eX-skeptic

Former atheist Mark McGee left his childhood Christian faith to search for truth in Eastern world religions, but it eventually led him into atheism. An inquisitive journalist, he investigated the evidence for Christianity and believed.

Mark's Resources:

• Grace Life Blog (Bible Studies) - https://gracelifethoughts.com
• Faith and Self Defense (Christian Apologetics) - https://faithandselfdefense.com
• Grace Martial Arts (Christian martial arts) - https://gracemartialarts.com
• Real Journalism (Weekly Newsletter for Journalists) - https://markmcgee4.substack.com/

Resources mentioned by Mark:

• The Philistines and the Old Testament, Dr. Edward Hindson

Former atheist Matthew Sabatine journeyed back and forth between faith and disbelief until he finally landed on a view of reality that best explained the universe and his own life.

Matt's Resources:

• YouTube channel: https://youtube.com/@TCC595
• Blog: https://www.thecommoncaveat.com/

Resources Mentioned by Matt

Conversations with God by Neale Donald Walsch

Former atheist Chris Adam experienced a difficult, chaotic childhood and was drawn to witchcraft and demonology to gain control over his life. After being introduced to the Bible, he surrendered his control and his life to Jesus.

Chris’s Resources https://www.xbible.com

To learn more about CSLI Resources and Events, visit www.cslewisinstitute.org

To hear more stories about atheists and skeptics becoming Christians, visit www.sidebstories.com

Former atheist Renee Leonard Kennedy left the God of her youth behind for what she thought was a more enticing life. After years of atheism, she was surprised to find both intellectual and spiritual reasons to believe.

Resources by Renee:

• Website: https://www.reneeleonardkennedy.com
• Book: After the Flowers Die - Encouragement for Walking through Life After Loss
• Podcast: Moral Tea - Spilling the moral tea on culture, taboo topics, and grey areas. A podcast exposing the artificial sweeteners of the world by multi-gen duo Renee Leonard Kennedy and Anna Gray Smith.
• Moral Tea Podcast Instagram: @moralteapodcast

Resources mentioned by Renee:

• The Case for Christ, Lee Strobel
• Cold Case Christianity, J. Warner Wallace, https://coldcasechristianity.com/
• Alex McFarland, apologist
• Bible app - https://www.e-sword.net/

For information regarding C.S. Lewis Institute resources and events, visit www.cslewisinstitute.org

For more stories about atheist and skeptics conversion to Christianity, visit www.sidebstories.com

Former skeptic Anna Gray Smith questioned her childhood faith and sought other avenues of belief to find identity, meaning, and truth. Her search led her back to a more robust, grounded faith in God.

 Anna Gray Smith’s Resources:

• Instagram: @annagraysmithphoto
• Moral Tea Podcast: Spilling the moral tea on culture, taboo topics, and gray areas. A podcast exposing the artificial sweeteners of the world by multi-gen duo Renee Leonard Kennedy and Anna Gray Smith.
• Moral Tea Podcast Instagram is: @moralteapodcast

Resources mentioned by Anna Gray:

How Shall We Then Live, Frances Schaffer

Former atheist Jon Wilke had no desire for God and wanted to go his own way. After years of living on his own terms, he became open to the possibility of God, and his life completely changed.

Resources Mentioned by Jon

Mark Mittleberg, Courageous Faith

For more information on CSLI Events and Resources, visit www.cslewisinstitute.org

www.sidebstories.com

Episode Transcript

Hello and thanks for joining in. I’m Jana Harmon, and you’re listening to Side B Stories, where we see how skeptics flip the record of their lives. Each podcast, we listen to someone who has once been an atheist or a skeptic, but who became a Christian against all odds. If you can hear more of our stories at our website at sidebstories.com. We also welcome your comments on these stories on our Facebook page. You can email us also at [email protected]. We love hearing from you.

As a reminder, our guests not only tell their stories of moving from disbelief to belief in God and Christianity. At the end of each episode, these former atheists and skeptics give advice to curious seekers as to how they can best pursue the truth and reality of God. They give advice to Christians as to best [00:45] how to engage with those who don’t believe. I hope you’re listening in to the end to hear them speak from their wisdom and experience as someone who has once been on both sides. We have so much to learn from them.

There’s something extraordinary about an extraordinary life change. When someone’s before looks dramatically different than their after, we lean in, and we want to know what happened. In the context of religious conversion, in this case from atheism to Christianity, you would expect an observable change in the way that someone thinks and lives. And that’s typically what you find. Everything changes, and not in subtle ways. Life looks and feels different in very significant ways.

Former atheist Jon Wilke says that his life is hardly recognizable from the man he was before he met Jesus Christ and the man of God he has become afterward. I hope you’ll come along to hear his story of dramatic transformation.

Welcome to Side B Stories, Jon. It’s so great to have you with me today.

Thank you for the invitation, Jana. It’s always a pleasure to be able to share what God’s done in my life, and maybe somebody who’s listening or watching will be encouraged by my testimony.

Oh, I’m sure they will. I’m sure they will. Before we get into your story, why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself now.

Yeah, sure. Thank you. Professionally, I am a media relations guy, so I work with a lot of reporters who want to talk to ministries and see what God’s doing in and through those ministries. I’ll share more about how I got into that maybe later. But I’m a dad, a middle-aged dad, and I love being a dad. I have an 11-year-old and 14-year-old girls. And the essence of who I am is as father. So I’m kind of your standard middle-aged guy with two kids. And I take them to the park. We go to the pool. We ride bicycles. We ride skateboards. I take them rock climbing and that kind of stuff.

Well, that sounds fun! Sometimes as an adult it’s really great to have kids. They just keep you young.

All right. Let’s start your story now. Tell me about your family, where you were born, your home life. Was it religious at all? Did they talk about God? Did you go to church? What did that look like?

I grew up in a large southern family, so there’s a cultural side of religion that’s in there. We had a giant Bible on our coffee table. We occasionally went to church, VBS, Vacation Bible School, was a great daycare for working families. They could drop their kids off for a week at a time. So I had some of those experiences. But my family… I have six brothers, four sisters. I come from a family where my mother was widowed, and then a couple things didn’t work out, and so I am the baby boy of eleven. I have a younger sister. I have six older brothers that are all really big, macho, tough guys.

But as far as religion, we would say grace at family functions. My uncle would share a prayer. Just this real simple basic cultural Christianity here in the South. You grow up with this understanding about what’s a little bit of right and wrong, what’s a little bit of morality, but not necessarily anything that’s gospel focused. My sister and I have had many conversations, Jana, about… we’re so thankful that the Lord rescued us from where we grew up from. A lot of times, you can tell a lot about a person by where they came from and where they left and where they live now. But my best friend growing up, my whole childhood, he died of a drug overdose, and that could have been me easily. The county I’m from in Kentucky is called Muhlenberg County, but it’s jokingly referred to, sadly, as “Methenberg County.”

Oh, my!

So there’s a lot of drug use there, and so we’re really thankful for being able to escape that and get out of that. But, as far as religion goes, we kind of knew who Jesus was, but it wasn’t something that our family took seriously. There were some token displays of religion, as pretty much most southern families know.

So you had some kind of touch points of God or church and VBS. Did you have any sense even as a child? Did you pray to God? Did you believe in God? Did you believe what they were saying?

I felt like I had a religious experience when I was about seven years old. I was at a Vacation Bible School. But I remember my best friend at the time, a guy named Derek. He professed Christ, and then walked down the aisle to get baptized. And we played baseball, we rode motorcycles, and we were always a very competitive friendship. So part of me… I walked down the aisle when I was like seven, and I got baptized, but it didn’t stick. There was nothing really there. I had a couple of points in I would say middle school years, where I began to just take a look at the Bible. I remember reading some stuff about predestination. I think it was in 1 Peter or something like that. And that just was kind of interesting to me.

But one of the main themes I did have in my whole life is I was terrified of death. Growing up…. Being 47, I was just a child during the Cold War in the early eighties. I was just terrified of nuclear holocaust. I mean, all the movies…. There was so much pop culture on this. And so what happened to someone who died, how you died, that was just something really mysterious that caused me a lot of angst, anxiety, just as a boy. And I carried that for quite a while.

Yeah. I would imagine that that would be difficult. You said your mother was a widow. And I am sure even just personally experiencing the loss of a parent, that that probably brought that issue a little bit forward for you and makes you think about it a little bit more seriously, especially when it’s happened so close to you.

There was always this kind of ghost in our home, Jana, where my older siblings’ dad, there were full-size pictures on the wall, like this one of the Eiffel Tower. In our house, there were always these thoughts and these conversations, and I had this whole separate family that was his family. But there were these talks of Jimmy—that was his name. Jimmy was watching down. He was looking down on people. There was always this kind of ghost of a person that was in our home and was talked about often, and so there was a presence of death and a bit of taste of afterlife that did definitely flavor my childhood.

I wonder. When you experience something like that, does that make you want to know more about God or supernatural reality or the question of death?

I had questions, but I didn’t really know who to ask. Because there were no real experts in my life. But, truth be told, we were such a poor family, my mother widowed. She worked two jobs. At different times, she worked at a furniture store, and then she waited tables a few nights a week, and then, in that part of western Kentucky, it was what they called a dry county, and so they would set up these illegal bars, where people would bring their own alcohol in, and my mother would be the bartender, so she would do that one or two nights a month to make extra money. So we were just so poor that it was like a survival mode. We moved nineteen times before I graduated high school. So it was just constant transition. And I think that really put me in the moment a lot, just a very existential, “What do we do to get through the day?” And then, when you move that much, when you move to a new school, the girls liked me, and the boys didn’t. So there were a lot of fights. There was a lot of trouble. And so I think I just really was in survival mode most of my childhood.

But let me just be honest: My mother was a sweet, loving, wonderful mother. She was my best friend. We’d sit and drink coffee and talk for hours. I could talk to her about anything. She’d been through so much she had a lot of wisdom to share, but she’s just a really kind, wonderful woman, and despite all of these challenges, I had a great childhood. I mean we had a lot of family, had a lot of cousins around. There was always family things to do. Back in those days, they would just send you out in the summertime on your bicycle, and you’d spend all day playing with your friends and come home for dinner.

So I had a wonderful childhood in that sense, that it was very loving. It was very supportive. There was lots of family and friends. And lots of fun, to be honest with you. But we didn’t have much. We got a cake for our birthdays. I never went on vacation as a child. One of the fun stories… I think it’s funny now, but I think it was my ninth birthday, I got a Dairy Queen M&M Blizzard. That was my gift, Jana. And I was happy.

Yes.

So there was a contentment that was with that, because you didn’t have any other choice. So you just learned to be content in those situations.

Right. Right. Yeah. I can imagine with, goodness, eleven children and just being in survival mode, but in a way, although there was no doubt, incredible struggle, it gave you a heart of gratitude for something so simple, as a Blizzard for your birthday. We have a lot to learn from that, I think, in terms of contentment. But it sounds like you were blessed in many ways, even with a simple upbringing. But as you’re moving on, you have ten siblings. Was faith among that culture at all? I mean, did your brothers or sisters believe. Did you start questioning it as you got older? How did that work its way out?

I had a sister who got involved in a church for a while, but that was because there were teenage boys there. But then sometimes God uses those things. My brother, one of my older brothers, he wound up falling in love with a woman who was very involved in a great family and a great church. And so he began going to church regularly with her. And then mom started going with him, and then occasionally I would go with her.

And so we started hanging out with that family from time to time through my brother. And I just got to see a little bit different way of life. His in-laws, who’ve both passed away, were just wonderful people, wonderful Christian people, and it made me really go, “Wow! I missed a lot.” Dorothy and Graham were just incredible people, and they raised wonderful kids and grand-kids, and they all lived close to each other. They were just a really strong Christian family. So I did see the effects of Christianity as a young man, a teenage boy, and I thought, “Okay. There’s something different here with this family,” and it really did have to do with Jesus. It took me years later to understand why that was.

Well, I’m glad that you got a good, embodied example of what a Christian family looks like, even though it may not have been the fullness of that in your own family, but at least you had some kind of positive example. So as you’re getting older, are you pushing back against faith or Christianity? Or are you kind of like, “That’s for them. It’s not for me.” Or what started happening in your life?

I started dating a girl whose dad—and they were very charismatic, so I remember going in this church, and this guy’s having some charismatic faith practices that just kind of freaked me out. But I liked this girl, and her family always was there, and her dad would occasionally preach. And so I was around a different kind of Christianity. It made me think, “Okay, what’s going on here? I don’t really understand all this.” I did begin to read the Bible. I remember reading in John, and I thought it was really interesting, and then 1 John about love. And so I had a couple of touches with the Bible. I don’t know if I would say God was really…. God was probably pulling me in at that time, but there was a resistance.

I was a hell raiser. I was a kid who got in fights at school. I was drinking at a young age. I stole my sister’s car. I made keys to my mom’s car when I was 15 and would drive it around when she was out bar tending at night. I did all those kind of things growing up. And so there was a part of me that was like, “Okay, if God is real, then I’m going to have to change the way I live, because obviously this is not the right kind of way to live.”

So, yeah. It wasn’t something you were really eagerly looking for. Yeah. As a teenage boy, I’m sure the last thing you wanted was some kind of cosmic authority in your life telling you what to do. So it was just easier, and I presume more fun for you, to live in the way that you wanted to live.

Well, sin has a particular appeal to it when you’re lost, and obviously, Satan’s really good at temptation and keeping people in that way. I do think now, many years later, that he was very fearful of the fact of what would happen when a man like me came to Christ. The times that I did touch into the Bible, there was always something that came up. There was always something that happened, with girlfriends and not living the right way, and accumulating a past that’s not to be proud of. But I would have called myself, at that point, a nonbeliever, an atheist, because it’s like, “I don’t want God to exist.” So I’m not necessarily a full-blown anger towards God. I didn’t really understand God. God was this very intangible thing. But I’d obviously seen the fruit of what a tangible faith looked like in the family that my brother was involved in and those kinds of things.

I did see that there is something that happens when you follow Christ and you live a good life. I mean, these people were good, wholesome people. But when you’re a young kid doing what you want to do and chasing after the things of the world, that’s kind of boring. It doesn’t appeal to you, and you’re like, “Oh, maybe that’ll be something that happens when I get older.”

So did you, at that time, when you were pushing away from God and the things of God, I guess, you called yourself an atheist? You identified? I mean, you rejected that there was a God? Or that you just didn’t want there to be a God?

There’s all these big questions. I didn’t have questions of really my purpose. I didn’t have questions about really necessarily the afterlife. It was more of the morality. I didn’t want God to be…. I didn’t want anybody to tell me what I could or couldn’t do. And that’s just really where I was. So we can talk more about my military stuff, I guess, in a few minutes, but when I went in the military, I had atheist on my dog tags.

And how far was it from high school to your military service? How old were you when you entered into military service and decidedly put atheist on your dog tag?

It was only a couple years. So I graduated high school not too long after I turned 17, and I joined the Marine Corps pretty soon after I turned 19. I was just a big party guy. And so I didn’t wind up lasting in school but a couple of semesters. And so I was moving home, and my brother, who’s a pastor he loaned me his truck to move out of the dorm, and so I called my best friend up. He came to the dorm to help me move, and on the way back to move home, we stopped to buy some drugs, and we got busted. I’d already talked to a recruiter once. But it didn’t really go anywhere. I thought, “Oh, there’s no way I could go in the military,” with all the authority issues I had and no control or whatever. So I was kind of forced.

So I remember walking into this foyer. And to my left was the Navy recruiter and to the right was the Marine Corps recruiter. So I walked in the Navy office, and there was nobody in there. And then the Marine recruiter said, “Hey, hey! Why don’t you come in here?” So I was like, “Okay.” I just kind of walked over there, moseyed over there, and we got to talking, and he said, “Well, have you taken the ASVAB?” And I said, “No, sir. I skipped school that day.” And so I had to take the test, and I would up taking the test, and in maybe a day or two, he called me back, and said, “Hey! You can do anything you want. You scored really good on the test.” I said, “Okay, great!” So I was like, “What are your “Public affairs,” and I said, “What’s that?” And he said, “It’s like you’re a journalist. Have you ever seen Full Metal Jacket?” He says, “”You’ll be Joker.” He said, “You go, and you write stories, and you tell the Marine Corps story to the community,” and he was like, “And then when reporters want to talk to Marines, you usually help them out and help them get their story.” I said, “Okay. Sign me up for that.”

And that’s how I got out of drug charges, and that’s why I joined the Marine Corps, which was a dramatic shift in life for me and really helped change the trajectory of my life. I’m really thankful for the Marine Corps.

Yeah. So that’s how I joined the military, and I then I wound up putting atheist on my dog tag. And so I did carry that title into the Marine Corps. And then, when I was in boot camp at Parris Island, the only time the drill instructors wouldn’t mess with you was if you went to church or chapel. They’d leave you alone. So I actually started going to church. I started going to chapel.

Just to get left alone by your superiors?

Yes! Just to sit there and doze off. Just to sit in air conditioning. Because on Sunday, it was a light day, but before noon, you’d go to chapel and then you’d go to chow, and you had a couple hours of free time. And free times was usually like, you work out on your own or you polish your boots. You write letters to mom and dad. Or you get ready for the inspection that’s coming up the next day, or whatever. Those kind of things. But for that little bit of time, that an hour, hour and a half, you didn’t have an instructor barking at you, which was a nice reprieve. But I did start carrying a Bible in the boot camp, and I read it from time to time, and I carried it in my pocket.

As an atheist. As an atheist.

Yeah.

Now, why did you start reading a Bible and carrying one with you? Does it haunt back to those early days of worrying or wondering about death?

Well, that’s a great question. I see why you have such a great show. It gave me something to do a lot of times. I mean there was a lot of hurry up and wait, where you would move somewhere as a unit and then you’d sit down for an hour, waiting for somebody to come, supplies to arrive, whatever, the training to begin, and so you’d get there early, and you’d just sit there, or you’d stand there. And so, if you had a Bible, you could pull it out and read it. But you couldn’t talk to anybody. It was boring. And so the Bible gave me something to do and something to read. And I remember… This sounds silly, but I remember just looking at the clouds a lot and just thinking, “I wonder if there is a God and if He’s happy that I’m reading this Bible.” And that somewhat gave me a bit of comfort, just to escape from the… I don’t know. The quote-unquote hell of boot camp. It just gave me a way to mentally get away from that place and think about something else.

When you were reading the Bible, were you reading it as something, “This might have actually happened in history,” that Jesus was a real person? Did you look at it as, “The Bible is myth and fairy tale. It’s unbelievable.” What was your perspective in reading the Bible?

At that point, the veracity of the New Testament was something that I couldn’t grasp, how true the Bible was, Jesus as a real person, but there were these fantastical stories in the prophets and in Revelation, and there was this wisdom Ecclesiastes and Proverbs, and then there were stories about Jesus. I didn’t really get it, but it was just something that… I think it was just something to do to entertain me, just give my mind some kind of exercise to do.

But if we fast forward a few years, I got out of the Marine Corps, and I moved back home, and I was going to use my GI bill and go to college. At that point… you’ve got to realize my time in the Marine Corps was really exciting. I got to do a lot of traveling. First time I wore a suit or a tie. First time I flew on an airplane, because as a poor southern guy, we just didn’t have… this wasn’t a part of my life. And so I got to live a pretty exciting life as a journalist, especially single, no kids, so I got to write incredible, fun stories.

But if we fast forward a few years, I got out of the Marine Corps, and I moved home, went to college, and then I joined the Army National Guard on September 7th because they had 100% tuition reimbursement.

I joined on September 7th, and then September 11th happened. And then I got called up, and we got deployed. And it was on that deployment where I gave my life to Christ. So this is where the Ecclesiastes comes in to play, because a man gave me a copy of the Bible and said, “Here. Keep this with you,” and I had heard the stories about George Washington and the superstition of stopping a bullet and all this kind of stuff. We were literally just going to Germany to relieve the army, so the army could go to Afghanistan and relieve the Marines. So it wasn’t a difficult deployment in that regard. But nonetheless, he gave me a copy of the Bible. And I did carry it with me.

And then, on the day we deployed, one of my soldiers, he had been married for two years and had a 2-year-old kid, and his wife said that she’s leaving him. And so he’s my soldier. And he was broken. I mean, this guy was distraught, just crying, bawling like a baby. His whole life was over, but he was getting deployed, so he couldn’t do anything about it. He had to leave or go AWOL. That was his only two choices. So one of the first sergeants said, “Well, take him to see a chaplain. I hadn’t been in a church in I couldn’t tell you how many years. At this point, I’m 24, I don’t think I’ve been in church since probably I was 17, 18. I might have visited a church when I went home to see mom. I don’t remember any particular time. And so I walk in the chapel. And I remember thinking, “Oh, if God’s real, I’m going to catch on fire as soon as I cross over the threshold of this place.”

Yeah.

For all the hell raising and bar fights and all the things I had done that I’m not proud of when I was in the Marine Corps and so forth. But the chaplain talked to the guy, encouraged the guy, whatever. I don’t remember what he said to him. That was one example where I was like, “Okay, this guy’s broken, and I have no idea how to fix this kid,” because he’s only maybe 19 or 20. But he’s my responsibility. I’m his sergeant. I’m in charge. And then I had another guy, a giant of a man, a big 6’8” tough guy. He lost his cool in the middle of a patrol and just threw his weapon down and cried like a baby because he was missing home, and he just had a nervous breakdown. I had no idea how to fix this guy, either. He was very angry, and so I was like, “What is going on with these people?” And then, not too much longer after that, I had another soldier whose son had passed away. He had three boys, and his oldest son died. He was only 13 or 14. So we got the Red Cross message, and I had to go get the soldier, bring him to the captain’s office, then I and the captain had the tell him, “Your son has passed away, and you need to go home and bury him, and then you need to come back on mission in thirty days because we need you here.” And you’ve got orders, you know?

And so it was those examples where I actually pulled that Bible out, Jana, and I started reading Ecclesiastes, because that’s what I knew. And at this point in my life, you’ve got to realize, you know hell raising, drinking, fighting. I mean, I was not a man who’d want to go to the Bible for anything, but I opened up Ecclesiastes and there it is: “Hey, everything you’ve done is in vain.” All those women you chased. That’s not worth anything. The money that you’ve had, it’s not worth anything. There’s nothing new under the sun. And so it was like, “Whoa! I’ve done the same thing other people have done, and there’s nothing new about that.” But it’s all fruitless. It’s all vanity. And then I got over to the New Testament. And then that’s where I experienced Christ for the first time in a real way.

I was reading and interacting with these people from all different strokes of life, from the Samaritan woman, the rich young ruler, to calling Peter and Andrew and these guys. He knew what was in their heart. “I saw you under the tree,” you know? And just all these things. And I was like, “Okay. Something about Jesus understands the heart of people.” And so that drew me to Him because the problems I was facing with my soldiers was how to help what was broken on the inside of them, and I didn’t know how to fix that. And that affected how they were able to perform on mission and what kind of soldiers they were, what kind of people they were, and if they stayed out of trouble or not. So I was like, “How do I help fix these guys on the inside?” And I didn’t know. So that’s when I began to read and got over to some really interesting verses, because I had been a journalist and been a writer, so I was pretty comfortable with the English language.

I got over to some verses like John 14:6: “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father but by Me,” and I remember thinking, “That is the most exclusive sentence I’ve ever heard in my life. You have these definitive articles. Either this is true or it’s not true. This is a really strong thing. Okay, this guy lived in early days in Jerusalem and walked around. Okay, was he real? Was He [UNKNOWN 36:20]?” I didn’t think about that? I was just thinking, “Whoa! This is….” Now, I would understand that was a truth encounter, right? I was having a truth encounter. God had begun to draw me in through some of these scriptures. I remember reading Jesus asking his disciples, “Well, who do you say that I am?” Peter said, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.” Okay. That doesn’t get any more exclusive. “You are,” which is like the present, “the Christ, the Son of the living God.” Okay, so these verses really stuck in my head and just caused me a lot of thought. And so, those were the initial parts of making me think more about the Lord, and, “Okay. Maybe there’s something to this.”

As you were reading all of this, whether it’s the Old Testament or the New Testament, about the Person of Christ, and Who He was and how He engaged with people, were you talking with other people about what you were reading? Was there a chaplain around that you were having good conversations with? Or was this something you were processing on your own? I wonder what you were thinking. “Is this guy real? Is this for real? Is there something to this that I need to be considering more deeply?”

Yeah, I don’t remember, at this point, having anybody to talk to. I mean, me and my buddy Joe, we were the company and battalion hell raisers. We were the guys you wanted to go party with. We were the guys that were cool and fun and all that stuff. So none of the good guys really wanted to hang out with us. There were a few Christians in our unit. One of them was our sergeant major. So like the top enlisted guy. This guy was as straight-laced as they come. He didn’t cuss. You barely saw him lose his temper. And for a sergeant major in the army, I had expectations of what those would look like. I was looking at him through a Marine Corps lens, so it was a little bit different perspective, but there were a couple of guys that I knew were Christians, and they lived differently. But no, I didn’t talk to them at that point. They didn’t want to talk to me.

But one of the things that did happen is I wanted to quit smoking. I was smoking cigarettes like crazy, and one of my soldiers, his name’s Aaron. I’m leaving off last names, but Aaron gave me a “What would Jesus do?” bracelet because I told him. He was one of my soldiers and said I wanted to quit smoking. He said, “Well….” He had seen me reading my Bible. He and a guy named Chris had been… they saw me read my Bible, and they were both Christian guys, and so this guy gave me a “What would Jesus do?” bracelet. And he’s like, “Anytime you want to smoke, just think, ‘What would Jesus do?’” So I put it on because he had honored me with that, and he had given that to me, and he was rooting for me, and I was like, “Okay. I going to wear it because he gave it to me. I’m not going to be a jerk about it or whatever. I’m just going to honor his little gift here.

So these were things, but God was working on me. These were convictions, now that I understand what was happening. These were convictions that began to happen. And God put these little pieces in place to start making me think about him and how to live,

None of these guys actually ever witnessed to me directly. None of them actually shared the gospel with me, came to me with scripture. They lived differently.

But they didn’t ever actually preach or pray for me or even explained scripture to me or even witnessed to me. There weren’t gospel conversations, but there was obviously a wholesome witness that they presented.

And was that attractive to you in some way? Or was that more repulsive at that time?

It was honorable to me because I had been such a bad person. I stole. I was a womanizer. I would drink and try to fight my best friends, and I’m trying to go out with them the next night, and they wouldn’t want to hang out with me. I mean, I wasn’t proud of who I was. And I wasn’t raised with my dad. Like I said, my mom was widowed, and she married a different man and had me. And he was an alcoholic. He was very angry. And I only saw him a few times a year, but one of the worst statements that could ever be said to me was, “You’re just like your father!” And so it was in those moments where I was like, “I’m becoming my dad.” And what’s funny, Jana, is I look exactly like my dad. Minus the blue eyes. Like we are twins.

Oh.

But anyway, there was a wholesomeness to that. It was honorable to me that they wanted to live differently and wholesomely, and I remember thinking back to the Grahams and the Dorothys of the world that had been just wonderful family context you think of when you watch TV and see all these wholesome families. That was not what I grew up in. I grew up in a home where I remember waking up on Christmas morning, I had one present under the tree, and there were bunch of people passed out… there were like a dozen people passed out in the house. I didn’t know who they were . I was 12 or 13 years old. I mean that’s the kind of home I lived in.

Oh, my! Yes.

But there was something about these guys that lived differently. And that was attractive to me. It was like, “Okay. There’s a different way to live that doesn’t come with all this trouble and drama.” And that was a little bit attractive to me.

And you knew they were Christians, but they just lived their lives in front of you. They didn’t try to push it upon you.

Never. They were honestly quiet Christians. I don’t remember seeing anybody really witness to anybody. So that is kind of fascinating now that you think back on it, how God wound up bringing me into his family.

Right. So then what happened? You were observing. You were reading.

Yeah. I got into a huge cussing fight with our company sergeant, so one of the top guys. And he was a nice guy. I don’t want to give him any credit, but I had a difference of opinion about things because I had come from the Marine Corps, and so my expectations of professionalism and service and devotion and all that was very different, so there were a lot of deeper philosophical issues. And I just remember getting into a huge fight with him. And we were just yelling, cussing. So angry at him. And he was two ranks ahead of me, so he probably could have got me on some kind of insubordination charge or whatever. And it didn’t resolve, but I remember walking back to my barracks. And some of those songs from the chapel came back. And so I just started having a little talk with Jesus, and telling Him about my troubles, because that’s what the song said.

Right!

You know, these old southern gospel hymns. Just a few of them. I don’t know hardly any of them. But I just remember saying, “God, if you’re real, I am 6,000 miles away from home.” Excuse my French. “My life sucks!” Like, “I’m a bad guy. I am not happy with where I’m at in life. I’m a paycheck to paycheck drunk. I’m fighting my best friends. I am just a mess.” And I was like, “God, if you’re real, I need You, and I need You now.” Like, “This is it. I need You to show up if You’re real.” And then the sergeant major came around the corner. And you’ve got to realize I only went to the company office a handful of times in a year. And the sergeant major’s…. Here I am. I’m in the Army at this point. I’m a sergeant in an army, even though I earned my sergeant stripes in the Marine Corps. I maintained my rank. And so here I’m supposed to be this tough sergeant guy, right? And I’m crying. I’m just bawling. Snotty, messy bawling. I’m walking down the street in uniform, the sergeant major comes out, and he’s like, “What’s going on with you, Wilke?” And I was like…. I knew he was a Christian, you know? Everybody did, because they always made fun of him because he’d never go drink and he wouldn’t do all this stuff. But anyway, I was like, “I’m just having a little talk with Jesus, and I’m telling him about my troubles.” I have no idea what he said to me. It was probably 30 seconds, but he encouraged me, right? That’s probably what we’d say about it now. But I can’t recall what he said.

Then a few minutes later, one of the other Christian guys was there, a guy named Charlie, and he saw me. He was like, “You okay?” And I was like, “No, I’m not.” He said some words to me, and I don’t know what he said, either, Jana. And then I went back to my dorm room, my barracks room, and I was crying, and I was just upset. And then I get a knock on the door. And so I go to the door, and it’s Russ. And I’m like, “What are you doing here?” Russ never comes to my room, right? Russ was the exact opposite of what I was. And Russ said to me, “God told me to come talk to you.”

And he hadn’t talked to the sergeant major or the other friend. He just-

No.

Oh, wow!

So I have no idea how long Russ stayed. He may have stayed two minutes. He may have stayed twenty minutes. I literally don’t remember, don’t remember what he said. I have no idea. The only thing that stuck out was, “God told me to come talk to you. So I’m here.” So he’d heard the voice of God, and he obeyed God. And so he’s talking to me, and I’m just sitting there thinking, “Whoa! Wait a second,” and then Russ leaves, and as soon as he leaves, I was like, “Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.”

You had just prayed, and Russ is knocking on your door. That’s crazy! But I guess it’s not crazy if God is real, right?

Right. When he left, I said, “Wait a second, this is…. Wait. God just…” and people have taken issue with this theology over time, and again, I don’t care. This is my experience with the Lord. I said, “Wait a second. The God of the universe just heard my prayers, stopped what he was doing”—that’s where people have a problem—“and showed me He was real.” And He didn’t send a flash of lightning. There were no unicorns running through the heavens. There was nothing crazy, right? It was really three people who I knew were Christians and respected as Christians that He had put in my path within moments, minutes, after I had prayed, “God if You’re real, I need You, and I need You now.” And God showed up in His people, and that was all the proof I needed.

Wow!

The verses of scripture, all that stuff, all that would come later, right? Understanding the Bible. But at that point I knew God was real, and if God was real, those things I’d been reading in scripture had to be true, and if that was true, then obviously I was feeling convicted as a sinner. And so my knees hit the floor, and I said, “God, I’m so sorry. I’ve done a horrible job at living, and so I’m done. I can’t do this my way. You’re obviously real. You obviously care about me.” It was His love that he gave me. It was this overwhelming love of God, that He would stop and notice me of all people.

Paul talks about being the chief sinner, and I would take him up on that when I get to heaven. No. Literally. I was like, “Okay. His love. Wow! He stopped and noticed me.” And that broke me, Jana, that just broke me, and I said, “God, I’m done. I can’t live this life like this anymore. However, you want me to live, I’ll do it.” And then that was it.

And then literally my next question was, “What does it mean to be a Christian?”

Yes.

Listen, I had nobody disciple me. It was me and the Word and the Holy Spirit. The Spirit of God took the Word of God and showed me the truth of God and revealed to me the Son of God and changed my life. And my next question was, “What do I need to do to be a Christian?” and God led me to, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself.” And that has been the very basis of my faith ever since, because I was like, “Oh, God, it’s easy to love You. You have done so much for me. You’ve forgiven me so much.” And I do not deserve His grace, mercy, forgiveness whatsoever. Loving people, on the other hand, is going to take a whole lot more work. And I’m still working on that. That’s the sanctification process.

Oh, yeah. Living is messy, right? People are messy. We all are. Sometimes unlovable, seemingly unlovable. Yeah.

Well, and to bring it full circle, there was a little chapel that some of these guys I talked about, Charlie and Russ and a guy named Mike and the sergeant major, they literally went down to this one room, turned a footlocker on its side, and it wasn’t much bigger than a one-car garage, and the sergeant major played the guitar, and somebody would sing, and then somebody would preach. And so I began to go to this little chapel. And it was on Father’s Day of 2002. So what would that have been? Father’s Day’s in June? One of the guys—I don’t remember who it was—got up and shared about God being our Father. And I realized, “Wait, wait, okay. God is my Heavenly Father. He is my Father. He’s the Father I’ve never had. He was there with me. He was walking with me. He was talking with me, and He’s real.” And this means that all of those expectations and disappointment I’d had towards my earthly father didn’t really matter anymore.

And I remember having a conversation with a guy about this in the laundromat as we were sitting on the washer, and we’re talking about our deadbeat dads and all this kind of stuff. And I remember being impressed by the Spirit. “You need to forgive your father.” So I literally went and picked up the phone within a few moments and called my dad after that conversation and said, “Dad, I just want to tell you that I forgive you.” I forgive you for all the things you did do that were awful and all the things you didn’t do. But I’m a Christian now,” and I remember telling him, Jana, “God is my dad, and I will love you as my earthly father, but God is my dad, and He provides me all that I need as a Father.” And I don’t know how that sat with my dad at that point. I was still thousands of miles away from home. But that was a turning point in our relationship, that now, looking back, I was able to love this man who had had so little impact but so great impact at the same time-

Right.

… on my life.

Yes.

That I was able to love one of the most unlovable people that… I mean, I still have siblings that still can’t forgive him and love him. And that made all the difference in the world. When I came back, we became very good friends, and I got to spend a lot of time with my dad before he passed many years ago.

Wow, what a beautiful redemption story that is. Truly.

It really is. I’m thankful for that gift.

Yeah. I just got chills, actually. The thought of being able to love someone who has, intentionally or unintentionally, harmed you deeply, in so many ways, but yet, you can love with the love of God, the love of Christ, through the love of Christ, the one who is unlovable. Because that’s what Christ did for us, right? So it becomes… It’s never really easy, is it, to do that, but yet, you were obviously compelled by the Spirit of God to do that. And what a relief for you, and I’m sure for him as well, the grace that you were able to extend in that moment, I’m sure, had a tremendous impact on him as well as you.

I would like to think so. But it was a great gift that I had with my dad, that friendship that we could have, but it was only through the power of God to have the love of God in me. But it was like, “Okay, if God can forgive me of all the things that I’ve done against Him and Him only, and I’m not like, ‘I can truly forgive somebody.’”

But it was also this provision of God, like the provision of God was, “Okay, I provide all that you need,” emotionally, obviously spiritually, even physical strength at times, to get through difficult, long days and things like that, you feel God just give you energy to get through these kinds of situations.

Yeah. What a relief it is sometimes. When we put so much pressure on other people to be a certain way for us and towards us, and certainly, we all desire a healthy relationship with parents and all that, but the reality is we live in a broken world with broken people, and no human will ever fulfill us or love us in the way that we desire, other than a perfect God with a perfect love, Who’s willing to give, when we just come to Him. And I love that you were obviously humble. I mean you came to a place of humility when you came to ask God, “If You’re real?” You were humble enough to do that. And then how gracious of Him to so immediately provide for you, to show you in such tangible ways. What a gift that must have been to you. It sounds like that there was really no doubt after that happened.

There has not been any doubt in my mind the existence, truth, reality, and; even the Person of God and the personality of God as my Father and as my Lord Jesus Christ. There’s no doubt that has been in my life in those years. There have been doubts about where I’ve stood and doubts about where I’m living and doubts about obviously trying to figure out living out and working out your own sanctification. There’s doubts with that, but there’s never been a doubt about the reality, truth, existence, and awareness of God in my life in twenty something years.

That is a huge gift. I would imagine the difference between those years of living without God and then living with God in a much more contented, settled, loved place, where I presume there’s no fear of death anymore. Talk to me just a minute about how things have changed for you, juxtaposed to your life before and after.

Now, I don’t want to put too academic on it, because I’m not an academic guy. I am a public schoolboy from Kentucky, with a basic education from college, but there’s this idea of redemptive lift that happens when you give your life to Christ. I got off drugs. I got off alcohol. I quit smoking. But then the Lord provided real friends. Like, all my drinking bodies immediately went away. I mean all of my party buddies immediately went away. They wanted nothing to do with me. So I was without friends. And then immediately He provided Mike and Adam and some of these other men, and then we began to study the Bible. So He provided community immediately for me and deep friendships, like a true source of koinonia fellowship, of a bondedness with these man through the spirit of Christ that I didn’t have within my own brothers, my own blood brothers, and then, once I got back home and began to go to church, I began to see what a godly father was. I began to understand a lot more truth about God.

Now, I had several years that I was… I didn’t know how to live out the Christian life. Literally, growing up, there were only a couple of family members who were married. I didn’t know what any of this was. I didn’t know what life looked like. I didn’t know what life could look like. So a lot has changed in the simple fact that God showed me there’s a different way to live.

A lot has changed. Some people take this the wrong way when I say it, but there’s two sides of it. I don’t know if I can…. Jesus says he who has been forgiven little loves little and he who has been forgiven much loves much. I’ve found that to be true with a lot of the really, really strong brothers I have been around in life, who really made a mess out of their life. When they get into a deep vine and pruning vineyard attendant, a sheep and a shepherd relationship, a very close father/son relationship with God, they’re just on fire. And they love him because they know where they’ve come from.

God has brought beauty from ashes, it sounds like, and restored the years that the locusts have eaten, all of those things, in the last 20 years? You said since 2002?

It would be 2002, so now yeah. It’s been 21 years that I’ve been walking with the Lord.

Yeah. Yeah.

Which is wild. I mean, I tell these stories to people, and it’s like I’m talking about a different person. When I came home, Jana, I mean it was the music, how I dressed, how I talked, things that I thought about, my dreams. I mean I have all kinds of dreams about God. Just everything. I literally was a new creation. Same skin, same flesh, same background, but I’m literally a brand new person. And people didn’t recognize that.

Yeah. Oh, I’m sure. I’m sure. It’s like, “Where did Jon go? And who is this guy?” Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. So now it’s funny, 21 years later, when I tell these stories, I’m like, “Who is that guy?” I mean, you get to telling some of your story and you get used to sharing some things, but we’ve skipped a lot obviously. It’s been 21 years. But it’s like people don’t even recognize that guy.

Wow! There’s such beauty and power in that kind of transformation, though, Jon, that’s so inspiring. Truly. I think that you can reach so many people with your story, because so many people are in that same place, are trying to figure it out. And I’m thinking about those, even who might be listening right now to your story, saying, “I’m that guy. I’m that guy,” or, “I’m that woman,” who is a hell raiser, or just whatever, and, “How I would like to find something different or something more, or actually have a piece of that obvious love that you have and contentment in life and change.” You know that change. I think, if anything, you demonstrate that change is possible.

All things are possible with God.

Right.

If He loved a sinner like me first, and that’s why I know what love is.

Yeah. So if somebody is listening like that today, what would you say to someone like that? How could you encourage them to… Is it saying a prayer to God? “Are You real?” Is it connecting with Christians? Reading the Bible? I can think of…. You actually took time to try to figure something out even though you were on your own for quite a while. How can you guide someone towards Christ?

I would challenge people to just pray that prayer. “God, I need you.” When you get to that little moment in life. “God, I need you,” and I have faith that He’ll show up. I have faith that He will walk into your situation and help you understand where you are and what you need. And He’ll show that He’s real, and He’ll show that He loves you. I would love to see people have that experience with God, where, you know, I first had a truth encounter with the word, and then I had an experiential encounter with God in that way of providing people.

I would also say you can’t discount the Christians that you know are around you. We’re all not perfect in what we do, but sometimes just asking the question, like, “What happened to you? I don’t expect you to be perfect, but how did you come to know God?” I mean just asking that question, because we do that all the time. “How do I fix a shingle?” “How do I change a tie rod?” We look up things on YouTube. We look up things all the time. We ask other questions all the time. So if you’re struggling in your faith, if you’re trying to figure out if God is real, just, one, ask Him. And, two, ask other people, because God uses His people, as broken and as messy as they are, He used people. He’s still sovereign, and He’s still going to work it out, but literally His people are a representation of Him, even in their mess and their struggle in life. People of faith still have a lot that they can share, and the Spirit of God is in them, and so the Spirit of God can speak through them to you and guide you to scripture and give you wisdom in life that you just would never have expected.

That’s perfect. And then, again, it seems like there were several touch points, that God had Christians or believers in your life at different points, even as a child, you saw that beautiful family as representative of something good. And then later, those men in the Army who were again just touch points. Maybe not pushy. They weren’t pressing. But they were living in such a way that you knew that they were different. What would you say to Christians in terms of how we can best engage with people who are… some may be looking. We don’t know it. Some may not be looking for God.

We, in this world, it has become so polarized and so vitriolic, I guess is the word. And so politicized. It’s hard for some people to separate, when they’re looking at Christians, the politics from who they are as people. So to Christians, I would say, just do the best you can when it comes to how you’re living. I’m literally at the pool yesterday, and I’m there by myself. The kids are off with the grandparents and stuff. And my neighbors are out drinking. So I just get in the pool. It’s hot. I get in the pool. I go over there and just sit down and talk to them. They’re drinking. They’re talking. And the guy’s, like, “Hey! Would you like a beer?” It’s like, “No. No, thanks.” And so literally I hang out with them for like an hour and a half. And we’d talk about some pop culture, we’d talk about some music, some movies, some news that’s happening. But through the conversation, I would just kind of drop little things. “Oh, you know what? I’m just kind of a straight-laced guy. I don’t drink and do those kind of things anymore.” But then, through that friendship evangelism, one of my mentors and friends, he wrote a great book about contagious faith. And it’s different styles of evangelism. With my neighbors, they obviously know something’s different, and I’m hoping those conversations will come up. And they see me obviously get ready for church and come home from church. They’re not hearing me cussing. They’re not seeing me drinking and hanging out. But those little things that I saw were, “Okay, there’s something different about this guy,” but I’m still relatable and I’m still fun, and I’m still cool enough to hang out with that they don’t really care if I’m not getting drunk with them. And sometimes Christians… I guess here’s the thrust of my answer, Jana. Christians get in their bubble so much they don’t know how to hang out with sinners anymore.

Yes.

And that is a sad thing, because our Lord walked with people to the point where they thought He was one of them. Even though He never partook in the same life that they did, and they accused Him of all kinds of horrible stuff. I don’t want to be accused of false accusations or anything. But if people see me hanging out on my porch over here with these neighbors that drink a lot, I’m okay if they question where I’m at.

Right.

Not because I like to hang out with them and drink and they watch a lot of basketball and football, and I don’t watch any sports. But they know, “Hey, we can talk about anything.” And we can hang out, and I’m not going to judge you. I’m not going to be angry towards you. But when the bottom falls out of their life, I expect that they’re going to talk to me. And I’ve found that to be true over these 21 years of following Christ, that if I can just be a constant witness that’s not judgmental, that’s not angry, and not living like the world, sooner or later, when the bottom falls out, they’re going to pick up the phone and call me.

I think that’s beautifully said. I think there’s something very, very powerful about just being in relationship with someone. As I’ve heard many say, just play the long game. I mean, be in relationship with genuine friendship, not project-related friendship, but genuine friendship, so that, as you say, when opportunities do come, and they’re at point of need or desire for something more, that they know who you are, and they know what you have, what you hold, and that you have something different, and you have something to offer. Yeah.

Jana, the Lord put a lot of people in my life really quickly, and I wouldn’t be where I am today without those people, who said, “Hey, you need to do this Bible study.” “Hey, you should be learning what it means to fast and pray, and you need to really be sharing your faith,” and I had other people say, “You need to stop cussing when you’re talking about Jesus,” because I didn’t know that was really a taboo thing. And then, “Hey, you really should start tithing.” All these people that God bought in my life just helped put the structure of obedience in my life. “Here are ways to obey God.” When I was like, “Okay, God. How do I follow You? What do I do?” He provided all that. It didn’t all come overnight. It came over a few years, but don’t discount the community of God.

Yeah. That’s a really good word. I think, too, what’s interesting about your story is you kind of came to faith as a Lone Ranger, as it were, so I appreciate your emphasis on the fact that your growth, your becoming a Christian and knowing what that means, what it looks like, what it is to live as a follower of Christ, all came in the context of community, and that that community provides such support, not only spiritually speaking and guidance, but also just in every other way. It’s really beautiful the way that God has designed things, that we are meant to be together and to belong together, and like you say, be in a right place, where it’s not just about receiving. It’s about serving, and it’s about giving, and it’s about growing. Which, obviously, you have done all of those things. So thank you for commending us there at the end. I think that’s a word for probably a lot of people.

So thank you, Jon. What an extraordinary story! Again, I never, ever tire of seeing God show up when people are calling out His Name to see if He’s real and then to hear and see the difference that He can make in someone’s life. What a beautiful testimony that you’ve given us today. Thank you so much for coming on and telling us your story.

Thank you very much for allowing me to share. I obviously can’t take the credit for it. It’s God’s story of what He’s done in my life, and He’ll do it in anybody else’s, too.

Yes. Well, thank you. Thank you for being such a strong man of God.

Thanks.

All right. All right.

Have a great day.

Thank you.

Thanks for tuning in to Side B Stories to hear Jon Wilke’s story. You can find out more about him in the episode notes below. For questions and feedback about this episode, you can contact me. Again, our email is [email protected]. Also, if you’re a skeptic or atheist who would like to connect with a former atheist with questions, please contact us on our Side B Stories website or again on our email, and we’ll get you connected. This podcast is produced through the C.S. Lewis with our wonderful producer, Ashley Decker, our audio engineer, Mark Rosera, and our video editor, Kyle Polk, who posts these podcasts in video form on our YouTube channel. If you enjoyed it, I hope you’ll follow, rate, review, and share this podcast with your friends and social network. In the meantime, I’ll be seeing you next time, where we’ll see how another skeptic flips the record of their life.

Former atheist Lee Strobel investigated Christianity in order to disprove it, but surprisingly came to believe it was true based on the evidence.

Lee' Resources:

• The Lee Strobel Center for Evangelism and Applied Apologetics:  www.strobelcenter.com
• Books:
  • Is God Real?
  • The Case for Christ
  • The Case for Faith
  • The Case for the Creator
  • The Case for Heaven
  • Spiritual Mismatch with Leslie Strobel
  • The Unexpected Adventure with Mark Mittleberg
  • many others

Resources mentioned by Lee:

• Simon Greenleaf, The Testimony of the Evangelists:  The Gospels Examined by the Rules of Evidence
• Albert Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus
• Norman Geisler, Roots of Evil
• J.I. Packer, I Want to Be a Christian and Knowing God
• Josh McDowell, Evidence that Demands a Verdict and More Than a Carpenter
• John Stott, Basic Christianity
• Frank Morrison, Who Moved the Stone?
• C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity and Screwtape Letters
• John Warwick Montgomery, Where is History Going: Essays in Support of the Historical Truth of Christ, The Is God Dead? Controversy, How Do We Know that There’s a God?
• G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man
• Thomas Aquinas, The Summa Theologica
• Blaise Pascal, Pensees'
• Francis Schaeffer, The God Who was There
• Bertrand Russell, Why I'm Not a Christian

For information for CSLI events and resources, visit www.cslewisinstitute.org

Side B Stories is celebrating three years of stories and honest conversations with former atheists and skeptics who are now Christians. Listen and celebrate with us!

Side B Stories Instagram @sidebstories

Side B Stories Facebook www.facebook.com/sidebstories

Side B Stories X/Twtter @sidebstories

www.sidebstories.com

Former skeptic Dave Glander grew up in difficult circumstances, pushing him away from God.  After years of self-destruction and militant atheism, he challenged God and found himself on the side of belief.

Dave’s Resources:

• Reasons for Hope ministry: www.rforh.com
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/1truthministries.tv/
• Book: How Why Where:  3 Questions that must be Answered before You Die
• Book: Faith Survival Guide (for leaders and students)

Resources/authors recommended by Dave:

• Greg Laurie, Knowing Jesus Personally
• W. Warner Wallace, The Case for Christ
• Josh McDowell, He Walked Among Us

For information on C.S. Lewis Institute’s Resources and Events, visit www.cslewisinstitute.org

To hear more stories of skeptics and atheists becoming Christians, visit www.sidebstories.com

(more…)

Philosopher and former atheist Pat Flynn assumed belief in the naturalistic story of reality but eventually found it lacking. Through further investigation, he found the Christian worldview made most sense of the universe and of himself.

Pat's resources:

•  Philosophy for the People website/blog: https://www.philosophyforthepeople.com/

• Book:  The Best Argument for God, release date 10/17/2023

Resources/authors mentioned by Pat:

• Alvin Plantinga, Where the Conflict Really Lies

• Writings of Thomas Aquinas

• Writings of William Lane Craig

• N.T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God

• Dr. Brant Pitre, The Case for Jesus

• Taking Pascal’s Wager, Dr. Michael Rota

To hear more stories about atheists and skeptics becoming Christians, visit www.sidebstories.com

Former skeptic Susan Leonard was a secular humanist and worked as a successful professional on Capitol Hill. She saw no need for faith until she encountered Jesus Christ in a way she couldn’t ignore.

Resources/authors recommended by Susan:

• Dr. Jeff Myers, Understanding the Times
• Josh McDowell, Sean McDowell, Evidence that Demands a Verdict
• C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain
• C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
• Talbot School of Theology, Biola University, Christian Apologetics

Atheists Finding God book by host Jana Harmon https://sidebstories.com/atheistsfindinggod/

Former atheist Dr. Alister McGrath dismissed Christianity and embraced science as the only way to understand the world until he began to see problems with this limiting view. Once he opened the door to alternative views, he found the biblical worldview provided a more comprehensive and grounded view of the world and of himself.

Alister’s website: http://alistermcgrath.weebly.com/

For more stories of atheists and skeptics converting to Christianity, visit www.sidebstories.com

Episode Transcript

Hello and thanks for joining in. I’m Jana Harmon, and you’re listening to Side B Stories, where we see how skeptics flip the record of their lives. Each podcast, we listen to someone who has once been an atheist or skeptic but who became a Christian against all odds. You can hear more of our stories on our website at www.sidebstories.com or through our YouTube channel. We welcome your comments on these stories on our Facebook page, and you can also email us directly at [email protected]. We do love hearing from you.

In the world of ideas, some people are experts in their field. They are scientists or historians, theologians or philosophers. They have a particular understanding of the world from their unique expertise, academic training, and personal perspectives. Sometimes, however, a concentration on one area of thought can skew the vision of the whole. The risk is that some become so specialized that all other sources of knowledge become subdued to their own unique slice of understanding of the world. With expertise in one area, it can become harder to see how that one piece of the puzzle relates to the bigger picture of reality. It can lead to a false confidence that their small area of knowledge explains the whole when perhaps it may not.

In our podcast today, you’ll hear from former atheist Dr. Alister McGrath, who holds three PhDs from Oxford, one in science, one in theology, and another in intellectual history. He’s also the author of more than fifty books. Although he dismissed belief in God due to his belief in science and the naturalistic worldview, he changed his mind. Now, he is one of the world’s greatest proponents of the necessary integration of a wide range of knowledge in order to best understand and explain what we observe in the world and in ourselves. And because of his broad academic accomplishments and years of coursing through the strengths and weaknesses of diverse ideas, including atheism and naturalism, he has the unique ability to see the big picture, integrating sub-specialties into a whole and making sense of all of reality. Through his erudite mind, he contends that the Christian worldview is not only the best explanation for what we see and experience in the world, it also provides the best story for our lives. In his view, the Christian story best answers the big questions of who we are and why we’re here. It best fulfills our deepest longings, as compared to other worldviews. I hope you’ll come along today to hear his story of moving from atheism to Christianity.

Dr. McGrath is also going to introduce us to his new forthcoming book, Coming to Faith through Dawkins. Many of you might recognize the name Dawkins as referring to Richard Dawkins, a recognized biologist and one of the four horsemen of the New Atheist Movement. This book is filled with twelve stories of former skeptics and atheists who were once enthusiasts for the claims and the writings of the New Atheists, but they became disillusioned by the arguments and conclusions of Dawkins, causing them to look deeper and with more objectivity at religious faith and became Christians. They became convinced that the authentic Christian faith is in fact more intellectually convincing and robust than atheism. I’m looking so forward to today’s podcast.

Welcome to Side B Stories, Dr. McGrath. It’s so great to have you.

Well, I’m delighted to be here. Thank you very much for having me as a guest on your program.

Terrific. As we’re getting started, Dr. McGrath, you come to the table with much gravitas, I must say. And I would love for our listeners to know exactly a bit about your academic background, your three PhDs at Oxford. You’re an author of over fifty books. There’s so much to say, but I also know that you have a new book coming out, Coming to Faith through Dawkins. So could you introduce us a little bit to who you are, your academic background, and even your new book?

Yes. I’d be delighted to do that. I’m a person who began as an atheist and a scientist, and then I went to Oxford University and began to realize that things weren’t quite as straightforward as I thought. I was an atheist when I was a teenager. I thought life was very, very simple, that science disproved God. I came to Oxford, discovered it wasn’t really quite that simple, so I discovered Christianity, and that was wonderful. And then I moved on from there to begin to explore the relationship between science and Christianity, eventually studying theology, and then moving on to begin a detailed study of the Christian faith and also learning how to teach it. I think that was very, very important for me, because being able to teach faith is really important. It helps to understand what’s really important and what really matters.

And, as you say, I’ve written lots of books, including textbooks, but the most recent book I’ve written is this very interesting account of how a lot of people in effect felt moved to read Richard Dawkins’ book The God Delusion, and then, when they began to read it, discovered it didn’t make sense at all and actually that it seemed to be rather inadequate and instead discovered Christianity. So we’ll talk about that later, but that was a very exciting project.

That’s really wonderful. So, let’s get back into your story. You encapsulated it there, as an atheist who came to Christ, but let’s start at the beginning of your story, because, as you know, we all embrace a story with our world, with our worldview, and I wonder of the worldview in which you were brought into the world. Talk to us about your childhood, where you were born, your family. Was God part of your family? Was Christianity or worship in any way a part of your world?

Well, I was born in Northern Ireland back in 1953, which is a long time ago. And my family were conventionally religious. I suppose that’s the best way of putting it. And I couldn’t see what faith was all about. It made no sense to me at all. What I discovered as I was growing up was that I was really interested in the natural world around. In other words, I really knew I wanted to be a scientist. I think that was a thing that really drove me. And as a teenager, I think I bought into this idea that science and religion were at war with each other. And therefore, if I wanted to be a scientist, I had to say no to God, no to religion. And I did so without really having looked at that critically, so I did that and became very involved in atheism. I became interested in Marxism, which gave added intellectual resilience to my atheism.

And then I began to have some doubts about my atheism as I prepared for moving up to university. I think that it seemed to me initially that things were very, very simple, that atheism was just the obviously right position for a thinking person. And I then began to realize there are problems here. I mean, I believed there was no God, but I couldn’t prove there was no God. It was a faith position. And that rather unsettled me. And so I began to realize that things were just not as simple as I had thought. So-

Oh, okay-

So I said, “Well, look, when I get to Oxford University, I’ll sort everything out,” but it didn’t work out the way I expected it to.

Wow! Okay. There was a lot there. I’d love to slow walk through a lot of that. Let’s go back to even when you were starting to question your Christian… you said the conventions of Christianity in which you were raised. You started to question that. You started to doubt that, as it sounds like a teenager or in your earlier years, when you started encountering science. Let’s kind of camp out there for a minute. What was it about science that you understood at that time in your life that was incompatible or made you push back against your Christian upbringing, as it were?

I think the key thing was this: Science proves everything. Religion, Christianity, just asserts various things and isn’t able to prove it. So I think I was intolerant of uncertainty. I wanted to be sure about things. And therefore I wanted to inhabit a world where I could know everything for certain. And so I think that led me to the conclusion that science would be able to answer all of my questions. And if it couldn’t answer my questions, then they weren’t real questions in the first place. So I think that was the really important thing. It wasn’t so much that science disproved Christianity. It was that it offered a different quality of knowledge, much more secure, much more reliable. And that’s what I was looking for, something that was safe and secure.

Okay. So would you say that they were, in that sense, non-overlapping magisteria, in that Christianity and God and that world, they, like you said, made assertions, but they weren’t seemingly grounded in as concrete a way as what you could find in the sciences. So it sounds as if you were moving toward more of a scientific view or lens of the world, but, with Christianity, was that something that you weren’t dismissing? You were just saying that it perhaps didn’t give as substantive answers as science, so you were turning your attention to something else. It wasn’t as if you immediately went into atheism. That form of knowledge was not as robust or confidence building as what you could find in science.

I think, to begin with, it was exactly as you’ve described, that in effect my initial feeling was, “I want something that is reliable, that I can trust, that can, in effect, give me secure answers.” And that was saying, “Well, Christianity is a different kind of thing.” But then I began to buy into this idea which I heard from many people, which was that Christianity and science were incompatible, that they were at war with each other. And that moved me in a slightly different direction. In other words, saying, “Well, look if I love science, I cannot be a religious person, because these are incompatible. They’re at war with each other.” Now, you might reasonably say, “Well, where did you get that idea from?” Well, it was in the intellectual and cultural environment. I just bought into it rather uncritically, and in fact, I spent the rest of my life kind of undoing that. But I think it was very, very… That was a very widespread perception at the time, and certainly I bought into that. So in many ways what you could say is, I began, in effect, by saying, “I’m looking for secure knowledge, and I don’t think Christianity gives it, but that doesn’t make Christianity wrong. Science gives that to me.” And then, taking this one stage further and saying, in effect, “Because science is so good and because science and faith are incompatible, that means I have to choose. It’s one or the other. I choose science.” So I think that’s really the kind of teenage logic that lay behind my decision.

So when you embraced science then as incompatible with religion or faith, then did you, at that time, label yourself or identify as a naturalist, a materialist, an atheist, even in your teenage years?

Yes. I did self identify as an atheist. I would say, “I’m an atheist.” And I would make it quite clear that I was saying not that I don’t believe in God, but I believe there is no God. It was a much more positive, aggressive form of atheism. And I think also there’s a cultural element here, which is I found religion rather stuffy back in Ireland. And proclaiming myself as an atheist kind of gave a sort of frisson, a sort of edge to life. I felt I had a sense of superiority over other people because I was intellectually superior. Now I know that sounds very, very arrogant but that’s the way I was back then, when I was a teenager, and it seemed to me atheism put me on the right side of history. Back in the late 1960s, that was the way things seemed to be going, and I wanted to be part of a movement that had a future. So there are a whole series of things, science and culture coming together and moving me in that direction.

Culturally speaking, there was a lot of religious unrest in Ireland. Did that feed into your perspective of: “Religion perhaps may not be true, and it may not also be good.”

I think you’re right. I think that one of the thoughts I had was this: In the late 1960s, religious violence did become a problem in Northern Ireland. My logic went like this: If there was no religion, there’d be no religious violence, so get rid of religion, all the world’s problems are solved. So it was very simple. In fact, it was really very simplistic, but that’s the way I thought at that time. So in many ways, I think I was kind of, in a way, buying into a number of reasons why I fought religion was wrong. Violence and inability to intellectually justify itself. And also this perception: Science and religion are incompatible.

So I felt I was moving to an intellectually coherent position which was a stable position. And that’s one of the reasons why I think I did not expect to review my positions at all as we moved ahead.

So yes, it felt like a safe, secure perspective. As you say, I think it’s often the case that those who are intellectually driven find that atheism or at least presume that atheism is a more intellectually superior position as well. And that I’m sure in some ways felt, as well as the way that you thought, that it was the right place to be for you.

I think that’s right. I think that I felt, “This is the right place to be,” and more than that, that I’d sorted this question out, that I now know what I think, and I won’t need to revisit this question. So I thought that I’d closed down the discussion and could move on to other things.

So at that time, when you had decided that science was the direction you wanted to go, what did you think religion was, other than it may be potentially dangerous? But how did you perceive Christians, Christianity, during that time?

I had read some Sigmund Freud, and I knew about this idea of religion being a wish fulfillment. And that seemed to me to be a self-evident truth, that actually religious people were inadequate people who in effect needed something to give them stability and security, and there was no God, so they invented a God. And I thought, “Well, that’s all right for them, but I don’t need this.” Now the problem was that, deep inside me somewhere, I think something said to me, “Maybe atheism is your wish fulfillment,” in other words that actually maybe I was constructing a worldview that suited me, rather than one that was true. Now, that thought went through my mind several times, but I did not follow through on it, I think partly because I found it a little bit disturbing. I thought I sorted everything out. I didn’t want to reopen the question.

Yes. And when you close the door on another worldview and think you leave the superstition behind, it’s not something you want to reopen, in a sense. I can imagine there would be some resistance to that. As you were pursuing what seemed to be a very positive aspect of being grounded in the naturalistic worldview, did you… I mean you’re obviously a very intellectually driven, logical, analytical person. Did you look at the logical implications of that worldview? You obviously were very well read. I’m sure you read Russell and Nietzsche and those people who actually understood that all that glitters is not gold, in a sense. There are some dark sides or despairing sides if you embrace fully the naturalistic worldview.

Well, I agree with you completely. What I realized was atheism was very bleak. It was very austere. There’s no real meaning in life. What you see is what you get. But actually I persuaded myself that, because it was bleak, I had accepted it because it was right. In other words, there was nothing to attract me to this position. I’d accepted it simply because it’s intellectually right, and therefore, in effect, there was no benefit to me in doing this at all. I simply being moved by its truthfulness. Now, of course, one of the things that began to trouble me a little bit by 18 years old is, “Well, have I really been as critical about atheism as I was about my early viewpoint?” And of course the answer is no. That kind of why I had bought into this was because it seemed to me to be progressive, it seemed to me to be what the future was going to hold, and some rather clever people I knew held this position as well.

But I think I did have face up to the fact that if atheism was right then life was pointless. There was nothing to do, really, other than trying to make the world a better place and live a good life. But deep down I had this nagging feeling. “I don’t think it’s quite as simple as this,” but I didn’t have a way forward. I felt, “This is where I’m going to stay, and therefore I’ve got to face up to the fact it’s bleak, it’s austere, but that’s the way things are.”

So you had to, in a sense, live with this dissonance, whether it’s cognitive dissonance or existential dissonance or something that you had a deep longing, perhaps, for something more, but that’s just the way that it was. And you were sober minded, and you were intellectually honest, so you wanted to maintain this path that you had set yourself on, I guess. So how long did you live in this, in a sense, state of tension? Or did you ever start questioning naturalism itself?

I think I stayed in that position for about two years. And I think that there were a number of things that made me realize, “This position might not be right,” but that didn’t immediately mean I was moving towards Christianity. It just meant, “Maybe this position isn’t as safe as I thought it was.” And I got a place to study chemistry at Oxford University, got a scholarship to go there, and while I was waiting to go to Oxford, I began to read some books on the history and philosophy of science, and one of the things that troubled me was that I began to realize that many scientific theories that people had thought were secure or were right were subsequently abandoned because they were seen to be wrong. And so I began to realize, “What about what we presently believe? What will happen then? Will, in the future, somebody say, ‘Well, we used to think they were right, but they’re wrong actually.’” And I began to realize science was rather more uncertain than I had realized. I think that began to make me realize that perhaps things were not as simple as I had thought.

And also, alongside that, I began to realize that I could not prove that atheism was right. I think that’s a very important point, because I had told myself this is right. But every now and then I’d say, “Well, how can I prove that to myself or to somebody else?” and the answer came back, “Well, actually you can’t.” And I began to realize actually it was a form of faith. “I believe there is no God, but I can’t prove that,” and so it seemed to me I had simply chosen a different faith position, which made me realize, “Maybe there are other faiths I should be thinking about, but up to this point hadn’t really considered at all.” But that was really as far as I got, because I thought, “Look, when I go to Oxford University, there’ll be lots of clever people there. They can help me sort myself out. And I’m sure they’ll be able to resolve all these questions, and then I can be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.” But that didn’t work out like that.

I’m curious. There are a lot of clever people at Oxford. I wondered if there were any clever Christian people who were also scientists who were in your world who could give you an embodied example of someone who actually was intelligent yet embraced God and science at the same time.

Well, the answer is, once I got to Oxford, I discovered lots of people like that. One thing that I began to realize was actually there were lots of very intelligent scientists who were also Christians who could give very good reasons for saying there isn’t a problem here. And I hadn’t really met people like this before. So the personal witness of these people was very significant and saying to me, “You may have got this wrong. You may have, in effect, not thought this thing through properly. You’ve got some rethinking to do.” So I think that was a very important moment for me as I began to realize that perhaps I’d been a little bit precipitate in my judgments, that perhaps there was more to be said about this. And I think that really began this process of rethinking and reconsideration, which eventually led me to embrace Christianity.

Before, Christianity was, in a sense, wishful thinking. That was the category you had for it in your mind. So I would imagine moving from that place intellectually to a place where you could actually believe it as something that represents reality in some way would have been a process. It sounds like you are, again, an intellectually honest enough person that you wouldn’t believe it just because it sounded good. It had to be substantive or robust in some way in relating to reality. It had to be true.

That’s quite right. And I think there are two things here: One was that these were intelligent people I was meeting. And it was obvious to me their faith was real. That in effect it was something that had captured them, that had animated them, that was giving them purpose and direction. So it made me realize there were some very intelligent people who clearly saw this as meaningful and were able to live this out. So again, you know, personal witness, embodied witness. “Here is someone who has internalized this and is living this out.” That was very important because I tend to think of religion as kind of thinking certain things, but it makes no difference to you. But these people were saying, “No, no. It changes my life. It gives me a reason to live,” and really living this out. So that side of things was very important.

But also, I think, beginning to express the questions that were bothering me and realizing that actually there were answers to these questions. Maybe not always ones that I could entirely accept, but really there were answers there. And I began to realize that I had kind of not really encountered Christianity in its most vigorous forms, that actually I had rejected, if you like, a misunderstanding or a caricature or a diluted version of the real thing.

So that’s always been very important for me now. When someone says to me, “Alister, we don’t think Christianity is up to much,” my primary question is going to be, “Well, have you understood what it really is? Let me tell you.” Because very often people misunderstand or perhaps misrepresent, but they don’t really get what this is all about. And I think, for me, discovering what Christianity really is, about the head and the heart, I think it’s very, very important, not simply for our own personal lives of faith, but also in trying to explain to people outside the realm of faith what Christianity is all about and the difference that it makes.

So I think you’re very, very right about that, that oftentimes Christianity is caricatured and reductionistic in the way that people perceive it as almost a throwaway and a dismissal without really looking at the robust nature of it. Again, to kind of tease some of this out, when you started questioning naturalism. I mean, there are a lot of assertions and presumptions, I guess, that are made by those who are atheists or naturalists that in a sense science will provide the answers. What things about naturalism in and of itself were causing you to question it that also helped you open the door towards a better or more full explanation?

I think there are a number of things that did trouble me. One was that naturalism does raise a lot of questions. And you’ve mentioned several of them. Why is there something rather than nothing? What about the capacity of a human mind to make sense of things? I mean, you can say, from a naturalist perspective, that the way your mind works might be understandable. But that doesn’t necessarily mean it finds its way to the right conclusion. So I found myself wondering if, in effect, naturalism was a kind of circular way of thinking, which in effect had to presuppose its own conclusions. And so I found myself worried by that. But I think also one of the things that really, I think, brought this home to me is that science is simply unable to answer many of the deepest questions of the human heart and the human mind. And you know, if these are valid questions, and they must be valid because we have raised them as thinking human beings, then perhaps the inability of naturalism to answer them, other than saying, “Well, you know, that’s the way nature works,” suggests that naturalism isn’t adequate, that more needs to be said.

So I think, for me, really I began to think we need more than the natural sciences, we need more than naturalism if we are going to make sense of our world. I think the problem I had was that I found there were different kinds of naturalism. The form I rejected very strongly was my core dogmatic naturalism, that there is only the natural world, and that is it. I could understand somebody saying that there is a natural world and that is our most secure form of understanding. But for me, even built into human nature is this deep desire to ask questions, the kind of thing that C.S. Lewis talks about in his argument for design. We have a sense that there’s something beyond, there’s something really significant that we haven’t grasped yet. And all a naturalist can say is, “Well, that’s just delusion.” But it’s a very important delusion. And if we’re thinking those thoughts, maybe we’re meant to be thinking those thoughts, maybe they’re clues to the meaning of the universe.

So for me, naturalism was really inadequate. It seemed to, in effect, shut down questions before you really got into getting good answers. So I began to look for better answers than that.

You know, Lewis is so amazing, but even rationality itself, he elucidates that there’s not even grounds for your own rational thoughts if you are coming from a naturalistic worldview. There are so many presumptions that are made that we are rational beings. And this is the most reasoned way to look at the world, naturalism, but yet they can’t ground their own rationality itself. Or the predictability or rationality of the universe, the intelligibility of the universe. How do we even conduct science if there’s no predictable, rational, intelligible universe, and where does that come from? How do we explain that? But yet there are a lot of things that are taken for granted within the naturalistic worldview that are not explainable apart from a transcendent source that informs reality itself. So those were the kind of things that were causing you to question, I presume.

Well certainly those questions were all going round in my mind. And I would add one more. And it’s this: Science has to work on the basis of the uniformity of nature. But how do we know that’s right? In effect, one of these assumptions we have to make, which we can’t actually show to be right or prove to be right, we have to make that assumption. And it helped me to really understand that there were certain grounding assumptions we have to make that we can’t prove to be true, but nevertheless we think are reliable. And I began thinking that that’s also true about God, actually. This is a grounding assumption, and it makes complete sense of everything. And if it makes so much sense, why not just say, “Look, it’s right. Let’s step into that way of thinking and see where it takes us.”

So as you were observing this embodied Christianity that was… they were intelligent, and it was informing their life, and you were seeing something different. I presume that you were seeing the holistic nature of how things can all fit together, heart and mind, but also the fullness of the universe and how it explains all of reality. Can you… for those who are listening, I’m sure there are some thinking, “Well, how can Christianity explain all of reality? That’s not what Christianity does.” But yet all of these big questions, whether they’re in the universe or in our own humanity, it does seem, when you look at it fairly, that it does provide the best explanation for what we observe, both in the cosmos and universe and in our own humanity. I think you’re probably one of the best people to understand the fullness of the whole story of Christianity and how it explains life and all that we know it in the best possible way.

Well, I think I draw a lot on G.K. Chesterton and C.S. Lewis, who I think are very good at making this point, that Christianity gives us a big picture. It’s not just saying, “This is right. That’s right.” It’s saying, “Here’s a way of looking at things which makes sense of the world and makes sense of us.” And in many ways faith is about stepping into that big picture and experiencing and realizing how well it works out and how well it can be lived out. And to me that’s very, very important. In fact, it says to us, “Look, things make sense. The world is coherent. You can live life out.” In fact, your individual story is given meaning and dignity and purpose by the bigger story of God Who created us and redeemed us. So it’s very much about realizing that actually Christianity makes sense of our world and makes sense of you. And for me, that’s one of the things that’s so important. Christianity gives us a lens through which we can look at our world and ourselves, and it brings things into focus.

And for a lot of people, they are looking at the world through the wrong lens. Richard Dawkins says when you look at the world, you don’t see any purpose or meaning, but he’s using the wrong lens to look through. That’s why I think it’s helpful to think of Christianity as a lens that brings things into focus, that gives you this better quality of vision, that allows you to see things as they really are and figure out how you fit into this big picture.

Yeah. That’s beautifully said. So as you were back at Oxford, and you were wrestling with these questions, how did you start investigating Christianity or taking it seriously? How did you pursue that? Was it through reading? Was it through looking at the Bible? Was it through having conversations with other intelligent Christians? How did that look? How did you start to make those changes or transitions? How were you questing towards truth?

I think all of those things you just mentioned were part of the picture. I was talking to Christian friends. I was reading the Bible. I was going to talks. I was thinking about things. And I think that what really helped me was beginning to realize that, first of all, I had misunderstood what Christianity was, and secondly, beginning to find those questions I had about it were resolved.

For example, here’s one of them: One of the arguments I had against Christianity was, “Look, God’s in heaven, wherever that is. And I’m here on earth, in space and time. And I do not see how God being in heaven can be of any relevance to me here on earth.” And I think one of the things that my Christian friends explained to me is the idea of the incarnation, that God enters into this world in Christ, comes into our world to redeem us and to show us what He’s like and tell us what’s right. And I began to realize, “If that is right, that makes sense of so much.” And also, it tells us about a God Who cares for us, Who loves us, Who comes to where we are, to bring us where He is. And that really made a very, very big difference to me.

So there are a whole series of things going on, but really important was this constant dialogue with my Christian friends, who helped answer my questions, who moved me along, and then I think I got to the point where I felt, “I now know enough. I know understand enough. I can step into this worldview and say, ‘I want to be part of that.’” So that was a very important step in my life, where I said, “I can now see this is where I belong,” I stepped into that world of faith, and I’ve been there ever since. And love it.

For someone who you said had a very positive sensibility that God did not exist, and then you were entertaining the idea that perhaps God did exist, were you convinced of that through understanding the cosmological argument? Or was it more questioning naturalism and its inadequacies? Or did you entertain positive arguments for the existence of God? Those kinds of things? Or did it just cohere and make sense when you’re looking at the bigger picture and how the presence of God does provide the best explanation for even how we do science? Everything, it just fit together. It wasn’t a particular, let’s say, argument to prove God’s existence.

I think it was the big picture argument. In other words, if there is a God, and if this God is like what we read in the Bible, then that makes so much sense of things, including why science works so well and what its limits are. In other words, you come to realize that the fact that science works so well is grounded in the Christian doctrine of creation. But you also realize there are lots of questions science cannot answer, like, “Why am I here? What’s the point of life?” As so I began to realize, if you like, whereas I had thought I had to choose either religion or science, and it’s going to be science, that actually, if I chose God, then I didn’t have to give up on science, because it actually made an awful lot of sense of science but helped me to recognize there were limits to naturalism and that those limits were, in effect, dealt with by the Christian faith. And therefore it seemed to me I now had a full, reliable, comprehensive way of making sense of myself in the world and also living meaningfully within it.

So it was a very wonderful feeling. It’s like you’re taking a set of spectacles. You look through two lenses. You see things stereoscopically, in depth. So for me science and faith gave me that depth of vision which I felt really helped me understand why God was so important to understanding this world.

Yes, yes. Again, I just love the cohesive, the whole-story understanding of reality and your life within it and even our understanding of everything in the world through that lens. Did you ever question the integrity or reliability of scripture as you started to read it? There’s so much skepticism about the Bible, and I know you’re very aware of that, and so that people dismiss it and say that it’s not worthy of belief because of all manner of reasons. But did that skepticism inform your reading of the Bible? Or were you just coming into it, looking at it again more holistically, like this story… it informs reality in the best way, but in a sense, again drawing C.S. Lewis into this, it’s not just a myth, it is the true myth. It is the one that’s not only a good story that informs all of reality, it’s historically grounded, it’s reliable, it’s believable for good reason.

Well, I think it’s more the kind of ideas you were talking about, the end of what you were saying, where I wasn’t really reading the Bible skeptically. I was reading it in a sort of way of trying to grasp what it was all about. And inviting my Christian friends to tell me what they saw there because I was a novice to reading the Bible. I realized I needed help to get it right, to know what to look for. I think that that is very important. We need to read the Bible in company, so actually, we are able to see things that others have seen that otherwise we might miss. I think I was worried that if I read the Bible in a very untutored way, I might misread. But I did read the Gospel of Mark shortly after I decided to commit myself to Christianity and found that illuminating in so many ways, in terms of the emphasis on the need for repentance to see things properly and in terms also of the impact that Christ has on people.

Now, of course I had questions, like: What does this mean? What does that mean? And I would ask my friends lots of difficult questions, and they go a bit impatient with me and eventually said, “Why don’t you start reading C.S. Lewis?” And so, when I took that advice and began to do that, actually that really helped. He was a wonderful tie to help me find my way and go much deeper into my new faith.

And obviously you’ve gone very deep into a faith that is far from new anymore. In your career, in a sense, you’ve gone on to write and debate and the foremost atheists in the world, I guess revealing the inadequacies of New Atheism and naturalism. the resistant would say, “Oh, there’s no evidence. Science still is the winner here. There is no God,” but yet, like I say, you have debated and conversed with those from other worldviews, particularly atheism, for years. So I’m wondering how you consider that. Why is it that sometimes, for some, the evidence is convincing? They can see the fullness of the Christian world as a greater explanation for themselves in the world. But then there are others who remain in a resistant, closed-door perspective.

I think that’s a very good question. And I think that one of the big issues here is that, for a lot of people, they do not want there to be a God. They want, in effect, to be the captains of their souls. They want to be in charge. They don’t want anyone else to be able to tell them what is right, what is wrong. They want to make up their own minds on everything. And C.S. Lewis was like that. When he was an atheist, he said, “I don’t want God to interfere with me, and I want to be my own master.” But one of the things I’ve found is that, being someone who used to be an absolutely certain atheist, who began to realize things were more complicated, that kind of helps me begin to challenge this assumption of atheist superiority. And one of the things I’ve discovered in debating atheists is that very often they use criteria to assess Christianity that they do not apply to their own beliefs.

And so, very often, someone like Richard Dawkins will say to me, “Well, prove that you are right.” And my response would be, “Well, I’m happy to try and do that, but you’re going to have to prove to me that you are right.” You can’t just say that it’s enough to argue that Christianity is wrong. You’ve got to persuade me you are right. And of course, that’s a problem with New Atheism. This is what I call an epistemic asymmetry. They, in effect, do not apply the same standards to their own beliefs, that they apply to other people’s. And when you press them and say, “Why do you believe that? How do you know that is right?” Well, in the end, they have to say, “Well, we don’t know.” I mean a very interesting debate at Oxford about 2012, between Rowan Williams, then Archbishop of Canterbury, and Richard Dawkins, was all about this. And actually halfway through the debate, Dawkins said, “Well, I suppose I’m an agnostic, really, because I just can’t prove that there’s no God.” And that’s very, very revealing, because of course, his whole case is built on the rationality of atheism, but he cannot show it’s right.

I think that is very, very important. We do need to ask those hard questions. And the other thing I’ve found very, very often is that actually many atheist authors have a very inadequate grasp of what Christianity actually is. And very often you can disarm stereotypes and say, “Well, look, maybe that’s what somebody’s told you, but that’s not right. Let me tell you what it really is like.” And so you take it from there. So I do need to reassure your listeners. There’s a lot we can say here, partly by saying, “Why are you right? Prove to me that you are right?” And also by saying, “Look, I don’t think you quite get what Christianity is all about. Let me try and tell you why it makes so much sense to me.”

I think you’re so right about that. It oftentimes seems that people are very intent on saying what they don’t believe, Christianity or God, but they don’t really know exactly what they do believe. And they put the burden of proof on the believer, right? And they don’t recognize. They lack a belief in God, they say, so they don’t bear the burden of proof, but there’s an implicit understanding that they do believe something, and they believe that God doesn’t exist, and there are implications for that and beliefs that come along with that. That only nature exists, right? So I appreciate your counsel there. If there was a skeptic who was listening in, Dr. McGrath, and he’s thinking, “Wow! Dr. McGrath is really, really bright. He’s debated the best and the brightest on the other side, but yet, here he is defending the substance of the Christian worldview.” And they may actually be willing to open the door to the possibility of God’s existence and Christianity’s truth. How would you encourage that skeptic to make a step forward towards exploring the possibility of belief?

If I were to say to that skeptic…. If you were an atheist, I would simply say to you, “Can you prove that is right?” Now, you won’t be able to do it, and the best minds in the world are trying to do that. And very often, what many of my atheist friends will do is use rhetoric to justify their position. “Only a thinking person can be an atheist,” or, “Only a fool would believe in God.” In other words, they’re not arguing. They’re asserting. They’re making rhetorical judgments. I want you to just ask yourself, in the depths of your heart, “Can you show that you are right? Prove that you are right?” Because if you cannot, then you have a belief system. And what I want to say to you is that it’s the nature of human beings that we have to believe certain things we can’t prove to be true. And once you realize that your atheism is a belief, I want to invite you to ask whether there might be better beliefs. Beliefs that, yes, can’t be proved to be true but actually might give you better answers, might open up a better way of thinking, because many atheists I know will say, “I cannot be religious because it involves belief.” Your atheism already is a belief. My invitation is to try some other beliefs. I’m going to tell you that Christianity will give you lots to think about. And in my case, I can tell you, in effect, give you a transformed vision of yourself and the world. I just want to invite you to think about stepping inside Christianity and seeing what it’s like and just asking what might it be like to live there.

Yeah. That’s good. That’s very, very good advice. Just giving it a chance, really, to see through a different pair of lens or glasses, I guess, to try that on. So, again, you have been such a wonderful example for us as Christians in coming forward and speaking truth and with boldness and clarity into a world and into a culture that does not always want to embrace it. And I wonder if, again, from your experience, how would you encourage us as Christians to best engage? I know you’ve spoken a little bit about good question asking and sharing the burden of proof with the other. And I also think of those embodied Christians at Oxford that really gave you a beautiful example of what being a brilliant scientist and a Christian could look like. But it required you being with them, right? And having conversations with them and seeing how that can actually work out its way in your heart and mind in real life. So how would you encourage us to Christians to engage with those who don’t believe?

Well, I think I’m going to say two things: One is that there’s a danger that we’ll come across as being critical. In effect, we’re saying, “We’re right. You’re wrong.” I think it’s very helpful to use the language of exploring. In other words, “I’m going to share with you what my faith is all about, and I’m just going to tell you how I found the difference it makes to me. And, you know, at this stage I’m not saying it’s right. I’m just saying let’s explore together. I’m going to tell you the difference it makes to me. And I’m going to invite you to think about, as I talk to you, whether you feel you can say the same about your naturalism or your atheism, whether it, in effect, gives you the same basis for living, reason for hoping that I’m describing to you now.” I think that’s a very important point.

The second point I’m going to make is this: Very often people have kind of picked up from the wider culture a very distorted idea about what Christianity is all about. So I think what you may need to do is just say, “Let me tell you very simply what I think Christianity is all about, what it means to me and the difference it makes.” And you’ll find your friends will listen to you. What you’re doing is in effect giving a testimony. But the testimony you’re giving is not simply, “I think this is right,” but, “I think this is real.” In other words, it makes a difference to me. It gives me a reason to hope. It gives me a reason to live. It helps me to position myself. One of the points I found in talking to many atheists is they feel, “Well, actually, I may be right, but it doesn’t do any of these things for me.” And therefore, in effect, introducing these new set of questions. Is this real? Does it give me a reason to hope? Does it, in effect, give me a new sense of purpose and direction? These can be ways that may not in effect change somebody’s life, but they might be questions that open up recesses in their minds where a transition can take place.

So don’t be discouraged if you get nowhere. Just feel you’ve planted some seeds, and in the Lord’s good time, these will grow if they’re meant to.

Yes. Again, a very good word. I think sometimes we’re so keen on trying to prove ourselves or to be right, like you say, but to your point, I think, especially in today’s culture, where there’s such a crisis of meaning and purpose and we’re seeing that everywhere, it’s not just trying to communicate that God exists, but that God matters. It matters, and it makes a difference. And it’s based on something real and true. So thank you so much. That’s just very, very wise counsel. Before we end, Dr. McGrath, is there anything you think I might have missed in your story that you wanted to say or anything else you wanted to add to the end of our conversation?

Well, I’ve very much enjoyed our conversation. I think I might just end by going back to this book, Coming to Faith through Dawkins, because it’s a very interesting book because it’s a story of twelve people who read The God Delusion and found it played a major role in bringing them to faith. Now I think that’s very significant, because what happened was they realized, “This book isn’t actually very good. The arguments don’t stack up. That Christianity clearly isn’t what they say it is.” And in effect, they went away from reading Dawkins saying, “We’ve got to look at this more closely. We’re going to read Christian books. We’re going to talk to our Christian friends and see where this takes us.” These are stories of coming to faith through Dawkins. I think that’s really interesting and really encouraging, because it means that each of us can tell our stories, and those may help other people come to faith.

I would encourage everyone to take a look at that. I presume that they can just get it online anywhere? Amazon or whatnot. So that’s Coming to Faith through Dawkins, right? So thank you so much, Dr. McGrath. It has been rich and a wealth of knowledge and wisdom, I think, more than that. You come to the table, like I say, with so much gravitas, and we are so grateful to hear your wisdom and your wise counsel, and more than that, just to see a transformed life, that God has done something extraordinary in you and through you, and we’re so grateful to you. So thank you so much again for coming on.

