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Explore every episode of the podcast Within Reason
Dive into the complete episode list for Within Reason. Each episode is cataloged with detailed descriptions, making it easy to find and explore specific topics. Keep track of all episodes from your favorite podcast and never miss a moment of insightful content.
| Title | Pub. Date | Duration | |
|---|---|---|---|
| #124 Sisyphus 55 - So You're Having an Existential Crisis | 05 Oct 2025 | 01:32:01 | |
Ben Thomas is @Sisyphus55, a YouTuber creating videos about philosophy, existentialism, nihilism, absurdism, and meaning.
His new book, So You're Having an Existential Crisis: a Roadmap for Lost Souls, is available now.
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| #123 Candida Moss - Were Early Christians Really Persecuted by Rome? | 28 Sep 2025 | 01:21:07 | |
Candida Moss is a historian of Christianity and author of The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom.
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| #122 Robert Greene - Near-Death Experiences and the Mind Apart From the Brain | 21 Sep 2025 | 01:23:26 | |
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Robert Greene is an American author of books on strategy, power, and seduction. He has written seven international bestsellers, including The 48 Laws of Power. He is working on a book about the concept of the sublime, and speaks today about its relation to near-death experiences, dreaming, consciousness, and religious belief.
Buy his books here.
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| #121 John Cottingham - The Father of Modern Philosophy: René Descartes | 16 Sep 2025 | 01:40:02 | |
John Cottingham (born 1943) is an English philosopher. The focus of his research has been early-modern philosophy (especially Descartes), the philosophy of religion and moral philosophy. He is a Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Reading, Professorial Research Fellow at Heythrop College, University of London, and Honorary Fellow of St John's College, Oxford. He is also a current Visiting Professor to the Philosophy Department at King's College, London.
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| #120 Brant Pitre - Jesus DID Claim to be God | 10 Sep 2025 | 01:59:50 | |
Brant Pitre is an American New Testament scholar and Distinguished Research Professor of Scripture at the Augustine Institute. He has written extensively on the historical Jesus, the Virgin Mary, Paul the Apostle, the origin of the Eucharist, and the canonical Gospels.
His book, Jesus and Divine Christology, is available here.
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| #119 Jim Al-Khalili - The Strange World of Quantum Physics | 01 Sep 2025 | 01:06:08 | |
Jim Al-Khalili is an Iraqi-British theoretical physicist and science populariser. He is professor of theoretical physics and chair in the public engagement in science at the University of Surrey.
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| #118 Joe Folley - Everything You Need to Know About Logic | 24 Aug 2025 | 01:34:30 | |
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Joe Folley runs the YouTube channel Unsolicited Advice. He graduated from Cambridge University in 202with an MPhil in Philosophy, specialising in logic.
TIMESTAMPS:
0:00 - What is Logic?5:04 - Aristotelian vs Stoic Logic12:47 - How Logic Provides Clarity18:42 Ambiguities in Logical Language29:07 - Validity vs Soundness in a Logical Argument39:40 Why Anything Follows From a Contradiction47:42 - The Law of Non-Contradiction56:27 - What is Truth and Falsity in Logic?58:36 - Does Your Mum Know You’re Gay?1:05:05 What is Fuzzy Logic?01:08:14 - What is Modal Logic?01:13:40 - Informal Rules of Logic01:29:15 - Resources to Learn About Logic
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| #117 Dan McClellan - The Bible Has More Than One God | 17 Aug 2025 | 01:30:12 | |
Dan McClellan is an American biblical scholar and author of The Bible Says So: What We Get Right (and Wrong) About Scripture’s Most Controversial Issues.
