In this episode Kurt reviews his time at the Evangelical Theological Society’s annual conference by airing a few interviews from scholars that were there.
Listen to “Episode 19: ETS Conference Review” on Spreaker.
Kurt: Well good day to you and thanks for joining us here on another episode of Veracity Hill where we are striving for truth on faith, politics, and society. Today’s episode is devoted to my time in San Antonio this past week where I was at the Evangelical Theological Society’s annual conference and it was a great opportunity to learn about cutting edge scholarship and to see some old friends and make some new ones as well, some great connections, so today in studio I’m joined by Chris here on the panel. I am doing tech duties too so thanks Chris.
Chris: Hello. Good afternoon.
Kurt: What we’ve got planned for you today is to play a few interviews that I had the opportunity to do with some scholars that I met there and just to talk about really a variety of issues. I just want to reflect upon my time because for those of you who are watching here on Facebook Live, I will show you this. Here’s the booklet and there are just a host of different talks. You’re looking at certainly over 100, maybe even 200 different sessions that someone could attend and you can only pick one out of say maybe twenty or twenty-five at any given time, so there are just loads to pick from and so I want to talk about some that I attended. I attended a talk by Adam Harwood who gave a session on divine immutability. What does it mean to say that God can change?
Basically, does the incarnation bring about a change in God? How can we affirm divine immutability while at the same time affirming the incarnation so that was an interesting talk. On Tuesday morning there was a session on Dr. Mike Licona’s recent book, his research on Plutarch’s Lives and what that means for how we interpret the Gospels so later on today we’re going to be airing an interview that I did with him yesterday actually. He was kind of busy early in the week but we scheduled it out. We had him call on and so we’ve got an interview to share with you on that. Before we get going on those interviews, just a few matters here of business. If you want to give us a call, you want to talk about anything pretty much apologetics related, theology related, politics of economics, we’d love to hear from you. The number if you want to call in is 505-2STRIVE. That’s 505-278-7483.
You can call us at any time of the week so you can call us live when we’re on the show or sometime during the week you want to leave us a message and you can let us know if you’d like to play the message on the air or not. We can do that as well. Also, a couple of weeks ago I announced that you can now text in to the show so if you want to text us through your cell phone all you have to do for that is text the word VERACITY to the number 555-888 and once you do that you can send me messages about the show, any questions you might have or even topic or guest requests and I’ll be checking the system that we have for those texts a couple of times throughout the show so hopefully, I may not be exactly on top of that, but if you text me in I’ll try to get that text and we’ll mention it here on air so I want to thank all of the listeners here who are listening to the show. I hope that it’s been a blessing to you, so with that I want to get into the first interview I had. Chris. I had the opportunity to interview Dr. Alister McGrath. Some people may not have heard of him. He is in the U.K. He’s originally from Northern Ireland, but he currently teaches at Oxford University and he is the type of guy….here’s a question for you Chris. How many people do you know have Ph.D.s?
Chris: How many people?
Kurt: Yeah.
Chris: Since I met you, probably twenty.
Kurt: Okay. Twenty people. Alright. How many people have you met do you know have two Ph.D.s?
Chris: Probably five.
Kurt: Okay. Do you know anybody that has three?
Chris: No. I don’t know anyone who has three.
Kurt: Yes. So Alister McGrath has three Ph.D.s. One is in I think biology or like molecular biology. The other one is in theology. I think he got this more recently because a couple of years ago I did not remember that he has this. He apparently now has a doctorate in literature.
Chris: Okay.
Kurt: So maybe from his studies in C.S. Lewis, he a couple of years ago came out with a book on C.S. Lewis, and now of course made a couple of books off of his research. Maybe that’s when he got his Ph.D. in literature, but he has three Ph.D.’s and he’s a former atheist actually, became a Christian sometime, I don’t know exactly when but I know in his younger years he was an atheist so I want to say maybe 20’s.
Chris: Okay.
Kurt: Maybe it was late teens. I’m not sure.
Chris: It’s quite a left turn.
Kurt: Yes. Yes it is. A big jump. So in this interview here that I’ll play for us I ask him a little bit about that and he’s the type of guy that he doesn’t make small talk so like last week when we had Os Guinness, Os would give us this great robust answer. With Alister they’re going to be short and concise because that’s just the way his mind works. He gets straight to the point on these issues so here I’m going to play now what’s just shy of a ten minute interview and if you’ve got questions or comments about this or any interviews we’re going to be playing today, go ahead and give us a call. Again that number is 505-2STRIVE. That’s 505-278-7483.
Interview with Alister McGrath
Kurt: I am here joined by Dr. Alister McGrath. He is the Andreas Idreos Professor of Science and Religion at Oxford University and he is the director of the Ian Ramsey Center and he’s one of the founding, or the founding president of the Oxford Center for Christian Apologetics. He’s got three doctorates, many other accolades, and his reputation precedes him so thank you very much for joining me today.
Alister: Great to be here. Hi!
Kurt: So I had a few questions about the relationship between Christianity and atheism.
Alister: Okay.
Kurt: And I’m wondering, what have you found, when you were a young man, you were not a believer.
Alister: That’s right.
Kurt: So I’m wondering at that stage in your life what did you find compelling about atheism.
Alister: I think what I found compelling was, first of all, it was very simple. No God. That makes it easy. And secondly also, in many ways what atheism was saying is there is no meaningful life and therefore those who think there is are simply mad or fools or something like that. I have to say I was quite arrogant so I thought atheism is saying in fact, atheists are really smart guys. Everyone else are losers. Hey. I like that. So there’s this kind of rhetorical side of atheism. To be an atheist was to be smart and that’s not a joke because as you probably know Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett want society to use a bright to refer to an atheist. Really arrogant.
Kurt: Yeah it is. The smart thing to do is to be an atheist. Okay, but over time as you began to study more what did you find compelling? What drew you to belief in God and ultimately the Christian faith?
Alister: I want to think one was realizing atheism was not, I use generative, it does not really give you a bigger vision of reality. It limits things. It’s not exciting. Then I discovered that Christianity gives you this great wonderful vision of things. This way of making sense of things where they hold together. I just thought I had not realized, this is something new to me, and discovering that was really exciting.
Kurt: So as you began to learn more about theism and Christianity, you encountered what’s called natural theology and so could you describe for us what is natural theology and why do you believe it is a legitimate form of study?
Alister: The word natural theology means lots of different things to different people. For some, it’s a way of arguing from nature to God. For some, it’s a way of proving God’s existence from the basis of purely rational, purely natural way to think. In other words, you don’t presuppose God. You start from reason and prove God. For me, it’s partly those, but could also be here is the Christian faith, here is the vision of nature it opens up. In other words it’s beginning fro