It’s been my pleasure. Thank you very much for having me.

Wonderful.

Thanks for tuning in to Side B Stories to hear Dr. Alister McGrath’s story. You can find out more about his books, including Coming to Faith through Dawkins, in the episode notes. For questions and feedback about this episode, you may contact me through our email, at [email protected]. Also, if you’re a skeptic or atheist who would like to connect with a former guest with questions, please again contact us through email.

This podcast is produced through the C.S. Lewis Institute through the excellent work of our producer, Ashley Decker, and audio engineer Mark Rosera. You can also see these podcasts in video form through our YouTube channel, through the excellent work of our video editor, Kyle Polk. I hope you enjoyed it and that you’ll follow, rate, review, and share this podcast with your friends and social network. In the meantime, I’ll be looking forward to seeing you next time, where we’ll see how another skeptic flips the record of their life.

Former skeptic Loren Weisman rejected the Jewish beliefs of his youth to embrace atheism.  Although he encountered bad examples of Christianity in his search for truth, he looked past those experiences and found Christ.

Loren's Resources: https://www.lorenweisman.com

Resources/authors recommended by Loren:

The Case for Christ, Lee Strobel

Cold Case Christianity, J. Warner Wallace

I Don’t Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist Norman L. Geisler, Frank Turek

 

www.sidebstories.com

 

As a reminder, our guests not only tell their stories of moving from disbelief to belief in God and Christianity, at the end of each episode, these former atheists give advice to curious skeptics as to how they can best pursue the truth and reality of God. They also give advice to Christians as to how best to engage with those who don’t believe. I do hope you’re listening to the end to hear them speak from their wisdom and experience as someone who has once been a skeptic but who is now a believer.

There are different stories of reality, and we live within some narrative that defines who we are, how we got here, where we’re going, what’s broken, and how it can be fixed. Some stories are closer to truth than others. Sometimes we look at people who are living out of certain stories and beliefs and make a judgment about the truth of that story. If someone says they believe one thing, but their lives reflect something else, something that is rather unattractive and hypocritical, then those looking on often think that that story must not be good or true.

Many have rejected God because of bad experiences with or observations of people who say that they are Christians, but their words and actions don’t seem to line up with someone who’s supposed to be following Christ. In my research with fifty former atheists, right at half of them, 48% to 50%, said one of the reasons that they rejected belief in God was because of a perceived sense of hypocrisy among Christians. Of course, although someone’s behavior may not, and often doesn’t, align with their beliefs, it doesn’t mean that the beliefs themselves are not true, but hypocrisy can and does fuel reasons why people walk away from God.

In our story today, former atheist Loren Weisman encountered Christians who lived as if they were not. That is, their attitudes, words, and actions did not reflect well on their faith. Surprisingly, despite these bad experiences and exposures, Loren’s heart was open, and he was willing to seek towards truth to see past those negative examples to look towards Jesus. Now, Loren strives to live a life of authenticity and truth in order to be a positive, winsome ambassador for Christ. I hope you’ll come along to hear of his journey past the obstacle of hypocrisy to come to know the real and true Christ.

Welcome to Side B Stories, Loren. It’s great to have you with me today.

Thank you for bringing me on.

Terrific! As we’re getting started, let’s paint a picture for our listeners of who are a little bit. Give us an idea, Loren, a little bit about you, about your life now.

My life now. I'm a messaging and optic strategist for the Fish Stewarding group, and what I look at for this organization is how we share our story, how we share what we have for products, and looking a little deeper than the idea of here's how we market or advertise, but much more so how can we be heard organically, authentically, with authority, when a lot of people say a lot of things. So, to me, it's almost like the first step before marketing to know if that story is true, if it's moral, if it's honest, if it's real, and when we build that foundation, regardless of what we do or who we are, we're building on a rock and not on the sand.

Wow. Okay. That is very intriguing to me, especially in light of the story that you're going to give us today. If those values you hold dear are truth and transparency and authenticity, I'm anticipating an amazing story of your own. So let's go back. Paint a picture for us of your childhood. Talk to us about what your life was like and the family that you grew up in. Did you go to church? Was religion or God or any of that a part of that picture?

It wasn't. As you can probably assume from the last name, I grew up Jewish, Passover was fun. Hanukkah was presents and lights. I went to Sunday school, preparing for a bar mitzvah. I do remember being a little child and frightened and saying, “What happens when we die?” and being told nothing. That was a terrifying thing when I was smaller. I grew up in Amherst, Massachusetts, which is the center of a five-college circuit area. You had the University of Massachusetts, the Ivy League Amherst, Mount Holyoke, Smith, Hampshire. It was a very broad experience in growing up at that time.

And my parents, things did not go well with them. I make the joke of it was the uncommitted divorce that took many years. I think they got together and separated numerous times until finally divorcing a little bit later in my youngest years. But that back and forth was a bit of a thing. I'm sure that had a little bit more of an impact. I was a lot more emotional than my brother was. My brother seemed to hold it all in. I was emotional, and in some ways, I feel like that let it out. And, in growing up in that, I found the drums. And the drums were everything. I found the drums at 13. And I didn't want to do anything else. I had had a drum set from a neighbor for about two weeks, and nothing was interesting to me. I needed to be a drummer.

Mm. So it completely captured your heart, or your passion, immediately it sounds like.

Yeah.

So before we get into that and your musical career, so this home that you grew up in. You had a Jewish heritage, in the sense that you went through the motions of Shabbat and high holy days and bar mitzvahs and things like that. What was that to you? Was that just some tradition that your family took part in? Was there something real there? Or was it just something that you did?

I'm sure we'll go in later in the conversation, but I’ve kind of enjoyed sharing this quote a little bit, that I learned more when I became a Christian about Judaism than I ever learned about Judaism growing up steeped in it. And again, that's why kind of the first-gear Jew concept of, you know, Passover.

We would read about the sons and the Elijah cup. It would sit on the table, and we'd ask questions, and sometimes it was, “Oh, we're going to celebrate Shabbat,” but then we're not. And Hanukkah was lighting candles and even going to the synagogue occasionally. It was all very ethereal and not directed. When we were learning Hebrew—Hebrew school was on Wednesdays and Sundays, preparing for the bar mitzvah. And what we were learning inside of the Torah was how to read Hebrew and not understand the words that were written. So the focus in the Jewish community of Amherst, and I'm not trying to bad mouth, but it was a sense of, “Here’s the alef. Here’s the bet.” My Hebrew name is Eliezer Ben Shimol, and the most that I understood is that it's your name, son of your dad's name. And we'd sing the stories about Noah and the forty days, and we'd sing small things in the seven days of creation. But none of it was ever put together or delivered, even for a kids’ level, in anything that to me would plant seeds.

So would you say that these stories that you were taught, were they merely stories, some mythology? Or or did you think that there was some historical veracity behind them? Obviously, the Jewish people, over centuries, have been celebrating things like Passover, and that's historical, right? But I guess what I'm trying to ask is: Did you think that there was something real to even the Jewish God? Or was it just a story or a ritual?

During especially inside the separations, I wanted it to be real. It didn't feel it. It didn't exhibit anything. But it seemed very allegorical. It felt like, “Okay, maybe this is just a story to teach you a lesson.” And, “Okay, they're roaming around the desert for forty years.” None of it seemed anything outside of fiction. The closest that I had, my grandfather. I remember going with my grandfather a couple times to a synagogue. And the heart that he had in it, and the way he prayed, those were a little sparks of maybe there's something more. But then there were times years later, going like, “Maybe this is just kind of like a boys club or a thing to do.” It didn't feel rooted or anchored in anything beyond tradition.

Okay. All right. And how long did you stay… I know you mentioned that your parents divorced, and your mother had actually taken on a Jewish identity, I presume because of your father. So once they divorced and separated, did you continue in any kind of Jewish practice at all? Or was it just something you left behind once they separated?

Well, the bar mitzvah, which… and that was closer. I mean they had divorced finally shortly before, but the bar mitzvah was sort of like the out. It was, “You have to study,” and then it was Hebrew school and Sunday school and a Hebrew tutor, and getting everything ready for, I think it was June 13, 1989 or 1990. I can't remember exactly. It was getting the suit. It was inviting all these family people. I mean, even walking around the bar mitzvah afterwards, it was like it was for everybody but me. And, again, not trying to make it a selfish thing, but it represented, in a way, “I don't have to do this anymore.” And then I would go to synagogue for my grandfather, and I would do certain things, but I mean I was kind of skipping out on most of the Hanukkah stuff and Passover. Passover was kind of a weird thing at my family on my father's side of: It was the same jokes done each year. I mean, Passover at that time was a whole bunch of food with a pre-game of ritual tradition. And then find the afikomen and get a couple bucks, and it was very… I don't know And I'm not trying to disrespect my grandfather in any way, but it was just… it was out there to me.

So that was something that was easy to leave behind.

Oh, yes.

And your attention then turned towards the drums. So it sounds like that captured your full, or at least primary, attention. Talk to us about that part of your life, in adolescence. So you were kind of leaving this religious thing behind, and of course your parents had separated, and you're an adolescent, so that's a very interesting time of life for anyone. So talk to us about that part of your life.

There was a confidence, and there was a fun in the drums. I think I picked up the drums, and a couple months later, I had a girlfriend!

Oh, yeah! You were suddenly cool! Right?

Oh, yeah. It was great! So, you know, I don't know if I was shy as much as a little withheld, and the drums gave a confidence. And there was an assertiveness in, “I want to be a drummer.” And then I got to meet a girl. And then there was an opening of just a fun direction. I didn't want to be a lawyer like my father. It was just nothing. I mean, I would visit his office, and there was nothing about that that I enjoyed. I was looking at what different people were doing, and then some people would say, “Oh, you'll get into what you want to do later.” It was immediate. I mean, sitting at the drums, everything felt in place. And when I was playing the drums, the divorce wasn't an issue, or school wasn’t an issue, or God wasn't an issue, or…. You know, at that time, if we die and turn to dust, at least I have this time with the drums. And so the drums became everything to me.

So you had mentioned a couple of kind of big questions that you had asked as a child. What happens to you when you die? And that sort of thing. But you said, when you played the drums, it filled you with so much joy, and you were able to escape into it, essentially, for a while, and obviously you were very good at it. I mean obviously, with the breakup of your family and all of those big things that you deal with, Were you still asking some of those big questions? Or, I guess, was the drums just a way forward out and through all of that and to a different life?

It was both. I mean, the drums were a way forward. I had a great fear of death, and I had a misunderstanding about the universe, and I listened to the things that we learned about, and it didn't add up. And there was something that was just off, and it took me in later on, which made more sense in the apologetics journey later down the line.

But I remember being in eighth-grade science class and just the stories at that time about, “Well, everything's just been here, and it's always going to be here, and, oh, the sun will burn out.” So how did this happen? And these other elements about the Earth and these other things, they were bothering me. I mean, when I was in ninth grade, I remember—and again, I was tucked away in the world of drumming, but I found myself asking the questions of, “Well, if there's nothing, why do we have to be nice? Why can't we rob a bank? Where is this law set that, ‘Okay, so we have to follow these laws,’ and there's nothing?” And then, at the same time, this chaos theory that's been so scientifically explained, and yet, if there's nothing, why are we not in chaos?

And I think some of that was anger at the chaos of my parents and just watching relationships and watching things happen. I was, even as much as the pleasure that I got from the drums, I was angrier in that eighth, ninth, tenth, eleventh grade.

Yeah. Because obviously you had experienced some personal brokenness and chaos, I guess you could say, in your personal world. “If this is a godless world, what does it mean?” You know? Right and wrong, good and bad. Where does it all come from? How do things all fit together, whether it's in the universe or in the world or in my mind? Those are all big, big questions. So talk to us from there. What did your life look like as you were continuing to pursue music, I presume. Was that something you pursued professionally? Or what did that look like?

Yeah. I went to Berklee College of Music. Not the California one.

Right.

Berklee College of Music summer program. And after that, and for many of the drummers that I admired, they all went to Berklee. And I explained to my mother that I was going to apply to one college, and if I didn't get in, I’d get good enough to get in. And my plan was to go to Berklee.

I felt Berklee was where I belonged, where I wanted to be, and so I put all the eggs in one basket. I did get in, and I remember opening the letter and being like, “Okay, is this really stupid?” And I got the acceptance, and I make the joke about, if you graduate Berklee College of Music you become a professor or a teacher. If you drop out, you've got a chance of becoming a drummer, or a musician. And so I was only there for a couple semesters and began to work with different groups.

I only wanted to be that hired gun. And I learned about how there were other drummers covering Ringo Starr's parts for The Beatles, and I understood about The Beach Boys and all these people that were considered ghost musicians. And they would come in, and they would clean up things, and they would not get the popularity credit, but they get the call, and it became this idea that I really enjoyed, and then I began to meet more people, and I met guys that were becoming famous in Boston, and I liked the idea of the discretion, of the quiet, of the being behind the scenes.

I mean I enjoyed playing live, but I didn't need the credit or the popularity. And so it was a TV show and a movie theme. I got called in while a drummer was sick, and he got credit for it. But I got paid.

Right.

And then I became a contact. And then I began to build that life of being this behind-the-scenes guy. And it was a lot of fun. I mean it took a while to build, but to go in and have something… it was like trying new dishes or traveling to new places. I didn't know what the music required. I didn't know what the music was. I didn't know what had happened. I didn't know why I was coming in, and the other guy or girl was going out. So it was constantly exciting. It was all new. I look at some of my friends that are in bands that they've been in bands for thirty, forty years, and they play the same songs every night. God bless them for the money they've made, the chance they've had. I would have been bored out of my mind. And so to be able to jump in and almost play like the Columbo detective, of finding out what's missing, what went wrong, where does it need to go? And, you know, I'm out the door, and nobody knew I was there. It was a lot of fun.

I bet. I bet that was really exciting.

It allowed another side to see things, and even then, in some of the anger. I mean, not to point it. I did a Christian album. I’m not going to name the band right now, but I found myself, even in that anger based around faith of like, “If you are all you claim to be, how can you be this crass, this mean, this insulting? If you're preaching this whole love thing and then saying the things that you're saying….” I found so many people in that time turning me away from faith. And I mean like being mocked. I came in, and they're like, “Are you a Christian?” I’m like, “No.” And they’re like, “Okay, well, we need you for this.” And then I'm hearing Jewish jokes. And it didn't hurt that much because I wasn't that close to it, but to hear some of the mockery and some of the condescension that I was getting from Christian sources, made me go, “I want to stay as far away from this as possible.”

No doubt. And so, when you were being exposed to hypocritical forms of faith, and it just—I would imagine that it pushed you farther and farther from even considering God in any kind of a serious way. Did you label or identify at any point, as like, “I'm agnostic,” or, “I’m atheistic.” Did you ever take on that label or identity?

I took on atheist for a while, and then it was—I still remember. It was a recording session. I was sitting in a beautiful wooden drum room, and we were redoing a part. We had done a part the day before, and there was something off, and I was going to pack up my drums and return the next day to go over other stuff, not playing the drums. And I felt at that point: “Leave the drums. We're going to need to do this again.” And I came back the next day. It was one of my first real, what I look back on and think it may have been a spiritual experience with God. And I came back that next day, and I felt this gratitude for being there. I felt this gratitude for waiting. I felt this gratitude for the particular song, that just… it drew me in, and I felt this thing where it flipped the switch to me not saying it was the Christian God or the Jewish God or Buddha or anyone else, or Muslim. It was just a moment that made me question atheism, and it was a shift. I mean, it's interesting. I’ve forgotten many things. I can still remember seeing what I saw, where I was sitting, when I just had this moment and went more toward the agnostic of, “I think there's something out there. I don't think it lines up with this Jewish God or this Christian God or any of this, but this seems like something more.” And I felt like that was a moment.

Hmm. So what did you do? How did you respond? When you have those moments, an epiphany or a feeling or a sense that there's something more than the atheistic worldview, which is there is nothing beyond nature or matter. There is no God. So did that, in a sense, startle you in a way? Personally? Did it make you question your assumptions? Again, was there something arising up in you that said, “Well, maybe there is something more.” What did you do with that, essentially?

Well, it wasn't the best story in the end of it, because I tried to pray, and praying had been what it was when I was a little kid, where it just didn't make any sense with…. You know, your sort of TV dinner Jewish prayers. Read this prayer. Read this prayer. Read this prayer. So I tried to pray for a second and give thanks, and then it just felt stupid. And so I packed up my drums afterwards. I kind of had this moment, and then I went off to see some friends, and we went out drinking. It was a moment that was incredibly brief. It was left behind. It didn't stop me. It shifted me a bit to think that there might be something more. But I kind of made the joke of, as I put my hands out, I'm like, “What am I doing?” And then it was, “Well, I'm not going to my knees.” And then after that it was, “Let’s go get a drink.”

Okay.

And so it was more dismissed.

Okay. All right. So what was your life like? Whether it was during your period of expressed atheism or not, this kind of reality of living in a way that God isn’t part of your life, it's not part of your picture. Was it a good life? Were you still asking the big questions? Or were you just kind of going through the motions, enjoying your drumming, and really not thinking about the big questions anymore?

I was enjoying the drumming, but I was angry. And I think that people that knew me would say I was angry. And I was a loving person, but there was always an anger. And I never really got in fights. I got in one fight in ninth grade, I think. And it was each of us passed two punches, and it was over, and we were in the principal's office. And I'm a big guy, I'm six four, but it's never been like a physical thing. But I was angry at my mom. I was angry at my dad. I was angry at my brother. I was angry at different bands. I was angry at lack of—I mean, for me, there was something very important about following through and drive and learning. And I was angry at lazy people. I mean it was just a strange anger, and at the same time it became an inspiration to not be lazy, to maintain drive, to go after things. And I look back on it now, and had you asked me then, I wasn’t angry. I mean I got annoyed and annoyed a lot more back then, but I was pushing through.

And in a way it was a darkness, and it was a wilderness, and I’d go after things, and I enjoyed alcohol, I enjoyed drumming, I enjoyed doing things sometimes and making money in ways in music that were not the most moral and reputable. I'm not 100% by any measure proud of some of the things that I did.

Yeah. Well, I think all of us could say that, right? So we've all lived compromised in some ways, but it sounds like there was an underlying anger, but yet you had… it sounds like a busy life, in many ways a fulfilling life, that you were accomplishing things, that you were setting goals, that you were pursuing your life, your profession, with gusto. And so it sounds like, too, that you weren't bothered necessarily by big questions, not any kind of existential crisis, or really thinking towards the end of a worldview without God or anything, but yet you had this moment. That appeared for a moment, and then it passed. So then what happened next in your life?

Well, I mean, it was a number of years of that. And I think that some of the anger, for me, might have been that constantly having questions and not having an outlet of a place of answers. I attended a church. It was one time. I'd run into a friend, and he's like, “Come to my church.” “All right.” And it opened up a lot of questions for me, and when I found that not a single one could be answered, and everything was countered at this particular church with, “You’ve got to have faith.” It didn't feel balanced. And in everything else, if I was going to learn this or I was going to study that, with music. If you want to be able to do this, you do this, this, this, and then you get there. And there were different ways to understand and balance and juggle those studious elements, the strategic elements, and when I went there, I brought that same state of mind, and this particular one church, “It had no answers.”

The pastor then—and I remember this, and this was shortly before I moved to the West Coast. A pastor took me out to lunch at a Chinese restaurant somewhere in Massachusetts, and he explained to me that my grandfather and my grandmother were going to hell—or were in hell. This was after they passed—because they were Jews. And even back then, thinking about messaging, going, “Well, this isn’t a great way to open!” And there was a moment of like, “Oh, my gosh! Is this true?” and then another moment, going, “There’s something very off if you are the representation of a church, and this is how you're opening doors to people. There’s something really off there.” That bothered me.

Yeah, you know, especially considering—I don't know what it took for you to actually even consider going to a church. I mean it was pretty amazing that you had a friend who asked you to go and that you actually went, but then to receive that as a welcome, it makes no sense to me at all. But what were some of the big questions that you were wrestling with as you were looking for answers? As you were going into this church environment?

Well, I was looking on a bigger level of saying, “Okay….” It was interesting with where I grew up. There was a Muslim community. There was a Buddhist community. There was a Jewish community. There was Christian. And it was like, “Okay, well, what's the difference between this Catholic thing and this Protestant and these Baptist people over here that scream?” There was his one guy I knew who just seemed like a cool Christian. And he seemed to…. When we looked at girls, he looked at girls with us. He’d talk about this, but he was not available Sunday mornings. He was in church. And there was something about that, of going. I almost wanted to see, “Is there more like that? Is there something a little bit more organic? Is there something where somebody could talk about this?”

And so I went four more times to this one church, because I wasn't trying to be, “Oh, I saw this once, and it was nothing.” And I came to him, and I'm like, “Hey, I'm a drummer, and I don't know if you ever need the help. I can handle this music and would be happy to support.” And again, beyond the pastor saying my grandparents are going to hell, it was a worship leader that's like, “You don't quite have the Spirit in you. I don't know if you can handle these songs.” “I'm the best player among all of you. I can lift this up musically,” and maybe, looking back on it, maybe by doing that it could invite me into something. But your ego of your subpar worship team. Another door was shut. I’m sitting here open to just listening, hearing, connecting, and I was having doors closed. I'm sorry. I get a little amplified thinking about it.

No! No!

It’s a strange memory.

Right! I'm sure that it was. I'm sure that it was. And what a shame. Really, I wonder, in going to that church, did they invite you to open the Bible or to read it for yourself or anything like that? I wondered what you were hearing, what you were seeing or reading.

It was forced. It was, “You’ve got to get baptized. You’ve got to accept the Holy Spirit. You’ve got to know Jesus.” I did get a Bible, and I started to read through it. And the one mistake I made: I jumped to the end. And so I said, “Okay, I want to skip to the end and see what's going on here.” It's a lot of what I used to do as a musician. You’ve got to figure out, “Where’s this thing ending up?” and we'll go back to the beginning and start. And then I'm in Revelation, and I'm like, “Okay, so there are dragons. There's some harlot. There’s Babylon.” I mean, it was not the place to start. Everyone says start in John now. I hear that. Starting in Revelation? Wrong answer.

Yeah. That’s a difficult place to start. It’s a difficult place for most Christians who’ve been in the faith for a long time. Yeah, I can imagine. I'm sure you were scratching your head with that.

I presume you did not become a worship drummer at that moment, so you left that, again, that experience of church behind as a potential open and shut door, it sounds like. And then what-

Very quickly.

And so guide us from there.

Well, and then I was involved in some projects that took me to Seattle, took me to Los Angeles. I started shifting into being a producer more. And there was one guy that had me produce an album, and I said, “I'm not a producer.” And he said, “I'm going to be very frank with you: Because you work with a whole bunch of the producers that I love, you work with them often, I think you know their style, and I know I can pay you a lot less.” “Okay.” So I started my hand in production, and one of the little early albums I produced was a gospel album. It was a gospel R&B album. And that was another experience of trying to… I almost wanted to hear a little bit more. It again turned me off, and I walked away from it. I had a really…. At the end of the production of that album, talking to the guy and saying, “Look, this is what you may want to consider when it comes to music,” and, “Here’s what's happening,” and the arrogance and belligerence of how he chose to share things. I said, “You’re supposed to, from what your faith claims, be all open to this stuff and hear this and listen to these things, and right now, you just think you're going to be a star. And it seems like it's ego and greed and all the stuff you're supposed to be against.” And so that was again a turnoff. Again, it was a strange time, and it was more of, okay, all these people I was coming across that had faith just seemed to be something I didn't want to have anything to do with. While I was still searching out faith for myself. And this was probably the time when I was drinking—again, I was never an alcoholic. I needed to stay in control. But it was a time I was drinking probably the most. And the angriest at those times, of being like, “What is this? If there is anything, why is it being represented by these people?”

And so poorly. Right? If there is a God, why do these supposedly God people look and act in these very unattractive ways? So you're being perpetually, it sounds like, pushed away, really, even though you were open, which… anyway, surprises, [40:33] well it doesn't surprise me, in a way, because we're all broken people, but it's disappointing, isn't it, when you expect something more of someone who represents Christ, and that's not what you're seeing, so you continued to get these really bad pictures of what a Christian is supposed to be. Who they're supposed to be. Who they’re representing. It wasn't anything you wanted anything to do with. But yet you were still, it sounds like, in a searching mode? So what were you finding next?

Well, it was strange at that point, and I look back on it now, and it seems to have a strategy to it. There was another Christian artist, a reverend, had me produce his album. And he was a little bit better. He still had a little bit of an edge to him, but he was a gentler individual. And then I started… I was asked by a bartender, who said, “You should write a book on music,” and so I wrote my first book, and it was a dumpster fire. It was awful. I wrote a second book on the music industry, which is the one I'm the most proud of. And that started taking me on a different journey, and I was starting to get hired by businesses outside of music. And I was kind of seeing this walk away from music. And I loved everything I did with the drums. I loved all the albums I was on, I loved the production. I was doing some stuff in television that didn't feel clean to me, so I did it while I did it, but then the book…. At the end of the book, I did this book tour. It was one of two book tours, and I gone back to Los Angeles, and I was finding myself around more and more people of faith, and none of them were pushing me. And so the agnostic elements seemed to lift up a little bit, and it seemed like, “Okay, there's something here.” And I found myself talking to a lot of people that were in faith. And eventually I left Los Angeles, moved with—it was a girlfriend at the time, who became my wife—to Florida, and it was in Florida that again I seemed to be surrounded by more people of faith. And I still was in a very agnostic mode, but when my daughter was born, this was around 2015, there was something that was lifting that agnostic thing to a different level. I would walk out on our back porch in, it was Vero Beach at the time, and I found myself praying, walking up and down the porch holding her and just thanking and praying that she's safe and healthy, and it didn't feel foolish, like it had the years before, and there was something just a touch different that felt very organic.

So the birth of a child can make a difference for a lot of people, in terms of when you're holding that beautiful baby. And seems so miraculous in so many ways, and you expressed gratitude, but the question is, for an atheist or agnostic, grateful to whom? And so, when you're praying, there's a presumption, right? That there is someone to whom you are expressing gratitude. So at that moment, I guess you were willing to acknowledge the possibility of a God? Is that right?

I was. And I laugh about when I read, I think it's in Acts, now, where Paul makes a mention about, “and you have this idol to the unknown god. Let me tell you about Him.” As I was sitting there, holding Olivia, I'm just saying, “Whoever you are, however this is, thank you. And can she be healthy? And what am I supposed to do? And can you tell me what I'm supposed to do? Because I don't feel like anyone else that's been down here that's told me has really been on point. Or if they're really listening all that well.”

Okay. So all of those Christians who you were surrounded by, you said they weren’t pushy, so they were living out their Christianity kind of around you but not really directly. They didn't confront you in any way or ask you particular questions or invite you to church or anything. I presume, after your past experiences, you weren't really making a lot of steps towards them, even though you could see perhaps they were better than what you had experienced in the past. But obviously the door had been opened once more through the birth of your daughter to an unknown god, some god out there. So did you pursue that god? Or try to figure out who that was?

Not really. I started doing a little bit more in the aspects of doing strategy and consulting outside of music, and I was having fun with it. I was having fun having a baby. I was having fun being a father. I was brought into a group of business individuals, and they were saying, “You’re saying things in a whole different light, and it's great!” And I ended up meeting a pastor and his wife that invited me to their church, not to the church, but to promote and work on the messaging of their programs.

Okay.

There was almost a little part of me that wanted to, in working on their messaging, learn more about faith. And we worked together for… it was a couple months. But then I got a phone call, saying, “We want you to meet this guy, Peter Lowe,” who used to apparently be a Christian and motivational speaker, and he’d talked to the presidents and Muhammad Ali and all of these people, and we had connected just gently. And he had a cruise, called…. It was Rollan Roberts and Peter Lowe. It was this Christian business cruise. And everything about it just seemed so off to me. It was just so much hype. But I kept talking with Peter, and then Peter invited me to be a part of it and come on the cruise. And I was the only non-Christian speaking on it.

You’ll like this: I’ll keep it brief. The night before I was supposed to go, Olivia had, whatever, macaroni and cheese. There was something off. She was getting sick. She got violently ill in her crib the night before I was supposed to leave. I mean just throwing up all over the crib. It was awful! And the whole plan, at that point, “I can't go, I can't leave my daughter. I can't possibly leave my daughter.” I still did the next morning, and that was the next time. It was like from the session drumming and then today are like, “I'm supposed to go,” and nothing in me wanted to. Absolutely nothing. I wanted to be there for my daughter, but I knew I had to go on the cruise. That was my second moment of…. It wasn't audible, but it was very clear I was supposed to be there. And I made the cruise.

So what was your experience like on a boat full of a lot of Christians as an outsider, in a sense?

Well, I wasn’t wrong, and I said this thing is over hyped. There aren't going to be that many people. I wasn't wrong. There was too much hype in what was presented, not as much by Peter, but the other person. And I still found it intriguing. I wanted to meet some of these people. And I went to the dinners, and I talked to some people. And I listened to what they had to say. And then there was one individual who said, “Look, a little later, I’d like to meet in your cabin and talk a little bit more about faith,” and as I'm opening my mouth to say, “Thanks, I’m good,” I said, “Okay.”

Okay. It’s like, “Where did that come from?” kind of looking around.

Exactly. “What?”

Like, “Who said that?”

And I mean, he wanted to…. I didn't get it at the time. He wanted to have me be saved, and for the first time, in letting my guard down, I allowed it, and I was open to it, and I don't know if it had been the number of days. I don't know all the different pieces, but there was something where I felt a little bit more open. And looking back at my entire career and my life and in that moment all the things, it just seemed to connect. It seemed to make sense. So I prayed the prayer with him, and my favorite part was he said, “First, I want to apologize for Christians that you’ve met.” I’m like. “Okay. Good opener.”

Yes. That kind of brings down a barrier or a wall there.

I wasn't looking for the answer. I wanted direction, and he gave me direction. And so I was saved on a Christian businessman's cruise.

Wow!

And it went very slowly for a bit. I mean I was starting to watch a couple of documentaries. I watched that NBC series. I was digging a little bit into a Bible. It was a slow lull time. It wasn't like… I had kind of envisioned, “I'm saved, and ahhh!” I didn't share it with my wife, and I began to just very slowly get my foot in, but it was briefly after, just a couple weeks after, where I was asked by the guy that was part of me being saved to come see him in Orlando. And Fish Stewarding Group, Doug Fish, he was there. And we were sitting there at the table, and he turned, and he goes, “I came here to meet you.” I was like, “What? You barely talked to me on the cruise.” We exchanged very little. We sat in a Starbucks and talked for four hours.

And I have been with Doug since. At first, he called me, and he said, “Help me with my messaging,” and then he brought me on board this, and he's helped me. “Here’s where to go in the Bible.” “Here's where to look outside the Bible.” “Here's where to take your strategy here.” “Here's what I want from you.” And that friendship, as well as business partnership, has been the biggest thing for doing what I do and what I love, and at the same time, sleeping better at night, as well as exploring deeper into faith.

You had been around some Christians who had changed your perception, perhaps, of Christians or Christianity. Maybe they're not as bad as you thought. You had a child. In a sense, there was an openness to you, obviously. Just your willingness to go on a Christian businessman’s cruise and position yourself there in that space. This gentleman was able to provide some substance for you. So not only that there is a God who loves you and wants a relationship with you, I would imagine, and that it's true. But he was able to help you start to put some intellectual pieces together, that it made sense to you in your mind, as well as your heart, it sounds like. Because you are very bright individual who likes things, like you say, to have a linear, logical, rational, reasonable support to them. Not just grabbing something out of the air because it feels good. That there actually has to be something that's true and real after your conversion or belief, that you were able to ground, in a sense, what was true about the Bible, that it's not just story.  That there really is some good reason to believe that you had found what was once the unknown God. You found the one true real God. So can you help us understand what it is that helped you ground that perspective, more than just your spiritual experience there in conversion?

Doug helped me find the proof to, for me, amplify the faith, where, in many cases, so many people were just saying, “You have to believe. You have to believe.” Doug helped me identify—and I don't say this in a derogatory way—the hypocrite in what I was hearing or what I wasn't able to hear or how I would take a presupposition with this experience, or these couple experiences now have given me a false conclusion. So it was Doug who… and he spoon-fed very slowly, and he respected where I came from in music and television. He respected my messaging and my optics, but at the same time he treated me like I think I needed to be treated. He brought small verses together. He showcased patterns of Old Testament to New Testament connections. My deepest, now analytical study has been about the last two and a half years.

Of the five, it was two years or so kind of this wavering and then slowly digging in deeper. And then it was looking at Lee Strobel. I liked his journalist, his anger, his atheism, his approach. I love J. Warner Wallace. I love detective stories. I find cold case homicides to be very cool, and how do you break that out? The validity for me—and I get it's different for other people—but to see proof laid out, When Doug sends me something, I'm going to listen to it. And then when I listen, I listen from the standpoint I'm not an atheist anymore. But what Doug has taught me the most that has made me more, I believe, more of faith is I listen with the atheist viewpoint, I listen with the filled with faith, and I listen to the on the edge.

And then I'm sitting there in what he has me doing inside the Bible, and I think Missler is known for saying, “Making the Bible my hobby,” I found it analytically, strategically, objectively, and at the same time, to grow my faith to know that, “Right now I'm connecting. Right now I'm not connecting. I can pray this way. I can pray from knees. I can continue to look at these things. It’s okay to doubt.” For me and who I am, to walk in this path with someone like Doug is so much more real and vetting and proven than these people just saying, “Oh, you’ve just got to believe.”

Right.

Sorry, that was kind of a rant.

No, no! That’s an important rant, to be honest. I mean, especially for people like you who are analytical thinkers, who need to know that what they believe is worth believing, that there is good reason for belief. And that's really fantastic and especially that you have someone in your life who is challenging you in a very substantive way towards growth. Of your mind, as well as your faith. So, since you’ve become a believer, it sounds like your passion and pursuits have been changed a little bit and perhaps your life and your perspective. You are a messaging guy. You talk about having presumptions of knowing what the atheist thinks, someone on the edge, and your current perspective as a Christian. You’re able to see things, I think, in a holistic way, really looking from different perspectives. And I just wonder how your perspectives have changed from moving from atheism to calling yourself a follower of Christ. How have your perspectives and your life changed since then? I presume that seeing those hypocritical Christians earlier in your experience probably makes you want to live a more authentic…. Authenticity and truth are big values to you. So I would imagine that you would move into a life or a lifestyle, perspective of living, that is authentic and true and that you want to represent Christ in a way that is unlike maybe some of the bad examples you had before. But anyway, talk to us about your life since you've found Christ.

It's been a long process, and I judged it when I saw other people saying, “Oh, I'm saved.” Like, “Well, why aren't you better?” And I didn't admit or openly wear a cross or leave my Bibles out or have multiple Bibles to be able to look at things. I would never… I mean, it was a couple years before I shared on social media. I think one of my first shares—and it dropped a whole bunch of people when I made a share—I think it was earlier in the spring, where I said, to celebrate certain Jewish holidays, “I consider myself a Christian or a Messianic Jew or both,” but I said, “I'm learning more from Christianity, and I'm challenging myself to look at all those sides.” I was the hypocrite before, that I saw what I saw in one person or in a small group of people, so that inside of that group study that I concluded all of this evidence from all of these other areas null and void.

I think that that's the problem with Christianity right now, and I think that part of that problem lies within us Christians. We have a heart to save, to share the gospel, yet much of our hearts, or many of us, are sharing from a standpoint that doesn’t consider the perceptions, the negative connotations, the assumptions, and presuppositions of others. And when we do, when we take a step back to breathe, and perhaps consider the one over the ninety-nine, we might bring in ninety-nine of those ones. I’ve found that what has kept me away from faith is the exact thing that I want to try to disarm with people that say, “Wait. You’re a Christian now?” I want to walk away and say, “Okay, maybe….” I forget who the guy was. I think it was Greg Koukl who mentioned something about, “I want to put a stone in your shoe.”

Yes.

“I don't want to save you, but if I could put a stone in your shoe, to say, ‘Okay, you've experienced all sorts of bad people. Great!’” But isn't it amazing that a story, beyond everything before, but of a man, just shy of, what are we? Nineteen hundred ninety years ago. That a story like that could still maintain, that so many of the countering arguments, the opposite side, the objections can be disproven, and brought out that, of all the stories, of all the fiction, have this limited amount of shelf life. Or to take Warner Wallace, the chain of evidence going backwards. And yet all of this is here. So if it's an analytical person like me, let's do analysis and I continue to have questions.

I believe, when we approach people where they are and don't try to fix them, don't try to necessarily invite them to church—and these churches, which include some of the ones I've been to here in Florida—“Oh, you came the first time. You’re family. Get baptized next weekend.” Cut! Stop! Pause! Take it down a notch. As opposed to the next-step programs that every one of these template churches have been putting out, why can't we have a next-step coffee. Why can't we take it just a little bit slower to take that great Koukl approach? Why can't we leave someone alone? Just like with my friend that’s up in Massachusetts. I brought out some stuff. I said, “Hey, you might want to have a look at this. I'm not going to invite you to church. I'm not going to have you read a Bible. I just want you to look at that and notice it's a little bit different, that some of this stuff might not be conspiracy. And some of this stuff might not be fiction.” And if we guide with the love that we're supposed to, and if we tell the story with the understanding of the context of now.

And in that learning, it brought me to faith, and I think that, in that learning of other people, not trying to save them, but potentially support them with a small seed. That's where it grows.

I think you're right in that sometimes we try to move too quickly. And again, to quote Greg Koukl, sometimes we’re meant to be gardeners, planting seeds. Not everyone is a harvester. And not everyone needs to be harvested in their first… when they just need a seed planted. Thank you for that wonderful wisdom. What about those who might be listening to you, Loren, who… they may have those moments of thinking, “Maybe there's something more. Maybe there is someone. Maybe there is a God, an unknown God.” And they do have those points of openness. How would you recommend that they take a step forward in their journey of faith? I would imagine some of that would be saying, “Ignore all the hypocrisy that you see around you.” I'm just guessing. But what would you say to someone you actually earnestly has the questions? They wonder.

Well, I don't know if this is the right thing to say or not. It’s what I feel. But if you're having a question or a thought, it might not be time yet to go to church. It might not time yet to open up a Bible. If you're planting a seed to learn about these things, what about a Lee Strobel Case for Christ book, and at the same time when you buy that, buy one of the books that is something a little bit more comfortable, something atheist. See the yin and the yang, for lack of a better word. I've shared to friends that are open to hearing, but a little bit more on the edge, Frank Turek and Norman Geisler’s I Don’t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist.

It can be… and again, I prefer to recommend go to the audios. Maybe it's in that time that you're in the car. Maybe it's in that time you're in the gym or you're out for a walk, and you just have a listen, and yeah, okay, those audio books are long. Listen to thirty minutes. See if it makes you want to listen to thirty minutes more. For anything that we look at, to look at the counter element of it, you never know where it could go. And it's not just necessarily walking into a church, or if a church is for you or a Bible is for you, you don't have to start at the very beginning. I had a lot of friends say—and I would have done this myself—starting in John or even searching things online and realize where they show up.

“The writing's on the wall.” I remember laughing when I went through Daniel. I’m like, “Oh! They grabbed that from there.” I was joking with a friend. I’m like, “Okay, pawn shops came from Leviticus. If you can't afford this, you bring this here. They offer 20%, or you can buy it back, or you can sell it to somebody else.” The funny elements of whether you believe in God, as what I believe, as what many others believe, as what Jana believes, to just beginning to see these little elements. They can spark something, or they can grow a little green, or spark a little bit more of a firing, and surprise you at all the nuances.

If you approach it from a researching, learning, and understanding, I believe, belief will follow. If you are just picking up or going to a church and expecting the end result to be belief, it may be a much harder journey.

Yes. I mean, I think that it would be for most of us, who, if we’re being asked to believe something we don’t feel has credibility or substance behind it, why would we do that, right? So all you’re asking is to actually research and see, come and see. Come and see. And I also like that you are encouraging people to really look at all these. I mean, because if it is true, if the Christian worldview is true, if God exists, then it doesn't hurt to look at other worldviews, because truth will be found where it is, and sometimes it actually helps to compare. Because I think a lot of people will put down belief in God or Christianity and really not even research their own side. They know what they’re against, but they're not really sure what they're for. And then when you actually start looking at both sides from a strategic or intellectual perspective, and you go, “Okay. Well, maybe Christianity does have substance behind it, but I didn't realize that it's there, and it makes sense of reality and makes sense of what I see in the world or whatnot.”

So I appreciate that, just taking a step where you feel comfortable. That's pretty wonderful. Loren, is there anything else that we might have missed, whether it’s your story or advice that you would want to capture here.

I believe… in the end, I think I was the last person to ever open up enough to see faith and see it as viable, and yet that's been my life, look at this, analyze this, support this, figure this out, and dropping that presupposition for a moment, considering something you might never have thought, looking a little bit deeper beyond the hearsay or the claim.

There are many things that have been presented as objective facts that are purely subjective opinions. And it's fine for us to feel, to think. But if we're going to state a fact, shouldn't we know all sides before we do that? And if someone else is stating a fact in the day where we are, doesn't that deserve—especially if our God, this God, is true—for us to look at all sides and explore it for ourselves, to find out for ourselves, as opposed to accepting and subscribing to the headlines other people want us to read?

Yeah. That’s definitely a challenge, I think, that a lot of us have, in terms of a lot of people presume a lot of things based on headlines and bullet points and desires, things that their friends believe, whatever, without doing actually due diligence to look for themselves. So I appreciate that, because if you seek after truth, true truth, you will find it, right? Truth in the person of Christ.

Wow! You’ve given us such a beautiful story, Loren. So much there. So much we could talk about, but your story arc is really, really beautiful. Again, I love not only the transformation, and the passion is very evident in your voice, but your desire for other people to know the Christ Whom you’ve found, the Christ Who is truth. And obviously He’s made a big difference in your life and the way that you see reality. But I also love the fact that you just haven’t decided, “That’s it,” and shut down. You continue to study. You continue to grow. You continue to test. You know, we’re called to test and see what is good and true and to hold on to that. And that's what you're continuing to do, as an analytical thinker, as a man who wants to know what is real, and to live like that, in truth and authenticity, and your message coming across is very authentic. And we need more Christians like you, Loren. So thank you so much for coming on to tell your story today.

Thank you for having me. I enjoyed talking about it.

Thanks for tuning in to Side B Stories to hear Loren Weisman's story. You can find out more about his work and his books and his recommended resources in the episode notes. For questions and feedback about this episode, you can contact me through our email at [email protected]. Also, if you're a skeptic or atheist who would like to connect with a former guest with your questions, please contact us, again through our email.

This podcast is produced through the C.S. Lewis Institute through the wonderful help of our producer Ashley Decker and audio engineer Mark Rosera. You can also see these podcasts in video form on our YouTube channel through the excellent work of our video editor, Kyle Polk. If you enjoyed it, I hope you'll follow, rate, review, and share this podcast with your friends and social network. In the meantime, I'll be looking forward to seeing you next time, where we’ll see how another skeptic flips the record of their life.

A Princeton and Oxford graduate, former skeptic Dr. Vince Vitale valued autonomy and pursued high achievement as the greatest good in life. When investigating Christianity, he found it to be worth his ultimate belief, value, and trust.

Vince's Resources:

• podcast:  Unbelievable? https://www.premierunbelievable.com/shows/unbelievable
• Book: "Non-Identity Theodicy: A Grace-Based Response to the Problem of Evil” https://academic.oup.com/book/32027

Resources/authors recommended by Vince:

• Blaise Pascal, Pensées
• GK Chesterton

Jana Harmon's book: Atheists Finding God. Use code LXFANDF30 for a 30% discount offer at Rowman & Littlefield

To find more stories of atheists and skeptics converting to Christianity, visit www.sidebstories.com

There is a common idea in our culture that religion, at its foundation, is nothing more than a fairy tale to help those who are scared of the dark, that faith is blind, that only uneducated, weak people believe. There’s a sense that religion is nothing but merely wishful thinking for those who aren't themselves thinkers, that Christianity is a man-made religion with no connections to facts, reality, history, or evidence.

But that begs the question: What of those who are thinkers, who are academically accomplished, who take their beliefs seriously as something substantive, worth believing, and for good reason. There’s something more than wishful thinking. Are they all deluded as a skeptic might suppose? Or could it be that an intelligent, thoughtful, serious-minded person may actually have investigated the claims of Christ and Christianity for themselves and found them to be convincing and true? This especially raises eyebrows for those who were skeptics of faith and then find themselves to become one of Christianity's most passionate proponents. Such a dramatic shift, from disbelief to belief, causes you to lean in and question what comparing evidence it must have taken to cause someone like them to change not only their views about God but change their entire life, helping others to see and know the truth about Christ that they’ve found.

Today's story is just that. Vince Vitale was a thinking skeptic who did the hard work of investigating the claims of the Christian worldview and did not find them wanting. Rather, he became convinced that they were not only true, but they led him to the Author of all truth, Jesus Christ, and that his life has never been the same. Come and listen to his fascinating story.

Welcome to Side B Stories, Vince. It’s so great to have you with me today.

Oh, it's wonderful to be with you. I appreciate the invitation.

Excellent. So the listeners can know a little bit about you, Vince, before we get started, can you give them an idea of perhaps where you life, a little bit of your life, maybe your academic background, and the things that you’re involved with now?

Sure. I live currently in East Palo Alto, California. I've been here for just over a year. My wife, Jo, and our two kids, Raphael and JJ, now four and two years old. We were in Atlanta before that. We drove out here in our little Kia, and once you… At the time, they were even a bit younger. So once you include their two car seats and the pack and play and the stroller, it wasn't much room, so it was quite an adventure.

Oh, I bet!

But we loved it. We loved it and seeing a lot of the country. We’ve been out here for about a year now. We're part of a house church community that has really been family to us, welcomed us with open arms at a very difficult season in our lives. So we've been so thankful for that, and we’ve just felt like this has been a place of provision for us in a time when we really needed it. And we're close enough to the beach that I can get out to surf every couple weeks, which is a particular joy of mine. So I’m very thankful for that as well. Before that, we were actually in England. My wife is from England. We met in graduate school there. I was there for twelve years and then, before that, in New Jersey, which is where I was born and where I grew up and stayed through college.

So you graduated both Princeton and Oxford, right?

Yes. That’s right. Yeah. Princeton was my undergrad.

And what was the focus of your study?

It was both philosophy and theology, religion. Interestingly, I got to Princeton not as a Christian but as somehow knowing that I wanted to study philosophy, even though I had never taken a philosophy class in high school. It wasn’t offered at my high school, but somehow I just knew those were the types of questions I asked and the way my mind worked. And I've always thought there was a faithfulness of God in that, in that He put me on a trajectory that aligned with what I ultimately was called to, even before my heart was in a place where I could understand why that would be the case.

That’s fascinating. Really interesting when you can look back and reflect on that and see God's hand in your life and the way that you were guided. And one other thing: Don’t you have a new opportunity in your life, something to do with Unbelievable? from Premier Radio?

Yes. That’s right. Thank you, Jana. I'll be one of the hosts for the Unbelievable? podcast, which I’m really thankful for, especially because I feel like those types of conversations, as I assume we'll get into more even on this podcast, conversations between Christians and non-Christians in a constructive manner were such a big part of my own story. The questions I was asking initially, it would have been very easy for Christians to dismiss me, and they didn't. They actually disagreed with me really well. And so that’s part of my story.

Wonderful! And we will…. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the Unbelievable? podcast, we’ll put a link in the episode notes, so that you can find it. All right. It sounds like that you have had an intriguing life. I am curious, as someone…. Obviously you’re a deep thinker. Even going into college, you knew you were asking big questions. So let's back way up. Let's start in your childhood. And, Vince, tell us about what your family home was like. Where did you live? Where did you grow up? Was God a part of that picture? Did you go to church? All of that. Let’s start there.

Sure. Okay. I grew up in New Jersey, Italian-American cultural background. I guess if you had asked my family if we were Christians, people would have said, “Well, of course. We’re Italians. Therefore, we're Christians.” It was part of the ethnic heritage, an important part of the ethnic heritage, but didn't generally reflect what we believed or how we went about our lives. So that's my cultural background.

And from a religious perspective, again, it was cultural, ethnic, something we didn't think about too much throughout the year, and then, at like 10 pm on Christmas Eve, somebody would say, “You know what? We should go to Midnight Mass!” And then we’d gather up everyone and once a year maybe we would go to church. So I don't remember, as a young person, meeting many people who thought very seriously about questions of faith or for whom belief in God made a very significant difference. In terms of whether people believed in God or not, I wasn't able to discern a significant difference in terms of what life looked like, so I guess that's a bit about my background and maybe why I was asking the big questions of life but not clearly coming to the position of belief in God.

So it was just something out there that you did on occasion, on Christmas, and really not much more than it. But again, you referred to yourself in a sense that you were a question asker. You were inquisitive. Yeah. Even as a child, I guess you were starting to just think about things, think about life or questions. What kinds of things were you thinking about?

Yeah. That’s right. I mean, as you were saying that, I was just remembering. So I came across this letter to Santa a number of years ago. It was actually written on a paper plate. And so I have this paper plate, all yellowed around the edges, and as kids, my brother and I, we used to put letters in the chimney, and then Santa would, whisk them away, and we would hope to get what we asked for from Santa. And so, one Christmas—I think, based on the writing, I was just learning to write cursive, and so I think I was probably like six, seven years old, and I wrote on this paper plate, “Dear Santa and God, was God ever born?” And I put it in the fireplace.

So there's a couple of interesting things about that. One, at a very young age, I'm realizing there are some difficult questions. Like there's a little bit of explaining to do when it comes to God. Okay, was God ever born? If not, can something just not have a beginning? So I was starting to ask questions like that, which explains a little bit the philosophy education later. But it's also very interesting that I wrote, “Dear Santa and God,” because I think, in my mind, I had trouble pulling them apart. They were conflated. Santa and God were both people who could see the way I was acting, were keeping a record of good and bad. You didn't want to be on their bad side. You might get good things if you're good. You get bad things if you’re bad. And they come by…. Again, maybe we’d go to church once a year. They come by once a year, and they don't stay long enough to say hello. It’s not something that would be relational, but both Santa and God were both this far off, disconnected thing in my mind. So yeah, that paper plate in some ways encapsulates my early childhood. I was asking difficult questions, seeing that there were these difficult questions that needed to be explained in some way, if God was going to make sense, but also having a very thin understanding of who God might be and having trouble differentiating between Santa and God. So then, I think, at some point, when Santa didn't exist, when I learned that Santa didn't exist, it then raises the question, especially if you think of Santa and God as very similar. “Okay, that was just a myth. And maybe this is just a myth as well.”

So is that where you landed there for a while? It was just this concept, that perhaps was a childish way of thinking about good and bad, and maybe it was motivating me to be good for a little while, but that’s not really real.

Yes. I think that's right. I think when I started to ask some of my hard questions about God to people who believed in Him, I often didn't get very robust answers. Maybe I had some reasons to question, “Why would God exist?” if Santa didn't, but it was also convenient for me, because I wanted to be my own god. I didn't like the idea of someone being superior to me, being better than me.

I wanted very much to have control over my own life and very much had a philosophy of life which was, “You take control of your own life. You work hard. You are successful. You win this one big competition. You’re better than other people. You work to be the best, and that's where your value comes from.” And so if you, in a sense, surrender control of your life to someone else, well, then, “How am I supposed to have any value? Because all of my value comes from me controlling things and putting in the effort, and therefore being rewarded with things because of what I’ve achieved.” And there were things going on in my culture. There were things going on in terms of my family background, beginning to ask hard questions and maybe not getting robust answers, but it also was convenient for me to not take God very seriously because of the way I wanted to be at the center of things.

So it was easy to leave behind and blaze your own trail, I guess, especially, like you say, as someone who's driven towards achievement. So as you were growing up, you were pushing those kind of questions to the background, at least with regard to God and religion and faith. I'm curious. As you were growing up and just maybe dismissed that, did you give any thought to really what that was? What was religion? As a thinker, I'm thinking, “Okay, if that's not real, if that’s just perhaps made up, or maybe nobody really believes it,” what was religion in your mind? All these people who went to services on Christmas, what was all that even for? What was that?

Yeah. That’s an interesting question. I think to some extent I probably felt like it was something for the weak to some extent. If you needed someone else to tell you what was true about life, if you needed someone else to do the things for you in life that you can’t do for yourself…. I remember even at times in my youth coming up with my own philosophical, spiritual, metaphysical, whatever word you want to use paradigms for what was valuable in life and how you were supposed to order your priorities, but it was very much I, Vince, in the late 20th century, as an individual. “I'm going to figure out the way it's supposed to be. I'm going to figure out the correct philosophy. Everybody else has it wrong, and now, of all the billions of people who have lived….” Again because life was one big competition. And I, in sports and in academics, I had done well at things, and so it reinforced this idea of, “Okay, yeah. That’s a way that I can see the world and I can do well and I can have value. Because I can do well at sports, be better than other people. I can do well in academics, be better than other people.” And so now, when it comes to the deep questions of life, “Okay, let me create my own philosophical mindset.” That kind of thing. Nobody else was smart enough to figure this out yet. “It's of the universe, but now I figured it out.” And it sounds very silly and arrogant, and it was, but it's kind of the natural conclusion and the natural place that you come to, if you think life is all about one big competition. Whatever it is, sports, academics, or your philosophy of the universe, you need to create it yourself, and it needs to be better than everyone else's.

And yet, even during this time, when I think I was just resisting God in my heart in a really serious way, I now look back, and there are a few moments where—probably many moments when He was reaching out to me. But there are a few that I now look back on and think, “Whoa! How gracious of God to interact with me in that way, give me that experience, at a time when I had my hand up to Him saying, ‘No, thank you.’” Just one example: I was in high school, and I rear-ended a car in front of me. And so we get out of the car, and the man says we should exchange insurance. And so I go back to the car. I’m thinking, “Oh, this is terrible!” I go back to the car and get my insurance. Sick to my stomach. We walk towards each other. I go to give him my insurance card, and it's like something just stopped him. I would now say the Holy Spirit just stopped him. And he looked me, and he said, “You know what? My family's going through a really hard time. Why don't you just agree to pray for us, and we'll just leave it at that?”

Oh, my! That’s unusual!

Yeah. Right? And at the time…. Now, I reflect back on that, and I think, “What an incredible encounter!” Here’s someone…. My mistake had a cost for him, but he was the owner of that car. He had the right to say, “You know what? I'm going to take this cost on myself.” He still had to go get that car repaired. “In taking that cost on myself, instead I'm going to invite this stranger, who's done nothing but actually harm me and my property, into relationship with me and my family.” I mean, it was this beautiful depiction of the gospel. At the time, I wouldn't have been able to put any of that wording to it, but I did walk away deeply moved and thinking, “That is not how I would have responded in that situation. There’s something going on in that guy’s heart which is different from what’s going on in my heart.” So even amidst all of this keeping God at arm’s length, God was very gracious and reaching out to me in a variety of ways.

Yeah. That was a beautiful picture of grace. But it seems to me that you were, like I think a lot of people…. All of us find ourselves in this situation. And many times where we’re independent, we’re fine on our own. “I’ve got this.” You obviously had some skill, some talent athletically, intellectually. You were able to achieve what you wanted to achieve, and so it sounds to me as if you had no felt need for God. Like you say, that you were the strong. You were the one who's got it in control. You’re the one who's going to figure it out. And that you had no need of God. And I think a lot of people find themselves in that place. They don't need the control or the interference or however they perceive God to be. But yet you've got this amazing picture, like you were in a little place of need-

Yes.

… and you received grace. That's incredible!

Yeah. That's a great way to put it. That's absolutely right. I think that's what it was. It was God prodding me, trying to show me, “You do have need. You do have need. You couldn’t take a breath if it wasn't for me.” And part of it, I think, was, you have to do quite a bit of self-deception to get to the place of feeling you don't have any need. And part of that, for me, was always rationalizing that I had been right, and other people had been wrong. When there was conflict in relationship, when I had hurt people, it couldn't be the case that I was actually wrong and in need of forgiveness, even in need of a Savior. So I needed to use my persuasive abilities as a budding philosopher to always convince others and convince myself that I had been in the right and they had been wrong.

So I think you're right. I think I was in this place of not thinking I had a need. Part of that was because circumstantially I had been able to be good at some of the things that you’re told to be good at as a kid, but then it also required quite a bit of self-deception on my part as well, to always find a way, persuasively, philosophically in my head to place myself in the right and other people in the wrong.

Right. Yeah. I think sometimes it’s easy to put ourselves in those places. You had mentioned that, even prior to going to Princeton, that you were a young man who liked to think about big ideas. That, going into Princeton, that’s why you pursued philosophy. What kinds of questions or ideas were you considering even as a high schooler prior to college that made you want to go on that trajectory?

Oh, yeah. Testing my memory now. I remember thinking about questions like, “Where did everything come from?” Which I still think is an amazing question and one that people spend far too little time thinking about. Sometimes we can go our whole lives without taking a few steps back and going, “Where did all of this come from?”

Right!

And the intricacy of the fact that we're sitting here as cognitive beings, talking to each other over a technological platform that’s somehow beaming stuff through the air. It’s all just incredible. So I think I had—maybe it was God given—an innate sense of awe and wonder at the reality of life. And that caused me to think hard about things. I think I thought quite a bit about love and purpose, some of the big questions of life. I thought about what it meant to live a good life, what was the good life.

There was quite a bit of idealism, I think, in my childhood as well, that sort of… partly because I hadn't dealt with much suffering yet, I had been good at the things I put my hand to, and so there was kind of sense of, “Anything is possible,” which I now think is true. True with God because of His power, not because of my power and my ability. So, there was this sense in which a lot of what I was striving towards and my thinking and my mind, there were remnants of truth in it, but they didn't make full sense if I was at the center of the universe and I was the one who needed to both come up with these answers and live out the ideals that I had in mind.

Right. So yeah. If you're skeptical of God being present or pervasive in this world in any way. I would imagine trying to figure out some of those big questions and issues would have been somewhat challenging without kind of a source of reality. When you were asking those big questions, and even going into Princeton when you’re starting into a rigor of asking those big questions, did that prompt you to think, “Well, how is all of this possible if God doesn’t exist?” Did it cause you to reconsider that as an option, as more than just a Santa Claus figure that you had dismissed?

Yes, I think so. At least to the extent of: Did there have to be some sort of cause to the universe? Did that cause need to be intelligent in some respect? But even as I began to think about some of those questions, even as I began to take philosophy classes at Princeton, it was also still very convenient for me to keep any conception of God that I might have—I don’t know if I would have used that language—even any conception of a first cause—as still quite detached and far away, more of a deistic understanding. Something that would allow me to explain certain things that seemed to need explaining but also wouldn't have much bearing on my own life, wouldn't infringe on my life and my control of it and the way that I wanted to live it.

And probably I thought more along those lines until I came into contact with Christians and a Christian community in particular, where… I think up until then it was like, “Well, I have some thoughts about these big questions of life, and everybody else does, too. And nobody has very much confidence in them, and I've been able to reason better than those people to this point, so my thoughts are probably better than most people's thoughts.”

And then I encountered a community of people that had a confidence about their understanding of the universe and God’s place in it, and that was drastically different than anything I had experienced to that point, and that caused a lot of cognitive dissonance for me. I didn't know what to do with that. And they seemed in a much better place than me with respect to their understanding of and their experience of reality. And probably even the competitor in me was bothered by that, and me wanting to do more thinking.

Right. Yeah. So who were these people exactly? And how did you encounter… because oftentimes we, especially if you think that you're fine without God and religious believers are a little bit weak-minded and those kinds of things. I’m just curious: How did your paths cross? I’m presuming you’re speaking of Christians that you encountered or some kind of community of Christians?

Yes.

How did that happen actually?

Yes, yes. Who were these people that turned my life upside down?

Who were these people? Yeah!

Who were they?

Right.

And it was amazing. In some ways, it's a superficial answer. Soccer teammates.

Okay.

One of the amazing things about sports is that you bring together in not just a superficial way but in quite a deep, “We’re bonded to each other,” way, a great diversity of people, all because we happen to be able to kick a ball reasonably well. And so I was on the soccer team as a freshman, just starting at Princeton. And there were two sophomores who were serious about their faith, who were Christians. I didn't know this at the time. They invited me to a meeting of Athletes in Action, which is a Christian fellowship. I didn't know what a campus ministry was. I didn't know what a Christian fellowship was. I didn't know what the word evangelical meant. I mean, all of this would have been outside the box of my awareness. I knew it was something Christian, and I had a kind of cultural Christianity in my background, but the bottom line was it had “athlete” in the title, Athletes in Action, and I was being invited by two teammates of mine, so that was enough for me to go along.

We were a few minutes late to this first meeting, and I remember walking in the back of the room, and one of the most impactful split-second moments of my life was when I walked in and I saw these Princeton students, peers of mine, other people who had fought their whole life to be the best, to be praised as perfect, and they were singing their hearts out to this invisible God. And I instinctively immediately knew, “Whatever these people mean when they say that they’re Christian is different from what my family and cultural background means by that term.” And then I began to just observe this and even listen to the lyrics of some of the songs, and I realized, “These Princeton students are praising, worshiping this God, precisely because of how much greater He is than them.”

But remember my philosophy of life was that life was all about being the best, being better than other people. If somebody was better than you, that made them an enemy, and then you had to do everything you can to try to top them, and here were these successful Christians students humbling themselves, singing their hearts out, and this intimacy, treating God like their best friend, when the fact that He was greater than them should have made Him an enemy. So I don't know if I could have put all that language to it at the moment, but I do think that that's what I was experiencing and what I was feeling. And I walked out of that meeting, and I can remember that I began to pray an agnostic’s prayer. I thought, “These people know something and have experienced something that I don't know and I haven’t experienced,” and bothered me. And I can remember philosophically reasoning to myself that, “If there is a God, He would honor a prayer of this sort: God, I don't know if I'm talking to anyone, but if I am I would really like to know about it.” And I began to pray that prayer after my experience of that meeting.

Was that prayer answered in any way?

It was. It was eventually. And that was a process. And I'm so thankful for this community that came alongside me. This Athletes in Action community came alongside me in that journey. I was challenged to read the Bible. I started with the New Testament. I hadn’t really read through it before. And I was challenged to read before I made a decision about faith, and when I first began to work through this Bible that I was given, I would actually cross things out, when I disagreed. I would add things, what I thought I knew better. I actually have this old Bible where I'd write a big “BS” in the margin where I disagreed. Not for Bible study.

Right.

Unfortunately. And so looking back now, I think, “Well done, Christian brothers and sisters,” because I would have been so easy to dismiss. Like, “Here’s a guy. We tell him to read the Bible. He’s literally crossing things out and writing BS in the margin of his Bible.” It would’ve been easy for them to just say, “Hey, let's move on to the next guy. This guy is just too far from that. He's too arrogant in his own thinking.”

Yeah. I-

But they journeyed with me.

But how amazing that you actually took the challenge.

Yes.

And you opened a Bible. And you actually read it for yourself, rather than just presuming what you knew was in it or dismissing it out of hand. You actually opened it and started reading. The things that were giving you trouble, were they the miraculous? The seeming supernatural? Or, like, “Oh, this can never have happened!” That kind of thing? Or were there also some surprises like, “This is not what I thought it was. This is more historical in nature.” Or any thoughts? What were you thinking as you were reading through the Bible for the first time?

Yes. All of the above. And I like how you point out, “But, hey! You did take the challenge.” And even in that, there's a real graciousness of God, because it was probably partly my competitiveness, which in some ways had been my downfall in terms of my understanding of spirituality and what was in my heart. And yet even that God was able to use as part of my story. Maybe I wasn't that interested, but nobody challenges me, and I don't do it, so, “I'll take the challenge, I’ll read the Bible, and I'll read it faster than anybody else read it!” So I didn't like the idea that other people knew the Bible better than I did. They were able to speak with competence about the Christian ideas in a way that I was not able to. So there were probably very mixed motives in my heart, some good, some bad, but God was able to use even that.

And I began to read through, only having read snippets before. I found myself very drawn to the person of Jesus, the way that He carried Himself, the way that He treated people. “You who are without sin, throw the first stone.” “Pray for your enemies.” “Love your enemies.” “Pray for those who persecute you.” “Do to others as you would have done to yourself.” I’m reading of all of these noble lines, and I'm attracted to the person of Jesus, but then, like you said, I then get to claims of virgin birth and resurrection, and I think, in part, I just thought, “It’s too crazy to believe.”

But then I took the challenge, and I kept reading, and in particular, when I got to the Acts of the Apostles, that history of the early church after the Gospels, I started to come across all sorts of words that I never expected to see in the Bible, words like “examined” and “convinced” and “explained” and “debated” even “proved.” “Persuaded.” I read that the Bereans were more noble than the Thessalonians. Why? Not because they took some blind leap of faith, but it says, “Because they examined the scriptures daily to determine if what they were being told was true.” And the more I read through in particular Acts of the Apostles and saw how much the early church was spending their time reasoning with people and saying, “This is believable.”

By the end of that book, I had to say to myself, “Okay, this is actually not a faith that’s asking me to take a blind leap of faith or to park my brain at the door,” and that was very important to me because I was already studying philosophy. I felt that would lack integrity, and I had to come to the conclusion, “This is a faith that's asking me to love God with my mind.” And that at least opened the door for me to pursue that further.

Wow. So you invested enough to be willing. It sounds like curiosity, competition, challenge at the beginning, but then there was something that grabbed you. Of course, the person of Christ grabbed you, and then the narrative grabbed you, and then the seeming intellectual rigor of it somehow grabbed you. So take us along this path. What happened? Did you continue to… I mean obviously you're wrestling with some difficult issues of what you're finding, but I guess it's still pulling you in the direction towards belief.

Yes. And at this point, it's a whirlwind going on in my mind as I’m trying to get my head around all of these new ideas and keep up with my classes and sports. But I was. You’re right. I was grabbed by the person of Jesus, and that kept me investing. Even by the time I got to the end of the gospels, I realized, “Boy, Jesus made some really incredible claims about Himself.” And maybe, having read snippets, I knew that to some extent, and I probably thought, “Oh, people probably made up a couple of those later.” But it wasn't until I read through in its entirety that I realized, “These are all over the place. There’s dozens of them,” you know?

Yeah. For those who are listening, what kinds of claims was Jesus making about Himself?

He’s claiming that your eternal destiny is dependent on what you believe about Him. That if you believe in Him, even though you die, you will live. He's claiming that He’s the Lord of the Sabbath, when it was talking about what we're allowed to do on the Sabbath or not. I mean, the Sabbath is one of the ten commandments from a Christian perspective. He's the Lord. He has authority over the Sabbath. He’s referring to himself most frequently as Son of Man, which I learned around the time refers back to Daniel 7 and this sort of eschatological picture of God coming on the clouds of heaven as the Son of Man. He claimed to exist before Abraham, who existed thousands of years ago. All these claims! He claimed to forgive sin, not just sin against Himself, but to just be able to blanket make a statement that someone sins are forgiven. And that's a very weird claim. If one person sins against another, I can't just pronounce that the person's sin is forgiven when it's not even against me. All of these claims. And I feel like the force of that when I read through the gospel straight through and saw that there are dozens of these types of claims popping up. I thought, “Boy, there’s a really good case to be made that historically Jesus was making some absolutely radical claims about Himself,” which leaves you with only so many options in terms of how you think about Him.

He could have been a vicious liar, but it would have to be a vicious liar, because He knew full well that his best friends were getting persecuted and ultimately going to be killed for believing what he was telling them. It could be that He was severely mentally ill and had deep, deep deceptions about who He was, and that just doesn't align, to me, with the composure that you see in His life throughout the gospels. It could be that He’s actually telling the truth, which seemed remarkable, but if you don't have any other good alternatives, then all of a sudden it becomes viable.

So that was significant for me. I kept reading, I got to 1 Corinthians 15, you know? The gospels had spoken about Jesus' resurrection, but then, in particular, when I got to 1 Corinthians 15, and there's this list of people that Jesus appeared to after He clearly had been killed. And I learned around the time that scholars take much of that beginning of 1 Corinthians 15 and in particular the content of it to be extremely early, to be dated to within months or a couple of years of Jesus' death. Not just Christian scholars, but scholars in general. And that was extremely significant for me, because I had just sort of assumed that the idea of a resurrection would have been something that developed in a legendary way over time. Nobody really believed that in the first generation but probably six, seven, eight generations later, you have slow, incremental changes, and now people believe something crazy. This passage, this early creed in 1 Corinthians 15, which predates the letter, it confronted me with the reality that, in that first generation, there were many people who were walking around utterly convinced that they were spending time with this man, after He clearly had been killed. And so it then raised the question, what explains that?

And I understood that, from a Christian perspective, that is explainable by the actual resurrection of Jesus. When I then went looking for other alternative explanations, I found them to be very wanting or even nonexistent in many cases. And so again, gradually, through this process of reading through the scriptures and thinking my way through the scriptures, in the context of community, I was coming more and more to the realization that this is a rational faith. This is a faith that can be defended, and it's quite amazing. In the same way that the apostles were doing in the Acts of the Apostles, you know? Acts 17. It also says God has provided proof to everyone by raising Jesus from the dead, and that's what they were persuading people of in that first generation, and now, 2000 years later, I'm reading through and having conversations with Christians, and it's the very same arguments that are having an impact on me.

So it sounds like, through your study and through your conversation with those who were informed, you yourself were becoming more convinced that perhaps God exists, and Jesus is God, and that He died and rose again, and that resurrection was not just some historical event, but it meant something for you personally.

Yes. And that's why it was so significant that I was going through this intellectual process, but it was in the context of a community I was observing, and again, I don't know if I could have put this language to it, but I think it was almost like I was saying, “Okay, this is what the conclusions that my reasoning seems to be coming to. In the community that I'm seeing live together, am I seeing lived out in practice the conclusions that I'm coming to here?” If there really was a resurrection from the dead, if the scriptures are actually accurate in saying that the same spirit that rose Jesus from the dead comes to live within the believer, am I actually seeing a difference in this community that would make sense of that? And over time, I found that that was the case.

And I feel like it was experiences with this community aligned with the conclusions I was coming to by reasoning things through, that really made me feel, “This makes sense in my head, and it makes sense in my heart,” and that's what I would expect. If God made all of me, then he would want His existence to make sense to me in a holistic way.

So I'm sitting here, thinking of this young man who, prior to coming to Princeton and meeting this amazing community, you were a young man who… you described yourself as arrogant. And pursuing self achievement and competitive and not wanting anyone to tell you what to do basically, that you had it figured out. Now, when it comes to this Christian community and seeing the humility involved with their faith, like you had described earlier, that they were worshiping a God Who’s bigger and greater and grander than they are. And that somehow they had submitted themselves in worship to this person Jesus, Who received worship, Who claimed to be God and He received worship. And somehow He’s worthy of it. I'm thinking how you might have been wrestling with coming to grips with the idea of, “What if this is true? What does this mean for me, for my life, for the way that I see myself, the way that I see my own life? C.S. Lewis says, “Is this the hound of heaven, coming to interfere? Break and be the iconoclast who breaks all of my-

Yes.

… my preconceptions of who He is and who I am,” and I'm sure that there must have been some wrestling? Or was it just a simple kind of like, “No. This is true,” and somehow, like you say, in your heart, you kind of turned towards, “This is really what I want. If this is true,” then your desires kind of conformed to that reality.

Yes. I think it's a very perceptive question, because I probably could have gotten to this point in my journey and still never really surrendered myself to Christ. I could have gotten to a point of intellectual assent and even admiration for Jesus and for the community that He had set up, or that I had experienced in this context, at least, without actually being this sense of, like you said, humbling myself and actually worshiping Jesus. That was another step on my journey. And for me, it really came later in my journey. This happened over a period of about nine months, from when I first went to that meeting to when I actually gave my life to Jesus.

But later in that process was a point where, and I think the Lord just knew when the right timing was for me, when knew enough to experience this in the right and most helpful way, but I really felt the conviction of sin in my life, and in some ways, really, for the first time in a deep and sustained way. Again, because I was so adept and in the habit of rationalizing and explaining away my sin beforehand. But now it was clear to me—and I think that was gift of the Holy Spirit. It was clear to me that certain things were wrong in my life, certain things I was doing were wrong, and I can remember…. So now I'm in sort of like two worlds, right? The Holy Spirit’s convicting me of sin, but there’s still part of me that's like, “But I'm in control. I’m powerful. I'm the divine one. I can make what I want of my life.” So I had this conviction of sin from the Spirit. And I sort of accepted that.

And I can remember thinking to myself, “Okay, well, if now I believe that that's wrong, I'll just stop doing that. On my strength. I’ll just sort of flip the switch, and we won't do that anymore.” And I can remember trying to do that and falling flat on my face. And then thinking, “Okay, I obviously didn't try hard enough. Okay, now I'll try harder.” Flat on my face. “Okay, now I need to try as hard as I possibly can. Okay, now let me try as hard as I possibly can.” Flat on my face. And it was sort of the first time in my life where I came to and was willing to accept the conclusion that I'm actually weak. There's sin in my life that I am helpless to do anything about, to even understand fully without the help of Someone Who’s greater than me. And that was very much the most significant place that I needed to come to in my heart. And it was really essential that I came to that place before I made a commitment to Christ. I had to get to a place where I was ready to see Jesus as my Savior. I think, before then, I might have even been willing to say, “Look, logically it makes sense. Rationally, yep. He’s God. He’s the one that actually created the universe,” but that's different than saying, “And I required saving, and He saved me.” So that was a very important part of my story.

Yeah. Sometimes it just is a process, isn’t it. And I think sometimes we need to be patient with ourselves and with others, as they're trying to figure things out and moving in the direction of God. I love your honesty there. It's very transparent. Because we are all guilty. I think the word says we’re all guilty. And we are.

Yes.

And we all need saving from ourselves. And that takes such a posture of humility, that is oftentimes, for all of us, unnatural. It’s an unnatural state. But once you get there, it seems like there's a lot of freedom that comes from that, and a burden that is lifted once you give that burden to Christ. So I'm wondering.  I'm sure your life changed quite a bit after you came to that place of surrender, not only in your life, in your pursuits and the way you answered questions, but it probably, in a sense, as a thinker, I would imagine asking these big questions, you can see how the reality of God really does bring things into focus, in terms of it does help answer the big questions of life. As a philosopher, how is it, through being a believer in Christ, you believe the word, and that it’s not for weak-minded individuals. It’s actually a pretty robust worldview to believe in. How has it shaped your understanding, really, of things intellectually and in your life?

Yes. I love that you used the word freedom. That's probably the word that most characterizes what my experience was of making that decision to surrender my life to Christ. Not everyone has a specific moment, but for me, there was a moment in my dorm room. I was in 122 Joline Hall, and it wasn't… I was reading a book at the time, but it wasn't like there was something very specific in that book. I think God just knew it was the right time, in terms of the process He had taken me on in both my head and my heart and the context of community, to give me the gift of faith. And I just somehow knew in my spirit, in a way that so far transcended any of my calculations or philosophizing, that God was real, that Jesus was Who He claimed to be, that He was present with me, that He loved me, what He had done for me. Nobody was in the room, but I dropped to my knees, and I exclaimed out loud. I said, “Oh, my gosh! This really happened!”

And freedom, I think, was the experience. And since then, this freedom to stop competing to be loved and to start enjoying it. There was no rest before that, because I always had to compete for my value and to be loved. And now I could rest in that and just enjoy being loved. And yet I competed harder than ever, whether it was on the sports field or with my academic studies, but it actually wasn't a competition against other people. It was an opportunity to worship God in gratitude for what He had given me.

Now it’s like, “Well, I’m not doing this for myself. I’m doing this for the God of the universe.” So, interestingly, sometimes people think, “Okay, well God gives us our value. God loves us no matter what, so we don't really need to work hard at anything.” At least my experience was I felt the freedom to work harder and to really pour myself into the things that I was passionate about because now it was, “Well, this is not just my individual preference. This is a calling given to me by God. There's something eternal about this. The good things will last for eternity. They’re not just transient. They won't just pass away. This isn't just for myself. This is honoring Someone Who has done so much for me, Who gave their life for me. And this is my opportunity to give my life back to them in service.”

So I found that there was a freedom, a rest, but even in that rest, a passion to pursue the things that I had been inclined to with even more tenacity.

That’s so beautiful. What a tremendous paradigm shift, really. In the way that you… Like you say, I appreciate that, that you're still working… You’re working hard, but it's with a different lens. It's with a different perspective and a different motivation. And you're still striving for excellence. It’s just the motivation is different.

That’s right. And the goodness of God that, again, He actually wove into my story things that he had given early on in life, even when I didn't know what to do with them, like an ability to persuade. From a young age, I was good at persuasion. I debated with people a lot, but I generally just used that to my advantage. How could I persuade people that I was better than I was? Persuade myself into a situation? Persuade people that they were wrong and I was right? And yet, there was something in the persuasion that was good. It was just corrupted.

Now, in the context of my Christian life, I wound up on a missions trip.

I didn't know what a missions trip meant. I just knew we were going down to this conference. I knew it had a Christian element to it, but it was actually a trip where you walked the beach and shared the gospel with other people who were down there for spring break, looking for lots of things other than hearing the gospel, but an older brother in Christ sort of took me under his wing. We walked on the beach. He gave me a couple opportunities to just share about what God was doing in my life and the journey I had been on. And as I did, there's one man whose face I can still remember, because as I shared with him, I don't know exactly what happened in his heart, but I remember seeing in his eyes like something was making sense. Some sort of burden was falling away, and there was kind of a clarity, and he was seeing Jesus more for who Jesus really is.

And it was like, in that moment, I knew that's what I was made for. I knew I was supposed to spend… I didn’t know exactly what forms, but in one way or another, I was supposed to spend the rest of my life telling people about Jesus, and persuading people of Jesus, not in a manipulative way, but sharing with them the truths of both the mind and the heart that I had experienced. And so there's just this beauty where I knew in some ways that I was geared toward persuasion. That’s why I was already choosing to study philosophy before I ever came to faith. But now it was like, “Oh! Now I get it. Now I understand why I have such this inclination towards persuasion, because You’ve actually built me to share You with others,” and I would have been just chasing a perishable crown of getting people to think better of me or getting myself into situations I didn't really deserve to be in. Now I'm actually using the same gift, but for an imperishable crown, for things of eternal significance.

So, I was so thankful for that, and yes, a lot changed, in terms of both my intellectual perspective on things and my personal experience of life. One of those things for me, which I'm so thankful for, was about asking for forgiveness, because before I came to think I would never ask for forgiveness, never ever, because that meant I was wrong, which meant I wasn't better than other people, which meant I wasn't valuable, which meant I was a lovable, and, you know, go down the whole spiral. So I couldn't ask for forgiveness. And so I then had to live with a lot of self-deception about why I was right and other people were wrong.

And this was partly cultural. In my Italian-American background, in my family, people really didn't do reconciliation. They got mad at each other, and then they didn't talk until no one could remember why they were mad in the first place. And then one person would show up at the other person's doorstep with a tomato plant. And it was always a tomato plant, Italians. And then they'd say, “Oh! Brother!” And then they would hug it out. But no words exchanged, no apology, no forgiveness. And then things would just kind of move forward.

But all that to say, the week that I came to faith, one of the next mornings, I woke up with a flood of conviction about ways that I had hurt people in the past, all instances where previously I had rationalized to myself, got myself to believe that I had been in the right and they had been in the wrong. And now the Holy Spirit was giving me actual clarity of thought about these situations and where I had actually hurt people. Not condemnation, but conviction, almost a freeing conviction, the freedom to actually live in reality and acknowledge truth. And I felt this compulsion to sit down, and I began to just write letter after letter to these people, acknowledging ways that I had hurt them and apologizing, and I saw God do some beautiful reconciliation and peace making through that and have sort of fallen in love with forgiveness, given and received.

But as someone, I mean, again, just to remind our listeners, you are no slouch when it comes to intellectual rigor and you went on from Princeton to Oxford to pursue a degree in philosophy there at the doctoral level. So what prompted you to do that?

It was the goodness of God that I was already studying philosophy. Even when I was not following Him, He sort of set me up to be able to do that, to study something that was aligned with what I was called to. And so my interest became more and more theological but retained a philosophical element as well. And I really got into philosophy of religion, arguments for and against the existence of God, questions about the nature of God. Some of the questions that really can act as obstacles to people taking faith seriously. Some of which acted as obstacles to me to taking faith seriously. And so I had a passion to study those questions. Really because I began to share the faith with people after that experience on that missions trip at the beach. And as I would share my faith with people, people would then have questions. Sometimes very good questions. Sometimes very hard questions. And so, for me, it wasn't just a philosophical interesting questions for the sake of questions. I did have that kind of naturally. I feel like God maybe gave that to me because of what He was going ultimately to call me to, but really the primary motivation to dig deeper in this area was sharing the faith and people asking questions and realizing part of what it meant to love them well would be to take their questions seriously and try to provide them with good answers. And so, even though I was studying philosophy at an academic level, I always thought of it as part of my service to actual people that I was going to meet in a taxi or an Uber or getting a haircut or in the context of community in some way.

Yeah. That’s pretty beautiful. I mean, again, your heart was directed towards God's inner purposes, and that is a sacrifice in itself, that kind of rigor that you experienced but was for the sake of the Lord and for others. That’s amazing!

And I'm thinking, Vince, of those who are intellectually driven, and they, for personal reasons, have resisted the person of God and think they're fine without him. But yet, curious enough, maybe your story has sparked in them an interest to think, “Well, maybe it is true.” What would you say to someone like that, who might be willing to move towards maybe reading the Bible or even saying that agnostic’s prayer or something? How can you encourage someone who is… It sounds like you have these kind of encounters with skeptics a lot, so what would you say?

Yes. Yeah. Thank you. One encouragement I would give would be not to dismiss Christianity because it seems crazy, not to dismiss it because it makes extraordinary, incredible claims. I think that was a mistake that I made. It was almost like all the different philosophies or worldviews were lined up on a race on the starting line, but Christianity starts three steps further back than everyone else because it makes these claims about a virgin birth and the resurrection from the dead. And I think that that was bad reasoning on my part. And so I would encourage people not to think that way. I mean, there are so many things in the world that just are extraordinary. I mean, even at the moment, some of our best versions of quantum physics suggest that the same particle can be in two places at once. That's crazy! But when a quantum physicist says that, we think, “Cool!” But when a Christian says that God is omnipresent, that He can, in some significant sense, be in various places at once, we think, “Oh, that's too crazy to believe.” Don't dismiss Christianity because it seems extraordinary. Actually take a step back and think that through. I mean, even when you think about that question that we started with, “Where did all of this come from?” There are only three options: Either God created it, it just burst into existence out of nothing for no reason whatsoever, or it's just always been here. It just extends infinitely back in time in this universe or through a series of universes but again with no explanation for why that's the case.

And from my perspective, I'm willing to put my hand up and say, “Okay. The idea of an immaterial God creating the universe? That’s extraordinary! That’s awe inspiring!” I'll put my hand up and accept that. But criticism without alternative is empty. Maybe that's the phrase I would leave people with. Don't just criticize a Christian faith because you think it's extraordinary. Think through the alternatives, and you might come to the conclusion, and you think, “Boy, Christians believe in a virgin birth. That’s extraordinary! But you know what? I sort of believe in the virgin birth of an entire universe, because that's the best scientific explanation I have for it. Wow! That’s extraordinary, too!” I think we live in an extraordinary world, and so we shouldn't be surprised if the explanations for that world are quite extraordinary as well.

So don't dismiss Christianity. Actually look into it. Don't criticize without having an alternative, whether it's the beginning of the universe, origin, or whether it's questions of meaning or destiny or purpose or morality. Put the different ways of seeing the world side by side, and even if one seems quite extraordinary say, “Okay, what is the alternative?” And if you can't find an alternative that answers all the questions of life in such a robust way and in such a coherent way, then I think you really need to take Christianity seriously.

And maybe one more thing I’d say, Jana, if that's okay-

Sure.

… is I really believe that… I resonate with what Pascal said: This is sort of a paraphrase, but he said, “God's given us enough evidence to believe rationally but not so much that we can believe based on reason alone.” And I think that's because He doesn't want just intellectual assent. He wants us to use our minds to pursue Him, to seek Him. He wants our whole selves. He wants that. But also, at the end of the day, He doesn't want people who just intellectually assent to Him. He wants us to know Him in a deeper way, in a relational way. And G.K. Chesterton said there are two ways to choose a coat. One is to look at the dimensions of the coat, what size it is, how long the arms are, the shoulder width. The other way is to try it on. And I think both are important. Like, for me, on my journey, I never would have picked the coat up and tried it on unless I was able to look at the dimensions of science and philosophy and history and say, “Yeah, that looks like it's roughly the right size. That looks reasonable.” But for a season, I felt that, “You know what? I'm not gonna take any sort of vulnerable relational step of commitment toward God until I have all my questions answered, I have perfectly analyzed all of the dimensions, and then I will know with certainty what I want to know to such an extent that then it will be easy for me to make a faith commitment to that thing.”

What I actually found, in my experience, is that the confidence and assurance, the type of knowledge that I longed for, was actually only possible through an act of personal commitment and trust. So there does come a point in this journey where you say, “Yeah, this is rational. This is as rational as any other faith system or worldview that I've been able to compare it to,” and yet at the end of the day, the Lord does say, “Taste and see. Clothe yourself in Christ.” There's a knowledge that transcends just the knowledge of philosophy or history. And there's an invitation to open the door to that knowledge, to take that step when the time is right.