Timestamps:
0:00 Why Does God Say “We”?14:36 Does God Create the Universe From Nothing?28:43 Is This Explained By The Trinity?34:32 Is There Only One God?47:39 Fake Idols or Gods?1:02:50 How English Translations Mislead Us Into Monotheism01:11:02 The Elevation of YHWH to God of the Universe1:20:36 Polytheism in the New Testament01:24:14 The Strongest Case For Monotheism in the Old Testament
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| #116 Peter Godfrey Smith - Animal Consciousness: What Can We Know? | 10 Aug 2025 | 01:58:25 | |
Peter Godfrey-Smith is an Australian philosopher of science and writer, who is currently Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Sydney. Buy his books here.
Timestamps:
0:00 How Many Times Has the Brain Independently Evolved?
4:36 What is a Nervous System?
7:12 The Differences Between the Human and Animal Brains
13:40 What Does an Octopus Brain Look Like?
25:21 What is it Like to be an Octopus?
35:48 Are the Mind and Body Distinct?
42:46 Panpsychism: Is Everything Conscious?
55:53 How Do Experiences Combine Into One Consciousness?
01:05:08 Which Animals Feel Pain? What is it Like?
01:16:51 Should We Make Shrimp Farming an Ethical Priority?
01:29:22 Animal Science and Animal Foods
01:35:59 The Ethics of Killing Animals
01:52:13 Are Octopuses Playful?
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| #115 Phil Halper & Niayesh Afshordi - What Came Before The Big Bang? | 04 Aug 2025 | 02:01:22 | |
Niayesh Afshordi is a professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Waterloo. Phil Halper is a science communicator and YouTuber. Together, they have authored a book called "Battle of the Big Bang: The New Tales of Our Cosmic Origins", an overview of the state of modern cosmology on the nature of the big bang.
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| #114 Simon Blackburn - What is Ethical Emotivism? | 28 Jul 2025 | 01:23:30 | |
Simon Blackburn is well-known both as a writer of popular philosophy introductions (like Think), and also a significant figure in non-cognitivist meta-ethics, having invented the term “quasi-realism” to describe his moral philosophy.
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| #113 Sabine Hossenfelder - Superdeterminism: Why Are Physicists Scared of It? | 21 Jul 2025 | 01:02:36 | |
Sabine Hossenfelder is a German theoretical physicist, author, science communicator, and YouTuber. She is the author of Existential Physics: A Scientist’s Guide to Life’s Biggest Questions.
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| #112 Rick Alan Ross - Do Cult Leaders Believe Their Own Lies? | 13 Jul 2025 | 01:58:28 | |
Rick Alan Ross is an American deprogrammer, cult specialist, and founder and executive director of the non-profit Cult Education Institute. Frequently appearing in the news and other media, discussing groups some consider cults. Ross has intervened in more than 500 deprogramming cases in various countries. (Wikipedia)
Get Rick's book, "Cults Inside Out: How People Get In and Can Get Out" here.
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| #111 Helen Bond - The Forgotten Female Disciples of Jesus | 06 Jul 2025 | 01:27:25 | |
Helen Bond is Professor of Christian Origins at the New College, University of Edinburgh, and former head of the School of Divinity there. She is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.
In 2023, she co-authored a book with Joan Taylor called Women Remembered: Jesus’ Female Disciples. Watch the documentary version here.
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| #110 The Cultural Tutor - Why Modern Love Fails and How to Rescue It | 01 Jul 2025 | 01:18:02 | |
Sheehan Quirke is The Cultural Tutor. A writer on history, art, and architecture with millions of followers, he is also the author of the forthcoming The Cultural Tutor: Forty-Nine Lessons You Wish You’d Learned at School, which is currently available for preorder here.
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| #109 David Pakman - The New Threat Donald Trump Poses to America | 22 Jun 2025 | 01:09:21 | |
David Pakman is an American progressive political commentator and host of @thedavidpakmanshow .
Buy David's book, The Echo Machine here
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| #108 Marcus du Sautoy - Do Numbers Exist? | 16 Jun 2025 | 01:07:29 | |
Marcus du Sautoy is a British mathematician, Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science at the University of Oxford, Fellow of New College, Oxford and author of popular mathematics and popular science books. Buy Blueprints: How Mathematics Shapes Creativity here.
