge theological and existential implications: the primordial cosmic ‘egg’ was fine-tuned, preprogrammed, and front-end loaded! In this Season Finale, we look back at an incredible series of episodes — most of them in the past few months, but many others from as far back as four years […]

After life got a foothold on Earth, it immediately set about to filling the various emerging ecosystems with new organisms. If you compressed the 3.7 billion year march of life on this planet down to 24 hours: earth comes into existence at midnight, the first fossils of life appear in the wee hours of the […]

Getting twenty five fundamental constants and physical laws just right to produce a universe full of electrons, neutrons, and protons … all the way up to planets and stars Last week, we learned that “Fine Tuning” can mean three very different things.  Today, we’re going to explore the first of those three: the exquisite precision […]

Human evolution is hard to take for some Christians, especially when we claim that humans have been climbing up the evolutionary ladder in the moral sense. It was only a few years ago that Pew Research found roughly one third of Americans believe that “humans have existed in their present form since the beginning of […]

The scientist poster-boy for atheism and an ex-Muslim, ex-atheist Christian have a conversation (not a debate) about worldviews (not God). One of our long-time listeners asked for our opinion on a ”debate” between Richard Dawkins and Ayaan Hirsi Ali: the conversation between the two of them raised many questions and points that resonated deeply with […]

Sparks fly when a Greek Orthodox evolution-accepting professor comes up against an Evangelical school headmaster bent on bringing in a Young Earth Creationist curriculum Why are we doing yet another episode on Young Earth Creationism?  The biggest reason is because it’s still a very potent ideology in Christianity, especially within Evangelicalism.  YECist parents and YECist […]

An experimental psychologist and a theologian with a PhD in psychology give us their perspectives on the emotion of awe and its role in the spiritual/religious experience. Last week, we explained why we decided to look more closely at the emotion of awe and its role in the spiritual / religious experience, as well as […]

After a quick primer on this uniquely human phenomenon, we’ll hear from someone who had a profound, life-changing experience during a solar eclipse, and then relate all of this to religious/spiritual experiences. Humans seem to be unique among all other species on Earth when it comes to the emotion of awe.  Whether it’s experienced while […]

Many Christians can fully accept the idea of human evolution, but they use a language which betrays Young Earth Creationism. If we don’t update our language, we may lose a whole generation of Christians. Many Christians are perfectly fine with human evolution: descent over millions of years down a family tree we share in common with […]

A week after Easter 2024, and in response to questions from our listeners, we discuss a whole new perspective on who Jesus was, and what he gave the Jews, and the world, when he died on the cross. Several members of our private Facebook Discussion Group asked us to explain how we’ve been able to […]

Brian takes an entirely new and unexpected direction in this latest book: it’s not enough to talk about bringing heaven down to earth, we have to stop creating hell on earth. Brian MacLaren is widely recognized in the Evangelical community. In fact, in 2015, Time magazine named him one of the 25 most influential Evangelicals […]

A social anthropologist, with decades of scholarship on people striving to connect to another dimension, gives us her perspective on the Evangelical version of this phenomenon. “It’s not a religion … it’s a relationship!”  Many Christians claim this is what separates their faith from all others.  There was a time when I myself made this […]

A brief retrospective on Season 4, and a longer one on the journey that the podcast has taken us on through Christian belief. Well, we kept it going for over a year, and added 54 more episodes to our archive. But all good things must come to an end. And so this will be the […]

Biology is unique among the sciences in its apparently absolute dependence on language that implies a goal, direction, or intention. Does this mean that biology IS goal-oriented, or directed? If so, that has huge philosophical and theological implications!? Our deep-dive into Intelligent Design got us wondering why so many people embrace that worldview. Not just […]

The details behind the story of how bacteria mutated in order to grow bigger and better by eating oranges, instead of sugar. Last week, we talked to a member of the Long-Term Evolution Experiment, Dr. Zachary Blount. He and his colleagues followed 75,000 generations of bacteria competing for a limited food resource — sugar — […]

Two very different interpretations of the same set of data: one from Creationists and ID proponents, and the other from the scientists actually doing the work. Here, we talk to one of the latter. A frequent talking point for creationists and Intelligent Design proponents in their anti-evolution rhetoric is a ground-breaking scientific project referred to […]

Dr. Janet Kellogg Ray, a deeply Evangelical believer and state college professor, has long been speaking to and educating Evangelicals about their science denial Unfortunately, science denial and pseudoscience run rampant in Evangelical circles. In our previous episodes, we’ve learned about the exceptionally strong correlations between being Evangelical and: … being against COVID protection measures […]

