Atlas Apologia (Formerly IDC)
A Stroll through the Last 3 Years of the IDC Podcast
Join me as I reminisce about the inception of the IDC Podcast, and we journey through my top episodes from our show's past three years, revealing the awe-inspiring evidence for a designer in every aspect of life and the universe.
Join me as I reminisce about the inception of the IDC Podcast, and we journey through my top episodes from our show's past three years, revealing the awe-inspiring evidence for a designer in every aspect of life and the universe.
Welcome to the Intelligent Design Collective, your number one source for a fierce defense of the Christian Gospel. This is Aleko, and I hope you're doing well, so I had it on my mind to put out a smaller episode today before we put out our bigger one, which, got along, should be uploaded in the next week or two, and I just wanted to say, first off, thank you for everyone who has listened, especially since from the beginning, and for those of you who don't know when the beginning was, it was right around spring of 2019. I had created two episodes, one based on the biological case for Intelligent Design and one based on Noah's flood and a multitude of research that I had done. So I had uploaded these two podcasts under another podcast name and I just left them alone and went about my business and didn't really think about them, although I had put some work into them. And I came back a week later and both of them had over 200 downloads. I thought, oh okay, well, that's interesting, so there's an audience out there for these things, and that was the intention. I wanted to share them. I thought they were really fascinating, so I was quite busy.
Speaker 1:I was the administrator of a school, an international school in Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam. So, following the incident that I have mentioned several times on this podcast and in my book, i had been researching the case for Intelligent Design for the better part of a decade and, seeing as I was a science teacher, it was something I loved, i thought was really interesting, and finding an uncaused cause or a root, foundational reason for everything was, to me, the most fascinating pursuit on earth. There could be nothing more important. And I finally came to a place in Ho Chi Minh City where I was able to share a little bit of what I had put together, consolidated based on the work of so many other scientists who had done a lot of the heavy lifting, if we're being completely honest. But I wasn't able to consolidate the work in a way that it would be appealing to the masses. There was just piles and piles of information, digitally speaking at least, in my files, and I quite simply just had a lot to do.
Speaker 1:But that all changed in the spring of 2020 when I moved up to Hanoi, vietnam, to accept a job at the British University of Vietnam and, you know, covid hit. So we were locked down in this thank God, really spacious, beautiful area in Hanoi, overlooking a really pretty part of the city, but there was this period where schools didn't quite know what to do and online teaching wasn't yet a thing for everyone, which it did turn out to be for a little while, and I wasn't really into that, of course. So, yeah, we had this long period of time off where we were just kind of twiddling our thumbs And I thought, well, you know, i've got all of this stuff that I would like to put out there and I've been planning this book that I had been more or less researching for years. Why not put it together, take the time and make some use of it? And the first IDC podcast was released right around the spring of 2020. So, for me, the early episodes were a tremendous success. Getting fan letters from people telling me to keep on producing more was extremely encouraging, and I enjoyed it. I thought it was a lot of fun And it was, in my opinion, different from a lot of other podcasts, because the early episodes of the podcast turned out to be the chapters of the audiobook that I now have on Audible the Pillars of Intelligent Design.
Speaker 1:So My methodology was I you know, i wasn't really a fan of books that had a lot of superfluous filler, and what I mean by that is you know the book tells you it's going to inculcate you about something really interesting. Right, he's got a fascinating point, whatever the author, whoever the author is, and you read through the book and you realize it's a lot of narrative around the thing that's going to be revealed. A lot of you know things that happen in the person's day to day, people that were pushing back, maybe things that others would find interesting, and then the what you could really do is distill the book down to one or two key points And the author would eventually reveal the interesting things. Toward the last third of the book, which to me was always frustrating and not very satisfying, i very much gravitated toward books that were sort of chock full of information, a lot more like textbooks, and I suppose that makes me a boring person.
Speaker 1:But I like the onslaught of tangible information, meaty stuff that you could just sink your teeth into, and I thought, well, there's a lot of really interesting stuff out there for intelligent design, but it's peppered throughout hundreds, if not maybe thousands, of books by credible scientists, and you know each one of them is put a book out that explicates an interesting thing but takes a lot of time to do it. And I thought, well, you know, i could consolidate the case for intelligent design, and I've said this before, but in my perspective, intelligent design is something so much more than what perhaps Stephen Meyer of Cambridge might consider it, which is, you know, building a case for a designer of you know life and the universe, right? I think you can take that definition much deeper, into a smaller scale, right, where you can find instances of a designer in everything ranging from life to the macrocosm, which would be the large scale universe, things like fine tuning, or rather anthropic principle, where all of the you know, pun intended stars seem to align and allow for life which, believe it or not, is dramatically impossible based on all odds, if you're coming at it from a materialistic perspective. And we also see this stuff at the microcosm, with the hyper complexity of the living cell, the complexity of sexual reproduction, how did the asexually reproducing cell, which materialists suggest maybe came from a primordial soup, just suddenly and arbitrarily decide to create a separate and completely compatible reproductive partner? And that could, you know, go so much further. But it is a really interesting conversation that not a lot of people are having, as a former biology teacher myself, looking at the evolutionary theories for how sexual reproduction, that is, reproduction with two partners, came about alone, is. It ranges from silly to absurd, because no one has any clue And of course there are, and I don't mean to go too far this direction.
