On this show we want to have a conversation about some of the ideas that give rise to doubt. Specifically we want to talk about arguments or ideas that each of us find puzzling to the faith. These are the sorts of ideas that we think are some of the best arguments against Christianity. Some of the arguments can be classified as the go to "problem of evil” kind (which seems to be the most popular), but we’re doing this a little different this morning. We want to talk about the best the atheist can offer that affect those of us in this program in a personal way. The defeaters to Christianity we're looking at are not necessarily the best or even best formulated as you’ll see in moment, but are the ones that have captured our imaginations and keep us in the spirit of “faith seeking understanding." Several of our staff have come prepared to talk about what they feel personally is the best defeater for Christianity. Then we want to talk about the defeater to the defeater. We then conclude with what we personally feel is the most persuasive argument for God’s existence. Some caveats: We’ll try our best not to create a straw-man. We’re not going to spend the most time defending the defeaters of Christianity because in the end we’re more convinced of the truth claims of Christianity than its denial. We may at times be stretching our imaginations to come up with good ones since we’re tired of the current state of popular debates going on out there. Don’t misunderstand, we value the art and science of debates, but there’s just a lot out there with the same kind of rhetoric, content and outcome. Supporting Harry Edwards as host are Sam Welbaum, Bruce Paolozzi and Joe Slunaker. Our Oxford team, headed by Richard Park, also include Britton Elliott Brooks and Max Baker-Hytch. We hope this not only encourages you but inspires you to keep searching for truth wherever it may be found.

John Stonestreet with the Colson Center for Christian Worldview recently told a room full of students that “Ideas have CONSEQUENCES!” Indeed. Ideas are powerful enough to shape cultures and change the course of history. What one person believes can affect how millions of others think. Ideas can thrust a whole society towards great moral, economic, professional, and/or spiritual progress. Ideas can destroy the most advanced of civilizations. What I believe will inevitably influence how I live. What ideas I embrace will change my life for the good or the worse. Ideas can empower me but can also regulate me. How do I and we maintain autonomy with intellectual and existential freedom in an imposing world of worldviews? Which thinker will contour mine and our spiritual lives? Which advocacy group, what church, which cult, what politician, what heresy, which ancient proverb will nourish us to thriving not fading? It is our understanding of the world and our place in it that matters. But everyone has a worldview and encounters other worldviews. We encounter a plethora of worldviews on a daily basis. We want you to feel comfortable entering the public square and confident engaging others within it. In this show, we will provide you with the resources to recognize, identify, discern, etc. Western Worldviews. We will be discussing cultural ideas and the philosophy that created them. The purpose of the show is to merely define and describe worldviews that Western people typically encounter, may have already adopted, or will be unknowingly constrained with from society at large. In later shows, we will critique, refute, and reject each worldview individually as we will spend a whole show on each one. This show is an introduction to a series on worldviews that we will go several months.

The Bible is one of the most important literary works in human history, perhaps the most important. Darren Aronofsky's grand new biblical narrative film on the life of Noah hits theaters soon but is this the bible as we know it? Was the error of the world urging the judgement of a loving god, environmentalism, or something else? Is it ok to take liberties with the text in order to tell a different, perhaps "better" story? Can we know the truth? Is it lost to time and culture? Award winning author, director and screenwriter Brian Godawa guides us through the dark waters of Hollywood with apologetics.com host Christopher Neiswonger on this special celebrity edition of the apologetics.com radio show

An important reality about human beings is that we were made to communicate. One of the central themes of the Nebula and Hugo Award winning novel-become-movie, Ender's Game, is the necessity of communication. The reason for the war in the story is a lack of ability to perceive the 'other' as having dignity, or see something other than monsters on the one hand, or expendable automatons on the other. This tragic reality stretches to every important relationship and circumstance of the story. Unfortunately for the film, another example of failure to communicate is that so much of what we learn about the main character in the novel is inside his head, and it doesn't seem to have been translated well into filmic language. Even for us outside the confines of the film, we need access to the minds represented inside the film, or we feel cheated. When Adam is in the garden, God speaks with him. This is a powerful place of discussion between Christians and Atheists. The account of the human person that begins with a supreme mind, the 'Word' of God, making human beings for the purpose of fellowship with himself has a different level of explanatory power than does an account of non-mind material organizing by happenstance into a complexity that has language and communicates. Staff apologists Lindsay Brooks and Christopher Neiswonger are joined by language scholar Jamiella Brooks and translator Arayik Khachikyan.

