Conversations from the Pale Blue Dot

I know that I have very few followers on this blog, but for anybody who does read these posts I wanted to recommend my favorite podcast (in fact, the only one I actually listen to). Luke, over at Common Sense Atheism, has a podcast titled Conversations from the Pale Blue Dot, in which he interviews various historians, philosophers, and scientists on topics related to religion and morality. Sometime later, I'll probably blog about the other resources on his site which are worth checking out (listing them all now would take too long, since that blog is full of great resources, and is likely the best atheism blog on the internet). For now, I just wanted to encourage those interested to look for an episode of Luke's podcast that looks interesting and see what you think. I haven't listened to them all, but I have enjoyed many of the episodes I have listened to.

And in case Luke needs some ideas for future episodes, I'm listing mine here.

(1) Richard Carrier:

• A discussion of his book Not the Impossible Faith.
• A discussion of his work on the historicity of Jesus.
• A discussion about the resurrection of Jesus, and his debates with William Lane Craig and Mike Licona.

(2) Sam Harris:

• A discussion of the dangers of Islam.
• A discussion of his views on morality.

(3) Richard Grigg:

• A discussion of radical theology, based on his work in books such as Beyond the God Delusion.

(4) David Marshall:

• A discussion of the reliability of the Gospels.

(5) Peter Singer:

• A discussion of practical ethical issues.

(6) Dennis MacDonald:

• A discussion of his thesis that much of the content in the Gospels was intentionally written as a symbolic story to mimic the stories of Homer.

(7) Gary Habermas:

• A discussion of the evidence for life after death.

(8) Brian Davies:

• A discussion of Thomistic philosophy of religion.

Those are conversations I would really like to hear. Beyond that, though, I think it would be pretty neat to have "dialogues" about very narrowly defined topics between two scholars. Thus, rather than having full-blown debates on CPBD, I think expanding to an area where Luke can bring together two scholars to discuss specific ideas that fit into a larger debate would make the podcast even more awesome than it already is. Let me give a few ideas of the kind of thing I'm thinking of here:

(1) The many-worlds objection to the Fine-Tuning Argument.

• This episode would bring together two scholars who have written on the fine-tuning argument for the existence of God and just discuss the merits of a particular objection to that argument. An episode on this which brings together Robin Collins and Elliott Sober would be good.
  

(2) Examples of mythical and legendary stories in the Gospels.

• This episode would discuss certain popular examples of stories in the Gospels that were written for non-historical purposes, and would explore the possible implications of the stories. If Luke could get Richard Carrier and Bart Ehrman together to have a friendly dialogue about this issue, that would likely become one of the most popular items on his blog.

Well, those are my ideas.