So I think we all, as Christians, are sitting back in admiration in some ways, of you as a very educated Christian, someone who has a heart for engagement ever since that moment on the beach. And we all, I think, want people to know Christ the way that we do, as true and loving and full of grace. But we don't always know the best way to engage with those who really don't believe, and those who are skeptical, those who push back. And so, sitting where you do now, having lived and engaged for a number of years, how would you encourage us as Christians to think about stepping out or stepping forward or engaging in a way that's meaningful as ambassadors for Christ?

I love that question. I'll try to keep it concise, because this is where my heart really gets excited, when people get excited about sharing Jesus with other people, and I think the opportunities are boundless. Take a very simple question, like, “How was your weekend?” How many times will you be asked that question over the course of your life? Say you get asked it five times every Monday for the rest of your life. I mean, that's thousands and thousands of times that you're asked the question, “How was your weekend?” And so often as Christians, we just say, “Fine. Thanks. How was yours?” But if you worshiped the living God in the context of community on a Sunday, I mean, that's not even an honest answer, right? 1 Peter 3 tells us to be prepared to give a response to everyone who asks us for the reason for the hope that we have. And I think sometimes we take that much too narrowly, like, “Okay, let me be prepared for the specific instance where someone says, ‘Hey, can you tell me about the hope that you have in Christ?’” And we don't realize that those opportunities are there all the time. If you have worshiped the living God in the context of community on a Sunday, the question on Monday, “How was your weekend?” is an absolute gift, and it should not take you by surprise. You know full well that question’s coming on Monday. So put some prayer into it, put some thought into it, that you can have this creative, engaging, not manipulative, real answer to that question on a Monday.

I find that oftentimes we find it so difficult to wind up talking about Jesus in conversation because so often we're trying to get from shooting the breeze to Jesus and that's a big jump. But if we could spend more of our time in the middle ground of asking creative questions, having meaningful conversations about things that matter, Jesus makes His way into those conversations quite naturally. I would say to people… I would say don't water down the faith in your desire for people to commit to Jesus.  God doesn't need us to be His marketing campaign, where we try on our own to make Him more appealing to people or think, “Oh, okay. If I put it this way but don't mention that and don't mention that, maybe it'll be a little bit easier for them to make this commitment.” Just remember, Jesus said, “Whoever would come after Me, be My disciple, must deny themselves, take up their cross daily, and follow me.”

So be honest with people. We actually…. You used the word surrender earlier, Jana, and I think that's the right word. We do a disservice to people if we make an invitation to Christ but water it down and make them think it's something less than surrender. Because that's different. It's even different than commitment. There are lots of things I'm committed to. I'm a committed New York Yankees fan. My dad was before me. My son hopefully will be. I’ll be a New York Yankees fan the day I die. But I'm not surrendered to the New York Yankees.

Right!

That’s a very different type of relationship, and I think sometimes we have this tendency to think God needs us to sort of re-calibrate His gospel or what it means to follow Him in some ways. Resist that. Resist that temptation.

Pray for God's heart for people. I think that is so significant, because at the end of the day, God will use you when your heart breaks for the lost. So pray for that, because we all can have that. It’s not something we can manifest. It’s something God can give as a gift, and I believe will give to those who ask Him.

And then the last thing I would say is just an encouragement, an encouragement that God is always doing more than we can see, nevertheless. Not too long ago I had an encouragement in this respect with regard to my own story. So I told you that I came to Christ in 122 Joline Hall. That was my dorm room. That's where I dropped to my knees. A few years ago, I was telling my story somewhere, and I didn't normally mention that specific room number, because most people… that doesn't mean anything to anyone. But I happened to say that room number, 122 Joline Hall, and afterwards a woman came to the front, and I could see she was teary, she was emotional, she was moved, and she said, “Did you say 122 Joline Hall?” And I said, “Yes. That was my dorm room.” And she said, “Well, I'm about 15 years older than you, and I went to Princeton, too, and I lived in 121 Joline Hall, next door.” And she said, “I spent my four years in college praying for the salvation of the guys in 122 Joline Hall.” And she said, “All these years, I’ve felt like God didn't hear that prayer, because I never saw that prayer answered, but as you said that from the front, I realized that God not only heard my prayer, but He answered my prayer word for word for the salvation of the guys in 122 Joline Hall.” And so just the graciousness of God, that 15 years before I even would have given Him a second thought, he had someone literally praying for the floor on which I would drop to my knees and give my life to him.

And I guess if you're of a skeptical persuasion, like I was, you could chalk that up to a very great coincidence. But maybe, and I would invite anyone who's listening to consider the fact that maybe God is pursuing each one of us like that, where even years before we thought to give Him the time of the day, He had specific people praying for us, praying for the very locations we would be in, the very times and places in which we ultimately would give our lives to Him.

And how gracious, too, thinking of that woman, just to bring it full circle, to allow her to see, even in this life, the effect that her prayer… I mean it was a blessing for both of you. That didn't need to happen. What are the odds of her hearing your conversion story? I don't know. The more I know about God and walk in this life, the I'm just astounded by the way He’s so personal and so intimate to reveal Himself to those who are looking for Him and who are longing for Him and who have called Him their own. And I'm so taken by that story, but also just, Vince, your life, and it's just such a beautiful testimony to what the Lord can do and will do in people's lives who are willing to look in His direction.

Yes! What a blessing to think how infrequently maybe we see that situation. She happened to be at that talk, I happened to tell that story, and we make that connection. But what a great hope to think, “Wow! How many times will that happen in the context of eternity? How many people will we meet one day, where we said, ‘Whoa! That happened to you? I prayed for that.’” And it gets me excited.

And again, just reflecting on that story with you, it just makes me think that so often our conception of the universe and of reality, it's just so narrow. And accepting Jesus into your life, allowing Him to be the bedrock of existence. There’s a freedom, and it expands our imaginations for what could be possible, the way that we're connected to each other, and what it means to love each other well and to love God well and to be able to enjoy that in the context of community for all eternity.

Yes, I couldn't say anything that would sum anything better than that, Vince. Thank you so very much for coming on the podcast today, for telling the fullness of your story. I feel like in some ways we just scratched the surface. I just feel like there's so much more wisdom and experience there to glean, and I hope that those who are listening will tune in to Unbelievable?, will seek out not only your ministry but also your beautiful wife, Jo Vitale, just such a beautiful, again Oxford grad, just an amazingly beautiful woman of God who expresses the love of Christ and the intelligence of Christ in such compelling ways. So I just am so grateful again for the privilege of having spent this hour and a half with you. What a blessing!

Well, thank you so much. And thank you for your ministry. Jo and I have just received your book, and we're very excited to dig into it.

Wonderful.

Thanks for tuning in to Side B Stories to hear Vince’s story. You can find out more about him and his work and ministry and how to connect with him in the episode notes. For questions and feedback about this episode, you can contact me through our email at [email protected]. I'd like to also thank our amazing Side B Stories team for helping with this episode production, Ashley Decker, our producer, Mark Rosera, our audio engineer, and Kyle Polk, our video editor, and of course, the C.S. Lewis Institute for including us in their podcast network.

Also, if you are a skeptic or atheist and you would like to connect with a former atheist or skeptic with questions, please again connect with us by emailing us at [email protected], and we'll get you connected.

I hope you enjoyed this episode, that you'll follow, rate, review, and share this podcast with your friends and your social network. In the meantime, I'll be looking forward to seeing you next time, where we'll see how another skeptic flips the record of their life.

Archeologist, world traveler, and former skeptic Dr. Josephine Thomas once thought all religions were fictional stories until she finally encountered the 'true myth' of historical Christianity.

Resources/authors recommended by Josephine:

• Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis

The Resurrection of the Son of God, N.T. Wright

Visit Side B Stories' YouTube Channel at https://www.youtube.com/@sidebstories

For more stories of atheist and skeptics' conversions to Christianity, visit www.sidebstories.com

English gentleman, actor, and former atheist Nigel Goodwin was raised within a Marxist worldview.  He saw church as fabricated theatre until he found the real God. Podcast episode notes: Nigel’s Resources:

• Biography of Nigel Goodwin written by author David Porter – Arts and Minds: The Story of Nigel Goodwin

Resources/authors recommended by Nigel:

• Francis Schaeffer books
  • The God Who is There
  • Escape from Reason
  • He is There and He is not Silent

Atheists Finding God book Rowman.com/Lexington Promo Code: LXFANDF30

Former skeptic Neil Placer was apathetic about the question of God until his own dissatisfaction in life led him to search for something more.   Neil's Resources:

• Podcast: A World in Tension -This podcast explores the universal struggles of life. Externally, we encounter conflict with others. Internally, we engage in a constant debate between our hearts and minds.  https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/a-world-in-tension/id1647690656

For more stories of atheist conversions to Christianity, please visit www.sidebstories.com

Side B Stories YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@sidebstories416

Hello and thanks for joining in. I'm Jana Harmon, and you're listening to Side B Stories, where we see how skeptics flip the record of their lives. Each podcast, we listen to someone who has once been an atheist or skeptic, but who became a Christian against all odds. You can hear more of these stories at our Side B Stories website at sidebstories.com. We welcome your comments on our Side B Stories Facebook page about these episodes, and you can also email us directly at [email protected]. We always love to hear your comments.

As a reminder, our guests not only tell their stories, but at the end of each episode, these former atheists and skeptics give advice to curious seekers as to how they can best pursue the truth and reality of God. They also give advice to Christians as to how best to engage with those who don't believe. I hope you're listening to the end to hear them speak from their wisdom and experience as someone who has once been a skeptic but who is now a believer. Also, please know that many of these former skeptics and atheists have made themselves available to talk with anyone who has questions about God or faith. If that's you, just please connect with us at our email at [email protected], and we’ll get you connected.

If there's something common to us all, it's that we want a life of meaning and purpose, to know and be known, to love and be loved. We want a life that feels important because it is important. It is valuable. The inevitable question before us though is how do we find that kind of love, that kind of life, that kind of meaning and value? Can it be found on our own in a world without God? Or do we need to look beyond ourselves to find what our hearts truly long for? C.S. Lewis is a former atheist who recognized the important difference that it makes to live with and without God. He knew that if God was real and Christianity was true, there was nothing more important than that, saying, “Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and if true, of infinite importance. The only thing it cannot be is moderately important.” In other words, God makes all the difference in the way that we can and do experience and see life. For those who believe, it should mean everything.

In today's story, former atheist Neil Placer moved from being completely apathetic about the question of God to now holding Him as of infinite importance. How in the world did that happen? I hope you'll come along to find out.

Welcome to Side B Stories, Neil. It’s great to have you with me today.

Thanks, Jana. It's great to be here.

Wonderful. Tell us a little bit about yourself, so the listeners have an idea of who you are before we get into your story.

Yeah, absolutely. So my name is Neil Placer. I'm 46 years old. I live in Chattanooga, Tennessee. I'm trained as an engineer, so I'm a mechanical engineer, but I would say that I'm probably an atypical engineer, in the sense that, well, number 1, I like communication. Although I consider myself an introvert, I do like to communicate. I do like to think deeply about things and really communicate those truths to others. So yeah. I've just always been someone who likes to consider topics, and part of what we're going to talk about is how I came to faith and how that was a bit of a journey for me, very analytical, yet also leaps of faith.

That sounds intriguing, Neil. Why don't you start us back at your story, at the very beginning. Tell us about where you were raised. Were you always from Tennessee? Tell us about your family. Was religion or God or church any part of your family life?

Yeah. So I think if people are tuning in from Tennessee, they'll pick me out instantly and say, “That guy's not from Tennessee.” So I actually grew up in the DC area, which is kind of the international, cosmopolitan land where there really isn't an accent. So Northerners think I'm a Southerner, and the Southerners think I'm in Northerner, so I can't win. But, yeah, I grew up in the DC area.

My father was Spanish. I say, was; he recently passed away. So his background, being from Spain. If you're not familiar with that, you're basically born Catholic, right? It's just part of the culture. Everyone kind of just connects themself to it, but from a spiritual perspective, that really didn't mean much. So they took us when we were kids to Mass, and we participated. I think they wanted the influence of it, but sooner or later, as my brother and I were getting older, we kind of became like Easter and Christmas Christians, if you will, right? So we just showed up for the major events. And they were… it was more like an event, so there wasn't really a strong focus on that, even though there was a religious component to my life.

Okay. So it was just part of the tradition or ritual, I suppose, of your family. It was something you did, not necessarily, I presume, something you've believed? Or did you have any kind of a tacit belief in God because this was part of your life?

No. I mean, I didn't really think about it much. I was thinking about this. I didn't really have… Growing up middle class, upper middle class, I didn't have a need for God, right? I had everything that I wanted materially. My parents kind of let the rope out pretty long, so I felt like I could do whatever I wanted. I was an athlete. I played soccer. So I just felt like I didn't… that was kind of for a goody goodies. And I was, by definition, truly just agnostic. Like I didn't care. I wasn't an atheist. I wasn't against it. I just didn't care. I didn't detect any need for it in my life.

Yeah. So just, I guess, what they might call apatheism, right?

Yes.

Yeah. You just don't care. It wasn't important to you. You obviously didn't need it. So, was this the case throughout your growing up years? It sounds like you were very occupied, had a great family, great life. And did you have any touch points at all of what you would consider to be authentic Christianity in your world?

Yeah, it's funny how, when you reflect back in the past, you kind of see where God was working. So I think the first moment was, my senior year of high school, I remember going back to the Catholic church on my own. So my parents weren't going, my brother wasn't going, but I wanted to just kind of explore. Instead of being the kid that just sat through it and said, “When is this over?” I wanted to actually seek. “What are they talking about? Is this a viable pathway of life?” My parents didn't even understand it. They said, “Are you going to impress some girl?” like, “What are you going for?” But I just said, “I just want to find out. What are they saying?” And I did that for a little while, and my conclusion, and I think it was a shallow search to be fair, was, “Yeah, this isn't really for me. Now I've actually listened to it with open ears, and yeah, this is not for me.” But that was kind of the first moment of considering something outside of myself.

What made you… I'm just curious. What sparked that curiosity? Was it some kind of dissatisfaction in your life? Was it just some intellectual curiosity? Or something that your friends were doing? Or it just kind of came from nowhere?

I honestly don't know. I mean, of the categories you just gave, I think probably intellectual curiosity was probably the answer. Other people were not doing it. I don't think there was some major gap. I think I was just curious. I've always been a curious type and willing to explore things, even if the crowd's not doing it. So, again, I think looking back, I think God was working on me. I just didn't realize it that way. So I don't really have a great answer.

No. That's fine. Sometimes we just do things without real, deep thoughtful considerations to something we're motivated to do. I'm also curious. You went to go see what it was, and you felt like it wasn't for you. What did you think religion was at that point? You knew it wasn't for you, but what was it, did you think? Was it just a place where people gathered. They needed community. What was it, did you think?

Being that it was Catholic, I thought it was very ritualistic, right? So it was just very, you know, up and down, knees. Liturgies, there was a lot of formality to it. But in the end, I just kind of thought it was empty. I just felt like people were going through the motions, checking the boxes for whatever reason, to make themselves feel good. I mean, it's kind of connected to my background. Like, why did we go as a family? I don't know. It’s just because that's what we did. That was the culture, right? So that was my conclusion. It just kind of felt a little bit empty, although, again, I'll say my search was shallow. I don't know that I was on a truly deep search at that point.

Okay, okay. So you tried it as a high schooler, which is admirable. Before you went to college. And so walk us on from there. How did your life look? Then you left high school, went on to university, and what happened?

Yeah. So my first year of school… so I played soccer in college. I went to Virginia Tech. And I would categorize my life, my first year of school, as kind of living in the joy of sin. And now that sounds funny to say. But like I really… I enjoyed the sin, right? I felt like I had all things going for me, right? I was studying engineering, so I was doing things hard with my mind. I was an athlete, so I was working my physical self. And I was also partying, so like I had all elements, I thought. And so I enjoyed sin. But the thing is sin has a season. Sin has an ending, because sin's pathway is alluring at first, but as Scripture says, it's sweet in the mouth, but then it's bitter in the stomach. And sometimes that bitter takes a while to realize. So I would say I really… I'm not going to say sin isn't fun. That's why people do it, right?

Right.

But I think that whole freshman year was kind of like that. And then, after that, I started to realize…. I didn't make the soccer team the next year. School was much… the first time I struggled with school. Like, “Maybe I'm not as smart as I think I am.” The whole partying scene became empty and old. “What what am I doing? What's the point?” So I would say after that was really the journey of struggle of, “What am I here for?” So God kind of pulled it apart. But I'm kind of saying it that way because there's people that just don't want religion because they think it's oppressive or it's going to wreck their lifestyle. But I would say, “What is this lifestyle that feels free and sinful really giving you?” Because, at the end, it doesn't give you much.

So you were feeling empty and spent and challenged, and life wasn't as pristine, I guess, as it had been prior. There were challenges coming in your path. So it caused you to introspect, I guess. And I think sometimes those difficulties are disruptors that cause us to step back and take a look at our own life, the way that we think, the way that we live. And so what did that disconcertion or tension or challenge do for you in terms of what were your next steps?

Well, it got me thinking and wrestling with things. I mean, I said earlier I'm kind of an introvert, and in terms of, like, to recharge, I need to go off to the side, and I need to think. So I just thought about topics, and, like, “What am I here for?” I mean, college is just kind of a good season for that because there's a bunch of people around you also that are going through that. And I don't remember all the bumps and turns, but I do remember concluding that it must be about love, right? All this other stuff is superficial. So it must be about love. And in the context of no God, then that means a human relationship, right? Like another person, that must be kind of…. The holy grail of happiness is that, which involves also kind of a, “It's not just about you. To make a relationship work. You have to mutually bring that joy and benefit to one another,” so that's kind of where I landed after sort of years of struggling through it.

And guess what? Surprise, surprise. That pathway became empty, too, right? There were some relationships that you thought would be going in a good way and they didn't. And so it was at that moment—and this is just to kind of walk you through the timeline. So freshman year was all about fun. Then, I would say it was closer to… I did 5 years of school because I was an engineer, and we did a co-op, so it's just kind of built into the program, but it was right around kind of that senior year or right before it that I just kind of said, “Okay, relationships don't work either.”

So now I don't know. Now I'm like… I'm really lost. I don't know what the answer is. And I'm about to graduate. And I'm about to get some job. And I kind of, for the first time, maybe categorized it as hopeless in terms of a deep meaning of life. I could have gone and done the job and done what everyone else does, but that was the moment where it was just like, “All right. I don't know what the answer is.”

So I guess you knew that religion, at the time, wasn't for you, prior to all of this. And you understood…. Did you, I guess, understand the logical [17:00] implications of atheism, that it does not bring objective meaning? I mean, were you that thoughtful about it? Or was this just something you were experiencing because you were just doing life without God?

Yeah, no. I wasn't thinking about sort of those apologetic arguments about atheism at all.  v And I think that's where the story gets interesting about that's where God's hand is… like God's hand was always working, maybe more subtly. We don't know how God works, but He kind of lets you get to a place where you're ready. And I feel like, at that point, I was ready. And then He really started to press in, and again, I think the story becomes interesting there.

Yes. I've heard it said. Well Os Guinness said, actually, “When someone becomes dissatisfied with their own worldview then they become open towards another.” And it sounds like you reached that point of dissatisfaction, so that you became willing or open to see, “Is there something more than this flat immanent frame,” I guess, as Charles Taylor would say. Is there something more? Or is there something more that I'm missing? I guess you felt that kind of earnest need or that angst in a sense. So what did you do with that dissatisfaction? Again, it sounds like you were willing to look for something more. What did you do?

Yes. So like I was saying, it got interesting. There were kind of three distinct people in my life. So I had my friend John, who I went to high school with, that he actually was kind of a professing Christian in high school, and then once he got to college, he kind of fell away from it. So I had him in the circle, this buddy who kind of knew faith and now doesn't have faith. So he kind of becomes more important at the end. But then there were two other people, and they were both ladies on the soccer team. So one was just a good friend of mine. And ironically, believe it or not, her name was Trinity. Now, she wasn't a believer, but what was really interesting about our relationship is that we both reached this point that, as friends, we were pushing each other towards faith, and we didn't believe it.

So I'll give you an example of just kind of one of these moments: I love these pause moments that God gives us to kind of just reflect. So we're out to breakfast, and again, I told you I studied engineering. It's a lot of work, a lot of reading, a lot of homework, and so we're talking about faith and religion, and she said, “You know, maybe we should pick up the Bible every once in a while and read it.” I said, “Look, I don't have time to read the Bible. I have all these tests. There’s no space for it.” And she said something that was profound. Again, she's not a believer. She said, “Well, if you think about it, if God is really true, then there's nothing more important than knowing about Him and you do that by reading this book,” like nothing else matters. What else is worth as much devotion of your time? And I just kind of thought about that and said, “It’s kind of weird that you're saying that because you don't really believe this, but number two, you're right. Like, just from a logical perspective, if that's true, you're absolutely right about that.” So it was kind of moments like that where God was working or like other times when…. And we started to go to church. And so mornings where, like, I'd call and say, “Hey, are you going to church?” “No. No. No. I'm not going.” “Come on. Let’s go. Let's go.” We were pushing each other. And so, like I was saying, God was really working. So-

Wow!

That was a key element. And then the third person is another girl named Kara, which I was more of an acquaintance with, but she was actually a firm believer in faith. And so what was unique about her is she… you could see something different. So there was a smile on the face. There was a joy. But not only that, there was…. We’d go out and play soccer together, and her work ethic was different. I remember going, “Why is no one else trying except for her?” And it was just kind of a fun game. But she demonstrated something different about Christ. So think about that. You have this guy that kind of fell away involved. You have someone who's challenging you who's not a believer, and then someone who really is a believer, all kind of in the picture together, kind of working at the same time. And I remember going to a church service, and my eyes were still blind. They kind of gave that classic picture of like you have the two cliffs, and the only thing that can split the divide is the cross splitting in between. You probably heard that at some point, right?

Mm-hm. 

And so they're, like, giving this clear gospel message. And I remember Kara looking over at me and going, “This just doesn't get more clear than this and, they were like ‘what do you think about the message?’” And I was like, “Oh, it was great. Loved it!” But I had no clue. It went over my head. I had no clue what actually was going on, so it was really interesting. My eyes were starting to open, but they had not been fully opened at that point.

So, for those who are listening who may not be familiar with that reference that you're speaking of, the sermon reference, can you explain that a little bit more and what that means, what the gospel means?

Yeah. So imagine there's kind of two big cliffs, and basically, what it's trying to say is that our sin separates us from God, and we can't ever cross that chasm. There's nothing we can do on our own power, but that there's a clear separation. And the only thing that can split that divide, or really fill that divide, and they drop a cross in there, is the cross of Christ. Which that’s not about the cross. It's about the fact… not the cross itself. It’s Jesus. It's the fact that Jesus paid the cost for our sins and basically became a mediator for us to God the Father, who is going to judge us for our sins. So that cross allows you that pathway. So it's basically saying you need Jesus to become your Lord and Savior, and He is the way to get there. So again, it's a very clear like, in that service, “Hey! You, Neil, need to surrender to Christ,” but I thought it was a great message, but didn't get that I needed to do that.

That it wasn't for you, but evidently Trinity was being taken in by this message. Was it something she responded to at the time?

So, well, let's…. She and I, we actually…. Let me finish the story, and I'll tell you about it. She and I actually came to faith at the same time.

Okay.

And so where this all led to was actually a moment in time where I gave my life to Christ. And so let me just give you the build-up. It was like an exam week, and so I was really busy. And Kara and my buddy John were actually going to go to this Fellowship of Christian Athletes retreat. It was a few hours up the road. And they said, “Hey, you want to come?” And I was like, “Look, I just can't think about this. I need to focus on my tests.” So it's literally Friday. I've finished my last exam, and I'm driving home, driving to my apartment at school. And I'm thinking, “Well, I could spend another week here and kind of just go downtown and drink and do whatever else I was going to do, that I’d done over and over, and it's getting old. Or I could go hang out with these wacky Christians.” And I thought they were kind of wacky. I mean, at that point, I'm like… And I was always up for a new experience. I was like, “You know, what do I have to lose?” Right? So I called them, and they were literally about to go. I said, “Look. Do you still have room for me to come tag along with you guys?” And they're like, “Yes, absolutely,” especially Kara, who was the firm believer. She's like, “Yes. Yes.” And I think Trinity had already decided she was going to go.

So anyway, we get there, and that was the moment where I had really never exposed myself. It was like a little world of Christianity, right? Everyone there was a Christian. There was no one like… I was surrounded by something I've never been surrounded in. So I was just kind of like this foreigner, right, in this town of Christianity. I was an outsider. And so you participate in all these Bible studies, and I'm just listening the whole time, because I have nothing to add. I have no clue what they're talking about. But I'm-

[27:08] Can I interrupt you for a moment? Obviously, so Bible studies, and you had mentioned that Trinity thought that reading the Bible would be the most important thing if God was real or true. Had you read the Bible prior to coming to the retreat? Did you take that as an invitation and start reading with Trinity before any of this?

Maybe we were reading a little bit, but not too intently.

Okay. So the whole thing with the Bible was a little bit intimidating or you hadn't really gone there yet. Okay.

Yeah. And I remember I was carrying around, now that you mention that, like some old seventies Bible, and the people at the retreat were like, “What are you? What are you carrying? What is that thing?” Because they didn't know what my what my story was, right? I think they just assumed that I was some Christian, too, right? Because I wasn't sharing anything. I was just listening to what they had to say, and it really just kind of blew my mind to see something different, that people were living for something purposeful. And again, God was then really, really working on me. And so the end of the story is, like, at the end of the weekend—and the speaker was some…. It’s the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, so they usually have some sort of athlete. But he was actually some kickboxer, professional kickboxer. And at the end of the weekend, he said, “Does anyone want to give their life to Christ?” the classic sort of altar call, if you will. But I remember that moment, like, everyone's eyes are closed, and it's like just raise your hand, and I remember that there was this war inside me like, “No! You can't do this. You can't do this. You're going to give up all the things you like.” There was this war. But at the end, I just stuck my hand up. And that was the moment. I really did give my life to Christ. And what's cool is…. It’s just so funny. I think God has this kind of cool, humorous, awesome way of working. That was Valentine's Day weekend, so my search for love, right? Like, He gave me love on Valentine's Day weekend.

Yes! Yes!

So I'll always have this marker there of that conversion. And I remember, at the end, they're kind of sitting in the circles, and they're like, “So, what did you think about the weekend?” And everyone's kind of like, “Ehh, normal weekend. Okay,” and I'm like… the first time I spoke. I’m like, “I think I just gave my life to Christ. I'm not even sure what this really means. But I just did it.” And one guy there, who I'm actually still friends with today, had the wisdom to say, “Number one, that's awesome. Number two, come get plugged in.” Like, here’s the FCA president or soon-to-be president at that time. He said, “Come get plugged in. Come join the community.” Very, very wise and good advice.

Wow. So I'm sitting here thinking you were someone who didn't care about God growing up. It became an issue that you actually started caring about, that there had to be something more in life, and then you found that something more in the person of God and Jesus and that He’s worth it. And you found, in a sense, the love that you had been longing for and searching for, and I presume the meaning that comes along with that. It sounds like you felt there was this internal wrestling and this battle of kind of laying down your own life for being part of a grander story. At any point, did you question or doubt, is this really true? Or does it just sound like a good story? Something that I can give my life to?

Yeah. So what was really cool about my conversion experience is that I think it was really out of character. What I mean by that is I'm a pretty analytical person. I think when I was giving my testimony at college, I’m just remembering this now, when I actually got baptized at the church at school, I said, As an engineer, you have these…. There's this green graph paper that we used. And it's like, “given,” “find,” “assumptions,” and then it's like, at the end, you double underline the answer. And so I wanted that sequence with Jesus Christ double underlined, but I kind of just jumped right to the end, and so it was very much a leap of faith for a very analytical person. And I think the impact of that is that I describe it as kind of Jesus… Or like being held by a father, like a baby being held, because I literally had no real Christian knowledge, no Christian experience to lean on, not even people. I was just getting…. There was nothing. And so, I viewed it like I was being held like a baby, like you do everything for the baby. I was just on cloud nine. I was loving it, so there wasn't really a period up front of me kind of doubting what did I just do, because I was experiencing something amazing. And the people around me even, they said stuff like, “Your face looks different,” which… The Bible talks about your countenance, right? They’re like, “You literally look different.” Like, instead of a grimace or weight, you have a smile. So people even saw what I was experiencing. So what’s cool about that, Jana, is that not everyone has…. I don't think everyone needs to have that story. Like for my kids, I’m like, “You don't have to go through a lot of chaos. You really don't have to.” But the good thing about that is like I'll always know, pointing back, what happened, and no matter what argument anyone throws at me, if there's ever seasons of doubt, something miraculous happened, and I cannot deny it. It's undeniable. And others saw it, too. I didn't just make it up in my head.

Right.

So I remember coming back and my roommates, nonbelievers, they were like, “So did you find Jesus?” like as a joke? And I'm like, “I think I did.” And then they got freaked out like, “Oh, my gosh! What does this mean?”

Yeah. Exactly. I mean, that is the question. What does that mean? What did that mean for your life? I mean, you were, in a sense, a meaningless empty existence. So what did knowing Jesus, having Jesus, mean for your life?

I mean, it ultimately over time, you realize what it does, or what the value of it is, or just kind of… And I got off cloud nine, right? Eventually, you realize, “Oh, wait. Life is actually tough,” and this isn't a straightforward… it’s not just like a…. Christianity is actually not an easy path. I mean, Christ says that not if we will face struggle, but when, right? There is struggle. There’s tension. It's just part of it. But I think, to answer your question, Christ talks about building upon a firm foundation, not on top of sand. And I think that's really real practically. No matter how tough life may be. Sometimes I’ve felt like all areas are not working well, right? Like my relationship with my wife, my work, my friendships, my church environment. I can feel like all those things are not working well for whatever reason at a given moment in time. Yet I always have this security to know, “Wait, but I'm sealed in Christ. I know what my ultimate destiny is, and I know that He is seeking to bring me comfort and peace and joy and that I can rest in the confidence of what He did.” It’s not just experiential, but there's historical validity and logical validity. That rock matters for me to stand on, to have that foundation. So I've realized that over time. But to think about not having that and where I was before, that chaos is really scary and really sad and empty, and I would never want to return there again.

So you went from this really miraculous experience, which I don't doubt at all. I know that so many people have had just a real touch point with God that is life transforming, and they know it's true and real. Now you speak of building a foundation that's historical and logical, and as an analytical person, could you flesh that out a little bit? What does that foundation look like in terms of… even though your mind wasn't perhaps a deep part of the journeying of accepting Christ, but it sounds like there is a foundation where you love Him with your mind as well as your life. What does that look like?

Yeah. And that's actually really important to me, Jana. I think Christianity cannot just be about the experience. Obviously. So what I'd say is, God created our brains and also our hearts, so the experience and the emotion matters. Absolutely. But God also gave us brains to think. I think sometimes, as Christians, we take an approach of just kind of acceptance of the truth without wrestling it. And so then when you're challenged, you don't know what to say. And I think that's a very bad…. Well, scripture urges us not to live life that way. In any season, you should be ready to defend your faith and have an answer.

I mean, I think there's just a few, like if I'm talking to someone who maybe is questioning what to believe. There’s kind of a few… I call them high-level apologetics, because apologetics can get very deep and wrestling with specific issues. But if you just, first of all, just look around you, look at creation, look at the human body. There are so many examples of just wonder and how you have to think that that all kind of just came out of nothing is really illogical. It really doesn't make sense. And I think that… I mean Romans 1 tells us that that's proof enough, that we are without excuse in just seeing creation. And creation really… I like hiking, so that really does it for me, like, seeing and just… you can't even take it in, right? Anyway, so that is a really, to me, solid argument in itself.

But beyond that, the evidence of it. If you go back and explore… I mean The Case for Christ is a great book where that whole story of Lee Strobel as a journalist kind of exploring the facts. But the validity, the historical validity, of the Bible is unquestioned compared to other historical texts. The fact that Christ came, was a man, did miracles, he died, he was resurrected, is all historically validated more than most any other source. And the connection of all that, the history, what we see now, what I experience, it all makes sense and logically touches all of the pieces of what we experience as human beings. And one interesting thought that I've had about that, Jana, is sort of like we have an enemy working against us, right? And just kind of as a matter of another apologetic, if you compare Christianity to any other spiritual system, every other spiritual system is about works. You have to do something to be good in the eyes of that god. Christianity flips it on its head and says, “Actually, you're saved by grace. You need a savior, and there's nothing you can do on your own.”

And so the thought exercise I went down on that one is like, “Why does our spiritual enemy not try to throw at us a counterfeit kind of grace argument?” Like a religion or something that was a grace alternative, because there aren't really that many grace alternatives, if you study them, and what I think I concluded is that that's how it all comes together, is that you can't create a duplicate for what Christ did. You can't duplicate a man coming, doing miracles, dying, resurrecting, seeing Him again. You can't replicate the amazing story. So it's combining history. It's combining the emotion of what people saw in those miracles and the resurrection. Imagine seeing a resurrected man! And how that connects to the Creator of the universe. You can't duplicate it, and so I think the enemy doesn't even try.

Yeah. So it sounds like it's just really fully orbed with you. It's your emotion. It's experience. It's your spirituality. It's your mind. It's actually how you're living your life. I'm curious, too. You said there were three key people in your life, in your story, as God was really pointing you or bringing you to Himself, and I'd love to tie a bow on some of those, because you mentioned the friend who was a Christian, left Christianity, but you said came back, and we haven't heard that bit of it, nor have we heard of Trinity and how she became, I guess, a friend in Christ as well. So talk to us about that.

Yeah. I’m glad you brought that up, so John actually recommitted his life to Christ that same weekend. And really did. He really started walking a new path. And what's really neat about that is he and I are still friends today. Our wives actually were roommates at one point, which is even a funny connection. Our kids know each other and like each other. So we actually visit them annually. So it's a really kind of cool connection, how He brought us together on that one.

Trinity, I actually have lost touch with her, but sadly enough, I think she kind of walked away from the faith. And I don't know if she ever returned. She did give her life to Christ, and that's when you kind of ask herself, “Did she really? Did she not?” So I think she struggled. It was kind of your question earlier. I think, after that experience, for her, I think she really started to question. I think it was kind of in connection to her family, and they didn't believe, and what were the consequences of that? So I hope she returned to faith. I hope it was a true conversion, but I don't know.

And similarly with Kara, I've lost touch with her, but yeah, God just used those different pieces together. So it's just a really, really great story.

That is great! It sounds like…. Your story has such a beautiful kind of story arc, in the sense that you were just dismissive of God. It was just not something you were interested in, not anything that you needed, and then you've had a felt need and an earnest search. I mean, it was earnest in the sense that you were willing to actually go where God was leading you, and then you found Him. You found what you were looking for. And it sounds like it's made an enormous change in your life, and for the better. You mentioned something about coming out of chaos. And I presume that you've moved towards shalom. From disorder to order. From restlessness to peace. It reminds me of Augustine, where our souls are restless until we find our rest in Him. And it sounds like you have found that and then some. I just really appreciate that.

As we're thinking about those who maybe, like you were, maybe a little restless, maybe a little dissatisfied, unsure of where to go or look for something more. How could you speak to someone like that, who might be willing to take a look at what God has to offer? Where would they go? What would you recommend?

Yes. So I mean the first thing I'd say is don't discount faith in Christ for some fuzzy soft reason, like not thought out reason, like just because someone said Christians are losers, and maybe you just held on to that simple…. Or they’re goody goodies. I held on to some simple, “That’s not for me.” Don't hold on to that. Or equally, I think sometimes I've encountered people that have some hurt because of some Christian connection. Someone did something, and it's pushed them away. And so now they will never go back because that hurt. I would encourage people to press through that, because the hurt isn't the truth. Truth is truth. And I believe Christ is it. And so if you are open to explore it…. Basically, don't push yourself away for either superficial reasons or even deep hurts. Press in anyway, and I think if you are, Christ is faithful to kind of… If you knock, he will open it. He will answer. He’ll show you the pathway.

And the second thing I'd also say is, like… I kind of touched on, I think, on again, some high-level apologetics for people to consider that I think are valid. But then I'd also say, flip…. Instead of pointing the finger at Christianity, why don’t you point the finger at what you believe and say, “Does it have merit? Is it delivering in my practical life?” To what you just said, “Is it really bringing peace?” Be honest with yourself. Don’t just cast stones. And don't judge other systems, especially ones you haven't explored, but ask yourself about yours. Because I think you will find that there's again, like, you were talking about atheism. If you're a true atheist, you have to believe that there is no sort of system of right or wrong, law and order, of meaning for people, so we're basically… I could shoot you right now, and that doesn't really mean much, right? Because who says that that's right or wrong? And you have no value, and I don't have value. Question the impact of what that does to your thinking and your emotions and how to live. That messes you up. That's not a healthy place to live, so really question that. And explore and find…. Obviously, you can dig into the scripture whenever you want. And I think if you do that, honestly, God will work with you. But also just try to find… try praying for someone, some authentic Christian to come into your life that can help lovingly guide you through and answer your questions, because, again, I think if you pray, you start to knock and open that door. Even though you feel uncomfortable, I think God will work.

Yeah. That's all really, really wonderful. If someone does open scripture or the Bible, do you have a place that you would recommend them to start? Because I know that the Bible can be rather intimidating at 66 books. So where would one start?

There's probably different answers for different people, on types of wiring, but first I’ll say that the Old Testament is probably a hard place. There are some parts of that that seem dry or are hard to understand, although the exception to that is Genesis. I think I the beginning especially of Genesis is pretty awesome for kind of setting up how things originated and where we go. So I think that's important. I think if someone is kind of more emotionally inclined, like kind of that artistic and singer like, Psalms has a lot of emotional wrestling that is authentic and real that people could get into. Proverbs if you're kind of intellectually wired. It has a lot of good logical argument of how to live life and challenge yourself. In fact, that's what I actually prayed when I first became a believer was, “God, I know nothing; help make me wise. I want wisdom. I need something,” and I spent some time in Proverbs. Ecclesiastes. I love the book of Ecclesiastes! Some people hate that book because it feels too open ended, but it just kind of tells you life is a vapor. Everything you can pursue is kind of meaningless outside of God. It's a great searching book. But I mean, then coming to the New Testament, obviously, I think a place where to lead people is natural is like the four gospel accounts or the first four books of the New Testament; Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John really help you to understand the story of Jesus, what happened, His work with the disciples, and then obviously His death, burial, and resurrection.

So I mean, there's so many good places. But those are some things I'd say. Look into it. And just be patient with yourself. You can't fully grasp God. You never will but just be patient with your questions. Some questions I still don't know the answers to, but I'm patient with it and believe in it. So just kind of trust the process. Don’t try to get everything answered in the first day, first week, but open yourself to what God can teach you and start trying to pray. Praying is just being authentic before God and having a conversation. It really is. It’s not certain words. So just start doing those things. Don't be afraid to press in.

Wow! That’s just so rich. And for those Christians who really want to meaningfully engage with those who don't believe. You’ve mentioned Kara, of course. She had evidently a beautiful embodied picture of what being a Christian looked like, and that in some ways was attractive to you or at least piqued your curiosity as to why she's different. How would you recommend that Christians live or speak? Or what attitude should they have or whatever?

Well, so I think first it comes with a heart posture of surrender. I've just become more and more convinced that life is really about surrendering yourself to Christ. And either… I think there's two options: We're either trying to control things to the way we want to or we surrender them to Christ. And surrendering feels like dying, but actually that's where you're finding life. When you're dying to yourself, you're finding real life. And I say that because that's the answer to nonbelievers or that's the answer to the most seasoned believer who knows… maybe is just a genius, just has all the elements, they still need to surrender. And I'm saying that because, if you don't do that, then how you approach someone else is going to be impacted in some way. Maybe you start treating them like a project or you lack the compassion maybe just to sit there and be silenced and listen to them for a little bit and just listen and then maybe later have a conversation.

I think if you're trying to strategize and do it in your own strength, “I'm going to walk them through this six-week study and then….” Really surrender yourself to what God wants you to do in this person's life. I think it's crucial because you can just mess things up. I think that is how Christians mess things up. They start spouting off on social media, and they're not surrendered. They're just taking their own approach to it. And that's very… I think people want to see authenticity, and you're not going to be your true self, the person that God designed you to be, until you surrender yourself. And so it's an ongoing day by day, minute by minute exercise, but especially as you're going to engage someone, you really should focus on doing that.

Yes. I don't think there's probably any wiser counsel that you could give right there. It sounds like you have been listening to the word and reading books of scripture and Proverbs and whatnot, because you are a man of wisdom. I can hear that. And it also sounds like you really have engaged in the larger story and God’s story, that you have surrendered your life to His story, which is the best story of all, right? You have found true love. And I think that's what we all seek, is to be fully known and fully loved, and it sounds like you have found that. Thank you so much, Neil, for coming on to tell your story, for your insights, for your wisdom. We just so appreciate it. Thank you so much.

It's been a pleasure. Like I was telling you earlier, I really enjoy what you're doing here. I think helping people hear stories…. Well, Jesus taught in stories. Something about stories catches our attention. So I really appreciate what you're doing. I think this is very helpful to unbelievers and believers alike, to kind of just hear how God is really at work in real people's lives. So I hope this is an encouragement to someone to take that next step, whatever that may be. But keep doing what you're doing, and I think it’s a big encouragement.

Thank you, Neil, for those kind words. It is a true encouragement. Thank you again.

Thanks for tuning into Side B Stories to hear Neil's story. You can find out more about his podcast, as well as other information, in our episode notes. For questions and feedback about this episode, you can contact me directly through our website at sidebstories.com or our email. Again, that is [email protected].

I'd like to take a moment to express my deep appreciation for our amazing audio engineer, Mark Rosera, of the C.S. Lewis Institute, and our producer, Ashley Decker, also of the C.S. Lewis Institute here in Atlanta, both for their amazing and excellent ongoing work. I always appreciate them.

I hope you enjoyed this episode and that you'll follow, rate, review, and share this podcast with your friends and social network. In the meantime, I'll be looking forward to seeing you next time, where we'll see how another skeptic flips the record of their life.

Former atheist Stefani Ruper was intellectually convinced of secular atheism, but found that it lacked substantive answers for her life. More than 13 years of scholarly pursuit of truth led her to choose belief in God.

Stefani's Resources:

Youtube Channel: http://youtube.com/stefaniruperInstagram: http://instagram.com/stefani.ruperWebsite: http://stefaniruper.com

Resources/authors recommended by Stefani:

Dominion by Tom Holland

Works of William James

Negative life experiences caused former atheist Matt Bagwell to reject God and Christianity.  Change in life circumstances allowed him to find an authentic kind of belief in God that he didn't think possible.

YouTube: @marksofmanhood  

[email protected]

Atheists Finding God book Rowman.com/Lexington Promo Code: LXFANDF30

Women in Apologetics https://womeninapologetics.com/

Former skeptic Joshua Rasmussen left Christianity to pursue truth through reason and philosophy. Over time, his intellectual pursuit led him back to a strong belief in God.

Joshua's Resources:

• Defending the Correspondence Theory of Truth, 2014
• Necessary Existence, 2015
• How Reason Can Lead to God, 2019
• Is God the Best Explanation of Things, 2019

For more stories of atheists and skeptics becoming Christians, visit www.sidebstories.com

Former skeptic Chris Waghorn left his belief in the Christian God behind to embrace an Eastern, universal view of god. After several years, he rediscovered the Christian God as the One who is both truth and real.

Chris's Resources:

• Twitter: @CJMindBody
• The Bible League Australia: https://bl.org.au

Resources/authors recommended by Chris for further study on Christianity:

• William Lane Craig
• C. S. Lewis
• Tim Keller
• John Lennox

Atheists Finding God promo code https://Rowman.com/Lexington promo code: LXFANDF30

 

Hello and thanks for joining in. I'm Jana Harmon, and you're listening to Side B Stories, where we see how skeptics slip the record of their lives. Each podcast, we listen to someone who has once been an atheist or skeptic but who became a Christian against all odds. You can hear more of these stories at our Side B Stories website, www.sidebstories.com. We also welcome your comments on these stories at our Side B Stories Facebook page or through email at [email protected].

Believing that something is true enough to give your life to it is not always clear or straightforward or easy, especially when it comes to religious belief, something that is not necessarily tangible in the ordinary sense. Religion not only entails answers to the big questions of life, but by its very nature, it also makes claims regarding the supernatural realm, that it is real, that God is real. And if God is real, then He can and does interact with our natural world.

When someone is considering religious claims, there is a difference between intellectually believing that something is objectively true, such as God exists or the biblical text is reliable and for good reason, and the subjective spiritual sense that God is real, as felt through a personal encounter or religious experience. That is, for some, belief in God may not come easily through arguments or evidence, although this grounding may open the door towards serious consideration of God's reality. Rather, belief comes through a wooing of the Holy Spirit, as the former skeptic describes in this story today.

Although Chris Waghorn encountered a substantive intellectual reason for belief and even a touch of God's presence, setting him on a path towards following after Christ, he left that behind to explore the world and its offerings. A few years later, he found the God he had left behind as both true and real. What made him reconsider? I hope you'll come and join in to find out.

Welcome to Side B Stories, Chris. It's so great to have you with me today.

It's great to be here, Jana. Thanks for inviting me.

Oh, you’re so welcome. As we're getting started, so the listeners can know just a bit about you, Chris, tell us about who you are, where you live, a little bit about yourself.

Right. I'm a Brit living in Australia. I currently live in Melbourne in the Yarra Valley foothills. My wife is an Australian, a Melbournian, so no choice in destination, although I'm not regretting it at all. We moved over here in 2019, and I'm originally from Hampshire, Petersfield in Hampshire, a small little village outside Petersfield, a traditional sort of place with a shop and three pubs, and blink and you'll miss it. So I grew up there, and then I went up to study at King's College London.

Okay. All right. So you're a Brit who lives in Australia. So let's start back, then, in your early life and your British life growing up in what sounds like a very lovely small community in Britain, in England. Tell me about what your life was like growing up. Tell me about your family of origin. Did you go to church? Was it any part of your picture growing up?

Well, religion was really no part of my picture when I was growing up. I was raised as a Catholic, and my mother and my father, they went to Catholic school. My sister went to Catholic school, but I didn't go to Catholic school. I had no real interest in religion, and because of growing up in England and being a Catholic, we were always kind of relegated to the chapel down the alley. We didn't have the nice big churches that the Protestants had. But anyway, I always knew perhaps there was something a little bit different there, but I don't think it was religion…. Even at school. I don't think it was really at the forefront of anyone's minds.

So, even as your mother was going to Catholic church or your sister going to Catholic school, did you get the impression at all that they had a personal or expressed faith? Or was it more of a ritual or just something that they did, more of an activity than a belief?

Well, just to come back to that, actually, even though my mother and my father and my sister went to Catholic schools, they didn't go to church at all. And we didn't go to church as a family. In fact, we only really went to church at Easter time and Christmas time, which I think made us what's known as C of E Catholics. So Christmas and occasional Easter. That was our experience. So no real interest.

I don't think that there was really any sense of belief. I wouldn't say that any one of my family were Christians, certainly not born again Christians. I think the kind of Catholicism or Christianity that they believed in was really relegated to tradition, that that’s something that happens in church. You can sort of believe it or not. It was kind of an optional thing. So I was brought up in a secular household, I think I could say, and there was a very vague nod to religion, but it wasn't something that was really necessarily talked about, certainly not practiced. We were never the type of family to go to church every Sunday.

Okay. All right. So you grew up in a secular household, and it was a piece or a part of your life, but it sounds like relegated a little bit to the edges. So you grew up… I guess you could call it fairly non religious, but was there any discussion with regard to God or faith or any sense of what that was, other than just tradition?

No, I really don't think there was. I can't remember any conversation that I had about faith or anything like that with my family, not until I started to do my own investigations and I began to want to talk about it. But that was much later on in life. As I probably went past 16 and 17, I started to get kind of more interested, I guess, in those questions.

Okay. All right. So growing up as a teenager, it was just not a part of your life, but what caused you to start asking questions about religion or God or those kinds of things?

Well, when I was at school, I was really blessed with some very inspiring religious studies teachers, or RE, or religious education, whatever you call it. They were very inspiring from the point that they were intellectual. They were very passionate about their subject. And I remember at school, I was studying I think it was Luke's gospel, and I was just taken aback with the wisdom that I was coming across that I was reading about. It just struck me, and I actually do remember that—at school, I had a natural aptitude to writing essays in RS, and I remember one comment that I had from one of my RS teachers in the margin, saying, “Chris, you're literally streets ahead of your peers,” so I think there was a natural—how could I say? A natural appreciation. But there was no faith at this stage.

So you considered yourself somewhat secular, I would imagine. Did you ever place a label on yourself or an identity of, like, “Oh, I'm agnostic,” or, “I'm atheistic.” As someone who grew up in a secular household, did you even think on those terms? So that when you came to Scripture, too, I’m just curious how someone of a more secular mindset would even look at the Bible.

I think the only tag that I would have given myself at school was rebel, because that's what I was. Yeah, so to give you some idea, I used to have long hair. I smoked. I never used to do up my top button. I always had to see the headmaster after school. Well, actually not after school, after assembly. It became quite kind of embarrassing in the end. And then, after one assembly, I wasn't actually asked to see the headmaster, and he came to find me, to ask me if everything was okay.

So I think he quite liked me in the end, but I think no. I don't think I had any sort of label that I would apply to myself. I marched to my own drumbeat very much at school. And I think I was very interested in literature. I was very interested in religious studies. I was very interested in the humanities. I think that's where I was kind of heading, because there seemed to be—I mean, I think, from reading the Gospel of Luke on this specific occasion, I remember I was quite amazed at the sense of, as I mentioned just now, the sense of wisdom in the gospel. And I wanted to find out more. I think it kind of piqued my interest. That's what happened at the time.

So it piqued your interest and then did you do anything with that interest? Or did you just let it pass?

No, not at all. Well, what actually happened was, at the time of my A levels in the sixth form, I was looking at what to do at university, and I wanted to study law at university. I fancied myself at the bar. So I was actually applying for all the different universities, and I put, of course, King’s, Birmingham, Oxford, all these other universities, and I thought I wanted to study law. And then, when I was putting down my choices, I was quite interested in the EU and Europe and all that kind of kind of stuff at the time, which is quite ironic. And I actually thought, there's this great course at Exeter, European Law. I remember I thought I would apply for that because, being a lawyer, it would be secure. My father would have my back and everything.

And then, just as I was filling in the application form, my RS teacher walked past, and he asked me what I was doing. And I told him, and he said, “If I could just give you one piece of advice, whatever you decide to do at university, always follow your heart.” And this seemed to make sense to me at the time. And I said, “Well, what do you mean by that?” And he said, “Well, what do you really enjoy doing?” And I said, “Well, I really enjoy the humanities. I enjoy history. I enjoy classics. Of course, I enjoy RS, Sir.” And he said, “Well, why don't you study theology?” And I said, “Yes, but what do you do with that? What can you do with theology?” And he said, “That’s not the point.”

He said, “That’s not the point.” So I thought, “Okay, I'm going to read theology at university. Why not? It’s not as if there's anything else that could keep me at university for three years,” because I was quite rebellious at the time, and I thought kind of following your heart, it sounded like good advice at the time. So that's what I did.

That is very, very interesting. For someone who was raised in a secular household. You enjoyed the humanities and literature. Of course, theology is the study of God. Now, at this point, again, as someone with a secular mind, what did you think religion was at this point? Did you think that there was a possibility that God was real? Or was this you just enjoyed thinking about these deeper issues and these issues of humanity?

Well, I think all of the above, really.

Okay, okay, so when you wanted to essentially demythologize the Bible, or scripture, I wonder, for those who are listening, what you mean by that. Like, for example, when you read the Gospel of Luke, and there are all kinds of things in there that seem rather supernatural or miraculous. I wonder, were those the kinds of things that you wanted to strip away from the text because they didn't make sense for perhaps a more modernized understanding or a more progressive understanding of religion and scripture? Talk with us about what you were thinking.

Sure. Well, this is actually going back quite a long time. I was about 16 when I read the Gospel of Luke, so I’ll have to cast my mind back. But I think, at that point in my life, I thought, “What’s all this supernatural stuff about? Is it real? Let's look at the historical Jesus. Let's look at the Christ of faith. Let's see how much evidence there is outside of New Testament writings to the historical Jesus.” Those are the kind of questions that I was interested in. And I think those… and early church history, patristics, you know, from Irenaeus all the way up through to Nicea and the Council of Trent and going all the way through that. I was interested in early church history and how the whole thing came about. So that's what I was really interested in.

I mean, at the time when I started reading theology, I had no interest in going to church, and I had no interest into the church, for example, but in the UK—and it might be slightly different in the States. It’s certainly different in Australia. You can read theology as an intellectual, as a liberal art. You don't necessarily—and you probably know this from your studies at Birmingham. When you study theology at university, you're not necessarily at seminary or Bible college. So I came very much from the outside to study faith and religion.

And actually what ended up happening at King’s was the complete opposite of what I set out to achieve, because actually what happened: I went in with the demythologization mindset, but actually what happened was the case for the Christian faith, the intellectual case for the Christian faith, began to stack up. And it began to stack up because I was studying theology, all of the units, and going to lectures and writing dissertations, and actually, far from disproving Christianity or the historicity of Christ, it actually went into actually building a case for the Gospels. And that really surprised me, and I didn't expect that to happen. And, yeah, we had some really good lecturers and professors at King’s, and some of them were ministers.

So I think at the time, Jana, I heard bits of the gospel, but I didn't hear the whole gospel. I did hear bits of the gospel at King’s, but then, as I think I mentioned, I did have an extraordinary experience in my third year at King’s, which left a lasting impression on me.

Can you describe that experience?

Yes, yes, I can. So what happened was I was in my third year and it was before my finals, before my final exams, and I'd been going through a really, really difficult period. I was a penniless student in an expensive city, as London is, and I was living in a bedsit in southeast London, in Peckham, which is—no disrespect to people who live in Peckham, but at the time it wasn't a particularly nice place, and I'd been going through a difficult period. I'd experienced bouts of intense sadness, and I was kind of becoming quite depressed and sad. I remember crying a lot at this time. I was about 20 or 21 years of years of age, so it was quite a confusing time. And I really struggled as well with theology, with reading theology, because it was extremely challenging to understand. I don't know if you've ever tried to understand Soren Kierkegaard or Hegel or Kant or Aquinas or any of these minds. And remember, not being a Christian, it was really, really difficult. And I remember drawing maps of, “What are these people trying to say? I don't understand.” Reading the same chapters and pages fifteen, twenty times, trying to understand where they're coming from, and the whole thing was just quite difficult.

And then I actually related my experience of being quite sad and struggling to cope with life in London and being a student, etc., and I spoke about it with this guy on the course, this other student on the course. He was a Christian, in fact. He was from Peru originally, but he had perfect English. And I remember telling him about my life and everything, and he said, “Well, don't worry about it, Chris, because you're just being wooed by the Holy Spirit.” And I thought this guy was completely insane because I didn't understand what he was saying. It made absolutely no sense. I just thought he was another one of those idiot Christians. But, that said, some part of what he said made sense to me at the time.

And I remember waking up one Friday morning in my bedsit, and I knew that I had to get to the chapel at King's College. So you take the train in from Peckham, and the chapel at King's College is on the first floor. It's a very kind of Greek Orthodox type of type of place, so it's…. It’s a really beautiful chapel, actually. And I arrived there, and I immediately got down onto my knees. I was in the pews, and I just started saying, “I'm sorry. I'm sorry,” and I started saying I'm sorry from the bottom of my heart. I started crying from my guts. I don't know if you ever had that experience. And I was bawling my eyes out. And then from nowhere, I heard a voice that said, “Go in peace.” It was like a command.

It was like a command. And, you know, since then, I've tried to psychoanalyze that voice and think, “Well, maybe I heard that voice because I was going through a very difficult emotional time,” et cetera, but in that moment, when I was told to go in peace, I felt incredibly light, like all my burdens had been lifted, and I knew that I had crossed Lessing's ditch, and I had gone from skepticism to theism, and there was no going back, because that voice was a command. I’ve thought about it a lot since it happened, and I recognized the voice, but I didn't know who it was. It's quite strange. It's a difficult, I think, concept to get across, but it means I recognized the voice, but I didn't understand Who it was at the time.

And some time after this had happened, I walked out of the lift in the McAdam building, and there was a friend of mine, Christina, standing there in front of me, and she looked at me, and she said that my face was shining. And she she started crying. She said she knew what had happened.

Oh, my!

So it was… So I committed to a church I went to for a period of about six months. I started going to church, and it was quite a charismatic church. And this was the first time in my life, really, I'd been to church willingly after my very dry and wooden experience of going to a Catholic church when I was a kid at Christmas or Easter. It was a very charismatic church, and there was a lot of charismatic expression. And at the time, I kind of felt a little bit uncomfortable with that, so I pulled out after about six months, and it wasn't the right time in my life to, I think, continue with that, going to church. And I was very young in the head. I still had a lot of living to do, but I think in the context of my entire journey, God is patient. I still felt that God had His hand on me.

Yes, yes. So just to clarify: You went through this theological education. You were expecting to debunk it. Instead, you found yourself kind of compelled by the intellectual grounding of it. So there was some element of you were finding some truth or belief, perhaps, and then you had this religious experience, to where it felt personally and palpably real. So you grabbed hold of it. It grabbed hold of you, I guess, for a period of time, but just for a period of time. Is that right?

Yes, that's right. Yeah. I just think I was too young in the head. I couldn't commit to it. I think I was very wild at the time. I had a lot of living to do, and I just wasn't ready to make that commitment in faith. In retrospect, that's where I think I was with things at that particular point in my life. I was about 20, 21 at the time, and that was that. But it never left me, it never left me, and it still hasn't left me. That was something that really did change my life at the time, and it was an extremely powerful thing that happened. And I only told a few of my friends about it because it was pretty extraordinary.

Oh, I bet. Something like that would definitely be life changing. For sure.

Yeah.

But, like you say, you were young and not ready to commit to the fullness of what it means to follow Christ. So what happened next, then?

Well, I had to go out and get a proper job after I graduated. And, at that point in my life, I think I wanted to see the world and I wanted to travel, and I did end up traveling extensively. So I had to cut my hair and put on a suit, and I really hated that. And I was told at one of the companies I worked for that I wasn't a very good cog in the machine.

Okay. You were still the rebel of sorts.

Absolutely. So I just said thank you very much. I said thank you because I thought it was a compliment, but actually it wasn't a compliment. And I was frogmarched out of the building, and I ended up, in the late nineties, going to India, because that's a country that I'd always wanted to visit and go to. For me, it was really exotic and exciting and different. So that's what I ended up doing. And I ended up deciding that I wanted to stay in India, and I was intent on not rejoining the rat race in London, so I kind of took the entrepreneurial route. So I set up my first business buying textiles in India, and I used to import the textiles back to London and Paris, and I had a stall on the Portobello Road, and I became very, very Indianized during this process, and that's what I did for a few years. I followed the sun for a few years, which was a wonderful experience as a young man, and I had a motorbike in India, and I went out into the villages to find these textiles and learned scuba diving, and I just had an amazing time.

And actually, on one of those buying missions, in a place called Rishikesh in the Himalayas, I was introduced to yoga and yoga meditation. So, yes, so that's when I developed my interest in my studies in that. I think, from a theological perspective, because I probably didn't continue the route of committing myself to my journey with the Lord, I think because I was a theist at the time, I thought that you could find God in all things. What I didn't realize, of course, is that all these different pathways have different concepts of God, and they actually lead to very different places. But I didn't know that when I was 21. And I actually remember, when I was in India, going to my swami’s—which is teacher in Sanskrit—going to my swami's quarters and challenging him about one of the lectures that he delivered. And he actually turned around to me and said he was surprised because he was being challenged. He's not always challenged. And he asked me, “By whose authority do you come?” which I thought was a very strange question to ask because I was just asking the question, but…. I can't remember his answer because it's such a long time ago, but I should imagine that probably his position wouldn’t be able to put up with too much scrutiny.

I doubt that his worldview was defensible, when push comes to shove. I think that's where that conversation would have ended up. But, of course, that's with twenty odd years of hindsight.

So when you ran into, or you became invested somewhat, in another worldview, in another world, across the world, and you were considering that God was multifaceted, perhaps. That there were all these roads, but then you were questioning that. You were questioning this particular road, and you found some resistance. Did that make you think, “Well, perhaps they're not all the same.” Perhaps, like you say, it doesn't come from the same place or lead to the same god.

Sure.

Did that kind of stir up that intellectual part of you that said that they can't all be true?

Oh, sure, yes. I mean, I never went to India to find God. Or I was never trying to find God in India, which is an extremely good position to go in, because I think, as a Westerner, if you go to India to find God, you're going to find millions. And I think, because of my experience in the chapel, more than the study of theology at university, I kind of knew in my heart who God was. So for me, yoga was only ever a physical type of practice that was done in order to be healthy, for its therapeutic value, and because I went into teaching it in the end, because of my studies in theology, I could understand what Vedanta was, and I could lecture about it. I could inform people about what it was, where it was from. And I think what I'm trying to say is that I didn't mix physiology with metaphysics, if you know what I mean, or anatomy with metaphysics. I was always able to be really clear about, “This is what this bit is about, and this is what that bit is about.” I didn't fuse them. I was always quite kind of objective about its practice.

Yeah. Thank you for clarifying that, because I think oftentimes there's a conflation of yoga, that you buy into its full metaphysics implications if you're practicing yoga, and it sounds to me that you really tried to separate the physicality from the metaphysic.

Yes.

So how long were you there in this world and teaching? And where was God or faith or the God that you had experienced back in the chapel? Where was He in any or all of this?

Yeah, I think that's a really good question, Jana, because what ended up happening is I think that the God that I experienced in the chapel gradually began to dissipate. And, because I was spending so much time in India, I began to bring in other views into my understanding, which were kind of more vedantic views of God and vedantic philosophy, so that's what I ended up doing.

And I went out, and I made a name for myself teaching. I majored on teaching one to ones, but when I started, I did classes, and my name got out there as a yoga teacher, and I made sure that I was well networked, and I taught various VIPs and stuff, and I had the ear of the press as well. And my kind of work, inverted commas, was kind of in quite a few of the national pages of the health press and magazines and stuff, so I managed to really scale it out there. And during this period, I developed a product range as well, which I got out into shops and national chains and kind of more at the high end.

So by the time we get to 2015, I really had very little interest in the church, the Christian faith, Jesus, et cetera. The only Christians, by about 2015, that I knew was my neighbor Mike. He was a Christian, but I always felt that he was a bit too Christian, “But I'll put up with him.” And of course, the other Christian I knew in my life was Cliff Richard, but I didn't know him, but I just knew that he was a Christian, so I didn't really have any… I felt that the church was an anachronism. I thought that all Christians were narrow minded and bigoted, and I thought my understanding, by that stage, of what Jesus was all about was far more sophisticated than the Christian theological understanding. And of course, what I didn't realize is that I'd actually become quite bigoted myself, intellectually bigoted, and of course my views and my understanding were very unfounded, I think, at the time.

I had to come back to London in the year 2000 because I'd had quite a serious injury, and I broke my neck in the year 2000. So I had to stop traveling and traveling overseas, and I was laid up in hospital, and so I had to recover from that. And it was after that I thought, “Actually, what I could really do now is, because I've done so much study in it, is I’ll go into teaching yoga and meditation,” which is what I ended up doing.

Okay. All right.

Yeah.

Yeah. And then you had this lovely neighbor.

That's right. That’s right.

Yeah. Yeah. But you didn't think too much of Christians at that point.

No, I didn't. I didn't. But I remember actually going around to his house. He lived in Twickenham in southwest London, and it was actually when I was thinking about moving into the area. I'd been living in North London until this point, and he was actually renting out rooms of his house. He had lodgers. And I remember when I first met him, we had an incredible conversation about theology and Christian theology, and I thought, “Well, I'm always going to know this man. I know I don't want to live here because I’ve kind of decided that I wanted my own place, but I know I'm always going to know him.” And in fact, he became the godfather of one of my children later on. Yeah, that's right.

But he's an amazing guy, and we used to spend quite a lot of time theologizing at his house. And of course, I came from a very kind of universalist perspective, a very kind of John Hick type of perspective, a liberal perspective, I guess you could say. And at one point, during one conversation we had, and this is a long time before I'd even begun to go down that Christian path or began to commit myself, he said to me, “Chris, at some point, at some stage, you are going to have to name Him.”

What did he mean by that?

Well, I think, because my perspective was so universalist, kind of fluid, and that… I don't know what he meant. Well, I think what he meant is, “Chris, you're going to have to be more specific. You're going to have to…. Your lines of argumentation, you have to start being able to defend them.” You're going to have to back up what you're saying, basically. And when he said that to me, “Chris, one day you're going to have to name Him.” I don't know if you ever had one of those experiences when the whole of your world kind of becomes slightly fuzzy at the edges and stops. Well, it was kind of one of those moments. I think what happened was it was a prick of my conscience. It was just a prick of my conscience.

So he challenged you. And so how did you respond to that?

Well, I can't remember how I responded. I just remember being really taken aback by the question and just standing there and probably thinking to myself, “Well, yeah, gee, I think he's right. At some point, I'm going to have to think through these things properly.”

So did you go back into kind of a more intellectual mode in terms of trying to look at this question and become more specific about who God is and what you believe? Or how did you approach that question?

Well, actually, what happened, Jana, is during this time, my coming to faith was actually more of a process that kind of occurred between 2015 and 2017. What I'd like to do is I'd like to share some of those moments, I think, which were really kind of important moments in that journey. And what happened at the time is my wife did an Alpha course.

Now, what drew her to an Alpha course? I'm just curious. Was your wife a Christian or just curious?

Well, we lived across the road from the church we ended up going to, and it's St. Stephen’s in Twickenham. And I'd actually been living across the road from this church for ten years without ever stepping foot inside. And I didn't step foot inside because I smelt the whiff of evangelism, I'd read theology at King’s, I thought I knew everything, and, of course, it ended up I knew very little. Very little.

So what happened is, my wife started going to an Alpha course, and she actually asked me if I'd like to join her, and I'm slightly embarrassed to say that I declined. I didn't want to go. I didn't want to join her. I had no interest in the church or the Christian faith or Jesus or anything like that. I just wasn't interested. And I started to see that her behavior started to change.

When I got back into our apartment, she was listening to kind of contemporary worship music. I can't remember what else, but I remember thinking to myself, “My goodness! She’s got it badly, this whole Christian thing. She's got it badly.” I remember thinking that.

Okay, so she started really absorbing Christianity and the culture. Did she take up on a personal belief in God and Jesus at that time?

So at that time, when she was doing to a Christmas service across the road at St. Stephen's, and during the service. They were showing a black and white film of the Virgin Mary. And I remember thinking to myself at the time, I remember thinking—it was a very good production, and I began to think, “What if?” And I thought to myself, “Something like this probably did happen.” And then the next Sunday, we went to a service, a family service, and we were really embraced by the people who went to St. Stephen's with open arms. And we were really encouraged. And I was invited to join a Bible group, a men's Bible group, called Fishers of Men.

And I remember, during a service, I remember we were singing some kind of contemporary worship music, and I saw on the screen Christ described as lovely and beautiful, and it was… and I saw, at the same time, there were a couple of the people in the church raising their arms, and I really wanted to be one of them.

No longer was God an intellectual type of primary cause or first mover or those kind of things. And to get any kind of understanding that God was for me was really radical to me. It was quite insane, really. I began to think, “Why would God be interested in me?” And then I think, during that process, I came to understand who Christ is and who Christ was, and it was really, really powerful.

But one of the deciding factors was my wife once came back into our apartment. I was standing in the kitchen, and we were struggling to conceive at the time. We'd waited about five years, and we were involved with IVF-assisted conception. And my wife came into the kitchen, and she announced, or she told me, that, while she was in prayer on the train coming back from King's College, where the IVF was actually happening at the time, she said that God had spoken to her and had given her the word Nathan. And she said that she didn't know any Nathan. So she Googled the word Nathaniel, and it means, Nathaniel means God has given. And it was so out of the ordinary, my wife saying that, because she's not the kind of person to say that kind of thing. I just thought, “What are you talking about? God spoke to you on the train? What are you what are you saying?”

But what I did remember in that moment, Jana, is how God spoke to me in the chapel when He said, “Go in peace.”

Exactly.

So I knew that God talks to His creation. I knew that, because that was the experience I had. And I went to the church on the Sunday, and I spoke with this lovely American lady called Annie, who was on one of the help desks there. And I said, “Annie, you're never going to believe it! You're never going to believe it! My wife's pregnant!” And of course, I saw Annie's face, and it was just this…. This picture of awe just came over her face and amazement and reverence, and it really, really is difficult to describe, but I knew that she had been praying for us, and I knew a lot of people at that church had been praying for us. So a lot of things were happening and had started to happen.

And there was another moment as well. I was exhibiting with my business at a… New Age kind of show. And I was there exhibiting with my business, and I had a look at the floor plan, and I saw…. It was about this period, and I was very, very excited because I kind of felt that things were happening, and I had this newfound faith. And I saw on the floor plan that there was this one Christian organization. It was like a prayer organization in the middle of that smorgasbord of New Age businesses. And I made a beeline for that spot. And I said to the woman—she sat down, and I just said to her… I was really excited, and I said, “Isn’t it just amazing that Christ died for my sins and was resurrected on the third day?” And I was just so enamored and passionate about it. And I think I made her feel a little bit uncomfortable, because she kind of looked away. I think she felt that I was probably one of the Looney Tunes from the trade show, from one of the other kind of New Age businesses. But what I realized at the time was that this was a new position. This was a new position for me in life. This was a supernaturally assisted position. This was not somewhere I could have got to myself. And this is what ended up happening. And yes, I was just amazed.

Yeah. So your friend had encouraged you to kind of figure things out, to find your way towards God, the God. Not any god, but the God, right? And so He was finding his way towards you, and you were finding your way towards Him.

Yeah. That’s right.

Yeah. And through your wife. And you were putting yourself in a position of really belief and coming to faith, seeing these things happening in your wife's life, in your life, and obviously you became very excited about… you were describing Christ's death, burial, and resurrection and what that meant for you. I love what you say, that you learned that God was for you.

Yes, that's right.

And that’s what the gospel is, right? That God is for you. And that He came to bring you to Himself. So you were coming to a place of really true personal belief, it sounds like.

Yeah. That’s right. It was no longer just an intellectual thing. It was no longer He was, as I mentioned earlier, the first cause or the unmoved mover. He had become irreducibly personal in my life. And when I had this conversation with this woman at the trade fair, it became evident to me that I'd become a Christian.

You surprised yourself.

I did. Because I had no plans, I had no plans to become a Christian. I didn't want to become a Christian. I didn't really try to seek it out, but, yes, there I was, and it was a radically new supernaturally assisted position and an irreducibly Christian view of the world, and that's where I got to.

And I remember another quick story that I'd love to tell you about was when I was with a friend, and all my friends had noticed something was happening in my life, something was going on. And a very good friend of mine turned around one day while I was visiting him in North London, and he said, “Surely you don't believe all that stuff.” And I said to him, “Oh, no! I believe that Jesus Christ lived 2,000 years ago. He was crucified. The Gospels are very, very accurate, and He most definitely resurrected. And not only that, He died for my sins.” And I said it with such weight that, when I'd stopped, my friend just turned around to me, and he said, “OMG.”

I guess he was stunned. He was stunned at your passion, I presume.

Well, yes, and it kind of felt like it wasn't me who was saying that. It was something else.

It was the Spirit of God. Right!

It was just so powerful. And then a few months later, he'd come down to Twickenham to see me, and we were walking down the road. We weren't talking about faith or Christ or anything. And then he pointed across the road at the church where I was going to, and he asked me. He said, “Is that where you go to church?” It was just really funny when he asked me, because I just thought, “Yeah. Yes, it is. That's where I go to church.” And that was it. But the point is, I knew that what I'd said had made an impact on him.

Right. Yeah. I’m sure it did.

And I hadn't even thought about it. I hadn't thought about it. But he was thinking about it. So it just goes to show how many hungry people there are out there.

Yeah, there really are. And speaking of that, Chris, I'm sure that there are a lot of people who are listening who are hungry. Some recognize the hunger. Some actually probably don't even know that they're hungry. They just are looking for something, and they're not really sure. But how would you encourage someone who is a curious skeptic or who might be looking in the direction of God or trying to figure things out? What would you encourage them to think about or to do?

I think it depends what kind of nonbeliever or skeptic that you're talking about. But if they do have a sincere heart, and they are interested, I think a really great place to start is reading. I'm an avid reader, and there's a plethora of good books out there that will help to address the issues or the questions that these people might have. And I think what a really good thing to do would be to find out the types of problems that they may have with where they're at in terms of their faith journey, even if they know it's a journey or not. And maybe just to gently put a put a book in their hands, because you're never given enough time, the time you need to really go into too much depth or to talk about it in as much detail or necessarily have all the answers there at hand to talk to someone who does have lots and lots of questions.

Since I came to faith, I have to say, before I became a Christian, I heard all about when you come to faith, you become the enemy. And that's been my experience. That really has been my experience. And I'm not playing a victim card at all, but I've really, really noticed that. Because I was the one who had the business and, you know, the business had a profile, etc., etc., but since I've come to faith, a lot of my friends think I've gone insane, that I've gone crazy, and I'm stupid, or this, that, or the other.

So I think there's a lot of arrogance out there, a lot of intellectual arrogance, but actually, I think the truth is it's not intellectual arrogance, because I think it really is mainly emotionally driven, because if you had a proper intellectual conversation about all of these issues, my belief is that it can only lead you to Christ. So I think what I'm trying to say is I think the obstacles people have to faith, certainly to the Christian faith, often I find that they're emotionally driven atheists, for example.

So to a hard-nosed skeptic who has rejected the Christian faith out of hand, I'd always say to them, “Well, you have to consider the evidence no matter where it comes from, because if you're not willing to consider the evidence wherever it comes from, then this effectively will make you intellectually dishonest, so you have to be able to consider these things without dismissing them or rejecting them out of hand.” And I've had a lot of those types of conversations, and I enjoy asking people questions. I've never been the kind of apologist who tries to preach at people, but really just to ask some very, very gentle questions. Because often I find that skeptics, or certain types of skeptics, are often just repeating caricatures of Christianity or the Christian faith or repeating slogans without actually ever really truly understanding what it is they're talking about.

I would consider myself to be quite a new Christian still, but that's been my limited experience so far. And when I get into a conversation; I love getting into these sorts of conversations. I often say to people who are curious about Christ and the Christian faith or religion or whatever, I'd always say, “Look, I'm not an expert, but I'd love to share my story with you and see what you think. See if that helps.”

Yeah. Have you found some reception to that?

Oh, yeah, very much. Yes. That’s right. Yes, I have. But I've also been—because, you see, when I came to faith, I expected the whole world to come to faith, which of course, didn't happen, because you realize something's true, and you're so enthusiastic about it. I've learned the hard way, obviously, but when I first came to faith, I was picking people up on social media and saying, “Well, you can't just say something like that. Have you considered this?” And hoping that people would start to question their assumptions, etc., but kind of in a gentle way. And I think a lot of the time people just need to be able to be given permission to be able to even ask these sorts of questions, I think especially in the scientific communities and people who consider themselves to be of a scientific mindset.

And you mentioned putting a book in someone's hand. I suppose it may depend on the kinds of questions or objections that someone might have, but are there any particular books that come to mind, just off the top of your head, that you like to give? That you feel are helpful?

Yeah, yeah. I mean there are tons of great books. I love Bill Craig. I think he is a fantastic apologist. He's just so clear and succinct, the way that he puts things across. And what's really great these days is that you've got tons of Bill Craig on YouTube. So if you've got a quick question to ask about, well, you know, suffering, even in suffering, for example, well, see what Bill Craig has to say about it, because for all the questions that you have, someone has probably answered that question. Just do a bit of research. So, yeah, you've got Bill Craig, you've got C.S. Lewis, you've got Timothy Keller, who I think is just wonderful, the way he speaks into that cultural space, and how he grew the Redeemer in Manhattan in a very secular environment. What did he do? How is he addressing his audience? And he's written some great stuff. He's very accessible. He's not too intellectual, but he's just intellectual enough for those very educated people of Manhattan who are very similar to the people that you meet in London, who are very similar to the people you meet in Melbourne and Sydney. John Lennox is great. Gosh, who else have we got here? Yeah, we've got lots and lots of people. Yeah. So I think those are good people to start with.

Yeah. I think those are really great recommendations. Now, for the Christian to engage with the nonbeliever, you’ve already given a lot of advice about asking questions and offering resources and just listening. Is there anything else there? 

I think never underestimate the power of a good question. I think the question, “Why would you say that?” is a really powerful apologetic question. Because if you ask that question, people will start to question their own assumptions. And usually those assumptions are only one or two or three in line for their argument to fall down, or certainly their position to fall down, because they realize that their position is vacuous. There's nothing there. I don't know if that made any sense, by the way, but-

No, it makes perfect sense. Yeah. It helps someone to think about why they believe what they believe, rather than just throwing out a slogan or a caricature, like you were saying before, of our faith. But, yes, I think you can't underestimate the value of a question. I think it's tremendous for everyone to think about why they believe what they believe, Christians and non.

I was just going to say as well, I think, when you ask a question, it's never about winning the war, especially in the job that I'm doing at the moment. I've met all sorts of Christians now, and it's never even about winning the battle, it's just about giving people the permission to ask that question. And maybe just making them feel a little bit uncomfortable. I think it's Koukl who refers to it as just putting a stone in someone's shoe.

Right.

And I think that's where you want to start. And then pray and let the Holy Spirit do His work.

Yes. The Holy Spirit would woo them as he wooed you.

Yeah. That’s right.

Yeah. Oh, what a beautiful story, Chris. I would say it's a very circuitous story. It takes all kinds of twists and turns, a little bit unexpected, but you found your way back to the one God Who is true and Who is real, Who had revealed Himself to you earlier in your life, and now it's obvious to me that he has transformed your life. And you work now, actually, for a Christian ministry, don't you?

Yes, that's right. When I came to Australia, I wanted to explore my Christian convictions. I've actually stepped out of my business. And yeah, I've stepped out of it. And I work for an organization called Bible League, and Bible League resources the under-resourced global church through the provision of Bibles and biblical resources. It's actually a mission that started in Illinois in the 1930s and came to Australia in the 1970s. And what I do is I work as a development officer in Victoria. So I support our supporters. I visit them and make sure everything is okay. And then on the other side of things, I go into churches on Sundays, and it can be at any denomination. So we work right across the spectrum. One Sunday, I'll be talking in a Baptist church, the next Sunday I'll be talking a Presbyterian church and then an Anglican church, and then Christian Reformed, Pentecostal. And I'm often asked to share my testimony, and sometimes I do messages and sermons as well.

So it's been an incredible transformation and change when I think about what I was doing just a few years ago, and I think one story kind of encapsulates this very, very well. I was on my way to actually delivering a sermon on a Sunday morning, and when it's morning in Australia, it's the previous evening in London, and I was having a conversation with my friends, who were all out together in a pub somewhere, and my friend asked me, “So what are you doing?” And I said, “Well, I'm actually on my way to a church to deliver a sermon,” and he just said, “Oh, wow!”

It's a silly story, but it kind of shows you the difference between what I was doing five years ago as compared to what I'm doing now in my life.

Yes. Dramatic transformation. Totally unexpected for him, I'm sure. And that will probably not be the last time someone looks at you and says, “Oh, wow! I can't believe where you are now.” But thank God for your story, for your life, and for the change that he's made in your life. It's so obvious. And too, how wonderful that he brought both your wife and you at the same time. What a blessing that would be, that you came to Christ together and that your family obviously gets the blessing of that.

But thank you so much, Chris, for coming on today.

Thank you, Jana.

And for sharing your story and your insight and your wisdom. And I just am so thankful for what He’s done in your life, and I'm just so pleased to share it. Thank you for coming on.

Yes. Thank you so much, Jana. I really enjoyed sharing my story with you today.

Wonderful.

Thanks for tuning in to Side B Stories to hear Chris's story. You can find out more about his work at the Bible League, as well as other contact information, in the episode notes. For questions and feedback about this episode, you can contact me directly at our email at [email protected]. Also, if you're a skeptic or atheist who would like to connect with a former atheist with questions, please contact us, again through our website, our email address, and we'll get you connected. I hope you enjoyed this episode and that you'll follow, rate, review, and share this podcast with your friends and social network. In the meantime, I'll be looking forward to seeing you next time, where we'll see how another skeptic flips the record of their life. 

Former atheist Mason Jones thought Christian belief was an overly simplistic view of life and reality until he began to recognize its depth and complexity, its ability to better explain reality.

Mason's Campus Outreach Page: https://cocentralil.org/mason-jones

Atheists Finding God book promo code LXFANDF30  valid at https://Rowman.com/Lexington

Episode Transcript

Hello, and thanks for joining in. I'm Jana Harmon, and you're listening to Side B Stories, where we see how skeptics flip the record of their lives. Each podcast, we listen to someone who has once been an atheist or skeptic, but who became a Christian against all odds. You can hear more of these stories at our Side B Stories website at www.sidebstories.com. We welcome your comments on these stories on our Side B Stories Facebook page or through emailing us directly at [email protected].

As a reminder, our guests not only tell their stories of moving from disbelief to belief in God and Christianity, at the end of each episode, these former atheists give advice to curious skeptics as to how they too can pursue the truth and reality of God. They also give advice to Christians on how they can best engage with those who don't believe. I hope you're listening in to hear them speak from their wisdom and experience as someone who has once been on both sides. We have so much to learn from them.

Also, please know that many of these former atheists have made themselves available to talk with anyone who has questions about God or faith. If you'd like to connect, please email us at [email protected], and we'll get you connected.

Christianity is often associated with a cross and with Jesus, who died on a cross outside the city in first century Jerusalem. Christians believe that Jesus not only died but rose from the dead and appeared to hundreds of people over 40 days, until He returned to heaven. They believe that these events, among others, confirmed Jesus' claims to be God, to be truth, to be the way to heaven. Christians believe that these were not merely historical events in history but that they take on spiritual significance for those who believe, that it is good news for themselves and for the world.

For those who don't believe, this story can seem like childish superstition, just another myth, wishful thinking, a psychological crutch to give comfort or hope for something better than this world alone can offer. It seems completely out of touch and disconnected with anyone or anything reasonable or rational. It is an overly simplistic understanding of reality, they think. Skeptics believe it is severely out of step with scientific and sober-minded reality. It makes no sense intellectually or morally, until it does.

Former atheist Mason Jones once found himself rejecting the Christian belief he now embraces, and more than that, advocates. For him, the cross of Christ held the key to him making sense of himself, of his own values, and of reality itself. I hope you'll come along to hear his story of moving from disbelief to belief.

Welcome to Side B Stories, Mason. It's so great to have you with me today.

Thanks. I'm glad to be here. Thanks for inviting me.

Wonderful. As we're getting started, so the listeners know a little bit about you, Mason. Tell them perhaps what you're doing now in terms of your ministry and your recent history.

Yeah, so I graduated from Eastern Illinois University back in May 2022, and right now I'm working with a campus ministry called Campus Outreach to plant a new region in Michigan. So right now I'm living in Illinois, learning how all of our financial systems and everything works, so I can then go and build everything basically from the ground up in Michigan, and I'll be moving this summer to go do that, and I'm really pumped about that.

You're in ministry, and that's a long way from being or calling yourself a former atheist, so I'm curious how that happened. Let's get back into your story. Let's start at the very beginning, Mason. Why don't you talk with us a little bit about where you grew up. Tell us about your family life. Was there religion there? Any references of God in your world?

Yeah, so I grew up…. When I was really little, my family probably would have said they were Christians, all of us, just, I think because that was the default assumption. But the God we believed in was pretty superficial, at least for myself. I think I viewed God as kind of a fairy godparent who just existed to basically take care of me, watch out for me, and make sure everything went smoothly. And yeah. I grew up, and my parents, especially my mom, really tried to shelter me from just the messed up stuff in the world, I think like most mothers do. So at least for the first few years of my life, I didn't really have anything to challenge that view of God, and I think my family didn't have a whole lot of that, either.

But when I was about eight years old, some stuff happened in my family that my mom just couldn't shelter me from, just a lot of hard stuff. Family deaths, sickness, broken relationships, just yeah, some hard stuff. Over the span of just two years, one of my grandmothers got breast cancer, my grandpa got lung cancer, one of my uncles died in a motorcycle accident. Actually, a year before that, another grandparent died of a brain aneurysm. Then, like, two weeks or something after my uncle died in a motorcycle accident, my other uncle took his life in our driveway. And really, that event was kind of where it really hit me hard. Like, the questions, “How can a just and loving God be reconciled with a world that seems so devoid of justice and love?” And yeah, I questioned that for a while, just to myself. Oh, sorry.

No, I was just trying to consider, as an eight year old boy, what that must have felt like. Experiencing that kind of loss in such a short period of time and especially so graphically in your own yard. I suppose, like you say, any semblance of faith in a God who exists to protect you would have…. It’s like the rug would have been pulled out from underneath you, I would imagine, sending you reeling in a sense, of where was this good and protective and powerful God? I can't imagine, as a child, really, what you must have undergone, and I'm so sorry.

Thank you. Yeah. It was definitely hard, and I definitely didn't have the resources to understand what was going on.