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| #107 Dale Allison - Did Jesus Rise From the Dead? | 12 Jun 2025 | 01:28:01 | |
Dale Allison is an American historian and Christian theologian. His areas of expertise include the historical Jesus, the Gospel of Matthew, Second Temple Jewish literature, and the history of the interpretation and reception of the Bible. Allison is the Richard J. Dearborn Professor of New Testament at Princeton Theological Seminary (2013- ). (Wikipedia)
By Dale Allison's book, The Resurrection of Jesus, here.
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| #106 Diarmaid MacCulloch - Sex and Christianity: a Tumultuous History | 29 May 2025 | 00:59:03 | |
Diarmaid MacCulloch is an English academic and historian, specialising in ecclesiastical history and the history of Christianity. Since 1995, he has been a fellow of St Cross College, Oxford; he was formerly the senior tutor.
Buy Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity here.
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| #105 John Lennox - Why Science Needs God | 22 May 2025 | 01:44:10 | |
John Lennox is a Northern Irish mathematician, bioethicist, and Christian apologist originally from Northern Ireland. He has written many books on religion, ethics, the relationship between science and God, and has had public debates with atheists including Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens.
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| #104 Annaka Harris - Is Consciousness Fundamental? | 04 May 2025 | 01:33:17 | |
Annaka Harris is an American writer. Her work touches on neuroscience, meditation, philosophy of mind and consciousness. She is the author of the New York Times bestseller Conscious: A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind.
Get Annaka Harris’ documentary Lights On here.
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| #103 Rhett McLaughlin - Why I Left Christianity | 20 Apr 2025 | 01:53:43 | |
Rhett McLaughlin is a comedian best known for creating the internet’s most-watched daily talk show, Good Mythical Morning along side Link Neal; their award-winning weekly podcast The pair also host a weekly podcast, Ear Biscuits; and the instant #1 New York Times bestseller Rhett & Link’s Book of Mythicality.
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| #102 David Deutsch - You're Not Smarter Than a Caveman | 07 Apr 2025 | 01:56:13 | |
David Deutsch is a British physicist at the University of Oxford, often described as the "father of quantum computing". He is a visiting professor in the Department of Atomic and Laser Physics at the Centre for Quantum Computation in the Clarendon Laboratory of the University of Oxford. (Wikipedia)
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| #101 Brian Greene - String Theory, Fine Tuning, and Divine Design | 02 Apr 2025 | 01:21:13 | |
Brian Greene is a professor of physics and mathematics at Columbia University, director of its centre for theoretical physics, and the chairman of the World Science Festival. He is best known for his work on string theory, especially in his book “The Elegant Universe”, which turns 25 this year.
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| #100 Philosopher Shootout - 16 Thinkers, Ranked (With Joe Folley) | 23 Mar 2025 | 03:09:31 | |
For episode 100 of Within Reason, I'm joined by Joe Folley, from the YouTube Channel "Unsolicited Advice", to tackle a completely arbitrary and ridiculous tournament of thinkers, each of whom are to some degree relevant to the show. Joe graduated from Cambridge University with an MPhil in Philosophy, specialising in logic, in 2023.
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| #99 Penn Badgley - My Religious Conflicts With Playing a Killer | 17 Mar 2025 | 01:57:11 | |
Penn Badgley is an actor best known for his roles in Netflix’s You and the popular drama series Gossip Girl. He is less known as a podcaster and member of the Baháʼí Faith, a religion which teaches that there is a historical unity between major world religions and their prophets, having itself developed out of a branch of Twelver Shia Islam in the 19th century.
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| #98 Jacob Hansen - A Mormon Explains Mormonism | 10 Mar 2025 | 02:22:38 | |
Jacob Hansen is a Mormon YouTuber at the channel Thoughtful Faith.
