"Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence..." Or so said Richard Dawkins at the Edinburgh International Science Festival in 1992. But is that really true? Do faith and reason really not mix? And why do so many people seem to think this?

Joining us, for the second of a short series of interviews, is the writer and researcher Thomas R. Goehle, author of America's Post-Christian Apocalypse: How Secular Modernism Marginalized Christianity and The Peril of Leaving God Behind at the End of the Age. Adopting a very, very broad-brush-stroke approach, in order to trace some of the contours of Western philosopy and theology, we embark upon a whistle-stop tour—from Thomas Aquinas and the Mediaeval Synthesis, through the Enlightenment, and onward into (Post)Modernity—and explore some of the reasons for the unhappy divorce of faith and reason in contemporary Western culture.

Thomas Goehle earned a Master of Arts degree in Philosophy of Religion (honors) from Denver Seminary. He lives in Williamsville, New York where he is working on his next book tentatively entitled Transhumanism, AI, and the Apocalypse.

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This week we are joined by Christian philosopher Dr. Glenn Peoples for an in-depth discussion on The Moral Argument for the Existence of God.

Each of us has a sense of what we ought—and ought not—to do in the many and varied circumstances of our lives, but what is the explanation for this ordinary, yet seemingly-unfathomable phenomenon? Does it stem from a God-given human faculty to perceive objective moral obligations? Or is it just an unintended product of our ostensible evolutionary history? Do objective moral obligations even exist? Or is all talk about them merely illusory, misleading or even meaningless?

Guiding us through the maze of opinions, Dr. Peoples persuasively argues that only within a theistic worldview of a personal God can objective moral obligations—which we each perceive—be adequately grounded in philosophical terms.

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"What is truth?"—a rhetorical question famously snarled by Pontius Pilate during his interrogation of Jesus 2000 years ago. Yet the question is a real one, and the answer of monumental significance in every day and age. But especially in ours, an age in which the very concept of truth itself is under merciless attack.

Joining us, for the first of a short series of interviews, is the writer and researcher Thomas R. Goehle, author of the important new book America's Post-Christian Apocalypse: How Secular Modernism Marginalized Christianity and The Peril of Leaving God Behind at the End of the Age. Beginning with the thesis of his book—that "s ecular (post)modernism has increasingly replaced Christianity as the hegemonic authority in our society"—we discuss how some of the negative fruits of the Enlightenment led a spiritually-autonomous humanity into the absurdities of extreme relativism and political correctness, and ask if such a humanity could resist the tyranny of a nascent New World Order.

Thomas Goehle earned a Master of Arts degree in Philosophy of Religion (honors) from Denver Seminary. He lives in Williamsville, New York where he is working on his next book tentatively entitled Transhumanism, AI, and the Apocalypse.

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For TMR's final programme of 2015 we are joined by Dr. Mike Spaulding, Senior Pastor of Calvary Chapel, Lima and host of Soaring Eagle Radio, for a discussion on the subject of Biblical Hermeneutics.

Isn't it obvious how we should read the Bible? After all, if it says such-and-such, surely it means such-and-such, and that's the end of the matter? Or is it really always quite so straightforward? Drawing upon his many years of study, grounded in the context of pastoral ministry, Dr. Spaulding guides us through the maze of biblical hermeneutics - observation, interpretation and application - and shares with us some invaluable tools that can help us unlock the plain meaning of the Scriptures.

Mike Spaulding was ordained to the ministry in 1998, and hold a PhD in Apologetics from Trinity Theological Seminary. He is the author of innumerable articles appearing in various publications by LifeWay Publishers, Baker Publishing and several online apologetics ministries. He maintains two blogs  – The Transforming Word and Dr. Mike Spaulding – and teaches on The Transforming Word radio show, heard on radio stations throughout the Midwest United States.

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This week we welcome to the programme Manoj Raithatha, head of the South Asian Forum of the UK Evangelical Alliance, who joins us to share his inspiring testimony and to discuss his approach to evangelism and Christian engagement with people from Asian backgrounds.

Manoj Raithatha, who is director of the course Discovering Jesus Through Asian Eyes, has been a teacher, a BAFTA award-winning TV writer and a highly-successful property entrepreneur. Though raised as a Hindu, in 2008 he became a Christian, partly due to the miraculous healing of his young son and the love shown to him and his family during their time of greatest need. Today, Manoj continues to run his property business, but with new God-centred priorities, and heads up Instant Apostle publishing house and the South Asian Forum, a grouping within the UK Evangelical Alliance set up to unite and connect the South Asian Christian community.