In the 18th century, philosopher David Hume called the traditional understanding of causality into question in such a way that the scientific endeavor was potentially undermined. Though Immanuel Kant managed to justify the cause and effect relation to some extent, we still live in a world rather skeptical of causality. In this episode, staff apologists Sam Welbaum and Bruce Paolozzi take up the issue of causality, showing that not only is Hume's system unlivable, it fundamentally presumes a weak understanding of causation. If it sounds like this one gets into heavy philosophy, then you're right. However, Sam and Bruce do their best to translate that into something understandable using various examples, not he least of which is a subway sandwich.

Synthetic Biology and Origin of Life research receive much acclamation by atheists and popular media. Most notably after a big study is released do we hear things like "Now we can finally piece together just how life started from non-living chemicals." Or "The generation of functioning cell components is possible through natural mechanisms of the biochemical realms." Atheists proudly tout that these recent breakthroughs of Biochemistry are completing the missing first step in the Naturalist's ladder of success. But a closer look reveals the contrary! While the lab is still a place of scientific exploration into the unseen, it is now also the design studio of biochemical engineers. A correctly engineered experiment can push the limits of hypothesis-execution-observation-conclusion into the realms of the highly-efficient-fail-proof-cell-parts-making-machine. Join Jeremy, Harry, and Jacob and Biochemist Dr. Fuz Rana as we travel deep into the sacred atheist temple of Abiogenesis. Dr. Rana has authored Creating Life in the Lab, Origins of Life, The Cell's Design, and Who Was Adam. We use Dr. Rana’s 2-fold thesis in Creating Life in the Lab: 1) Abiogenesis (Chemical Evolution: Life comes from non-life) has not been shown to have occurred apart from intelligent agents creating life in the lab as shown in synthetic biology and origin of life research. This creation of “life” takes place only by an intelligent agent with “deliberate effort, inordinate ingenuity, and astonishing skill.” Thus, the naturalistic explanation is not validated by any success in the lab, rather success validates ID and external intentional intervention. 2) Those who have what could be considered success in the lab in developing prebiotic molecules and potential pathways to life fail to show geochemical relevance to the early Earth conditions. In this show we develop these main points by A) Understanding the basics with origin of life research in the lab and experimenter involvement. B) Examine in some detail each stage of the process that is typically thought to have occurred in developing the primitive earliest cells. C) Present additional critiques of probability based abiogenesis arguments and the future of abiogenesis research.

With special guests from across the theo-spectrum we discuss why even after 500 hundred years the Reformation is more important than ever. The doctrines of grace, the Five Solas and TULIP are still reverberating through history. Long ago Martin Luther said that "unless I can be convinced through sound reason or sacred scripture I cannot, I shall not, recant." If anything at this time in history the doctrine of justification, the doctrine by which the Church stands or falls, is under greater siege than ever. The Holy Scriptures demand the least respect in the pulpits and ivory towers of modern culture. Those that have a historic faith stand silent, those that have no faith at all lead churches. What's to become of the Gospel when the church becomes a mere echo of the world? Thankfully, justification by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone, according to Scripture alone, to the glory of God alone has no yet fallen into that same darkness that preceded the Reformation and that slogan of the Reformation "Ex Tenebras Lux" still stands on firm if contested ground.

