Welcome to Think Biblically, Conversations on Faith and Culture.

It's a podcast from Talbot School of Theology at Biola University.

I'm your host Scott Ray, Dean of Faculty, and Professor of Christian Ethics. We're here with our special guest, Gavin

Orland, who is a pastor of the first Baptist Church of Ohai, California. He's the

author of several books related to historical theology, Anselm, and Augustine, but he's got a fascinating subject

we're going to talk about today.

And I have to admit, it's not a subject that I've thought about a lot and I suspect our listeners might not have thought about a lot but it has a lot of intuitive appeal

Topic is the argument for God from music

So Gavin welcome. It's great to have you on with us and I'm sure

our listeners are fascinated to hear what's coming in the next few minutes.

Yeah, thanks for having me and I can say as the first thing I was very skeptical about whether this argument could work, but as I got into it, I found there's actually a lot to it.

So I'm excited for us to have a chance to talk about it.

So tell our listeners first of all what

got you interested in pursuing an argument from God in this particular way?

Yeah I think the experience that stands kind of behind the argument for me was actually just listening to music.

I think it was probably 2017, so a few years ago and just experiencing this overwhelming

longing for heaven and that wasn't the only time in my life that had happened

but and you can never predict it you know it's not

like oh it was this one song therefore if I listen to that song again I'll have the same experience

but I just began to reflect on why does music do that and

before long I started getting into some of the literature that it would explain

that from a secular perspective and that just started the process of thought, of what's the best way to understand

...