Most arguments about faith go one of two bad ways. Either someone preaches at you with the lights down and the music swelling, or someone tears it all down and calls it blind superstition. This is neither. It is a conversation — the oldest way of getting at the truth there is. Twenty-four hundred years ago Socrates didn’t hand people a pamphlet. He asked questions, let people push back, and followed the answer wherever it led. That is exactly what we set out to do here, for three unhurried hours.
I invited two people who do not agree with me, and I asked them to bring everything — every doubt, every objection, every “that’s a cop-out, Pastor.” They did. What you’ll hear is not a sermon. It’s a real back-and-forth that keeps moving, with the hard questions asked out loud and answered in the open.
Who’s at the table
- Pastor Glenn Lyvers — your host, and the writer of everything on this site. Here to make the case, and to be interrupted as often as it takes.
- Maya — a hospital lab technician from a secular background, science-minded and recently grieving. She brings the questions about the science and about suffering: the Big Bang, DNA, evolution, and the one that actually matters to her — if God is real and good, why did her grandmother have to die like that.
- Marcus — raised in the church and walked away from it in his twenties, half over the arguments and half over the hypocrisy he watched up close. He brings the sharp end: the reliability of the documents, “isn’t this just blind faith,” and the wound that no argument touches.
What we actually walk through
The episode climbs in order, each step resting on the one beneath it. Approximate chapter marks, if you want to follow along or come back to a piece:
- 0:00 — A note on the format, then the cold open, the cast, and the ground rules: nothing off the table.
- ~8 min — What Lone Trumpet is, and the strange bet behind it — one writer, no ads, no tracking.
- ~18 min — How a person becomes a Christian — reason first, then the five honest steps.
- ~32 min — Foundations: can we even know truth? Why no one stands on neutral ground.
- ~44 min — Does God exist? The universe’s beginning, the fine-tuning, the eclipse, and an atheist astronomer’s confession.
- ~1:02 — The code in the cell, and Paley’s watchmaker — the argument that, years ago, pulled me back from the edge.
- ~1:24 — The moral law, the mind, mathematics, consciousness, longing, and the ache of beauty.
- ~1:46 — The documents and the resurrection — how we know, and why the empty tomb is hard to explain away.
- ~2:13 — Who Jesus claimed to be: liar, lunatic, or Lord — and why “good teacher” isn’t on the menu.
- ~2:25 — The problem of evil — the honest objection, answered honestly.
- ~2:39 — Hard objections: other religions, hell, and the Bible itself.
- ~2:49 — The church, its hypocrisy, and honest doubt.
- ~2:57 — Adding it all up — what the case does, what it doesn’t, and an honest invitation.
A note on the format
This is an old idea wearing new clothes. Twenty-four hundred years ago the philosophers made their case not with lectures but with dialogues: Plato would set Socrates across from a questioner — sometimes a real person, often a character invented for the page — and let them argue it out, objection by objection, so the reader could watch an idea get tested line by line. The pushback wasn’t a nuisance to clear away; the pushback was the whole point.
This podcast does the same thing with one modern twist. The two skeptics who spend three hours questioning me are digital readers — synthesized voices, not live guests in a studio. But every word, theirs and mine, comes from a script I sat down and wrote myself. Maya and Marcus are characters, the way Plato’s questioners were characters, but the doubts I put in their mouths are the real ones, the hardest I could find. The arguments, the science, and the history are the genuine article, and you can check every one of them. An old form, in a new voice, written to be tested rather than simply believed.
Go deeper, in writing
Everything discussed here is laid out, slowly and with sources, on the site:
- Is Christianity True? — the whole case, end to end, in thirteen parts for the honest skeptic.
- Thinking About Becoming a Christian? — the reasons first, then a clear, pressure-free path to begin.
- The guides — deep dives on the resurrection, the science, suffering, doubt, and the questions people actually ask.