Episode #83 - Resurrection & Rationality with Dr. James T. Turner

Carrying on our broader conversation on Apologetics, we are joined by an analytic theologian, Dr. James T. Turner, who is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Anderson University and the author of On the Resurrection of the Dead: A New Metaphysics of Afterlife for Christian Thought(published by Routledge). In this conversation we touch on the nature of apologetics as an enterprise designed to demonstrate that Christianity is not fundamentally irrational. As Dr. Turner contends, this is all apologetics really ought to be, and he goes further to explain that the idea of removing intellectual objections to the faith won’t actually lead people to bow the knee to King Jesus. Another branch of our conversation then delves into the subject matter of Dr. Turner’s book, which is the resurrection and the nature of the afterlife. Dr. Turner is a hylomorphist, which is the view that everything is comprised of matter and form. The soul, then, is the form of all living organisms (humans, plants, trees, dogs). The form thus can’t float free from the matter, and cannot be separated from it. This has huge implications for popular apologetics that point to near death experiences as an argument for God (usually implicitly given in the form of a narrative, such as books like Heaven Is For Real). Dr. Turner explains that he holds this view because he believes that the Bible places all of its hope on the bodily resurrection of human beings, as well as the physical restoration of creation, not on immaterial souls going off to Heaven after the body dies. Team members from The Two Cities on the episode include: Dr. Amber Bowen and Dr. John Anthony Dunne.

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