Speaker 1:But you know there are detractors who will say well, not knowing the answer is not a case for God, and then what Dawkins would call a God of the gaps. But the obvious retort is that the chasm between one to the other is so large that it's not merely a diminutive gap, it's an unfathomable opening that could not be closed with a simple mutation or happenstance based on the environment. It's a much bigger problem than some people would like to admit. And of course, you find design in things like the scripture, and there's no shortage of it, everything ranging from prophecy, where God declares the end from the beginning, as well as things like gematria and equidistant letter sequencing, and that's not an easy one to summarize right here, but they have God's signature all over them, because no army of mathematicians could have composed the impossible curiosities that we find in the scripture.
Speaker 1:So, all of that being said, i thought that maybe I would just share with you a couple of my favorite episodes over the past three years and recommend them. If you haven't gone back and listened to them, i won't go into them in detail, but maybe just say a thing or two about them and just kind of point you in that direction, because I, while I am proud of everything that we've put out on this episode, even the most seemingly mundane book club episode is chock full of information, because I, you know, we're able to, you know, discuss really fascinating things that have been brought up by extremely intelligent authors, in my opinion, some of them guided by the spirit, and there are some concepts that are being explicated there that are worth listening to if you're willing to to dig into them. And it also worth noting is a big section of our library some of the early 2020 stuff is not there and that is just early episodes of the early chapters, rather of the pillars of intelligent design, and a couple of episodes that were done with recording equipment. That wasn't the best, but people still seem to listen to it. But, you know, i wanted to maybe repolish the show a little bit, get a better microphone when I found that I had a little bit of an audience, and that's why those are in an archive. Right now. I am I am able to share some of them, but not all of them are. You know. There's more refined versions of them in the episodes now that you can listen to. Okay, so here are a couple of my favorite episodes, and I'm not going in numerical order here, i just arbitrarily open them and they're kind of sporadically placed in my list. Episode 148 a closer look at the flood, where I do a an extremely deep dive into the flood narrative of the bible. This is the second highest downloaded episode. people seem to really like this one and I promise you there will probably be some stuff that you haven't heard in there, so I recommend that you go back and check that one out if you have a chance. So the one that started it all the pillars of intelligent design full audiobook, which is episode 137. This can be found on audible right now, but you can also listen to it completely for free.
Speaker 1:The way it came about being uploaded to audible was what I would call a synchronicity, or rather timing miracle that I explained to Michael. I recall in the feasts episode the Feasts of Israel and we were talking about prophecy and I brought this up and what had happened was I. I prayed about it and I felt what I did was I released the, the book, to the publishing company and they said that they were going to publish it. Right, and it was supposed to be a very short amount of time. They said like a week and a half, maybe two weeks and what I had felt God tell me in my heart was that I should release this for free on the podcast first and then release it to audible. And I thought, well, yeah, i, i'm happy to release it for free. It's already been out for free, but I would like to sync them up so I can do a kind of a marketing thing and I can, you know, tell people about it all all at once. Right, i didn't want them to be staggered. I thought that could be kind of weird. So I'll wait for audible to release it or for my publisher to give it to audible and for them to release it after approving it, and then I'll put it out there for free on the podcast.
Speaker 1:So I waited two weeks and it didn't show up on audible. I checked with the publishing company. They said the audible was inspecting it, making sure it's something, something you know, to to meet their, their standards. And three weeks went by and nothing had happened. And finally we reached four weeks and what my hope was that it was going to be released before Christmas of 2021. So that, you know, i could just tell some people and say, hey, here it is, it's a Christmas gift people might enjoy, and then it's also for free on the podcast for anyone that would like it.
Speaker 1:And and the intention was never to make money on this thing and if you knew how much audible actually pays me for each book sold it, you would realize that but rather to get it out there and multiple platforms, and then, you know, market it and just be kind of neat and tidy with it, right? but alas, we came to the end of December and nothing had happened and finally I said you know what? I'm just going to upload it to the podcast. I just I'll just get it out there and just share it, because I'm proud of this work. Thank God, you know he allowed me to produce it, he gave me the strength to put all of this information together and in all glory is due to God here And I think that this piece of work needs to be put out there. So I uploaded it to the podcast And within an hour it shows up on Audible, just as God said it would, that I needed to release it first and then it would be put up on Audible.