Did your parents try to help you talk through that, or was that something you were observing and processing on your own?

As far as I remember, I don't remember really talking about it very much. I think we tried to avoid the reality of it as much as possible. And to this day, I don't know if my mom knows how much I actually saw, because my parents are divorced, and I was visiting my dad when my uncle took his life and yeah, I just never really talked about it with my mom and didn't really talk about it with my dad, either. That was his brother, and so he was going through his own process of grieving and a whole lot of pain there. So I think our solution a lot of the time was just not to talk about it, but I definitely asked a lot of questions to myself and just didn't verbalize them very much. Just questions like, yeah, how could a loving God let this stuff happen?

At one point, I'd gotten to the point where I think I was asking, “All right, maybe God is good. Maybe I'm just not on His good side. Just the question of, like, “How good do you have to be to be good enough for God?” kind of was replacing the question of, “Is God really good?” And so I was wrestling with that. And that was when I finally did ask my parents. I asked my mom as we were… I still remember it. We were pulling out of a grocery store parking lot, and as we were pulling up to the stop sign, I think I asked my mom, “How good do you have to be to get to heaven?” And she, I guess, at some point herself had become an atheist. I don't think she was before all this stuff happened, but she just turned around and said to me, “Oh. You know none of that stuff's real, right?” And that was first time I had realized my mom didn't believe in God. But at that age, it was still, I think, anything especially my mom said was, “Oh, my mom is where I look to for truth.” And so it was, “Oh!” From that point on, I think I was an atheist and just was like, “Oh, I guess God isn't real.” It was devastating, but it was just kind of, “This is the authority figure in my life. That’s I guess the way things are.”

Wow. And again, that's a pretty sobered view for a young child, really. As you were processing through all of that and walking through all that. I’m also presuming, by your story…. You were surprised at her revelation. I guess that means that you weren't actively going to church or involved in any kind of Christian community at all during any of this period of time.

No. Like I said, all growing up, my understanding of God was really superficial. I didn’t even have really a category for what function church could serve, other than, “Oh, man, you must be really devoted if you go there.” I don't know if we even owned a Bible in our house. So I just really had a truncated, simplistic view of God that was pretty easy to take apart. So it wasn't like…. When my mom told me God didn't exist, it wasn't super hard to reconcile with just the information that I had, because the understanding of God that I had seemed like a contradiction, and it was. Yeah. It was really superficial, which—I was nine years old.

Right. In your world, too, did you have any friends who were Christians or believed in God at all? Or was it a fairly nominal faith or at all in any of your friends that you had association with?

Yeah. I don't know. It's hard, looking back then, because I wasn't even asking questions that would have gotten at the genuineness of someone's faith. But as far as, at least, I can remember, as far as conversations I've had with friends growing up, none of them ever said anything that would indicate a deep, rich understanding of Christianity and the gospel. I think there was a lot of nominal Christianity, which again, we were eight, nine years old. So some of that's just we weren't old enough to really have rich, deep understanding of the gospel. But also, I think, even just growing up after becoming an atheist, that was a common trend, was the religious friends I had seemed to have that truncated view of God that, at that point, had left a bad taste in my mouth. I think I thought little of them for it.

Christianity or God or belief in God left a bad taste in your mouth. There are some people who experience pain and dismiss God and say, “Okay, I guess He’s just not there. He’s not real.” And then there are some who feel it, I guess, a little bit more palpably and can even develop almost a bitterness or a distaste or a contempt for religion, for religious things, for, in an ironic way, the nonexistence of God. Did you feel that sense of contempt in yourself? Or was it just, “Okay, I guess He just doesn't exist. I really don't care. Let’s just move on.”

Yeah, I think I definitely wouldn't have said I had a contempt for Christianity as such. I think I just had a contempt for the simplicity which I did attribute to Christianity. I didn't realize there was a more comprehensive nuanced worldview out there under the banner of Christianity. But I had, again, friends that were professing Christians that… I wouldn't have said that I was hostile to God, that I was angry at God. Although of course, examining myself in the lens of the Bible, of course I was hostile to God. I was alienated from him. But at that time, I wouldn't have presented myself as such. I think I would have at least framed myself as objecting on purely rational grounds and rejecting the idea of God as a contradiction, not as an emotional hostility.

So it was a rational decision, in a sense, that God didn't exist, and I presume that you're saying that it contradicted the idea that He was there, that He was present, that He was protective, those kinds of things. You've couched or used the word simplistic a few times with regard to your understanding of Christianity at that time. Can you flesh that out a little bit more? Because you're contrasting it between a simplistic understanding, but yet you're saying there was a deeper complexity to it that you didn't understand. But just, at that time, what did you think Christianity or belief in God was?

Yeah. I thought the essence of Christianity was, “Believe in God and do enough good things, and you get to heaven,” and that way of ordering the universe and understanding how objective morality and God's goodness and sovereignty, how all that fit together, it seemed like, and I still think today, it is a contradiction. If you come in with the assumption that people are basically good, like I did, and with the right notion that God is both perfectly loving and sovereign over all of the universe, then there is no rational explanation for what goes wrong in the world.

So that's what I mean by simplistic. I had kind of a one plus one equals two understanding of Christianity.

Okay. Okay. I think that that is fair, a fair analysis, I think, in terms of your own, and many, I think, think in those terms. So I appreciate you kind of spelling that out for us. So you're eight, nine years old, and you've decided that God cannot exist rationally with what you're observing and experiencing in the world. So then what happens from there?

Yeah, for the next few years, honestly, I didn't think about it very much. It was just kind of, “Oh, this is the way it is.” At least, I didn't think about God as such that much. I thought about the implications of my atheism pretty often. I remember, as early as fourth or fifth grade, just sitting in the classroom and just having like, existential dread, realizing, “Man, if  something happens and if I die today, then that's just it. There’s nothing!” And being terrified as a grade schooler, and yeah, that wasn't a normal thought for people in my classes.

No! Right, right. That's, again, a fairly mature perspective or understanding as a boy, really, that you understood what you were rejecting, but you also understood what you were embracing, in terms of what it means for there to be no God is that there is no life after death, as it were. That can be pretty frightening for a child, I would imagine.

Yeah. It was definitely a hard time, just because there was, I think, an instinctive fear of death. I think as I got older, it got easier for me to make the—or at least convince myself that, “Oh, it's okay. It’s just like a really long nap, or a forever nap.” But at that age, I think, just instinctively I knew better, that death really is a tragic thing, that it is sad, it's hard, it's devastating. And, yeah, I understood it better than I did, I think, when I got older.

Well, you had been very close to several deaths to people close in your life. So I would imagine it would be a much more palpable reality for you, to consider that you would just watch people that you love die. So of course, there are other implications to a naturalistic or a worldview where God doesn't exist. You had spoken of objective moral values and duties and things, and just knowing things that are absolutely right or wrong. Were those things that you wrestled with as you were trying to come to terms with this godless world?

Yeah. I think I realized pretty quickly, just on an intuitive level, that if—I was a physicalist atheist, so I was the most common, but also the strictest form of atheism there is. It’s there's no phenomena that can't be explained apart from what's physically observable and just the principles of physics that you would learn in science class. So I think pretty early on I realized the implications of that, that if physical phenomena and physical properties are the only properties and phenomena that exist, then there really isn't a place for objective and transcendent moral values, because a physicalist worldview traps you within the immanent. You can't reach out to the transcendent to grab resources.

And I recognized that. And from as early as I can remember, that was hard, because I couldn't live as if that was actually true. Like I, at random points in the day even, would just recognize, “Oh, if God isn't real and what I do doesn't matter, then why would I not cut in line at lunch?” Or, “Why would I care about not skipping school?” But almost invariably, I wouldn't do those things. I would do what was really a contradiction, but what I would say is the moral thing. And that perplexed me. It was confusing. My stated beliefs weren't lining up with my practiced beliefs. And that was causing some tension even from, again, like fourth and fifth grade.

Did you talk with others who shared your worldview, how they seemed to reconcile those moral intuitions, if you will, or things that didn't seem to line up with the atheistic worldview?

Not that I can remember. I don’t know. Maybe part of it was growing up in Texas. Even if you are an atheist, I think a lot of people aren't very vocal about their atheism because it's still at least a very nominally Christian area. But I remember in English class, especially English class, we would read things that just started from, I think…. They weren't atheistic, but they were the same presuppositions that undergirded an atheistic worldview of, morality arises from social constructs, like it is a construct of society to order society. And so I was engaging with those thoughts that… they provided the only alternative to a morality that was based in God that I could think of. But I think even engaging with those, I realized they were kind of shallow. Like if morality was just a construct that just naturally arose from evolutionary processes, there was no reason for me as an individual to follow those restrictions. Those constraints, if they served an evolutionary purpose, which is the hypothesis that people put out, then I should disregard them when my own self interest goes against those constraints, because that would actually be advantageous for myself, which would then pass on those genes to future generations, but I didn't. And so either I was the worst piece of Darwinian machinery on the planet, or something wasn't adding up.

Okay, wow. So something wasn't adding up in your atheistic worldview. Were there any other points of tension that were causing you to step back and consider maybe this isn't…. Just as your belief in God became, in a sense, non-rational or irrational because of what you were observing and experiencing in the world, with the deaths and all of that, it seems to me that the pieces are falling apart a little bit with regard to your atheistic worldview, that there were points of tension that were, again, not adding up, not making sense with regard to the whole of your worldview. Were there any other points of tension? Or was this enough for you to turn and really question what it is you were believing?

There were probably other points of tension, but I don't think—even the points of tension that I felt, I was pretty content in my atheism, as far as, it was like, “All right. Yes, parts of this stink.” Like, “Man, the fact that me dying is just the end, that is not something I'm excited about, but it's just the way it is. It's the best way I can order things that I can think of.” And so I was pretty settled in my atheism. It wasn't like I was reaching out for something else. It was just, “Oh, I've got to find some way to either find meaning and find an orderly account for reality, or I have to just push that problem off to the side, which that ended up being kind of what I did, is I just pushed the whole morality problem off to the side, because I was like, “All right. I don't have the tools to figure this one out right now, so maybe someday, but for right now, I’m just not going to deal with it.”

It seemed like within my framework, I didn't have the resources to deal with it. But the only other option seemed so implausible that it just wasn't even worth considering. And again, it was fundamentally because I had misrepresented Christianity, not because of any flaw in Christianity itself. And I would have said, again, my objections to Christianity were rational, but it was, on a deeper level, much more pre-rational, having to do with the basic assumptions about life. Again, starting from the assumption that people are basically good, that was the unstated assumption that led to all the conflict and tension in what I perceived was the Christian worldview.

So you're in this sober minded, more rational understanding of reality, or so you think, within your atheism, and you're going along, you were not completely satisfied with it, but it's the best of all possible options on the table for you, or so you think, again, at the moment. So walk us along. What begins to happen or change?

Yeah. So when I was 15, about to go into my sophomore year of high school, my mom—she was in the military. She was a cardiologist in the military. She got re-stationed in Augusta, Georgia. And when she moved from San Antonio to Augusta, I moved in with my dad in Illinois. And my dad had just relatively recently started going to church, and when I moved in with him, he started taking me with him.

Interesting. I wonder what had caused your father to go to church.

I'm not entirely sure. I think part of it was he, unlike my mom, had never stopped believing in the Christian God. He always would have called himself a Christian. We have actually talked since, and we, I think, both kind of agree he probably didn't really understand the gospel and become a Christian until around the same time that I did. But he felt, just kind of on a deep level, just from his upbringing, that like, “Church is something that we should do,” and he had not been going for a long time, but just hard stuff happened. And whereas my mom's response and my response, both of us was to pull away, his response was to lean in a little bit, and it was a bit of a delayed response, honestly, but eventually it happened, and I'm really thankful, because otherwise I would have never heard the gospel. So I went to church-

So he had you go to church. Did you resist that at all, as a professed atheist? Did he know that you were an atheist, as he was trying to bring you to church?

I don't think he did. Again, my family, we just never really talked about that stuff. I think because we know crossing that line hurts, that it brings up all the pain of that stuff, and so our default was just, “All right. Let’s just operate as best we can without dealing with that stuff, crossing that line,” so I don't think he knew I was an atheist, but also I wasn't… because, again, in my mind, it wasn't that I just was super angry or anything. It was more so like, “As an atheist, it's illogical to be angry at God,” and that was my thought, was, “Why would I be angry at something that didn't exist?”

Right.

So I was like, “Oh, I love my dad. This is an hour a week. I can do it.”

So I'm curious, what were your first impressions of going into a church? You really hadn't been much of a church goer, so I'm curious, as a self-perceived atheist, what you thought of the service and the people.

I honestly think the first time I just fell asleep and didn't think much about it.

Okay. Yeah. That’s honest. Yeah.

But I think gradually it kind of was…. I think the biggest thing was running into other people my age who were going to church, and the biggest thing, the single biggest thing that happened was…. It was probably the second time I went to church because again, the first time, I fell asleep. The second time, I actually do remember. I just actually heard the gospel. And I heard that the world was made good and was a reflection of God's goodness and His perfect sovereignty over that creation, and that He made man in His image to enjoy that creation and to in that creation enjoy Himself. And that was the first time I heard that purpose statement for creation. But then it was also the first time I had heard an explanation, a consistent explanation, for what's wrong with creation, that we messed it up, that it was our own free choice that brought the curse of sin on creation, that we’d chosen finite, broken things instead of the infinite, eternal God to try to satisfy us. And that was the first time there was even a category given for what's wrong with the world, other than God has to be what's wrong with the world. Instead it was, “Oh, what if we're what's wrong with the world?”

And then the gospel was the good news, that's what euangelion means is the good news, that God was committed to redeeming His people, that He was committed to pursuing them, and so He sent His own Son, again eternal, infinite, perfect, and all His attributes, and He suffered the full weight of the curse that we had subjected creation to. And so I heard basically that the world is far more messed up than I had ever thought and that I even had the categories to think of, because as an atheist I only have whatever categories fit within the immanent frame. But I also heard that there is a God who is far more committed to restoring and redeeming that universe than I had ever thought to imagine. And so again…. Or not again. This is the first time I'm saying it, but I wasn't immediately converted right then on the spot. But I did realize at that moment that I had really oversimplified Christianity and that I at least really needed to engage with its claims more seriously.

So it caused you to take a step back and take another look. How did you engage the claims more seriously? What did that look like?

As far as what I did intentionally, I think I realized pretty quickly that ground zero for this was the resurrection, because it was the claim that the entire…. Every doctrine within Christianity and the whole of Christianity hinged itself upon the reality of this man, Jesus of Nazareth, rising from the dead 2000 years ago. And so I realized, “All right, if that's true, Christianity is true. If it's false, Christianity is false.” But also it was something that no other religion has. It's a falsifiable historical claim. Every other religion makes claims and builds its foundation on abstract principles, things that you can debate, you can argue about, but you can't falsify them. You can’t ultimately disprove them if they're wrong.

And so I was not a full-on, full-blown logical positivist, which is basically—I guess I’ve got to rewind now. Logical positivism. I’m sure you're familiar with it, but for those of you who may be listening that aren't, it's basically the idea that the only statements that even have meaning are those that are empirically verifiable or analytically true. That's true in and of themselves. And here was an empirically verifiable claim. And that was, for an atheist, an atheistic physicalist even, like me, that was gold. It was like, “Oh, I can engage with this!”

But I think also through that, through engaging with the historical data, I realized, on a much deeper level, there needed to be some deep challenging of the fundamental assumptions that I brought into my reasoning about the world. Because I realized my worldview, the basic assumptions I had, the presuppositions that inform how I think about everything, they precluded the very idea of a resurrection, because that's necessarily a supernatural imposition on the natural order. And if I'm a physicalist, I don't have a concept for that.

Right.

And so if that's just a claim that I believe, then that's fine, but it has to be something that can be broken down and falsified. You have to be able to prove me wrong, that physical phenomena is all there is. And that wasn't the case. Instead, it was a presupposition. It was something that was baseline taken for granted, taken as just an axiom, and it was what informed all of my reasoning. And so it was an invitation into the worldview of the gospel, which is where my friends were super helpful, because I, if just left my own devices, would have been trapped with the basic assumptions and the way of thinking that I had always held.

But through engaging with my friends, I for the first time really saw people who actually believed the gospel. And so they had fundamentally different baseline assumptions about the world around them. Instead of doing things to get something or just as a functional process of, “Oh, this will give me this good,” there was something that instead, on the front end, drove their decisions. And that was that they were justified by the grace of God alone, through faith in Jesus Christ alone. And it actually produced real change in their lives. It affected and informed all of their decisions. Because, like I said, I had met at least nominal Christians beforehand, but I hadn't seen that before. And so, through my friends being able to actually imagine a different worldview and see how those assumptions would just fundamentally change everything, that was a huge part in how I became a Christian.

So it sounds like it was a combination of, not only as an empiricist, at the time of your research, just looking for the evidence for a falsifiable claim of Jesus's resurrection, and then adding to that an embodied view of Christianity that was not only attractive, but it also had, like you say, completely presuppositions about the world and how you see it and how it drives your life. And you could sense a palpable change.

So I'm just curious, for those who are listening who are saying, “I can't go there with the resurrection,” but how did you study? Did you have particular books or authors or claims that you investigated? And how did you pursue that?

Yeah, I think my starting point was Google, and I just looked up Jesus’ resurrection, historical facts, case for, case against the resurrection. And I realized there were good and bad arguments on either side. But especially the arguments against the resurrection only worked if you started with assumptions that disproved the possibility of the resurrection. And so that's where I realized, like, “All right. That only helps you get from point A to Z if point A is point Z. If you start with, ‘The resurrection is false,’ you can end up back at, ‘The resurrection is false,’” but I wanted to see, like, “All right, if I was a Christian, could you actually convince me that the resurrection wasn't real?” If I was a thoughtful, informed Christian, if I believed that the supernatural can impose itself on the natural order, is there anything about the resurrection that's inconsistent? Is there any conflicting data? Is there any of the earliest eyewitness or historical documents that would go against this? And the answer was no.

Basically the best argument people could give for why we shouldn't trust the biblical documents, which are eyewitness documents, was that because they validate Jesus’ resurrection. It’s like, “Ah! We know that can't be true.” And I was like, “That doesn't make sense.” I actually gave a talk on the resurrection one time, and at the start, I was like… I basically gave an example, like, if I was talking with my friend Brock, and I said, “Man, what would happen if I dropped this mic right now?” And he told me, like, “Oh! It’d fall to the ground.” And I said, “Yeah, well, that's only because you believe in gravity.” You'd be like, “Yes, but the question is, do I have a good reason for believing that?” And so if all the eyewitness documents were saying that Jesus rose from the dead, in my mind it was, “All right, there has to be a pretty high burden of proof to the contrary to show that every single eyewitness is false, rather than they're actually reliable.

That's pretty impressive, I would say. As someone who really wanted to investigate what you believed… as someone who held rationality and evidence in high regard, that you were willing to take a look at evidence that perhaps went beyond your presumptions that only the natural world exists, that there is no supernatural. I'm just so impressed that you were willing to take another perspective, the Christian perspective, to grant the possibility, “What if?” and then look at the data. And obviously you were convinced by it. You're sitting here as a Christian. I presume that you believe that the resurrection occurred, that Jesus, because of the resurrection, it verified His claims to be God and His claims towards redemption, that all those things you talked about at the beginning, that God, or even through the gospel rather, that God really wants to redeem not only the world, but His people and all the brokenness in everyone, and that He does that through Christ on the cross, and then verified those claims through the resurrection.

And then, again, you say you saw your friends who lived in an embodied way, with a different set of presuppositions, that God exists and that He actually accomplished the gospel through Christ and that He produces redeemed lives. And you saw that palpably in the lives of your friends. So I presume all of that came together and that you were able to move beyond your prior presuppositions to embrace this new view of reality and that it was applied to you yourself, that you personally took on that redemption that Christ accomplished on the cross, that the gospel was made true in your life.

Yeah.

How did that happen?

Well, I think, just fundamentally, in order to actually believe the gospel and to be able to make that shift from atheistic physicalistic assumptions, presuppositions, to Christian presuppositions, there had to genuinely be a heart desire change. And I think, even up until recently, I would have recoiled from that, because I've just by default, and I think probably a lot of people listening can relate, just think of myself as a rational, intellectual being. The Descartes, “I think. Therefore, I am.” Not realizing that, fundamentally, at least if, as Christians, we listen to the Bible, and even if you're a postmodern listening to this, you listen to your own philosophy. We are teleological beings drawn to an end, one end or the other, and so my telos had to be at least shaken up and then progressively changed for me to even have the option to consider different presuppositions. There was a movement from the baseline heart level of where my worship was, up through the pre-intellectual level of the baseline assumptions that inform how I think about the world, through the intellectual level.

And so, before the gospel could be intellectually viable, it had to be intellectually, and more than intellectually, actually just practically appealing. That's why, in showing a different way to live out reality and to understand reality and to do so in a consistent way, my friends didn't just stir up my mind to think about it but my heart to genuinely desire it. And an objection that someone might raise is like, “Oh, so you're just a Christian because that is what you want to believe.” In a sense, I'd say, “Yeah. No one ever believes anything they don't want to believe.” But the question is, is that correct? Is that right? I think, just on a fundamental level, I don't want to believe anything that's a contradiction. But also, reality, from a Christian worldview, can't just be an abstract set of propositions. It has to be something that's lived, that's glorious, that's beautiful. And so, as Christians, yeah, we need to reclaim the aesthetic, the beautiful, the joyful, because that's what made me a Christian, was the beauty of the gospel, not just the rationality of it.

And the rationality is part of the aesthetic appeal. It's part of the beauty. It's part of the joy of the gospel. But if we reduce it to just the intellectual, then we miss out on entire dimensions of the gospel. Sorry, I don't know if I answered your question, but-

No. No, no, no. I think that's really quite beautiful, and I love that you're saying that, because we are not just parts and pieces in our humanity. And I think it's interesting, too. Part of the reason why you rejected Christianity and God was because it was too simplistic and it didn't seem to fit or match with the reality that you were experiencing at that time. And you were experiencing something very deep, and it was more than rational. And I think we're all looking to make sense of our lives and what we think. And I think that, if you can find a worldview that's, like you say, not just superficially simplistic, but deep and complex and beautiful—it's good and it's true—that it is a good place to land. And it seems to me—and maybe you could talk a little bit about how you have been transformed in your ways of thinking and living since you found Jesus and the gospel applied to your life and that you believe that it is true and for good reason. All of those things together, that, once you find that, that it is transforming, like you observed in the lives of your friends. You're sitting there as someone who is a campus minister wanting others to know Christ. Obviously, your life has been fully transformed. Well, not perfectly, right? But in a grand way. Why don't you talk with us a little bit about how your life has changed since you took on Christ, as it were, as your Savior?

Yeah. I think again, because I recognized, even before coming a Christian, pretty early on, wrestling with the claims of Christianity, that if Jesus Christ really did die and rise from the dead, that I realized that that demanded every ounce of my being, that that demanded to redirect my thoughts, my affections, everything that I was pointed towards and the end for which I lived my life, had to be captivated by that. And so, once I became a Christian, I didn't really know what that would look like, but I knew, “All right. If I ever come to the realization that there's a claim that Christ could make on my life that I am not living in light of, then I need to drop everything and follow that claim that Christ demands of me.”

So for me, my freshman year of college, that meant dropping my dream of becoming a software developer and instead just devoting myself to ministry. That doesn't mean that for everyone, but for me, I realized both that I had a passion for teaching the word of God, for evangelizing and for discipling people in their faith, and raising them up as laborers to go evangelize and disciple and then mobilize other people. I realized I had a passion for that. And then I also realized that that's probably like the single biggest need that the world has right now, is not enough laborers in the harvest. And I could have done that within computer science. I could have, in a workplace, shared the gospel with a ton of people, honestly, especially with the high turnover in the technology industry, just could have made a lifetime of faithful witness. But I think, with campus ministry, and especially eventually I want to go into church planting, I realized there was a unique opportunity to not only share the gospel with many people but build people up in their faith through just a life long of intentional discipleship, which is my full-time job. Like, I don't have other stuff to do.

There's unique sacrifices that go into a job like this. I don't have a steady salary. I support raise for my salary. So if people drop off my support team when COVID hits, then I'm in trouble. But there's also unique opportunities that, man, I have no other job than to pour into these Christian brothers and sisters and to equip our staff. I'm in the primarily administrative role, so I also get to really just do everything that our staff need to be able to do their own ministry. And so I'm ministering to both staff and students, and I just have a unique opportunity to pour my life out for the gospel without any other obligations. And honestly, I got the easy way out. It's, I think, a lot harder and takes a lot more intentionality to devote your life to serving Christ in a secular workplace than it is in a Christian workplace.

Yeah, that sounds very full. And, in thinking back in your story, too, in terms of the desire to make sense of some of these big issues in life, whether it be objective moral values and duties, knowing that something is right and wrong and that there's a transcendent source for that, or that there is something after death, that there is purpose in living all of the things that might not have perhaps made sense as an atheist. Within the Christian worldview, this complex and deep worldview, do those things seem to come into alignment, that there's more sense making, I guess you could say, as well as meaning making within the Christian worldview, that you're not at those points of tension that you're trying to wrestle. I mean, we’re all wrestling, especially when bad things happen, right? When there's pain and suffering in the world and someone close to you dies, there's a problem. How do you reconcile that within your own worldview? And I would imagine as a Christian now, reconciling those issues, issues of death and pain and suffering, are a little bit different than where you were as a child, understanding it from a godless point of view.

Yeah, actually a really hard but powerful example is my grandpa that got lung cancer when I was younger. He actually just passed away this past year, and it was painful. It was really hard. But when I was an atheist, there was no outlet for that pain. There wasn't any solution to it, other than, “There is no meaning to this. This is meaningless, senseless, chaotic suffering,”  and there was no firm basis for grief. But under the Christian worldview, there is. In the same foundation in which we find hope in grief, there's also the foundation that gives the basis for grief. And that's that the world's not made to be this way. There is a good God Who has made us in His image and cares deeply about all forms of suffering and is committed to redeeming and restoring it. And so there's a place for sorrow. There’s a place for wrestling with the pain of a world that's not the way it should be, and at the end of all that wrestling, it should lead us to a deeper and more full hope in the God Who has promised to redeem this world.

Because it's not that God is cold and distant from the suffering. That’s the reason why it still exists, because God Himself took on flesh and entered into that suffering. Jesus Himself bore all the burdens of this world. Isaiah says that He was despised and rejected by men. He has borne our sorrows and carried our griefs. He's walked in every kind of suffering that we've known. He had every form of pain. He faced sickness. He faced sorrow at the loss of others. He wept at Lazarus's tomb, and He walked through death Himself. He walked through the curse of sin, all the brokenness in the world, taking it on Himself on the cross and in His death. And then He conquered it. It's not just that, “Oh, God understands. He knows how you feel.” But no, He walks through that for a purpose, and that was to redeem it and to give victory over it. And so, if the gospel was just, “Oh, Christ died for us,” then maybe there'd be comfort in that. Like, “Oh, whoever is running things, He’s been here.” It's like having a boss that has also worked your same job. It's like, “Oh, He knows what's going on.”

But we have far more than that. We have the promise that God not only walked through death, but He came out the other side, that Jesus rose from the dead and conquered it and reigns at the right hand of God the Father. And so there's the resources to more fully deal with the tension and the pain and the sting of death and grief.

Yeah. Well, what a change you have made. What a change God has made in you. It really is palpable. And I'm considering those who might be listening, Mason, who… they can feel that things aren't quite right in the world, quite right with themselves. They're feeling a little bit broken, maybe curious that there might be something more than what they're experiencing and what they know. And I'm wondering what you would say to someone who's curious, who might actually, like you, be willing to take another look, open their mind and their potential horizons to something different, consider other presuppositions. How would you advise someone who might be open to the possibility of looking closer at God and Christianity?

Yeah. I think step one is engage with the claims of Christ, engage with eyewitness accounts of Jesus' life, death, and resurrection. A great place to start for just who Jesus is, a historical compilation of eyewitness accounts, is Matthew. He's a meticulous collector of historical accounts, and he's super committed to taking detail because he knows that people he's writing to are going to want to fact check him. So he's very careful in how he writes, but he also writes with a warmth and a joy in knowing Jesus personally that just shines through. So it's not just a mere academic… he's not just writing a paper that's seeking to make a point. He's writing a genuine account of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection that is thematic and carries the weight of what Jesus has done, not just as historical realities, but deep and transformative truth that this is what Jesus has done, and this is what that means, this is what that offers you. And so you get both at the claims of Christ and you can compare those with people like Pliny, Tacitus, other first century, second century historians, in the case of, say, Tacitus, and other influential people at the time of Jesus's resurrection, in the early Christian movement. And you can compare them to Matthew.

But I think maybe even more important than that is just find some Christians who actually genuinely believe the gospel, who believe that the Bible is actually real. They believe that Jesus did rise from the dead. And not just who say that but who actually live as if that's the case. And make friends with them. You don't have to commit to, you know, “These people are my life,” because obviously, if you're skeptical about Christianity, you probably don't want to do that, but commit to inhabiting their worldview for a little bit. And invite them to inhabit yours. Let there be a healthy dialogue there. And I think just be patient with them, because I sure found this out, hanging out with a bunch of teenage, college-age Christians, you’re probably going to find a lot of inconsistencies in their faith. There's a lot that was inconsistent about my life, even when I was an atheist. It's just we often don't live consistently with our values. But I think if you're patient and you let them really show by their actions what they fundamentally most treasure, what they believe, and what commands their hearts, I think that'll be a really powerful testimony alongside the Bible of the gospel's truthfulness.

That's good advice. And I'm aware of also the reality that atheists and Christians don't often socialize. They're often not in the same space. And it may be, I wonder, a little bit hard for an atheist to find one of those genuine authentic Christians that you're talking about, just because they don't run in the same world. But to that end, I wondered how you would commend a Christian to engage with skeptics, to engage with atheists. How can they be in relationship? How can they get to know atheists? How can they best interact and share Jesus?

I would say just actually spend time with non-Christians outside of a church context. It sounds really simple. And you might ask like, “Well, how do I do that?” But reality is there are plenty of ways. We are social creatures, we will spend time with people, and it's good to spend time with other Christians, but if our view of the Christian walk is just gathering up in a holy huddle and singing worship songs to Jesus all the time, then I think we're missing an entire dimension of the gospel, and that's that it's fundamentally outward focused, that Jesus's prayer, when He sees the brokenness in the world, is, “Lord, raise up laborers to go into the harvest, because the harvest is plentiful, the laborers are few.” And I think that'll always be true in a sense. Even if every Christian was committed to sharing their faith, there would still be just a lot of work to do, just because there are a lot of people in the world.

But I think just, for example, on Saturdays, I'm joining a run club here in Peoria, and I'm just doing that because I work in a church office right now. I live with Christians. I'm still working on getting everything set up for a Michigan region, so I'm not spending a bunch of time on campus to spend with non-Christians. So this is just a chance for me to just actually, on a regular basis, be around non-Christians and have conversations. I think it's so easy for Christians to get caught up in all the other things we do that are part of just the spiritual disciplines, of growing in Christ, of reading the Bible, praying, spending time with other Christians, going to church, that we forget that, if we're really believing the gospel, it should have also an outward dimension to it, too, that evangelism is as much a spiritual discipline as any of those other things, that it's good for our souls to really live as if the gospel is true, and that people around us really do face the reality of hell apart from God's grace and the Person of His Son, and that God really is committed to saving people. And that, if we have those conversations with people, if we really commit ourselves to just laying down our lives for the kingdom of Christ, then God will do stuff, that God is more committed to evangelism than we are.

That's a good word for all of us, Mason. I am so appreciative of everything that you've said today, all that you've brought to the table. Is there anything else you'd like to add before we wrap up? Or do you think we've covered everything?

I would just say, hey, if you're listening to this and you haven't shared your faith in a long time, then I think the thing you most need to hear is not, “Go get out there,” but Jesus came, lived a perfect life on your behalf, died a sacrificial death on your behalf, and has called you to Himself, is committed to sanctifying you, and is now sending you out to be a part of the work He’s doing in building this new creation, as a gift, not as an obligation. So embrace the reality of the gospel.

I love that. I think you are such a beautiful example, Mason, of having embraced the gospel, and again, the gospel has embraced you. And that it's obvious to me that this is something that you didn't have, that you didn't understand, that you didn't know in its fullness, and that you lived without, but yet you found it, and Christ found you, and yours is a life change, that you are passionate now towards others finding what you found. And I think we can all grab a glimpse of that and be inspired by that and are just so thankful for the work that He’s done in you, because we know that He is working so much good through your life and through your ministry and your obvious heart that has been surrendered to that kingdom purpose, towards bringing others to know what you've known, to know what you know. So thank you for coming on today, for sharing your story, for really sharing your life and your heart and your mind for all of us today.

Thank you. I really enjoyed it. It was a great time. Just sweet to talk about this stuff, how God's just been really faithful in working to save me and to just work on my life since saving me. I hope the gospel gets ever sweeter and hope the same for everyone listening.

I'm sure it will be. So thank you so much. Thank you so much, Mason.

Thanks for tuning into Side B Stories to hear Mason Jones's story. You can find out more about Mason and his ministry with Campus Outreach in the episode notes. For questions and feedback about this episode, you can contact me through our website at www.sidebstories.com or through our email at [email protected]. I hope you enjoyed it and that you'll rate, review, and share this podcast with your friends and social network. In the meantime, I'll be looking forward to seeing you next time, where we'll see how another skeptic flips the record of their life.

Former atheist Stu Fuhlendorf felt no need for God, achieving high level of success and power in the business world.  However, his achievements were tainted by emptiness and addiction which helped him become open to his need for God.

Stu's Resources:

• book:  Wall Street to the Well:  A Story of Transformation from Fortune to Faith
• church website: redemptionhills.com
• Lifeverse website: www.lifeverse.com

Former atheist Will Witt presumed atheism was true until his beliefs began to fall apart under the weight of scrutiny for grounding of his values. It opened him towards a search for God.

Will's Resources:

• website: theflstandard.com
• book:  How to Win Friends and Influence Enemies
• social media: @thewillwitt

Former atheist Pedro Garcia grew up in a secular culture, making it easy to leave his nominal religion behind.  After encountering serious, intelligent Christians, he began to question the possibility of God.

website: askandwonder.com translator for Christian organizations: askandwonder.com/translations email: [email protected] church: The Donelson Fellowship

To learn more and hear more stories of atheists converting to Christianity, visit www.sidebstories.com

Former atheist Malia grew up in a religious home but she never personally believed in God.  When she followed atheism’s rational end towards nihilism, it led to her to question what was true.

For more stories of atheists and skeptics converting to Christianity, visit www.sidebstories.com

Episode Transcript

Hello, and thanks for joining in. I’m Jana Harmon, and you’re listening to Side B Stories, where we see how skeptics flip the record of their lives. Each podcast, we listen to someone who has once been an atheist or skeptic but who became a Christian against all odds. You can hear more of these stories at our Side B Stories website at www.sidebstories.com. We welcome your comments on these stories on our Side B Stories Facebook page as well. You can also email us directly with your comments and feedback at [email protected]. We’d love to hear from you.

It’s sometimes thought that religious people believe in God not for any rational or evidential reason, but on blind faith alone. Some skeptics have said that religious people believe in God in the face of no evidence or oppositional evidence, evidence that actually leads away from God. Most atheists say there is no evidence for God, nor could there ever be, since He does not exist.

But there are many who believe in God for what they deem to be good, solid evidence. There are many Christians who contend that Christianity is a falsifiable belief, that it is true based upon good evidence, arguments, and reasons, and that they would not believe it if they did not truly think it was the truth. Their intellectual integrity would not allow them to buy into a belief system to satisfy anyone or anything else unless they were genuinely convinced it was worth believing, and for good reason.

In today’s story, former atheist Malia once thought belief in God was not compatible with reason, with evidence or science. But she changed her mind. Now she studies the rational grounding for the Christian worldview, something she once thought an irrational and impossible pursuit. How did her paradigm shift occur? I hope you’ll join in to find out.

Welcome to the Side B Stories podcast, Malia. It’s so great to have you with me today.

Thank you so much for having me. I’m very grateful to be here.

Wonderful. As we’re getting started, Malia, why don’t you tell the listeners a little bit about yourself?

My name is Malia. I am 20 years old, I live in Colorado, and I am an apologetics student.

An apologetics student, okay. Where are you studying apologetics?

I first started studying at the University of the Nations, and now I study at the Lee Strobel Center for Apologetics at Colorado Christian University.

Okay, terrific. Wow, a 20-year-old who’s studying apologetics. That’s an interesting pathway for someone really young. You must be very passionate about what apologetics can bring. Just for the listeners who may not be familiar with what apologetics is, can you describe for a moment what you’re studying?

Yeah. So apologetics at a base, it’s defending your faith with reason is the simple way to explain what apologetics is. And I’m focusing on practical apologetics, so that means I’m focusing on using tangible evidence like science, archaeology, history, really modern things to defend the Christian faith in a way that people may not think that they should complement each other.

Wow. That sounds fascinating, and maybe we’ll get into that as we pursue your story. I’m sure it’s intriguing, too, for those who don’t think that any kind of Christian belief is based on evidence.

Yeah.

Yes. I know there are some who think that way, but obviously you’re studying a whole curriculum that is moving in the direction of a profound intellectual grounding for the Christian faith. All right, so let’s move back into your story, Malia. Why don’t we start where you grew up. Tell me a little bit about your home, your family. Did you pray? Did you go to church? Did you have any semblance of belief in God at all in your home? 

I grew up in Denver, Colorado, specifically this little town called Littleton. I’m actually adopted, so I was adopted into a very big family of four older siblings. My parents were originally Catholic when I was growing up, and I was going to a very small private Catholic school. When you grow up, you don’t really have an understanding of God or anything of that sort. And so for me, it’s kind of just where I was. It wasn’t my belief. It was my parents’ belief. We’d go to Catholic church, and I’d have to sit through church on Fridays at my school. We’d pray in class, but God wasn’t a common topic in my household. We never prayed together or talked much. It was kind of just, “Let’s go on Sundays, or if we can’t go on Sundays, let’s do Christmas and Easter.” And so, yeah, I kind of grow up in that sort of setting where there was God, but He wasn’t really there, I guess.

As you were growing up, were you praying to God? Did you have a belief that there was a God out there? Or was it just something that you did, more of an activity?

It was more of an activity. I think the influence came from my grandparents to my parents, and it wasn’t a belief. It was more of just an activity for us, to get dressed up all nice and go to church. But I can’t say I ever really prayed when I was younger, nor did I ever see my parents pray.

But you said you went to a Catholic school?

Yeah. And I would say that was kind of…. When you’re in a setting like that, you kind of are forced to do that thing, but I think there’s a difference in choosing it and just going along with it.

Okay. And I get the sense that you were just going along with it. So how long were you just going through the motions of this Catholic faith?

I would say till about maybe fifth grade. I think I started to understand as I got slightly older, that it just personally wasn’t something I believed, especially when you have…. A lot of young kids have questions such as why do bad things happen to good people? And what about natural disasters? What about these things? And growing up, there were a lot of really bad events for me, especially leading up to fifth grade. And so at that point, I had kind of decided that God just didn’t really seem real to me because I hadn’t seen Him do anything.

And I don’t want to get intrusive, but were the bad things that happened in your life, or were they just kind of around you, in the world at large? Was it more of a conceptual pain and suffering, or were you feeling that very personally?

I would say both. I think, conceptually, outside, looking at the world. Around that time when I was younger, that was when the Arapahoe shooting happened. And so kind of seeing that. And in myself, too, I was picked on a lot as a kid, essentially, for being slightly different from everybody else. I grew up in a town that was marginally all Caucasian, and being the only Asian, very small, very petite, I would say that there was a lot of judgment and a lot of insults thrown my way growing up.

So this good God Who was supposed to be there, Who was supposed to care, didn’t seem to, I guess, show up in the ways that you thought He probably should have if He existed. Is that the kind of thing that you were thinking?

Yeah. You hear all about how good God is and all the things that He did in the Bible, but when you kind of take a step back, sometimes you see, “Oh, well, why hasn’t God done anything good in my life? And I think that’s the question I had that kind of led me to be like, if He hasn’t done anything good in my life, He hasn’t done anything, therefore He’s not good, and He’s not there.

And you said that was when you were about fifth grade, around ten years old or so?

Yeah, ten or eleven. Just around.

So then you started doubting God at all, but you were still going through the motions, I guess, of church attendance. How did that work out? When you began doubting, were you still required to do all these kind of religious things?

Well, actually, after fifth grade, I had moved to a STEM school, a science, technology, engineering, and math school. So I was no longer required to go to church, and I no longer went with my family to church. We actually stopped going because my parents kind of dropped off from the faith after I left that school. And so I was in a new setting, and we had kind of stopped going to church. And if it was just an activity, you can just stop an activity, because it wasn’t really a belief.

Right, right. Yeah. Activities can come and go without much change in living, right? Or in life. And that was just something that dropped off your radar, it sounds like. So then you were moving into middle school, high school, and a STEM program, which is obviously science and technology oriented, why don’t you tell us what the view of God was perhaps among your fellow students, your peers, or in your education? What was the sense of whether or not God existed with regard to any of those things? Or did it even come up?

When I was going to middle school and high school in a setting that was primarily dominated by scientific and intellectual minds, God wasn’t a topic, but you kind of just knew that it was irrational. Because we go to science, and they talk about evolution and the Big Bang and all of these scientific theories that state how exactly the Earth and the universe were created, and there were no outside questions. It made sense to you at that time, and so when I was going to school, there were a couple of people of different beliefs that…. We never talked about what we believed. If somebody was Mormon, they never really said they were Mormon. If somebody was a Christian, they never really said they were a Christian.

So it basically became a nonissue for you.

Yeah. It was something where I didn’t have to think about it, because nobody was bringing it up, and I was already pretty set in what I thought, and everybody else was pretty set in what they thought, and so it just wasn’t brought up.

And what did you think around that time? Were you in coherence with the things that were taught at STEM, that we live in a world without anything supernatural, that science explains everything? That kind of thinking. Is that what you basically adopted through that process?

I would say yes. I would say I was pretty firm in the… if God isn’t good, He’s not real. And so I kind of said, “Well, there’s not a God, so there has to be something, another explanation.”

And at that time, science was really appealing. And so that was kind of where it was, like, “Oh, there’s a scientific reason. There is something tangible. There’s tangible evidence to why we exist like this, and there is no need for supernatural intervention by God or whatever,” and whatever else there was. Like angels weren’t real, things like that.

Yeah. And it just sounds like that was the world that you lived in. It was a presumption that was made, and it was comfortable for you, and it allowed you to pursue science or technology in the way that you wanted without any complication. During that time, did you ever identify or label yourself as an atheist or an agnostic, or was it not something that you gave a lot of thought to?

I think I didn’t really put a name on it until I got to high school. And that’s when I started calling myself an atheist, because I wanted to make sure I had all the information to be informed of what I was calling myself. And so when I was going through this technology school in middle school, I wouldn’t say that I was an atheist or agnostic. Technically, you could say I was probably an atheist, but I just didn’t put that label on until I was able to understand what that label meant. But yes, I would say at that time, I probably was.

Yeah. And atheism is described or defined by a lot of different people in a lot of different ways. How did you conceive of atheism at that time? How would you have described what that is?

I think my understanding of atheism has changed a little bit, but at that time, I would say it was just the nonbelief in anything spiritual or supernatural.

I didn’t think God was really a tangible explanation or reason for everything that exists or was going on in our world. And so I just assumed and kind of moved on to the path that there was an intellectual reason, like reason being an intellectual term, like there’s evidence, and there’s something tangible, and things like that. And so I didn’t think God was there, in the realm of intellectualism. And so the way I thought, atheism was essentially intellectualism.

Okay. Okay, good. Yeah. It really buys in a bit into the way of thinking that atheism is the rational way to believe, it’s what the intellectual people believe, it’s what the “brights” believe, all those who are scientific. I think there’s a very common mantra in that, and there’s a comfortability and a confidence in that as well. And I presume that you were confident in this worldview without God. When did you start doubting? Or what happened that allowed you to question your own sense of atheism or naturalism?

So It was right around when COVID hit actually. I was still in high school. I believe I was a junior, and I was just fine not believing in God. I had a whole plan. I wanted to be a scientist. I wanted to study biochemistry in college. That’s what I wanted to do. I wanted to graduate, go to university, study that, and then get a great job. But COVID hit, and all of a sudden, I was stuck in my house, and I had a small little screen where I would talk to my professors, and that’s all I did for months. And I kind of was like, “Huh. I wonder what happened. What do I do now?” And my grades kind of started to tank because of being alone in your house and not being able to go out and see people. My biggest thing was being able to ask questions and interact with teachers and stuff like that. And I wasn’t able to do that. And so I didn’t know a next step. And I actually decided to finish high school early. So I finished high school early, and I didn’t know what to do.

And my sister had sent me a text that kind of just said, “Hey, I know you don’t have anything to do right now, but I think you should go somewhere, take a gap year before going to college. There’s this really great program that you should look into, and they have a location in Hawaii. They have locations all over the world, and it’s called YWAM.” And I looked up YWAM. It’s called Youth with a Mission. It’s a Christian organization. And I thought she was insane.

I bet! Was she a Christian at that time, your sister? Is that why she sent you this information?

Yeah. When I was in high school, my family, so being my two older sisters and my parents, started transitioning into Christianity. So after a couple of years of nonbelief, they started transitioning to believing in God again, but in a different way. And I thought that was weird. And I distanced myself. I didn’t go to church. I didn’t do youth group. I was like, “I don’t believe in God. I don’t need to do this.” And so she sent me that text, and I thought she was crazy. I was like, “You know I don’t believe in God. Why are you telling me to go somewhere to essentially be with other people who believe in God?”

Yeah, that’s really unusual. So did you look into it at all?

Yeah, so I looked into it a little bit, and I assumed, because in every place like that, there’s a little group of atheists that are just there because their parents wanted them to be there. And so I was like, “To start, there’s probably a group like that, but I don’t really want to do this.” And then I got a contact from one of my sister’s friends, being two twins, who I was familiar with. And they said, “Hey, we want to talk to you about why YWAM,” and it was completely unprompted. From my memory, it was unprompted. And I was like, “That’s kind of a coincidence, and it’s kind of weird, because I don’t really believe in coincidences.” And so I agreed to talk to them, and I did my research, and strangely, I felt like I should go, because when I looked at it… yeah.

Yeah, that is strange, and for those, again, who are not familiar with, YWAM, Youth with a Mission, what does that typically entail? Isn’t that some form of global travel and commitment?

Yeah. So YWAM, it’s a missions organization, Christian missions. And when you go there initially, you do something called a DTS, which is a Discipleship Training School, and you spend three months at the base. There are hundreds of bases around the world. And then you spend three months going to an unknown location doing missions work. And so that’s kind of what people were trying to buy me into. They were like, “Oh, you could go stay in Hawaii for three months and then travel. That’d be a really cool experience for you!”

Right. Yeah. So do you think that this was your family’s way of trying to get you to become open again to some sort of belief?

Yeah, I believe so, because around that time I was going really deep into philosophy and epistemology and kind of tangling myself in a couple of webs.

Tell me about those.

So my parents ended up sending me to a Christian school for my junior year in high school. For whatever reason, I was there. And I had a teacher, my Bible teacher, who I was really familiar with. He understood kind of where I stood intellectually, and I learned what the term nihilism meant.

And again, for those who aren’t familiar with the term, can you describe what nihilism is? 

So nihilism is… Everything is true. Everything is right. I can have my own view on what is right and what is wrong,” you start to go down this path that eventually leads to nihilism, which is if everything, if every opinion of every person is right and wrong, nothing’s right and wrong. There’s no intrinsic value or intrinsic right or wrong. Therefore, there’s no point to your existence, if there’s not one sticking point.

Right, right. So there’s no objective truth. If everything is relative to a person or a group, there’s nothing to call anything absolutely right or wrong, like you say. So what discussion did you have with your teacher about nihilism?

Well, that’s actually where I put myself for a year. Because I had gone so deep into science and philosophy and all of these intellectual things, I really couldn’t find a tangible explanation to one question, and that question is… it still is at the forefront of my mind. And that question is: What is truth? My teacher asked me that question because we were discussing it in class, and I did not want to answer it in class, and so he asked me in a private conversation, “What is truth?” and I genuinely couldn’t answer that question. There was nothing that I could go through that would give me that answer. And so, when you go down the truth route, then you realize, “Well, if truth is all subjective, there is no point to truth, and therefore there is no point to you if there’s nothing to hold onto, no core value.” And so I went down that. I was like, “Oh, that’s actually where I am.”

How did that feel, coming to that place of realization and even admission?

It’s a worse feeling than you think, because, when you start to go down that route of values and the lack of, it’s depressing, and I’ll be blunt. It’s like, “What is the point of being, of living, if you have no value, if there’s nothing for you to gain nor give?” So that’s kind of where it was, and it kind of sucked because that kind of put me in a hole where I no longer… I didn’t want to be at the school where they talked about God because I didn’t believe in God. But I also wanted to avoid all of the intellectual conversations and the books that I had kind of spent a lot of time reading into, because both of them kind of drove me down this hole of truth, like, what is it? Does it exist? If it doesn’t, there’s no point.

So these philosophy books that you were reading, were they from atheist authors or were they from another worldview?

Most of them were from atheists, because they were a lot of the older philosophical texts, which most of them back then were all atheists.

Like Bertrand Russell or some of those.

Yeah.

Or Friedrich Nietzsche or some of the existentialists?

Yeah. A lot of Nietzsche. Nietzsche was a frequent of mine.

Oh, okay. A companion of yours in your reading? Yeah. If you read those books enough, I think that you do realize that, at the end of the naturalistic or atheistic worldview, there is nihilism. It can lead to a point of despair when you realize the underbelly, as it were, of a godless worldview, when you lose all of the things that are important, that make you you, and then all of your values and your dignity and all of those things that substantiated it. So what did you do when you were in this place? You said you were kind of in a hole at that moment when you realized what you had essentially reasoned yourself into believing, into this rational, but almost irrational belief when you look at some of the outcome, or like I say, the underbelly of the belief.

Yeah. At that time, there really wasn’t an open door for God. And so for me it was kind of just sitting in that and trying to come up with reasons, so trying to read a bunch of stuff about epistemology and find logical reasons to describe truth. But in reality it’s like the realization is truth isn’t… it’s not inherently an intellectual logical title. Because where I was, people were just like, “Oh, well, truth is the Bible. Truth is God,” and I thought that was stupid. I thought that that was the most cop-out answer, I guess, to that question. But when I weighed it with mine I was like, “Well, mine doesn’t make sense either.” And so I was wondering, “Where do I go from here?”

So you didn’t want to believe in God, you didn’t think there was any substance to belief in God, but yet you found yourself in between this rock and hard place and allowed you to sit with it and study it about how you know things and how you know truth. And you said that there was a glimmer, there was a breach in the wall as it were, that allowed you to reconsider the possibility of truth, it’s source, it’s grounding. What happened? What was this little glimmer of light that came through that allowed you to shift and become open toward the possibility of God?

Well, it was the fact that I just could not answer the question. And then that teacher that I was familiar with had asked me a question and said, “Well, does every question have to be answered intellectually? Does, ‘What is truth?’ does that question have to have an inherently intellectual answer?” Like, “Can’t it just be that the answer to, ‘What is truth?’ be, ‘It’s God.’ Can’t that just be the answer? And how do you navigate that?” And so I sat and thought, and we had to write reports on this question, and I read a couple of people, and I kind of started to see where maybe I needed to start reasoning less. I needed to kind of take away this worldview that everything had to make perfect sense, everything had to have an intellectual answer. And that’s kind of when I started to be like, “Okay, well if truth can’t be explained by logic, it has to be something outside. Well, maybe it is God.” I kind of circled back around. I was like, “Well, maybe it is God. If it’s not the Christian God, maybe it’s something else. Maybe it’s Buddhism. Maybe it’s Judaism. Maybe it’s Hinduism.” Like, “One of them has to be true, because something has to be true. Nothing cannot not be not true.”

So then did you just start looking at and investigating worldviews? Or what path did you go on next?

So I started investigating worldviews, exactly as you said. I had a lot of friends who were Buddhist, so I started with Buddhism, and that didn’t really make sense to me. It’s kind of a hard concept. So was Hinduism. Hinduism is very complicated and needlessly complicated, and I just didn’t see validity in everything else I was looking at, Mormonism.

I even looked at some pseudo-Christian beliefs that were just not… they didn’t look good on paper, nor did they look good when I was kind of looking at them, and circling back around, I landed on God and Christianity. And at that time, leading up to when I had decided to finish high school and move on, it was perfect timing because I had said, “Well, God has to be an answer. I might as well spend some time looking at it,” and then that invitation to go to YWAM came up and I said, “Well, it’s a perfect opportunity to do some investigating.”

So you said yes to YWAM then? And then you went into that three-month period of training. Is that where you started looking at the question of God a little bit more seriously?

Yeah. It was possibly the worst three months of my life. Not to be over dramatic, but it was such a different setting, and with everybody who—I was wrong, actually. Everybody there believed in God. I could not find one person that had one stray disbelieving thought about God.

Yeah. So that little group of atheists you thought you might find on the road there did not come to fruition. It sounds like you were alone in this.

Yeah. And it was hard because nobody thought like me. I was kind of like, “Oh, well, what about this and this?” and, “Why does this happen?” And, “Why isn’t God there in that?” And people just completely pushed away my questions. And they were like, “Oh, well, you don’t need to even worry.”

Oh! So they didn’t really take your intellectual questions seriously?

No. The people that I was with, I was with a group of people that were very strongly evangelicals, and kind of the impression I got from this specific group of people was that they thought intellectualism was invalid when it came to God.

Wow! So that, I’m sure, was not attractive to you in terms of… I know you were looking a bit beyond reason, but not anti-reason, right? You were looking for something a little bit more solid than, “Just believe,” or, “Don’t worry about that.” That’s not satisfying to someone who is intellectually curious.

No, it’s not. And really, if you think about it, it doesn’t make sense to put blind faith in something. You don’t put blind faith in something. You have a reason for it. Nothing is ever blind in that way. There’s always a reason that you believe. You have to have a reason or else that faith can begin to feel unreasonable. And that was the case for me. And so I had to go. Now, I kind of say God sent me down this path by myself because I had been so dependent on other people and other people’s theories and opinions that I had to go down this six months by myself, where I had to find this middle ground that nobody else was really believing in. But I had to find a middle ground that could say that God and reason do go together.

So what did that six months look like for you in that journey? Obviously, you’re not finding affinity with the Christians there in terms of finding answers. So what did you do? How did you solve this seeming conundrum or the tension that was produced by the cognitive dissonance you were feeling? How did you navigate this?

So going through that program was tough because they have a lot of belief in miracles, a lot of belief in spiritual gifts, like prophecy and healing. And that was hard for me to get a grasp on, because Catholics don’t believe in that kind of thing. Most Catholics don’t. We don’t really believe in the gifts of the Holy Spirit. And so it was even harder for me because I could look back and say, “Oh, well, belief in God. I know what that is because my parents used to have it when I was younger.” But the spiritual gifts thing was really hard for me to grasp, so I went through the six months being surrounded by constant talk, like speaking in tongues, healings, seeing a lot of different things that were really hard for me to get a handle on. And then kind of towards the end, I ended up going to the Dominican Republic. And firsthand, whether you believe in miracles or not, I believe that I witnessed them when I was in the Dominican. And I think that was the moment, where I was like, “Oh, wait! God actually most likely probably is real,” when I tangibly saw evidence. I needed tangible evidence, and I hadn’t seen it yet. And I saw it. I saw a miracle performed in front of my face. And that’s for somebody who prides themself on basing all of their thoughts on tangible evidence, I had to take that into consideration.

So I’m just curious, what kind of miracle did you see that caused, again, for you to consider that possibly God is real?

Again, whether you believe or not, this is like a personal experience of mine. I saw a woman in a church. She had a really horribly bad gash on her foot, and it was infected, and it was deep, and it was ugly, and she couldn’t walk, and she was going to have to get it amputated because it was climbing up her leg. It was very bad. And a good friend of mine, he was kind of like the glue for me, I think. When I had the most doubts, he sat with me. Even if he didn’t understand my thinking, he just let me talk. And he prayed with me even when I really didn’t want to or when I didn’t know how to pray. He really kind of guided me through the six months, even though it was really hard. And he had said, “Hey, I want you to see something. Let’s go pray for this woman.” And I was like, “Oh, well, I don’t really know what we can do for her. She should go see a doctor, but let’s go pray for her.” And I think it took maybe 5, 10 minutes. And I watched her stand up and walk, and I watched the gash close.

Oh, my! That would be very unsettling in a good, surprising way. Unsettling, though.

It was unsettling, because she went from having to hop her way in and sit down and not be able to even stand on her leg to jumping around, dancing, walking, and it was completely fine. And again, whether you believe in miracles or not, to me that’s evidence. That’s evidence right in front of my face.

And it happened immediately, after the prayer?

Yeah. It took a couple times, and this miracle healing, I saw a couple more of them when I was in the Dominican, and that was the evidence I needed and that I was asking for from numerous other types of faith, but especially from God. When I had first circled back to God, I was like, “I need tangible evidence, because if not, I don’t think this is something I could believe in.”

Wow. So you weren’t convinced of the truth of God so much as the reality of God. It wasn’t through a rational argument. It was through an experience of watching the miraculous.

Yeah.

So, in some ways, I guess, what the YWAM people were telling you is, “Just believe. Look at the miracles. Look at what’s happening. Don’t look at the intellectual arguments and evidences.” But like you say, that is a kind of evidence, what you witnessed with your own eyes. So take us from there. You were trying to make sense of what you were seeing. You were admitting the possibility of God. Where did you go with that?

Well, now that I had tangible evidence, I was like, “Okay, now I have the belief, but now I need a reason piece.” Like I need some sort of logical reason to believe in God other than He performs miracles. That was hard for me, and I think that was the first step. I walked away from that experience with that initial belief, being like, “Okay. Nobody else can do this. This is obviously God.”

So I ended up going back home and then going back to Kona to be involved in a program that was more intellectually based. And so it was studying the Bible for three months, studying classic worldview for three, and then studying apologetics for three. So I guess you could say that’s kind of where I got my attention kind of piqued, because, reading the Bible, I’d never read the Bible all the way through. I read it all the way through at least twice, maybe almost three times, in that first three months. And I started to understand the character of God, and I started to ask questions. And there was a teacher at this school who was… he had a degree in biblical studies, and so I asked him questions, and he was able to answer them. Not only did he answer them, the questions that I had since I first came to YWAM, he also told me to keep asking questions. And that was the first time that I heard that encouragement, that curiosity is really important.

Wow! I bet that was refreshing for you, because you hadn’t found, I guess, a community of Christians who were willing to ask the questions or answer the hard questions or to value reason as you did. So I’m sure it was encouraging to you to actually run into someone who’s saying, “Yes, ask the questions,” that there are actually answers for these.

Yeah, and he also said, “Keep asking questions, because if I can’t answer them, eventually there will be answers, because God will answer those questions for you.” And that kind of changed my whole opinion on Christianity, because originally the thought was, “Oh, it’s just belief. There’s no intellectualism because they don’t like people who think intellectually.” But this teacher, he changed that whole thought and got me kind of back to where I was, but in a different way. So now I was asking questions and doing research, but now I was doing it in the direction of Christianity. So I was writing down questions and looking them up and reading the Bible and trying to find these answers because they were so important to me, because I needed these questions and answers to explain why I believed. And I really think I owe my current belief to this teacher and his wife, who actually is an apologist. And she started pushing me towards apologetics.

So now I was answering the hard questions, and I was asking them, and I was understanding where God stands in all of that. And so I went from this, “Oh, well, I guess God exists because He can do tangible things. That’s really cool.” And then coming back to be like, “Oh, well, there’s now a reason to believe in God. God is actually intellectually true,” when I thought about it. And I think that was kind of… yeah.

Yeah. So just for clarification, subjectively there is truth that we decide in ourselves, but objective truth is that there’s truth outside of us, whether we believe it or not, something is true or not true. So when you’re saying, you were believing in God and you were choosing to believe in God, there is, in a sense, a subjective component to it, that there is a willingness there to see what you perhaps weren’t able to see or didn’t want to see before.

But yet you’re telling me that there is an objective reason to believe that God is true and real and the things that you were learning with regard to truth and reality and Christian belief are, in a sense, objective, that they are objectively true and rational and reasonable, and that there is a worldview there that seems to match with your intuitions and with reality. It’s not just faith that you want to be true.

Yeah. I think it’s your choice. Your belief is your choice, but with that belief, you need to have a personal reason. The question is, “Why are you a Christian? Why are you a blank? Why do you believe?” And if you were to ask me that question, I would say because I believe there’s tangible scientific evidence for God when compared to the classically naturalistic theories that we have that explain the Earth. If I were to weigh them against each other, I would say that the creation story makes way more sense when you look at the specifics. It makes more sense when you look at science.

I don’t like the separation between science and God because I think they go together. I think science, logic, and God actually do cohere. And I think it took first a choice to say, “Okay, well, if truth is subjective maybe I do choose to try to find a different truth.” And then you come to what is actually true, which there is one objective truth. Whether you believe that or not, there is one. You just have to choose to find it first.

Because you had become open, you had chosen to really see the evidence for what it was, it came to a place where it actually was rational and reasonable, and like you say, all the pieces came together. It made more sense, even scientifically, which is a far path from where you were in your high school days, when you thought that science and God were incompatible, or at least belief in them were incompatible. But you were able to see actually the reality of God helps us make more sense, even rationally, of the world around us and how we make sense of ourselves. So it sounds like that, through your study, you were able to make sense of things intellectually, rationally, that the worldview seemed to come together in a way that made sense for you and what you had observed, even in the miraculous events in the Dominican Republic. Did the pieces start falling together for you as you were willing to pursue the evidence and the logic and the rationality of Christianity?

Yeah. It’s hard to describe in words the exact process that happened for me, but I started to realize there’s not a separation in what I believe and what I think intellectually. And so I was able to start taking the things that I thought and putting it towards my belief. And I think when I got rid of that separation, that’s when I begin to really believe in this cohesion together, that it’s not just feelings and thoughts separate, but they’re together. And when you put them together, you can make sense of it so much more. And I think I had this separation and so, again, it’s kind of hard to put into words, but I began to take what I knew and apply it towards a Christian worldview and a belief in God and kind of merge them together, and they made more sense together than they did apart for me personally. And so that’s when, as you say, the pieces fell together, and that’s kind of when I really called myself a Christian, when I could actually believe, know why I believe, and had a reason to believe in God.

So you had confidence that what you were believing in was true and for good reason. That’s what you had been looking for all along, I suppose.

It wasn’t worth believing in something that wasn’t true, so I wanted to make sure something was true before I believed it, essentially.

Right, right. Wow! It sounds like you have a very confident belief now and you’re pursuing more in terms of your study of the Christian worldview because you obviously have not only believed it intellectually, but I presume personally as well. Truth is also a person, right? And Christianity is intellectual belief and assent to certain things that are true about reality and history and about the person of Christ, but it’s also knowing the person of Christ, right? And the Christian story really of putting our trust in Him. So I imagine that was part of your conversion as well?

Yeah. That was. Yes.

Yeah. That’s beautiful. Malia, you know what? I really appreciate your honesty and your struggle. It seems like you were alone for a lot of your life in terms of not only just believing as an atheist and coming to that conclusion, but also in your path towards God. It wasn’t as if you were surrounded by a lot of people who were able to answer questions, who were able to come alongside and deal with not only your intellectual angst and your cognitive dissonance, but eventually, eventually you found your way. I think there’s something to say about perseverance, intellectual longing, and curiosity to make sense of your life and the world around you. And you weren’t willing to give up on that.

I commend you for following that, even though it was a very difficult path for you at times, and even though you put yourself in very uncomfortable situations, even with a group of Christians who didn’t believe the way that you did, that you were willing to go to an unknown location in the world and to really figure out this question. And there’s no bigger question than the question of God.

Yeah. I would say that, for me, it was important for me to do it alone. And I did have people. Whenever I needed it, somebody came into my life to kind of prompt me to go a way. But I really think, for me, it was a personal understanding I had to come to without falling into what other people believed, without falling into the norm. I think that’s why I was put in such uncomfortable situations, to essentially be isolated even in a huge group of people, because I think that’s what I needed, and I think it was worth it. And I think I did find what I needed because of it, because I was kind of forced to be by myself with my thoughts.

If there is someone who’s curious, he’s skeptical or she is skeptical, and they’re thinking, “Well, I don’t know. I wish I knew what was true,” that they may be in that place where you were, in kind of a conundrum of trying to figure out what life is about, where to find truth. How do I know it? How would you commend the skeptic? What next step would you encourage them to take? I know Bible reading was part of it for you, but that was a little bit later in your journey. You were willing to read the atheists, but you were willing to sit down and read the Bible. You were trying to engage questions with Christians. How would you encourage someone?

First of all, I want to say it’s not about age. I think people think there’s a certain understanding that comes later in life or earlier in life. I’m really young, but I came to that understanding, and I’ve seen older people come to that understanding. I’ve seen teenagers come to an understanding of God and belief. And I think the first thing I would say for a skeptic is just be willing to ask questions. I think questions are always the first knock on the door. I think when you ask a question, you’re begging curiosity and allowing yourself to follow those questions, So to find answers, to consider all the possibilities. I’m not going to say you have to read the

Bible first to do all this, but if you have a question, ask the question and see where it leads you, because it might lead you down a route that you never thought you’d be down, but a route that gives you more satisfaction than the one you were down before.

I think asking questions is critical, really. And I appreciate that for you. And I do also appreciate the fact that, you’re right, anyone of any age, as long as they’re willing to ask questions and pursue truth, it can be brought to them, or they can find it, basically. They can discover what’s real and true. And if you could think back in your young life, perhaps of the Christians who impacted you on your journey along the way, like you say, God sent someone in your life here and there when you kind of needed it, what would you say to the Christian who wants to engage with those who don’t believe?

Something that I’m very firm in my belief about is that every Christian should be asking questions and not in a way that leads to…. Questions are healthy. Not every question leads to doubt, but it just leads you to strengthen your belief. And I would say for Christians trying to engage with nonbelievers is encouraging questions from people who don’t believe, willing to have conversations where they sit, and all you do is ask questions. I mean, that’s the biggest part of apologetics, what I’m studying, is just asking questions and prompting somebody to ask a question that leads them down a path that is going to lead them to an answer that they essentially need. And so I think just learning to kind of defend with questions, but not offensively. I think there’s something to trying to understand a nonbeliever. Rather than telling a nonbeliever they’re wrong and that they need to read the Bible, that they need to go to church, ask the nonbeliever questions like, “Oh, well, why don’t you believe?” “Oh, well, if truth isn’t a God, what is truth then?” Like, “What do you think?” Asking very prompting questions, really I think ultimately that is a better approach to helping people believe than trying to really hammer in the idea that Jesus died for you and that you have to read the Bible. Because that comes next, but you have to let somebody go down the curiosity and the belief first before they can start nailing down the details, if that made any sense.

Yeah. That absolutely made sense, and again, I come back to thinking about your journey and that you were, I guess, there for a while, perhaps in high school, you were presuming that the atheistic worldview was true and you really weren’t interested in the question of God. But you eventually became interested. For those who aren’t even willing to engage in questions, I mean, how would you have… thinking back again to the time period in your life where you really weren’t interested. How would it have affected you if a Christian would have tried to engage you in conversation at that point? In question asking?

The thing is, I was always asking questions. Whether I believed it or not, “What is truth?” was a question in the back of my head for a very long time. It just wasn’t candidly an issue until later. And I think at that time, if I would have been asked those questions, yes, I might have gotten a little defensive, but I think it still would have prompted me, because I had a couple of conversations like that that always prompted me to kind of look more into, “Oh, I wonder why they thought that way. I wonder why my thoughts contradict theirs or why theirs contradicts mine.” And I think, if somebody gets offended, it just means that they’re probably

going to think about it, and they’re going to think more about what you said. And so I would say asking a non-offensive question that might offend somebody, I think, does more than it does to try and shove the gospel down somebody’s face and be up front about it. I think I would rather give a question that’s prompting and deep that might offend them, but it means they’ll go look at it later, and they’ll come back to it.

I think that’s really great advice, Malia. As we’re wrapping up here, is there anything that you think that we’ve missed in your story or in what you’re advising us? Is there anything else you want to say?

I just think the last thing I’ll say is curiosity is important, and I think that’s the whole point, that I would say my journey is curiosity is important, and guided by the right things, it leads to a place where I’m very firm in my belief in God, and I have a reason for it. If it wasn’t for curiosity and somebody asking me questions or letting me ask questions, I don’t think I’d be where I am. And so, if anything, I think everybody should learn how to ask good questions. I mean, whether you’re a Christian or not, everybody should learn how to ask good questions, and maybe you’ll be led to an answer that is more true than what you originally thought.

Yeah, that’s true. Curiosity. Like you say, questions for ourselves or questions for others. That’s how we grow, right? Even if we’re challenged in our own beliefs by what we read and what we seek, we’re always wanting to be led towards truth. So that’s a good encouragement for us all, Malia. Thank you so much for coming on and telling your story today. I so appreciate it!

Of course. Again, thank you so much for letting me come on and tell my story.

Wonderful.

Thanks for tuning in to Side B Stories to hear Malia’s story. You can find out more about some of the books she read that led her towards a solid belief in God and Christianity, as well as where she is studying apologetics, in our episode notes. For questions and feedback about this episode, you can contact me through our website at www.sidebstories.com or again directly through our email address at [email protected]. Again, if you are a skeptic or atheist and you would like to connect with a former atheist with your questions, please contact us at our Side B Stories website or email address, and we will get you connected. I hope you enjoyed this episode with Malia and that you will follow, rate, review, and share this podcast with your friends and social network. In the meantime, I’ll be looking forward to seeing you next time, where we’ll see how another skeptic flips the record of their life.

Former atheist Ben Clifton thought religious belief was for the weak-minded, for those who didn’t believe in science.  His caricatures of Christianity began to break down as he encountered authentic, intelligent Christians who challenged him to consider the reality of God.

Ben’s Resources:

• www.apologeticsonmission.org

Resources recommended by Roger:

• Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis
• Fingerprints of God, Hugh Ross, https://reasons.org
• William Lane Craig, Reasonable Faith, https://www.reasonablefaith.org
• Biola University, Masters in Apologetics program, https://www.biola.edu/degrees/g/christian-apologetics-ma
• Tactics, Greg Koukl

For more stories of atheists and skeptics converting to Christianity, visit www.sidebstories.com

Episode Transcript

 

Hello, and thanks for joining in. I’m Jana Harmon, and you’re listening to Side B Stories, where we see how skeptics flip the record of their lives. Each podcast, we listen to someone who has once been an atheist or skeptic, but who became a Christian against all odds. You can hear more of these stories at our Side B Stories website, located at www.sidebstories.com. We welcome your comments on these stories on our Side B Stories Facebook page as well as you listen.

We all seem to possess a deep intuition about what is really right and wrong. There’s no question about that. When someone cuts in line in front of you, it feels that it’s not fair, that some unspoken rule has been violated, and that someone should do something about it. Why do we feel this way? You may recognize that example as the one given by C.S. Lewis in his book Mere Christianity, pointing out the inherent tension we feel when some commonly known and often unspoken standard is broken. We know that it’s wrong, but we may not be able to say why it’s wrong. We just know that it is. But if you ask the question why, it’s a problem, especially if you don’t believe in God.

Lewis reminds us that we would not be able to call something wrong or crooked without some sort of standard of knowing what is right, without knowing what was straight to begin with. We would not be able to tell that a wall was not level without a plumb line. So it seems that some sort of standard is necessary for us to call something good or bad, right or wrong, straight or crooked, fair or unfair, of what ought or ought not to be. Without such a standard, there’s no way to make a judgment about anything for anyone except for ourselves. Somehow, this deep intuition is an unavoidable pointer to the need for a transcendent standard, for the need for God.

In today’s story, former atheist Ben Clifton did not want to want to believe in God, but he felt backed into a corner by this seeming conundrum, convinced that he would eventually be able to explain our real sense of right and wrong without resorting to some transcendent standard, without believing in God. Was he able to do it? This was one of the pieces and parts of his atheism that began to crumble as he began to take a closer look at the reality of his own worldview, the reality of God, and the truth of Christianity. I hope you’ll come and listen to his story.

Welcome to the Side B Stories podcast, Ben. It’s great to have you with me today.

Great to be here, Jana.

Wonderful. As we’re getting started, so the listeners have an idea of a bit of who you are, can you tell us a little bit about yourself?

Absolutely. So I guess the pertinent thing is that I was an atheist until I was 33 years old, and God performed a miracle in my life and changed my heart and led me on a path of seeking answers for why I should believe this change that happened in me. And so that led me to apologetics. And now I’m here many years later and pretty much full time in apologetics.

Okay. And you have a ministry as well? And what is that?

I do. Yes. It’s called Apologetics on Mission. And in a nutshell, we take apologetics, we take these great resources that we have in the west, and we take it to regions in the world that don’t have much visibility or access to apologetics, and we train up emerging leaders, so that they can equip their communities with great answers for why Christianity is true.

Okay. Wow. Okay, you’ve come a long way on your journey. Yeah. Let’s get started at your childhood, though, because we want to hear the full arc of your story. So take us back to your childhood, your family, where you grew up, whether or not religion or talk of God was any part of that.

Yeah. So I was born in Eugene, Oregon, to parents who were not quite hippies because they were a little bit too old, but they were hippy wannabes. If you know Eugene, Oregon, it was a bastion of everything about the sixties. So they were living there. Both of my parents are teachers, and so we lived in that context until I was seven.

Pardon me. Did your parents believe in God? You said this is kind of the culture of the sixties, which there were a lot of things going on around the sixties.

Absolutely. In short, no. Especially my dad. So my dad was a hardcore English major, and in the sixties, that really embraced a lot of philosophy and had to do with theology. And he was pretty down on the whole Christian story, the whole idea of God the Father sacrificing His Son. It’s the typical God is a child abuser, cosmic child abuser. And so he really didn’t like that story and remains antagonistic against it. My mom, I think, just culturally went to church a bit in her childhood, so she had some influence there, but none of them practiced any kind of religion. If anything, my mom would embrace kind of a new agey, back to Mother Nature, kind of spiritual aspect to her life, but it really didn’t manifest in a way that I saw much of. She was more of a hippie. I guess my dad was pretty well informed religiously, but again rejected particularly the Christian story. If anything, he would embrace a kind of Eastern… he would take a happy Buddha over a suffering Christ any day.

So I take it then, there was no going to church on Sundays or even Christmas or Easter, nothing.

Well, we would culturally celebrate those things, but not in any kind of a religious aspect. I will say—fast forwarding a little bit—later on, again culturally, I did have some exposure, but we’ll get to that in a minute.

Okay. So you said you were about to turn the page when you were seven years old.

Yeah, when we were seven years old, my parents decided, because some of the backdrop is my grandparents on my dad’s side were some of the very first Peace Corps volunteers when Kennedy created that program. And so their first assignment was out in Micronesia. And my grandpa was a retired judge from LA County, and he went out to Micronesia to help the judicial system. At the time, Micronesia was a trust territory of the United States.

So that really intrigued particularly my dad, and so they didn’t join the Peace Corps, but they applied for jobs just as teachers, and they got accepted. And so when I was seven, we moved out to an island called Yap in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, and we were only supposed to be there two years, it ended up being a total of six years, and we lived on progressively smaller islands. We only lived on Yap one year. Then we moved out to what are called the outer islands, and these are little atolls with a population of at most 300 people. We were the only foreigners on the island. And so my childhood from seven to thirteen, right before going into high school, was I was an island boy.

I bet that was an amazing experience in many ways.

It was. In retrospect—and I knew this at the time—it was a boy’s paradise. I like to say that when I came back to The States, I discovered that what oftentimes is…. The kids in the US, in my group, we would pretend to do stuff. In Micronesia, we would do it. So we would build a fort, and then we’d live in it. I literally lived in a fort for the last, like, two and a half years when we were out there. We would go fishing for real out in the ocean and catch real fish. I mean, big blue water fish and go spear fishing and just all that kind of stuff.

What an extraordinary experience! And culturally, I imagine, too. Religiously, was there anything?

Yes. So this is where I did have some exposure to church. Throughout the history of Micronesia, there’s been various influences, but the Catholic Church, they had a strong influence there, and they actually had planted some Catholic churches on the outer islands, and they would have a priest that would come out about once a month. And it was kind of a weird combination of Catholicism and any kind of traditional spirituality that the islands embraced. And again, they would have services Sunday, but when the priest wasn’t there, it would mostly just be singing. And yeah, that was about it that I can remember. That wasn’t like sermons delivered. And even when the sermons were delivered when the priest was there, it was always very, very short. So I don’t know, honestly, and at that age, I really don’t know how many people actually heard the true gospel in that context. But that was my idea of church growing up.

Okay. So you actually attended?

Yeah, we did, because everybody did. I mean, the entire island would just… that’s what you did on Sunday.

Okay. All right. So it was just kind of a ritual, in a sense.

It was a ritual, very much so.

A community ritual.

Yes.

So then you moved back to the States, I guess. Is this when you went to Oregon?

So we moved back to Washington State, and again, my parents were following kind of the no t quite hippy but really back to earth, kind of back to Mother Nature. So we bought some property and ended up building a house, literally with our own hands. We built our house outside of Port Townsend, Washington. And that was a great experience for me because I learned how to do all that stuff. And I think it was formative in setting my path to ultimately engineering,

So you moved to Washington, and you’re still in this very, maybe vaguely spiritual, not religious, home?

That’s right. Yeah, very vaguely spiritual. At this point, there was no religious activity. I would say the closest we got to it is my parents decided to join a community choir. And so, of course, they would do seasonal things, and they would do… they did The Messiah, so they performed The Messiah. And so I got exposed to that. But until I was a Christian, I never made the connection of what The Messiah, the piece of music. I never made the connection between that and the Christian story, which is like, how did I miss that?

Yeah, and I guess I should clarify. It wasn’t a church choir. It was a community choir.

Oh, a community choir.

So it was a secular… but they would perform sacred music like The Messiah. So, again, maybe that’s a little bit of a reflection of the way our home was, is that it was completely secular, but culturally, interweaving is hard to avoid. Maybe today it’s easier to avoid bringing in that cultural aspect of Christianity. But, long story short, I did not understand. I got to tell you this, too. Where does this start? At some point in my walk—this is before I was a Christian. I think it was even in Micronesia—my mom had a cassette recording of Jesus Christ Superstar. And so it was a big thing to have one of those little cassette recorder things back there, so one of the few things that I was able to play was Jesus Christ Superstar. So I kind of put that together with the Catholic Church island service and listening to this, so a lot of my understanding of… my false understanding of what Christianity was, was that mishmash of Jesus Christ Superstar and island church, and my dad thinks the Christian God is a moral monster, blah, blah, blah. So that was the mix that I was in.

Yeah, that’s quite a mix.

Yeah. Ultimately, so as I progressed through high school, it became clear that what I wanted to pursue as a career was engineering, and a lot of that was because I got very fascinated with science and technology, and I liked the image of myself as being this kind of techie science geek kind of guy. So that’s what I ended up pursuing.

And during that time, I’m sure the messages for you were a little bit confusing, especially if you have a father who has this antipathy towards Christianity but yet singing sacred songs. What was your idea of what Christianity was? Was it something simply social? Did you have any contempt? Did you carry any of that from your father? Or was it just something that was there?

Yeah. I wouldn’t say I carried contempt. Maybe part of what I wanted to be is very tolerant, so I wanted to be like this techie…. So in retrospect, it was a lot of arrogance. So it was like, “Oh, well, I’ll tolerate these backward thinking people, but I know the truth.” But it’s like, “I want to be a nice guy, and I want to be very accommodating. And that’s wonderful for you. I’m so glad.” But honestly, Jana. I had no idea. You can live a long time of your life, even in the United States, and have no idea really what the Christian story is really about. You get a lot of cues from culture, like I said, Jesus Christ Superstar. You see Christmas movies or whatever, Charlie Brown Christmas. So you get all this kind of influence. But if you don’t go to a good church and if you don’t go frequently and hear it over and over again and start putting the truth together, you can come away with really ignorant views of what the Christian story and Christian truth is really all about. And that’s honestly where I was. What I was dismissing was not true Christianity because I had no idea what that was.

So there were no what you would consider to be authentic Christians or references to Christianity in your world growing up?

No. And if there was somebody who was Christian, in the circles, because of my parents, they would have been most likely very liberal, borderline, not even know if they would really be Christian. So if there were any of those that I can’t remember, that’s the flavor I would have gotten.

Yeah. So it just wasn’t on your radar at all growing up and through high school.

It wasn’t.

So you said you became interested in engineering, and I suppose you went on to college from here.

I did. So I went to Washington State University and went through a four-year program there, which was great. I loved it. And came out of that and got a job in central Oregon right out of college, and couple of years later met my my future wife. So that’s where my story takes another turn.

So at this point, after college, did you even identify yourself in any way, like, “I’m agnostic,” “I’m atheistic.” Did you…?

Yeah. I started thinking about spirituality things, and I got enamored a little bit with some bizarre stuff, like, I don’t know if you remember Carlos Castaneda. I think it is, A Separate Reality?

No.

Okay. Well, for a time, he was a popular author, and his thing was kind of ancient Aztec or something, and it involved taking peyote, which is a hallucinogenic drug. And so it’s a very Native American kind of religion. And so this guy wrote a bunch of books about his experiences. It turns out later they were all fiction, but it was presented as nonfiction. And I kind of got enamored with that idea. Not that I was a drug taker or anything like that, but that idea of spirituality kind of intrigued me. Again, it was very like Southwest Native American kind of indigenous religion. That was about as close as I got.

So you were not totally dismissive of the possibility of something spiritual in nature in terms of reality?

Yeah. I wasn’t totally dismissive of the possibility, but I definitely thought that the Christian story, what I understood of it, especially as it intersected with science, I thought was totally bunk and did not jive with reality. So, on that basis, the whole thing must be false.

Okay.

And I think I probably just, osmosis wise, absorbed some of my dad’s attitude towards it and thought that it belonged in the realm of backwards thinking, and I didn’t want to be in that camp. I wanted to be in the modern, science has truth, and that’s where I wanted to be. And before I leave college entirely, there was an experience there that impacted me only years later. So one of my good classmates became a Christian during his college experience.

And his story involves a lot of struggle, so he struggled through college but turned to Christ for comfort during those times. And so he invited me to his baptism, and so I went, and I got to witness his baptism. And again, I had that attitude of, “I’m a really tolerant, understanding person, so you do your thing, Carey, and I’m applauding what you’re doing. I’m happy for  you. I know it’s not true, but I’m happy for you anyway.” So, Carey, when we graduated and parted ways, he gave me a Bible, and he wrote a little inscription in it, and it was fairly simple. He said, “I pray that someday you will encounter Christ in the same way that I have, and I’ve found that Jesus has been the thing that has sustained me and given me purpose and meaning in life, and that’s my prayer for you.” So I squirreled that away, and every well informed person on their bookshelf should have a Bible, right? So that was my Bible.

Okay, so now I’m a couple of years out of college, and I meet this wonderful lady that was to become my wife. And so I discovered fairly soon that she was a Christian. At the time, she wasn’t really walking in the Christian life, but she was definitely a committed… I mean, she was a believer. And I thought, “Well, this is kind of awkward, but I really like her. And it should be no problem to free her from these archaic ideas once we spend some time together. We’ll have the conversation, and I’ll straighten her out, she’ll abandon those ideas, and then things will be fine.”

Right.

Well, that didn’t quite go that way, and she held pretty strong to her faith, and in fact, she was pretty conflicted with the way we were with our relationship and her relationship with Christ. But we were in love, and she really felt like I was the guy. So she made some fairly timid attempts. She gave me a couple of books. One was Mere Christianity, and the other one was a book called A Severe Mercy. And I don’t know if you… it’s not a super common book, but it’s the story of a couple who go through a lot of grief, and C.S. Lewis happens to walk them through that and was very influential. So I got to say, this is probably something you hear a lot, but Mere Christianity, I actually read it, and as Greg Koukl likes to say, boy, did that book put a stone in my shoe that I didn’t want. So his argument from the reality of morals, so his version of the moral argument totally painted me into a corner that I didn’t know how to escape. As I’m reading, so I can remember reading he predicted all of my, “Yeah, buts,” and got to the end, and I ran out of, “Yeah, buts,” and he nailed every one of them. And I was like, “Ooh, I’m going to put this book away.”

Right, right.

So, anyway-

Ben, for those who are listening here who are not familiar with Mere Christianity or the moral argument that C.S. Lewis makes, can you give us an abbreviated version?

Yeah. Sure. So Mere Christianity is by C.S. Lewis. Aside from his fiction, it’s probably the most well known of his writings, and it’s been influential to so many people like myself, because it’s basically arguments for the existence of God, arguments for Christianity kind of distilled to the most basic elements. But one of the key arguments that he gives, and it’s a very powerful argument, is the reality that there are these things called morals. There are these things that are truly right and truly wrong. They’re moral duties or moral values. They’re obligations, and we know it, and we can’t escape their reality. So the question is how do we explain the existence of these moral duties and values? And when you think deeply about it, it is a compelling argument that there must be an authority, there must be a source that grounds, that provides the foundation to make those moral realities true. They are objectively true. And so that, of course, points to a moral law giver, which points to an aspect of Who we call God.