We live in a society in which human sexuality is perpetually challenged, displayed, twisted, objectified and perverted. The sex industry is the highest grossing industry in the nation, major US cities are hubs for sex trafficking, media presents sexual activity as a recreational activity, young people are taught that sexual activities are just meaningless conduits of pleasure and the very concept of having a sex, or a gender, that is distinct from the other is under fire. Does the church have anything to say about this? Yes we do, but sadly we remain silent. The church doesn't know how to address the issue of sexual sin, and is often times uncomfortable having a conversation about the topic of sex and sexuality itself. In this episode host Sam Welbaum and panelists Kurt Blake, Justin Davis and Joe Slunaker present a critique of the society's understanding of sexuality, argue for a purpose to sexual powers/acts, assert that gender matters and address the question "Why does it matter who I have sex with?" If you've ever wished that there was a podcast that mentions Song of Solomon a lot...you just found it. Also, the book that we keep referencing is "On the Meaning of Sex" by J. Budziszewski. Below is a link to the Amazon page. http://www.amazon.com/Meaning-Sex-J-Budziszewski/dp/1935191241/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1381603141&sr=1-1&keywords=on+the+meaning+of+sex+by+j.+budziszewski

Race coming front and center in the nations headlines, perhaps by design, has also brought it uncomfortably to the fore in our relationships within the church. Opinions on news stories have been divided along racial lines, and talk about what the church's role in race relations ought to be has been stoked. The Bible has much to say about race as it deals with tongue, tribe, and nation, and there is a history of the church that can be analyzed with how it has dealt with race. The peculiar history of the United States is a case study of compromise and strange justifications, and it's just one story in a larger global picture. Staff Apologist Lindsay Brooks and guest Rev. Phillip George of Calvary Presbyterian Church in Glendale CA take an unflinching look at the Bible's racial policies, and how these policies have been played out, or not, in the history of the world. Also, a surprising vision of what the Kingdom is is proclaimed, and apologetics against accusations, both fair and unfair, are dealt with.

Is God required to create a big bang? Or can physics now describe the cause of the big bang without God? If physics can replace God, what then of the Christian doctrine of Creatio ex nihilo (God freely created the universe out of nothing a finite time ago)? Cosmologists Lawrence Krauss and Stephen Hawking have recently developed sophisticated theories that provide a completely naturalistic explanation to the cause of our universe’s beginning. In slightly different ways, they espouse that false quantum vacuum energy fluctuations before the beginning of this universe may have also given rise to a plethora of inflating universes (the multiverse). They contend that the efficient cause of our universe is attributed to the vacuum fluctuation universe generating machine at work before the big bang. This necessitates that there is no time boundary singularity or absolute beginning of time as we understand time. This has dramatic implications to the traditional Christian understanding: before God created the universe there was no physics or physical particles – that all physics and physical particles came into being when God created. Hawking states: “So long as the universe had a beginning, we could suppose it had a creator. But if the universe is really completely self-contained, having no boundary or edge, it would have neither beginning nor end: it would simply be. What place, then, for a creator?” (Hawking, A Brief History of Time) But, is this all speculative cosmological theory? Apparently not. Last year’s monumental Higgs boson discovery at the Large Hadron Collider (at CERN near the France/Swiss border) gave observational evidence of a long standing theory of how certain quantum particles obtain mass as they excite the Higgs scalar field. We now have significant and confirmed evidence that through quantum fluctuations, nothing can create something out of nothing. At least that is how it is propagandized to the public by proponents such as Lawrence Krauss. In this show, we seek to work with the actual physics at play to discern if Creatio ex nihilo is still warranted. We discuss the following main points: Recent discoveries in physics are helpful in understanding the Christian doctrine of Creation: Creatio ex nihilo from a scientific perspective. The Naturalist challenge to Creatio ex nihilo does not succeed at establishing a beginning less natural cause or eliminating God by way of naturalistic explanations. Alternative cosmological models that eliminate a beginning of time, such as the Boundless-Finite Model, have significant problems. Therefore, Creatio ex nihilo is not contradicted by actual science but actually corresponds well to the results of recent discoveries in physics. Astrophysicist Dr. Jeff Zweerink joins Jeremy and Sam to discuss this extremely hot topic. Perhaps now we know just how God created “In the beginning.”