For his podcast “Hank Unplugged,” Hank Hanegraaff talked with Stephen Meyer about Return of the God Hypothesis, and noted the striking way the book is framed. Hanegraaff “couldn’t put it down” because of that framing — the story of Meyer’s Toronto debate with the aggressive atheist cosmologist Lawrence Krauss, teaming up with a Christian theistic evolutionist of the BioLogos stripe, Denis Lamoureux. There were a couple of striking things about the debate, where Meyer was overcome early on by a migraine brought on by the bright lights.

First was the character test it was for Krauss and Lamoureux. I remember finding it repellant at the time, five years ago, to watch the Christian, Lamoureux, kissing up to and joining with the atheist, Krauss. More important, though, was that Meyer was forced, by the difficulty he had at that moment in speaking, to be very, very concise in summarizing a three-point argument for the existence of a personal God. That became the structure of his new book, which is subtitled Three Scientific Discoveries That Reveal the Mind Behind the Universe. In a real sense, the book came out of the experience, the trial, of that debate. Providential? It sounds like it. Listen to the rest of the conversation with Hanegraaff — which goes to a generous hour and 47 minutes in length — here.