Reasons to Believe Podcast Reasons To Believe

Reasons to believe podcasts communicate some of the relevant findings in the books that Hugh Ross has written. Its increadibly clear and takes the position of researching and knowing the alternative views overlaying the scientific method to reduce the noise into the only logical explanation.

Let me start off by saying how much I enjoy the 28:19 segments. I feel they do a great job of communicating the science of various mechanisms without speaking above layman understanding. I could listen to Dr. Hugh Ross and Dr. Fazale Rana speak on the topics in their field all day and still not get enough. Dr. Rana is the one that originally got me stuck on Reasons to Believe as he really went into the nitty gritty on certain topics and made me consider things that were outside my scope of reasoning.

All that said, I really do find myself getting less and less interested, in particular because of the emphasis on Straight Thinking. It’s initially an enjoyable part of the whole RTB experience, but once you’ve heard them talk about one topic, it really becomes easy to predict what they’re going to say. I understand that Kenneth Samples places an emphasis on Trinity doctrine and St. Augustine, but I’ve begun to find myself being more entertained by counting how many times he can say the word “Trinity” or the name “St. Augustine” in one podcast than I am in the actual material he’s discussing. I have ignored the last few episodes of Straight Thinking, which has lead me to be less interested in RTB as a whole. I suppose what he contributes is an important part of RTB since they allow him so much time to say what he has to say, but I found Dr. Dana’s Facebook Live discussions so much more challenging to my beliefs and refreshing as a whole as he hasn’t built up his entire worldview around simple “heroes” that he places a strong emphasis on, unlike Mr. Samples He also allows more room for opposing worldview’s, whereas with Mr. Samples, if you don’t hold to the Trinity doctrine or aren’t very interested in St. Augustine, then you really begin to feel a little left out in their discussions. I do enjoy it when he gets more into the richness of Christianity and such, but I just find it hard to listen to him since I can guess what he’s going to say while not being trained in philosophy at any level. I would enjoy it more if it was a monthly thing instead of every week, hearing him bring up the same points he made last week while talking about an entirely different subject.

I really feel like I would rate this podcast higher if it wasn’t for the Straight Thinking segment. That really does drag down an overall great product. I feel as though it’s more important to address the science-faith issues, as that’s more of a challenge to the modern mind than the relation between philosophy-faith. Giving Mr. Samples 50% of a show while forcing the other 5+ RTB scholars to fill in the other 50% just makes for an overall boring product that can only begin to scratch at a topic, rather than explore it in more detail. Straight Thinking is just too simple of a segment to want to invest an hour into it weekly. It really just regurgitates the few intellectual points and calls that the “aesthetic of Christianity” which I’m sure it is to them, but as someone that isn’t enamored with that rhetoric, it wears thin quickly. If Straight Thinking absolutely must be around every week, at least make the topics more interesting and not something repeated constantly.

I enjoy the way the podcast relates science (both in terms of history and present times) to the world that God has created. It is very fascinating to reflect on the impact of documents that are about 4,000 years old (Genesis and Job) speak to the details of science that we are discovering over the last couple of centuries. What a powerful testimony to our Creator!!