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What are the New Testament Gospels? How should we read them in relation to each other? And are they really "full of contradictions", as some would say?

This week we welcome Dr. Mike Licona, associate professor of theology at Houston Baptist University, who joins us for an extended in-depth discussion on the New Testament Gospels and the differences between them. Drawing upon his many years of research into the subject, Dr. Licona leads us through the maze of questions often asked about the NT Gospels, and explains how familiarity with the literary conventions of Graeco-Roman biography and historiography can help to provide compelling answers.

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To begin the summer season of programmes here at TMR, we welcome back Nick Peters of Deeper Waters Christian Ministries, who joins us for an in-depth discussion on the subject of Mythicism, or Christ Myth Theory.

Was Jesus of Nazareth a real person of history? Or was he, perhaps, originally a mythical character, whose story gradually came to be understood as historical through processes of allegorisation and misunderstanding? Alternatively, was he a Roman invention? With reference to some of the ideas of writers such as Earl Doherty, Richard Carrier, Robert M. Price and Joseph Atwill, we discuss the plausibility of mythicists' attempts to revise the history of Christian origins, and conclude that the hypothesis of Jesus' existence best fits the evidence.

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This week we welcome Rev. Dr. Robert H. Bennett, Executive Director of Luther Academy in Fort Wayne Indiana and specialist in missions, for a fascinating conversation on his research into demon possession and spiritual warfare in the context of Madagascar.

In 2007, while on a trip to Madagascar, Dr. Bennett experienced something that was to have a profound effect on his future research and ministry: in the midst of a Lutheran worship service, right at his feet, a woman began to convulse and receive calm and controlled exorcism ministry from members of the congregation.

Through the field research that followed, Dr. Bennett investigated the indigenous animism of the Malagasy people, and sought to understand the role of exorcism in the mission of the Lutheran Church of Madagascar.

Based on this research, in 2013 he published the book, I Am Not Afraid : Demon Possession and Spiritual Warfare : True Accounts from the Lutheran Church of Madagascar, a scholarly work that not only documents his findings and sets them in the context of biblical practice and church history, but issues a challenge to the too-often-spiritually-compromised church in the West: exorcism is, and always has been, part of the ministry of Christ through the Church, and we neglect it at our peril.

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In place of our scheduled interview with David Conn, who has unfortunately had to postpone due to illness, we take the opportunity to share a fascinating address by David Theroux, Founder and President of the C. S. Lewis Society of California, entitled: "C. S. Lewis on Mere Liberty and the Evils of Statism".

Delivered as the keynote talk at the first annual conference of Christians for Liberty, at St. Edwards University in Austin, Texas, on the 2nd of August 2014, this address explores the extent to which Lewis was critical of the modern State, with its tendency towards scientism and technocratic control, and identifies a nexus of beliefs and values - of which Lewis's Christian theism was the foundation - as the motivation for that critique. As David Theroux puts it:

"Throughout his work, Lewis infused an interconnected worldview that championed objective truth, moral ethics, natural law, literary excellence, reason, science, individual liberty, personal responsibility and virtue, and Christian theism. In so doing, he critiqued naturalism, reductionism, nihilism, positivism, scientism, historicism, collectivism, atheism, statism, coercive egalitarianism, militarism, welfarism, and dehumanisation and tyranny of all forms."

In a world in which Christianity and the State are too often seen as natural allies, we offer this address as arguing that what we might call libertarian values are fundamentally consistent with Christian thought.

(The address by David Theroux included in this episode is Copyright © C. S. Lewis Society of California, all rights reserved, and used here with kind permission.)

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We are joined again by biblical scholar Robert M. Bowman Jnr., Executive Director of the Institute for Religious Research (IRR.org), for an in-depth and penetrating critique of Bart D. Ehrman's book, How Jesus Became God : The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee.

A respected New Testament textual scholar and a gifted writer, Bart Ehrman argues that neither Jesus nor his earliest disciples considered him divine in any sense during his earthly ministry; but that, following his Resurrection (or, at least, following his disciples' belief in his Resurrection), a process quickly began whereby Jesus became viewed as increasingly exalted, leading to his eventually being considered equal to God.