So there’s many formulations of that. William Lane Craig does a great job. He always incorporates the moral argument in his list of arguments for God’s existence. But the way C.S. Lewis formulates it, and I probably couldn’t recite it again, but the way he presents it is just wonderful, because, like I say, it predicts everybody’s objection, like myself as an atheist, and answers it before you raise it, and lands you. My best description is like, I’m going along and then I look and I’m painted into a corner. He’s trapped me, and there’s no place I can turn.

So how did that make you feel, when you felt like you were trapped in a corner? It’s hard to dismiss the moral argument there.

Yeah. It made me feel like, “Ooh, this is uncomfortable because it’s rocking my worldview.” And whenever our worldview is challenged, that makes us feel uncomfortable. But I had faith that I’d figure it out. It’s kind of like one of those puzzles, like, “Oh, that seems like a contradiction, but it’s really a paradox, and I’ll figure it out. I’ll solve this someday. But today is not the day,” so I kind of just ignored it. But again, that’s why I love the description of it’s a stone in your shoe, and you feel it whenever the topic comes up. So whenever the topic of anything spiritual came up to me, it’s like, “Oh! I feel that stone.” My attention was just drawn directly to that argument, and it kept bugging me that I still haven’t solved this problem, and someday I’ve got to solve it.

So she was allowing you some space to read and to process and not to push, I presume, but you were open or willing in some regard to actually receive and like you say, process the information, with the confidence that you would defeat it in some way. But that wasn’t-

Yeah. Interestingly, my reaction was, not to her, but to myself, to go on the defensive. So I started reading more and more to affirm my atheistic worldview. I wanted to know all about evolution, and I wanted to understand better maybe what the Christian perspective was, so I could go and defeat their arguments.

Right.

So I was kind of like…. This was all for my own personal comfort because I didn’t like that C.S. Lewis argument, so I was going all around, trying to fortify my own worldview against that, with the hopes that at some point I’d land on the perfect counterargument that would free me from C.S. Lewis’s argument. So that was all happening. And then we had kids… We got married, we had kids.

And then my wife suffers from clinical depression, which thankfully, she’s pretty much been cured of.

Wonderful.

But for many years she went through some tough times, So she started going to church, and to make her happy, I would come with her. So I would accompany her and went fairly faithfully to a medium-sized church. And what I discovered there is that, number one, the senior pastor there was like super people person, very loving. His people ness just infused the whole congregation. So they were very loving and receptive of me. They knew that I wasn’t a believer, but they still… I mean, they didn’t care. I mean, they did care, but it wasn’t like, “Oh, well, come back when you have cleaned up your act.” It was very welcoming.

And the teaching pastor, and then the subsequent pastor after that, these were actually—it sounds terrible now, but they were pretty smart men, and they rocked my… I had had the intelligence of C.S. Lewis, but I hadn’t intentionally known people who were in leadership and were expressing intellectually really challenging stuff. And I was like, “Wow, these guys are like my professors at university!” And I didn’t know Christians were like that. And so it started changing my attitude a little bit, like, “Okay, well, they’re not all idiots. These guys seem pretty smart.” And of course I got the gospel message preached all the time.

So I sat there with my wife for like four years, I think, and it was a Foursquare church. And part of their tradition is, at the end of every service, pretty much, they would have an invitation to receive Christ. And I would always kind of have an attitude of I’d peek a little bit to see who raised their hand. If somebody did raise their hand, I’d have an attitude internally of like, “Well, there goes another sucker.” And I know it’s terrible. Now that I think about it, I was really terrible. I was such a nice guy, but inside, ooh, I had a really nasty attitude that I’m embarrassed about. Well, so one Sunday morning, there I am sitting in church, and there’s the altar call, and it’s not an audible voice from God, but it’s an understanding in my soul that God is saying, “Hey, Ben. This is your day. You got to decide. I am talking to you.” And I’m sitting there feeling like… I just felt this weight of, “Today is your day of decision.” And so I raised my hand, and it was like, “What? Whose hand is that? Is that really connected to my body?”

Right, right.

And people around me were kind of surprised, too. It was like, “Whoa! Did Ben raise his hand?” So anyway, a very nice gentleman came and prayed with me, and that was my transformation.

Wow! Okay, so just backing up for a moment here, because the last I knew, you were trying to disprove Christianity by reading atheistic books, but yet you’re sitting in this service for four years, and I guess by osmosis, and I’m sure you were listening and thinking. Were you being intellectually convinced of Christianity at all through this period? Or no?

You know, Jana. Yeah. I wish I could say that, yeah, some great apologist came and gave me all these arguments, and I finally put it all together and, like, ding, I figured it out, and then I made this decision, and it was a very rational decision. I’m an apologist. That’s kind of the story I like. It wasn’t that way for me. And theologically, the reality of it is that God took my heart of stone and gave me a heart of flesh just sitting there. And I can’t explain how it all happened, but that experience was the thing that then my soul cried out for God, and my hand was raised because of that. And so my journey from then on was trying to make that connection between what I knew happened in my heart and the intellectual basis for that.

Absolutely. And you had mentioned the word gospel earlier, and just because something isn’t a syllogism, a rational truth, doesn’t mean that there’s not truth in the gospel, which at its basis talks about who God is, who we are, and how we can reconcile with God. You’re an apologist on a mission, and I just wondered if for a moment, if someone has not heard the gospel, could you just tell them maybe what you had heard over those past four years that also helped persuade you that this is true, that God is real?

So the intellectual assent to the truth of Christianity came afterwards. And I know that there are people for whom their experience has been different. It’s like they’ve really had somebody work with them on the intellectual side for a long time, and then that is the mode that the Holy Spirit works in that person’s life. For me, it was kind of the reverse. And I should add, too, that, in retrospect, I do believe that the challenges that my wife faced with depression often put me in a position of helplessness. One of the experiences of people who are caring for people who are suffering from depression is helplessness. There’s nothing you can do. As an engineer, I’m like, “Okay, what’s the problem? Let’s design a solution. Let’s fix this thing,”  right? And I can’t. There’s no way. And so I think, again in retrospect, that put in me a realization of, like, there are some things that I am helpless against. And the way people are built is that, through that, we cry out to God. And so my soul was crying out to God even if my head wasn’t letting that happen, because I was like, “Intellectually, that’s crazy. Don’t do that. Don’t give in!” I think.

And so yeah. Back to your question, the gospel. So the gospel is actually really simple. It’s the most complex thing in the world, but it’s also the most simple. And that is simply that we as human beings are helpless to really do what we’re called to do, what we’re supposed to do. And we feel the weight of the guilt of our failures, and we try to make that up by doing this and that good thing to try and atone for the things that we’ve done that are wrong. And we can never do it. We can never get there. We can never earn our way back from the things that we’ve done. And so we’re hopeless. In ourselves, we’re hopeless. But the good news, the gospel, is that, unlike us, Jesus is God. He came in the flesh. He became a human being, and He, unlike us, did live a perfect life, and He took what we deserved. That is death, eternal death. And He made a great trade. He said, “I will trade My perfection for your imperfection. All you have to do is say yes, and I’m going to go to the cross. I’m going to die on your behalf. I’m going to take the penalty that is really supposed to be yours, and I’m going to take it on Myself. I’m going to give Myself up for you, Ben, for you, Jana, for anybody who places their faith in this reality,” and it’s free. It’s a gift. You don’t have to do anything. In fact, that’s the whole point. You can’t do anything. The only thing you can do is say, “Yep, I can’t do it. And Jesus, You did.” And my goodness, it’s like it’s the best deal ever. Why would anybody say no to that? And the reason we say no to it is because we want to be in control. We want to say, “Actually, I am good enough. I can do this.” And that’s pride, and that’s the root of all sin. But the good news is that Jesus took on what we couldn’t take on and gives us eternal life, which is just unbelievable. It starts here, but goes on for eternity.

Right. You know, it’s funny, your story is reminding me a little bit of, is it Carey? Is that the name of your college friend?

Yes.

Who went in a moment of felt need and found the Person of Christ and the sustainability of Christ. But for you it seems like that, in a way, is a parallel kind of action of feeling hopeless and helpless and yet finding Christ. Now, at the time that you left, and he gave you a Bible, did you ever, through that four-year journey, were you curious enough to open the Bible and read it for yourself?

Okay, so there’s a good story with this whole thing. So my wife did. So my wife would say, “Hey, this is your Bible! Hey, wow! Who’s Carey?” And so there was some conversation around that, and my wife Joey said, “You know, you should read this, maybe.” “Someday. Yeah, it’s on my shelf. I’ll get to it someday.” Anyway, so years after I became a Christian, I ended up, thanks to Facebook I think, thanks to Facebook. It has some redeeming qualities. I I found my friend Carey, and this was probably maybe 15, maybe 20 years after college. I connected with him and I said, “Hey, Carey, you won’t believe this. I’m a Christian now.” And so that little prayer, I sent him a picture of the little prayer. He said, “Well, God answered that prayer.”

And I still have that Bible.

That’s wonderful. And I’m sure you read it now.

I do.

So then you became a Christian, and you accepted Christ. And then you say, in order of events, which is true for many of us, is that you come to find that it’s not just an uninformed belief, but that it actually becomes a worldview that is the best explanation for reality, as compared to other world views, when you actually start looking at it. But why did you and how did you pursue this intellectual aspect of your faith? And how is it that… I’m hearing skeptics saying, “You know, you just believed it, so you wanted it to be true, and then you found arguments to sustain your your so-called faith.” How would you respond to someone like that? 

Well, so again, my experience was a transformation of my heart, my soul, and then it was truly faith seeking understanding. And I didn’t know really what any of this looked like. So I said, “Well, I’m going to go into a Christian bookstore, now that I’m a Christian. I’m going to start learning about this thing,” and some of my biggest intellectual hangups remained in the area of the sciences. Like, how do I integrate this understanding I have of the universe and Big Bang and evolution and all this stuff with what I’ve just embraced?

So I went to this local bookstore, and there on the bottom shelf, there was a book that, in retrospect probably shouldn’t have been in that bookstore. And it was called The Fingerprint of God, which is by Hugh Ross from an organization called Reasons to Believe. And so I open this book, and I start reading it, and it’s like, “Wow, this is by, oh, an astrophysicist? Wow!” At the time, he was still, I think, a practicing astrophysicist. He’s got a PhD. And I started reading about cosmology, and I go, “What’s this doing in a Christian bookstore? And how is this related to Christ?” So I started reading it. It turns out I had a business trip to Asia. It was like a two week long business trip. So you got a long flight. So I get this book, and I know God providentially put that copy of that book there in that bookstore for me. And so there’s another miracle. So I’m reading this book on the plane, and I’m just like, every page, my jaw is dropping. And I’m like, “Oh, my gosh! He’s addressing all the issues that I had,” and not only addressing them, but now taking all of the stuff that I had used to disprove Christianity. He’s turning it around on my face and he’s saying, “Oh, this actually points to God.” And I’m like, you’ve got to be kidding, right? And I’m just loving this stuff. It was the very, very early days of the internet, and they just had got their website. So through that, that was the first crack in the door of discovering the life of the mind as a Christian, but particularly apologetics. I didn’t know what apologetics was.

So once that happened, and I started becoming aware that there’s this entire world of not only good answers to the challenges that Christianity is confronted with, but there’s this immense domain of intellectual pursuit of this Christian worldview. And so I started taking classes at a little Bible college that were part of our church. Again, it just happened that Bible college started up right when I became a Christian. The timing was such that I could go and take the 8:00 in the morning class before I got to work. And my first class was a survey of the Old Testament which started with Genesis. And so I’m reading Hugh Ross and reading Genesis and in this class, so I got super stoked to discover that this is an amazing area of the life of the mind and applying so much of my previous life, my previous objections, but now seeing it in a completely different light. And so that sent me off on a trajectory of apologetics. I started with science apologetics. I became an RTB apologist. I took their little course. I still have the cassette tapes from that. And joined with the team, ended up being the chapter leader here.

So now I’m going to fast forward up to the present. And I continued to take classes at Canby Bible College, had opportunities beyond my qualifications to speak, to debate, to engage at a ministry level, so in 2008 I had the opportunity to fulfill what was a growing dream, which was to go to Biola and get my Masters in Apologetics. So I did that. It took me about three and a half years. Awesome experience. Anybody listening, if you have the opportunity to go to Biola through that program, it’s really life changing. So I graduated from that in 2012 and all this time I’m working as an engineer, doing startup businesses and having a great time doing that as well, but growing in my faith and equipping myself with apologetics.

Then, in 2015, my wife and I decided it was a time for a change of churches, and we joined this little startup church called Missio Dei that turned out to be… had been birthed out of a ministry called Eternal Impact. So I started getting engaged with Eternal Impact. Turns out that Eternal Impact would take small missionary teams to East Africa. So after I was engaged with them for a while, I said, “I better go on one of these to see what it’s like.” So I go, had no idea, no thought at all about apologetics being connected to that, and the ministry is not an apologetics ministry, is more of a leadership development ministry. So I go there, and I share my testimony out in the middle of “nowhere” in western Uganda. Part of it is a little bit of what I’ve said about my conversion story and how apologetics really played a role. And after the service, after my testimony, this young lady comes up to me and said, “Hey, Ben, what you were talking about apologetics and especially your degree, I’m really interested in that. Someday I would like to pursue such a program. Right now I’m kind of busy. I’m completing my PhD in molecular biology, but later I would like to pursue a degree like yours.” And I’m going, “What?”

This is bad, but that was my reaction. It’s like, “How are you getting a PhD in molecular biology out here in the middle of nowhere?” It turns out that she actually was, and her name is Monica. She features prominently where I was awakened to like, “Oh, my gosh! These people, they might be interested in apologetics, too.” And so then, from her prompting, we got some students together. We talked a bit, and it’s like, yeah, they were all for it. I said, “Wow, this is cool! I wonder what’s going on.” So, long story short, I went back the next year and did a series of four apologetics conferences in Rwanda and Uganda, in different parts of Uganda, in churches and on campuses, and I was like, “Oh, my gosh! This is awesome! I got to do this more.”

So then I went back in 2019. This time I got to partner with Greg Koukl, so he and I went to the very place, western Uganda, and they got to hear the Colombo Tactic from Greg Koukl and a little bit of a translation, cultural context translation, because they don’t know who Columbo is. But anyway, that was great. COVID hit. It gave me the opportunity to…. By the way, I had moved from student at Canby Bible College to professor, so I was teaching apologetics there now and honing my skills there. One of the things they let me do was to include about ten Ugandan students, by Skype at the time, into our apologetics class. So that was great. Then 2021, I went back, did more work, and at the end of 2021, Eternal Impact, the ministry that I was involved with, said, “You know what? We’re going to commission you. You’re going to start a ministry dedicated to taking apologetics on mission to places where it doesn’t exist hardly at all.”

So that was the formation. We started as Adventurous Apologetics. After about six months, we discovered, boy, we really need to be Apologetics on Mission. So that’s who we are now. We’re a small, growing ministry with way more opportunities than we can possibly deal with. So we’ve already taken a total of four missionary trips, both to Africa and Latin America. We’re going to be going to Brazil here at the end of this month, and that looks really exciting.

We’re going to be going back to east Africa in May and hoping to start some activity in west Africa, primarily in Nigeria, in the latter part of this year.

Wow.

So that’s what we’re doing.

That’s fantastic. And we will put a link to your ministry and any contact information you might have. We’ll include those all in the episode notes.

Great.

Yeah. So thank you for sharing that. That’s very exciting, very, very exciting. As we’re closing, Ben, thinking about yourself in younger years, when you were agnostic, atheistic, not believing that Christianity was true. Now you’re one of its biggest advocates. What would you say to your younger self? Or to perhaps a skeptic who is curious enough to maybe open Mere Christianity, like you were willing, or something. How would you commend someone who is willing to take a closer look at God?

Yeah. Well, I guess the first thing I would say is don’t be overly confident that you understand the Christian story, because if you’re not a believer, you probably don’t really understand it very well. So work on that. It’s a different era that we live in now because there are so many resources that you can access, good resources. So I would say listen to, A, what the Christian story is, B, listen to I mean spend 20 minutes listening to, say, William Lane Craig in one of his debates. His twenty minute preamble. He’ll give you five super solid arguments for the existence of the Christian God right there. Spend 20 minutes. As my younger self, I had no exposure to that. I had no idea, and in retrospect, I had no idea what I was saying no to. And so that would be my advice, is like, get off your high horse. Don’t think you understand this idea, and make sure you understand what it is you’re saying no to first. And there’s no excuse for not doing that, because there’s great resources. Listen to the stories of other atheists. Listen to Side B, listen to Jana’s other interviews of similar stories, and you’ll hear probably a real consistent theme there.

So know what you’re saying no to, and then just trust from many voices that the Christian worldview is the most intellectually robust worldview out there, bar none. And so if you’re like me and you like engineering, you like things that all fit together, then go for Christianity. And you’ll find, compared to any other worldview, especially atheism—atheism is the most—at root, it is the most incoherent worldview out there.

I take that as almost a challenge for someone who might listen to that statement and look at things more closely and scrutinize-

All the atheist has to do is say that Christianity is bad. And boom. I mean, when you dig into that, it’s like, “Well, what is bad?”

Yeah.

And again, you’re right into C.S. Lewis’s moral argument.

Right.

And you’ll find yourself, if you actually embrace intellectual, be honest about it, you’ll find yourself in the same corner that I was painted into however many years ago.

Nice. Full circle. Nice. So when I’m thinking about your story, Ben, and I think about the Christians who influenced you or in some way or another, beginning with Carey and then, of course, your wife, who you said was solid and did not compromise despite her relationship and her love for you. She didn’t just compromise on her faith. Or when you went to the church, you found embodied Christians who were intellectual and could communicate ideas in a robust way that was so surprising to you. And I think of the church, too, that was so loving and welcoming to you and did not put you off even before they gave you a chance to even hear what the gospel was. How would you commend the Christians who are listening to engage others for the sake of Christ?

Well, yeah, of course I’m biased, but my one complaint is that, in general, I wish our churches embraced apologetics more. And that put it, you know, put it in my face. Why wasn’t there somebody at the church that I was sitting at for four years saying, “Hey, do you have doubts about Christianity? We have a blah, blah, blah program. Come and we’ll answer all your questions.” I discover in the developing world there is a lack of awareness and lack of accessibility of apologetic stuff. But I’ve got to say, even here, there’s no lack of accessibility. It’s everywhere. But the awareness, particularly within the church, is not nearly where it should be, in my opinion. And I would encourage our churches and our church leaders to embrace apologetics as part of our responsibility as shepherds of the flock and shepherds of those who are not yet of the flock. Give the person like I was a forum to go in and ask those tough questions.

I know it’s challenging because it means that we’ve got to be equipped. But to the church leaders there that are overwhelmed and thinking, “Well, I’d love to do that, Ben, but I can’t.” Well, you personally don’t have to do it. Find people in the community that, for them, doing that is like their heart’s desire. They would like nothing more than for a pastor to invite them to the church to do an eight-week thing on apologetics. There’s lots of people that are well equipped out there to do that. Be discerning, but yeah, I’d love to see more of that. More apologetics in the church.

Yes. Even great resources these days, too.

Absolutely.

That are in book or in DVD form or that are wonderful for using as teaching tools. And thank you for that really exhortation, because I think we all need to appreciate those who come to church who are actually looking for answers and not finding it. I would imagine that four year period might have been a little shorter had you been engaged in that kind of way. So thank you for that.

Yeah. Just because you graciously plugged my ministry, I’m going to plug both your ministry but also another ministry that I’m really excited about and I know you’re involved in. And it’s a great example of what you’re saying is that we have an embarrassment of riches in apologetics resources. Women in Apologetics. My goodness, I don’t know how old that is, but it’s like five years old. And you guys, those ladies are going gangbusters. And that’s just a wonderful example of like, boy, there’s no excuse to not get informed on the Christian worldview, to get informed on the answers to the challenges. And so, yeah, everywhere we turn, we’ve got great resources to grow from.

Right. And we’ll include, again, all of the things that you’ve mentioned and maybe even more so in our episode notes, too. Well, Ben, this has been a very rich and full story and episode, just filled with twists and turns, and I think it’s always wonderful to look back in someone’s life, and you can see the way that God orchestrated your path, despite kind of the nebulous upbringing, how yet He brought you to Himself through very strategic ways. And I’m always encouraged to see that. Plus, your life transformation is amazing. And the way, obviously, Christianity is not just checking a box. This is something that has become your full heart and life and that Christ is the center. And you found something so rich, you’re willing to travel to other parts of the world to demonstrate the truth of Christ and this worldview. So it’s such a privilege to have you on, and I know that everyone listening is going to be so encouraged by hearing your story. So thanks for coming.

Well, thank you, Jana. It’s been great. And it’s fun to get the opportunities to recount. I think you said it well. God really…. He’s telling his story, yes, through people, like me, like you. And so I just… sometimes it’s good to step back and like, look at it and say, “Wow, what a miracle!”

Yes, yes.

God is still doing miracles.

He still is. He’s in the miracle working business for sure. Well, thank you again, Ben, and I just so appreciate your coming.

Thank you again.

Thanks for tuning in to Side B Stories to hear Ben Clifton’s story. You can find more about Ben, his ministry Apologetics on Mission, and the resources he recommended in this episode in the episode notes. For questions and feedback about this episode, you can contact me through our website at www.sidebstories.com. Also, if you’re a skeptic or atheist who would like to connect with a former atheist with questions, please contact us on our Side B Stories website, and we’ll get you connected. I hope you enjoyed it, that you’ll follow, rate, review, and share this podcast with your friends and social network. In the meantime, I’ll be looking forward to seeing you next time, where we’ll see how another skeptic flips the record of their life.

Former atheist Nico Tarquinio rejected a religion he thought was not worthy of belief.  As a lawyer, he considered both sides in a search for truth and changed his mind about Christianity.

Resources recommended by Nico:

• Cold Case Christianity, J. Warner Wallace
• Letters to an Atheist, Peter Kreeft
• Unbelievable? Podcast with Justin Brierley
• Reasonable Faith Podcast with William Lane Craig

For more stories of atheist and skeptics converting to Christianity, visit www.sidebstories.com

Episode Transcript

Hello, and thanks for joining in. I’m Jana Harmon, and you’re listening to Side B Stories, where we see how skeptics let the record of their lives. Each podcast, we listen to someone who has once been an atheist or a skeptic, but who became a Christian against all odds. You can hear more of these stories at our Side B Stories website at www.sidebstories.com. We welcome your comments on these stories at our Side B Stories Facebook page. 

Oftentimes, we are perfectly content in what we believe until something happens in our lives that disrupts the status quo. New circumstances arise that cause us to rethink what we think about the world around us, about our lives, about what we hold to be true or not. At those thresholds, we are presented with an opportunity to take a closer look at our beliefs, or we can continue on, presuming our pathway in life is built upon a good foundation without examination. 

In today’s story, former atheist Nico Tarquinio encountered a change in life circumstances, and with that, a new opportunity to look more closely at his own and others beliefs, to search more intentionally for truth. As an attorney, he was naturally driven towards critical thinking and analyzing and debating ideas. But this journey for him ended in a place he never expected, as a strong believer in God and apologist for the Christian worldview. What did he find on his journey towards discovery that was so compelling that he was willing to move towards Christianity, a worldview he once held in contempt? I hope you’ll join in to find out. 

Welcome to Side B Stories, Nico. It’s great to have you with me today. 

Jana, it is amazing to join you. Thank you so much for having me on.

Wonderful. So the listeners know a bit about who you are, Nico, can you tell us some about who you are, what you do, where you live? 

Sure. So, my name is Nico Tarquinio. I’m currently living in Lincoln, Nebraska, but I’m from Massachusetts originally, Southbridge, Massachusetts. I’ve lived in Maine. I’ve lived in upstate New York. I’ve lived in Boston. I’ve lived in Vermont. I’ve been a lot of places, and these days I am living in the Midwest. I work for the Federal Government. I’m an attorney and, well, non practicing at the time, but I did pass the bar exam, so it counts for something. I love to do apologetics and theology in my spare time, and I’m also raising four kids in my spare time. That little hobby on the side there. So gosh, I wear a lot of hats.

Sounds like you’ve got a very, very busy life, Nico. Very full. So it also sounds so that you’ve spent a lot of time in the Northeast. Is that where you were born? Why don’t you take us back to your childhood and where you were raised, that culture, your family? Was religion or God any part of your world? 

Sure. So I was raised in a contentious divorce situation, so my mother and father didn’t see eye to eye. They often came to harsh words with each other, and I was primarily raised by my mother. My father, on the other hand, eventually moved to Florida for a while. My grandmother still

lived in town. But my more religious side would probably be my father’s side of the family, simply because, if you couldn’t tell by my name, Nico Ramo Tarquinio, I’m Italian. And if you want Nonna’s meatballs, or at least a good conversation after she puts the meatballs on the table, not like she refuses them to anyone, you’re going to go to Mass, at least on Christmas and Easter with everybody. So that was kind of a very typical experience in the Northeast in general, but certainly within my family.

And my mother, who was much more open spiritually, and she’s a very brilliant woman, but I don’t recall Bibles being in the house. I do recall seeing Tarot cards, seeing spell books. I remember her going to psychics. She was very open spiritually, and I don’t think that comes from a dark place or anything like that, but that kind of shows the kind of spiritual upbringing I had. We certainly didn’t pray over dinner or do any of the kind of things we associate with Christianity in the household. There was a little crucifix above my bed from when I was baptized. Like most Catholics and Lutherans, I was baptized as a child, but that was kind of it. It kind of becomes a point of celebration, and you get together on holidays and you go to Mass,

And I would say that religion in our family was very strong, but the strongest place that it was was with my Italian Nonna, as I mentioned. The house that she lived in was full of images of Jesus, primarily. There were pictures of the saints. There were rosaries. There were Bibles. There were prayer books. There were pictures of church. It was very important to her, and she lived a very—and she still does—live a very strong spiritual in a Christian sense life. But English isn’t her first language. She spent most of her time taking care of us, and she didn’t kind of force it on anybody. It was kind of just her thing. And I remember going through my childhood seeing all these beautiful pictures on the wall, and it was almost like I didn’t see them. They were there, and I know that they were there, but I didn’t know whose faces belonged to the pictures. So when I came back as an adult and a Christian, it was just such a light bulb moment, where all of a sudden I go, “Nonna, that’s St. Anne. That’s St. Rita. That’s Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane,” that beautiful picture that looked over my bed when I stayed there. And they were beautiful works of art to me, but if anything, they were just boring old people things to me back then. The faith certainly wasn’t alive in my family. And I didn’t really even go to church on any regular basis until Confirmation rolled around, and my father had moved back from Florida and started taking me on Sundays.

So even your father had some kind of appreciation for the Catholic Church or for confirmation obviously. There was no animosity towards God. 

Oh. Absolutely not. No. I would say my father does believe, and strongly so. he certainly understood the need to go to church, I mean especially in the Italian culture. My actual godfather was my confirmation sponsor. It’s not just a movie stereotype. Your godfather is a part of your life, spiritually speaking.

Yes. So through all that time, Christmas, Easters, Confirmation, did you ever believe any of what you were being taught in any kind of personal way? Or was it just going through the motions of expectations? 

It was really going through the motions. I didn’t really talk too much about what started me on this, what kind of immunized me to receiving any of these messages. Because even on Christmas and Easter, you read from the Bible at Mass. I mean, you hear the word of God, but I zone out. I mean, it’s not something that struck me as important.  If you understand what confirmation is, I believe it’s from Acts 18 in the Bible, that’s when you really are supposed to be saying yes to God, at least in the Catholic faith. And I mean, I said it, but I said it because my parents wanted to throw a party for me after. And I wouldn’t say otherwise, of course, not to disrespect them or to destroy their expectations, but it really didn’t mean anything to me. I mean, Catholicism to me was something to mock. I was growing up was the time when we started hearing the allegations of the absolute terrible pedophilia scandals going on. So what you would think of the entire faith was just completely and utterly…. There was just no chance of me respecting it.

Yeah. I would imagine, especially as you were getting into your preteen, teenage years, around that time, it was probably a little bit of an approach avoidance, I would imagine, especially with that scandal and not really thinking or taking things personally in the faith to begin with and the cultural animosity, all of those things kind of brewing together. And you mentioned something about your friends earlier. Did your friends embrace Catholicism? Or were they mocking? Or what was going on there? 

When you say cultural animosity, I think you hit the nail on the head of the experience of a child being raised in Southbridge, Massachusetts, in the nineties. And I would say that’s probably true of a lot of places in Massachusetts, from what I was aware of. It’s funny, I heard an interview with somebody who was raised in the Bible Belt, saying, “Well, here in America, we still have respect for Christ,” and that certainly wasn’t the case where I grew up. Gosh, everything from the voices that I heard on the radio to things that I saw on TV to the books that I read were all steeped heavily against Jesus. I’m sure many of your viewers will be familiar with The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Absolute classic. But that book starts off with an absolute indictment of God. It’s a parody. the book starts off with an overview of the universe. It goes, “In the beginning, God created the universe, and everyone mostly agreed that that was a bad idea,” and then it quickly goes into God having an argument with somebody about why he even bothered creating them, and he disappears in, quote, “A puff of logic.” So these are the kind of voices that are in my young mind growing up, that God is incompatible with logic and reason, that it’s a book of these…. And this is when the New Atheist movement was in full swing. I mean, you hear these things about faith being belief despite the evidence from popular celebrities at the time. I listened to a lot of rock  music, and I will tell you that folks like Marilyn Manson and Slipknot were certainly not friends of the faith.

And I would say that, even at a very young age, one of the experiences that I will never forget and I really do think started to just knock things loose in my mind about what I would think about Christianity. It was second, third grade, and none of my friends believed in Christianity, as far as I’m aware. I didn’t know a single person who was a practicing Christian. We certainly had folks who would also go to Mass on Christmas and Easter and who would even go to CCD class and things like that to make their sacraments. But I remember the conversation about Santa quickly shifting to Christ, because it was kind of like a: “Santa’s not real. Of course he’s not real. It’s your parents putting gifts out for you.” And then people would start talking about, “Well, what else is real? What else is not real?” And of course Jesus is going to come up. So I remember somebody at our table, our lunch table. I can see it in my mind, and I know this sounds unbelievable, but I would say depraved is a very good word for the kind of conversation you would have around the lunch table.

And I remember one of the kids, popular guy, said something along the lines of, “Well, no. It’s all made up, obviously. None of that stuff happens in real life. The Virgin Mary, she either cheated on Joseph, or she was raped, and she had to make up a story so she didn’t get stoned to death.” And it’s so crazy because I think that maybe something in some of those other kids at the table, and it’s so awful to say these words, by the way, it really hurts to even say them. But I think even they felt scandalized because I don’t remember anyone saying anything, but I remember a lot of people nodding. Certainly nobody said, “Oh, no! That’s not true. This is real. No. I know it’s real.” Even if it was just, “Well, Mom and Dad say it’s true, and I know it’s true.” None of that happened. And that kind of just gets deep into your psyche when you hear things like that from a young age, especially when it goes completely unopposed by any reason to believe in any of that stuff.

I mean, my catechesis going around that age, going to CCD classes once a week. It’s not exactly like…. If you’re not hearing the faith at home, you’re certainly not going to learn it in one-hour segments with a priest on a seasonal basis. My questions were never answered in a sufficient way. You’re left with these questions that just make Christianity look awful, look fake. I could go on and on, but culturally, that animosity is definitely real, and there’s certainly no incentive for… I mean, why would you believe in it if that’s all you’re hearing?

Right, right. And so I guess during those teenage years, then, you pushed back from any kind of Christian or Catholic identity? 

Yeah. Yeah. In both cases, especially because that was…. As things started to heat up in terms of dialogue in the United States and especially with respect to things like gay marriage, we would see the media turn especially hard against now a faith that we were seeing exposed as having a lot of horrible secrets in terms of these pedophile scandals and talking about things like gay marriage. And the Westboro Baptist Church was ubiquitous on the news for very hateful stances, not only just toward gay people, but toward veterans, toward people of other religions, toward Jewish people. So when you thought about Christians, you didn’t think about much except ignorance and hatred.

Yeah. That’s a tough bill to sell, isn’t it? You don’t want to be a part of something that has so much negativity circling around it. And I would imagine, too, you were questioning whether or not He was even real, much less good. So walk us on from there. Did you outright reject it? Did you just say, “I don’t know.” How did you-

It’s funny, you hear a lot of conversations sometimes when you hear debates between Christians and atheists. A lot of times you hear the Christians pose the question to the atheists, “Would you want this to be real?” And some atheists will say, especially some of the louder ones. I think Ricky Gervais is one who would say something like, “If God was real, I’d punch Him in the nose for being so evil.” But you have others who I feel like are more honest, and they say, “Well, if an all-loving God who would make me happy for all eternity existed, of course I would want that to be real.”

So I think a deep part of me did want it to be true, not only just to please my family, who I’ve already had a contentious relationship with, in the sense of the divorce going on and just a lot of friction that would happen in that sense. So when I went to college, there were a few times that I went to church to try to see, “Is this for me?” I was a young adult. I didn’t have anything else to do. I was kind of nerd, so I wasn’t exactly getting invited to a lot of parties. I mean, I did end up going to quite a few over time, but I would go. And here’s the thing: It’s the Northeast Catholic experience. You go to church, and there’s one person there, and they’re probably in their eighties, and I’d go alone. And what I would hear being said—again, the backdrop is the US, and a lot of social turns going on. The priests would preach on things like gay marriage, and if that’s your experience going into a church, hearing the hellfire, but not hearing the love, it just reconfirms what I heard from all these media sources. They’re hateful.

I mean I understand things in a very different context now, of course. I could speak to that. But for somebody just wandering in and not knowing what’s going on, it was strange. And so, in college, it took a deeper turn, probably even further away from faith. And I think I deeply wanted it to be true, and I wandered in every now and then, maybe seeking comfort or something. But I would do pranks. I would start doing things that—I was a comedic genius. So I would see a sign that says Keep Christ in Christmas, and I’d peel off the T, so it said keep Chris in Christmas. And I would say, “Hey, Chris, look!” And I’d do stupid things like that. Or I’d write…. Gosh, they were quotes from like Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot, and this is probably a little bit more disrespectful and quite frankly evil, disrespecting Christianity, talking about how it’s false, and writing those quotes on the Facebook page under anonymous accounts and things like that. Trying to do everything… Or posting what we would say, the dark parts of the Bible, Some parts of the Old Testament, where we read about some of the wars between the Jews and the other tribes, and there were some very descriptive passages concerning the warfare going on, and it would just make it seem so awful, and I’d loudly trumpet those.

So it wasn’t just that you were not believing, you were actually becoming active about becoming one of those who held animosity and mocking as well? 

And you know what the most bizarre thing is? And I feel like this is actually pretty common among people in my generation. The spiritual-but-not-religious thing was there, the kind of agnostic, the kind of, “Oh, yeah. I’m open to these things. I’ll watch Ghost Adventures on TV. I’ll do a Ouija board. I think there are ghosts and demons haunting my college,” without ever realizing the natural implications of the idea that if there are demons, certainly there’s something , but you’d hear about those, and I would never make the connection. “Oh, yeah. Demons definitely exist. There’s definitely these weird ghost hunting videos, but God? No. Definitely not!”

No, that’s boring. That’s stuff for hateful people. That’s Bronze Age fairy tale, as they used to say. And made up by a bunch of goat herders a long time ago just to explain the world around them.

So you lived in this place of some form of rejection of this traditional, conservative, very unappealing form of belief. How long did you live in that place? And what allowed you to reconsider your thinking? 

That is a really great question, because I would say I can see little drops of it as I went along my experience, where I would find myself almost—for example, once I left college and my wife and I moved to Vermont at one point, I knew somebody who converted to Christianity, somebody who was also deeply agnostic, deeply spiritual, but not religious. And he wrote a book about how he had. And I like writing, and I edit books on occasion. And he sent it to me. And all I could do after reading that was kind of mock his faith and disrespect him and say, “Oh, this doesn’t make sense,” where his journey was definitely leading him to Christ, but I just didn’t believe any of it. And as I went on my journey, though, it’s funny, I went from that to suddenly there were moments where I would find myself maybe defending the Christian worldview because I saw how maybe inconsistent the way that people treated Christians were.

My wife was taking college classes on the side at a college in Vermont. And I remember at one time there was an assignment, and it was an online class, and the professor asked them to discuss and compare mythologies, and these mythologies would be Greek and Egyptian and Norse and Christian, and there were Christians in that class.

And one of the other sources—I don’t know. Some of your viewers may be familiar with him, even some people who are just completely secular. There’s a guy named Dave Ramsey, a popular financial coach, and my wife and I were on our own completely, we needed to shore up our finances.

And at the very end of Dave Ramsey’s Financial Peace program, and a lot of times, he cites the Bible throughout it and some basic financial principles about lending and things like that. There’s a bonus episode, and if you watch the bonus episode, and we did, because we had nothing else to do, he implores the viewers to just pick up the Bible if any of it resonated with them.

So my wife and I went and bought a Bible, and that was what really started to open my mind, and we started to try to read it together just like any other book. And unfortunately, again, that cultural animosity—I love those words—really came to me again because we would read stuff like Leviticus, and Leviticus would seem like it’s condemning, depending on who you listen to, lifestyles and people, instead of understanding it in the proper context that it was meant for back then. And, my goodness, it brought me right back to my childhood again. This is all just empty. This is just people trying to moralize. This is people trying to be, “I’m superior to other people because I read this book and I go to church once every few months.”

There’s a quote, and I’m going to bring it up now because I think it’s maybe the most important quote to me these days, and throughout this entire experience of converting, and it’s from C.S. Lewis. In terms of how I relate to the Bible: “Christianity, if false…” is of no importance, and if true, of infinite importance, but the one thing it cannot be is moderately important.” But everybody in my life up until this point treated it as moderately important. “Yeah, we go to church.” But to a young mind who’s skeptical of things and who’s trying to understand the world around him, I’m studying things in school. I’m trying to understand things. Why, logically speaking, if you believe that there is a God of the universe who numbered every hair on your head, why would you go to church once every six months or so? I mean, that just seems like a waste of time, because if you care about Him, if He’s real, certainly you would be giving your whole life to Him. But if, you know, what is the point otherwise? Why not just own up to it? Don’t go to church if it’s not a thing. And anyway, so that was kind of my experience up until then.

And then I read the Bible and to me, yeah, it’s just moderately important. It’s nothing. These are just people who want to moralize others. But since reading the Bible, at least, and seeing people like Dave Ramsey, who’s probably one of the first sincere Christians I’ve ever seen in media. . . gears started to move here. Well, I can’t just say, “Christians disrespect these people, so I’m going to go with these people. I’m going to protect those people from the evil Christians,” but then see somebody else going after a Christian and not say, “Hey, wait. Leave them alone. You can’t call their faith mythology.” So things started to change a little bit.

Yeah, that is interesting because, again, it seemed like a bit of dissonance going on there because you’re reading the Bible and feeling it’s pulling back those negative emotions of, “This is just moralizing text,” but yet you see a counterbalance with an authentic Christian in Dave Ramsey,

And it feels like two sides of a coin that don’t seem to be able to reconcile, at least at that time. But yet you were willing to contend for its viability, or respecting a Christian and their beliefs as more than mythology. So it does feel like you’re kind of wavering a little bit, going back and forth, trying to navigate these waters of what this really is. 

Yeah. It was definitely a back and forth is a good word for it, I certainly didn’t as a child, which is kind of crazy when you come to know authentic Bible reading, Bible believing Christians, because, again, if it’s important, why wouldn’t you? Even if it is a hard book to read? And it started coming crashing down again, to the point where we just rejected it. I remember a couple of times in that early period of us—and I was recently out of law school.

But maybe I chose a bad day because I walk in the door. My experience is this: They give us a $50 gift card to go get coffee, which okay, like, “Nice gesture, I love coffee, but, it seemed a little weird. And then we go in, and there’s an issue. And I loved the worship part. I love the music. Beautiful. Cool stuff, seeing all these people who are raising their hands, and there was something there that I admired and something that I just couldn’t understand, because I never felt that way before. But there was an issue with the projector, and the pastor started yelling at the projectionist, and it actually sounded like he threatened him, like he was going to harm him. Not only that, but the sermon, almost the entirety of the sermon was: One, you need to give more money because we’re not going to be able to keep our doors open. Two, you need to fast, because God spoke to me and says, “You in the crowd need to fast,” and now granted I believe some people hear the voice of God, not only just through reading the Bible, but I think sometimes that still, small voice is there. But as somebody who has no belief whatsoever, when you go in and somebody gives you a card to stay,  then tells you to give them money, then tells you that God told them to do something. “Don’t eat food. God told me that you can’t eat tonight.” My wife and I didn’t go back for a while, and we stopped reading those Bibles. And that led to, I would say, maybe the deepest period of atheism that I ever experienced, where I just said, “That’s it. I have no desire to go to church after that.”

So you adopted an atheist identity, then. I mean, you came to a place where you basically confirmed, at least for yourself, that God does not exist, could not exist, in light of all of these things we’re observing about people who portray God or Christianity in such an off putting way. So then of course you’re no longer— I get the sense that Christianity is infinitely important for you now. So how did you make that turn or that change? 

So my wife and I were married. We were married actually about a year into law school at that point. But if it gives you a sense of where we were religiously at that point, we have our vows. I actually have them in a little scrapbook over here. And my wife and I, when we were writing them, we made sure to scrub all references to God, because what did God do for us? I mean, the only people who were ever real to each other in our lives at that point were each other.

So we had written God off, and we were in our marriage, we were happy with each other. And my wife had the instincts and the desire to become a mother. Thank God she did. And eventually kind of broke me down on that, where I wasn’t going to live a life of playing video games and reading books. We’re going to at least try to have at least one kid.

And that prompted questions for me, deep questions, because suddenly I’m reflecting on this crazy ride I’ve had growing up and having these weird, bad family relationships, having this kind of inconsistent faith, and I thought about my family, and I thought about, “What are they going to think of us having a kid? They didn’t even approve of us getting married. Are we going to get our kids baptized?” And that brought on other questions, too, because suddenly I’m not just responsible for finding out what I believe about the universe. I have to convey that to a child. That’s a big deal to me.

The whole reason that things like the pedophilia scandal are important to me is because, deep down, and we could go into the moral argument of C.S. Lewis, but children are a big deal, and the idea of being responsible for somebody’s upbringing, both moral and intellectual, it raised the question, “What do I teach them about religion, and specifically Christianity?” So that was where things started to turn and got interesting, so to speak.

So how did you start to answer those questions, those big questions of what you thought about belief in God and Christianity and whether or not you were going to baptize your child, or all of that? 

Research. I was a lawyer. I mean, I wasn’t a practicing lawyer. I did practice, but I eventually started working for the government,

I did what any millennial would do. There’s Google. And initially my search was quite frustrated. I kept searching for things like Christian scientists, Christian celebrities, and probably because of the way the search results are stacked, I know the number of intellectuals who have shaped the world as we know it who had the Christian faith. But back then, I couldn’t find a single one.

So I did the second thing that Millennials like, and that’s podcasts, and I was surprised to find that there’s quite a few interesting ones. The work that I was doing, while it was difficult, I could do it without thinking too much, so I could listen to podcasts. there was one called The Daily Audio Bible, I started listening to it because I was like, “How can I write this off and tell a kid, ‘Oh, yeah, this isn’t true,’ if I haven’t even listened to the dang Bible?” So I started listening to that. I started listening to Bad Christian, which, strangely, was with a band I used to love when I was a child. I was into a lot of crazy emo and screamo work. I actually really enjoyed their stuff, and I was just kind of like starting to come to respect some of these people. These were people I listened to. And I found out, surprisingly, a lot of people into metal music are into Christianity.

And that really resonated with me spiritually at the time, because I was going through a lot of dark stuff. I was going to therapy, and I learned that as a child through some therapy about some repressed memories, there was some serious abuse going on, and that was really hard to confront. You’re with some of the darker emotions that you can feel.

So while I’m going on an intellectual journey, I’m reading the Bible, I’m also spiritually starting to say, “This angst that I feel was felt by somebody 2000 years ago,” and I will say this is when the intellectual stuff coming in, too. Like I said, I was a lawyer. I wanted to know what’s the evidence. There’s other podcasts on there, and one of them, quite fortunately titled, is called Reasonable Faith by William Lane Craig. There’s Unbelievable with Justin Brierley, which I actually recently was on, and that’s a debate show. And what is more appealing to an American lawyer than two people arguing? So this is kind of where I’m starting to go with this.

So you were open to the evidence, wherever that led, or the arguments for the Christian worldview. You were willing to consider both sides. You were actively pursuing something, pursuing truth. What were you finding? As you were that lawyer in you who was debating both sides of the issue probably in your mind, what were you finding in terms of where was the evidence landing for you? 

Well, here’s the thing: That’s where the objections started coming up, and they started coming up hard, because in my mind I’m hearing those voices from people like Christopher Hitchens and Dawkins and all these books that I’ve read, and I’m thinking, “Okay. There’s no evidence for Christianity,” but then suddenly I hear voices like Cold Case Christianity with Jay Warner Wallace, who’s a former cold case homicide detective, who says, speaking directly to me, who had just gone through evidence classes, “Well, what is evidence? Evidence is anything, anything that raises the probability that a truth claim or an argument is true.” So people say, “Oh, yeah. There’s no video of Jesus Christ being crucified and rising from the dead,” but of course there isn’t. I’ve been through trials. Even in today’s day, it’s very rare that you have a video of the murder or something happening. It’s always… and it’s funny, you watch TV shows, and they talk about circumstantial evidence like that’s a bad thing. Circumstantial evidence is how the majority of court cases are decided. Testimony is the most common form of evidence.

And suddenly this starts to… I’m listening to Jay Warner Wallace talking about that, and I’m like, “Yeah, that makes sense to me. I’m trained as a lawyer. This is how we decide things.” I’m listening to debates on Unbelievable between people of different worldviews, not just Christianity and non Christians.

I started hearing these arguments, and I found myself impressed by Christians, and surprisingly so. And I also at the same time felt kind of betrayed by the church that I grew up in or by people who never taught me this stuff, because I didn’t know Aquinas’s 5 ways to God, that there were proofs of God. Blew my mind when I suddenly heard, “Oh, my gosh! There’s a Kalam’s cosmological argument for God that is not only just used by Christians, but by Muslims as well!” The idea that something can’t come from nothing. You can extrapolate that to a deep philosophical proof that I had to either stop working or turn off the podcast because I can’t listen to quantum mechanics and how that interacts with philosophy and properly do my job. So I felt stupid. And I don’t often feel stupid, and I don’t want to say that to toot my own horn. I’m not an arrogant person. My wife is ten times smarter than me, I’ll tell you that. And I’m not just saying that, so I’m not in the doghouse tonight. She is a brilliant woman.

But all of a sudden I’m like, “Wait a second. These people, these Christians who I was raised to believe they believe in the Bible because they were raised with it. They don’t know anything better. They reject evolution.” Turns out not all Christians do. ‘They reject all these scientific principles that I came to accept.’ And I’m not saying some of that in a derogatory way. I’m saying some of them have very good reasons to believe why they believed. And they should. I mean, it’s what? 1 Peter 3:15 or something like that, “Have a good reason to believe what you believe.” And anyway, so this is getting more intense, this search, for me. But while this search is getting more intense, something kind of hard happened, and I don’t know if you want me to go into that, but I can.

Yes. What else happened? Yeah. 

So, almost as if, while I’m starting to have hope that these arguments for Christianity might actually be good. And I will say that not every debate I listened to I sided with the Christian. There was many where I said, “Ah, that Christian was kind of just talking nonsense and just saying, ‘Well, the Bible says it’s true,’” which is what I always believed Christians did. But some of them genuinely had things I never considered before, like the fine tuning argument.

Well, meanwhile, hardship starts to strike again in my life and while going through some dark things in therapy, my wife and I, we’re not conceiving. I mean, we’re trying to have a kid, and it’s just not happening. And there are a lot of people out there who are probably going to hear this, who have been through infertility or maybe still are and never come out of that. It’s really hard on you emotionally, even as me, as somebody who didn’t want to have a child, it really broke my heart. And seeing my wife just disappointed month after month, just knowing that this future that we had kind of planned for ourselves just wasn’t coming.

It was absolutely devastating for my relationship, for my idea that maybe there is a God Who cares about us, because obviously, to the uninitiated, you often hear people say, “Oh, that bad thing happened. Well, where was God? Oh, you’re infertile. Why doesn’t God fix that?” I mean, it’s in the Bible. So much of the Old Testament deals with people who couldn’t have children. And so it’s going both ways. It’s interesting, my wife’s searching Pinterest boards and things like that for infertility resources, and you find Bible verses about God making your life fruitful, and it wasn’t happening to us, What did I do to deserve this kind of thing?

So you were in a difficult time emotionally, but it sounds like it pushed you away from God. All the while, you were perhaps being positively impressed or challenged by the Christian worldview, by intellectually astute people. So it sounds like your head and your heart were almost conflicted at this point. 

It was a battle. This is when I started to pray. And this is like the prayers of an idiot who never read anything about Christianity and still had that genie mindset. “God, well, if You’re real, why don’t You just reveal yourself to me? You knocked Paul off that horse. Why don’t you knock me off that horse? Strike me with lightning. Do something here. I’m reaching out. Where are You?” And I wasn’t getting anything. “God, if You’re real, why don’t you just make my wife pregnant? Show me that You’re real tomorrow.” And these are now, I understand selfish, immature, not real Christian prayers, but to somebody who doesn’t understand Christianity, they sound right. And I’m like, “Okay, well, if God is real, He wants me to believe in him, right? So where is He?” And that’s getting more intense. And I’m starting to kind of bring my wife along for the ride, because obviously she’s stuck in the same house with me. She certainly wasn’t having it. I bought her a planner once. I remember we were talking about this. It had Bible verses in it. Just to see if I could get her kind of interested. She’s like, “Why did you buy this for me? I don’t want this. Where’s God in our walk with life?”

But she loves me. Somehow. She got me—we love books, too, so we love books. We love each other. We’re the Barnes & Noble one night, and there’s a bargain section. She gets me a book. It’s called Letters to an Atheist by Peter Kreeft. And she knew all the stuff that I was interested in. Now, Peter Kreeft, for those of you who don’t know, is, at least in my opinion, one of the smartest theologians of this era. And I read this book because my wife handed to me and said, “This sounds like you.” So I start reading it, and it’s a brilliant book in the sense that it’s addressed to an imaginary atheist in order to address the many questions: Why is there evil? Things like that, that were really deep to me. And I was reading this book, and it was late at night. And I remember—you have these moments in your journey that kind of stand out to you.

And I remember my wife—she never slept well to begin with, and during what we were going through, emotionally speaking, she was kept up late at night, and I didn’t even care if she was awake or not. I started shaking her because sometimes I would talk her to sleep because, as you

can tell, I talk a lot, and it helps people to get to sleep. You can always market this podcast after as a sleep aid if you’d like. But I told her, “I think it might be real.” I was reading the argument about the apostles and what motivated them, and I’ve already heard this a little bit from Cold Case Christianity, defending the historicity of the Bible and comparing it to other documents in the ancient world and saying, “No, this is extremely well attested stuff.” And as J. Warner Wallace put it, there’s only a few motives for people to lie or to do things, both criminally speaking and almost anything else. It’s money, it’s power, it’s sex, it’s pride.

I mean, there’s a few others, but Peter Kreeft wove this into the lives of the apostles and the Resurrection and whether or not the Resurrection was fake. Did they hide the body of Jesus? Did they make up a religion, as so many people had told me, that, “Oh, yeah, they just made it up because they wanted to earn money. It’s to control you. These governments made up Christianity to keep people in line.” But you’re reading the lives of the apostles, the martyrology of them, and they died. All of them went to their death. Did they have money to gain? Did they have power to gain? Did they have sex to gain? Absolutely not. These were, some of them celibate Jews who knew that they were preaching against the most powerful empire on earth, possibly even throughout history, one of the strongest empires. They were speaking against their own religion. And why? What did they have to gain from that? They knew Jesus personally.

And I know some people that are Jesus mythicists out there. I will tell you. Look at books like Jesus and the Eyewitnesses. There’s a lot of fantastic books just showing that it’s just a silly hypothesis at this point. He was somebody Who lived, and I accepted that. There was a guy named Jesus, and these apostles clearly knew Him. Somebody was writing about it, enough that we have the documents today, better preserved than most other documents throughout history. And they all died. I mean, if you put a gun to my head at that point in my life and said, “Is Jesus real?” I would have said, “No. Please don’t shoot me.” But they didn’t. They were crucified, upside down in Peter’s case. They were thrown to the lions happily, and I’m shaking my wife, and I’m saying, “This makes sense to me.” And Peter Kreeft concluded the chapter with, of course, the trilemma.

There’s either three possibilities: He’s a lunatic, He’s crazy, and people are believing Him for some reason, but why would they believe a lunatic? I mean, why would they go to their death for someone who showed signs of craziness? He was a liar. He was making it up, again for money, power. What motive did He have to lie? Or He was the Lord. And man, that struck me, and I get chills just saying that, because I remember staying in that bed and just like, “Wow! What an argument, and I finished that book that night. Of course! You’ve got to keep going.

And at the back of the book, Peter Kreeft, despite being a very well-known speaker and apologist, said, “If you have any questions, here’s my email,” and I took him up on that. So a lot of times when people ask me these days, “How did you become a Christian?” Well, I lost a debate. I emailed him with some objections.

Oh, yeah. So you came to a place where you could no longer refuse what actually made sense intellectually? 

Yeah. I sent Peter Kreeft my email, and I asked him right off the bat, I said, “Hey, I have some questions. I know you’re probably busy, but could you answer them? You did such a good job,” and nobody else—I literally was asking professors in college that I knew said they were Catholic, but they didn’t have anything for me. They had no idea. Or Christians, even just Protestants. And very few people had any answers for me. Gosh, there was even a woman at work who had a cross necklace, and she was a very devout believer. Again, I didn’t know any growing up, so whenever I met one, it was something of an oddity. You’d be like, “You really believe in this stuff.” And she’s still a friend to this day. Wonderful woman. And so, and that’s a note, by the way, for any Christians out there. If you ever wonder whether or not you should be wearing crosses around your neck and things like that, it might help somebody, because I asked her about her faith, and she helped me a little bit later on.

Anyway. Yeah, Peter Kreeft, his response to me when I asked him if I could ask him questions was, “Yeah, of course! And if you have questions that Christianity can’t answer,” “You shouldn’t believe it.” I said, “What? You’re saying that if I have a question for you, and you can’t answer it, I shouldn’t believe in Christianity?” I’m like, “Well, game on, buddy!”

So I took him up on that. I was kind of arrogant. I’m like, “Okay, I’ve got some hard ones for you.” And, I mean, there were things, again, problem of evil. Why do all these churches disagree? And I was just blown away by his confidence there. This wasn’t a guy giving me $50 to coffee and saying, “Come to my church, and I’ll give you coffee money.” This was a guy saying, “I got nothing to lose. Christianity’s got all the answers,” and I’m like, “All right,” and by the end of that email chain, I said, “Okay. I believe it. I’ll go to church eventually,”

It was enough to convince you. 

Yeah. It led me to my next step.

Yes. Which was? 

A real prayer. Not a, “Gimme, gimme” prayer, not a, “God, where are You? Where’s Your Name in the stars?” prayer. A, “I am convinced, intellectually, God, that You exist. You don’t have to do anything for me, because You already did. You died on a cross for me, and I love You. Thank You for showing Yourself to me. I’ve been asking You all this time, and I kind of had to meet You. You left these crumbs for me, and I see that this is Your way of approaching me. Gosh, infinitely powerful God, arranging things providentially, so that I come upon these books. I mean, how else could it be?” So I prayed and I said, “God, I don’t care. You don’t have to make my wife pregnant. You don’t have to appear to me in a beam of light and say, ‘Here I am. Ask me questions.’ I really think you’re real, and I’m going to believe in you no matter what,” and so this was over a year in our journey, my wife and I. There was a lot going on that week, and it was really hard, I would say, because we had already come to terms with the fact that we weren’t having a kid. I was going to an adoption conference the very next week. I know this all sounds very crazy, but, I mean, we had an IVF appointment that Monday morning. I was praying on a Sunday. Obviously, we weren’t going to church because we didn’t really know where to start. And my wife wasn’t exactly along for the ride at that point either.

And that very night, we had a big fight, right after I prayed, my wife was devastated. And I don’t blame her. I mean, she was kind of like, “How can you still have hope? I just want to have your kids. Is that really so much to ask? I just want to be a mother,” and she went to bed in tears. It was a really rough time for us.

So that was a big moment. I was Christian, she wasn’t, and there was a lot going on for us in the background.

So obviously you have four children, and so your infertility issues were resolved in some way. But I also wonder, your wife, who was perhaps not initially accepting of your faith, did she come to believe as with you? 

There’s a quote I really love. And this is from a completely unrelated topic. It’s from, gosh, John Green, The Fault in our Stars, a fiction book, terribly depressing, beautiful book about cancer. But the quote is, I think, something along the lines of this: “I fell in love like falling asleep, slowly at first, and then all at once.” It’s just a beautiful quote about how sometimes these things happen, where we kind of edge into them. I think that describes my faith, but I think it describes her even better because of what happened.

So the next day, instead of me shaking her awake and saying, “Hey, I think I believe in God,” which was a couple of months prior at that point. She woke me up, and she was just…. Okay, one, she doesn’t do that. Two, it was 4:00 in the morning, so it had to be good, right? Or bad. One of those two things. And I will never forget it. And she said, “I’m pregnant.” This is the unbelievable part, right? And she, in her hand, of course, over the bed is the pregnancy test, and it says she’s pregnant. And so there’s all sorts of questions here, right? Like, one, why is it 4:00 AM? Two, why are you testing? We weren’t even, at that point, believing that we could be capable of that. I still have the picture of her sitting in the bathroom.

Both of us are bawling our eyes out, as I almost am right now, with this test in our hands that says positive. I was just celebrating. I was ecstatic. I was like, “Really?” I didn’t believe it. We were going to take three more of those that morning. So over time, we start, and it’s funny, the first time I ever prayed with her, and it’s still hard. I mean, we’re still atheist growing up, so it’s still weird, but the first time I ever prayed with her was the night before we went in to have our son Ronan. And she obviously is this first-time mom about to give birth. I mean, gosh, I would be terrified, too! So we said a prayer together, and at that point you really couldn’t ignore it. Slowly but gradually. And then I remember when I sent that email to Peter Kreeft much later, with those kids, I said, “As I write this to you, there’s a Bible by my wife’s bed stand. There’s Mere Christianity, there’s Screwtape Letters, there’s a stack. And I would have never believed this could have been her. So she is probably even more…. She helps my faith these days, not the other way around. She believes, and when my son was born, and I was holding him in my arms for the first time.

I said, “Ronan, welcome to the world,” and I just pray and I say, “Thank You, God. Thank You. And I will raise him to know about You, and I will do everything I can. Please use me, use my family to spread this through the world in whatever little ways You can,” because what else can I offer? I mean, He’s God. He has everything He wants, but I can give Him my free will. And to this day, I’m trying apologetics, I hope that I can reach people.

Yeah. I’m just so overwhelmed by your story. And it takes me back to that time where you, just at the thought of having children, wondering what to teach whoever this child or children were going to be, and being willing to ask the big questions, being willing to go on a path of discovery, a journey of searching. And it had twists and turns, but look at where you landed. I think God honored your journey. Obviously, you are not only convinced intellectually, but you have a very palpable passion about Who it is you believe and what you believe and why you believe it and what you want to do, like you say, with your life. It’s just extraordinary, Nico. And I’m just very taken by the full arc of it, of moving from such skeptical atheism to such profound and deep belief in God. 

For someone who might be listening, and they are way back at that questioning skepticism, maybe spiritual but not religious, or even just not even imagine believing in God because of all of the awful stuff going on with the church or you name it. What would you say to someone like that? Who might be willing to take a second look. 

Two big things: One, don’t assume that you understand the objections that you’re putting out for Christianity until you’ve read the other side. Seek out debates. Unless you’ve even broached the…. You don’t have to read the Summa Theologica or whatever it’s… I don’t even know if I can pronounce that correctly. You don’t have to read Thomas Aquinas. But if you don’t understand the main arguments on which Christianity is based, don’t assume you know. At least—and this is what I’ve always said to atheists. I usually give a list of books, and I’ll say… and even stuff like C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity. I mean, there’s a central reading. And I never say to an atheist, “Read this and be converted.” I say, “Read this because either you’re going to convert to Christianity, or you’re not going to be converted, but you’re going to be a better person for it. You’re going to be a smarter person for it. You’re going to be affirmed in your atheism, and you’ll understand why you don’t believe what you don’t believe.”

And so I would say read. And don’t just assume that this is all just Bronze Age fairy tales or all this craziness. Some of the smartest minds, I believe, in history were at least faithful. I mean, at least deist. Don’t write it off. Don’t look at the worst Christians, just like I wouldn’t look at the worst atheists as examples of atheists.

And I would say, number two. This is going to sound weird. And everyone’s going to look at me and be like, “Oh, yeah. Of course, the Catholic would say this.” Don’t just read the Bible. If you’re going to read the Bible, and you absolutely should. Even if you’re a committed atheist, and you will never convert, it is one of the most important works ever composed. It’s multiple works in human history. Read it with commentary. Read it. Listen to The Bible in a Year (with Fr. Mike Schmitz), where he’s going to explain some stuff to you, because there’s stuff in there that’s going to sound absolutely bizarre. You got talking donkeys. You got talking serpents. None of that’s going to make any sense to you. And you’re just going to do what people like I think Penn Jillette of Penn & Teller would say: “I’m not a Christian because I read the Bible.” “Well, sure you did,” but the Bible is a collection of works across thousands of years, written by different cultures for different audiences, with different understandings of the world in a different language. So to think that you can just pick up the Bible…. Now, granted, I do believe it’s inspired by God. The Holy Spirit is there. He will speak to you when you read it. I believe that 100%. And I will believe He leads you to truth through reading it.

There are things I discover today, seven, eight years in, and I don’t think this is ever going to stop. I used to say to myself, “We’re going to become Christians, and then we’re going to get bored, and then we’re going to be atheist.” Anything but. We’ve never stopped reading. There’s so much. I told you I used to be into sci-fi/fantasy. Now I’m into history because there’s just so much to learn, and I feel like there’s not a Sunday that goes by where I hear something that I may have heard three times before, but I’m like, “Oh, my gosh! Not only was this a callback to the Old Testament in Isaiah 22, but this also has context from the culture going on at that time.”

So my advice is twofold, again. Read, be open minded, at least try to understand what the best…. Steel man your opponents. Don’t straw man your opponents. St. Thomas Aquinas was famous for steel manning his opponents in debates before he tried to knock them down. Do the same to us. Try to knock down our arguments. Take us at our absolute best. Look at the five ways. See if you can find a way around them, because I don’t think anyone has. And actually read the Bible with a mind for being open to what it says culturally. Look into what it actually does say, and just be open minded. That’s all I would say. I’m open minded to other truth claims, too. I like reading books by atheists still. I like reading books by different denominations in Christianity. We’re made better—again, this is my lawyer speaking, in America, and this definitely—now, set aside corruption and other things like that. The best way you’re going to learn what the truth is by setting the two opposing claims against each other, and the truth always wins out. And I believe Jesus Christ is that truth. He is truth incarnate. He is the word.

Yeah. That’s powerful. I think it’s very important what you’re saying, because as you have said before, I think people dismiss Christianity out of hand without a hearing, and it is important to understand what it is you’re rejecting by giving it due diligence, without just rejecting it out of hand. So I appreciate your encouragement there. 

So for the Christian who’s listening, and they know a skeptic in their life who seems to be perhaps where you were way back when, and they want to somehow engage them in a meaningful way, what would you encourage them to do or to say? 

So much. we are in an age of hyper skepticism. So my advice is this: If you are a Christian, “Be prepared to have a reason for why you believe.”

When I teach my fifth grade class, But I would say, “Why are you Christian?” That was my first question. And so many of the answers were, “Well, because Mom and Dad told me I have to be,” and I want to teach these kids, even if their answer is, “Because I think it’s true.” Well, why? And I think that’s something that we have to be prepared to give to others, too. And it can’t simply be because the Bible says so. And I see that in online comments all the time. And as somebody who once heard those arguments, that was the worst argument. That was the one that you just wrote off  just going to say, “Oh, yeah. The Bible says it’s true.” Because as an atheist, one of the objections was often, “Well, why aren’t there other things besides the Bible?” long story short, you’ve got to be ready to explain why is the Bible a reliable source if you’re going to want to point them to that.

So for Christians out there who want to kind of bring their atheist friends along for the ride, what you can do as a Christian is knock down the obstacles, the walls that humans put up. You see it in the Bible. It says there are going to be people who don’t understand why you believe what you believe, and you need to be ready to account for that.  I’ve actually heard atheists argue to me that the Big Bang is evidence that Christianity doesn’t exist. And I think that’s absolutely hilarious, because those who actually understand it know that George Lemaitre—I don’t know if I’m pronouncing his name right—was a priest, and he was scoffed at by other scientists as trying to backdoor creation into his scientific theories.

So anyway, just be ready. prepare your teenage kids when they go onto the world, and even before that, for the challenges that they’re going to ultimately be raised with. And we can’t force them to believe. That’s one thing to always understand. You can’t force a kid to believe. In fact, if anything, that’s just going to make it worse. You can’t give them a $50 coffee gift card and say, “Come to church.” That’s not going to work. You have to convince them. And that starts in your own home, and it starts with the way you live your life. Do you act as if…. It really starts with whether or not you live out those words, that the only thing that Christianity cannot be is moderately important because it’s infinitely important. You’re going to be at church every week.

You’re going to be praying every day. You’re going to be talking to the God who knows every single thought that you have in your head, and you’re going to be living your life accordingly. If your kid—kids smell insincerity, and if they see mom going to church, but dad staying at home and watching football or playing video games or something like that, they’re not going to believe that.

So I would just say live consistently. Be ready with apologetics to the best of your ability, not to convince them, just to be able to show them, “Oh, no. There is a basis for what I believe.” And yeah, just have an understanding of why you believe what you believe. You can’t just say, “Well, why is Christianity true? Because God so loved the world that He gave His only Son.” You’re not going to win anybody over with that. I’ve seen people try. It wouldn’t have won me over. It’s not going to win anybody else over. You can’t just throw what they already don’t believe at them and hope for it to land. You have to tell them why should I believe that?

Yeah, that’s all very, very wise advice. I can tell, again, that you see Christianity as something as infinitely important and that it shows in your life. And I think your admonition to us as Christians is for us to think and feel it, live it, to breathe it, for it to be so much a part of our lives that it’s undeniable and that it’s important to us and that it’s life changing, not only that God exists, but that He matters and it makes all the difference. 

So thank you so, so much, Nico. I have loved our conversation today, and I really genuinely appreciate you coming on to tell your story. 

Keep doing the ministry that you’re doing. It’s so important in the world today. Somebody like me is going to pick up your podcast, and they’re going to listen, and hopefully they’re going to find the support that they need and they’re not finding anywhere else in their lives. So thank you for what you do. And God bless you and everybody listening. Thank you for sitting through this, even if you think I’m full of baloney.

Thanks so much, Nico. 

Thank you.

Thanks for tuning in to Side B Stories hear Nico’s story. You can find out more about Nico and the resources he recommended in this episode in our episode notes. For questions and feedback about this podcast, you can contact me through our website at www.sidebstories.com Also, if you’re a skeptic or atheist who would like to connect with one of our former atheists with questions, please contact us on our Side B Stories website, and we’ll get you connected. I hope, if you enjoyed it, that you’ll follow, rate, review, and share this podcast with your friends and social network. In the meantime, I’ll be looking forward to seeing you next time, where we’ll see how another skeptic flips the record of their life. 

Former skeptic Ken Boa put aside his childhood faith and became a secular humanist who tested his philosophy through psychedelic drugs. After an agonizing search for meaning, he came to believe in the reality of God.

Ken’s Resources:

• www.kenboa.org

Resources recommended by Mark:

• Escape from Reason, Francis Schaeffer
• The God who is There, Francis Schaeffer
• Works of C.S. Lewis

For more stories of atheists and skeptics converting to Christianity, visit www.sidebstories.com

Episode Transcript

Hello, and thanks for joining in. I’m Jana Harmon, and you’re listening to Side B Stories, where we see how skeptics flip the record of their lives. Each podcast, we listen to someone who has once been an atheist or a skeptic, but who became a Christian against all odds. You can hear more of these stories at our Side B Stories website at www.sidebstories.com. We also welcome your comments on these stories on our Side B Stories Facebook page as well. 

It’s often the case that what someone believes or is taught as a child begins to fade as they encounter other ideas or other people that seem more sophisticated, more adult, more true. It becomes easy to leave childhood ideas behind, to be put on the shelf as a remnants of an outgrown time. But what happens when someone begins to find holes in their new way of thinking? When it, too, doesn’t seem to answer the big questions of life as well as they might think? What happens then? Returning to childhood beliefs seems off the table. Yet living in the tension of intellectual dissonance and existential dissatisfaction is not an option either. Perhaps indifference or distraction is the answer, confronting the tension by avoiding it. 

In today’s story, philosopher, theologian, and former skeptic Dr. Ken Boa once rejected his childhood Christian beliefs for more adult-seeming secular humanism and experimentation with Eastern mysticism and even occultism. He continued to be unsettled by the inability, though, to explain things like the ineffable quality of beauty or his deep need for meaning. But these conundrums were not enough for him to search for the God of his youth. What happened, then, to compel him to a profound belief in the God that he had left behind? I hope you’ll join in to find out. 

Hi, Ken. Welcome to Side B Stories. It’s so great to have you with me today! 

Thank you.

Why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself? 

Yeah. I often describe myself as a writer, speaker, and teacher, and a mentor. In a broader way, though, I’m a bit of an odd duck, insofar as I love to process things with people. I use beauty, and I use goodness, and I use truth, and I seek to winsomely draw people through narrative and through story. I want people to learn how to love well, learn well, and live well.

Can you give me an idea, also for the listener to understand, your academic background?

Yeah. Well, as an undergraduate I went to Case Institute of Technology in Cleveland, Ohio. And another thing about me, I’m a philosopher of science.

I was drawn to astronomy and math and physics and so forth. But then I started at graduate school at Berkeley in California. But then the oddest crazy thing, many things happened that led me instead to go to Dallas Theological Seminary. This was a long time ago, and I got a Masters of Theology there. And then working with different organizations. But I eventually started teaching at the King’s College in Briarcliff Manor, New York, when it used to be up there. And I was going to NYU to work on the philosophy of religion, so I completed my PhD from that. And then, some years later, about ten years after that, I wanted to go to England and just take a sabbatical. So what ended up as a sabbatical turned out to be actually going to Oriel College at Oxford, and ultimately I got my DPhil in philosophy and theology.

Okay. So, Ken, you obviously have studied at the highest levels, at Oxford, areas of philosophy and theology, but you didn’t start there. And so I’d like to go back to the beginning of your story and see how those atheistic views developed. Why don’t you start us back into your childhood, your family of origin. Give us a sense of the home in which you were raised, whether or not God or religion was part of your family life, part of your culture life. Why don’t you start us there? 

Yeah. As I’ve looked back, I recently realized—I didn’t know this until recent inquiries that I was actually baptized in the Episcopal Church when I was four years old. My father was a bus driver in New Jersey, and he was a very, very witty and clever man, and people loved him, and he apparently had one of his passengers. He must have gotten close to him and had an impact on him. And so my father started going to that Episcopal Church. And so my godfather was this man, this other fellow. But when he died of a brain tumor not long after that, my father lost his best friend, and his whole role then with regard to God was one of bitterness. How could God allow that to happen? And so that was his narrative. The net effect was that I still remember vaguely going to that Episcopal Church. I was about four or five. I remember what it looked like. It was a strange experience. And then I also remember my parents sending my older sister and me to church. It was a Baptist church that we had to walk by ourselves. This is in the ‘50s, and so these things were done then, but we walked by ourselves almost 2 miles to this Baptist church, and we had to go to a Sunday school class, and then we’d come back together. But my parents never went to church at all at that time.

But it was a strange thing, hearing those—I still remember the lessons, the flannel board teachings. I still remember the songs we sang. So it obviously had a big mark on me in some ways. And then also my grandmother had a huge impact, and she was definitely a strong believer. So there were those influences there. And one of my uncles as well. So it was there, but it was not something that was fed in my home.

So as a child, would you say you had some kind of childhood belief in God? That God was real, that God was there?

Yeah, I did. And we talked about these things. But my sister and I were in a world of fantasy and imagination a lot, and we got this set of book trails that was an eight-volume collection of stories, and I used to read them out loud to her. And it was a magical thing. So we were very much in the mind of the imagination. But in that understanding, we were believers, in that God existed and so forth. That’s an interesting thought. Though I didn’t carry it to its logical conclusions. Though I remember having some experiment with prayer when I was about seven, I think, when I asked God if He could send me a million dollars, and I had heard that, if you believe, if you have enough faith to believe it. So imagine my disappointment the next morning. So that kind of changed when the obvious would have occurred. But I knew I believed in God. Although I had strange dreams. I still remember at the age of six having a dream about infinity. The number one got oppressively large and larger and larger until I woke up in terror.

So this idea of the ineffable, of the mysterious, this has been a motif in my journey, from that inception. I can remember. I was drawn and terrified, both in that dream and also in my experience with the mysteries of nature. That seems to be a motif in my life. So I believed in God in  that sense.

But your father, in some sense, had rejected, and both of your parents, neither one of them went to church. And so you and your sister walked to church, and you were developing a childhood belief but also an appreciation for the grandeur and mystery of the transcendent. 

And so how long did that continue until you started becoming skeptical of what you were seeing or thinking? 

Well, what happened, we went from Dumont, New Jersey, and later on we went… as a period, we went to Louisiana. My mother is from there. So I lived in two worlds, the Monroe, Louisiana, which was actually going back like thirty years in the past. And we would go to a church there. My grandmother would take us to a church, and so forth.

But when we came back to New Jersey, my parents again sent my sister and I to church, so we went to this Emerson Union Church. But later a new pastor came, and it was Emerson Bible Church. And the pastor was a graduate from Dallas Theological Seminary. I was fascinated by him, and he had a good mind.

And what happened was I had two sets of friends by the time I went to high school. I went to Hackensack High, a big school. And my friends there were not believers, my closest friends, but my friends at Emerson Bible Church were. And I was involved in even Christian Service Brigade, which was this Christian version of scouting, boy scouting. And my friends, they’d have stories. We’d have a story and games and so forth. And sometimes then they were going into this back room, and they’d come out and say they received Jesus. And so I was the last one left. I figured I’d better do it, too. So I went in there, and I heard a guy say a prayer. I listened to the prayer and said, “Yes,” but it was his prayer. It was not really my own invitation, but more an intellectual reception, rather than a personal embrace. And that was a real problem for me, because I thought I had the real thing, but it wasn’t real. And a real profound inner tension that produced.

It wasn’t real because obviously it was another person’s prayer. You accepted it intellectually, but not personally. 

That’s correct.

So for those who don’t really understand the difference there, they might think just you’re a Christian just because you believe certain tenets. 

Yeah. It’s a matter of not believing about, but trusting in. And this whole idea of a transfer of trust, a choice, a will, rather than just an intellectual acknowledgment of a thing, became a very, very different thing indeed. It’s more a matter of a choice that you’re making, not just an intellectual acknowledgment. There’s a big difference.

Right. And so you never made that personal faith decision, trust in, what you believed. 

Yes. Although I wrote in a Bible the next year, when I was I think 14, “I received Jesus as my personal Savior.” So I knew the words, but I didn’t have the reality. But I could not in my heart of hearts acknowledge that, because then I’d say, “Man, none of this is true then.” So the interior tension terrified me, and sometimes his sermons would terrify me, because then I’d have to work up with some experience, emotional experience, to believe I was still there. It was a strange experience for me to be in that. So I was two different people.

So with your more secularized friends, you were thinking more maybe scientifically, more in a way towards the natural world as ultimate reality? 

Well, in part. Yeah. They were more into music and also into history. they were secularized. They loved great music and art and so forth. And it was a different kind of music, a different kind of an art, a different kind of an ethos than I saw at Emerson Bible Church, which was very thin. And so I was drawn more to the life of the mind and of the aesthetic dimension of beauty, again. So I became two different kinds of people. I was terrified, though, that two of them would ever meet each other. I wouldn’t know how to respond. I’d be two different people.

So there was this dichotomy for a while, a cognitive dissonance for a while, and so did one end up kind of winning over the other in terms of- 

Well, here’s what happened. Yeah. You can’t live that way.

Right. 

So I’m an old guy. It was in the fall of ‘63, then, that I went to Case Institute of Technology. And I remember being in the dorm, and I would still read my Bible as a kind of perfunctory thing before I’d go to sleep, and I decided I was going to go to a church. It was an embarrassing experience for me. It was some kind of fundamentalist kind of experience, and I was burned by that. And so I formally took my Bible, and I remember this moment. It was an amazing thing that I took it and put it on the shelf. I can see myself doing it. It’s an iconic moment. Sometimes time is frozen on a particular image, and visually, you take a photo. I put it in the shelf. And it was symbolic of the fact that I won’t deal with this anymore. I’m going to move on, and I’m going to bracket God’s existence or nonexistence, neither accepting nor rejecting, because I didn’t want to deal with that internal tension that was too great. So I just decided.

So it was more of a—scientific humanist was my modality.

Okay. So you put God on the shelf, literally and spiritually and figuratively, and all of it. 

In all respects, yeah. And that’s why I say I bracketed God, by which I mean I didn’t want to deal with the questions of: Who am I? Why am I here? Where did I come from? Where am I going? The fundamental issues of life. Because I knew in my heart of hearts I didn’t have answers. And I still remember, and I was at Pi Kappa Alpha in the fraternity, and my weekend blew apart when I was 19, a sophomore. All my plans went apart, and I was the only one in the house. And for the first time all these issues of questions about life imposed themselves, and it was a terrifying thing. I still remember that awful experience. I don’t know who I am. I don’t know why I’m here. I don’t know where I came from and where I’m going. And so I said I’m never going to do that again. So, like, as Pascal predicted, indifference and distraction became my modality after that, and I made sure I would never let that happen. I didn’t want to think about it.

Yes. Now, you had mentioned that you were drawn to the life of the mind, and that evidently wasn’t in the world of Christianity that you had experienced. So I’m imagining that there weren’t any more intellectual Christians in your world to whom you could go and discuss God or Christianity or these larger questions with a Christian for whom you respected or could find, I guess, intellectual fodder at the level at which you were processing ideas. Is that right? 

Yeah. I’d say that would be true. The life of the mind, I found it to be somewhat anemic in those contexts of the church experiences I had, though there were men—and I will say this—godly men and women, especially these men who took me under their wing and became like mentors to me. I still remember them, and they were part of my journey. So it was a very real sense, because of my scouting and also in my Sunday school classes. These were men that I did admire. They had a quality in them, but they were ordinary men. They were not extraordinary in their way of thinking or apprehension. So it didn’t satisfy the level of understanding or beauty, because I was drawn to beauty, and to beautiful things. I became a lover of great, beautiful books, for example, and aesthetic things of that nature. So that’s where I found—my two best friends were both people who loved beauty and weren’t as concerned about truth. They were more concerned about beauty and goodness in a certain way. It’s an interesting thing, but there was a sort of mystery that was there.

Right. And so as you were moving into this more aesthetic, ethereal world that was secularized, I’m curious. Because they weren’t as concerned about truth, but there has to also be a grounding of goodness and beauty. Was that anything that caused any kind of cognitive tension in terms of the grounding? Or when you’re looking at something like you were looking at the sky earlier, and you feel the power of what you’re seeing, that it has to come from somewhere or be grounded in something? Or was it just it just was? 

That is why I didn’t want to think about it, because I knew it was pointing beyond me, beyond to something that was ineffable. And I was terrified of ineffability because I didn’t want to think about those categories because they reminded me of the internal turmoil underneath, where I knew I was an impostor. I was pretending to be what I was not, but I couldn’t admit it to myself. So that was a very real dilemma for me.

But you said, in Pascalian terms, you became distracted, right? With things. 

Indifference and distraction.

Indifferent and distracted, yes. 

And so my way then would be to make sure I didn’t think hard about those questions anymore.But the point is, I cannot help but think about meaning. I’m haunted by it. So that’s what’s going on. And so I think it is the Hound of Heaven and God Who stoops to conquer, and in my case, He stoops to conquer.

And so he used, of all things, then, the psychotropic drugs to make me to become aware of a realm that I had been trying to occlude so successfully for a good period of time. And it was in my junior year at Case Institute of Technology that I began to get involved with hashish and with grass, and then later with LSD, and so that opened up an entirely different world. That was a whole new realm.

And so, through psychedelics, was that pursuit of meaning beyond the imminent world? Or was it just distraction? 

No. It was not that. It was the pursuit of a new kind of another-

Level of consciousness? 

Yeah. As well as the synesthesia. And I have to say it was a pleasurable experience, the synesthesia, where you hear color and you see sound, and your senses are moved together, and everything comes together. There are reasons why that occurs, but in those conditions, I found it to be very compelling, very drawing, and so it forced me in, and so we were doing experiments with time even. And I experienced a very different experience with even time. It dilated. We would actually be able to go into a dark room and take a cigarette and write a word, a short word, and it would linger. You could see the thing. It was a very intriguing experience indeed.

Yes. 

So we were doing experiments with that and with different aspects of consciousness. After all, we were scientists, so we tried to control the variables and so forth. And we believed in Timothy Leary’s idea. So it was experimentation, and that’s what it was. In consciousness.

So sometimes in those experimentations, or in psychedelics, people will get a sense of the other, like more than the natural world, that there is definitely something more than just what our senses… that there’s something more. Did it make you question again the possibility of God, based upon your experiences? 

Not so much that. It made me aware of the mysteries that surrounded me, but I still didn’t connect them to transcendence. But here’s what happened on one particular occasion: For the very first time, I went away from other people on a trip. It was a duplex, but the second floor, and I remember going away from the other guys, and it was a journey. It took me a world to get up to the top of those steps, as my hand is going into the wall and yet it’s not and so forth. And I finally see myself in the mirror, and it was an incredible flash of complex geometries and so forth.

But then I found myself for some reason meandering to the end of the hall, which I never would do. I went to my friend Ray Musselman’s bedroom, and I found myself on lying on his bed, and suddenly it happened. I was aware of the presence of the holy, and I was terrified and absolutely drawn to Him. It was both the mysterium tremen—it happened again, but more now fully. It was so intense. I don’t know how long it must have been. It must have been about maybe 15 minutes it lasted, because it was long enough for Ray to come upstairs after a while and wonder where I was.

Right. 

But I was pinned on that bed in ineffable terror and longing. And I realized that there was a separation from that which… but I wanted it more than anything else, this being. And so my friend Ray comes to me and says, “Where have you been?” “I’m talking with God, Man.” That was my answer.

So that, and every time subsequent, every time I dropped acid after that, whether I was with people or not, the most important part was to deal with the ineffable, the mysterium tremendum.

Now, I’m just thinking of the listeners here, that they would say, “Well, you just were hallucinating. You were on acid.” 

So it would seem.

One would imagine. Yeah. How can you differentiate between that which was a hallucination and that was the real? 

What happened is I had to go back to Cleveland to do one thing. It was right after graduation. So I went back to Cleveland and saw my friends, and there were about eight of us who dropped acid together in that same place. And one of them I didn’t like. I was just going to avoid him. Of course, you can guess what happened. As we get further and further, I get drawn to him, and I realized why I didn’t like him. Because he was a mirror image of myself. Because, at the age of 13, he too had the same experience. We had a profession of faith in Jesus, but he realized it wasn’t real, and it forced me, after eight years, to have to admit that I didn’t either.

So for the first time we both became aware, through each other, why we didn’t like each other, because we were reminiscent of the same process and the same problem. We both found ourselves suddenly on the road less traveled. We were heading toward the road. We were on a road, and we could see that road.

We couldn’t put on the brakes. We couldn’t stop. A forced choice was made. We both took the road less traveled the same moment in time. And we were then instantly as straight as we are now in this room. All the hallucinations were gone, and it was replaced by the power of the Spirit, who brought to mind the scriptures we’d learned as kids, because we’d learned the same texts of scripture. I’d share a verse, and he now, as a new believer, having found Christ, would understand its meaning for the first time. And he was blown away. Then he’d share one with me. And it was back and forth, back and forth, until the joy became so intense we literally couldn’t stand it. We had to back off.

And when we backed off, the trip came back. And then we’d get back into the scriptures, and then it would be all focused on that again. All night long. And I went to church for the first time the next morning. That was a Saturday night. And I remember going there late for the service, it turned out. I don’t even know how I got there. I was in the balcony, and I just remembered the sermon started, and it was on the prodigal son. So it was a lovely theme for me.

But that night, on that experience, I knew I was going to go to Dallas Seminary, not because of an inference, but because of an assurance. This book is God’s blueprint for living. That was a metaphor. “This is His proof, and I’ve got to learn what it says.” Not to be prepared for ministry, just to get my head screwed on right. So I came back, and I made an application, though I had applied to Berkeley and Columbia and had been admitted both places. I also put in my application to Dallas Seminary. But it was a profound experience, with a witness who had the same experience as well. And I’ve talked with him recently about that. I never heard anything like it.