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| #97 Kipp Davis - What Are the Dead Sea Scrolls? | 02 Mar 2025 | 02:15:51 | |
Kipp Davis (@DrKippDavis) is a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Agder in Kristiansand, Norway, where he specialises in the assignment and reconstruction of fragments from the Dead Sea Scrolls and their interpretation. (Google Books)
The Dead Sea Scrolls are a set of ancient Jewish manuscripts from the Second Temple period. They were discovered over a period of 10 years, between 1946 and 1956, at the Qumran Caves near Ein Feshkha in the West Bank, on the northern shore of the Dead Sea. Dating from the 3rd century BCE to the 1st century CE, the Dead Sea Scrolls include the oldest surviving manuscripts of entire books later included in the biblical canons, including deuterocanonical manuscripts from late Second Temple Judaism and extrabiblical books. At the same time, they cast new light on the emergence of Christianity and of Rabbinic Judaism. (Wikipedia)
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| #96 Music, Mormonism, and Peter Hitchens - 1.25m Subsrciber Q&A | 01 Mar 2025 | 01:02:31 | |
A Q&A to celebrate hitting 1.25 million subscribers on YouTube.
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| #95 James McGrath: John the Baptist, the Bible's Most Mysterious Man | 31 Jan 2025 | 01:24:32 | |
James Frank McGrath is the Clarence L. Goodwin Chair in New Testament Language and Literature at Butler University. He is the author of two books on John the Baptist: "John of History, Baptist of Faith: The Quest for the Historical Baptiser", and "Christmaker: A Life of John the Baptist".
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| #94 Dan McClellan - What Does the Bible Say About Abortion? | 27 Jan 2025 | 01:20:41 | |
Dan McClellan is an American public scholar of the Bible and religion. His forthcoming book, "The Bible Says So", is available here.
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| #93 The Etymology Nerd - How Social Media is Transforming Our Language | 21 Jan 2025 | 01:10:24 | |
Adam Aleksic is a linguist known online as "The Etymology Nerd". His educational videos are watched regularly by millions. His forthcoming book "Algospeak" is currently available for preorder.
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| #92 Bart Ehrman - The Dark Side of Christmas | 20 Dec 2024 | 01:02:01 | |
Bart Ehrman is a New Testament scholar focusing on textual criticism of the New Testament, the historical Jesus, and the origins and development of early Christianity. Get Bart Ehrman's new course, The Dark Side of Christmas (affiliate link).
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| #91 Filip Holm - What is Sufism? Islam and Mystical Experience | 13 Dec 2024 | 01:24:47 | |
Filip Holm is the creator and host of "Lets Talk Religion", a YouTube channel which aims to educate on the subject of religion from an academic perspective.
He joins the show to discuss Sufism, which can broadly be defined as the mystical tradition within Islam.
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| #90 Rainn Wilson - Reclaiming Spirituality From Traditional Religion | 06 Dec 2024 | 01:37:58 | |
Rainn Wilson is the actor and comedian best known for his role as Dwight Schrute on the The Office (US), for which he received three consecutive Emmy Award nominations for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series.
He is also the host of Soul Boom, a podcast discussing spirituality, and authored a book of the same name exploring how we can use spiritual tools to help solve some of life's problems.
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| #89 The Cultural Tutor - The Philosophy and Ethics of Art | 28 Nov 2024 | 01:02:27 | |
Sheehan Quirke is the Cultural Tutor, a writer with 1.7 million followers on X. His work on art, history, and architecture is some of the most widely-enjoyed in the world. He writes a newsletter called the Areopagus.
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| #88 Ayaan Hirsi Ali - Why I Converted To Christianity | 22 Nov 2024 | 01:03:22 | |
Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a Somali-born Dutch-American writer, activist and former politician. Once an advocate for the new atheist movement, she last year announced her conversion to Christianity.