But how secure is Ehrman's thesis? Did Jesus really "become" divine, in the eyes of his followers, after his death? Or did Jesus appear on the scene as God Incarnate: a reality experienced by his disciples and expressed in the pages of the New Testament?

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We are joined by Christian apologist Nick Peters and atheist author Ken Humphreys for a lively, informative and very friendly debate on the historicity of Jesus.

Whatever we may think about Jesus - whether we acknowledge Him as Lord and Saviour, or not - one thing we can surely all be agreed on is that he existed and walked in Palestine 2000 year ago. Not so, according to Ken Humpreys, director of the website JesusNeverExisted.com, who opens the debate defending the propostion that the New Testament Jesus is a fictional character. Arguing against this position is Nick Peters, founder of Deeper Waters Christian Ministries and host of the Deeper Waters Podcast, who maintains that the evidence we have clearly and persuasively indicates that this same Jesus was (and is) a real person of history.

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Do we have free will? Or is it just an illusion? Do we have souls? Or are we entirely material beings? And what does it matter anyway? To discuss these questions we are joined by Dr. Angus Menuge, Professor and Chair of Philosophy at Concordia University Wisconsin and current President of the Evangelical Philosophical Society.

Dr. Menuge studied at the University of Warwick (BA) and the University of Wisconsin-Madison (MA, PhD), and joined Concordia University in 1991. His research interests include philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, Christian apologetics and the work of C. S. Lewis. His academic book Agents Under Fire: Materialism and the Rationality of Science (Rowman and Littlefield, 2004), which defends the concepts of agency and intentionality against naturalistic alternatives, was the first book-length study to relate Intelligent Design to contemporary issues in the philosophy of mind.

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Was Hitler an atheist? Was he an occultist? Was he a Christian, as some allege today? ("This murderous, genocidal psychopath, one of the most evil men in history, was a devout Christian. Deal with it!") Or was he, perhaps, something else altogether?

Joining us this week is J. P. Holding, President of Tekton Apologetics Ministries and author of the book Hitler's Christianity, who maintains that Hitler was indeed something else altogether: an adherent of so-called "Positive Christianity." Rejecting large portions of the Bible as too Jewish, despising biblical teaching, and even claiming that Jesus was really a blue-eyed and blonde-haired Aryan, Postive Christianity was an influential New Religious Movement in Germany during the first half of the Twentieth Century that distorted Christianity by combining it with ideas of racial purity and Nazi ideology. It is here, argues J. P. Holding, that we get the closest glimpse of Hitler's religious views.

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If God knows the future, how can I be free? If there's human evil in the world, how can God be good? If people live beyond the reach of the Gospel, how can God be all-loving?

This week we are joined by the philosopher Max Andrews for a fascinating look at the mind-bending and strange (yet potentially illuminating) world of Molinism, a philosophical position on God's omniscience and providence that offers potential solutions to a whole host of theological conundrums.

Max Andrews is a Philosophy PhD student at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, whose research centres in the ontology of the Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum physics and in the problems associated with cosmological fine-tuning. Already published in several journals, Max Andrews has presented at conferences of the Evangelical Philosophical Society and Tyndale House in Cambridge (UK), lectured at Liberty University (US) on a wide range of philosophical and analytical-theological subjects, and published two ebooks, The Problem of Existence: Existential Reflections on Pain and Suffering and An Introduction to Molinism: Scripture, Reason, and All that God has Ordered.

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We are joined by one of the world's leading experts in Resurrection Studies, Dr. Gary Habermas, Distinguished Professor and Chair of the Department of Philosophy and Theology at Liberty University, for an in-depth discussion on the historical case for the Resurrection of Jesus from the Dead.

How might we persuade people of the truth of Jesus' Resurrection? Must we appeal only to the divine authority of Scripture and hope that people will agree? Not according to Dr. Habermas, who explains how his "minimal facts approach" (which relies only on historical data agreed by the vast majority of professional scholars in the field) bypasses such appeals to authority, and has the power to persuade - through logic and historical reasoning alone - that Jesus did in fact rise from the Dead.