Right. No. So it’s almost as if you had had some kind of intellectual assent younger, earlier in your life, but there was no palpable reality of God, whether it be personal or otherwise. 

Precisely.

And then later you have this extraordinary experience of God, where you could not deny the palpable reality of God, so it was where truth and reality came together for you, and I presume all of the dissonance you had felt prior somehow coalesced into a wholeness of all of those big questions of life that you were talking about, identity and meaning and all of those things. Were they met with some kind of almost a sudden satisfaction through the person of God? You knew who you were. You knew where you were going. You completely immediately changed your path. 

Yes. I was a new creation. But it launched a journey, an agonizing journey, of conscious worldview transition that lasted about a year.

I’m sorry to say this. I’m not recommending this. You need to understand this. It is not a recommendation. It is just a realization. That’s why I almost never tell this story, because people get the wrong idea. I’m saying God stooped to conquer. And that is an important word for people to hear. I’m reporting what happened. It was radical.

So it was a year I was there, and it was in the fall of that year, the next year, so I’d been there a year, it all came together. I had an epiphanic experience that was not just in the mind, but shivered my being, my body, my mind, everything. Everything in this epiphany of sudden recognition. After about a year of being there, it all came together. Suddenly I had a worldview that was coherent, consistent, clear, and comprehensive. It all fit together. I had been reading Schaeffer’s…. His first book came out, Escape from Reason, in ‘68. And I found out about this guy I’d never heard about, C.S. Lewis, so I was reading Lewis and Schaeffer and so forth, The God Who Is There and so forth. But it took that long. It was an agonizing process until it all came together in a coherent whole. And it was the most satisfying. It was visceral, not just cognitive, and I was immersed in the beauty, the splendor of mystery, and it was ethereal. It was luminous. I was in this thin place between heaven and earth, where it was a numinous encounter with the living God. So it was grace to have other experiences of this nature that have been very powerful for me.

So when everything coalesced for you in terms of the Christian or the God-centered worldview, and everything made sense, and it was comprehensive and cohesive, and it corresponded with reality, all these other things, the mysticism in terms of Eastern mysticism, your occultism, your use of psychedelics, those…. I would presume as your Christian worldview got stronger, you were able to see that those were not based in truth or you were willing to give those up as your understanding of the true reality solidified, that those kind of went away as not part of the true truth. 

It sounds like God was taken off the shelf for you in a very, very powerful way and has informed all that you’ve done since, both you and your wife, in your life. 

Yes. So that’s why I love the life of the mind and the heart. I love the interior of the beauty and the goodness and the truth. And I love the heart, the head, and the hands. Being, knowing and doing. Loving well, learning well, living well. And so all truth connects together, so as a synthesizer, I see them all together, and I love to connect things with things in disparate ways, because whether it’s music or literature or film or poetry or architecture or whatever it is, beauty always points to the ineffable One, Who made it all. So everything connects, everything relates in that way. It’s a lovely way of being.

Yes. And I would imagine, too, as compared to the lack of finding those in the community of Christianity who did not have a fostered life of the mind, it seems as if you’ve been a leader in that field now and have probably found strong community with those who call themselves Christians but have a very strong life of the mind.

Now, all that I’d ever learned about music and art and literature all converged in this one. And so I see myself, then, as one where all these fields kind of point in integrated ways, and I love to connect disparate things and put them together. So I say that the heart cannot rejoice in what the mind rejects.

Now there are, I would imagine, some curious skeptics listening today who really respect who you are, in terms of your ability to see and to experience things in very deep and  grand ways. And I wonder if they’re curious, that you have obviously found a worldview that makes sense of who you are and what you see and what you experience in reality in the world. And it makes sense for you. How could you advise or encourage someone who is curious but yet skeptical, as you once were, to continue to seek to find as you did? 

Yes. Because I think that is the issue. You just said. Those who seek will find. Those who ask, it will be given to them. Those who knock, it will be opened to them. There are two kinds of people in the world. Those who seek to know God and those who seek to avoid Him. And both will succeed in the end. So this whole idea then is what do I seek? Is my aspiration big enough? Because I’ve claimed that no earthbound felicity can sustain the awful, awful freight of human aspiration because we are bearers of the imago dei, and therefore, to avoid God is to actually deny ourselves. And so to pursue Him is actually to discover ourselves, by losing ourselves and finding Him. And frankly, everyone admits that personhood is better than the impersonal, in their practice. Everybody admits that. They just don’t want it to be true of the universe. And the reason for that is because personhood is daunting. The creator of beauty displays the ugly, the source of goodness reveals evil, and the author of truth exposes error.

for those who are seeking, as you kind of experienced or spoke of, you used the word terrifying a few times. It does seem a little bit frightening, a little bit terrifying to pursue the One Who is all and is in all and above all and through all and overall. But it’s worth it! 

Well, it is worth it.

And for the Christians who are listening who want to help lead or foster skeptics towards looking and seeking towards God, how would you best advise Christians to engage with those who are skeptical? 

I think asking these fundamental questions. And there’s three of Jesus’ questions. These three questions, if you don’t mind, I’ll show them to you. What do you seek? Who do you say I am? And you love Me more than these? So, “What do you seek?” is for me the most fundamental question that determines what you find. What are you looking for, you see? And is it big enough to sustain you? So I think a prayer, even the desire to be pleasing to Him is pleasing to Him. And so I think an offering would be to say, “Lord, I don’t know if I believe in You, but I want to discover if You are Who You claim to be, and just give me the grace of knowing You as I pursue this.” So as you study scripture or expose yourself to something that you’re just inviting the grace of holy desire.

Yeah. Who do you say that I am? 

Yeah. Here’s the thing about this: This isn’t an optional thing. Everybody, if Jesus is right, and this is the Pascalian wager, of course, that the one who doesn’t believe in God gets nothing of gain, but the one who does gets everything. But if he’s right, Jesus is going to be the judge, as well as the lover of our soul. So He comes in his first advent in humility, but ultimately we will all have to give an answer to, “Who do you say that I am?” And every tongue will acknowledge. It would be mighty smart to be willing to acknowledge Him now and bow the knee now, because ultimately we will.

You can’t be on a road without making a decision. You need to make an informed—and this is my word. I appeal to people’s pride. And I mean by that that you owe it to yourself, if this Person has shaped the world in so many profound ways as He has, ancient, medieval, and modern, you owe it to yourself to at least hear what He had to say of Himself before you decide to accept or reject. But you will either accept or reject. You don’t have an option. You will. So wouldn’t it be wise for you to choose whether to have an informed opinion as to whether to accept Him or reject Him? That’s why we created this little thing, Jesus in His Own Words, which is that’s exactly what it does, is it gives them the way of actually having to understand that.

Yes. What you’re saying, too, just reminds me a little bit in your story, where you were talking about that there has to be a choice at some point in the road. Right. 

That’s right. It was the two roads diverge, and I can say it now. How long has that been? Fifty five years, is it? I mean, it’s scary to think because how brief the earthbound sojourn is. But if we should always be amazed at the brevity. We’re in our last days. Never presume a year. So wouldn’t we be wise then to see there were defining moments in the journey of our lives? But if you can’t avoid a choice of Jesus permanently. You can only say no so many times. I don’t know, for example, when we were in that experience. And what if we hadn’t chosen the road less traveled? Would that have been our last opportunity? I don’t know that. But there is a last. There’s one step too far, and a person can say no only, and then their heart will be hardened. So this is not just a game we’re playing. This is a reality that you have to engage in, and at least if you make an informed decision about whether Jesus is Who He claimed to be or not, but you will have to accept it or reject it.

And your story, Ken, has given us so much to think about today, so many big issues of ineffability and beauty and goodness and truth and just experiencing the reality of God and what we are seeking, Who we are seeking, and who are we. I think everyone who will be listening to your story will be asking themselves the same questions that you were asking yourself. And I appreciate you bringing these big and grandiose, yet very, very personal issues to bear to all of us. 

So I really appreciate your story, Ken. I know that it’s going to touch some lives out there of those who are, God willing, seeking and that they will find. So thank you so much for coming on with me today. 

Thank you.

Wonderful. 

It’s a pleasure to be with you. Appreciate it.

Thanks for tuning into Side B Stories to hear Dr. Ken Boa’s story. You can find out more about Ken, his podcast, the prolific number of books he’s written, as well as his ministry, Reflections, at his website, www.kenboa.org, which I’ll also include in the episode notes. 

For questions and feedback about this episode, you can leave a message on the Facebook page, as well as contacting me through our website at www.sidebstories.com. Also, if you are a skeptic or atheist who would like to connect with a former atheist with questions, please contact us on our Side B Stories website, and we’ll get you connected. I hope you enjoyed this episode and that you’ll follow, rate, review, and share this podcast with your friends and social network. In the meantime, I’ll be looking forward to seeing you next time, where we’ll see how another skeptic flips the record of their life. 

Everyone in his town knew Roger Sherrer as “the community atheist.” He thought belief in God was not only childish but bad and needed to be taken down. His atheism began to break down as he suffered the consequences of his nihilistic worldview.

Resources recommended by Roger:

• Hugh Ross, Reasons to Believe, https://reasons.org
• William Lane Craig, Reasonable Faith, https://www.reasonablefaith.org
• Cold Case Christianity, J. Warner Wallace
• Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis

Episode Transcript

Hello and thanks for joining in. I’m Jana Harmon, and you’re listening to Side B Stories, where we see how skeptics flip the record of their lives. Each podcast, we listen to someone who has once been an atheist or skeptic, but who became a Christian against all odds. You can hear more of these stories at our Side B Stories website at www.sidebstories.com. We also welcome your comments on these stories on our Side B Stories Facebook page as well. 

When someone takes on an identity, whether it be atheist or Christian, we often have presumptions of who they are. That works both ways. At least we think we know who they are, and they think they know who we are. We think we know what they think, how they feel about things. We presume that they will always be like that and that they will never change. And vice versa. But if you get to know someone, and they get to know you, oftentimes our perceptions will change as we begin to reveal the persons we are below the persona, below the presumed negative caricatures and stereotypes. Sometimes, underneath a hard exterior and strong anti-God sentiment of an atheist, lurks the unexpected, softer side of someone who has the same human needs and desires for truth, meaning, value, and love as everyone else. 

In today’s story, former atheist and strong anti-theist Roger Sherrer thought belief in God was not only childish but bad and needed to be taken down. Now, he is just as passionate about his belief in God and is an apologist for the Christian worldview. What could move someone from such an anti-God vitriol to becoming such a strong advocate for Christianity? I hope you’ll join in to find out. 

Welcome to the Side B podcast, Roger. It’s so great to have you with me today! 

Yeah, thank you so much for having me, Jana. I’m honored to be on here with you.

Wonderful. As we’re getting started, Roger, tell us a little bit about who you are, where you live, perhaps-

Sure. I’m a youth pastor. I’m in Lebanon, Missouri, and so here in the Midwest. We’ve got a church, on average, I would say youth wise, we run about 200 on a Wednesday. So a lot of fun that we have here in our youth group. But beyond that, I’m also a college student, and so I recently finished my undergrad at Liberty. And my degree is in Christian ministries and currently working on my masters right now and doing my thesis. And my masters is in apologetics, also from Liberty. So that’s kind of what I’ve been doing the last couple of years.

Okay. It sounds like you’re very, very busy. 

Yeah, I like busy. All good ministry is busy ministry. So it’s fun.

Yes. That’s great. Well, let’s walk back into your story and your childhood, because obviously you have experienced a period of disbelief. But as it stands now, it appears that you’re a very strong believer and a strong advocate of the Christian faith. So let’s walk back into your childhood and tell me about—did you grow up in that area in Lebanon? Or in the Midwest? Tell me about your home, your culture. Was Christianity or God a part of your upbringing? 

Yeah. And so no, I guess, would be the short answer. And it’s been what I tell people about my family. My mom and my dad were divorced, and so I kind of had two families. But I tell people there’s two people that have never heard me preach the gospel. Of course, I’ve preached on Sundays. I’ve preached on Wednesdays. But my mom or my dad are two people, they’ve never heard me give a message. They’ve never heard me give my testimony. And that is something, growing up, being very distant from church, organized religion, certainly something that we did not adhere to, and so what kind of started as unbelief growing up in Missouri, really transitioned from just almost an agnostic, “I don’t know if there’s a God. I don’t really care if there’s a God,” turning into a version of anti-theism, in which my identity going into high school really was predicated upon, “There is no God, and not only do I believe there’s no God, but if you believe in God, then you have inferior intelligence. You are a weak person. You are emotionally, mentally, psychologically, intellectually subpar.” And so my identity, people that knew me in Lebanon, which is a town of about 15,000 or 20,000 people, I was kind of known as the community atheist. That was really something that people knew me as. And so that very much was my testimony up until about my junior year of high school. In terms of growing up in church, there certainly was no church component in my life.

So what did your parents believe? Did they have any animosity towards God or religion? Or was your home irreligious? 

Yeah. It was very irreligious, and I think my dad never spoke of God. I think he did not grow up in a religious household, and so I think a lot of times your belief is going to be dominated by your upbringing. In my dad’s case, that was very true. My mom, I always said—and I love my mom, and she’s a very genuine person, but a lot of her what I would call a religious belief was her political beliefs. And so very, very progressive politically, very much a humanist in terms of her philosophy. And a deity did not play a role in a lot of what she believed in, the principles that she wanted to pass down to myself. God was obsolete. He was unnecessary in what my mom truly felt was important. And so she was not dogmatic that there is no God. It simply was He was absent in all of the things that she gave to me. And I was really the one to say, “Hey, not only is Christianity irrelevant, but it’s actually harmful and detrimental to intellectual growth.”

And I do want to investigate where that contemptuousness came from, but before we get there, even as you were growing up as a child, the Midwest is typically steeped in at least a cultural Christianity. Did you have any friends, even growing up, as a boy or a child, that professed belief?

I would say that I did have friends that were Christians. I would say that they were very lukewarm and that they didn’t get their feelings hurt when I professed my atheism. The people that I targeted, and I did target them, were those outside of my friend group, and really the FCA kids, as I called them. They were not just Christians, they were the obnoxious Christians, and they were the ones I really wanted to humiliate. I wanted to minimize them. And so I did have friends that were Christians. I don’t think any of my close friends went to church. I think they were very much Pascal’s wager level Christians. “Hey, I believe in it for fire insurance, but it’s not really something I live out every single day.”

So as you were growing up, and your mother obviously saw no need for God, and there was no God in your home, what informed your particular atheist identity … I mean belief that there is no God is a fairly strong positive statement of reality. 

Yeah.

How did you come to that place or that conclusion or that identity, I guess. How old were you when you decided that you believed in this way? 

Yeah, no. That’s a great question. And so I would say my 8th grade year I watched a YouTube video. YouTube was just becoming a thing, and it was a Christopher Hitchens talk on a book that he was writing called God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. I was completely mesmerized by what he was saying, and I thought, “Everything that I’ve kind of perceived, he’s putting it in words that make sense.” The next year would have been my freshman year of high school, 2007, and Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion hits The New York Times bestselling list. And I went to Barnes & Noble in St. Louis, just a couple of hours away, and I bought my copy of The God Delusion. And that was my Bible. I memorized that book, and it was really my blueprint on how to deal with Christians, how to argue with Christians.

And so I found, in a very Bible Belt community, I’m wearing politically motivated shirts, and the people that are the most distasteful to me are those that are carrying a King James Bible. And so it gave me an incentive to take my atheism a step further, to say, “Well, no, now I actually have motive to be angry at you people, because you’re the ones that oppose everything that I stand for.” And so it was the New Atheist Movement, the Dawkinses and the Dennetts and the Harrises and the Michael Shermers, and I still have all those books at my house. They’re in my garage, and I read them front to back. I read the Old Testament, and I memorized many parts of the Old Testament, the Levitical laws, the Deuteronomical laws. And it really became an opportunity for me to intellectually flex myself against those that I truly believed were just brainwashed.

So you found an intellectual affinity with these New Atheists, and if you read their writings, which you obviously have, there is a bit of animosity spewing from the pages towards Christians, and I would imagine that, when you start there and then you add then the political aspects to it, I can see where the contemptuousness would rise. 

Yeah. And I would say it reminds me of one of my favorite apologists, Frank Turek. When he debated Christopher Hitchens, of all people, he summarized Christopher’s atheism or antitheism as, “There is no God, and I hate him,” and that very much was my atheism. “God does not exist. He’s Santa Claus for adults, and, oh, by the way, He’s a misogynistic bully, and if you believe in him, you believe in a celestial dictator.” And so I very much went into the level of animosity that it was a war zone. When we talked about faith, when we talked about your testimony, I was going to treat you with the disdain that I thought you deserved.

So you really embodied that the religion is bad and should be gotten rid of as quickly as possible, that poisonous view of Christianity and of Christians and that whole ideology. 

Well, I would say often that some atheists say, “I don’t believe in God, but I wish God did exist. It sounds nice.” I took the stance of, “I don’t believe in God, and I’m glad He doesn’t exist.” And so when I say I was the community atheist, outside of Lebanon High School, we had a local message board that people would post on. The newspaper had it on their website. And I was one of the only ones that used my name. I used Roger Sherrer because I wanted everybody to know, “Hey, I’m not hiding behind a name.” And most of my posts had to do with Christianity and why it needed to be lessened in our community. So people that knew my name, they knew me as, “Oh, that’s the atheist kid from Lebanon High School.” And so it was not a secret.

Right. So if God did not exist, and Christianity was not true, what was Christianity in your mind? 

As Stephen Hawking said, it was for those that are afraid of the dark. It is for those that cannot explain death. It is the biggest phobia, the biggest fear that humans, we innately have. And yet, just as Mark Twain said, “You were dead 1000 years before you were born, it will be the same after you die.” You will cease to exist. And it is for people that need to play fairy tale to give them answers, just as we give children answers about the man that goes down the chimney or the bunny that does this or the tooth fairy. It is simply a more adult version of what we have been making up for centuries upon centuries. That was my answer. And just as at some point you have to tell children, “Hey, Guys, Santa’s not real,” it was my intellectual responsibility to play that role for adults and say, “Hey, Guys, the jig is up. It’s time to start living a different direction.”

What convinced you that atheism and/or naturalism or materialism or the worldview that came along with atheism was true? 

Yeah. It’s funny, because when I was in high school, I was captain of the debate squad. Speech and debate was my thing. It was the only thing I was really, really good at. So, in the midst of that identity of me trying to be this confident, vehement, dogmatic atheist that is just so good at speaking to all these Christians, deep down was the most insecure person you would have ever met, that was screaming, “Love me! I want somebody to love me. I want somebody to hold me and to say, ‘Hey, it’s going to be okay.’” And so my compromising in life of my war against Christianity came down so much to the biggest things that I feared. And so in the midst of that was my diagnosis with depression and the sadness and the despair that I had, and really, I would say, a nihilistic philosophy, in that there is no meaning, there is no value, there is no purpose. And it was Halloween night 2009, October 31, that I wrote out my suicide note. And it was a two-page note. It’s actually a note that I read to our congregation a few months ago for a sermon that we did on mental health, and I read the suicide note from beginning to end, where I apologized to my mom, to my dad, to my grandparents, to my principal and said, “I’m so sorry that I’ve been this burden on you,” because I had never felt any semblance of meaning for me to even exist anymore. And it was in that midst of breaking myself down to the point where there was nowhere to look other than up because I was on my back.

And it was the next morning I found myself at the First Baptist Church. And funnily enough, the church that I’m sitting in, the church I’m now a pastor at, was the church that I found myself at, in the corner of the balcony, trying to hide from everybody to get some type of answer. And during the invitation, the pastor said, “If you lack meaning, value, or purpose in your life, there is a God that wants to know you,” and it was a Saul-to-Paul-level conversion in that moment, that I truly had become born again.

Wow. Okay. There’s a lot there. 

A lot there. Yeah. I wanted to give you everything, and then you could unpack it.

Okay. So first of all, I want to acknowledge here that you were an honest enough atheist to understand the implications or consequences of your own worldview, which the endpoint is nihilism. For those who don’t understand that term, can you just express what nihilism is? 

Sure. Yeah. It really is that… the aspect of what is the meaning of life? And that is a question that, if you look up Google searches, everybody wants to know. What is my meaning? And to me, I would tell people, I would say, “Listen, this is doom and gloom, but this is what you need to hear. We are on this rock, this pale blue dot, for a little bit of time. We will die. We will cease to exist. We will eventually decompose. And our meaning is whatever we put into it. But beyond that, our meaning is relative. It’s subjective. And in the end, we’re going to explode. We’re all going to die a heat death on this Earth. And our meaning, therefore, is by definition, purposeless, meaningless, and valueless. All of those things are man-made inventions that we put upon ourselves. We impose on ourselves to, again, give us some level of optimism when we wake up the next day. But in the end, there is truly no purpose in what we do. We are simply one species evolved from those that are in the animal kingdom. We are a half chromosome away from a chimpanzee. And in the end, we all die the same death, which leaves us with very little.”

And so that was my style of nihilism. And usually people left saying, “That’s really depressing.” But I said, “Yeah, but the truth isn’t always depressing, right? I mean, when we see children get cancer, it’s easy to make up fairy tales and to make up heaven, and that sounds really good, but in the end, they’re dead, and they’re going in the ground with you and I, and that’s the end of it.” And so I think I almost wanted it to sound that depressing, because to me, life was depressing. And I wanted my philosophy in life to mirror everything else I saw. That was the lens that I viewed everything, was truly value is simply a man-made principle that truly doesn’t exist.

So that’s a very honest, pragmatic, sober-minded view of life. Just because you lived this, and I’m so curious, again, as someone coming from another perspective now. But looking back, there are a lot of issues within atheism that are difficult to grapple with, nihilism, meaninglessness being one of them. But there are other questions that are very difficult to answer, I think, within the atheistic and naturalistic worldview, and I won’t name them for you. I want to see if there were any conundrums within the atheistic worldview that you scratched your head and said, “I’m not really sure about that. I don’t know how to answer that. I’m not sure if science will actually provide the answers that we need.” You had mentioned earlier that you were a very strong antitheist, and oftentimes with strong antitheism comes a strong confidence that your worldview is true, and for all of these reasons. But I wondered if there were any inherent doubts for you, as you, at the same time, were projecting this strength of persona of atheism. 

Yeah. I think the first true intellectual objection that I had to really look myself in the mirror was a few months before I became a Christian. I was still very much involved in my atheism, and a local pastor that had heard of me had invited me to have a meeting with him. And I very much agreed, because I loved nothing more than to have one-on-one conversations with pastors. And   so I met with him, and we talked a lot about some of the issues we’ve already discussed, and one of those was dealing with death and how you deal with people that are involved in that, whether it be the death of a loved one. And he said, “Roger, I want you to put yourself in my shoes for a second. I want you to pretend that you’re a pastor and that you’re in my shoes.” And I said, “Okay.” And he said, “I want to tell you a true story that happened a few weeks ago.” And he said, “I had a couple here, mother and father, loving couple, devout Christians. The mother had a baby that was stillborn. The baby did not make it. They had named this baby. They had painted the walls of this baby’s room. They had picked out all the outfits for this child. And as a pastor, I’m driving to the hospital, and I’m thinking of the words that I have to say to this mother and to this father that are holding their baby.” And he said, “Thankfully, we were able to turn it into a moment of celebration, in that you’re going to see that child again. You will be with your child in eternity.” He said, “Roger, I want you to play the role of me right now. How would you have responded with your worldview to that family?” And I think in that moment, it took the issue off of me because it was easy for me to say, “Well, hey, life is meaningless. I’m only here for a little bit. I’m going to have as much fun as I can.” But in the first moment in my life, my feet were held to the fire on how do you respond to grief? How do you respond to suffering as an atheist?

Because it was easy for me to put the telescope on God and say, “Well, why would God allow this?” But then instead to turn that telescope back on me and say, “Okay, if you can’t explain God’s account for suffering, how do you explain that account apart from God? How are you able to give that answer?” And I think that question wrestled with me for months and months and months, and it kept me up at night.

And even now, as a pastor, and I get to talk to atheists that maybe have a similar question, and I get to use that example that worked in my life. And so that was something that—obviously it’s an emotional ploy, but there is an intellectual side of how do we have an account for that suffering if nihilism truly is put into practice? And I think that that was something that really was effective in my testimony.

That’s very interesting and actually insightful, in terms of him asking you to consider something from your own worldview. Were there any other issues? Obviously, you are a thinker, you are a debater, and you knew the issues coming from the atheistic perspective. Were there any that you just scratched your head, like, “I’m not sure why there’s something rather than nothing?” Or, “How did the universe arise out of nothing?” Or the fine tuning of the universe? Or consciousness? 

Sure. Yeah, well, my thesis is on the second premise of the Kalam cosmological argument, and so I’m looking at William Lane Craig’s work in the last ten years, specifically from 2006 until today, with the Borde-Guth-Vilenkin theorem, and basically, as we see the expansion of the universe and we’re starting to see more and more through the Hubble telescope, and less than 100 years ago, in the late 1920s, and so I have a passion for the origins and the beginning of the universe. But what’s interesting is that was never an issue, I think, that I really grappled with when I was an atheist. I think the best argument, in terms of an intellectual argument, which again was innately emotional, was probably what CS. Lewis grappled with in Mere Christianity. It’s funny because I talk about politics, and my mom was dominated by politics, and I was dominated by, I would say, my mom’s politics. And of course, going door to door, missing school in 2007, because I was going door to door, telling people to vote for the president that I wanted to vote for. That was very much my view, is, “Okay, let’s get God out of the way, and let’s focus on real world issues.”

And I had a friend. His name is Tim. He’s a pastor here in Lebanon. But he was my one Christian friend that did go to church, and he did live out his faith. And I remember he would ask me, he said, “Roger, why do you hate Christians so much?” And I focused on homophobia. I focused on women who don’t have the rights that they should because of Christianity. And I remember Tim saying, “Well, Roger, why is that wrong? Why is it wrong? Let’s say Christians are homophobic, hypothetically. Why is that wrong?” And I would say, “Well, that’s wrong because it’s humanity,” and blah, blah, blah. And eventually he got me to eventually run into my nihilism, in that I’m so angry about all of these issues. And then finally, “Roger, what standard are you using to say that Christians are immoral for these actions that they take?” And I think finally figuring out, “Well, wait a second, I think certain things are objectively evil and some things are objectively good. Well, wait a second, I can’t do that. I have to argue moral relativism. There’s no other way out of that.” And so then, finding myself looking at the arguments for moral relativism and subjective morality, but then finding out that, yeah, that doesn’t do it for me, because if moral relativism is true the way I need it to be true, it has to be a prerequisite. Well, then I don’t get to have the moral outrage that I truly feel when it comes to why certain Christians do this and why self righteousness exists and why judgmental people exist. And so I think it really was objective moral values and duties. If they exist, what standard do I have? And eventually I realized, “Well, some of this is self evident. There are objective moral values.” And that one was tough for me, too, as an atheist, I would say.

But I guess, too, I want to appreciate the fact that as a sober-minded thinker, a debater, someone who was willing to weigh the ideas for what they were, you were willing to admit that objective moral values and duties don’t fit within the box of naturalism. That they are not consistent with your worldview. Again, for those who might be listening and are a little bit confused by that, I guess maybe you can speak to the fact that atheists have a sense of right and wrong, right? And can be very moral people. 

Yeah.

But their ability to ground that sense of right and wrong is-

Exactly. Yeah. And I tell people all the time, jokingly, I know a lot of atheists that are a lot better on the surface than some of the Christians that I’ve met and talked to. And as Paul writes in Romans, he says, “The law was written on their hearts.” It’s not that you have to read the Bible. When Moses had the Ten Commandments, I’m assuming they knew, “Thou shalt not kill,” before he revealed the Ten Commandments. And so it’s not just the knowledge, but it is where is that seed? Okay, I’ve never been taught that killing children recreationally is evil. What makes that self evident? And so we all have that self evidence, no matter what our philosophical or ideological belief is. The question then becomes what is the seed? What is what is written on our hearts, as Paul says in the book of Romans. And so certainly, yeah, that is definitely something that I think a lot of atheists will straw man and say, “Well, no. I’m a good person. I do a lot of good.” And that’s not the argument. So yeah.

So it sounds like, in your journey, that you were having not only some intellectual doubts, some dissonance perhaps, with regard to your own worldview intellectually, but also existentially, that you were depressed because of the purposelessness and the meaninglessness of life, I mean to the point where you were willing to write a suicidal note. And obviously, thankfully, that did not come to fruition. But you mentioned in your story that you found yourself in a church. And so I’m curious. Were you invited? Was it because of your felt need that perhaps there’s something more? Or maybe I need to give this a second look. I mean, the thought of such a strong antitheist sitting in a worship service in a church? I guess I’m just wanting to know how you got from A to Z here. 

Yeah, no. And so it’s funny because, my junior year, I took an art class with a lady by the name of Shelley Osborne. Shelley Osborne was who I would call obnoxiously Christian. She was not enough to say, “I believe in God,” but she had to wear the cross around her neck, and she was obnoxious. And I did not like her, and I didn’t even know her, but I didn’t like her. And my friends knew, you’re going to take an art class with the obnoxious Christian. You’re the obnoxious atheist, and so my friends literally took that class with me as spectators, because they knew that I was going to challenge her. And I think it was like the third week, and she starts talking about art history, and she’s showing Christian art, she’s showing these different levels of Christian art. And I immediately raise my hand, and I start asking her, “Mrs. Osborne, is it true you believe that a man survived in a giant fish for three days? Because if you believe that, I’ve got some ocean front property for you that I’d like to sell you. You believe in the talking serpent. You believe in all of this. You believe in the story of Noah on the boat,” and I mean, just humiliating her in class in front of all these students. My friends, they’re in the corner, and they’re like, “This is perfect. This is fun.”

And I remember Mrs. Osborne, she said, “Roger, I can’t give you my testimony in a public school class,” and she moved on. But it was afterwards she came up to me, and she said, “Roger, if you really have questions about my faith, I’m going to do something out of the ordinary. I’m going to invite you to have a meeting with my pastor, and you are allowed to ask him any question you want to.” And so again, my rule, if a pastor invited me, I accepted. And so the next day, she took me to her church, which happens to be the church that I’m sitting in. And I met Matt Taylor, who happens to now be my boss and my lead pastor. And I met Matt Taylor, and we had a two-hour dialogue where I asked him all of my gotcha questions. Those are my checkmate questions that I knew no Christian could answer. And the conversation was very uneventful, because I don’t remember much of the content of what we talked about. Neither of our minds were changed, but I remember afterwards, as I got up to leave, he came up, and he hugged me, and he said, “Hey, you want to do lunch tomorrow?” And it was the first time in my life where a Christian, after I had just spent two hours decimating his worldview and telling him why he was basically an intellectual idiot, he had embraced me and said, “Hey, let’s hang out. Let’s do some stuff,” and so what began was the most unlikely friendship in the history of Lebanon, Missouri, the most well-known lead pastor and the most well-known atheist. And Matt Taylor became my best friend in the entire world. He became the person that I called. We never talked religion beyond debate, and I never asked for prayer. But when I needed someone to listen to me, Matt was the person I called, apart from being a pastor or a minister.

And so I tell people all the time, 1 Peter 3:15 is kind of the apologetics verse. “Be prepared to give an answer to anyone who asks it of the hope that is in you, but do so with gentleness and respect.” And if we don’t do it with gentleness and respect, having an answer will so often fall on deaf ears, because no atheist has ever converted to Christ because they lost a debate. I’ve never met an atheist that said, “Okay, your points are better than my points. You win. I’ll be a Christian.” There’s obviously much more to that. It is how we present ourselves. And so the next morning, I write my suicide note, I call the suicide hotline, I pass out on my bed, and I wake up the next morning as alone and defeated as I had ever felt. And I remember saying, “I need to be around the one person who has loved me throughout all of this, and his name happens to be Matt Taylor.” And so I went to the First Baptist Church not to be a Christian, but because I felt that that’s where I needed to be, because that’s where Matt was.

That’s extraordinary! So from the initial meeting, and he said, “Let’s do lunch.” I just am curious what that looked like. You met for lunch. You said you didn’t debate. Was it just getting to know you like a friend and hanging out? What did that look like? And for how long did that last? 

Yeah. It’s funny, in the few months of my atheism, he taught me how to drive a stick shift. And so I was 17, and I didn’t have my driver’s license because my parents had never taken me out to drive. I had failed the driver’s test. And Matt said, “Hey, meet me at the church at 11:00.” And so he taught me how to drive a stick shift. And then I went and got my driver’s license. And he’s a big Pittsburgh Steelers fan. I’m a big Atlanta Falcon fan. So we would talk football, and we would argue why the Falcons are better than the Steelers. And he was a right wing conservative, and he would say that from the pulpit. I was a far left liberal. And so we would argue politics, and we would have fun with it. And he truly got to know me in a span of a few months, more so than probably any friend I had ever had.

Wow. So he really just invested in you just because he loved you as a friend. 

Yeah. And I was so used to Christians saying, “Hey, I’ll pray for you,” and I never heard from them again. And my response to that was always, “You pray for me, and I’ll think for you,” because it was so condescending, and it was so much…. Christians were so focused on the afterlife that they were missing what was happening in that moment, and all it would have taken was ten minutes to realize, “There’s something else with this kid. There’s something going on here,” and they were so focused on my eternity, which is important. As a pastor, I’m very much into that. I think we need to be into that, but we have to minister to people where they’re at. And Matt ministered to where I was at, and he did it with gentleness and respect, and it opened my heart.

Through all those months together, did he ever bring up kind of God-focused conversations, or did he just let you become open to go wherever you felt comfortable? 

Yeah, no. We did. And it got to the point where he broke those walls down, where he could give me his testimony, and he can tell me about the impossible things that God had done in his life, and instead of me getting into debate mode, I think I was willing to listen to them. Now, granted, my response typically was, “Hey, Matt. That’s great. I appreciate that you believe that,” but I think it humanized it to an extent where it wasn’t just a sales pitch. I always said Christians are like timeshare people. “Hey, I’ve got a place that you can stay for the weekend, but you have to listen to my presentation,” and so many Christians maybe wanted to be my friend, and then I realized, “Oh, wait a second, this is a timeshare. You just want me to listen to your sales pitch. Okay, well, no, I’m out, because I thought you actually wanted to be with me. It turns out you just wanted to make your little sales pitch.” Matt ceased that in my life. He was a Christian that it wasn’t just a timeshare presentation, but he was able to make it real in a way that I had actually never seen before, and so he taught me a lot without necessarily beating me over the head with a Bible.

That’s really beautiful. But through your relationship, you were still, I guess, going downhill emotionally in your own life, really despairing, I guess, and to the point where you were willing, I guess of your own volition, to go to church. That I’m sure, in your mind, must have been a real point of desperation. But yet having been softened, I suppose, by having been with Matt and seeing the love and care that he showed-

Yeah, absolutely.

So tell me again a little bit more about what happened that morning. 

Yeah. It was funny because I did not want people to know I was there. I did not want people because my fear was that, everyone jokes about, “Well, if I walk into church, the steeple is going to burn down,” or something like that. Being a local celebrity and that my atheism was my identity, and I’m now going to the biggest Southern Baptist church in Lebanon, Missouri. I joked that it was like I became a Navy Seal. I became a special operations Tom Clancy splinter cell. Like, I snuck into that church and got to the balcony. And in our church, we have a lower level, and then we have an upper level. And I was able to get unscathed to the top left corner of the balcony, and I was able to sit by myself, away from everybody. Matt didn’t know I was there. I had to call Matt the next day, and say, “Hey, buddy. We need to have a conversation because there’s something I need to tell you.” But I was able to get into church and leave church basically unnoticed.

And what’s really cool about that as a pastor—I preach a handful of times a year on Sundays. And every time I will preach, I end it with an invitation. And that invitation is the top left corner of that balcony. And I get to point to the very balcony that I got to sneak into and the balcony that I became born again in, now preaching to 1000 people on a Sunday and saying, “Hey, maybe you’re in that balcony right now. Maybe that’s where you’re at.” And so it’s like we talk about how God writes these stories in our life. And it’s like, man, God wrote this out perfectly. Twelve years later, I still get to do that. And it was last month was my spiritual birthday, November 1, 2009. And every year, that’s the most important day of my life. And it’s a day of reflection and just a day of thanks, that God, you’ve put me in this position, like I don’t deserve this. And yet that’s how He works. And so it’s been really, really cool.

So what did you hear that morning that changed your mind and heart? Did you anticipate going in…. You went in stealth, and you weren’t probably sure why you were there. But then… So it was probably an approach avoidance in a way, but then you found yourself on the other side of the fence. 

Yeah. And I think my goal was truly not to get a gospel conversation or a presentation. I think my goal was to show up, hide, and then eventually, once the message was over, I was going to kind of sneak down to Matt and say, “Hey, buddy. Can we maybe go do lunch or something?” And so my goal was kind of to get to Matt. And I knew church is where he’s at. It’s easy to find a pastor on a Sunday morning. You don’t have to go searching for him. And the message itself, the content of the message, is not what really drew me in, but in that invitation, and I say that it was word for word. “If you lack value, meaning, or purpose, there is a God above that wants to know you,” and as Christians, we always joke like, “Man, Pastor, Preacher, that message really spoke to me this morning. I felt like you were preaching to me one on one.” That’s never been more literal in that moment. Because he inadvertently—it wasn’t like he knew I was there. He used the very lingo of how I saw life. I mean, meaning, value and purpose, that’s what he said.

And I tell people, and they think I’m being hyperbolic or figurative, I almost collapsed in my chair. And it really was a moment that—I say Saul to Paul. And it was a moment where I walked out of the church. I tell people I could have crab walked all the way to Pittsburgh. I was so happy. I didn’t know why. I couldn’t explain everything, but I knew I was born again. And so my whole life flashing in a moment, and I knew, “This is why I’m here, and this is my story.”

So the words “born again,” especially for those who are perhaps skeptics, skeptical,  of that kind of Christian language, that may seem a little bit off putting. What do you mean by born again? 

Yeah. No, I mean, and Paul talks about a new body, and we say born again, and it does become, and as a pastor, I’m always careful, because sometimes we get into that church lingo. But in that moment, realizing the gift of grace and realizing that I had spent my entire life sitting on God’s lap, just so I could slap Him in the face, and knowing that, for some people, it’s the struggle of, am I truly forgiven? And I think in that moment, as I was accepting Jesus, I was like, “God, do You really love me? Do You really understand all the things that I have done?” Because I had been living for the flesh, and yet in that moment—and when I say flesh, my meaning and purpose in life was what is happening right now? Because in the end, it’s all going to end. But to truly realize that there’s something beyond myself, and I think when I talk to my students, and I hear students present Jesus to people, and I say it’s very important. And as a former atheist, I would give this advice to any Christian: Do not present Jesus as a self-help coach. Do not present Jesus as Somebody who is going to fix all of your problems, because if that’s the case, there’s going to be a lot of former atheists that feel like they’ve been sold a bill of goods.

One of my favorite authors, J. Warner Wallace, he says, in Cold Case Christianity, he says, “I did not become a Christian because it works for me. I did not become a Christian because it makes life better. I became a Christian because Christianity is true, and it became real to me.” And so in that moment, making something that was once artificial, something that was once flat-out fake, in how I viewed it, it became real. It became authentic. And in that moment, I realized, “I’m leaving this a new creation. I am leaving this as a brand new person.” I’m still Roger, I still have the same struggles. And by the way, 29 years old, I still suffer from clinical depression. And that’s my testimony. God did not cure my depression. He did not remove a lot of the anguish that I had in life, but He gave me an opportunity to live with that and to live through that through His Son Jesus. And so I know that’s very churchy and it sounds very churchy, but I think even to the most hard atheist, he can hear that and say, “No. That’s not disingenuous. It may be a fairy tale, but it’s not disingenuous.” And I think that that’s important. It’s important to be real with people, because atheists need real. They need authenticity. And I think, as Christians, we need to thrive on that.

Yeah. And and I agree with you. There was something so profoundly real and true for you in that moment that allowed you to surrender, as it were, surrender this animosity, surrender everything that you had. Like you said, you were sitting on God’s lap to slap Him in the face. I can hear a skeptic in my mind saying, “Sometimes stories are too good to be true, and that’s what you wanted. You wanted this kind of meaning. You wanted purpose and value and dignity. And although you were sober-minded to accept it as an atheist, you no longer are, so you bought into this.” What about that? Of course, there’s been a huge transformation, but what about that morning that convinced you that it was true? 

Sure, yeah.

Now, J. Warner Wallace, I agree, and I believe that you believe that, too, that you believe Christianity not because it works, but because it’s true. Same as C.S. Lewis, right? But what convinced you? Of course, God is involved in all of this, and sometimes changing your mind or your heart is mysterious, and it’s a work of the Spirit of God. And at that moment, I’m sure it was much more profound than some kind of intellectual argument. 

Exactly.

But at the end of the day, the skeptical rebuttal. How would you respond to that? 

Yeah. Well, there has to be both, and so one could say, “Well, Roger, you contradicted yourself, because before you said no atheist has ever become a Christian because they lost a debate, but yet J. Warner Wallace says, ‘I became a Christian because Christianity is true,’ so how do those…?” And there has to be both. I appreciate Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, who say that there is something beyond myself, and even though we can get into the intellectual side, William Lane Craig, one of my favorite apologists, and of course I’m doing my thesis work on a lot of what he writes, but when he debates, he gives the intellectual arguments, the teleological argument, the cosmological argument, the moral argument, the ontological argument, all these big words that people are like, “Okay, great.” But he always ends every debate. He says the final argument is not much of an argument at all, but it’s what philosophers call a properly basic argument, which is that God can be personally experienced, He can be known apart from arguments. And so, as Christians, we believe in the Holy Spirit, and that’s not just church speak, right? I mean, that’s not just, “Oh, all of these things,” and some Christians don’t even know what they mean, but we literally believe, we literally believe that, when you become a Christian, that the Holy Spirit will come inside you. And we believe that as a born again Christian, you live with the Holy Spirit inside of you. That in itself—there has to be a level of self evidence to say, “Listen, I have personally experienced this.” Now, if you want to argue that and it’s like, “Well, that’s your experience versus my experience,” well, then that’s when we’re able to have an apologetical conversation and say, “Okay, that’s my experience. That’s our foundation, our pillars, our bedrock. We have that. Now let’s build arguments on top of that that will confirm or validate the emotional experience to make it intellectual.” And so from there, okay, there’s my testimony. Now let’s talk about the beginning of the universe. Now let’s talk about moral values and duties. Okay, let’s talk about the complexity of the human eye and let’s go from there. But I think there you’re able to bridge two conversations into one. And I think that that is very effective when dealing with atheists that are often going to have two different levels of questions, the emotional question and the intellectual question.

Right. And your story is such a beautiful marriage of the both. 

Like I said, it is God’s authorship in my life. And we talk about divine providence and all of that, and it has been a blessing to be able to share that testimony and to be able to baptize students every month that are very much in that position and to be able to say, “Hey, listen. God is using me as a vessel, and there’s days I wonder, ‘Am I qualified? Is this really…’” like, of all the people, my background, my testimony, and yet it’s just a confirmation every single day I’m exactly where God needs me.

Yeah. It really is beautiful, really, to listen to. And I imagine that people around you who have seen the transformation are just amazed that you no longer have to enter the church building like a Navy Seal. 

No, I walk through the front door now.

You’re on the front lines now. 

Yeah. Exactly. It’s amazing.

Right. So for those skeptics—and I love that you work with young people, because I’m sure you’re hearing all kinds of push back, so you’re on the front lines, just like I said. And so for those who are skeptics and who are listening in and are pushing back but yet open in some odd way, could you speak to them? What would you encourage them to do in dealing with this whole issue of God? 

Yeah. And I think it’s a great question, and I think if I have a student or even an adult that is grasping with that, or let’s say they’re not even grasping with it, they’ve made up their mind, and they say, “Hey, listen. God does not play a role,” I very much focus on the emotional versus the intellectual, kind of what we had talked about, finding out what those objections are. I think what you will find is that, from a naturalistic worldview, that this is all we have, nature is all… the observable universe, that’s it. Going into the question of, “Okay, and that’s great, and science is an amazing tool that we have,” but beyond that, when we talk about things that we experience every day, and I love focusing on human consciousness and music and poetry. Goodness gracious, I’m a 29-year-old man. I cannot watch Titanic without crying. I’ve never gotten through it without crying. It’s embarrassing. I can’t watch America’s Got Talent without seeing an audition that just makes me feel like, “Yes! This is it!” And I don’t mean to trivialize it, and yet I think we all have to have a standard, and we all have to have an account for, “Okay, this is how I explain this,” and there are so many atheists that are great, great people, and they do things in life that I envy on the goodness scale. But why are we putting that standard?

And going back to the pastor that I talked to years ago, and the mother holding the child, and the child has taken its last breath. What do you say? How do you respond? How do you do that with love and truth, but to give them hope? And I think that, for so many, and those that may be atheists, and they say, “Well, I can’t fit God into this this worldview that I have.” Don’t be afraid to ask questions, and don’t be afraid to go to Christians that have answers. Because here’s the thing: As Christians, we have a biblical account. We have 1 Peter 3:15, 2 Corinthians 10:5. Paul tells us we are to demolish arguments when we talk about the knowledge of God and that there are very real answers to very real questions. And if the only answers you’re getting are, “You’re going to hell,” or, “I’m going to pray for you,” find other answers, because there may be some other answers that may intellectually surprise you.

Yeah. That’s good advice. And some of that, again, is for the Christian, too. I hear that asking good questions is a good thing. But when I think of your story and I think of, whether it’s the art teacher in your life or Matt, Pastor Matt, and the way that he invested in you, even the way that the art teacher knew she may not have had the answers that you were seeking, but she knew someone who did. And resources. How would you commend Christians to engage? 

That’s so important. It’s so incredibly important. It reminds me of a conversation I had. It was my sophomore year science class, and I was talking to a Christian, well-meaning kid, good kid, and he asked me, he’s like, “Well, there’s no way you’re an atheist, and you believe in evolution, and yet why are there still monkeys? If evolution is true, then you evolved from a monkey, but there’s monkeys all around,” and it’s like, there’s an easy atheistic response to that. You actually don’t understand evolution. You’re not a biologist. Like, we did not evolve from monkeys. We evolved from apelike ancestors. Like, okay, I just destroyed what you felt was a checkmate response to me when, in all actuality, your response should have been, “Hey, listen, I believe in intelligent design. I believe in young earth creationism, or progressive creationism like Hugh Ross, whatever you believe in,” and instead of us always having the answer, instead saying, “Hey, listen. Let me recommend a book. Hugh Ross wrote a book. He’s got a ministry called Reasons to Believe. And all those objections you have, Hugh Ross, he’s an astrophysicist. He is so brilliantly smart. I would encourage you to go and watch one of his DVDs and then let’s talk about it. Let’s have coffee, and give me your response, because I would love to hear, as an atheist, like, how do you respond to some of those objections that he has?” And as a former atheist, I promise you, anytime somebody told me, “Watch this, and let’s talk about it,” I’ll always take him up on that. And sometimes, as Christians, that’s all we’ve got to do. We don’t have to be smart. We just have to know somebody who is smart. And through that, we’re able to have a lot of good conversations from it.

That’s really, again, excellent advice. Anything else about your story that you think we missed that you’d like to add before we finish? 

I will close with this: I wrote an article in a journal for our local apologetics network in the state of Missouri, and I implored parents and youth leaders. We are arming our children, our young adults. We are arming our students with rubber knives, and we are expecting them to go to gunfights when it comes to their faith. And “Jesus loves me, this I know,” is true if you’re a Christian, but the questions that are being asked as we continue into this world that we live in, a fallen world, a postmodern world, we have to understand that young people are leaving the faith in droves. And even with my apologetic background, I have conversations consistently with students that come home and say, “I’m done. I’m not doing it anymore. Because I was never given an answer. I was never given an account.” And thankfully, some of those students we can try and win back, and we can have those conversations. Do not take this issue lightly. Do not take this issue with a grain of salt. It is a very real issue, and it is something that, as Christians, we need to be ready to fight. And I don’t mean fight in a violent sense, but we need to be ready with our students and our young adults and our children. We need to arm them with the proper material, proper education, so that when they do go off to college, as Jesus says, to love the Lord your God with all your mind. We need to start teaching our students to love God with all their minds. And that would be my core thing that I always want to stress to parents. We’re in this together. Let’s do it. So that’s how I would end it.

No, that’s fantastic. And I think that applies to ourselves as well. Right? So many of us are ill equipped to deal with what’s happening in culture, and the issues that are just like a tsunami that are coming at us. We all need to be prepared, right? 

Very much so.

You’ve brought that up many times through 1 Peter 3:15. And I so appreciate that. Roger, you are just such an inspiration in so many ways. You are a voice of wisdom, a voice of reason, obviously a voice of passion for what you do, that this is something so incredibly real for you that you’ve made it the front line of your life. And I so appreciate your story. Your testimony is powerful. I think it gives hope for people who know others in their life and think they will never believe. I mean, you were that guy. 

Yeah.

And now you’re this guy. I mean, look at you now, and I just think, “Praise God!” No one is too far from His reach, and His plans are perfect. So I am so grateful for you coming on to tell your story, and I’m excited for those who are listening. So thank you so much for coming on. 

Oh, I appreciate that, Jana. Thank you for having me on, and thank you for all that you do and your ministry as well. And you certainly are fighting the good fight alongside, so we appreciate all that you do.

Thanks for tuning in to Side B Stories to hear Roger’s story. You can find out more about Roger and the resources he recommended in this episode in the episode notes below. For questions and feedback about this episode, you can contact me through our website at, again, www.sidebstories.com. If you’re a skeptic or atheist who would like to connect with Roger or a former atheist from this podcast with questions, please contact us on our Side B Stories website, and we’ll get you connected. Again, I hope you enjoyed it and that you’ll follow, rate, review, and share this podcast with your friends and social networks. In the meantime, I’ll be looking forward to seeing you next time, where we’ll see how another skeptic flips the record of their life. 

Through a serious study of philosophy, Dr. John Wise began to doubt his Christian beliefs.  After 25 years of atheism, he began to question his disbelief.

John’s Resources:

• Podcast: ‘The Christian Atheist’: https://pod.link/1553077203
• Podcast: No Compromise
• Podcast: Simple Gifts
• Website: https://wisewordsforyouroccasion.wordpress.com

Resources recommended by Mark:

• Surprised by Joy, C.S. Lewis

Episode Transcript

Hello, and thanks for joining in. I’m Jana Harmon and you’re listening to Side B Stories, where we see how skeptics flip the record of their lives. Each podcast, we listen to someone who has once been an atheist or skeptic, but who became a Christian against all odds. You can hear more of these stories on our Side B Stories website at www.sidebstories.com. We also welcome your comments on these stories on our Side B Stories Facebook page. 

How do we know what is really real? Can we know that God exists? How do we know that what we believe about the world around us, much less what we believe about our own lives, is even true? We may not be able to hold to our beliefs with 100% certainty, but can we at least hold to a level of confidence that our beliefs are true? And how can we know? And what exactly is faith? Where does knowledge end and faith began? Is faith simply blind? Or is it grounded upon what we can know? Do only religious people have faith? Or is some kind of faith inevitable to anyone who does not know everything about everything? 

These big questions about how we know things, religious or not, are important ones, especially for those who are deep thinkers, who are philosophically minded, who are intently searching for answers to the mysteries of knowledge and life. These kinds of questions can lead towards skepticism, towards deconstruction of faith and rejection of belief in God. But these questions can also be the ones that lead towards a faith and belief in God. 

In today’s story, philosopher and former atheist Dr. John Wise once rejected his Christian beliefs for agnosticism and then full-blown atheism. After 25 years of disbelief, he rejected atheism through a journeying back to the reality and the truth of God. After all those years, what was so compelling to convince him to return? I hope you’ll come along to find out. 

Welcome to Side B Stories podcast, John. It’s great to have you with me today. 

I’m really glad to be here.

Terrific.

So tell me a little bit about your life right now, kind of in a nutshell, and then we’ll walk back into your story. 

Perfect. Right now, I am teaching philosophy at the University of Arizona Global Campus, online. So I got my PhD from the University of California, Irvine, in 2004.

while I’m teaching philosophy at University of Arizona Global Campus, my wife and I podcast together, and she does all the technical stuff. And we began a podcast called The Christian Atheist, telling my story of how I converted from 25 years as an atheist professor of philosophy back to Christ. And in that podcast, which we’ve been doing now for about two years, we do some pretty heavy philosophical lifting. And so Jenny and I do a sort of subsidiary podcast on the same channel called No Compromise, in which she and I talk together, and hopefully she’s able to soften some of my hard edges and make clear some of the deep and difficult things that I try to elucidate on The Christian Atheist. And we have one other podcast called Simple Gifts, in which I try to make the point that everything in the Western world points to God.

I really, truly believe that there is no truth that does not point to God. And so therefore, I try, in that podcast—I never preach on it. All I do is read literature, poetry, whatever it is, and I invite everyone to come and listen. And hopefully, as C.S. Lewis said, all of the books, if you’re an atheist, will turn against you, and they will point you to God.

Wow! It sounds like you’re very busy and that you have some incredibly substantive and intriguing things that you’re talking about. And we’ll put all of those links in the episode notes. Before you were 25 years an atheist, you were a Christian. So that gives me some indication that you grew up in a home where Christianity was present. Why don’t you take us back to your boyhood, your childhood? Talk to us about your family, your community.

My mother was definitely an evangelical Christian. She had Christian radio on 24/7, and so I grew up hearing people like Charles Stanley and Charles Swindoll, Through the Bible, all of those things I grew up with. And I made a decision for Christ myself when I was five or six. It was very real to me and kept me going all through my early adulthood. But my father was—I guess I would classify my father as an agnostic. A very brilliant man. He fought in World War II. He was at Pearl Harbor when it was hit. I lost him in ‘95. But I loved my father deeply. He loved my mother deeply. And I used to tell people when I was growing up that I got my faith from my mother and my ethics from my father.

So I grew up in a traditional home, in the sense that we embraced all the traditional values that would have shaped the Western world. And my father was a big believer in discussions, and so every night when we would come home and share dinner together, we would discuss topics ranging the entire, from politics to literature. So we discussed everything, and I guess that laid the foundation for me to become deeply interested in philosophy later in life.

So, yeah, my home was, in that sense, a divided home, between the Christianity of my mother and the agnosticism of my father.

Was that challenging for you as a young child growing up? You had an expressed belief in God, but did you ever question Christianity growing up in a home where your father was not a believer? Did he attend church with you all or any of that? 

Yes, we did. We went to a mainline denomination church, United Church of Christ. My mother thought it was important for us to go to church as a family, and my father would go to that church, whereas he wouldn’t have gone to a more conservative one. But I don’t think I felt it ever as a super deep tension. I guess that might be a result of the psychology of children. It was what I knew, and it was a nice mix, actually, because my father and my mother were both very open people in terms of intellect. They were interested in everything. And so, although my father, I think, was an agnostic, I wouldn’t say he was exactly hostile to faith. He never certainly gave me any difficulties about my growing up with faith and was very open to talk about things like that. So I don’t think it was a hostile environment, but it certainly left things open for me, I think, for later, for sure.

Yeah, I would imagine so. But it’s good at least there was some sense of consensus, going to church together, and a sense of, I guess, community in that way, that that hostility wasn’t there. So you grew up with a very evangelical mother, a mainline church, and an agnostic father. That’s quite a mix. 

That is a mix.

But evidently you maintained your faith through childhood, through adolescence. How long did you hang on to this expressed belief in Christ and Christianity? 

Up through high school graduation, and then I went to four years of Bible college.

Okay, so this was pretty solid belief for you. 

Oh, yeah. I was planning on being a pastor.

Okay. 

And so I spent four years in Bible college, became interested in philosophy in the midst of that, and studied it with one of the most brilliant men I’ve ever met in my entire life. Bob Willey. If you’re out there, Bob, still today, I adore you. You’re a fantastic man. You taught me a lot, and I hope I wasn’t a disappointment in walking away from God. So he was amazing.

But Bible college was a double-edged sword for me, because when I got there, I was used to my family’s sort of freewheeling notions, and Bible college presented me with a community of faith that was much more rigid in its understanding of things than I think I was ready to deal with. And it became overwhelming for me. And what I tend to tell people is that that community of faith gave me a vision of Christianity that I tried to live up to, and it felt utterly impossible to live up to. And so I began to question its validity, and by the time I graduated from Bible college, I was probably well on my way to agnosticism, maybe already there. And it wasn’t until graduate school that I actually pulled the plug, but I was certainly deeply questioning by the end of my Bible college career.

So when you say you were deeply questioning, obviously you mentioned that it was a hard standard to live up to. And of course, the biblical standard is quite high. It’s perfection. Hard to reach that. But I know that there are certain expressions of Christianity that really promote that kind of works-oriented, earn your way kind of acceptance with God, and that can be very daunting. But when you say questioning, especially as you were studying philosophy, and probably that was opening up some intellectual doors and questions about another aspect, probably the truth or the validity of the belief, much less living up to it. Were there both kinds of pushing back against the Christian faith by the time you left? How would you describe it? 

It wasn’t a sense of trying to live up to the perfection of God and failing to do that. I was okay with that. I’m still okay with that today, fortunately, because that’s a higher standard than I’ll ever reach. And trust me, I’m not a good man. I don’t think of myself as a good man. And there’s plenty of evidence that I’m not. That I’m a Christian now, it really isn’t a reflection on my Bible college days on that score. What it was was a sense in which I was doing a lot of evangelistic work while I was in Bible college, and I began to think to myself, “Am I selling the right product here? There seems to be holes in this,” and the more I thought about it, the less certain I was that it was the right answer to the questions that were being asked by the world. Science seemed to have more certainty than I could find in Christianity.

And I think when I say I couldn’t live up to it, I think I mean more that the Christian message, the Christian story that I was being given, seemed to have holes that I couldn’t plug up. And because I couldn’t plug them up, I began to think what Christianity was for me was an attempt to convince myself of the truth of these things. And I think what set me free ultimately to come back was the recognition—and we’re anticipating things here, but—was the recognition that all of those doubts don’t need to be answered and that you’ll never get to certainty. And that’s why we call it faith. And that was, I think, the huge lesson that I needed to learn. And it took me 25 years to get there.

As you were experiencing the doubts, and you’re deciding, “There are too many holes. I can’t seem to fill the holes or find the answers, ” Was it just a gradual deterioration or a disintegration of your faith or belief? Was it a sudden kind of process? And were you going through this alone? Were you asking, say, your philosophy professor? Were you asking the questions, or to a science professor or anyone to help you fill up those holes? 

The process of education for me… I’m deeply introverted. I don’t know if you know some of the psychological tests that evaluate your personality. On introversion, I am like all the way down. I am such a deep introvert that I almost can’t get out of it. I’m close to being zero in extroversion. So I lived inside my head, and so helping other people, okay, I would maybe talk to other people a little bit, but not much. Almost everything was done inside my head. I always tell people that I learned in spite of school, never because of school. So school might help me, point me to a direction that I could explore myself, but I lived in books, and I lived in my mind. And so I searched to try to find the answers, to plug them up for myself, and this was probably very arrogant, because I didn’t really trust anybody else to answer those questions.

Certainly the questions that I asked of the evangelical leaders, the answers I got and still get to this day when I ask those same questions, don’t… I get this dogma instead of serious thought about what it is you’re asking. And they return to these pat answers. And I’ve learned that pat answers are almost always wrong at some level. And for me, getting to the point of being able to allow those extra strings to fly off and recognizing that those extra strings are never going to be tied up because I am, as Socrates says, a human who has fundamental limitations, and the only Person who knows everything is the Person that I stopped believing in, God. And so any human being is fundamentally ignorant. It’s unavoidable, and it’s okay to be there.

So this was, in a sense, an epistemological… I wouldn’t call it a crisis of sorts, but almost an awakening of your own, like you say, our own human, what they call a finitude or limitations. You’re telling me, “No, we can’t find certainty, but it’s not so lost that we can’t know anything,” right? So in a way, you’re pushing away from God because of a lack of knowledge, of being able to know for certain that God exists because of some holes that were coming. So I guess my question is: Did you move from your lack of confidence in the absolute certainty of knowledge to not a total run to relativism or postmodernism? I presume that you landed somewhere in between? 

I don’t look at faith as a leap in the dark. I think of it as stepping out on what you have found to work most plausibly and moving forward with it, being willing to say, “I don’t know, but this seems to be the best way forward,” and then moving forward with that.

So that’s rational. I think getting to that point and every step along the way is rational. But there comes a point where you’re at a fork in the road, and you’ve got to choose. In fact, I was just reading just today, because I knew I was coming on with you, and C.S. Lewis talks, in Surprised by Joy, about the moment of his conversion, and he says something there that I found absolutely profound. It’s about a paragraph long, but he thinks that that perhaps was the one really free choice in his life. He stood there, and there were no requirements to go one way or the other, but he knew that choosing at that moment was the most momentous choice you could make.

And that’s exactly what it was like for me when I came back to Christ, because I told people, Christians who had talked to me, that I would never come back because I’d thrown the switch, and I didn’t know how to come back. And yet there was a moment where—and it came with my relationship with Jenny—where that switch opened up again, and I was standing there and it was, in a way, dispassionate, and it felt like a moment of freedom. Like you choose one way or the other and everything hangs on the choice, but you’ve got no… I hate to say you don’t have any rational reason, but in a sense you don’t. It’s like the rationality comes from the choice, rather than the other way around, and you’re stuck with a value choice instead of a rational choice, because both sides have a rational story that’s compelling. And this time I had a reason to choose Christ.

As you were leaving the whole idea of Christianity behind, and you said that you were an atheist for 25 years. You taught philosophy as an atheist philosopher, which means, of course, that you embraced a different worldview, a non-theistic, non-God, non-supernatural worldview, which, as a thinker, a deep thinker that you are, it makes me wonder how much you embraced the naturalistic worldview, took that on in terms of even your own rationality. You speak of Lewis and how, in the naturalistic worldview, it’s hard to have grounds for trusting your own rationality, even to make rational choices. So I’m wondering, as an atheist, how much did you consider these implications and these losses that you had in the Christian worldview that you no longer had at your access? 

That is a fantastic question, and it is something that I look back on now and see the blindnesses that you live in once you accept that worldview. There are very few real atheists, because being an atheist means you abandon completely the sense of any transcendent truth or value. And you can’t live like that as a human being. You just can’t. Because living as a human being means that you’re valuing things at a level beyond simply being able to explain it away. And so you’re right, my position was undermining itself. And that’s why I think ultimately I came back. And by the time by the time I actually made my conversion back, I was wanting desperately to come back but found no way, because I saw how empty it had all become.

And also, I guess, one of the things that helped keep me tied in is that I knew the Christian worldview as well as any Christian did. I rejected it. And yet I had deep respect and love for Christians and for Christ. And one of the verses that kept haunting me—was Hebrews 11:6: “He who comes to God must believe that He is and that He is a rewarder of those who seek Him.” Now, I had no problem with the second part of that verse, all through my atheism. It’s like, “If there’s a God, He’s a good God, and He rewards those who seek Him.” And I found that to be true throughout my life. Whenever I was looking for things, it seemed as though things came together to help me find the truth. And so that was the easy part for me. The hard part was believing that there was a God behind all of that.

You speak to trying to find the god behind the universe, were not any of those philosophical arguments, like Aristotle’s, the argument for first cause, any of those kinds of things that you need…. 

Oddly enough, though, I did not find them at all compelling.

Nothing was compelling from a rational sense, so that’s what I hear you telling me. So if a Christian would have come up to you during your atheism and said, “Here, I have these arguments for God from a philosophical point of view, from a scientific point of view. There has to be something outside the natural world,” et cetera, all of that, would any of that ever have made a difference to you? 

No. Not a bit. I knew them better than most of the Christians who presented them to me, and so they had no effect whatsoever. I knew them.

But they were not convincing for you? 

No.

I think this is probably one of the hugest—is that a word—issues in the apologetics world. Is that we have these compelling arguments, but somehow they just seem to bounce off, as if they have no effect at all, why then do you think that this evidence that’s presented to you would have had no effect? Why do you suppose that was? 

Because when you make the fundamental choice at the beginning, you are shaping also what you mean by evidence. And so when you choose to believe that the world has no fundamental value at the base, essentially what you do is you abandon transcendence. We talked about the materialist worldview. So materialism is essentially abandoning any notion of transcendence. So any value is value within the imminent structure of the world, and therefore nothing can point outside of the world. And therefore, you’ll never find evidence for God because it doesn’t exist. By your very starting point, it doesn’t exist. So unless you’re willing to entertain… and I talked with atheists about this, too. It’s like unless you’re willing to entertain the notion that something would be evidence for God, then why are you looking for evidence for God? Because if it can’t possibly exist, you’ve decided the question in advance, and nothing that I give you is going to provide evidence for God. And I was there. I understand it.

That’s why I say, at the end of every one of my podcasts, I know both sides of the looking glass, and I know them with open eyes. I recognize that, when you’re an atheist, you’ve made a choice, a fundamental choice, and you’ve concealed it from yourself as a fundamental choice. You think of yourself as an open person who’s willing to entertain any evidence that will come to them. But you’ve decided what counts as evidence in advance, and therefore there is no evidence that will point to God, none. No matter what it is. And I believe that is true of those who say things like, “If I could only go back and witness the miracles of Jesus, then I could believe.” No, you couldn’t. You’ve already decided the question. And just being present there at a miracle would not do it. You would explain the miracle away, because that’s what I did.

Yeah. I think that, if anybody looks at any feeds on Twitter, that’s oftentimes what you’ll see, are those just carte blanche dismissals of God. That there’s no evidence. There couldn’t be any evidence. it’s the million dollar question: So if someone is just so…. Their starting point is dismissive of God, of anything supernatural, anything miraculous, there’s no way, then what is it that breaches that? What is it that causes the shift, the change, the movement from closed to open? So back to your story. You were saying that there were holes, through which you entered towards atheism, but yet there were holes in atheism that brought you back towards faith. So talk us through what allows someone who is—you said you saw no way back. 

Right.

So walk us through that. Just because I’m on the edge of my seat here. 

So T.S. Elliott, who’s one of my favorite poets, says, at the end of Four Quartets, “We shall not cease from exploration. And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.” And that’s exactly what happened to me. Over those 25 years, I circled again all of those things that made me leave belief in God and came to recognize, when I got to the end of it, that I made the wrong choice back when I threw that switch. And the wrong choice in the sense of I threw away everything that mattered to me. I have always been deeply, deeply in love with meaning and therefore with literature, with science, and I came to see that, if I really wanted to believe in those things and their value and the value of the people around me as sparks of God, as something that has inherent value, if I wanted to believe in those things, that human beings are inherently valuable and that all of those pursuits that we as human beings engage in are valuable, then I needed to also believe in a transcendent notion of value. And if I’m going to do that, I believe in God already.

And that’s kind of where I was in 2019, when I first met Jenny, and she was talking to the people in the church. She said one day, “I walked past everybody as they were all sitting in a room praying for the church atheist John Wise to come to Christ,” and I walked past, totally blasé, had no idea what was going on.” And she said she wanted to tell them, “You don’t understand. He already believes. He just doesn’t know it himself. He’s deceived himself about it.” And she was right.

Interesting. Yeah. It sounds a bit like C.S. Lewis, doesn’t it? All the things that he valued—joy, meaning, beauty—all the things that he really valued were illusory in a naturalistic worldview, and they were not anything that he could hold on to in any substantive way because they, for him in that worldview, weren’t real. But the things that he could believe in were mundane. 

Yeah. Oddly enough, the reason I walked away was that I didn’t have confidence in the faith. And when I come back, I come back recognizing how incredibly ignorant I am, that I don’t have all the answers, that I’m not even certain there’s a God, but I believe it now at a level that I believe my presence here in my house. That’s as certain as we ever get about anything, I think. And so I left the faith to find certainty and then wandered about in this area where I was looking for it, and when I finally came back to faith, I found the level of certainty that human beings can find about anything in faith. I’ve got no reason ever to leave again, because my belief in God is as solid now as the fact that I’m sitting here talking to you right at this moment. And that’s not something I ever had before in my life. And if it took 25 years to get here, thank God for those 25 years.

You obviously seem very confident in your belief in God, that it is, in a sense, true that Christ is the truth. Oftentimes in apologetics, we’ll be going after the rational arguments. But here what you’re telling us is, again from C.S. Lewis, is it’s almost like the argument for desire, that there are things in our own humanity that cry out for satisfaction, whether it’s meaning, we’re constantly searching for meaning. Like he says, if there’s thirst, well, there’s such a thing as water. If there’s hunger, there’s such a thing as food. And for us, as humans, we search for meaning, value, for dignity, for all of those things that make life worth living. If we crave those things, then they’re probably real in some sense, not just make believe that they’re actually there. And I know an atheist might be shaking his head on that one, but we’re constantly craving to make sense of our own lives. And I think what you’re telling us is that that really can only be found if the transcendent exists in the person of God. All of those things that we crave in our humanity. And so, in your atheism, you knew, at least you came to a place where you knew, that those things were not accessible. Really, they don’t exist. Those values, those objective standards, again the things we crave in our humanity.  

Yep. They’re real or they’re not. And if they’re not real, if you go down that pathway, I think we end up in Auschwitz. I think that is the pathway that leads us to all of the horrors that we human beings are capable of. That’s another reason that, after 25 years, I look at it, and I say, “There are two paths, fundamentally two paths, and you choose them at a level of value and not really at a level of rationality.” And I have to be careful there because I make all of the rational arguments. And what allowed me to come back to Christ was recognizing that belief in God is a completely rational thing to do, and that, in fact, there is no rationality outside of some notion of belief in… okay, if you don’t want to call it God, in some sort of transcendent reality. And for me, we keep going back to C.S. Lewis. So I read C.S. Lewis’s probably Surprised by Joy back when I was in Bible college, but never during those 25 years. And I’ve read it several times since. And it’s like I find my life followed that same pattern that Lewis talks about.

Now, I know that part of your story, too, was, when you think about the embodiment of value, the embodiment of, well, God through Christ. Of course, that’s one thing. But when you actually see the embodiment of Christ through a person here, that it can actually help you imagine who God is and what Christianity is and who Christians are, at least in some sense, that is attractive in a way that perhaps it may not have been when you get other poor examples. 

Talk us through that part of your journey, because I know that your wife, Jenny, was a big part of you really seeing how the transcendent can become incarnated, as Lewis says, that we can become like little Christs in a sense. Not God himself. We ourselves are not divine. It’s just that Christ in us is being seen by those who don’t know Him. And somehow, for you, it seems like that was the part of your journey, that you were drawn back towards God because of Jenny. Why don’t you talk about that? 

Yeah. Sure. It was the capstone, sort of the finishing touch that God crafted in that 25-year journey. So if you had asked me, while I was an atheist, what the process of education and experience amounts to, I would have said that everything is a process of disillusionment. And what I meant by that is, from the time you’re a child, you’re taught that the world is in such in such a way, and slowly, as you grow, all of those illusions, all of the magic is taken away from you. And at the end, you’re down to the bare bones reality of the world. And it is just the sort of darkness that leads us into the ever-expanding universe, where all the lights go out and everything ceases to be, and there is no such thing as meaning. And so that’s the path I was on for sure. And so, when I was getting to that point, it’s like, “I can’t take this anymore. I want to come back to Christ, but I can’t.” I mean, I always respected Jesus. I loved Jesus. I would have come back in a second if I could by the end, maybe three, four, five years of my atheism. But Christians would talk to me, and I’d say, “I can’t throw the switch. I can’t just make myself believe.”

And what was missing, I guess, I guess I know, was a re-illusionment, a sense in which I could see that the ideal could be real. And I lived through a pretty tough marriage, and my first wife died in 2019 in not such great circumstances, and that was rather painful, but it was like, by the end of that, all I wanted was to be free of all of the things that had been keeping me in bondage. And I didn’t realize how much that bondage was self-induced. And so, when I met Jenny, she had just gone through a lot of the same things that I did. Her husband died, and she had had a difficult marriage. And so she and I started texting back and forth as friends. And I thought to myself as my wife was passing, “I don’t want to live alone.”

And so I started looking around, but Jenny is a Christian. I’m not a Christian. I know the Christian doctrine well enough that she’s not even an option for me. I did not even allow myself to think in that vein. Of course, that’s another way in which we can be self-deceptive, right? Whether I wanted to think in that vein or not, I was starting to think in that vein. But I started to date. But every woman I looked at, it came back to me, “She’s not Jenny.” And Jenny was kind of like, “That guy’s weird.” She liked talking to me. She’s my friend and stuff. But she also thought I was pretty weird. She’s kind of fun to talk about what our relationship was before, because while I was falling for her, she’s like, “Man, this guy is strange.”

But increasingly it became clear to me that all that I had missed all of my life was something she had. And that included the Christianity, of course, because her faith was unshakable. I saw it. And it was different from the evangelical community we were in. It was different from most other Christians that I’d met. It was settled in a way that I didn’t quite understand. And she represented to me what I’d been searching for, not just personally, but ideally in how to relate to the world and how to think about things. And she became…. There’s just no other way to say it, a mini incarnation for me. And she made it evident to me that, regardless of what our connection was, there could be a connection between the transcendent ideal, something that I held in my mind, right? From the time I was a kid, thinking, “Wow, if I could be with someone like that,” and suddenly, there she was. A real human being that instantiated a transcendent ideal. Now, she wasn’t perfect. I don’t mean it in that way, but she struck me as that. And frankly, the impression has just grown stronger after having been married for three years. I’m more in love with her now as an ideal than I was when I idealized her. And so she represented to me a realization of something that I thought was impossible, or that I’d convinced myself was impossible.

So Jenny was the real reason why you decided to say yes to God, why you chose again to move back into this world where all of the things that you valued were not illusory, that the Christian worldview had, in a sense, a way of providing the grounding or the source for rationality, for meaning, for purpose, for consciousness. For love, for virtue, for good and evil, all those things that we, in our humanity, desire. But yet you affirmed as well that there are good reasons beyond those even, but that she incarnated Christianity and Christ in a way that was so attractive to you that you turned in a way to say yes to Christ. 

For the skeptic who’s saying, “Oh, he just became a Christian because he fell in love with a woman.” I hear that a lot on feedback on social media, and I wondered if a skeptic said that to you, how you would respond. 

Oh, I worried about that myself. And I do think others think that sometimes. But for me, and I think for Jenny as well, that ceased to be a problem some time ago. I don’t even worry about it because it is God through Jenny, not Jenny. And there’s nothing good about me. There’s nothing good about her, except that which is given by God. And so I make no apologies. I have not tried to soften it for others who might want to think that way. They can think what they like, and I’m not going to be able to convince them one way or the other. But without a doubt, I absolutely adore my wife, and I would do anything for her. And she instantiates… because she instantiates Christ. It is because I see Christ through her that she has the value that she has, and hopefully the other way around as well. She’s not perfect. I would never make that claim. She’s perfect for me.

There’s almost no other way to explain it, because she is my perfect complement. And if that’s what it took for God to bring me back, then so be it. I praise God for that. He knew what it was that I needed to help me to throw that switch, because it really was odd. In the last few years of my atheism, I thought to myself, “If only I could go back, but I can’t. And I never will.” I was convinced I never would. And I was convinced long after I met Jenny and was in love with her that I never would. In fact, that’s one of the things I said to her. I said, “I don’t know what to do, I’m desperately in love with you, but I can’t ask you to violate your Christian commitment.” If she had, she would have lost so much of that value for me because, I mean, that was what was on the line, her own faith. And her faith was part of what appealed to me. And had she violated that faith, she would have destroyed her witness. And so there was one option left, and it wasn’t an option on the table for me. And that process, and I try to explain it as well as I can, in the first eight episodes of The Christian Atheist. I try to explain that process whereby God made the moves to change my heart or my life or my reasoning or whatever it was that was necessary to open up that door again and allow me to flip the switch.

Yeah, I love that. It’s a mystery, right? It’s a mystery how and why sometimes we believe the way that we do, why we’re closed off to certain things, open to others. But more than that, I think it really is a mystery of how God can soften our hearts and change our minds and change our lives and bring us to a point of seeing truth in a new and fresh way. And I praise God for the work that he’s done in you and through you, and that you seem to be incredibly passionate now about your faith. And I love what you said at the beginning, too, where you and Jenny have a podcast, and that, in some sense—and I’m rephrasing—that all of reality points to God. So you’ve moved from a place where, that you’re not just embracing God because you found a woman who embodied these beautiful Christian virtues. You actually see all of reality, philosophically, rationally, scientifically, whatever, existentially. Everything points to God, and so that whereas the evidence once was lost because your worldview didn’t allow for that, like you say, you just don’t even think it’s possible. To now, everything can’t help but be evidence for God. It feels like a very fully orbed transformation. 

Yeah. I am utterly convinced that when, in Genesis, God says, “God saw that it was good,” that that is the foundation on which faith is built. You either start there or you go the other direction. And Hebrews 11:6 that I quoted earlier, that someone who comes to God must believe that He is and that He is a rewarder of those who diligently seek Him. If you start with the idea that the world has been created in a good way, that the world around us is good, you’re on the path. And that is my goal, to put people on that path, because I think, as soon as you’re on that path, you will find God. Ask, seek, and knock. And if you’re not knocking at the right door, then you’re not on the path. But if you’re looking at the world around you, and you’re seeking the truth, you really want to find the truth, then you will find God, and you’ll find Him everywhere because that’s how He set up His world.

It’s like once you see it’s hard to unsee. 

Yes.

And that is a really great word for the skeptic. Anything else you would advise? If somebody says, “John, I want to want that. I want to believe that. I want to choose that. But I just can’t.” Is there any other way that you might advise them? Because I know you were in that position, right? You didn’t think there was ever a possibility of you moving towards God again? Any other things that you might suggest for the skeptic? 

It’s not an easy answer. I’ve run across people like that, and I honestly don’t know what makes the final step other than God. It really is a mystery. And I fully embrace the idea that God is the eternal mystery. We will never get to be able to plumb the depths of who He is and what He does and how it happens. And embracing that mystery is the only path forward. And when and how God does it, I don’t know. It is a mystery. But what I tell others is keep asking, keep seeking, keep knocking, because He promises the door will be opened if you do that. That’s the best I can do.

Yeah. It reminds me of a book by Esther Meek. I believe she’s a philosopher, where she says it’s a bit like looking at a hidden 3D image. You know those pictures? But you have to be intentional about finding the image inside of the picture. And so there has to be almost an intentionality towards searching, or towards looking, before you even see it, before you even begin to see it there. I think it comes back down to what you were saying: There has to, in some way, be a choice, a choice to be open and look.

I have a long series called “The Evidence and Faith,” in which I talk about the nature of evidence. And I do think that the world is the evidence. I think God has set up this world in which we live as filled with good, and all of that good points to Him. And we have to open our eyes and see it and embrace it and not reject it, not take the little bits that we see for the whole, but look to where all of the parts point us.

I think that’s really excellent counsel, because I think sometimes we can look at one small thing or bad circumstance and throw the baby out with the bathwater, instead of looking at the whole. Look at the comprehensive. That’s a discussion for another day. For those who really have a burden just like you do: You want others to see, to choose towards God. Or in thinking of Jenny in your life, even, and the beautiful example and the draw that the Lord used through her to Himself, how would you encourage Christians to engage or to live in front of atheists or skeptics or whomever they want to know God? 

I would say, from my experience, be intensely human, and don’t try too hard to be a Christian. Just live. Live as God calls you to live, do what He asks you to do, and don’t get caught up in the notion of what you have to do as a Christian. I think Christianity is much more of a life than it is a series of words that we speak. We find that in church, too. It’s like people walk in, and suddenly they have to be this certain type of thing, and instead of just being who God made them to be, with all the flaws, all the failings, just be you, be honestly you. Express your doubts, what you know, what you don’t know, what you really feel, the things that make you question. Stop being afraid, Christians, to face the fact that we don’t have all the answers, because we don’t.

And we may have a hope that they don’t have, but then live that hope. Just show the hope in your everyday existence.

Thinking of hope, I’m sure you saw it in Jenny as she was losing probably her first husband, but yet she had a hope eternal, right? 

Yes. Exactly.

You saw her walk through just devastating circumstances, but yet with a faith that was unwavering, and there’s something very attractive about that, I think. 

Absolutely.

Yeah. Anything else you want to add about your journey today, John, that you want to include?

I am absolutely enthralled with the life God has given. This is an amazing world. It is an amazing chance to live and interact and try our best to serve our maker. I love living my life now, and it’s not…. Before, it was this process of disillusionment. Well, now it’s a process of re-illusionment because it keeps getting better and better. As you get to know God better, get to know others better, and try. You have this opportunity to correct all of the things that you’ve screwed up through your life, and trust me, I’ve had plenty of them, and thank God we have it.

Well, it sounds like a life worth living, and I’m sure that you’re one of those who make the Christian life attractive to those who don’t believe as well. I know that you have given us a lot of wisdom today, and I’ve been enthralled by your story. It’s just so interesting and compelling and honest, I hope that our listeners will go and listen to your Christian Atheist podcast, as well as the other ones that you and Jenny have. You just obviously have so much to offer. So thank you so much for coming on today. 

Thank you, Jana. Actually, I’m looking forward to reading your research, too, in any form that you are able to get it to me, because I’m fascinated about the ways in which atheists make the turn.

Thank you for the opportunity. God bless.

Thanks for tuning in to Side B Stories to hear John Wise’s story. You can find out more about him and his wife, Jenny, where you can follow them on social media, as well as links to his Christian Atheist podcast in the episode notes below. For questions and feedback about this episode, you can contact me through our website at www.sidebstories.com. Also, if you’re a skeptic or atheist, and you would like to connect with a former atheist with questions, please contact us on Side B Stories website, and we’ll get you connected. I hope you enjoyed this episode and that you’ll follow our podcast, that you’ll rate, review, and share it with your friends and social network. Again, we welcome your thoughts about this episode and our podcast on our Side B Stories Facebook page. 

In the meantime, I’ll be looking forward to seeing you next time, where we’ll see how another skeptic flips the record of their lives. 

Former atheist Mark Goodnight rejected God because of tragic life circumstances. After years of self-destructive living, he became convinced God was real through a series of unexpected events.

Mark’s Resources:

• Blog: https://cyberpenance.wordpress.com/
• Twitter: GospelApologist
• Instagram: @martyrtek

Resources recommended by Mark:

• Tactics, Greg Koukl
• Forensic Faith, Jim Warner Wallace
• Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis

Episode Transcript

Hello, and thanks for joining in. I’m Jana Harmon, and you’re listening to Side B Stories, where we see how skeptics flip the record of their lives. Each podcast, we listen to someone who has once been an atheist or skeptic, but who became a Christian against all odds. You can hear more of these stories at our Side B Stories website at sidebstories.com Also, if you’re a skeptic or atheist and you would like to connect with a former atheist with questions, please contact us on our Side B Stories website, and we’ll get you connected. 

It’s often thought that religious people are religious because that’s how they were raised. It is the context in which their beliefs were formed. The same can be true of atheists, who may have absorbed their beliefs on the back of their home or culture, or on the back of their life experience. Context sets the stage towards belief or disbelief in God. While context does not determine the truth of the belief, it can and does bear influence on the acceptance of a belief, upon its plausibility, on what seems true or what seems attractive, whether it is worth considering in the first place. 

It’s not surprising then, that someone rejects God because of bad things that happen in life, especially as a child. When life is difficult, it becomes hard to see how a good or caring God exists. If He did exist, why did He allow such horrible things to happen? Couldn’t He have prevented it? Why didn’t He? It’s also been proposed that atheism is born from a childhood experience of a physically or emotionally absent or abusive father, that it would be incredibly difficult to believe in a loving God when your own father is far from that. That could be the case for some, but certainly not for all atheists. That is, there seems to be a correlation between bad experience with a parent and rejection in belief in God. In my research with fifty former atheists, one out of every eight expressed that troubled or absent relationships with their mothers contributed to their atheism. And approximately one out of every four, about 28%, reported that a difficult or absent relationship with their father created resistance to belief. 

In today’s story, former atheist Mark Goodnight strongly rejected the existence of God from an early age, embracing everything that was opposite of a healthy life, moving into some very, very dark realities. Now he lives and speaks as a bold and vibrant ambassador for Christ. What happened that changed Mark’s mind about God and changed his entire direction in life? I hope you’ll come along to find out. Welcome to Side B Stories, Mark. It’s so great to have you. 

Thank you for having me.

Wonderful! As we’re getting started, to let the listeners know a little bit about you now, can you give us an idea of perhaps where you live, what you do as work or your ministry or whatever you want to tell us? 

Yeah, I currently live in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Actually, I’ve lived here most of my life, and I work in IT for a company out of DC, so I work remotely, and I’ve been happily married for 13 years now.

I’m currently a Reasonable Faith chapter director, and I help answer some of the questions of the week and recently changed churches, so I’m getting involved in a new church.

So you grew up in the Midwest of the United States. Tell me about your early life there. I know Oklahoma. It’s not the Bible Belt, but certainly there’s a strong Christian influence in that area of the country. 

Yeah. We jokingly call it the buckle of the Bible Belt. I grew up with an older sister and a younger brother, and my mom and dad. We grew up in a mobile home park out in the middle of nowhere.

So as you were growing up with your family, was there God or religion or faith? Was that any part of your upbringing at home? 

Yeah. So my grandma on my mom’s side was very devout and religious, and my uncle, my mom’s brother, was a deacon in Episcopalian Church, and mom took us to church. I probably embraced it at a young age. Probably around the age of seven, I asked to be baptized and got somewhat involved at a younger age but started questioning it by the time I was twelve.