Speaker 1:So, you know, for some people they, i think, if you go over a lot of our miracles episodes and we do cover them a lot, ranging from the book club discussing Craig Keener's 1000 page book Miracles, as well, as, you know, pepper pepper throughout the podcast That might not mean something to a lot of people. They might think, well, it's just, you know, happenstance, right. But one of God's signatures, as we found through so many years of prayer and through, you know, interfacing with God, is timing. Sometimes miracles are, and I think most of the times, actually, miracles are very, very personal. They're things that are meant just for you, meant to edify you, and what that does is, in my opinion, it improves your witness or your ability to witness and to allow other people to experience that same thing, because when you find Christ, you begin to, in my opinion, see Him everywhere, and that's one of the small things that I just feel so tickled to share, even though I know it might not sway some people, right.
Speaker 1:Okay, all that being said, yeah, episode 137, the Pillars of Intelligent Design, full audiobook. Check it out. It's several hours long. I don't even recall It's been a long time, i think it's four hours and 47 minutes. But a lot of work was put into it And you're going to pick up some interesting tidbits at least at some point. You know it runs the gamut from biological intelligent design to philosophy, mathematics, so the gamutria, equidistant letter, sequencing of the scripture, as well as prophecy and several other things, so I highly recommend it. Okay, so my third most downloaded episode was episode 147. And that's Calvin Robinson and the Kingdom of the Sky.
Speaker 1:Calvin Robinson is a growing political commentator in England who was just anointed into a conservative branch of the Anglican church And he was very kind to come on the podcast and maybe share some things after I had met him at the unbelievable conference in London where we listened to, you know, famous Christian apologist Justin Briarley speak, as well as several other really interesting people, and I met Calvin Robinson there and he was a fascinating guy. I had actually posted a video of him on our Instagram when we first kicked off the intelligent design collective Instagram, just because I thought he had something really interesting to say and I thought he was a real fascinating guy. My wife pointed me in his direction because he's a friend of another conservative commentator, this gentleman by the name of Lawrence Fox, who is quite popular in certain circles in England, and I'm not particularly political, i don't like to get involved in politics. I think that it's a mingling of the world and ideologies and I believe for a thousand reasons Christ has asked us to stray from the world and to try to pull other people from it as well. But he had some interesting things to say, and so Fox was my segue into Calvin Robinson and it was a lot of fun talking to him during my five month stay in England last year.
Speaker 1:In that episode I also get into another topic that is growing rapidly in The zeitgeist at the moment and that's UAPs, or rather UFOs and identified aerial phenomena and Unidentified flying objects. Right, i think it's a really interesting topic, especially when juxtaposed with the biblical worldview, and I don't think that they're incongruent. I think that they're actually quite interesting. I Recommend that you give it a listen, if not for Calvin Robertson. The UAP Portion I think is is really fascinating, and and we also have our book club discussing Lee Strowbell's the case for the real Jesus, which was a fantastic book in my opinion. So episode 147 you're definitely gonna enjoy that.
Speaker 1:So, to wrap things up, i would like to say a lot of time has been poured into every single one of these podcasts and I wouldn't isolate Just several of them and say those are the ones that you should listen to and the other ones are not worth listening to. And the amount of legwork that's done to, to consolidate the information that goes into every single podcast is somewhat extensive, and there was a point where it would take me a month to produce an entire episode, and It's. There's a lot that went into it, especially considering my work schedule, but I always thought I would. I would model it after some of my, my favorite scientists who have put books out there before, and, as well, as you know, a couple of other interesting podcasts that are out there. Like I've always had fun listening to Astonishing Legends, i think that's a really interesting one and oh yeah, you can.
Speaker 1:You can hear my voice on one of their episodes. I don't recall which one it is, but They put out a really good show that's. That's chock full of information, and I think that's the kind of thing I like to listen to. Just just give me the facts. A little bit of a little bit narrative is fine, but I like to hear the interesting stuff up front. Bring, bring that and that's. That's what I'm there for, and I hope that My audience finds this podcast to be similar.
Speaker 1:But just to put a little button on the end of this, this episode, i will say that, in terms of popularity, episode 159, the reason for evil did turn out to be one that dead people really, really enjoyed, and I did get feedback on that one and, yeah, i thought it turned out well, i enjoyed discussing it and I thought I found it to be edifying for myself personally. Just, you know writing it and putting it together. So if you want to go back and listen to that, i think you'll you'll be comforted and edified and you'll find it interesting. So, to conclude, i just want to say you can say hi to us on the intelligent design collective Instagram account And you can also support us at buy me a coffee dot com forward slash ID podcast. Thank you so much for listening and, god allowing, i'll have a new episode up soon. Take care, god bless.