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We are joined by Dr. Paul L. Maier, Russell H. Seibert Professor of Ancient History at Western Michigan University, for a wide-ranging, informative and entertaining interview on the evidence for Jesus' existence outside the Bible, and on the historical reliability of the New Testament. In characteristically ebullient and academically-combative style, Dr. Maier dismisses popular claims that "Jesus never existed" and that "Jesus is a myth", and demonstrates that the New Testament evidence for Jesus is corroborated by secular writings from antiquity.

Dr. Maier also addresses the so-called gnostic gospels, New Testament apocryphal writings, Joseph Atwill's hypothesis that Jesus was a Roman invention, Bart Ehrman's misrepresentation of textual criticism, the Birth Narratives, and answers questions commonly asked about the reliability of the New Testament.

(We apologise for the sound quality of this recording, which, at times, was plagued by technical difficulties.)

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This week, we are joined by Dr. Michael J. Behe, professor of biochemistry at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania, for an in-depth (and sometimes slightly technical) interview on the theory of Intelligent Design (ID). Author of two iconic books on ID - Darwin's Black Box, and The Edge of Evolution - Dr. Behe explains how his research into the complexity of biological systems at the molecular level led him to question the adequacy of the Darwinian paradigm, and why he now believes that the data point towards Intelligent Design.

We also discuss empirical research indicating the limits of Darwinian processes, the logical status of ID theory, and Dr. Behe responds to objections to ID raised at the famous Kitzmiller vs. Dover court case of 2005.

[Intelligent Design, ID, evolution, Darwinism, Creationism, Michael Denton, Kitzmiller vs. Dover, Establishment Clause, inference to the best explanation, irreducible complexity, bacterial flagellum, intracellular transport, Type III secretory system, TTSS, haemoglobin, thalassemia, glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase, G6PD, E. coli, malaria, sickle-cell disease, protein bonding, Flying Spaghetti Monster, FSM, Pastafarianism, David Hume, William Paley, Charles Darwin, Richard Dawkins, Kenneth Miller, John McDonald, Judge John E. Jones, Richard Lenski, Big Bang Theory, Walther Nernst, peer review, God of the gaps fallacy, self-organisation, chaos theory, complexity theory]

This week we are joined by Robert M. Bowman Jnr., Director of Research at the Institute for Religious Research (IRR.org), for an in-depth interview on the history and teachings of the Word-Faith (or Word of Faith) Movement within Christianity. Born out of the "faith-cure" teachings of the late 19th & early 20th Centuries, and developed and popularised in recent decades by flamboyant evangelists and preachers like Kenneth Hagin and Kenneth Copeland, Word-Faith teaching now reaches the homes of millions through TV broadcasts around the globe. Promising health and wealth in the name of Christ, and assuring its followers that they have delegated spiritual power from God literally to speak miracles into their own lives, this unbiblical distortion of Christianity sets unrealistic expectations, and often leads to disappointment, and sometimes even to rejection of Christ.

[Word of Faith, Word-Faith, Health and Wealth, Prosperity Gospel, positive confession, Kenneth Hagin, Kenneth Copeland, Paul Crouch, Jan Crouch, Benny Hinn, E. W. Kenyon, A. J. Gordon, William Branham, Charles Capps, Frederick K. C. Price, Joel Osteen, John Osteen, Latter Rain Movement, Trinity Broadcasting Network, TBN, eschatology, New Age, Faith-Cure Movement, Restorationism, Seed-Faith]

In the media, "celebrity becomes more important than Truth, and rhetoric is more important than Truth." (Ward) For the "half-term" break we take the opportunity to present a Guest Episode courtesy of the Centre for Public Christianity, based in Australia. In two separate, but related, interviews, the U.K. philosopher-turned-theologian Keith Ward (one-time Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford University), and the U.S. theologically-motivated analytical philosopher Alvin Plantinga (currently John A. O'Brien Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana), give their reactions to the so-called "New Atheists", and ponder some of the deepest questions in life.

My guest for this interview is Prof. Edgar Andrews, Emeritus Professor of Materials Science at the University of London. With his book "Who Made God?" as our focus, we explore the explanatory limits of the natural sciences and discuss how his concept of the God Hypothesis offers a coherent explanation of reality. Prof. Andrews also expresses his concern about the increase in atheistic propaganda in the mainstream media, and shares his experience of debating Richard Dawkins at the Oxford Union in 1986 on the motion: "That the doctrine of creation is more valid than the theory of evolution."