Okay, so you did have what you would consider a real faith as a child, or a childlike faith, where you went to church, you believed in God. I presume you prayed to God, believed he was real, but then you started questioning that. So why don’t you tell us a little bit about that? 

Yeah. So while my mom did her best to raise us in a religious family, my dad, he wasn’t totally against it, but my dad was both an alcoholic and a workaholic, so he was rarely home, and when he was home, he was drunk. But I started noticing that we were all going to church and he wasn’t going to church on Sundays, and it was like, “Well, if he doesn’t have to go to church, I don’t have to go to church.” So I sort of started stepping away when I was twelve, and looking back on it, I think I did turn my back on the church at the age of twelve, which kind of started the downhill slide. By the time I was 14 or 15, I rejected God and actually asked Satan into my life.

Okay. That’s a pretty strong turn. 

Yeah.

So it makes me feel or think that there’s something more to the story than just that your father didn’t go, so you didn’t want to go. 

Right.

Talk us through some more of that. 

Yeah. So, with my dad being an alcoholic, alcohol was sort of an issue with me from an early age. There were tales of…. I mean, there’s pictures of me drinking beer at six months, and they would put beer in my bottle to get me to go to sleep or calm down, or even to get me calm down enough to give me a haircut when I was a baby. By the time I was four, I was drinking his scotch. Not like full drinks, but I’d walk up and take a drink, and he’d laugh and be like, “Take another one.” But when I was five, I was sexually abused by a babysitter. And even at that age, I tried to kill myself and told my mom I wanted to die at the age of five. So me turning to God at the early age…. I already knew something was wrong with me, and I was trying to find peace. I guess that’s the only way I can think of it from that age. I was just trying to find an answer to things.

I will say that the entire time that I was seeking God at that early age, I didn’t have any issues. But once I started turning my back on the church, and then my parents separated when I was 14, so around the time that I asked Satan into my life, I also emptied out my mom’s medicine cabinet and put myself in the hospital for a week. And then they sent me to a dozen psychiatrists through junior high and high school years to try and find out what was wrong with me.

And by the time I graduated high school, I was classified as a level five neurotic by the state of Oklahoma. And then in college, it got worse. In high school and college, I started dabbling in the occult. And then in college, I got into drugs, which really put me over the edge psychologically.

Right. So again, walk me through. There’s one sense in which someone stops believing in God, in a sense. There’s another sense in which… when you say you asked Satan into your life, that’s full-fledged rejection and really running in the opposite direction. 

Yes, it is.

With almost a contemptuousness or a defiance. When you’re asking Satan into your life and then move towards occult things, that can move into a very dark place. Obviously you had experienced a lot of darkness as a child, so I don’t want to presume. Why did you move towards asking Satan into your life and move towards the occult? 

So when my parents separated, it really hit me hard. Like, I was just starting to get to know my dad, and my mum kicked my dad out of the house. And I didn’t even talk to my mom for like two weeks. I wouldn’t even be in the same room with her. The whole time leading up to it and afterwards, I would do a lot of praying. Like, “God, I want you to save my parents’ marriage,” you know, and as a kid, you don’t understand that people have free will. You can pray for things, but people have free will, and people can do… they’re going to do what they’re going to do sometimes. And that’s not saying that God doesn’t step in and do miracles, but there has to be that repentant heart and seeking towards God in that relationship. So me praying for my parents was… I didn’t see anything, and it was like, “Well, then. Screw you, God.”

Okay. 

And then in the occult, it was more dabbling, just playing around. It wasn’t like serious or anything. I definitely saw a bunch of things in high school and college, but it wasn’t like… I guess in some ways I say it wasn’t like devoting my life to it. But then in college, I did automatic writing with my “guardian spirit” for a year and a half and had books full of things this spirit would say to me.

So there was some sense in which you believed in a spiritual realm, right? So you believed in a dark spiritual realm, but not necessarily in God or the devil. 

I knew the devil was real. I knew demons were real. I knew the supernatural existed. Just never thought that God actually cared enough to interact in our lives like that.

Okay. So then you were saying that you were in college, you were pursuing, just dabbling in the occult, but also in drugs, and that you were still walking in a bit of a dark place. Take us from there. 

Yes. So I ended up dropping out of college and just like going almost full fledged into drugs. There were probably three, four years that there wasn’t a waking moment that I was not chemically altered in one way or another. And by the end of it, I would tell people, “Drugs are my God. Drugs are the only thing that care about me.”

So I ended up in Dallas and was getting heavily involved in coke, cocaine, and had dabbled with crack and everything. And I knew that things were getting bad, like really bad in my life. And I ended up calling my sister one night, at 3:30 in the morning. And the whole reason I was in Dallas was because I’ve been kicked out of the house and had no place to go and had a friend set me up in Dallas. So I called my sister at 3:30 in the morning and kind of told her everything that was going on. And I was like, “Look, things are looking bad. Things are going to get worse.” And she told me, “Hold on!” She said she was going to call mom first thing in the morning, and then she was going to reach back out to me, and she told me, “Just stay strong, hold on, and I’ll call you in the morning.” And I got off the phone, and I said the first prayer I’d said in years. And the prayer was basically…. It started with, “God, if you are real….” Like, I didn’t even know if God was real. I didn’t know if I believed in God or anything like that. But I was just like, “God, if you’re real, I need help.”

And at 7:30 in the morning, my sister calls me back. And she was like, “Okay, I spoke to mom. You can come home. I don’t know how we’re going to get you home yet, but I’m working on it. Stay strong, and I’ll call you back.” And I put the phone down. And this is like, to this day, it’s freaky because I put the phone down, and no sooner…. This was back before cell phones. This is ‘91, ‘92. So I put the phone down on the cradle, and as soon as it hit the cradle, it rang again. So I was like, “Okay.” So I answered the phone.

And it was my cousin. Now, my cousin lived in Kansas City. I’m in Dallas. And he said that he had driven to Dallas for a few days and wanted to hook up. And it was like, “Oh, my God! You’re my way home,” because he had to drive through Tulsa to go back home.

That’s right. 

And it was just like, “Holy cow! Wait a minute. God, You’re real.”

Wow. 

And I’m a very stubborn and slow person, so it was still a couple of years before I surrendered to Christ. But I mean, at that point there, I believed that God was real.

Okay. Because He had shown up. The God who didn’t seem to show up actually showed up when you said this feeble little prayer. 

Right.

He heard it. 

Right. He heard it, and He answered it in a way that I couldn’t shake and I couldn’t deny. And I get back to Tulsa, and of course, I’m still doing drugs, and mom isn’t having it, so she kicks me out of the house again, and I go live with my sister. And I’m still doing drugs the whole time, and I jump from one job to another because I’m doing drugs, and I end up moving to Tulsa with a friend of mine, and things are going bad. And during this time, I’m still dealing with all the depression and suicidal tendencies that have plagued me from the age of five. And obviously, drugs are not helping. But when you’re doing drugs, you can’t tell that.

Because I’d been to see psychiatrists throughout my life, and I tried religion, I thought, as a kid, and dabbled in the occult and done drugs, illegal drugs, legal drugs, and none of it was helping. It was like, “Well, screw it. I gotta help myself.” And I buy this book at Waldenbooks called How to Cope with Depression. And I had psychology classes in high school and college, and the book didn’t teach me a single thing that I didn’t already know, but there was something that stuck out to me in the appendix, and it said 90% of depressives turn to religion for help. It’s like, “Well, okay. What else have I got to lose? Because I desperately need help.” So I asked my mom for a Bible, which I know had to really shock her.

Oh, I’m sure. 

So I got a Bible, and I started reading it, and I’m living here in Tulsa. It’s like three of us in a two bedroom apartment, and I’m working graveyard. And when you’re working graveyard, it’s very easy to lose track of what day it is, just because everything’s at night. And I had a habit of getting off work, coming home, getting high, and reading the Bible, which is… I don’t recommend that, but that’s where I was at at that time. And it’s Sunday morning. Or I’d get high and watch cartoons or whatever. And it’s Sunday morning, and I don’t realize it’s Sunday, and I had a really rough night, and so I’m getting high, and I’m flipping through channels, and there’s no cartoons on, and there’s some old dude talking. I’m like, “Okay, well, let’s hear what this dude has to say.” And before I realize it, it’s Oral Roberts.

I was not a fan of TV evangelists, and Oral Roberts was at the top of my case of the ones I was not a fan of, but by the time I realized it was Oral Roberts, I was hooked on what he was saying. And so he turns to the TV, and he does his altar call and then turns to the TV and says, “All you all that want to ask Jesus into your life, get on your knees and lift your hands up in the air,” and I’m like putting my drug paraphernalia down and getting on my knees and lifting my hands in the air and repeating this prayer after him. And I felt something.

I would tell people, “I saw something come out of the ceiling.” Whether it was a drug thing or whatever, I felt something, and it invigorated me. And the very next night, I was partying with my friends, and I told them. I was like, “You’ll never guess what I did! I think I asked Jesus into my life,” which was ironic because not six months before, I was telling my friends, “If I ever become a Christian, take a gun and blow my brains out and put me out of my misery.” And that’s a direct quote. So they started challenging me about stuff, which is kind of funny and ironic. All I’ve got is I’m reading the Bible. I picked up Oswald Chambers’ My Utmost for His Highest, which I still read to this day. Fantastic book.

And so for the next nine months, I’m getting high every day, I’m reading the Bible, and I’d read something in the Bible, and it’s like, “Oh, I should probably change this in my life.” And just making baby steps, basically.

Right. So you weren’t going to church at this point. You weren’t with any other Christians at this point. 

No.

Obviously, you had a real disdain for Christians, right? You didn’t want to be one, and then you found yourself believing. Just as a side note, why the disdain for Christians? Why the hatred towards them? 

It was a number of things. At its core, I knew I would have to change my life.

Okay. 

Some of the disdain was because, and if you have any Christians that listen to your podcast, let them take this as a lesson, but some of the disdain was I was working in the restaurant industry, and churches would come over Wednesday night as they let out, like 15 minutes before we closed, or Sunday night as they let out, and they were the worst people we had.

Oh, my. 

And they didn’t tip. They treated our staff like crap. And it’s like, “You guys are Christians? I don’t want to be one.”For me, it’s like any time I go to restaurant, I tip. Always try and be nice, and if they get your food wrong, you can say, “Hey, my food is wrong,” in a nice way. You don’t have to be a jerk about it, because if you’re going to pray and bless your food, they’re going to see it, and they’re going to know you’re a Christian. Whether you witness to them or not, they’re going to know it. So people just have to think about that, right?

Right. So again, you’re still on drugs, reading your Bible. 

Right.

Right. That’s an interesting combination. Keep going. 

Yeah. But God has grace for us, and it’s like… He accepts us the way we are, but He doesn’t leave us the way we are. And sometimes it’s like a radical transformation, and sometimes it’s a slow one. So I asked Jesus into my life in September of ‘94, and by this time at work, I was working as a stocker overnight, graveyard at a grocery store, and I had somehow become the crew chief, which is like, “How did that happen?” But we had a Christian come in to work under us, and he was going to Bible college, and he was like studying during his lunch break. And I was being nice to him and everything, and he was like, “You want to go to church sometime?” And I’m like, “Yeah, sure. Whatever.” And there was a Sunday in February, and I couldn’t tell you when it was. Like I said, I was high all the time. But he showed up at my house or at my apartment right after I had just got done getting high, knocking on my door, and he’s like, “You want to go to church?” And I’m like, “Did I say I’d go to church?” He’s like, “Yes.” “Okay, when?” “Now.” “Okay.”

So I ended up getting dragged to this church like higher than a kite. And I sit in the back in the bleachers, and the pastor’s giving this message, and it’s like, “That’s kind of cool,” and he does his altar call, and he’s like, “Everybody bow your head, and close your eyes, and anyone who wants to answer the altar call, ask Jesus into their lives, put your hands up in the air,” and I’m kind of like feebly putting my hands up, and I look up, and he’s looking the other way. So I put my hand down, and some dude starts tapping me on the back saying, “Hey, it’s all right. You can do it,” and I was so furious, and I was so high. It was everything in me not to just turn around and start beating the crap out of this guy, because I didn’t have an aspect of social graces. So me kind of controlling myself was actually a grace in itself.

But anyway, so I leave there and I’m like, “I’m never going back to church.” And I don’t even remember this a couple of months later. Like I said, I was so high. And Easter of that year, Easter is coming up, and I’m like, “Hey, Easter is like a Christian holiday. If I’m a Christian, I should go to church.” So I call up my sister, and we find a church, and it’s like this Southern Baptist country church. And I actually, for the first time in a couple of years, I don’t even get high when I first wake up. I at least waited till after I got out of church. So I went to church sober and in a straight mind, which was completely radical for me at that time.

Right. It was a step forward for sure. 

Yeah. And I liked it so much that it was like, “Okay, I want to go back.” So the next Sunday, I go back with my sister. And the very next night, one of my friend’s girlfriends heard that I was getting into church, and she was like, “Hey, you want to go to church?” I was like, “Sure, yeah, I’ll check it out. What have you got?” Because I’ve been twice, so I’m like, “This is kind of cool.” So she took me to this church called Guts.

It’s called Guts? 

It’s called Guts. Yeah.

Is there a reason for that? 

It takes a lot of guts to stand for Jesus, is what the pastor always said.

Okay. 

And it wasn’t even the regular pastor. It was a guest speaker. But he did an altar call, and I’m like immediately one of the first people down there on the altar call, and he prays for people who are addicted to drugs. And I’m like, “Yeah, that’s me.” So he laid his hands on me and prayed for me. And any desire for drugs just left me.

Immediately. 

Immediately. Like, I went home and threw away hundreds of dollars worth of paraphernalia and didn’t have any problem.

That’s astonishing!  

Yeah. And then I’m like, “We got to go back to this church. This church is cool.” Because it was like a rock and roll church. And like, I listened to heavy metal, so it’s like you’re more in my vein than like a Southern Baptist church. And so, for the next three weeks, every service, I’m there Wednesday and Sunday. And every service, I’m just in tears and I’m answering the altar call because I am a despicable human being and I need Jesus. And if I’ve got to answer that alter call numerous times, I’m going to do it. And about three weeks later, I was still dealing with the depression and suicidal tendencies that had plagued me since the age of five. And so I answered the altar call, and at the time, they were taking everybody in the back room, and they’d have ministry people pray with you. And I made sure I was the last person to leave the room. And I copped the associate pastor, and I told him a lot of what I’ve told you here right now, as far as the depression and suicidal tendencies. And he prayed for me and laid his hands on me, and I felt better than I ever felt. I felt like I was high, but I wasn’t on drugs, right?

Right. It was a spiritual high. 

Yeah, absolutely! Absolutely! I didn’t know that at the time, but it was just like, “This is crazy!” And I get up the very next morning, and that depression and suicidal hurt hits me like a ton of bricks. And I was standing in the bathroom with a razor to my wrist, which wasn’t anything new. I mean, I would carve them. At the height of my drugs, I would carve on myself with knives. So I’ve still got scars on myself from stuff that I did to myself.

Oh, I’m sorry. Yeah. 

Well, I mean, God’s a good God. I’ll just say that. And so I’m standing in the bathroom with a razor to my wrist, and these words come out of my mouth, and it was so foreign to me, but these words came out of my mouth. “I can’t be about these things anymore. My life is not my own now. I belong to God.” And as soon as I said those words, and I was like, “Where is this coming from in my mind?” But as soon as I said those words, that depression and suicidal tendencies left me like that.

Amazing!

And I can tell you. That was ‘95. It’s 2022 now, and I haven’t had any issues like that. There is natural depression, a loved one dying. When my mom passed away or my dad passed away or my sister passed away. There is a natural, healthy sadness that hits you. If you haven’t dealt with depression or suicidal tendencies or anything like that, you can’t imagine, because those are like the tip of the iceberg to what you would feel with the kind of depression that I had. And yeah, I mean, like I said, ‘95. It’s now 2022, and I haven’t had any issues. And I’ve even had atheists tell me, “You got to watch yourself because you’re going to fall back.” It’s like, “Yeah, okay. Well, it’s been 27 years now. When’s that fallback going to happen?” Because it ain’t.

Right, right. Wow. That’s extraordinary, to be suddenly released. I mean, first of all from your drug addiction and then from your depression, I mean serious, serious depression, on the back of a prayer. Someone praying over you. I imagine, whatever power you saw in your earlier life in the occult dabbling that you did, this power, whatever this power was that came upon you, to release you or free you from these oppressions in your life and addictions and depressions. I mean, obviously, the God who answered your prayer in 1991, He kept showing up for you in these incredibly personal and powerful ways. 

Yeah. And that kind of healing, it’s like, “Okay, I’m in. Wherever this goes, I’m in.” It didn’t stop, because a couple months later, like I started smoking cigarettes when I was twelve, and by the time I hit college, it was a pack a day. Through my drug years, it could be up to two packs a day, and that’s a serious addiction unto itself. And I realized, it’s like, “Okay, I should probably try and quit smoking.” And I quit for like two weeks. And in two weeks I was just a nervous wreck. I mean, I would meet people and say, “Hi, I’m Mark. I’m trying to quit smoking. Don’t piss me off.”

Okay. Fair warning. 

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that lasted about two weeks, and I was immediately back to a pack a day. And I was still working at that grocery store, but now I was no longer on graveyard, and I was head over like shipping and receiving, and so I’d be in the back, and I could be by myself sometimes. And so I’m sitting in the back room waiting on a delivery, and I’m smoking a cigarette, and I think it was like my second or third of the day or whatever, and I heard a voice. And it said, the voice I heard said, “Put your cigarette out, throw your pack away, and rely on Me for your strength and endurance.” And I literally got up and looked around like, “Who said that?” And I mean, I’m the only one in the back. I’m like, “What the heck? I must have imagined it.” So I sit back down. I hear the exact same voice, exact same tone, exact same words, everything. And I’m like, “Okay, I may not be the smartest chip on the block, but I think God is trying to talk to me,” so I sat there for a couple of minutes just really thinking about it. And so I did. I put the cigarette out. I went over to the trash can and took the pack of cigarettes out of my pocket, and I held it over the trash can and I was like, “All right, God. I think you’re speaking to me, but I don’t know if this is You or not. So if it’s you, I’m going to need You to be my strength and endurance because I already tried this, and I can’t do this myself.” And I threw the pack away, and I was delivered like that. Again.

Wow. That’s truly, truly extraordinary. These immediate deliverances from these very, very strong addictions. Physical addictions. 

Yeah. And it’s been 27 years, and I’m still a Christian. I still read my Bible every single day.

Well, even in your own life, it was a slow process, and it took a long time for you to even come to the point where you were even willing to say, “God, if you’re real….” You yourself, you weren’t pushed there. You had to reach that point yourself, where you were willing to even consider it. And everyone is on their own time, right? 

Exactly.

But I’m also intrigued by your story in the sense that you made the comment, and I think it’s often heard, but I think your life really shows us is that you come as you are, that God accepts you as you are, but He doesn’t leave you there. It’s a process of change over time, and maybe some who are listening are going, “Well, he didn’t act like a Christian when he first accepted Christ, but that was-

I definitely didn’t!

No. But it took a while, right? It was a journey for you of transformation that was, again, kind of a slow burn, but you were making steps forward. It just took a lot of time. I’m sure that there were some people, some of your friends who perhaps would say, “Oh, yeah, he says he’s a Christian, but look at him.” But it takes time, right? It takes time and patience. God is so patient with us. 

Yeah. Thank goodness, too.

He’s so very patient. But, anyway, since that time, obviously that was back in the nineties. And here we are in 2022. Talk about the transformation in your life that has occurred. Obviously, there’s been a great deal of maturity and transformation that has occurred even since then.

Wow. In 2020, I celebrated being a Christian for half my life. I’m a lot more loving and accepting of people. I understand that some people can get just changed overnight, and some people are born saints, God bless them, but there’s other of us that we’re like a kicking and screaming baby that has to be dragged. But God can still work on people, and you can never give up hope on someone because you never know what’s going to happen with them. I mean, in my own life, from those days, I committed to reading the Bible every single day. And you find so much in the word if you just… For me, I read it cover to cover, just because I’m analytical like that. But I’ve been through some discipleship training. I’ve been through some internship that was like a total God thing. Being an intern for a year in the mid 2000s was as radical a change in my life is getting saved was.

In what way? 

Well, getting saved, obviously, I changed from hating Christians to saying, “Hey, now I am a Christian,” and getting delivered from drugs and getting delivered from depression, suicidal tendencies, and getting delivered from smoking. So the change in my life from the internship was getting more confident, understanding that I can actually get up in front of people and give a message. I’ve taught a couple of classes on apologetics now, which is like, “How did I get here?” But that’s like the story of my life for the last 27 years is, “How did I get here?”

Right, right. 

And I always look at it as like, “Hey, I’m just in God’s hands, along for the ride. Wherever He takes me is where I’m going.”

That’s good. Obviously, you’ve gotten married. Incredibly, you’re obviously sober in body, but sober in mind, and you’ve accomplished a lot of things since that time. One more question before we go to the advice. I’m just thinking of someone’s listening, and they’re thinking to themselves, “You just got saved. I mean, like, you just called out to Jesus. What is that? What do you mean saved? That just sounds like Christian lingo.” Obviously, in many ways it sounds like a full surrender of your life to God, but how does that work? What do you mean by, “I got saved?” 

I think you know that it’s a surrender to God through His Son. I mean it’s seeking God through Jesus. I mean, Jesus says in John 14:6, “I’m the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to God except through Me.” And Romans 10:9-10 says that if you confess with your heart, if you believe in your heart that Jesus died on the cross for your sins and rose from the dead three days later, and if you confess with your mouth, you will be saved. And I mean, that’s what it means. It means that, “God, I believe that You’re real. God, I believe that Your Son truly existed and died on the cross, that the stories and the gospels are true.” And you don’t have to be like, every word is true. It’s the context of the message, the resurrection, that He did this to help redeem us, so that we could have that relationship with God, so that we could be washed from our sins, because every one of us sins. I mean, I’ve been a Christian for 27 years. I still sin every day. My sins may have changed, and they’re not as bad as they were, but we all sin, and we all need that healing. We all need to be cleansed from our sins, and there’s nothing that can wash away our sins. It’s like that old hymn, “What can wash away my sins? Nothing but the blood of Jesus.”

Yeah. I’m sure that there are many atheists that you’ve encountered that kind of rebuff your story or just don’t believe it. I can’t imagine that they would just accept these sudden deliverances. But you are a walking testimony of the reality of God and the power in His life to free you and to heal you, in a sense, and move you from brokenness to wholeness. You are a beautiful, embodied example of that. Your life alone is an amazing testimony, and I love the words that you’re putting to it as you’re walking us through it. If there’s a curious skeptic who’s listening to your story and is kind of on their heels in disbelief going, “I just….” 

Right.

But in some way, like you say, we all know there’s something wrong with us. We’re all craving for things to be right and good and to have that internal joy and that wholeness that you’re speaking of. And they might be willing to say, “Hey, God, if you’re real….” What would you say to someone who actually perhaps has just that moment of willingness, to say, “Hey, God, if you’re real….” 

Well, I mean, to the skeptic I would say, “Hey, I was there.” I mean, I went through this stuff. You just heard my story. And as I was going through it, I was like, “This can’t be real.” But it is. To the person that is at that moment, reach out, have that moment of faith, just give God a chance and see if He’ll show up, because there’s tale after tale of people who have had that moment of God showing up and rescuing them from something. But we have to be sincere about it. It can’t be just, “Oh, God, I want to see your laser light show.” I mean, to me, when I prayed that prayer, it was like end of my rope desperation, because I honestly knew I’d be dead in a month or two if I didn’t get out of that situation. And I don’t know why… As a Christian, I know that God loves us enough. Isaiah 43:4 says that God calls us precious in His sight, which I had a revelation of how much God loves me through that verse that I felt like I had the wind knocked out of me for two days from Isaiah 43:4. So I know that He cherishes every one of us. I mean, there’s countless scriptures about how much God loves us. Jesus says that He knows the very number of hairs on our head, or not hair on my head, but He provides sustenance for the birds, and aren’t we not worth more than that? The Bible says that we’re the apple of His eye. I mean, He truly loves us, each one of us, individually, and we have to be willing to receive Him.

The years I was resisting God, and sometimes giving Him the middle finger, He wasn’t acting in my life because I didn’t want Him to act in my life. C.S. Lewis put it great, as far as there are those that say to God, Your will be done, and there are those that God says to them, “Okay, your will be done.” He loves us enough to allow us free will to accept Him or reject Him, and Him accepting you, to me it’s an adventure. I mean, you don’t know what’s going to happen because God shows up. I don’t know. He has for me continually. Even this year. I mean, there’s tale after tale. I’m telling the big ones that got me started on this journey, but I could go on, almost every year, sometimes multiple times a year, just God continually showing up and being faithful. And I think it’s in 1 Timothy or 2 Timothy that Paul writes that God is faithful even when we’re faithless.

Right. 

That’s very good. Obviously, too, Mark, you have a very deep and abiding love for the Bible, or what we call God’s word, and you invest in it, and you read it, and it’s obviously coming out of you. Now, when you were very first…. From the very beginning, you got a Bible from your mother, and you started reading it. So it’s been a practice for you, even in those early, early days when you may not have known what was going on. If a skeptic is willing to pick up a Bible, maybe for the first time, it can be a little bit intimidating and not knowing where to begin. 

Yes, it can! And my biggest advice is do not start in Genesis.

Okay. 

Start in the New Testament.

Okay. So just start with the stories or the biographies of Jesus? 

Yeah.

Maybe Matthew or Mark? Or do you have a favorite book or letter? 

Well, my favorite book is actually Psalms, but for someone who’s just getting into it: So Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, they’re each written to a different audience. And I really think of it like, okay, are you like, just give me the facts person, and you want just the action, then read Mark, because it’s short and sweet and to the point. And it’s also what I was named after. And usually I’m short and sweet and to the point.

And then Matthew is sort of written to the religious minded. And Luke is written to the intellectual. And John is written to all the rest, I guess, is the best way, because he was the last one, anyways. But read them. And there’s a great book, probably one of my favorite books out there is The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus by Gary Habermas and Michael Licona. And even if the Bible isn’t true in every word, which, I mean, I believe it is, don’t get me wrong.

No, I understand. 

But if you just approach the Bible as a historic document, the core facts of it show that Jesus existed, that He died on the cross, that three days later His tomb was found empty, that His disciples had experiences, that they believed that they saw Jesus from the dead. That Paul, a persecutor of the church, suddenly became a believer. That James, the brother of Jesus, who didn’t believe in Jesus before He died on the cross, became a believer and became a head of the church. And you’ve got to address theories that try and explain those, and only the resurrection covers all of them without being ad hoc or multiple theories, which just makes your theory even worse. And it’s a great book that just covers those five facts and the historical reliability of just those five facts.

I mean I know that there are some Christian theologians that don’t like the minimal facts theory or the minimal facts argument. But for me, as a former skeptic, it just rings true with me. It’s like, if someone would have told me that, given me that argument while I was a skeptic, I may not have accepted it immediately, but it would have planted a seed in me, where it was like, “I can’t stop thinking about that,” type of thing.

Yeah. That’s really wonderful evidence. If someone is willing to look at the evidence from a historical point of view, from even skeptical historians can’t deny those facts. 

Right.

So it’s very, very powerful. Thank you for raising that. And for the Christian who’s listening, I know you had kind of given some advice to us Christians in terms of engaging, like when you were talking about your brother. What would you say to the Christian who really does… they have a skeptic in their life or that they love and they want to see come to Christ? How would you-

Never give up.

Okay. 

I mean, don’t give up. Don’t stop praying for them. You never know what’s going on in their life. No matter how close you are to them, you never know. Because I didn’t, like, tell all my friends that I got a Bible and started reading it. And like you pointed out, for me, I didn’t have people witnessing to me. I didn’t have a church or anything. I just was seeking God on my own and got a Bible and had a random encounter watching TV. And it was nine months after I asked Jesus into my life that I started going to church. And then the radical changes started. But you never know what’s going to happen with someone. Like I said, not a year before I asked Jesus into my life, I was so hostile to Christians. I mean, if I found out you were a Christian… I can remember being at a party, and this is, you know, during my drug use, and there was one girl that said, “I went to church this morning,” and I went off on her so bad, even my friends were like, “Dude, chill out!” It’s like, “No, I will not tolerate this.” And I become a Christian a couple of years later. I mean, you never know what someone is going through.

You have to understand that… so someone who is hostile to Christianity, witnessing to them is just going to push them away. Just love on them and be there for them. J. Warner Wallace has a great book, Forensic Faith, that talks about dealing with people in general. That book there is making the case for making the case for Christianity, and there’s some good lessons in there, as far as how he talks about breaking up… He sees people in four different categories. You got category one, someone who’s going to believe, agree with you no matter what. And then category two, that someone’s going to agree with you but would be open to listening to the other side. And then category three is someone who disagrees with you but is open to hearing your point of view. And then category four is someone who disagrees with you and is not open to hearing your point of view. And he says, category four, he doesn’t even try having conversations with them. And he still prays for them, and he still believes for them, but until they move into that category three, it’s going to be a pointless or a fruitless conversation, generally speaking. And again, going back to what Greg Koukl said, there are those times that it’s like a Spirit of God, like the Spirit is leading and you have to follow it because something radical is fixing to happen. But generally speaking, we’ve got to use wisdom. We got to be wise as serpents and harmless as doves.

Yes, that’s excellent advice.

For the Christian that has skeptics in their life, read books by William Lane Craig. Read books by J. Warner Wallace. Read books by C.S. Lewis. Get your mind thinking about some of those arguments that you could just bring up in a conversation. I remember a conversation we had with my brother, and we were having breakfast before an event, and we got on the topic of morality, and it just naturally came into the whole moral argument for the existence of God. It wasn’t forced or anything like that, and it was just one of those things, where even he was like, “Yeah, I’m a hypocrite. I’ll have to think about that.”

Yeah. You put a stone in his shoe, right? 

Exactly. And Tactics by Greg Koukl is probably one of the best books to read, because it’s about how to have that conversation.

That’s really excellent advice. Anything else that we may have forgotten or that you wanted to add in this conversation? Or are we good? 

I think we covered the gamut on this one.

Okay. Good. No. That’s great. 

I appreciate you having me on here. This has been a pleasure.

It’s a total pleasure to really bring your story forward, Mark. It’s remarkable in so many ways. I think you have said it many times through our conversation is that you just can’t give up. You never know. No matter how far someone may seem and how far someone [may seem and may are 1:07:56] may be from God, you never know that they may be turning in the direction of God, and you just don’t give up hope or give up prayer. And you’re a living example of that. 

No. The other thing that’s just coming immediately to mind right now is, I mean, it may even be a last-minute thing. Look at the two thieves on the cross. They both were, according to the gospels, they both were ridiculing Jesus. And then one of them was like, “Wait a minute. He doesn’t deserve to be here.” And he turns to Jesus and he says, “Remember me when you get there.” And Jesus turns to him and says, “I give you my word. Tonight you will be with me in paradise.” I mean, that was like the gospel right there. He didn’t have time to show fruits of righteousness, but he was still accepted. And according to those words, the way I read it, he was saved right there.

Right, right. Yeah. No. We should never give up. God never gives up on us. 

Right. Absolutely.

But, thank you, Mark, so much for coming on. You have an extraordinary story, and it’s been such a privilege to hear such a dramatic transformation in life. I know, just for our listeners, there is a blog that you write. Is there a way that they can follow you on social media? Can you tell us- 

Yeah. So I’m on Facebook and Instagram and Twitter. If you follow me on Facebook, you’ll probably get spammed with a bunch of memes.

But I also do have a blog. It’s called Cyber Penance, and I’ve sent you the link to it, so you can link it below. And, yeah, I should update that blog more often, but I’ve been having a lot of time just spending my morning devotions reading some great books and getting carried away with that and not working on the blog as often as I should.

That’s not such a bad thing either. 

No. But it has truly, truly been a pleasure having this conversation, and thank you so much for your time and having me on.

Yeah. This is terrific, Mark. Thank you again. 

You can find out more about Mark and where you can follow him on Twitter, Instagram, and Cyber Penance blog in the episode notes. For questions and feedback about this episode, you can contact me through our website at sidebstories.com. If you enjoyed it, I hope you’ll follow, rate, review, and share this podcast with your friends and social network. Again, we welcome your thoughts about this episode and our podcast on our Side B Stories Facebook page. In the meantime, we’ll be looking forward to seeing you next time, where we’ll see how another skeptic flips the record of their life. 

Former atheist Kim Endraske believed in science and her own morality instead of God, yet she lived with a constant fear of moral failure and death. After her views were challenged by an intelligent Christian, she found belief and grace in God.

Kim’s Resources:

• Book: God is Real: The Eyewitness Testimony of a Former Atheist www.amazon.com/dp/1975916328
• YouTube Channel: www.YouTube.com/c/FormerAtheist58
• Blog: www.TeachWhatIsGood.com
• Ministry to Families Continuing their Pregnancy to Term: www.AChildOfPromise.org

Resources recommended by Kim:

• More Than a Carpenter, Josh McDowell
• Evidence that Demands a Verdict, Josh McDowell
• Chronicles of Narnia, C.S. Lewis
• Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis

Episode Transcript

Hello, and thanks for joining in. I’m Jana Harmon and you’re listening to Side B Stories, where we see how skeptics flip the record of their lives. Each podcast, we listen to someone who has once been an atheist or skeptic, but who became a Christian against all odds. You can hear more of these stories at our Side B Stories website, sidebstories.com. We also welcome your comments on these stories on our Side B Stories Facebook page. 

It has been said that there are two things in life that we can be certain of: Death and taxes. As much as we try to avoid one or both of those things, they are inescapable. For the atheist, death is the end of our physical existence. There is no soul or spirit that exists beyond the grave, beyond death, only memories that live on in the lives of those whom they’ve left behind. If that is true, there should be nothing to fear in death, for we will all experience that. And, for many, that becomes a mandate to make the best of our time here now, to live life to its fullest, to accomplish, to eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die. Or perhaps we just mindlessly pursue distractions and pleasures to avoid the inevitable. 

Yet for others, the fear of death can become overwhelming, even for those who don’t believe in God, immortality, and the afterlife. The fear of eternal nothingness, of blackness, can cause a fear in life of the unknown, of what will happen next, of when and whether death is coming sooner or later. 

In today’s story, former atheist Kim seriously wrestled with this existential reality. Fear of death was her constant companion. But that fear wasn’t enough for her to change her mind about God just to soothe a personal discomfort. After all, atheists are the adults in the room, called to soberly and courageously live with realities such as death and dying that may be personally unsettling. They are not to succumb to the childish notions of happily ever after in the afterlife. What was it then that changed Kim’s mind about the reality of God, and through that, lose her fear of death? I hope you’ll come along to find out. Welcome to Side B Stories, Kim. It’s so great to have you with me today. 

Thanks. It’s good to be here.

Wonderful! As we’re getting started, so that the listeners can know a little bit about you before we get into your story, tell me something about you, perhaps your family, where you live, what you do. 

Yeah. My name is Kim Endraske. I am a home schooling mom for 21 years, but in addition to that, I have a YouTube channel at FormerAtheist58 and love to kind of share with people on my YouTube channel. I have a blog at Teach What Is Good, and I’ve always liked to write ever since I was a little girl. Actually, when I was little, I would make little newsletters and sell them to my neighbors, like a quarter apiece or something. And God has just continued that in my life, where now I’ve written several books, and I like to blog, and I’m just a teacher at heart.

That’s wonderful! The world is desperate for good teachers. And good writers for that matter. And so for all of our listeners, we’ll include all of these, her YouTube channel, her blog, and all of these connections to you. We’ll put those in the episode notes, so that they can access some of your writing as well and be taught, hopefully, in some way. 

Thanks.

So let’s get into your story, Kim. Why don’t you talk with me about your upbringing? Tell me a little bit about how and where you were raised and whether religion was any part of your family life at all. 

Yeah. So I was born and raised in Des Moines, Iowa. I’m the younger of two girls. I have an older sister who is three years older than me. My dad and my grandfather are both attorneys, lawyers, and my mom was actually my dad’s legal assistant. So I grew up in a very academic home. Our dinner table conversations usually consisted of whatever case that my parents were working on. And so that was always—we just had a very academically rigorous upbringing. My parents had very high expectations for my sister and I. We were both identified talented and gifted, like, from the earliest age. My sister actually skipped a grade in kindergarten, and I skipped a grade when I was in fourth grade, actually. I took the Iowa Test of Basic Skills and scored all 99s on it, and they were like, “Okay, something is going on here,” and so I was actually promoted mid-year when I was in fourth grade, from fourth to fifth.

But that’s just a little taste of the academic rigor, that there was just an expectation that I was supposed to be the best student in class. I was always reading books. I would prefer reading over playing outside or over watching TV. I’ve always just kind of been a book lover. And I think that that impacted all of my life, that I wanted to know, I wanted to learn. I wanted to be the smartest, the best, the brightest, be looked up to for my academic excellence.

So as far as where religion fits in all of that, well, I don’t remember too much when I was five, but my mom tells me that I told my grandmother when I was five that there was no God. So to me, that means that must have been in there from very early childhood, that I had made up in my own mind that God did not exist. And I don’t think my parents told me God doesn’t exist. I think it’s more just God was absent. You know, there was no faith in my home. We didn’t go to church together. We didn’t pray. We didn’t read the Bible. We didn’t follow any other religions, either. It was just we did things our own way. We made up our own rules, and I think that I liked making up rules.

Jana, I’ve always been somebody who likes making up rules. I’ve always been a rule follower, and I liked making up rules, and I liked making up rules for myself. And so I think that’s an interesting little piece of me. I think sometimes people have false conceptions about atheists, that they’re all, like, immoral, into drugs and alcohol and just off the charts. And that was not at all who I was. I was a very good, law-abiding citizen, and I was trying to be good.

There was no end goal. I didn’t believe in any kind of afterlife or any kind of spiritual anything. And so it was just about me. And so I wanted to be a good person just for me. And I wanted to help other people because it made me feel good. It made my life mean something to help other people.

Right, right, and I can imagine growing up in a home like that, where you’re probably having pretty meaningful discussions around the table. With an attorney and a paralegal as parents, you’re learning about what’s according to the law, what’s breaking the law, so I would imagine you would have this sense, real sense, of right and wrong. Like, some things are law abiding, some things are just what you do, and some things are just what you don’t do, whether God’s in the picture or not. That was probably just the flavor of your home, to grow up with a framework like that. 

And I’m so glad, too, that you pointed out that there are so many misconceptions and stereotypes, whether it’s Christian or atheist, that they’re all just a certain way. And I think it’s important that you brought that up, that we don’t broad brush anyone. I think everyone is an individual, and some of the atheists who are friends of mine are some of the most moral people that I know. So it’s not that someone cannot be moral or not based upon their religion. It’s the grounding of that morality. But that’s a story for another day, perhaps. 

But back to, again, who you are, growing up. So you you’re rule oriented, you’re moral. But I’m so surprised, even at age five, that you had this very stark, kind of pragmatic view that God did not exist. And of course, you were academically minded. You’re telling me that you were growing up in rigorous kind of intellectual study. I’m curious. Did you consider if God did not exist, did you take on any kind of identity? Or what that looked like if God did not exist? What that meant for you in any way? 

Yes. So it’s really kind of a harder question than you might think, actually, because for me, it was just a very humanist—is that a good way to put it? It was just humanist, that my life was just centered on human wisdom, human intellect, human science. Like, I wanted to be a scientist. I was going to be a veterinarian, actually. So I was always very science oriented, into evolution. I wanted to be a veterinarian, so I was always studying animals and especially horses. I thought horses were fascinating. And so the evolutionary theory really grounded me that there was no need for God, because the world just kind of evolved. And so this is where I hooked into, “Okay, yeah, so who needs a God?”

But there were two specific things where I really thought, “Okay, I don’t know what to do with this.” I didn’t know how to mesh the beauty that I saw in creation and death. These are two things I really wrestled with as an atheist. So when I saw really beautiful, the created—and now I can say created—but the way that the world was and how beautiful it was, I thought, “Wow, how is this possible?” So I can remember two specific times, I just have this memory, and it’s like a vision burned into my mind. I was in high school. I was at a debate camp. So my sport of choice is I was a debater. So I won speech awards as a debater. I went to Harvard to compete as a debater. When I was in high school, I was a debater. Okay, team policy debate. That was my sword of choice.

So I was at debate camp in the state of Vermont, and in between these debate classes that we had, we had a little time, time off, a little break. And I was sitting out in this grassy field, and this blue sky and these trees, and I’m sitting there and I’m watching all of this, and in my head I’m like, “God, if you are real, will you please show yourself to me?” Because I just thought, “How is this possible?” But then Nothing happened. Like there wasn’t lightning or like a Bible fell on me or like somebody walked… Right? Like, no one walked up to me at that moment and said, “Jesus is God!”

And so I was like, “Okay, well, I guess God’s not real,” but I actually think that in the creation of what God had made, He was saying to me, “I am real.” He had put into my heart a desire to search for Him, even in that moment.

The other thing that I struggled with was death. So I had an ongoing, constant fear of death. I think un-normal. I have four children of my own. None of my children are living in fear of death. So like I said, I was a very moral person, and I think one big reason why I was very moral is I lived in constant fear that I would die. So I wanted to wear a seatbelt, I didn’t want to speed, I didn’t want to use drugs, I didn’t want to drink alcohol, because I lived always thinking, “Oh, I might die! I might die!” And when you died, then that was it. There was nothing after that, and so I didn’t want to die, so I didn’t want to do any of these things. And that also made me think, “Okay, is this really all that life is?” Like, “Is this really it?” Death was also a struggle for me.

Okay. Yeah. And those are very real issues of beauty and death, and of course, you as the atheist humanist have to look at life through a stark lens. Like you say, death is all there is. When you look at the diversity and beauty in the world, it really is a little bit hard to explain. I know that there are atheists who look at the cosmos and call it magical because it’s awe inspiring and it’s hard to dismiss that. But at this point you had intellectually dismissed God.

Now, you had a moment there where you were wavering, but I’m curious just…. Before we go there, what did you think of Christians or Christianity or belief in God at this point? That it was just subpar intellectually? That it’s just some wishful thinking or fairy tale? Give us what you were thinking around that time and why it wasn’t an intellectually viable option for you. 

Okay, so that’s a great question, Jana. I had some Christian friends, friends that referred to themselves as Christians, in middle school, high school, college, people calling themselves Christians. I remember having friends invite me to youth group, and I said, “What is youth group?” because this is like Christian-speak. I didn’t know what youth group was. So they were like, “Oh, it’s when people from our church get together, and we talk about God and stuff.” And I was like, “Well, no, I don’t want to do that.” I wasn’t interested in that. But a lot of it was because the morality that I was keeping was actually superior to the morality that my friends were keeping, right? And so I remember having this friend who was involved with her boyfriend in an immoral way, and she was a Christian and she would say, “Well, God will forgive me,” and that was like what she would say. And I just thought, “Well, if that’s Christianity, I don’t like that.” Now, keep in mind, to me…. Okay, so one is the Christians that I knew, unfortunately, they just did not really… they were not holding to their convictions. So they would say, “I believe this,” but they weren’t really doing it.

But there was the occasional Christian that wasn’t like that and that was really appealing to me. So as an atheist, there were these couple Christians that I knew, and now looking back, I wish that I could get in touch with them again and be like, “You were a good example for me!” But people who cared about me and who wanted me to know God.

But the other piece of it was I was largely ignorant, okay? So I think sometimes Christians think that atheists know more than they do. And I understand that some atheists have really researched, and they know all about Christianity, and they’ve read the whole Bible, and they have chosen to reject the actual tenets of Christianity that they have read and studied and read the Bible, and they have chosen to reject it. But I think that a lot of atheists, including myself, were like straw man argument, okay? So we have this illusion of what Christians are, and we are rejecting that. So I was rejecting Christians, okay? I was rejecting a faith in an unknown God because I couldn’t see Him, touch Him, feel Him. But I really didn’t know Christianity as far as the gospel, and we’ll get to that in a little bit.

But the things that I knew: When I was in college, we took kind of a comparative religion class, and I thought, “Okay, I’m going to choose a religion. So Jews have the law, right? And they like….” Okay, so what I knew, what I understood was: There’s the Ten Commandments. You keep these laws and that kind of stuff. I thought, “Oh, well, that sounds kind of good. A religion where you keep laws, that sounded good to me.” Or other kinds of religions where they were very…. Rule-based faiths sounded more appealing to me than what I knew about Christianity. But, once again, a lot of it was ignorance. And if there is one thing that I really hope that some people will understand, it’s that sometimes you’re rejecting something that you have not really studied and learned about and that you really know what it is that the person actually believes. And not just, “Oh, well, I met this Muslim guy this one time, and I didn’t like him, so I don’t want to be a Muslim.” I met Christians, and I didn’t like some of them. Therefore, I didn’t want to be a Christian. And in my growing up, at that time, most of what I was exposed to would have been Christianity. I didn’t really know a lot of other tenets of faith, but that’s another little piece of my story if you want to hear about that. I don’t know.

Sure, sure. 

So I skipped a grade, I shared that, I skipped a grade. I became a complete social outcast, right? Because my fourth grade friends wanted nothing to do with me, and the fifth graders wanted nothing to do with me. So I was just a complete social outcast, and so who welcomed me in but this little group of refugee immigrants from Asia. Okay? So one from Thailand, one from Vietnam, and one who was Muslim. I’m not sure where in the Middle East she was from. But those were who became my friends. But they weren’t really trying to convert me, either. They weren’t telling me about their faith, you know? So it would have been interesting if they had, if they had started telling me about their faith. I don’t know. But they really didn’t.

When I was in college, my roommate was Mormon. Once again, I liked her because she kept lots of rules, and I liked that. That was really appealing to me. But didn’t try to convert me. I think I’m kind of…. Maybe this is a stereotype of atheists. I’m kind of out there, Jana. I kind of speak my mind, and I’m kind of scary sometimes. Even with Christians, I can be kind of scary and intimidating because I know how to steer a conversation. So I would steer a conversation to where I wanted to talk about, right? So when I was in college and I would have conversations with people that were professing Christians, and

I would steer the conversation to whatever topic it was that I wanted to talk about. So, for example, maybe I wanted to talk about how ridiculous it was to believe that the Bible is God’s word, okay? And so I would just start on… it would be like a talking point, and I would just, “Well, how can you believe that the Bible is God’s word? Do you have any proof? How do you know that?” You know. And they didn’t know how to answer me, you know? Or, “What proof do you have that God created the world? What proof do you have of that? Were you there? How do you know?” right? And then they would just kind of be stumped. So, likewise, I think a lot of times people didn’t really try and share stuff with me because I wasn’t comfortable talking about that thing, and I would just steer it to talk about whatever it was I wanted to talk about, and then I would dominate the conversation. And there I was. That’s where we went.

Yeah. So it sounds like, then, you had really a picture of Christians and Christianity. Not only were they hypocritical, it was not attractive to you because they weren’t following the rules, although a few were, I guess a few were, but it was more the exception. And then they didn’t seem to be able to intellectually stand on their own two feet. It sounds like, when you were challenging them with their own worldview, they didn’t seem to be able to stand toe to toe with you or engage in a meaningfully intellectual way. So you didn’t have respect, it sounds like, morally or intellectually for the Christian, but it is interesting that you were surrounded by a lot of different people from a lot of different faiths, and really it sounds like only the Christians, at some times, engaged you in conversation, and then that was seemingly impotent.

So your view of religion at this point, it sounds like, continues to fail, or meet your expectations for failure, in a sense, as an atheist. But yet you spoke of coming upon a moment in your life where you were overwhelmed by the beauty and the grandiosity of what you were experiencing as you were looking into the world and seeing the beauty. And so much so that you actually were willing to say, “God, if you exist.…” Now, that’s a little bit stunning admission, considering you were seemingly in control of the conversation and in control of your life, but yet you had, like you said, these two vulnerabilities, kind of two-sided coin of death and beauty. But God didn’t seem to answer in the way that you wanted when you were vulnerable in that moment. And I presume that that was a very sincere request of God, right? That you were open at that moment, but He didn’t answer in the way that you had hoped. So what happened there? Did you just close the door again and move on? Or were these two things, death and beauty, just kind of underlying tensions, causing some kind of dissonance in you that wanted an answer? 

Yeah. I think they were ongoing tensions for me. But as far as that moment, in Vermont on the grassy field and all of that, I do, I kind of think in that moment, it was almost like, “See, I gave you an opportunity.” You know? It was encouraging me to close the door once again on God and be like…. Because I know that at that camp there were some Christians at that camp, and probably they were trying to engage me, and I was closing them off, and I was kind of like, “Okay, God, I’ll open the door. You get two minutes right now, and You could do something,” but you know, really, my heart was hard. I wish that I could say I was as open minded. I think that I would have called myself open minded. You know, Jana? I would have said, “Oh, I’m open minded. If you can prove it to me, I will believe it,” but I really wasn’t open minded. I really had already made up my mind. I was an atheist, and I had made up my mind about that, and I had told everybody.

And I mean, it’s kind of funny, actually, after the fact, a couple of friends who have found out that I’m a Christian, they are like, “What?” They can’t believe it because I was pretty out there. I was an outspoken atheist. Now I call myself… I was an evangelical atheist. I was trying to convert people to be atheists. I wasn’t just a closet atheist. I was an outspoken atheist. And so to leave that identity is like my identity was in being me, so to be humble for that moment and be like, “Okay, God, if You’re real, show Yourself to me,” and then He doesn’t do it, then it was like, “Okay.”

I would love to share one other little piece of my story, and that is an experience that I had ongoing with C.S. Lewis. So when I was a kid, my grandparents gave me The Chronicles of Narnia series, and it was my most favorite series, and I read it over and over and over again. And when I was in high school, we had to choose our favorite author and write a paper about them. And now, I haven’t told any of you how old I am, but when I was a kid, I was younger than the Internet, so I had to research things, like in a library, right? I had to go to the library and do research. So I put it off to the weekend before this paper is due, and I go to the library to research C.S. Lewis, and I’m like, “Oh, no! This man used to be an atheist, and he converted to be a Christian. What am I going to do? And I chose him to be my favorite author. This is terrible!”

I presume in reading the Narnia series over and over, The Chronicles of Narnia, you didn’t have the sensibility of who Aslan was and the redemption story or any of that? 

Right. Right. And now when I read it, I’m reading it going, “Oh, oh, it’s so beautiful! It’s such a beautiful story!” But it’s beautiful to anyone, whether you know God or you don’t know God. It’s a beautiful story of redemption. It rings in your heart. I mean, all of them, The Last Battle, Silver Chair, I mean, there’s so much beauty in all of them. Not just The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. And so when I wrote this paper, I left out huge segments of his life.

I imagine so. 

I was not the most honest person. With these rules that I made up, honesty was kind of honesty as far as no one was hurt and I wasn’t plagiarizing and I wasn’t lying. I was just leaving out huge portions of his life. So I would just say certain little things.

But it’s funny how now you can look back and see different ways, different little things, little seeds that were being planted in my life in different points in time, where here was a man who had been an atheist and who had converted to believe in God. And so when I became a Christian, then I have…. I mean, I’m reading Mere Christianity right now. I mean, it’s just there are so many things that C.S. Lewis has touched my life, so just a little aside for-

Yes, yes, yeah. 

I don’t know. Little catalysts. Catalysts that made you think, “Okay, is God real?” This is a person that I admire, right? I liked writing. I admired him as an author, and this was a man who had converted, and he was a wise man, and he had converted. And it made me think, “Hmm. Maybe this is something I should think about.”

Right. I guess you hadn’t read book one of Mere Christianity. Since you were such a moral person, the first few pages of Mere Christianity would have really caused you a little bit of tension, I think. 

Now, I did buy a copy of Screwtape Letters. Now, I was at a public library, and they were having a book sale, and I… “Oh, look! This is by C.S. Lewis!” Now, this was before I wrote the paper about him, and I didn’t know what it was about and anyway. So I picked up a copy of Screwtape Letters, but I thought, “This is really strange,” and I never read it, but now I’ve read it a couple of times, and it’s good.

That’s interesting that you picked up Screwtape Letters, but it didn’t make much sense to you. C.S. Lewis was and is just an extraordinary writer and thinker, former atheist, as you said, but it is also quite interesting that there were dots and pointers, like you say, towards the transcendent, as he would probably advocate that even his work was one of those pointers towards the transcendent. 

So then pick us back up with your story. You had read…. You almost felt betrayed by the fact that you found out that C.S. Lewis was an atheist and now a Christian. 

Right.

Did you ever come to a place, since you were such a moral person, that there had to be some kind of a transcendent grounding for objective morality? Or did that play at all in your line of thinking or openness towards God? 

No. Honestly, I can’t say that that ever occurred to me. It seemed like a social construct. It seemed just like humanism of… we make laws, keeping in mind once again, my dad’s a lawyer, my grandfather is a lawyer. We have these laws for the social good, and I should do these good things because it’s good for society. My parents are very generous people. They want to help other people. And so I wanted to be good for myself, for my own pride, but also to help my community, to help my society, for the benefit of mankind.

Actually, one other little interesting stereotype breaker was that I was an outspoken pro-life person. I took my pro-life signs and went to the… marching at different things.

Interesting! 

And I think that is interesting, but I was very science based, right? And I had seen pictures of a little ultrasound of a little baby, and I was like, “Well, that is a baby.” So, right and wrong, I’m going to say that you should not kill that because that is a baby. Just like I also was a vegetarian for several years, same kind of time period. I was a vegetarian for several years because I saw animals and I loved animals and I didn’t think we should eat them. And I felt that this was a consistent worldview. These things, there’s no God in this. It’s all science. It is just, “This thing is alive. This thing is alive. We don’t kill them.” So I just… Once again, in my head, now who knows, but in my head, I was making up rules for myself, and I tried to keep them, but at the same time I couldn’t keep them perfectly.

Right. 

So here’s an example where we start getting a little deeper into my life. So when I was 16, I started dating a guy and fell in love with him, and he was going to be the one, right? But I’m 16, but he’s going to be the one. And so I get intimately involved with him when I’m 16. But I had made this rule for myself that I wasn’t going to be like an immoral floozy, right? So he was just going to be the one. But then, man, we broke up a couple of years later.

So then, when I’m like 18, we have a new “the one.” And so I date him all through college and get into an immoral—but in my head moral—monogamous relationship with him for three and a half years. He was going to be the one. But then…. We dated all through college, and we were about to get married. I had wedding invitations. I had my wedding dress. We were going to get married. But he was abusive to me. And, for as smart as I was and how self-confident everyone around me thinks that I am, I’m not, you know? I was that rejected kid. I was the one who really struggled to fit in in a lot of social situations and the idea of breaking up with him… I made these rules for myself, and I didn’t want to have another partner. I wanted to marry him, but I couldn’t marry him. I couldn’t. And everyone was shocked. My parents were shocked. And I broke up with him, and I moved to a new city. I moved to St. Louis, Missouri, to student teach my final quarter of college because I needed to get away from him. I didn’t feel safe breaking up with him and staying at college. So right before I moved, I broke up with him, gave him the ring back, broke off the engagement, and I moved to a new city.

And this was the rock bottom. For all these other kinds of things, I’d always had some kind of support system, but now I’m in a new city, I’m about to graduate, I don’t know where I’m going to work. My parents, at this point, are living full time in an RV. My sister is living in Colorado. I am in a city where I know no one, and I was at a very, very… the lowest point in my life. So I had been in St. Louis for about two weeks, and I get a call from a girlfriend. And I’m at a school, and I am teaching, and the person on the end of the line is this girlfriend, this Christian girlfriend who I had not wanted to maintain contact with. And she said, “Hey, Kim. I’m getting married tomorrow, and you have to come to my wedding.” And I’m like, “Really?” Once again, I lie on occasion, only just when I needed to for the other person’s best interest. I’m like, “Really? I didn’t know,” but the truth is I did know, and I didn’t want to go. I had just broken off the engagement. I did not want to go to this girl’s wedding. But here she is, she’s on the phone!  What am I going to do, right? So I’m like, “Really? Tomorrow? Okay. Yeah!” And I mean I have nothing like, “What am I going to do?” So I’m like, “Okay, I’ll be there.”

So I go to the wedding. Do you know where she was getting married? In St. Louis.

What are the odds? 

I’m from Iowa, okay? I was going to college in Illinois. I am in St. Louis for like twelve weeks to student teach, and she’s getting married in St. Louis. And I’m like, “Okay, well, I guess I have to go, and so I go to this wedding, and I hadn’t RSVP’ed, so I was like, “Okay, I got to go to the wedding, and I got to find somewhere to sit, and so this guy says, “Hey, you can sit at our table.” And so he then became my friend while I was in St. Louis because, like I said, I didn’t know anyone. I had no friends. I am living in a dorm with elementary…. It was a residential school where I was teaching, and so I was living in a dorm with children. And I mean, that’s not who I wanted to hang out with. So I would go spend time with this guy.

So he’s a Christian, and he starts talking to me about God, but once again, I would steer the conversation. I would steer the conversation. And so he would tell me about this thing or this thing, or I would ask him questions just to try and show him how foolish he was and Christianity is just a crutch. It’s only for foolish people. But this went on for several weeks, and he kept calling me, which is shocking. I don’t know. I think I would have been like, “Okay, I’m not interested in you anymore.” But he kept calling me, and so, at some point he said this word about, “Well, when people are saved…”

So in this moment when he says something about being saved, I’m like, “I’m sorry. What do you mean? What do you mean by saved?” And I heard the gospel. I heard what it meant to be saved.

What did he say? 

So he’s like, “Oh my goodness! She just asked me what it meant to be saved!” And he’s like, “Well, so you have to admit that you’re a sinner, that you’re bad, that you’ve done bad things, that you have broken God’s commands. And that Jesus is God, and that Jesus died on the cross to pay the penalty for all of those sins, and that, if you put your trust in Jesus, that He died for you for your sins, that Jesus pays for that.” And I’m like, “Jesus is God?” This is just to show how ignorant I was. But Jana, I didn’t know that Jesus was God. How do I not know this? I grew up in America, but I didn’t know Jesus was God and that Jesus died on the cross for me. I was like, “Okay.”

So I’m like, “Okay, God, if this is real… like, I want to believe this. I want to believe that this is real. Will you please help me? Help me to believe that this is real. I want to be saved. I want to believe in You. I want to trust You.” But it’s hard. It’s hard to go from unbelief to belief. And yet when I’m praying, I’m like, “Okay, help my unbelief.” That kind of like, “I want to believe. Help me to believe this,” and so I believe that in that moment, that was the beginning of God beginning a work in me.

So, just to be clear, again, to go from a space of adamant unbelief. You hear the gospel. You’re willing to say, “God, if you’re real,” again, one of those, except very heartfelt again. It sounds like there was something very attractive about whatever being saved was. I imagine, again, as a very moral person, you’re always trying to live up to a certain standard of performance. There’s always—inevitably, because we’re all fallen—there’s always a disappointment, always a failure, always never enough in our own sense. So there must have been something very appealing to you about this gospel message. 

Yes, Jana. Because, for as much as I was making up my own rules, not rules God made, rules Kim made, I couldn’t keep my own rules. Do you hear me?

Right. 

I couldn’t keep my own rules. And these were rules that I was making for myself, but I couldn’t keep them. So the idea that I was a sinner, that even in keeping my own rules, whether these were God’s rules or my rules, I recognized that I didn’t want to lie, but I did lie. Right? I wanted to only be with the one person that I married. But that didn’t work out, you know? I knew that I had done things that were wrong, by God’s standards or my own standards. I knew that I had done things that were wrong. I knew that. So then the idea that God Himself would take on human flesh and walk among men and then die for me, for the sins of the world, it was the best news I’d ever heard. I couldn’t believe that I was 21 years old and this is the first time that I’d ever heard or understood that. And it’s hard, I have to almost say heard and understood, because at some level I’m sure that, at some level, I had heard things about this. But I don’t think it was clearly and personally… I know it was never personally to me expressed, right? Maybe in a comparative religion class, maybe an Easter service while I’m doodling or sleeping on my grandma’s lap. But personally, one on one, I know that none of my friends have ever explained this basic “the gospel.” Why was I converted? I heard the gospel.

So obviously, again, it was something so appealing and so attractive. But as a thinker and intellectual, you were going, “Well, so how do I know that God exists? How do I know that Jesus is God? How do I know that this isn’t just a fairy tale story to make me feel better?” Were any of those thoughts going through your head? Or was it, “This just sounds so amazing! I really want this to be true.” 

Okay, so both/and, right? So, “This is so amazing! I really want this to be true,” right? “But how can this be true? This can’t be true.” So like I said, it is a, “God, if this is real, please help me to believe that this is real.” So after this, Bill gives me a Bible, and I kind of start reading the Bible. Now, before I had a Bible in my home, and I had read some of Genesis up through about Noah where I stopped, and I thought this was just craziness, and I don’t know how anyone could believe that, and that was the end of me reading the Bible. I’d never read Matthew, Mark, Luke, John. In fact, a little piece of my ignorance is that I remember, after becoming a Christian, after praying and wanting to be born again or wanting to believe that God is real, that someone said you should read the book of John. And I was like, “Okay, well, where do I get that book?” Because I didn’t know that the book of John was actually a part of the Bible, so I really didn’t know these things.

And so I started reading, with some direction of, “Hey, read the book of John,” right? So my first step was: Maybe I should read the Bible. I know that, for some people, obviously how can you reject something that you’ve never known? But a lot of people reject things that they don’t know. I didn’t really know what I was rejecting. I was rejecting it because I was rejecting it. And so I started reading the Bible with an open mind. And as I’m reading this, now this is at some level Christian speak, okay? So I will try to say it in a way that anyone can understand. Like, before when I would read it, I didn’t have God, the Holy Spirit, living in me and giving me wisdom. And after I prayed this, I truly believe that the Holy Spirit came and changed my heart and I started reading the Bible. It was the most obvious evidence to me that something life transforming had happened in my life in that day, in April 1994. I had been changed. And I start reading the Bible, and I’m like, “This is real.” Like, “This is true.” “Oh, my goodness! This is amazing! This is so amazing!” And I’m reading the Bible, like, “This is not just a book. It’s not just a fairy tale,” like, “This is really the word of God.”

And so, at some level, it’s the good news of the gospel, and I was changed, but I also wanted answers to my questions. Like, “Okay, is my faith reasonable? Is there evidence that proves that the Bible is provable and believable and it’s not just pie in the sky faith and nothingness?”

But, in addition to all of that…. So for some people, their struggle is to believe that God is good, or their struggle is to resist sin, or their struggle is—we all have kind of different struggles as a Christian, putting your faith in something. And for me, my struggle was just to believe that God was real. I don’t know how to express this. It’s hard to express it unless you have been an atheist. Like there are still moments where it’s this struggle of like, “Okay, so is God real? Is God real, or am I just believing in a fairy tale?” And that was still a struggle.

And so after becoming a professing Christian and saying, “I believe in this,” unfortunately, life did not get easy. There have been many difficult marriage struggles. My second child passed away after finding out in utero that he had a fatal condition. We attempted in utero surgery, and he passed away. We then adopted a child. There have been terrible tragedies that have happened in my life, but in all of these little things, it is like God is real, and that helps me to believe that God is real.

Yeah. That’s quite a testimony, really. When you’re looking for someone Who is real, not just true, but a God Who is actually there, and a God Who is there for you personally. And then I imagine that, as your belief was becoming more foundational, your periods of unbelief were perhaps leaving, and your periods of belief were becoming more and more firm. I would imagine, after embracing God as real, then you can look at things like beauty and have an explanation for what it is that you see and experience in the world. But I would also imagine your question of death would be a very different issue for you now as a Christian, that fear that you once held as someone who didn’t believe in God. How do you perceive issues of death now? 

Yeah. It’s funny. The song that pops into my head is, “O, death, where is your sting?” Right? So when God told Adam and Eve that they had to leave the garden and that they couldn’t eat from that tree of life anymore and that we would die, did you know that in the Christian mindset, this is actually good, because death now means being ushered into eternity in heaven with God. For the Christian, death is the end of this hard, hard life that we have lived on Earth. And it’s the beginning of, like. I will see my little baby boy again. But I’ll see Jesus Who died for me, even more than I will see my loved ones. The idea that I will see my Savior. And the idea that God does not hold against me those years of being a blasphemer and that I can be forgiven, truly forgiven, of who I was and be welcomed in with open arms to eternity. I mean, this is good news. You know?

I heard this once, and I thought it was so earth shattering, the idea that Earth is the closest to hell that I as a Christian will ever get, but Earth is the closest to God that those that don’t know Jesus, those that reject Jesus…. Earth is the closest that they will ever get to God. Because here on Earth, there is still some goodness here on Earth in a way that, eternity apart from God, there is no more of God’s goodness left once you choose to continue in your sin and to have heard clearly—any of you that are listening to this, you have heard clearly the gospel, you have, and you can make the choice to turn away from your sins and to turn to God. He offers that to you. He offers it to me freely. And I’m not the same person that I once was. I have hope. I have joy. I have peace in a way that I can now go through these trials. They are still hard. I don’t like them. But I can have joy now in Jesus, in knowing that this world isn’t all that there is.

Right. Yeah. And as you say, God is, in a sense, home, where you’re fully known and fully loved and fully accepted and fully belong, and all those reasons why we want to look even beyond death towards what’s to come. 

Kim, what a beautiful story of transformation! It just strikes me as someone who was so resistant. You know, the evangelical atheist who is now the evangelical Christian! It’s so obvious to me that your heart is for others to know what you know and to experience what you experienced, because you’ve obviously found something so good and true and life giving. For those who are skeptical and who may be listening, who perhaps have that moment of open vulnerability or humility or whatever it is that might want to call out to God and say, “God, are You real?” There’s something there that they’re curious about. What would you say to the skeptic who might be curious? 

Gosh, I have so much I want to say. So, one being don’t be afraid. I think, at some level, there is fear of that unknown God, right? Don’t be afraid to put your trust in something that you can’t see. It will…. Not it, God. God is good. And even the fact that you are questioning or that you’re seeking, at some level that communicates that God is real and that God is prompting you and encouraging you and drawing you. And also, I would say seek. I think sometimes we just…. We…. Me, okay? Me, atheist. Why wasn’t I seeking? I mean, this is the most important decision in your life. It’s the most important decision in your life. And not to put it off. I guess, you know, maybe at some level I was like, “Oh, I’m still young, and maybe I’ll look at that some other time,” but you’re not guaranteed tomorrow. So to really seek. I found Josh McDowell’s books really helpful. More Than a Carpenter, I think, is a fantastic book. I think Mere Christianity is a fantastic book. And at some level, just that you’re even listening to this, that’s awesome. Like, keep seeking. God wants you to know Him. God created people for good, and He wants people to know Him. So reach out to Him.

Yeah, I think that’s really great advice. It makes me think, too, of what you were saying before in your story, that you really didn’t even know what you were rejecting. You were just rejecting God and Christianity out of hand and for some reason, but not thoroughly investigated or intentionally sought out reasons, you know? They were just presumed. And I think sometimes, if you’re willing to seek, like you say, just to seek honestly, that you’ll find, probably a lot more than you thought was there. 

For Christians who might be listening, and like you say, you’re an evangelical Christian now who wants others to know God. There are so many Christians who are listening, who have people in their lives, who don’t know God or are rejecting God on some level and rejecting Christ and Christianity. How would you encourage Christians to best engage, perhaps with a life that is not hypocritical or that they know why they believe, not just that they believe, so that they can give answers, unlike those who were not able to answer you when you were younger. What would you encourage the Christian to do or be or think in order to be more effective in the way that they engage others? 

Okay, so there’s a couple things: One is always be prepared to give a reason for the hope that is in you and do it with gentleness and respect. So be prepared that the person that you’re talking to might control the conversation, be angry, all of that, but you have to be able to continue to be gentle and respectful and avoid arrogance. Humility is so attractive, and unfortunately, I’m afraid that so many Christians, they can become prideful and arrogant in their knowing the truth, rather than being humble in knowing the truth. So encouragement to be humble. But also to always be prepared to give a reason. So to be able to share the gospel quickly, concisely. I can share the gospel in a nutshell in one to three minutes.

I can share in one minute that Jesus Christ was God’s only son, that He came to earth. He lived a perfect and sinless life. He did all kinds of miracles to prove that He really was God in the flesh. He died on the cross to pay the punishment for our sins. All of those wrong things that we have done, all of those things that we have done against God’s laws, He took those upon Himself on the cross, paying for our sins. And He rose from the dead after three days, proving again that He is God, and triumphing over sin and death. And now Jesus reigns from on high. And you can trust in God and turn away from your sin today. What is preventing you? What is stopping you? What concerns do you have in putting your trust in Jesus? And then be prepared to hear what they have to say. There might be some stumbling block that they have. Not everyone is going to be like me and be like, “That’s the best news I’ve ever heard! I want to believe!”

If they have a struggle, then go with them, like Bill, who continued to stay with me and stay with me and stay with me. Walk the journey with them. Read the Bible with them if they’re willing. Recommend some good Christian literature to them. And stay with them in whatever it is that they’re wrestling with. Yeah. So share the gospel. Be humble.

Yeah. I think what you say is really spot on, and I think that…. Gospel means “good news,” and it was good news for you because it means that you didn’t have to perform. None of us have to perform because we’re none of us good enough, right? So the idea of having grace laid upon you, that you don’t have to be good enough, that God has done that for you, that is tremendously good news, and it would be good news for anyone who wants to hear it. 

So thank you. You really are the consummate teacher, I think. And it’s obvious to me that you have spent a lot of your life communicating ideas and that it’s not just from your head and the logical aspect of you, but really you have such a passion for what you believe to be true and real. And I just appreciate so much, Kim, you coming on with me today, for sharing all that you have in such a transparent and really pragmatic way, that I think that a lot of us need to hear and want to hear at some level. And I pray that really that this conversation is benefit to so many who hear. So thank you for coming on with me today. 

You’re welcome. You’re welcome. I hope I can be an encouragement to Christians that don’t have a testimony like mine, that your testimony matters too. You don’t have to have a testimony like me. When Bill shared the gospel with me, his testimony doesn’t look anything like mine, but his testimony and sharing the gospel are what God used to touch me. So you don’t have to have a, “I was an atheist, and now I got saved,” to be able to share the gospel with other people and encourage them in their faith. So thanks for having me on. I really appreciate it.

Oh, you’re so welcome! Thank you again. 

Thanks for tuning into Side B Stories to hear Kim’s story. You can find out more about her and her story through her book, God is Real: The Eyewitness Testimony of a Former Atheist. She also has a YouTube channel and blog, and I’ll post all of that information and links in the episode notes. For questions and feedback about this episode, you can contact me through our website. Again, that is www.sidebstories.com. If you enjoyed it, I hope you’ll follow, rate, review, and share this podcast with your friends and social network. We would really appreciate it. And again, we welcome your thoughts about this episode and our podcast on our Side B Stories Facebook page. In the meantime, I’ll be looking forward to seeing you next time, where we’ll see how another skeptic flips the record of their life. 

Claire Dooley left the God of the Jehovah’s Witness religion behind and became an atheist.  After encountering the overwhelming love of Jesus, she came to believe. To learn more about Claire and her film documentaries, go to www.clairedooley.co Hear more stories of atheist conversions to Christianity at www.sidebstories.com Episode Transcript

Hello, and thanks for joining in. I’m Jana Harmon, and you’re listening to Side B Stories, where we see how skeptics flip the record of their lives. Each podcast, we listen to someone who has once been an atheist or skeptic, but who became a Christian against all odds. You can hear more of these stories at our Side B Stories website, www.sidebstories.com. We also welcome your comments on these stories on our Side B Stories Facebook page as well. 

People hold a lot of ideas about the Bible from what they’ve heard or presumed. Many skeptics may or may not have personally read it, but they often have strong impressions about it, mostly negative. Considering the Bible in any serious form or positive way was simply out of the question according to many former atheists in my doctoral research. They expressed many reasons to reject the text. It was viewed as a mixture of myth, fabrication, ignorant commentary from bronze-age Jews, a tool that someone had actually crafted to control the population, or a generally non-historical false religious book. Its supernatural content alone caused nearly half to soundly dismiss it. For them, the Bible wasn’t worth taking a first, much less a second look, unless to disprove it. 

Interestingly, some who began their quest towards discrediting scripture found themselves in a precarious place of changing their preconceived notions. Once they got around to examining the Bible, many found it to be historically, intellectually, and even morally forceful, with a ring of truth. Although initially hostile to reading the Bible, some were even compelled towards serious, even voracious, reading, surprised by what they had found. Others found the person and words of Jesus as extraordinary and surprising and were personally drawn to Him, wanting to know more. 

In today’s story, former atheist Claire Dooley opened the Bible for herself, and she was changed. A storyteller and filmmaker, she was drawn not only to its compelling narrative, a grand love story, but became intrigued by Jesus, the Author and Giver of love Himself.

Welcome to Side B Stories podcast, Claire. It’s so great to have you. 

Thank you for having me. I really love being here.

Wow, that’s wonderful. I’m just so grateful for you being here. Why don’t you tell our listeners a little bit about who you are, so they have an idea before we get into your story. 

So I am from Mississippi. I currently live in Austin, Texas, and I’ve been making documentary films since I was 19 years old.

And you’re 23 now? So for about four years? 

I’m 23 now, and yeah, it’s been about four years. I went to college for a year and then left school and was mentored by someone in the industry in New Orleans, and so I kind of skipped, bypassed the whole school process.

Tell me about your home and your family growing up. Was there any religion, any kind of faith, anything like that, as you were growing up as a child? 

Yeah. So I think I kind of have a weird story. When I tell people my childhood, they’re like, “What?” Like I said, I was raised in Mississippi, and I was home schooled until I was eleven, and now I have six siblings, but at the time, when I was really young, I had three. So my mother was a Jehovah’s Witness. And my dad was not. So my dad had been to church on Easter and Christmas when he was a younger child. But my mom was converted when she was around 19 years old. And so, when we were little, I would literally go door to door preaching the good word to all of these different people. I mean, from a very young age, five years old, knocking on these doors, preaching to people. And then the older I got, the more I realized that something was off, right? My father wasn’t necessarily supportive of my mother’s faith. And she had, they ended up having three more children. So there’s six kids at this point, and she couldn’t continue going to church by herself. So me and my older sister would go a lot.

So when I was eleven years old, just to backtrack a bit, we went to public school for the first time. And so that was kind of interesting, being a home schooler, going from this very more sheltered environment to a public school in Mississippi. And so me and my two older siblings, both of us were in school until we graduated after that point. And so it was interesting because I was sitting there and Jehovah’s Witnesses are very rule oriented. There’s not a lot of grace. There’s no acknowledgment of this unconditional love that our Father has for us. It’s talked about on the outside, but on the inside, they don’t really live by that. So if you dress a certain way, if you celebrate holidays, whatever it is, that makes you a worldly person. And so I would be in school and watching all these kids around me, and they’d be celebrating Christmas or even simple things like saying the Pledge of Allegiance.

And I constantly felt like an outsider, and I was put in this really unfair predicament, I think, because I’m a young child with all these beliefs that have been thrown on to me. And at the same time I’m put around all these “worldly people” and expected to, as a young person, be completely unwavering in anything, in any of my decisions, right? Especially given that my father was not a Jehovah’s Witness. So he had family Christmas on his side. If I went over to family Christmas, the Jehovah’s Witnesses that I was friends with, the young people I was friends with, would not invite me to things and would basically shun me for doing those things, when it was something I had no control over. And so, as I got older and older, I just remember trying so hard. I remember trying to follow all the rules. I remember trying to be the perfect Christian and get the right amount of hours and service, which is what they call whenever you go door to door and preach. And my older sister and I would go to church by ourselves without our mom.

And when she went to college, the woman who was actually hosting the Bible study with her from our church cut her off because she was upset with her for going to college and didn’t help her transition whatsoever.

You see that a lot in Jehovah’s Witness’s kind of culture. And so at that point, I just stopped.

You were believing up until that point. You believed in God, or at least this Jehovah’s Witness version of God and Jesus. But again, it was very rules oriented, very legalistic. So there were a lot of positives and negatives growing up with this image of God, I guess, in your mind. Through your journey of being a Jehovah’s Witness, who did you perceive God to be? What was their picture of God to you? 

So Jehovah’s Witnesses don’t really talk about what we call the Trinity at all. They believe that that is part of “false religion.” And so Jehovah, which is a translation that came about in, I think, the 18th century, late 18th century, would be what we call Yahweh, and so He was God. Jesus had nothing to do with that. Jesus was just a ransom sacrifice. And Jehovah’s Witnesses also teach and for the last century, since 1914, I think, is when they were started, around that point, they’ve taught that Armageddon was coming. It’s coming, it’s coming, it’s coming. It’s fear, it’s fear, it’s fear. You know, Jesus is going to come back soon. All the world is going to be done away with. And if you’re not a Jehovah’s Witness, you’re going to die. That’s literally what they teach. And so I was always so afraid. I was like, “I’m going to die if I don’t do all these things right. I’m gonna die. And I have to follow each of these rules because that’s how God is. And He expects all this of us. And if I don’t do this, then it’s all on me.” And I wanted nothing to do with that God by the time I turned 16. I had a lot of trauma surrounding that God, because it’s not who I know Him to be now whatsoever.

So your sister went off to college. You saw the way that she was, in a way, shunned by the JW community, or her Bible study teacher, and that was, I guess, for you, the last straw, to see the way that she was treated, and was there something about that that you said, “I’ve had enough.” 

It wasn’t out of anger as much as it was…. It was more feelings of hopelessness. She’s gone, and the woman was also studying the Bible with me and ended the Bible study with me. So I just felt like I wasn’t important, and I felt like I was a lost cause, like I’d been put on the back burner. And the woman made no arrangements to find someone else to mentor me and be there for me in the spiritual way. And so I just kind of thought, “I can’t do this. I don’t feel capable of doing this.” I could never be good enough for God. And I remember actively breaking down about two years later, because in the back of my mind, I thought He was there. But then again, I just always thought, “No, I could never be good enough for Him. I could never achieve that. I’m just going to die. I’m giving up right now.” And I remember, like, I said this prayer, and it was the last time I prayed for three years. I remember having a conversation like, “God, I’m sorry, but what You ask of me, I just can’t do it. I don’t know how. And You deserve so much. You are such an amazing Creator to do everything you’ve done for us, and I just could never, ever repay You for that. I could never be the person You want me to be.” Because I knew nothing of sanctification. I knew nothing of this grace. And so at that point, I just said goodbye to God, basically, and ventured into being agnostic. And that was around the time that I went off to college.

Okay, yeah. So when you went off to college, you left whatever remnants of faith you had behind, and you said you became agnostic. So you were, I guess, in this period of not really sure. You just didn’t want to have anything to do with Jehovah’s Witness and that kind of God. And so okay, so walk us forward then as you entered into this, I presume, again kind of a secular university, that was not JW or anything to do with that? 

No. It was a liberal arts college in Mississippi called Millsaps. And so I went there for…. I remember my parents dropping me off and just kind of having this ultimate freedom. And at the time it ended up being a very beautiful thing, but I was dating this guy, and so it did protect me from a lot. But I remember just thinking to myself, “Well, maybe God’s not real. Maybe all of that was in my head and maybe there’s not really a God at all,” because all these things I like to do, everything that I find joyful and pleasurable about entering the world, is the complete opposite of what I think, these people, what they call God, wants. That doesn’t make any sense to me.”

So I just kind of thought I might as well just live the most sinful life I can. I didn’t think of it that way, but that was kind of the concept in my moving forward, just, “Yeah, I’m just going to do whatever I want to do because I honestly don’t even think God exists, and I’m just going to completely let go of any kind of sense of moral direction.”

And I lived like that, and my whole life, I think because of religion, from around 14 years old, I struggled with depression and anxiety. When I was 14 years old, and this is kind of, I think, a byproduct of the environment I was in, the school I was in, and all these different attacks from Satan that were going on, I struggled with self harming, with withholding food from myself, so eating disorders, and then definitely suicidal thoughts. And so, when I got to college and all that was going on still, but I’m diving deeper and deeper away from the warmth and love of God and completely ignoring that He existed, I definitely began to have suicidal thoughts like I never had. I remember I’d just be driving down the road, and I would just think, like, “I could just push the wheel,” you know, or whatever it was. I remember thinking of ways that I could kill myself without being in pain, because to me the world was just so dark and so terrible, and, “God doesn’t exist and nobody loves me.” And it’s this isolation that you feel when you don’t have Him in your life.

And all of those feelings kind of came to a head. And I made this rash, like, completely irrational decision. I’d met this girl one time, at prom my senior year, and it was the end of my freshman year of college, and she was like, “I’m going to go hike this trail in California called the Pacific Crest Trail. Do you want to go?” And I was like, “Yes! I’ll go. Sure.” I’d never been to California. I’d never flown commercially. I didn’t even have the money to do it. I didn’t even know how I was going to pull it off. But I told her I would go with her. And so the last day of school…. Because I was just trying to run away from everything, I was still very atheist. And the last day of school, I remember I was in the basement of the library, and I was walking out, and they were giving…. They give away free books once people don’t check them out for a certain amount of time. They’re like, “Oh, let’s just through these out.” And I saw Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis, and I thought that it was making fun of Christianity.

Interesting. 

Yeah. So I took it home, and it just sat there in my room all summer. And then it was time for me to go on this hiking trip. So I had gotten this pack. It was like 40 pounds, and I had stuck it in my backpack right as I was leaving because I realized that I didn’t have anything to entertain myself. So when you’re hiking, you don’t have service, right? So I’m going to be in the middle of nowhere for two weeks, backpacking. So it’s not like…. Everything you need is on your back. So I’d packed so light, as light as I could go, and it was still 40 pounds. And so I realized…. I’m a writer. I love writing, and I didn’t have anything to journal with. I didn’t have anything. So I just saw that, at the time I thought stupid book. I just picked it up and threw it in my bag and went on my merry way.

Now, at this point, this is so funny to me, because it’s not as if you were looking for God necessarily. In a way, you were running from God.

But you went from one place to the next, which was much darker, but then you grabbed this book, and it’s not as if you were looking for God or praying to God or anything at this point, like, to show you. You just happened to pick up the book Mere Christianity and put it in your backpack. I find that very ironic. 

I agree. I had no idea what I was doing. And I thought that was so funny, now, looking back, because I thought it was like some special book, you know, that nobody knew about.

So I fly across the country for the first time by myself, and at this point, too, I’m just trying to run away from everything, my family, even college, the idea of college. I mean, it put me in such a dark place, and I had become a fully blown atheist.

I’m just curious, at that point, when you had decided to take on the atheist identity, were there other atheists in your world? Were you associating or with other people who believed similarly, like, “Ah, there’s no God?” Or was this kind of an independent road that you were on? 

It was a bit of both. I think that, whenever I fully started talking about the fact that I didn’t believe in God and that God didn’t exist, I remember there was someone…. There were a few people that I had spoken to and had conversations with. They kind of tipped me over the edge of from being agnostic to atheist. And just the way they spoke about Old Testament God and different things like that, I think I already had such a horrible idea of who God was from Jehovah’s Witnesses. So whenever I went to college and met people who were also atheist, I already had that in the back of my mind, because I think it was a lot easier to believe that He wasn’t there than to continue living in the grief of knowing that I was going to be obliterated, because that’s what Jehovah’s Witnesses had taught me.

So there were some people that I’d met, who I’m not really friends with or was friends with then, but I had conversations and I was like, “Oh, that makes that makes a lot of sense. God probably doesn’t exist.” And I’m pretty sure that the girl I went hiking with at the time didn’t believe in God either. And so there were a lot of people kind of in my circle that, at a liberal arts college, either didn’t talk about their faith, or if they did, they probably were atheist. So I’m sure that influenced me in some way.

Yeah. 

But I think what really dove me deeper was just the depression that I was experiencing. I was just like, “If there is a God, why would He ever let me or a person suffer like this? He wouldn’t do that. And if He would, I still wouldn’t have anything to do with Him.”

Yeah. That’s a very, very difficult thing, trying to understand or make sense of a good God when you’re in a dark place. 

Yeah. And so I think that was why that hiking trip was so… I don’t know. At the time, I didn’t realize it, but God was calling me to go. But I kind of saw it as a means of, once again, just escaping everything and doing something that was in my control. I honestly thought that going hiking would fix whatever was going on in my head. And funny, it kind of did.

So tell me what happened. How did this work its way out? 

So we were actually planning to do a section hike called the John Muir Trail, which goes through Mount Whitney, and it’s just a beautiful 200-mile trail that is the most frequented of the Pacific Crest Trail. So the Pacific Crest Trail runs from the border of Mexico to the border of Canada. And so we were going to do a section hike on the John Muir Trail. I had done all the preparation, I applied for the permits, I had the maps, and I did research on the wildlife and different things to watch out for. And the week before, the California fires had reached that section, and it was blocked off, and we couldn’t hike on it.

So I thought to myself, I was like, “Okay, well, we’ll find LA and hike through Angeles National Forest. And what we’ll do is we’ll just go to the ranger station, talk to them, get the maps, and educate ourselves in the area.” Because it was so soon, it seemed like the best option. So I looked at the ranger stations that were open, called to make sure, and then we Ubered all the way to Angeles National Forest, which I think was like an hour. And we get into the park. There’s no service. We get dropped off. And I remember watching the car drive away, and I had no service on my phone. We’re in the middle of nowhere, and I walk up to the door, and it is so closed, like there’s no one there. And there’s just a sign on the door that says, “Caution: Drought in this area.” And I’m just sitting there like, “Okay. All right. I guess I’ll just start.” So I took a picture with my phone of the board that they have kind of outside hiking trails that are super not accurate, and we just started hiking, with no idea what we were doing.

