Episode Details

What are the questions you aren’t supposed to ask in church—the ones that earn you a sit-down with the pastor, worry your parents, and might even make you leave your faith entirely? In this episode, Dan kicks off a brand-new series, "Questions I Wasn't Supposed to Ask in Church," by revisiting a question that got him into trouble during his own time as a pastor: does it really look like human beings were "intelligently designed" by a maximally perfect, omnipotent Creator? While a hypothesis of superhuman design made sense for most of human history, Dan calls bullshit on modern creationist claims by looking at the glaring engineering flaws of the human body—from the staggering statistical inefficiency of human reproduction and dangerous choking hazards to the evolutionary mismatch of our metabolic health in modern society. Why does asking whether a supreme designer could have done a better job elicit such vitriolic pushback from theological traditionalists, and how does confronting the sheer implausibility of intelligent design expose the limits of high-control religion? Join Dan to find out.

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