After a seven-episode deep-dive into Intelligent Design, we finally arrive at our better informed opinion of our position on this worldview. We started this 7-part mini-series introducing the Intelligent Design proposal that many creationists hold, and also shared our position at the outset on it: at that time, we were not convinced, feeling like we […]

After last week’s scientific experts cleared up much ID-rhetoric, we ask a rising star in the ID movement — Dr. Jonathan McLatchie — to respond to our reinvigorated questions, concern, and critiques of Intelligent Design After starting this mini-series with an interview with one leading ID proponent, and then hearing from a number of scientific […]

Three internationally-recognized, world experts on the bacterial flagellum connect the dots regarding the evolutionary origin of the flagellum, and draw some compelling comparisons to the evolutionary emergence of the Bible! Three episodes ago, Dr. Michael Behe used the bacterial flagellum as Exhibit A in his defense of the Intelligent Design proposal. Last week, we heard […]

A scientist who specifically studies the bacterial flagellum using some of the most cutting-edge research tools clears up a few myths and misconceptions. Much of Dr. Michael Behe’s defense of Intelligent Design rests on claims made about the bacterial flagellum. It certainly has become his signature, and one could even say it’s become the symbol […]

Most people don’t know: the genome is a formatted database with read/write memory systems which can reorganize itself to produce new species. This is a re-release of an episode we put out almost two years ago. In the episode that preceded this re-release, and which set the stage for this interview, we had given a […]

Dr. Michael Behe, a biochemist and Intelligent Design proponent, gives us his perspective of ID, and responses to several counterarguments against ID. To start off our deep-dive into Intelligent Design, we wanted to talk to a knowledgeable representative of that movement. Dr. Michael Behe, a biochemist who has been waving that flag for three decades […]

Before hearing from Intelligent Design advocates, we thought we’d give our listeners some useful background information about how cells work …. it turns out it’s all about making shapes out of string. Before we present our interviews with Drs. Michael Behe and Jonathan McLatchie (both leading proponents of Intelligent Design), we feel we should give […]

A short introduction to start a mini-series on this Christian apologetic idea, and some of the reasons why we have such difficulty with it. Intelligent Design” has attracted much criticism — certainly from the secular, scientific community, but even from Christians of all stripes … including ourselves. Over the next few weeks, we’re going to […]

“Why not just throw the worship service out the window, and re-think what it means to be a Christian community?” Most Christians today have nestled into, or hopped between, a very standard modern expression of Christian faith, one that involves meeting for an hour on Sunday and having an unchanging mixture of songs, scripture reading, […]

Four particularly toxic ingredients make it especially hard for some (many?) Evangelicals to maintain their belief system beyond a few decades. Christianity, in the West at least, is certainly experiencing a “great falling away”: churches closing, memberships dropping, people leaving the faith entirely. Some might conclude they’re leaving in order to better enjoy “sex, drugs […]

A traumatic experience while serving in a church led to a complete deconstruction of her Christian faith: she’s still “a hopeful Christian agnostic” who finds Jesus’ message “beautiful and life-giving” Another one of our listeners tells her story. Rachel Sanders also grew up in a conservative Evangelical home, and went to a Southern Baptist church, […]

Her spiritual journey was going perfectly well, until life circumstances blind-sided her and the “body of Christ” failed her, putting an end to her journey. This week, another long-standing member of the podcast discussion group drops into our “studio” and shares her spiritual journey. She was perfectly comfortable for the first few decades with her […]

Another listener tells his story of navigating a long and meandering path through Evangelicalism: many detours, but the same destination. This week, we talk to an old friend of both of ours: Paul Almas. Paul played a key role in Luke’s reconstruction journey, was someone that both Luke and Scott looked up to 20 or […]

Getting to know one of our listeners, and his very unique and thought-provoking path into and out of Evangelicalism. We talked to Doug, one of our listeners, to learn a bit about his very unique story through Evangelicalism: from Fundamentalism, through progressively more liberal churches, eventually going back to Bible Seminary as an atheist to […]

Science now makes the former no longer tenable, leaving three options for believers: ignore the problem, reject the Bible, or revise one’s theology. The story of “the Exodus” has traditionally been seen to involve millions of Israelites following Moses out of Egypt: this image is derived from a literal reading of the Old Testament, with […]

Although the origin story for Jews, and the foundation for much of Christian theology, many scholars will ask: did it really happen? Moses leading the newly-born nation of Israel out of slavery in Egypt, wandering through the desert for 40 years, and taking possession of Canaan is an iconic story. Not only is it the […]