Deeper Waters Podcast 8/8/2015: Win Corduan

What’s coming up on the Deeper Waters Podcast? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

We all know the story of civilization. That ages ago savages lived in fear of animistic gods. Slowly these gods became more and more dignified and powerful in the eyes of the people with the traditions evolving as it were. Then we get to a polytheistic system like the Greeks and Romans had. After that, society reaches the peak in deities and goes to monotheism. Of course, some think that this goes a step further when the people realize that there is no need for even the monotheistic deity and move straight to atheism. This is the story of the history of mankind that we all know.

Or do we?

According to Winfried Corduan, we have it wrong. Who is he?

Win Corduan

Dr. Corduan was born in 1949 in Hamburg, Germany. In 1963 he moved to the U.S. and in 1970 got a B.S. in Zoology at the University of Maryland. He went on to earn a Master’s in philosophy of religion at Trinity Evangelical Divinity school and got a Ph.D. in Religious Studies at Rice University. From 1977-2008 he was the professor of Philosophy and Religion at Taylor University, and retired on disability in 2008 as Emeritus professor of Philosophy and Religion. He is the writer of books like Neighboring Faiths, No Doubt About it, and In The Beginning God.

The last book is the book that we will be discussing on the show. Corduan contends that when we get back to the earliest traditions of primitive man, that we find that they did believe in one monotheistic deity. Now of course, they could have other beings out there that were non-human entities, like Christians, Jews, and Muslims believing in angels, but only one has the right to be called “God formally and that is the supreme being of these religious systems.

The book is a thorough and entertaining look at the subject and as you can imagine, I have reviewed it here. The reader will not get lost in highly technical details too much and will find that this is a quite interesting area and in many ways, one that we do not really discuss too much in apologetics circles but one that is certainly worth discussing.

I will be asking Dr. Corduan about the history of this kind of research. If we are Christians today, why does it matter how we start out as long as we know that today there is one God? Were the leading pioneers in this area arguing for an original monotheism simply Christians just letting their bias dictate their research? How is it that we can even do so research to get back to what people believed thousands of years ago? Wouldn’t it have changed over the years?

These are all questions on a topic that as I said, we don’t really talk about much, but maybe we should. That will be for you to judge after you hear the next episode of the Deeper Waters Podcast when I interview Dr. Winfried Corduan. I hope you’ll be watching your ITunes feed.

In Christ,
Nick Peters

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