Last Sunday, Rose and I released the first episode of our new podcast. Since then, we managed to get onto Apple Podcasts (iTunes), Google Podcasts, and Spotify. We got tweeted by J. Warner Wallace and Brett Kunkle, and Dr. Jonathan Sarfati. As of Thursday night we have 435 downloads, and 79 views on Youtube. Episode #2 drops early Sunday, so you can listen to it on the way to church.

Until then, here is a review that a Christian woman who works in information technology sent to me. I found it fascinating.

She writes:

I came to this podcast after finding the blog of Wintery Knight, which I found after asking myself the question, “If Christianity is true, why doesn’t everyone believe?” I knew there is quite a bit of evidence in the physical universe but I’m no scholar and I wanted to at least be able to defend my faith on a minimal level.

I thought there were more “holes” in the evidence than there actually are, by which I mean things that could be shooed away with a shake of the all-knowing hand and a “pfft.” Rose talks about one of these dismissal techniques in the podcast, the hallucination theory, which seems to be how atheists used to disregard the resurrection – all those people who thought they saw Jesus were just hallucinating. Hallucinating en masse, in different places, at different times. Now, apparently, that no longer flies because it doesn’t make sense. Rose did a good job of explaining this.

But my initial question remains stubbornly unanswered – if atheist scholars have now exhausted their naturalistic attempts to explain the resurrection and are sailing under some general “something happened but we don’t know what” flag, isn’t that a bit like taking the ball and going home? At what point does someone cry uncle? I still don’t understand why everyone who sees the evidence doesn’t believe in Christ. The minimal facts argument and all that is compelling. In the beginning of the podcast, they talk about the importance of coming to agreement about the existence of God in the first place, and I guess that’s the point. Without a belief in God, I suppose you can’t believe in miracles, and even in the face of trustworthy evidence, you always seek a different answer because you simply can’t believe otherwise.

Churches should teach more apologetics, whether people really want it or not. My church talks about the resurrection as though we all believe it, not as though we might need to defend it. Having the knowledge that non-Christian scholars like Ludemann believe in the appearances of Jesus after he was resurrected is like WOW. I did not know that. Why was I never told that? I thought atheist scholars thought it was all bollocks. But as it turns out the Bible as a book of history seems to be well-respected by those who make a living of testing the accuracy of historical stories. So that’s a nice boost of confidence. I hear that many kids walk away from church after they leave their family of origin and I can’t help but wonder if that’s partially because they are under the impression that Christianity is embarrassingly false, nothing more than ancient judgmental mythology. We might not lose so many if we gave them some facts during years of kids church.

To the podcast itself. It is really refreshing to hear a woman do most of the teaching. Wintery Knight obviously knows apologetics, but he took more of a skeptic role and Desert Rose made most of the points. This seems rare. It seems to be mostly a male space and kind of a nerdy one. I am probably an unusual bird here because I am a female, and I don’t know a whole lot of females who are really into apologetics. But I wonder if that’s strictly because the female mind is not as analytical as the male mind, or if it’s somewhat also because apologetics is seen as a guy sport. That’s sad if that’s the case. I work in software development and surely there are plenty of girl engineers I know who might be interested in apologetics if it had a bit more balance. I could say the same thing on the other side about most of the books and studies aimed at Christian women – they feel overly touchy feely, to the point that a woman like me often finds them unappealing because of the lack of balance. At any rate it was nice to see this dynamic of balance between the sexes in an area that’s more geared to thinking rather than feeling. Both hosts were easy to listen to, seemed very knowledgeable, and had good rapport with each other.

Maybe one criticism. I would have liked to have seen the excerpts from the debates that were read. I found myself going back 30 seconds in the podcast to listen to them again, and then later going back again and trying to find them and not being exactly sure where they were in the podcast. It would have been nice to have those included in the show notes so I could read them, but I understand this would have added a considerable amount of effort for the hosts. An alternative would be to timestamp the major parts of the show so it’s easier to find one segment. Maybe that’s there somewhere and I just didn’t find it.

One other comment, it was fast-paced and packed with info. It was more of a “treadmill” podcast than a “grocery shopping” podcast. In other words, if I had to listen to it while simultaneously doing something else that required thought, I would have missed all the good stuff. Even during a treadmill listen, I missed a lot. No problem really, I just listened again. The key to most learning is listening/reading more than once, and I found I picked up so much more the second time around.

Great podcast. 5 stars.

Orual’s Babble

That’s the review. I asked her if I could publish it. She agreed, and chose “Orual’s Babble” as an alias. I really liked what she said about her experiences in church, and her comments about Rose, women, and apologetics.

I updated the show notes to include the missing text that she was looking for.