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| #87 Cliffe and Stuart Knechtle - Biblical Slaves, Women, and the Unforgivable Sin | 13 Nov 2024 | 02:47:02 | |
Cliffe and Stuart Knechtle run the extremely popular online Christian ministry 'Give Me an Answer'. In this episode they discuss troubling passages in the Old Testament, New Testament sexism, Job, doubting Thomas, the unforgivable sin (blaspheming the Holy Spirit), and more.
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| #86 Pre-Election Podcast - Destiny on Immigration, Trump, and Voter ID | 31 Oct 2024 | 01:38:52 | |
Steven Bonnell II, known online as Destiny, is an American live streamer and political commentator. He joins me to talk about Trump, Kamala, Biden, Elon Musk, Tucker Carlson, Mark Zuckerberg, Voter ID, immigration, demographic change, and who to vote for in the upcoming election.
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| #85 Magnify - 7 Translation Problems in Genesis | 28 Oct 2024 | 01:37:21 | |
Magnify is a YouTube channel of mostly short-form content, covering interesting details across history, linguistics, and religion.
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| #84 David Nutt - The Truth About Drugs | 22 Sep 2024 | 00:59:39 | |
David Nutt is an English neuropsychopharmacologist specialising in the research of drugs that affect the brain and conditions such as addiction, anxiety, and sleep. He was the UK Government's chief advisor on drug policy. He was fired in 2009 after criticising the Government's approach to drug harms.
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| #83 Esoterica - The History of the Demiurge | 15 Sep 2024 | 01:50:35 | |
Justin Sledge is currently a part-time professor of philosophy and religion at several institutions in the Metro-Detroit area and a popular local educator. His YouTube channel is "Esoterica".
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| #82 Joe Folley - 9 Questions Atheists Cannot Answer | 09 Sep 2024 | 02:30:44 | |
oe Folley runs the YouTube channel Unsolicited Advice. he graduated from Cambridge University with an MPhil in Philosophy, specialising in logic, in 2023.
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| #81 Nick Bostrom - How To Prevent AI Catastrophe | 01 Sep 2024 | 01:02:41 | |
Nick Bostrom is a philosopher known for his work on existential risk, the anthropic principle, human enhancement ethics, whole brain emulation, and superintelligence risks. His recent book, Deep Utopia, explores what might happen if we get AI development right.
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| #80 The Moustache,The Bible, and The Kalam - 850k QnA | 25 Aug 2024 | 00:53:14 | |
Thank you for 850,000 subscribers!
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| #79 Elaine Pagels - The Origin of Satan | 11 Aug 2024 | 01:09:26 | |
Elaine Pagels is an American historian of religion. She is the Harrington Spear Paine Professor of Religion at Princeton University. Pagels has conducted extensive research into early Christianity and Gnosticism.
Buy "The Origin of Satan" by Elaine Pagels here.
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| #78 Rory Sutherland - Why Logical Thinking is Illogical | 29 Jul 2024 | 01:49:32 | |
Rory Sutherland is a British advertising executive, and vice chairman of the Ogilvy & Mather group of companies. His book, Alchemy, is available here.
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| #77 Bart Ehrman - What is the Gospel of Judas? | 21 Jul 2024 | 01:51:23 | |
Bart Ehrman is a New Testament scholar focusing on textual criticism of the New Testament, the historical Jesus, and the origins and development of early Christianity. He was one of the first people in the world to see the rediscovered manuscript of the Gospel of Judas, when he was asked by National Geographic to join a small team of experts who verified its authenticity.
Study Bart Ehrman's courses and support the show at https://www.bartehrman.com/alex
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| #76 Jonathan Pageau - Deconstructing the Fall of Adam and Eve | 16 Jul 2024 | 01:59:46 | |
Jonathan Pageau is a French-Canadian icon carver, YouTuber and public speaker on symbolism, religion and the Orthodox faith.
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| #75 Destiny on Jordan Peterson, Voting, and Political Principles | 07 Jul 2024 | 02:26:49 | |
Steven Bonnell II is a popular American political streamer known online as Destiny.
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© My Podcast Data · Independent project · Data from Apple & Spotify