And so to kind of summarize, because I don’t want to go too deep into this trip, but a lot of crazy stuff happened. We almost ran out of water several times. We ended up accidentally taking the wrong trail, and it was called High Desert Trail, and it was not maintained. And we’re on the edges of these cliffs, like, trying to get across, then there’s this rattlesnake. And all these things happen, where we had so many near-death experiences, and especially the day that we got stuck on that cliff, we finally make it to the other side, and then there’s a bunch of inmates everywhere cleaning up stuff, and we’re these two young women by ourselves in the middle of nowhere, and we’d taken the wrong trail and had no water.

And so all these things were happening, and the kindness of strangers just never failed to amaze me. So I remembered, like, two or three days in, that I had this book. So I remember I walked up to this woman and I was like, “Hey, can I trade you?” I had a dollar or something. And I was like, “Can I buy a pen from you?” She was just some random lady at the park. She was like, “I’ll just give you a pen.” So she gave me a pin. And so I started writing in the pages of the Mere Christianity book. I wasn’t reading it. I was just writing because, once again, I didn’t have to write with, so I was journaling all these things that were happening. And in the process, as I’m journaling, I start catching these lines from CS. Lewis, and I’m like, “What is this guy talking about?”

And so I was very confused, because I was like, “Whoa, this is not the Christianity I know at all. Is he making fun of it, or is he agreeing with it? What’s going on here?” So I started reading more and more, and I’m in the elements, right? So I’m going to bed every night not knowing if a bear is going to come tear me apart to steal my food and not knowing if I’m going to find water the next day or not knowing if I hitchhike with someone, if they’re going to kidnap me. And I’m having all of these, to be dramatic, I would say near-death experiences. But I felt like it was that at the time.

Exactly. I mean, that was your experience. Yeah. 

Right. So many things could have gone wrong. And I remember this one day we had what I call a trail angel come and find us, and we had once again hiked the wrong way. Nothing is going right. And we hitchhiked with this man, and he told us about how we reminded him of when he was younger, and he went on a hiking trip with one of his friends, and they had hitchhiked. And he said that friend had actually just passed away the week before. And so we had this long conversation with him. And I remember he prayed for us. His name was Norm. And I once again remember just thinking, “What are your prayers going to do for me, dude? Just help me find where I’m going.” But the thing about a real Jesus person is that he did. So Norm took us to this fire station, charged our phones, because our phones were almost dead. They resupplied everything. They gave us food and water. And then he went and brought us back onto the trail. He gave us a map and sent us on our way. And everything went smoothly after that for the most part.

And later I found out that this man had not only done that, but he went to every stop along the way that we would have passed through and told the people we were coming through and to watch out for us and to let him know if we came through. And if we didn’t come through, he was going to go right through where we were hiking and find us to make sure we were okay. Like, this guy was amazing.

Wow! He really was a trail angel. That is amazing! 

And I still am in contact with him to this day. And so anyway, so we’re hiking, and we go up this mountain, and I think it was a total of 12 miles in a day. And it’s one of the tallest mountains on the southern side. It’s called Mount Baden-Powell. And so I remember getting to the top of the mountain. The blisters on my feet are just horrendous. My back is aching. My trail partner is literally just face down on the rocks. And I’m sitting there, and it’s just silent. And I’m on top of this mountain. I can see all the way down to LA. I can see miles and miles in every direction. And so I pull out the book and start reading again. And I actually don’t even remember exactly what it was I read, but I remember just thinking, “I can feel God. I don’t know what it is. I don’t know who He is, but something’s going on here, because I should be dead right now.”

But I was in denial, right? So I was thinking more along the lines of, like, “Okay, maybe it’s like the universe thing, where it’s like, ‘Yeah, the universe is looking out for me,’ and maybe C.S. Lewis is just talking about the universe, but he’s not talking about God Himself, right?” So it was still an atheist moment, but it was that one little step I needed towards meeting someone who helped us so deeply and courageously. And so I remember thinking, “Well, maybe God exists, but maybe not. Maybe it’s like this universe thing, like maybe there’s some kind of karma thing going on here,” right? 

So I leave, and once again, I decided… I did an internship with this show called The HighWire with Del Bigtree.

So when I was younger, I always said I wanted to do something with film. I didn’t know what that would be. And at a small business, I did wedding videos in high school and stuff like that. And so I knew that I wanted to run away from everything, and I was seeking fulfillment in the world still. But because of my experience when I was hiking, I realized that a lot of the things we think are problems aren’t actually problems, right? If I know I’m going to have food and water and a roof over my head, I’m good. I really am fine.

It’s amazing how things can come into perspective somehow. 

So I decided I was either going to transfer to a school that had a film program, because the one I was at didn’t, or drop out and just give it a try. So I settled for somewhere in the middle, and I found this program called Film Connections that connects you with a mentor and has a curriculum and kind of walks you through what it’s like to be a filmmaker. And so I reached out to this mentor, this producer in New Orleans named Ralph Madison, and he was like, “Yeah, we’d love to have you.”

and he was nothing like I expected him to be.  He does amazing work. So I expected him to be this stern film guy, and I show up, and he’s kind of this hybrid, right? So he’s into crystals and Reiki, but he calls on the name of Jesus. And I was like, “Whoa! What is going on here?” And it really kind of threw me off, because I’d never known anyone like that, right? So he was into kind of the New Age spiritual stuff, but he still was his own version of a Christian, so he wasn’t in a church, but he would read the Bible. And so that kind of, I think, began to open my mind to things, where I was like, “Well, maybe I can just have my own version of whatever that is,” and blah, blah, blah. But by me leaving college, it began this path where I think it helped me slowly open my mind back up to the fact that there may be a God and that He may exist and that He may love us.

And so I was mentored for six months in New Orleans, and he taught me a lot, and he was an amazing, incredible mentor and an amazing person. And I, long story short, ended up getting a job in Austin, Texas, on a documentary. So I’m moving here to work on this documentary, and I met a producer at my friend’s wedding in Austin, and that’s how I got the job. So my friend was leaving Texas, and her family was like, “Well, why don’t you just move in with us since you’re moving?” I was only 19 at the time, and so I moved in with them.

And they have the biggest hearts out of anybody I’ve ever met in my life, to this day probably. The most giving, kind people. And so their story is very interesting because they were also atheists before they moved to United States, but their son Billy really loves live music, and there’s a church next door, so they start going to church every week because Billy wanted to go. And Billy is an adult with autism, and they slowly came to terms with who God was and His love. And so they were another example of someone I had met who was atheist and had converted to Christianity. They used to make fun of Christians. They did not like them at all, and then went from that to being big time Bible readers. Their names are Polly and John. What I loved about Polly was that every single morning I would walk into the kitchen, she’s reading the Bible, and every single Sunday, she would say, “Oh, we’re going to church. Do you want to come with us?” And I would always say no. And she would always try to talk. She wouldn’t force it on me, but that’s just how she is. She’ll talk to anybody about Jesus any time, and just includes Him in the conversation, like He’s a friend. And I love that about her.

And so I saw her talking about Jesus, but in a way that wasn’t like anything I’d heard. First off, she always said Jesus. She never said God. It was always Jesus.

But she would always just talk about His unending love. And she would treat everyone with this intense love and was so giving. And everyone in the neighborhood that she met, who she knew would be in need, they would come every single week and get eggs from our chickens. And if somebody was sick, she would make this beautiful British meal and bring it to their house. Or when I would be going out to the bars with my friends, she would give me cash to make sure that I had money for dinner. They were so giving, and they would make my room up nice whenever I went to travel. They would prepare foods for me. I went through a really terrible breakup at the time, and they would have game nights with me and just support me and surround me in love.

And I had never really experienced something like that. I had never been loved like that. And to experience something like that from people who call themselves followers of Christ, I thought, “Maybe not all Christians are bad people, but I still just don’t think this is true.” Like, “Maybe she just sees another side of God, but she’s not talking about the full picture,” because that is what Jehovah Witnesses, kind of that indoctrination I had in the back of my mind still, what they would say. “Oh, the world just condones all sin,” and they’re all what they call Christendom, that they’re part of fake followers of Christ and misleading people by telling them that God loves us unconditionally. And so I think in the back of my mind I thought, “Well, yeah. She just doesn’t have it quite right.” There’s still this part of God that is legalistic and hates us and that kind of thing. And so I think, because of that, and subconsciously, I still was just completely denying that He was there because it was easier to do that.

But it was hard to deny the love that you were being constantly shown. Yeah. 

Absolutely. I knew there was something to that. And so I got this job in Miami, so I had then, at this point, stayed with them for over a year and just been surrounded by their love. And so then I moved to Miami to work on this documentary, and I am all alone, and this is at the end of 2019, so I didn’t know anyone. I’m working twelve hour days, seven days a week, so I think on Sundays, I would work like a half day, and that would be all my time off. So I had no time to make friends, and then everything locked down. And at this point, once again, I just completely started ignoring any kind of idea that God may exist or the question in my head because I wasn’t around Christian people anymore. And I was very isolated, and… it’s kind of hard to bring this up.

Whatever you feel comfortable with or not. No, it’s fine. 

No. I was very isolated, and I didn’t really know a lot of people, and so I made some friends from work, and I went out to a bar, and this was about probably two or three weeks before everything locked down in the United States from COVID-19, and I was roofied and sexually assaulted.

Oh, I’m so sorry. 

It was definitely the darkest moment in my life. And my entire life, I had struggled with anxiety and depression, and so I remember just thinking like, “I don’t want to be here anymore. This is horrible. If this is what the world is, I want nothing to do with this.” And just the amount of deep… It was the most intense pain I had ever felt in my life. I mean, I remember just feeling like I couldn’t breathe and crying on the bathroom floor for days. And I just thought, “I don’t know how I’m going to get through this. I really don’t.” It was such a dark moment. And I remember just sitting there, and I prayed for the first time, I think it had been since that last prayer I mentioned. And I just said, “Look, if You’re there, I can’t do this alone. I cannot keep doing this alone.”

No. Right. 

“I’m literally going to kill myself if You don’t rescue me right now. If You’re there, come and let me know who You are because I can’t do this,” and I have no way to describe it other than I felt all of heaven surrounding me.

Oh, my! 

Legitimately. I felt His presence so strong in the room, and all of those years of depression and suicidal thoughts and anxiety came crashing down on me at the same time. And it’s the most bizarre thing. I can never describe exactly what it felt like, but I remember just thinking, “There are so many things in my life I’ve ignored. There are so many actions that I’ve taken that have caused me such great pain, and all of them are rooted in what I always thought was sin. And I’m going to acknowledge those things right now, and I’m going to feel it.” And I remember, flooding in my mind, I had memories from when I was really little, all the way up until that moment. Every single thing I’ve been through. Memories from my childhood, memories from my parents’ relationship, from other experiences I’d had, in particular with men abusing me sexually. And so I remember just thinking, like, “I’m going to feel all of this. I’m going to stop ignoring all of this, and I’m going to feel it right now.”

And I mourned. I mean, I mourned for a week straight. I’ve never cried so much in my life. I cried every single day, every single moment I stepped through the door after I finished my work, or even sometimes when I just shut the door to the office, when I was leaving, I would just start pouring tears. I was just trying to hold it together to get the work done and then going home and just mourning every single horrible thing that had ever happened to me, including being sexually assaulted.

And God said to me, “I’m here and I exist, and I love you.” I didn’t hear his voice, but I felt that very clearly. And so I started this journey where I, once again, wasn’t really sure, wasn’t really sure if it was the Christian God, but I knew God, like there was a God, because I felt its presence in that moment, so clearly. And it pulled me out of these depths at this moment where I was just like, “I can’t do this unless I have You.” And so I started praying for the next few months, but I wouldn’t say a name. I’d always say, “God, show me who You are. Reveal yourself to me. Show me the truth. I want to know who You are. I want to worship You. I want to love You, but I don’t know who You are.” So I was reading books on Buddhism, Hinduism. I mean, I was doing everything. I was looking everywhere I could for the truth.

Right. 

And I remember I woke up one day and nothing had really worked. I would feel connected to something, I would try it out, and then nothing would happen. And I wouldn’t feel that Presence I felt in that dark moment. I was like, “Where is that Presence?” I’m looking for it everywhere, and I couldn’t find it. “Point me to You.”

Yes. 

And I picked up the Bible, this old Jehovah’s Witness Bible that I had. So the translation is a bit different. And I just started in Genesis. I just started reading it, and I was like, “Oh, my gosh! This is not what I thought it was at all!” And even like God had opened my eyes, even like the veil had been lifted. And so I’m reading of His love, and I’m reading of creation, and I’m reading of how we were designed to live, and that was exactly what I wanted. And nobody else was talking about that. Other religions deny suffering, whereas God tells us, “You’re going to suffer, and it’s going to suck.” Excuse my language. But it’s going to suck. “But I’m going to be with you,” and that’s the difference, right?

Yes. 

So I was like, “Oh, so I don’t have to transcend existence and pretend like I’m not suffering in a Buddhist way or whatever,” you know?

Right. 

I can suffer fully and feel it fully and go through really hard things, and pain is okay because I know where I’m going. I have the hope of salvation. And so when I picked up that Bible, I started reflecting back on John and Polly and their love, and I was like, “That’s what they do.” I was like, “I want some of that. That’s what I want. They’ve got that part figured out. I’m just going to read the Bible and keep on praying.” And so through this really horrible experience of being sexually assaulted, it brought me to this rock bottom moment where I fully turned to God, because there was no way I could do it without Him. And He had built this intricate story line of dropping me bite-sized pieces of love. And so John and Polly, I started calling them, and I told Polly what happened, and I remember she really supported me in that time. And then, after reading the Bible for about six months, I decided I was going to move back to Austin, and I asked her if she would baptize me.

And so I went back to Austin. And once again, at this point, I have a lot of religious trauma. So I’m like, “I’m never stepping foot in a church. Not doing it. No way. But I’ll read the Bible and I’ll pray, and that’s good enough for me.” And so I go to Austin, I meet with Polly, and she throws this beautiful party for me. And in that moment, I made clear to everyone that that was the life I wanted to choose for myself. And I kind of always say it was the best day ever.

It was the best day ever? 

Yeah. It was! So this is just kind of a funny side story. So I love the sun. My mood is very dictated by the weather. And I woke up that morning, and it was cloudy, and I just prayed, and I was like, “God, I’m not trying to be petty right now, but can You please make the sun come out? Because I’m not trying to get baptized in a cloudy day.” And so I was just kind of joking with Him. And that’s what I loved about the new relationship I had with God. It was never like, “Dear Father, blah, blah, blah,” you know? “Forgive me for this, and blah, blah, blah.” It was very personal. I always had conversations with Him and, like, He was a real living, breathing God, because He is. And so I remember saying that. And then as I’m coming out of the water—I have a video of this. The clouds parted, and the sun came out.

Wow, what a gift. 

And I was like, “This is so cool! You didn’t have to do that!”

Celebrating over you, I think, there in that moment. If I could ask a question, you speak of being baptized. Now, the God that you knew as a Jehovah’s Witness. You never thought you could be good enough. No matter what you did or how many doors you knocked on or whatever it is that you had to accomplish. It was just so overwhelming. You just wanted to give it up. Now, when you move to a place where you meet Jesus and you’re ready to get baptized, baptism really symbolizes something very particular. Of course, it’s putting off the old and putting on the new, but there’s a washing away a sense of sin, at least in the Christian way of thinking about things. And I’m wondering, as someone who understood the weight of trying to work your way to God, what it meant for you when you understood what the gospel is and what grace is and those things you said that were missing before that I guess you had found. Can you kind of talk about that a little bit, so people listening can understand that contrast and that transformation? 

Yeah. So I remember I started reading the Bible and the God that had been skewed in my mind as a child was not in there. And I remember something that always has stuck with me is Romans 8. That’s my chapter. Anytime I feel lost, go straight to Romans 8 and start reading. And for anyone who doesn’t read the Bible, I would say go there because it paints this beautiful picture that we don’t choose God, that He chooses us, and that His love is unending, and that we were bought and paid for whether we wanted to or not. And He gave that freely as a gift to us. And there is not a single thing in the world we could do that could separate us from that love. And in particular, at the very end, I think it’s 39 to 41, Paul writes about how the future nor the present can separate us from the love of God. And I always thought that was really interesting. Or angels nor demons can separate us from the love of God, nor governments, nor any powers that be.

And the thought of I couldn’t do anything tomorrow that would separate me from that love, “Is that what you’re saying to me right now? That You know You love me so much that You knew everything I would do in my life and You didn’t care. You loved me and You wanted to transform me and You wanted to give me hope and save me.” That was a narrative I’d never heard before, and that was the truth of the Bible. And so I think reading that really transformed my entire view of what God was like.

And just the story of Jesus, His love and how He came and He fulfilled the entire Old Testament in two phrases: “Love God with your whole heart, mind, and soul, and love your neighbor as you love yourself.” And if you’re not doing that, then you’re not following Christ, right? You’re not a Christian. It’s as simple as that. And so kind of having it all simplified down that way. It’s like I had been taught by the Pharisees and the Sadducees, you have to follow all these rules. And then Jesus came along in my life and said, “No, you don’t. Love me. Love God with your whole heart, mind, and soul. And love your neighbor as you love yourself, and you’ve got it covered. That’s all you got to do.” I was like, “What?” So I thought it was really beautiful. There’s so many beautiful truths that were revealed to me.

It was obviously convincing enough for you to become a Christ follower, because that’s what baptism symbolizes, that you are a follower of Christ. Yeah. Wow. So how has your life changed since that time? I mean obviously you’ve come a long way in your very young life, but you’ve experienced a lot. And I wonder, how has it been to walk as someone who follows Christ, to have this completely different understanding of being completely and utterly loved in the way that you spoke of? 

It’s been just better. And it’s like, just by following Christ does not mean that, when I struggle with depression or anxiety, that it just goes away. But these kind of things become less frequent and less intense. And following God has given me such freedom and beauty in my life. I no longer feel like I’m a slave to these sinful behaviors. And when I say sin, I always like… I think that term became so stigmatized by people who are outside the church. But sin is essentially things that God knows harms us or harms others, right? Or disrespects Him. And so putting it in that way, when I felt like I was freed from doing things that harmed me, that I was chained to, like, what a beautiful life that is, you know? And when I’m depressed and I have the week where I don’t want to get out of bed or shower or whatever it is, I still have His love waiting for me right there, holding me, all along. And once again, it’s not that it’s always easier. It’s never going to be easier following Christ, but it’s definitely better, because I know at the end of the day that all of this is temporary.

And I know that He’s going to use my story. He’s going to use the fact that I was sexually assaulted. He’s going to use my past to help other people, and He has redeemed all of that pain in my life. So everything I’ve been through, and even more recently, since I’ve become a Christian, He’s used those things to help other people. And that is so healing for me to watch that, right? And to be close to people and connect to people and to be open and raw and real about what we actually experience. He’s given me a support system. He’s given me His unconditional love. He’s given me joy. And I think, most importantly, He’s encouraged me to not feel like I’m bound by anything of this world. So when it comes to my career, I’m never going to make films the same way again. Making films is completely different for me, because I know that God has given me my story and He gave everyone else their own testimonies. And so as a filmmaker, what I want to do is elevate their voices and to be in a position, I feel so blessed to be able to do that. So He’s given me a beautiful career, fulfillment in my career. I mean, I could talk all day about how much better God has made my life.

That’s amazing! That’s amazing! And it is a beautiful life. You’re living a beautiful life. And beauty, and that doesn’t mean that there’s no pain, but with God with you, as you said at the very beginning, things can become beautiful even when they’re hard. 

As we’re turning the page here, and you know what it’s like to be an atheist. You know what it’s like to be on the receiving end of Christians like Polly and John, who offered not only their home to you, but were incredibly generous to you throughout a year or more, and beyond, I guess, and have always been there to support you. It sounds like they have the gift of hospitality and generosity, no doubt. Or Norm, I think of Norm, the man who was almost like the Good Samaritan, who was just making sure that you were attended to and coming back and just making sure you were attended to along the way. Those things were very strong touchstones in your life that affected you, that created openness towards the God of love that you eventually came to know. If you were giving advice to Christians on how to engage with people who don’t believe, what would you say to Christians, in terms of however you would want us to be or behave in the world to show Jesus, I guess. 

I think all along what I really needed was somebody who was honest with me. And that was the thing about being around John and Polly. And in high school, I forgot to mention, but I had a teacher named Coach Campbell who…. All of them had this in common, where they were blatantly open about their sin, right? And not in a way that glorified sin, but in a way that made me think, like, “You have a faith like that, but then you do X, Y, and Z? And you’re open about that? Is that the kind of God you have? That God loves you anyways?” And I think that was the most important thing to me, was getting to know people who had a real faith that they were open about but didn’t pretend like they were perfect and that showed unconditional love.

And Coach Campbell, the teacher I had in high school, he was the same way. Once a month, he would sit down and talk to us about whatever God had put on his mind that day, and it would always be something relevant to what was going on in our lives. And we didn’t know how that was even possible. I was like, “Okay, this guy must be like…. How does he know what’s going on in my life? He’s talking about it. This is creepy!” But it was amazing to be around someone like that, too, who openly shared, who was bold, but he didn’t say, “You need to believe this,” and, “You need to be like this.” I remember him having discussions of joy and happiness and the difference between the two and free will and sin and Satan and spiritual warfare, and he never was saying, “You have to believe in God.” He was just saying how the gospel had changed his life, and he was telling his story, and that’s what John and Polly did.

So after all the hard things I went through, I realized once all that pain was redeemed, that all of that was a gift. That my testimony was a gift.

Yes. 

And that I didn’t have to force my friends to read the Bible or force my family, who have left the church but still don’t really know where they’re standing, to believe in the Trinity or whatever it is. All I have to do is love them. That’s it. And tell my story, because I think your story is the most important part. If you can tell that… because your story is a gift from God, and so if you can give them that message. And so we’re you know, Christ is in us. We become living with His word in us and give our testimony to other people. That’s how we make change. If someone had done that, the people that did do that are who God used to get me to where I am today.

Yeah, yeah. Amazing. And for those who might be listening who are still skeptical and they’re perhaps a little bit open, curious about you, about your story, about how you found seemingly a God who was real, how would you encourage someone who might be open to taking another step or thinking about it more or…. What direction or how would you encourage someone like that? 

I think there’s so many lies that circulate, from Satan, from the world, from people who claim to be Christian, about who God really is. And I was brutally taught that lesson from a young age. The idea of who God was that I had as a child versus how I know Him now is completely different. And the one thing that showed me that difference was actually reading the Bible. Not because someone forced you to and not John 3:16 on Google or someone posted it on Instagram in their bio, but actually picking up a Bible and reading it. And just asking whoever God is in your eyes to show you the truth. Because if you haven’t read it with a genuine curiosity for truth, that veil is still over your eyes, and you won’t get that. You are not able to see it.

And as soon as I was able to see it, my entire life was changed, everything changed. And once again, as someone who has struggled throughout life with depression, it was so life changing. The joy that I have now and the happiness that I have from Him is incredible. Like, what do you have to lose just by picking up a Bible and asking for the truth and reading it? If anything, you will prove yourself right, and if you prove yourself wrong, you’ll live the rest of your life in joy. And I don’t think we can ask for much more than that.

Right. No. That’s what we all long for, really. The Bible can be a little bit intimidating for someone who’s never really looked at it. Where would you encourage someone to begin reading? Because I know there’s the Old Testament, the New Testament. In the New Testament, the stories about Jesus are more there, and sometimes it’s easy to get lost in the weeds, you know, if you don’t know where you’re going. Where would you encourage, a particular book or place? I know you started in Genesis. Where would you encourage someone who was just opening the Bible for the first time? 

So when I recommend just picking up the Bible and reading it—interesting because I would always pray and ask God where I should stop or where I should look. But if you open it up, and then you’re reading it and you’re like, “Yeah, I don’t know, this doesn’t make any sense to me.” New Testament. If you’re curious about Jesus, you know, Luke, Matthew, those are great places to start. Just hearing stories of His love and the kind of person He was on this earth, His generosity, how He treated the poor, the sick, how He raised the dead, and how He fed thousands. I mean, just the stories about Him are so beautiful, and you can get those in that area of the Bible, Luke, Matthew and that kind of stuff. If you have a background in Christianity but were atheist like I was and now you’re considering it again, maybe, I always go to Romans or Ephesians because there’s a lot of sanctification, a lot of grace, a lot of love, and what we think of how God views us as sinners, how Satan pushes these ideas in our heads that we can’t be forgiven or that we can’t change or that we don’t deserve love. All that is really cleared up in Romans and Ephesians, I would say.

I think it’s been a beautiful, beautiful testimony. I really genuinely appreciate your transparency, Claire. I know it’s not easy to talk about certain things in your life, but you have done so with grace and again with transparency and authenticity. And I think, as you mentioned before, I think that there will be people who are blessed and benefit from knowing that about you and seeing the transformed life and that you can actually have joy beyond the darkness, that you can have hope and life that’s truly life beyond. I see in my mind that place where you were in Miami and that you’ve come such a long way since then and that you are an example of light and hope that we need so desperately in this world. So thank you so much for telling your story today, Claire. I really, really appreciate it. 

Thank you for having me. I really appreciate it.

Thanks for tuning in to Side B Stories to hear Claire’s story. You can find out more about her and her films through her website at www.clairedooley.co, that’s dot C-O, which I’ll post in the episode notes. For questions and feedback about this episode, you can contact me through our website. Again, that’s at sidebstories.com. If you enjoyed it, I hope you’ll follow, rate, review, and share this podcast with your friends and social network. In the meantime, I’ll be looking forward to seeing you next time, when we’ll see how another skeptic flips the record of their life.

For two years, we’ve been sharing stories of atheist and skeptics’ journeys from disbelief to belief in God and Christianity. Thank you for listening and joining us along this journey.

Visit www.sidebstories.com for the podcast archives, video library, and more resources!

Former atheist Dr. Hugh Ross, an astrophysicist, began an intensive search to discover the cause of the universe, and it led him to God. Reasons to Believe – www.reasons.org Resources by Hugh Ross:

• Always Be Ready:  A Call to Adverturous Faith
• Why the Universe is the Way it is
• A Matter of Days:  Resolving a Creation Controversy
• Improbable Planet:  How Earth Became Humanity’s Home
• Creator and the Cosmos:  How the Latest Scientific Discoveries Reveal God
• Who was Adam?  A Creation Model Approach to the Origin of Humanity

Episode Transcript

Hello, and thanks for joining in. I’m Jana Harmon, and you’re listening to Side B Stories, where we see how skeptics flip the record of their lives. Each podcast, we listen to someone who has once been an atheist or skeptic, but who became a Christian against all odds. 

There are big questions about the universe we live in. How did it all begin? Why does the universe appear to be so fine tuned for life? How did humans come to be? The answers to these and other questions are but a few of many that not only help us understand the bigger picture of reality, they also help us to understand ourselves. But how do we answer these big questions? Our guest today, a truly brilliant astrophysicist and theologian, Dr. Hugh Ross, has spent his life carefully, meticulously studying two sources which have helped him find the answers, the book of nature, that is what we observe around us in the world, in the cosmos, and the book of scripture, the Bible. 

As an atheist, he was searching for the best explanation for what he observed in the cosmos. Were naturalistic theories sufficient to account for the origin and fine tuning of the universe of life? Or did he need to look beyond purely naturalistic causes to substantively ground what he was discovering? As an analytical scientist, he felt compelled to honestly, carefully search until his curiosity was satisfied. 

Today, we’re going to hear Dr. Ross tell his fascinating story of moving from atheism to becoming a strong proponent of the Christian worldview. We’ll also hear him discuss the seeming inescapable relationship of science and belief in a Creator God. He is a prolific author, thinker, and scholar. You may have heard of him or his ministry, Reasons to Believe. I hope you’ll come along and listen to his amazing story and catch a glimpse of his extraordinary intellect. 

Welcome to Side B Stories, Dr. Ross. It’s so great to have you with me today. 

Well, thank you for inviting me, Jana.

Wonderful. As we’re getting started, so the listeners know a bit of the—I will say the word gravitas, that you bring to the table. It’s such a pleasure and privilege to have you, because of your expertise in so many ways. Could you just enlighten our listening audience a little bit as to your academic background? 

Yeah. I have a bachelor’s degree in physics from the University of British Columbia and a PhD in astronomy from the University of Toronto. And I was on the research staff of Caltech for five years thereafter. And while I was at Caltech, I got called to join the pastoral staff of a church a few miles away and have been serving on the pastoral staff of that church for the past four decades. And it was that church that helped me launch Reasons to Believe some 36 years ago. And we’re basically a group of scientists and theologians that are developing new reasons to believe in the God of the Bible.

Of course, that sets off curiosity in me in terms of how science and theology go together, but I’m sure we’re going to tease that out as we go. Let’s back up into your story as a child. Can you give us a sense of where you grew up? Let’s start there, with just where did you grow up? And tell me about the culture in terms of religious belief in the world around you. 

Yeah, well I was born in Montreal, Canada, and my father had a thriving hydraulics engineering business, even though he only had a 10th grade education. He had several dozen engineers working for him. But then his financial partner saw the money and basically bankrupted the company and went to Brazil. So my dad had to lay off all the employees when I was four years of age and basically took what little money he had left and moved us all to Vancouver, British Columbia. So I grew up in one of the poorer neighborhoods of Vancouver, but it was in Vancouver, attending a public school, that I really got interested in astronomy.

Your parents, did they have any faith in God? Did they have any belief that God existed at all in terms of just even your home life? 

Well, they believed in the morality of Christianity, and so they certainly taught me and my two sisters moral principles. But they both denied eternal life, and so they just said, “This idea of a Trinity is nonsense. There’s no such thing as eternal life.” So they weren’t Christians. There were no Christians I knew of in our neighborhood. I really didn’t get to have a spiritual conversation with a Christian until I arrived at Caltech to do my postdoctoral research.

And people often ask me, here in the United States, “How is that possible?” Well, it’s different in Canada. The Christians tend to isolate themselves in suburbs outside the big cities. So, for example, 60 miles away from downtown Vancouver, there’s a suburb that’s about 80% Christian. But where I was growing up, it was like 1%, and I had no contact with that 1%. So, yeah, I didn’t really know Christians during my growing up years, although I tell people I did see two Christians from thirty feet away when I was eleven years of age. And these were two businessmen that came into our public school and put two boxes on our teacher’s desk. They didn’t say a single word. They just put two boxes on our teacher’s desk and left. But in those boxes were Gideon Bibles. And we were all invited to take one home. And everybody in my class took one home. I took one home, but I didn’t pick it off my bookshelf until six years later.

Okay. All right, so it sounds like that the Christian ethos or whatever, it was somewhat visible in your home with regard to morality, but in terms of practical practice and encountering Christians, that was fairly absent. So now take us back to you said you were seven years old, and you were having a conversation with your parents about the stars. 

Well, Vancouver rains a lot, but I remember one night when the rain stopped and the clouds opened and you could see these stars, and I was struck by that and just said, “Hey, are those stars hot?” And that’s when my parents said, “Yeah, they are.” But they couldn’t tell me why. Now, the public school I attended, I was in grade two. At the beginning of grade two, the teacher took us on a field trip to the Vancouver Public Library, where they had 3 million volumes, huge library. And so I was fascinated by that library. And I remember that day going home with five books on physics and astronomy. That was the maximum you could check out.

But I read those books in one week and went back to the library. And that was back in the 1950s, when parents felt okay, because they just basically gave me the bus fare. And by myself, I made three transfers to get to the Vancouver Public Library, checked out five more books, and brought them home. Parents today would never allow their children to do that by themselves at that age, but that was common back then. So that’s how I spent my Saturdays, going to the public library and bringing home four or five books. And they were always on physics and astronomy. I wasn’t interested in fiction. Occasionally, I would look at some other science books, but I basically gravitated to the physics and astronomy. And literally every year growing up, I would focus on a subdiscipline of astronomy.

And it was at age 16, I said, “I’m going to study cosmology.”

Okay. 

Yeah.

Let me ask you a question before we go there. I’m sure someone’s listening, just a little befuddled at the idea of a 7, 8, 9, 10 year old reading five books at that level of physics and astronomy and all of those things. Is there something unique about you that allows you that level of intellect that we should know? 

Well, I’m on the autistic spectrum, and people with a high IQ that are on the autistic spectrum, they tend to behave like professors. They get focused on a subject, and they study that one subject to a great deal of depth. It might be dinosaurs. It might be fungi. For me, it was stars and galaxies and cosmology.

And in one year, I had read all the books on physics and astronomy in the children’s section of the Vancouver Public Library, and I talked to the librarian, and she gave me an adult pass. And later on, I was able to get a pass to the university library. So growing up, I was reading everything I could get my hands on, and it was easy for me to comprehend it because I was so motivated. And then I started to basically specialize. Every year it’s like, okay, this year I’m going to study stellar atmospheres, this year the interior stars, next year galaxies. I was at age 16, I said, I’m going to look at cosmology, looking at the different models for the origin and history of the universe.

Was there anyone able to converse with you in any kind of meaningful way on these scientific issues or issues of astronomy? Or was this something that you were completely pursuing independently? 

I was doing it independently until I had hit age 15. And what happened at 15 is that there was a benefactor who came into the city and said he wanted to pull out the 25 top science students in the city. And so I was invited to sit for an all-day exam. It took 9 hours to take the test, but I was one of the 25 that was selected to be part of this program. And that’s where I got to know the science professors at the University of British Columbia. I also got involved in the Astronomy Club in Vancouver, and at age 16, they made me the director of observations. So I was actually giving lectures on astronomy at the university to adult audiences starting at age 16. And I then got involved in research on new forming stars in the Orion Nebula. My dad worked with me to build a telescope, so I used that on the few nights where it wasn’t raining to study these T Tauri stars, and I wound up winning the British Columbia Science Fair for my research. And then when I went on to the university, as a sophomore, I won the journal prize for the best science article in the Physics Society Journal. So that’s kind of what it was like. But my fascination was there.

But I can remember when I was eleven years of age, my parents thinking that I was being obsessive about physics and astronomy. It seemed a mystery to me. Why are they worried about me? But they were, and so they wanted me to read outside of physics and astronomy. They tried to get me to read novels. I had no interest in novels. I only wanted nonfiction. And I did read a little bit of history. And so they wound up having me read this big, thick book of evolutionary biology at age eleven. I was the only one in the family that read it. But I said, “Mom, Dad, the numbers don’t add up. I see all this appearance of phyla, orders, and classes before humanity, but nothing after humanity. What’s going on?” They said, “Well, go talk to your science teachers.” They said, “Go talk to those science professors you know.” Nobody could give me an answer for why there was this discontinuity.

But what happened at age 16, as I looked at the steady-state model for the universe, the oscillating model, the big bang model, but recognized that the evidence, the observations, heavily favored big bang cosmology. And I recognize, if it’s big bang, the universe has a beginning. If there’s a beginning, there must be a cosmic beginner. And so I said, “I want to find that cosmic beginner, but no one could guide me.” I said, “Well, I think the best place to look will be in the philosophy textbooks of Rene Descartes and Immanuel Kant,” so I remember going through the Critique of Pure Reason and saying, “There’s a lot of internal contradictions in this that are not making sense.” And Descartes didn’t really satisfy me, either. And I went to a public high school, where we had refugees from around the world.

And so that’s where people were telling me, “Hey, if you’re interested in this, look at Hinduism, look at Buddhism, because we have people from all different religious backgrounds.” So I went through the Hindu Vedas, the Buddhist commentaries, the Quran, the writings of the Zoroastrians, and finally, I picked up that Gideon Bible and began to go through it.

Now, what is it about those religious texts, the Hindu, the Buddhist, the Baháʼí, all of these religions that you investigated, why did they not satisfy? You were seeking an explanation for the beginning of the universe. So why did they not satisfy that or comport with that beginning of the universe? 

Well, I first read a textbook on comparative religions, and I noticed that often the critiques of the world’s religions, they put their holy books in the worst possible interpretive light. And I said, “I’m not going to do that. I’m going to read these books in the best possible interpretive light, give them the benefit of the doubt, wherever that appears.” But what I discovered with the Hindu Vedas, for example, even when you put it in the best interpretive light, there are serious problems. I mean, the Vedas talk about how the universe has repeated beginnings every 4.32 billion years, and I knew that the number 4.32 was wrong. We have measurements that prove that it’s wrong. And this idea that the universe reincarnates. Most people know that Hinduism has this belief of the reincarnation of humans and animals, but it’s fundamentally based on the idea that the universe reincarnates. But I knew that the entropy of the universe was at least 100 million times too high for there to be any possible mechanism to reincarnate the universe. So I said, “Hey, this is not the pathway to the one that created the universe.

And I did the same thing with the Buddhist commentaries. I looked at the Quran. I looked at the Mormon writings. I looked at Baháʼí.

But that was all before I really looked at the Bible. But what struck me when I first picked up that Gideon Bible, going through the first page, Genesis 1, for six days God creates. On the seventh day he stops creating. And I noticed that, for the first six days, you have them closed out by, evening was, morning was, day two, three, four, et cetera. So I said, “It’s telling me each of these days has a start time and an end time.” But when I got to day seven, there’s no evening, morning phase, and that’s the day when God stops creating.

So I remember going through the rest of the Bible quickly and discovered Psalm 95 and Hebrews 4, which basically exhort us humans to enter into God’s day of rest. So I said, “The day of rest is ongoing, and that explains the fossil record enigma, why we see all these new phyla, classes, and orders appearing before humanity, but none whatsoever after humanity.”  The six days are referring to the eras before humans. The seventh day is the human era.

And so, ever since I was eleven, I was plagued by this enigma. And just looking at the first page of the Bible, I said, “This answers the fossil record enigma.” And also I spent 4 hours going through the Genesis 1 creation account, and again, part of it is that I was steeped in the scientific method. In the Canadian public education system, we were taught it in grade one, grade two, all the way through to grade twelve. But none of my public school teachers told me where the scientific method came from. When I began to go through that Gideon Bible, looking at the creation text, I said, “This is the scientific method. This is where it came from.” Because, when you look at Genesis 1, what it tells you is a frame of reference for the six days of creation. It’s God hovering over the surface of the waters, and it gives you the initial conditions as dark on the waters. The waters cover the whole surface. The Earth is empty of life and unfit for life. Well, those are steps one and two of the scientific method: Don’t interpret until you have first established the frame of reference. Don’t interpret until you have first established starting conditions. That’s right there in Genesis 1:2. And from that point of view you go through the six days of creation, and I realized everything here is correctly stated, and everything is in the correct chronological order when compared with established science.

And long before that I’d looked at the Enuma Elish of the Babylonians. I looked at the creation text in the Quran, in the Buddhist commentaries, in the Vedas, and it’s like they got almost nothing right. The best I found outside of the Bible was a creation text that got 2 out of 14, 2 right, 12 wrong. The Bible got everything right and put everything in the correct chronological order.

And so that began an 18-month study. Now, I knew my parents would be disturbed if they knew I was studying Christianity and the Bible to that degree. So I waited till midnight. Basically it was between midnight and about 1:00 or 1:30 in the morning where I’d have my bedroom door closed, and I’d be secretly studying the Bible and did that every night for an 18-month period. But after those 18 months, I recognized, “When I put the Bible in the best possible interpretive light, I cannot find a single error or contradiction.” And that persuaded me. This book is not just written by human beings. It must be inspired by the One that created the universe.

And so it was at age 19, I signed my name in the back of the Gideon Bible, committing my life to Jesus Christ. But to be frank, it wasn’t just me checking out the science. I also checked out the fulfilled prophecies in the Bible. And I think what really struck me when I first began through the Bible was the elegance and the beauty of its moral message. Because all the holy books have a moral message, but they pale in comparison to the elegance, the consistency, and the beauty of what you see in the Bible.

And one of the things I did during those 18 months is say, “I’m going to do everything I can to live up to this moral message. It’s so beautiful.” But the harder I tried, the more I realized I couldn’t do it.

And I need to give credit to the Gideons. They tell you exactly what you need to do once you become persuaded that what you’re reading is the inspired inerrant word of God. And they have a page there where they say… The primary message is, “We humans need God. We cannot live up to His moral standard, but God is willing to do for us what we can’t do for ourselves. He’s willing to trade His moral perfection for our moral imperfection,” and I also appreciated what they were saying is that the Creator of the universe knows better than we do what’s best for us. So it only makes rational sense to make the Creator of the universe the boss of your life. And of course, they describe how the Creator of the universe came to Planet Earth as a human being, demonstrated a life of moral perfection, proved that He was God through the miracles He performed, and yet willingly sacrificed His life so that we can be delivered from the consequences of our sin. So I remember thinking to myself, “This is an offer that’s too good to turn down,” so I signed my name on the back of that Gideon Bible, committing my life to Jesus Christ.

Amazing. It’s interesting how your curiosity, your scientific curiosity is what drove you to the philosophies and the religions. But I don’t suppose that you were anticipating this kind of whole life change based upon what you were reading. You were seeking an explanation for the beginning of the universe, but you ended, not only with an answer to that question, but also as the Creator as Lord of your life. 

Right. I had been exposed to little snippets. I mean, even though my parents were not Christians, didn’t believe in the Christian message. I remember, growing up—my father, when I told him this, said he had no recollection, but I was about ten or eleven, and out came from his mouth, “There is a way which seems right to a man, but the ends thereof are the ways of death.” And he claims he had no idea where that came from. He had no idea it was in the Bible. But he said that once after a dinner conversation. And I got to think about that, you know? “What’s going to happen? This life here on Earth is short, and I’m pursuing this career in astrophysics. Is that really the best way I can spend my short time here on Earth?” So it got me thinking.

I also remember, when I was about eight or nine, my parents went to a department store in downtown Vancouver, and they couldn’t afford a babysitter, so they dragged me and my two sisters on the bus to do their shopping. And we got off the bus. There was a street preacher there with about a dozen people around them. I remember my parents saying, “We’ve got to get away from that nut,” and so they dragged us away as fast as possible. But I heard about 15 seconds of what he was saying, and it got me thinking, because in those 15 seconds, he talked about the fact that we cannot deliver ourselves from our own failings. So that’s all I heard, but it got me thinking. And that one Bible passage my dad quoted got me thinking.

So I imagine, as someone listening to this, they think that there’s no way that science can be reconciled with belief in a god. That for them seems rather an archaic or superstitious position. How would you respond to that? Obviously your entire work has been a response to that question. But if someone were to ask you that, how would you answer them? 

Well, it was recognizing that the universe had a beginning. And that was followed up by the spacetime theorems, which proved that the universe not only has a beginning, but the spacetime dimensions also have a beginning, which implies that the cause of the universe must be some entity beyond space, time, matter, and energy. So I recognized that in my late teens and said, “There’s got to be some kind of God. I need to find that God, that cosmic beginner.”

And in my studies of science, I realized the laws of physics are never violated. They’re consistent, they’re constant, throughout the entire universe, throughout the whole history of the universe. I can really trust what I’m seeing in the world and the universe around me. It’s a revelation of truth. And I also realized that, “Hey, we humans are personal. We’re capable of free will and expressing and receiving love. The Creator of the universe must have those characteristics as well.”

So when I heard about these different philosophers and people of different religions claiming that the creator of the universe had communicated to us, I said, “Well, that’s within reason,” but I also knew that all these different holy books contradicted one another. So I said, “Okay, I’m going to check them each out and see if any of them has any validity.” But it made sense to me that this personal, loving Creator Who’s provided for all of our needs would want to communicate.

So I began to go… and again, I put these books in the best possible interpretive light, and that was based on the belief it makes sense that this God would want to communicate. But the ministry of founded reasons to believe is founded on the two books principle, that God has revealed himself through two books, the book of nature and the book of scripture. And it comes from the same God for whom it’s impossible to lie or deceive. And so I was looking for a book that would concord with what I knew to be true in the book of nature. And it took me 18 months, studying an hour to an hour and a half at night, but I finally came to the conclusion, this is it.

I love that both the book of nature and book of Scripture is just such a succinct but clear picture of the comprehensive unity, really, of a God who is the God of all truth, God of the Bible, God of the universe. For those who aren’t familiar with the way that you interpret the creation accounts and how you’re able to marry those with what we find in current scientific study, I’m imagining that they would want some clarification because, obviously in the Christian worldview, there are different interpretations. 

Sure.

And could you explain some of that for us, please? 

Yes. Well, you heard earlier that I’m on the autistic spectrum, and everybody who’s on the spectrum is different from everybody else in the spectrum. As I talk to parents who have autistic children, I say, “You need to find their special, unique gift, and it’s going to be different for every child.” And what I’ve discovered is the gift that I seem to have is the capacity to integrate across multiple complex disciplines. And I approach the Bible the same way, integrate the 66 books of the Bible, and so when it comes to the creation text of the Bible, it’s like I hold off of my interpretation until I’ve examined all the creation texts in the Bible. And my principle is to interpret them both literally and consistently, because I remember going through these creation texts and realizing they’re written very differently than the creation texts you see in the Quran or the Hindu Vedas, namely that they are devoid of metaphorical language or allegorical language. And there’s a strict chronology that’s implied there. There’s a historicity. So that told me these texts are designed to be interpreted literally, but literally and consistently.

And so how I help Christians with these different creation interpretations is to say, “Let’s go through all the creation texts, realizing this comes from a God for whom it’s impossible to lie or deceive. So if your interpretation of Genesis 1 contradicts your interpretation of Hebrews or your interpretation of Romans, then you know you need to adjust your interpretation,  because God’s not going to contradict himself.”

So that’s kind of my guiding interpretive principle, and I apply that too to my science. So for example, when I’m engaging evolutionary biologists, I say, “When we look at the history of Earths’ life, we need to not only examine it in the context of paleontology, the fossil record, we also need to look at it in the context of genetics, and not just genetics and paleontology. We need to look at it in the context of solar astrophysics.” And whenever I do that with biologists, they say, “What on earth does the sun have to do with it?” I said, “Well, as an astronomer, I can tell you that the sun gets brighter and brighter as it fuses hydrogen to helium, and therefore, unless you have the Creator intervening and removing life from Planet Earth and replacing it with new life on a regular basis, throughout the history of life on Planet Earth, the surface of the Earth would become so hot that it would bring about the sterilization of all life on planet Earth.

But what, in fact, the Creator has done is, by removing life and replacing with new life that’s more efficient and pulling greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere as the sun gets brighter and brighter, we have God by creating just the right life on planet Earth at just the right time, pulling the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere down to perfectly compensate for the increasing brightness of the sun. And so I say, “Yes, you can look at the genetics and think there’s no God involved there, but only a mind that knows the future physics of the sun would know which life to remove from Planet Earth and which new life to replace it with.”

And then that also brings up the issue of integrating the biblical text, because they’ll say, “There’s nothing like that in Genesis.” I say, “Yes, I agree with you, but it’s in Psalm 104, the longest of the creation psalms in the Bible. And if you go to verses 29 and 30, it says it’s the property of all life to die off, but God recreates and renews the face of the Earth.” He’s constantly removing life from planet Earth and replacing with new life. And I say, “Look at the fossil record. What you can easily document is that it’s filled with mass extinction events, quickly followed by mass speciation events.” I say, “Notice King David said it first 3,000 years ago. Only now in the 21st century have we discovered that indeed the fossil record is typified by these mass extinction events, followed by mass speciation events. But it’s exactly what needs to be done to compensate for the increasing luminosity of the sun.”

So that’s kind of what I’ve dedicated my life to, integrating all these complex scientific disciplines and integrating them with the 66 books of the Bible to basically show people this is the pathway to truth, and this is the pathway to receiving truth, life, and love from the Creator of the universe.

I’ve heard you speak also in terms of the predictive value of scripture, and that that was in some ways convincing to you that there actually was a Creator or a mind outside of the universe itself. Could you speak to some of that? 

Well, you heard me say it took me about 18 months to get from Genesis to the end of the Book of Revelation, and that’s because I was checking out all the predictions I saw in the Bible. And there are two categories of predictions: The Bible predicts future scientific discoveries. It also predicts future events in the history of humanity. So I would read these in the Bible, go to the university library, and basically see whether or not these statements in the Bible really were correct. Really and accurately predicted future scientific discoveries and future historical events. And during that 18-month period, I had a notebook where I was actually collecting all the places where the Bible had correctly predicted, and I was committed. I said, “If I find one where I can clearly say the Bible got it wrong, that’s enough for me to say this is not the word of God.” By the end of 18 months, I couldn’t find a single place where the Bible got it provably incorrect. I’ll admit this: I found passages I didn’t understand. But the ones I did understand, everything was accurate and correct.

So I already shared how, going through Genesis 1, I realized all the creation events are correctly described in the correct chronological order, which was way beyond the science of Moses. Some of these things have only been verified in our lifetime. I also discovered that the Bible had accurately predicted the four fundamental features of big bang cosmology and again recognize no one even had a hint that the universe had these characteristics until the 20th century. And that was also captured by fulfilled human prophecy. You read the book of Daniel, and Daniel speaks how there will be four major world empires that will rise upon the face of the Earth. And he was a contemporary of the Babylonian empire, but he predicted the rise of the Greek Empire and the rise of the Roman Empire in great detail. And so I said, “Hey, this is an example where he got it right.”

And then the prophecies of the coming of the Messiah. There’s over 100 that were fulfilled by the life of Jesus of Nazareth, and even prophecies about the modern nation, Israel. I remember going through the book of Ezekiel and saying, “I’ve got to check this stuff out.” I literally spent two days with a physics friend of mine. He was my lab partner. He was not a believer. I was not a believer. But we went through these microfiche of newspapers published in ’46 and ’47 and ’48 and realized we had just demonstrated that the Bible had precisely predicted the events that we now recognize as the rebirth of the nation of Israel. So that’s what brought me to faith in Christ, seeing that predictive power.

And that’s amazing. There are a lot of skeptics who push back against a biblical creation because they say that—I believe that they conflate all creation models because they don’t seem to tease out the fact that there are some who believe in a literal 24-hour day in Genesis and there are some who interpret the word day in a different way, but still allow for special creation of Adam and Eve, that the historicity of the text is not lost in that way. Could you tease that out a little bit, especially for even the Christian who might be confused or are hearing this for the first time or even for the skeptic? 

Sure. Well, I run into skeptical scientists and engineers very frequently, as you can imagine. And what I hear all the time is: “How can you possibly believe this Bible when, even on the first page it gets everything dead wrong?” And I said, “Well, from what point of view are you interpreting that text?” And what I hear is they say, “Well, God above is telling us a story of what He claims to have done here on planet Earth.” And I said, “Well, you have the right frame of reference for the universe, Genesis 1:1, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the Earth.” And a lot of them say, “Hey, the Bible got it is dead wrong there. We know the universe was first and the Earth later.” I said, “You are aware this was not written in English, right? It was written in Hebrew. And in Biblical Hebrew, there is no word for universe. They use an idiom for the universe instead, and the idiom is the heavens and the earth. It’s used 13 times in the Old Testament, always referring to the totality of physical reality.” So that helps them.

But I said, “Notice this: The frame of reference, the text changes it from the universe in Genesis 1:1 to the surface of the Earth in Genesis 1:2. And I agree with you, if the frame of reference is above the clouds of the Earth, then the text is teaching nothing but scientific nonsense. But if you put the frame of reference on the surface of the Earth, everything is a perfect fit with the established scientific record.” And for many of the skeptics I run into, that’s a mind blower for them. But I also try to remind them it was Galileo who said, “The biggest mistake you can make in Bible interpretation is to get the wrong frame of reference.” And here’s a perfect example right in the first page. Get the wrong frame of reference, it’s teaching nothing but scientific nonsense. But with the stated frame of reference, it’s a perfect fit. And as far as the days of creation go, again, I say the challenge… notice there’s 40 really good translations of the Bible in the English language. The reason for that? Biblical Hebrew has only 3,000 words in its vocabulary, if you don’t count the names of people and cities. English is the biggest vocabulary language. It’s more than 4 million words. So naturally we’re going to need multiple translations to try to communicate what’s in that original Hebrew.

And so I encourage people: “You got questions, don’t just look at one translation. One translation will not be adequate. You need to look at multiple translations.” But I said, “Look, even without any knowledge of Hebrew, when you look at Genesis 1, it’s clear that this word day must have at least three distinct literal definitions, because three are used in the text. On creation day one, it uses the word day for the daylight hours. On creation day four, it uses the word day for one rotation period of the Earth. But in Genesis 2:4, it uses that same word day to refer to the entirety of creation history. So that day is a long period of time.

And you heard me just say earlier, when you go through the seven days of creation, the first six days are bracketed by an evening and a morning, implying they have a start time and an end time. But there is no such statement for day seven. We’re still in the 7th day. And if we’re still in the 7th day, then these days of creation must be long periods of time. And I take the point, I do translate that God created in six literal days, recognizing there’s four distinct literal definitions of the Hebrew word yom that’s translated as day.

And to my scientist skeptical friends, I said, “I know you interpret science from a purely naturalistic perspective. And that makes sense if you’re doing your science in the human era, because the Bible says God has rested from His work of creation. So when you’re doing research in the human era, you’re only going to see naturalistic processes, but it’s an error to think that that applies all the way back to the beginning of the universe. Previous to the human era, naturalistic process is not adequate to explain what we see revealed in the record of nature. It’s a combination of naturalistic processes and divine miraculous intervention. And that explains why so few biologists are Christians, because most of them focus their research on the human era. It explains why so many astronomers are Christians, because their data comes from deep time. It takes time for the light of stars and galaxies to reach our telescopes. So most of what we do in astronomy is looking into the six days of creation. Most of what biologists are doing is looking at day seven.

And so it explains why there’s a theological and philosophical distinction for what you see in people in the social sciences, the life sciences, and the physical sciences. Social science, it’s 100% the human era. So no wonder that the number of believers in the social science is as low as it is. They’re focused on the wrong day.

That makes sense to me. You’re getting a context of the whole, not just the part. You’re not conflating the part to the whole. You’re seeing the big picture. And I love that. One other clarification, and that is sometimes I think that there’s a presumption, if you believe in an older ancient universe, in an older Earth, that somehow you don’t believe in the special creation of man, that you are an evolutionist. But that’s not necessarily the case. Again, for our listeners, to provide clarity, could you talk about that for just a moment? 

Yeah, I sure can. I mean, our position at Reasons to Believe is that we acknowledge that all of humanity is descended from one man and one woman that God specially created in a garden in the Persian Gulf region. I mean, Genesis 2 tells us. There are four known rivers, the Pishon, the Gihon, the Tigris, and the Euphrates, come close together in the Garden of Eden, and two of those rivers are flowing today, two are dry river beds, and that tells me that this must be an ice age event, because only during an ice age would all four rivers be flowing. And then where they come together is in the southeastern part of the Persian Gulf, which today is more than 200ft below sea level. But during the last ice age, it was above sea level. So I think Genesis 2 is implying that God created Adam and Eve sometime during the last ice age, which would be 15,000 to about 120,000 years ago.

Scientists have come up with a date for the origin of humanity based on genetics, but the date isn’t very accurate. It’s 150,000 years ago plus or minus 150,000 years. In a lot of popular literature, they’ll say scientific evidence proves that humans originated 300,000 years ago, but they’re simply taking you to the very far edge of the error bar. The truth is it’s between 0 and 300,000. Take your pick. Although radiometric carbon dating would tell us that humans have been here on Earth for at least the past 40,000 years. So somewhere between 40,000 and 300,000, but the Bible gives you a narrower time frame. It would be previous to about 120,000 years ago, but at a time when the Garden of Eden would have been above sea level.

And geneticists will say, “Well, if you look at the genetics, it seems to indicate that humans are descended, not from two people, but a population of several hundred, maybe even a few thousand.” I mean, Francis Collins wrote in his book 10,000 individuals, but that same genetic data also has large systematic errors which would permit the human species from being descended from a maximum of 10,000 individuals to a minimum of two. So two is certainly within the range of scientific credibility.

In fact, you were mentioning earlier, before we got started, about a debate I had with the president of BioLogos, Deborah Haarsma. And I was sharing with her, “Well, when I was growing up, they were saying the ancestral population was 1 million, and then when I got into my 20s, they said 100,000. Francis Collins says 10,000. A debate my colleague, Fazale Rana, had with Dennis Venema, they said somewhere between 800 and 1200.” And she says, “Well, we at BioLogos could go as low as 132.” And I said, “Well, Deborah, how about if we plot a graph to see where it’s been going? One million, 100,000, 10,000, 800, 132. If we extrapolate, it seems to be heading towards the biblical two.” So I’m just saying let’s wait and see, but my experience of my lifetime is, the more we study the book of nature, the more evidence we uncover for the supernatural handiwork of God.

And I personally model that. Every week I write a 1000- to 1500-word article on our reasons.org website. It’s called “Today’s New Reason to Believe.” So literally, just combing the scientific literature, I’m able to produce an article on a weekly basis showing the more we learn about nature, the stronger becomes the case for the God of the Bible. And I can tell you this, if I had time, I could write six articles every day. That’s how much is being published in the scientific literature. But I’m only one person, so I pick one of those discoveries and write one article a week.

Now, you have written several books. If this has really piqued someone’s interest and they’re wanting to take a look, I know you’ve written in several different areas, but could you highlight a few books that might be good for our listeners to know? 

Yeah. I just finished my 23rd book, but a lot of my books focus on this two-books model and how, the more we learn about nature, the more evidence we get for the inerrancy of the Bible and the Christian faith. My best selling book is The Creator in the Cosmos, now in it’s fourth edition. One book that laypeople like because it’s short and it’s easy to read, Why the Universe Is the Way It Is. And another one would be Improbable Planet. And just this month, we’re releasing a brand new book, Designed to the Core. So, yeah, I got lots of books on this subject. And you can get free chapters of my books at reasons.org/ross.

That’s wonderful! That’s great! So again, at the end of the day, at 19, you signed your name in this Gideon Bible. And it sounds like, from an intellectual point of view, as well as a spiritual point of view, it sounds like the world started to make sense in a comprehensive way, that all of the pieces came together, that you were able to put together the book of nature and the book of Scripture, and that it informs now perhaps everything that you do. 

Well, it was a turning point in my life, because I just finished my sophomore year at university. I was going into my junior year, but I saw my academic career catapult in the sense that, once I gave my life to Jesus Christ, suddenly my ability to comprehend what was in the Bible was much greater than it was before. And likewise, my grades began to catapult. I saw much greater success in my studies in science. Research became much more fun for me.

And something I’ve noticed, especially amongst my peers who are scientists and engineers: When they develop that strong emotional bond with their Creator, their ability to perform catapults.Their abilities to do things becomes greatly enhanced through that relationship. The same thing is true of us human beings, that our capacities and abilities become much greater once we have that bond with a higher being.

That’s extraordinary. It sounds like, again, your life and your work has been just prolific. And so many lives have been touched by your faithful dedication and obvious passion to discover more and more about the truth of the Creator, the truth of creation, and also your passion for Christ, and that Christ is known by all. 

As we’re turning the page here and thinking about the skeptics who are listening, what would you advise them, in terms of, perhaps they can look in a meaningful way. I think one of the things that impresses me about Reasons to Believe is that you put forth a Biblical creation model that is testable and predictive. And that might be surprising to someone who’s listening, that anything about Biblical or creation model could be testable and predictive.

Well, thank you for the opening, because what we’ve done at Reasons to Believe is go to secular university campuses, and we will briefly present an outline of our testable biblical creation model. And then we invite a panel of science professors who are not believers to critique our model, and then we open it up for Q&A with the students and the faculty. And every time we’ve done that, the critique we get is not about the data. It’s not about our interpretation. They tend to drift off into the philosophy of science. “Can we really apply this to this?” But the audience picks up on it right away. They had an opportunity to critique the model, and they didn’t provide any scientific critique of the model. It was only philosophy that they responded with. And so it’s opened a door for us. And what I’ve been doing recently with scientists is say, “Look. So I read my Bible. It says that God begins His works of redemption before He creates anything at all.” In my newest book, Designed to the Core, I basically demonstrate the fine tuning evidence for the God of the Bible is most spectacular in the context of what’s necessary for billions of human beings to be redeemed from their sin and evil.

So what I’ve been sharing with my colleagues who are not yet believers: “Look, I know you’re not a Christian. I know you don’t believe in God. But why don’t you try this experiment? Do your scientific research from a Biblical redemptive perspective and see if it doesn’t make you a more successful scientist. Put it to the test and see what happens.” So that’s kind of a new way I developed for sharing my faith with skeptical scientists and engineers. Just challenge them. “Try this and see what it does for you. If it makes you a more successful scientist, if you’re able to be more productive in your scientific discoveries, then maybe you need to pick up the Bible and look and study its message of what it means for you.”

That’s good advice. And for the Christians who are listening in, I know that there are probably many who have skeptics who push back, who are scientists, that they don’t think that religion has any part of their world. How could you advise Christians to meaningfully engage with those who are skeptical around them? 

Well, I’ve been a pastor for more than four decades in a church that’s sandwich between Caltech and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. And what I’ve discovered is the primary reason why people don’t share their faith with adults: They don’t feel that they’re prepared. And I see that in 1 Peter 3:15, “Always be ready to share the reasons for the faith and hope you have in Jesus Christ with gentleness, respect, and a clear conscience.”

So my advice is: Step one, get prepared. And that’s what our mission at Reasons to Believe is all about. We write articles, we do books, we do video, all designed to prepare believers to be able to share their faith. A lot of our material is designed to persuade those that are highly educated, either in science or theology or philosophy, or all three. But I said, get those books. You can skim them, get an idea of what they’re all about, and then when you run into people that are skeptics, say, “I’ve got something I want to give to you,” but at least skim it so that you have an opportunity after they’ve read the book, to say, “Hey, how about we have lunch together and talk about what you found in that book?”

And if you get stuck, we’re here to back you up. And so I know one lady who was sharing with a scientist, gave him a couple of my books. He had a ton of questions. They wound up having lunch, and it was way over her head. But she says, “I think I can set up a Zoom meeting for you with the scientists of Reasons to Believe. And that was very productive.

I know one lady who hasn’t read any of my books, but she’s given away more than 250 of my books to people who are not yet believers. And she keeps sending me notes of how those books have brought people to faith in Christ.

That’s extraordinary! I think sometimes half of the work is just knowing what’s available, knowing the resources. I mean, not all of us can be astrophysicists, but we can be familiar with what’s available from those who are and can make connections, and it sounds extraordinary to me, too, that you would offer your expertise on a Zoom meeting, for example, or someone on your staff, to be able to talk through or walk through issues with people who are genuinely curious and asking those questions. 

Well, I think that’s crucial. It’s not just resources that people need. They need that human contact.

Yes. 

One example happened where there was a bunch of professors at a university in the United Kingdom. They were part of a book club, and there was only one Christian in the book club. But they said, “How about if we look at this book?” And they said, “Well, that’s quite different from what we normally look at,” but they gave it a go. But they invited me in after they had read the book. So I spent 2 hours just answering their questions. And, yeah, it was very fruitful in the sense that they all said, “We need to seriously consider this. This is serious stuff. It’s not fluff.”

It is. I think oftentimes the Christian story or narrative is just written off as a myth, just like everything else, that it’s not substantive. But as you’ve seen and you’ve shown through your extraordinary journey of investigation, through not only the religious texts, but also the scientific texts, [1:03:05] this is the worldview that substance resides. It is where things come together, where things make sense. It is a comprehensive worldview. It’s integrated. It’s explanatory. Like you say, it’s predictive. There’s so much there to be known. And I think that there are so many who would be surprised if they’re willing to take a look, like you have. 

I so appreciate even your example, as well as your story. Of course, you’re a genius. But I think what is one of the most pressing things, impressive things to me, is that you were willing to investigate until you found the answers that were satisfying to you, the answers that seemed to match with reality, with what you were seeing in the world, and in the textbooks, and what you’re observing in the cosmos, and that it made sense to you. And also, of course, that you love to share what you know. We’re all benefiting from the hard work and investigation and from your genius. So thank you so much. 

You’re very welcome. But I think one of the unique features of human beings compared to all other life: We’re compulsively curious, not just about where we’re going to get our daily food. We’re curious about those distant black holes and quasars and creatures that exist on the other side of the world. And it’s fun. And what I noticed in the Bible, it says we’re to study both the book of nature and the book of scripture. So what I share with people is do not leave it up to the theologians to study the book of scripture. It’s way too much fun. Everybody needs to be involved. And don’t leave it up to the scientists to study the book of nature. It’s way too much fun. You need to get involved and pull together both books. So God wants us to be engaged. Let’s have fun.

Yes. And of course, the more you know about His world, the more you know about Him, right? 

Right.

Thank you again, Dr. Ross, for coming on today. It’s been nothing but pure pleasure. 

Well, thank you.

Thanks for tuning into Side B Stories to hear Dr. Ross’s story. You can find out more about his books, writing and speaking through his website, reasons.org, which I’ll post in the episode notes. He’s also written a book with regard to his story of conversion, called Always Be Ready. You can access a complimentary chapter also on his website, reasons.org. For questions and feedback about this episode, you can contact me through our website, sidebstories.com. I hope you enjoyed it and that you’ll follow, rate, review, and share this podcast with your friends and social network. In the meantime, I’ll be looking forward to seeing you next time, where we’ll see how another skeptic flips the record of their life. 

 

Former skeptic Dr. Fazale Rana, a biochemist, began to question whether evolution could explain the origin of life. He began to reconsider the need for God.

Reasons to Believe: www.reasons.org Resources by Fazale Rana

• Humans 2.0 – Scientific, Philosophical, and Theological Perspectives on Transhumanism
• The Cell’s Design – How Chemistry Reveals the Creator’s Artistry
• Fit for a Purpose – Does the Anthropic Principle Include Biochemistry?
• Who was Adam?  A Creation Model Approach to the Origin of Humanity
• Origins of Life

Episode Transcript

Hello, and thanks for joining in. I’m Jana Harmon, and you’re listening to Side B Stories, where we see how skeptics slip the record of their lives. Each podcast, we listen to someone who has once been a skeptic, but who became Christian against all odds. 

We all have assumptions about reality, about the way things are in the world. Most of the time, we’re pretty settled in our beliefs. We don’t question them, especially if they seem to make sense to us. They seem true to us and to those around us. But what happens when those beliefs are challenged, when we are presented with new information? We’re generally confronted with a couple of options. We can shut down any opposing viewpoint without consideration and listen to those only within our own camp and become more convinced in our own beliefs. Or we can become open to other ideas, take a closer look at the confounding issue at hand, and look for the best explanation, the one that makes the most sense of what we’re seeing or experiencing. 

But sometimes taking a closer look can be difficult. It can come with costs. We may need to reorient our own views in a way that seems a bit uncomfortable, that takes us in a direction we never anticipated. We all want to be intellectually honest, or at least think that we are. But that road can be both challenging and demanding, especially if we find that the truth leads us to situations or intellectual positions we thought we would never seriously consider, much less believe. 

As a brilliant scientist, biochemist, and author, Dr. Fuz Rana valued objective truth. His intellectual curiosity, intellectual honesty, and openness led him beyond his naturalistic presumptions to go where the evidence led him from skepticism to belief in a Creator God as the best explanation for what we see in biology, in all of reality. I hope you’ll come and join in to listen to his fascinating story, as well as his perspectives on whether and how science and belief can and do relate to each other.  It should be interesting. 

Welcome to Side B Stories, Fuz. It’s so great to have you with me today. 

Jana thank you for having me.

Wonderful. Before we get started into your story, I’d really love for the listeners to know a little bit about you. You’re quite an accomplished, credentialed scientist. So talk to us a little bit about who you are, in terms of the things that you’ve studied and where you are now in your professional life. 

Yeah, well, I have a PhD in biochemistry, earned the PhD from Ohio University, and then afterwards did a postdoc at the University of Virginia and then another one at the University of Georgia. And so my area of specialization, if anybody cares, is cell membrane biochemistry and biophysics. And after my second postdoc, I took a position in research and development for a Fortune 500 company and worked there for nearly a decade before joining Reasons to Believe 23 years ago. And I’m, just in the last few weeks, assuming the role of president and CEO of Reasons to Believe, And, you know, this is an exciting organization, where we really look at opening up the gospel for people by revealing God in science.

So science played an important role in my conversion to Christianity, and so I’m utterly convinced that, through science, people can see the reality of God’s existence and be set on a journey to come to know Him. So it’s a fascinating place to work. I’ve been privileged to be here for 23 years.

It sounds very fascinating, and I really would want to venture into some of that relationship between science and faith as we move through your story. Let’s start at the beginning of your story, though, Fuz. Let’s start at the beginning of your story. Tell me where you were born. What area of the country. Were you from the United States? Where you grew up, what that was like in terms of your home, and was it a religious home at all? Walk us through that. 

Sure, sure. Well, my father was from India, and he lived in India prior to the partition taking place, where India won its independence from Great Britain. And when that happened, the states of East and West Pakistan were created, and my father’s family were Muslims, and so they were forced to immigrate into the state of Pakistan as a result of that. My father was a nuclear physicist, and so he came to the United States through Canada, where he did a PhD in nuclear physics, and he worked for a number of years in research and development. This was in the 1950s, and of course, being a nuclear physicist in those days was the ticket to have in the sciences, and he eventually left his work at General Dynamics and took up a university position at North Dakota State University. And that’s where he met my mother, who came from a Catholic background. Her family are Germans, and so they agreed to disagree.

My father was devout as a Muslim, and usually if a non-Muslim marries a Muslim, the expectation is that a conversion will take place, where that person will convert to Islam. But my father was very devout, but also very progressive and modern in his views of Islam. And so he never expected or asked my mom to convert to Islam, but she was really a nonpracticing Catholic.

So, as my brother and I were growing up in our household, we were exposed primarily to Islam. But my mom’s parents were devout Catholics, and so when they would come to visit or we would go visit them, part of that experience was always going to Catholic Church, so I had a little bit of exposure to Catholicism growing up as well.

I was born in Ames, Iowa, in the Midwest, and then ended up growing up, for the most part, in West Virginia. We moved there when I was four. My father took a position at West Virginia Institute of Technology as the chairman of the physics department, and so I consider myself really to be from West Virginia. If you ask me where I’m from, that’s where I’d say, from West Virginia. So that was a bit about where I’m from and kind of a little bit about my family background.

That would be interesting, growing up with two very different religious perspectives, one from your mother’s side, one from your father’s side, and it sounds like there was more active participation, perhaps in the more Islamic part of your religious upbringing. Was that confusing for you at all, in terms of doing something Catholic with one side of the family and Muslim on another side? 

Not really. It just was the way it was. That was the way it was from the very beginning. And there was a lot of discussion from my father about Islam relative to Christianity, where he had a rather negative view of the Christian faith for the most part. He would not go to Catholic Church, as you might imagine, with my mother and her family. But my father was open minded in many respects, though. I mean, he was, again, very devout, but he wasn’t dogmatic. He always kind of left it up to my brother and I to really make our own decisions when it came to things involving religion. For him, the most important things were our academics, and so he was very much interested in our academic pursuits. That was really… If there was anything that was non-negotiable in our household, it was not excelling in academics.

My father very much lived out his faith. I remember him getting up every morning, and he would go through a ritual cleansing and then pray to Mecca facing the east, laying out a prayer carpet. He would carry a prayer book with him in his breast pocket everywhere he went. So he really was very devout as a Muslim. And again, he never really imposed Islam on my brother and I. But you catch things by osmosis many times. And I can remember, in West Virginia at that time, there weren’t mosques anywhere. And so, from time to time, we would actually go to prayer meetings that were hosted at a friend of his home who would invite Muslims in the community to come. And so I would go through prayer with my father and kind of learned a little bit about, quite a bit, actually, about Islamic theology, again, just through casual conversations with my father.

But when I was a teenager, I became very interested in Islam, and I think part of it was I just wanted to connect a little bit with my father. Part of it was really trying to come to grips with my heritage. So my father taught me how to pray, and I began to read from the Quran. I recited the Shahada, which was the declaration that Allah was the one true God and Muhammad was his one true prophet, and spent probably a good course of a year, year and a half of actually exploring Islam. I can remember telling my friends that I actually identified as a Muslim, which was not necessarily an easy thing growing up in West Virginia, which was in the heart of the Bible Belt. So I can remember a few instances where I was actually treated poorly as a result of that.

In the 1970s when the Iranian hostage crisis took place, my friends actually… A couple of them actually beat me up a little bit. Not really badly, but kind of pushed me around a little bit because of that. And I can remember one time somebody in the locker room… there were all kinds of locker room antics that went on back in those days. Things weren’t very well supervised. I could tell you some stories that are not necessarily appropriate, some of the things we did, but I remember one instance somebody washing my mouth out with soap because I had Allah on my mouth and that type of thing. So I went through that experience because I identified as a Muslim. But yeah.

Would you say… during that time obviously you were identifying as a Muslim. You were reading the Quran. You were going through some ritual prayer. Would you say that… It sounds as if you held some kind of a belief in some kind of a higher power, Allah, at that time, I would imagine. 

Yeah. I don’t ever recall, growing up, really doubting God’s existence, at least as a young man. But after a period of time, I just kind of became disillusioned with Islam. Part of it was, for me, reading the Quran, at least at that point, seemed very… it was just very esoteric. It didn’t make a lot of sense, didn’t have a lot of meaning for me. The prayer became burdensome. It was something that—in Islam you pray as an obligation, not as a way to commune with God. It’s an obligation. In fact, in Islam, God is unknowable. We can’t know God in the way that a Christian would say that they know and experience God.

And I remember an instance where, I was probably a junior, the world history teacher that I had knew that my father was a Muslim and asked if he would be willing to come to class and just talk about Islam. And my father refused to do that. He felt like that was just putting a target on my back. And so that really had an impact on me, because it’s like, “Okay, you live a life, and you are sincerely devout, but you’re not willing to actually express your belief. And so if that’s the case, is this really true?” And that had an impact on me. And this was about the time when I was getting ready to graduate from high school, and so there were other things that were interesting to me, too, that were competing. Girls, rock music, sports. It was a bunch of things. And so it was probably a combination of things that really just led me to really give up on Islam.

Okay. Now, you said that you were in West Virginia, which you characterized as in the Bible Belt. So you were surrounded in some sense by Christians, or at least cultural Christianity. What was your experience with Christians at that time?

Yeah. Well, both my mother and my father had a fairly negative view of Christianity. And of course, growing up in West Virginia, you saw what was really a more fundamentalist expression of Christianity. There were people that handled snakes. That was something that was part of Christianity, at least for some people in West Virginia. And you had people like faith healers and things like that. And so my parents really saw Christianity as being something that uneducated, unsophisticated people held to, and that kind of had an impression upon me, but yet I really, in some respects, envied my friends who were Christians because they were part of this community. You could tell at school that they had these friendships with other classmates, and that friendship was born out of the fact that they went to church together, they were part of the same youth group together, that they had these experiences together that really knit them. And so I felt a little envious and felt a little bit like an outsider.

I just don’t have that real sense of community. But I can remember, in college, having friends that were Christians, and they would share their faith with me, and I would just think, “I just don’t know how you can believe these types of things.” At that time, I was taking courses in science and chemistry and biology, and through the courses particularly that I had in biology, that really in many respects, fostered a position of agnosticism. I wasn’t really sure that God existed, because the grand claim in biology is that everything can be explained through evolutionary mechanisms. And if biology can be fully accounted through by mechanism, then what role is there for a creator to play? A creator becomes superfluous. And many of the professors I had, particularly biology professors, were really… Again, teaching biology in the Bible Belt, a lot of their students would challenge them on the issue of creation and evolution, and I think they had just had it with that. And so they had a very negative perspective on Christianity as well.

So I felt very comfortable calling myself an agnostic. I don’t know that I ever would have said I was an atheist per se, but I was really uncertain about God’s existence.

So you, I guess, became comfortable in that scientific way of thinking, that you associated yourself with those who were intellectually astute, that evolution could explain the reality of what we’re seeing, at least in the biological world in terms of mechanism. 

Did you, by chance—when you embraced this kind of godless reality, did you consider that naturalistic worldview? Or at least I know you were agnostic. But did you follow that worldview through beyond say biological implications, say with regard to your life. Or even question it in terms of the origin of life? Not just the mechanism of biology.

Yes, I think I probably limited it primarily to the way I thought about things scientifically. Science is such an alluring drug, and it’s so much fun to investigate problems and to learn about nature and investigate problems in nature that in and of itself, it becomes an obsession. And so that’s—as an undergraduate student, I began dreaming about going to graduate school and earning a PhD in biochemistry and really pursuing a career. So all I thought about was, “How do I learn as much as I can about the sciences?” My parents—even though my mom was a nonpracticing Catholic, she was a very moral person. My father was a very moral person. So I had a very strong moral upbringing.

So I wouldn’t say that I held to a kind of a Christian worldview in terms of my morality and ethics exclusively, but I would have considered myself to be a fairly moral person, understood that there was right and wrong, but I just never thought about things more deeply from a religious perspective than that.

So as you were moving along in your academics and pursuing science, and it sounds like you were very engrossed in that world, did it just confirm more and more kind of an anti-God sentiment in terms of your understanding of the world and reality? 

Yeah, I think so. By the time I went to graduate school, I had no interest in the God question whatsoever. To me, it was, “Science is the answer to our problems as human beings,” and that as a scientist, I could participate in, not only uncovering the secrets of nature, but doing things that would dramatically impact people’s lives.

It sounds like that actually gave you a lot of meaning and purpose and ambition, in a sense. As you were moving along and setting really at high, very elite levels of academia and pursuing these questions, was there anything that caused you to sit back and think, “This is hard to explain from a purely naturalistic perspective?” 

Yeah, it was really in graduate school, in the first year of graduate school, where that question kind of surfaced. And as I was learning about biochemical systems, it was just so much fun to be a graduate student, because I was surrounded by professors. I was in a smaller chemistry department, so I had access to almost all the faculty. And so it was just a lot of fun to talk with the different faculty to get their perspective on things, to learn about their research, to engage other graduate students, to take advanced coursework. I started reading the scientific literature, began to do my own research.

And in that environment, it was again just absolutely thrilling. But what was remarkable is how all of us just marveled at the nature of biochemical systems. It was not unusual for all of us to say, “Look at how amazing this is!” “Look at how cool this is!” “I can’t believe it works this way.” There’s just an elegance and an ingenuity to biochemical systems. And I began to wonder, “Gosh, how on earth do we account for the origin of these systems?” And I knew from an undergraduate that was the origin of life question. And so now I’m a graduate student. It’s like, “Okay, I’ve got the wherewithal to really dig into this.” I’m going to, on my own time, study the origin of life problem. It wasn’t really required in the coursework.

And through that investigation, I very quickly came to the recognition that these processes that people are speculating could generate biochemical systems seem woefully inadequate to me. It just doesn’t seem like chemistry and physics could produce these kinds of systems, because I had enough experience as a chemist to know how hard it is to get chemicals to do what you want them to do under carefully controlled conditions in a laboratory setting. To think that somehow molecules that are far more complex than anything that a chemist could ever dream of producing in the lab could just simply emerge through chemical evolution just seemed to me to be far fetched.

And so it was at that point that I reached the conclusion there has to be a mind behind everything, that at least when it comes to the origin of life and the origin of biochemical systems, there had to be a higher intelligence that brought those systems into existence. Now, once those systems are in existence, I reasoned at that point that evolutionary processes could have explained the history of life. But to me, at least with respect to the origin of life, there had to be some kind of creator that was responsible.

At that point, did you, in terms of who or what that creator or that mind was, did you do any further investigation in terms of trying to identify more who or what that transcendent source was? Or did you just kind of accept that and then move forward? 

Well, for me, at least, when I realized that there was a creator, then the question became, “Who is that creator? And how do I relate to that creator?” And I became very interested in that question. I didn’t really have the tools to properly engage that question. I had no training, theologically or philosophically, of any sorts. And so I began just on my own to reason through, who could this creator be? And so I began going down a path of universalism where I thought, “Well, maybe this creator revealed himself to the different people of the world in different ways and that the different religious systems of the world really represent this creator reaching out to people.” And when you look at the moral teachings of the world’s religions, there’s quite a bit of common ground.

I was, again, theologically and philosophically naive, because the different religions of the world teach very different things about the nature of reality and the nature of God and the nature of the Person of Christ, but at that point in time, I just didn’t have the sophistication to appreciate that. But also, I think part of my exposure to Islam played a role as well, because in Islam, Muhammad is considered the seal of the prophets.  Muslims view Adam and Noah and Abraham and David and Moses and Jesus as being prophets to particular people at particular times. And so there’s a type of universality to Islam. There’s a type of religious pluralism embedded in Islamic theology.

And so I’m sure that some of that was influencing the way I thought about things. I also saw really Islam, and I was exposed to Catholicism, and so here are two expressions of religions that I saw growing up, and so who has to necessarily choose one or the other? Why couldn’t they all be true? So I was going down that particular path.

And what really changed my way of thinking was my wife-to-be’s conversion, my fiance’s conversion to Christianity. She grew up in a Christian home, and she dedicated her life to Christ as a teenager and then kind of drifted away from her faith. And then her mom had a friend who was going to a small Pentecostal church in downtown Charleston, West Virginia, and invited Amy’s mother to go to church. And she really liked that experience. And so they both invited Amy to go to church on Easter, and Amy went and rededicated her life to Christ, and so she began to share her faith with me.

And what did you think of that? I guess at that point you were somewhat open to the possibility of God, or a personal God, perhaps a Christian God. 

Yeah. I remember when Amy told me that she had become a Christian or rededicated her life to Christ. I remember saying, “Hey, this is wonderful if that’s what you want to do. I just don’t think I can be a Christian because I’m a scientist.” And I don’t know where I got that mindset from, other than probably just the experiences I had growing up and the way I saw Christianity expressed. But I felt like I was being very generous because I saw the example of my parents. And so I thought, “Look, if this is something you want to do, I’m fully supportive. It’s just not for me.” And she had a bit of a crisis. She was again at this small church and was really just growing enormously as a Christian. It was at a Bible study where the topic of being unequally yoked with a nonbeliever came up. And we later learned that her pastor, Johnny Withrow, deliberately was teaching on that lesson, but he was actually directing the lesson towards somebody else, not towards Amy. But she’s the one that actually took that message to heart. And so she was like, “What do I do?”

And so I became the prayer project for this church, and we were going to be married in a couple of months, and we had the date for our wedding set, and she was like, “What do I do?” And so the whole church was praying for us. And I remember Amy telling me, “Well, Johnny wants to meet with you because we want to talk about the wedding plans. And I can remember saying something really idiotic. Like, “Whatever you guys decide to do for the wedding, I’m fine with. Just tell me when to show up.”

Right, right. 

So, you know, being married now for 35 years, I know just how moronic that was. But anyway—my poor wife, what she’s gone through.

So she insisted. And I thought, “Well, I’ll go ahead, and I’ll meet with Johnny.” And I was just bracing myself for the sales pitch. I knew what was coming. And so, to Johnny’s credit, what he did is he basically challenged me in saying, “Have you ever read the Bible?” And apart from reading Genesis 1, I’d never read the Bible. And he said, “Well, how do you know it’s not true?” And I thought, “You know, you really have a point here.” And he really appealed to my pride as a scientist, saying, “Look, if you’re a scientist, you should be open to investigating truth claims no matter where they come from.”

And so I thought, “Well, my wife to be is a Christian. Johnny’s making a good point.” So I got a copy of the Bible, and I would sit in the chemistry lab after I finished my work for the day when everybody else had gone home, and I didn’t want anybody to see me reading the Bible. And I’d sit at the lab bench, and I’d start reading through the Bible. And I can remember complaining to Amy. “I just don’t really know where to start. I’m having some trouble here.” And she said, “Well, start with the gospel of John.” And I ended up not understanding exactly what she meant, so I started with the gospel of Matthew.

And what was intriguing to me is like, “Oh, this is where the Christmas story comes from.” Growing up in a non-Christian home and being exposed to the Christmas story, it’s like, “Oh, this is intriguing. So now I understand where the story comes from.” And then I remember reading the Sermon on the Mount, and that was an incredibly powerful passage of scripture for me at that time, and it still is, because here I’m introduced to the person of Christ and His teachings, and I realize that this is the way that I want to live, that what Christ is teaching here is true. I found the person of Christ very winsome, and at the same time, I was being condemned by what Christ was teaching. And I had this desire to please Jesus that was really odd to me.

And along the way, one of Johnny’s friends gave me a little booklet on how to become a Christian. And so I realized that there’s no way I could live up to the standards of Christ. But I wanted to. And I wouldn’t have had the words for it at that time, but I was really confronted with my sin. So there’s this little booklet on how do you become a Christian that kind of took me through the gospel. And going through that book, I prayed to receive Christ, but through the process of… really that evening, I remember reading again the Sermon on the Mount. I had this… I would call it a religious experience, where it felt like there was a person in the room with me while I was really contemplating what the Sermon on the Mount meant. And I had this overwhelming sense that this was true. And I’ve never had an experience like that before. I never had an experience like that afterwards. And so I would just say that it was an encounter that I had with the resurrected Christ. That that was part of that process of really drawing me towards Jesus.

But the stage was set with seeing God revealed in science and then really, I’m sure, the prayers of people that were praying on my behalf. I found out later that my wife, if I didn’t convert, was going to call off the wedding. She was really that convinced, but she never said that to me. It was just this was her personal conviction, and so God faithfully honored her prayers.

That’s amazing! Yeah. There are a few things that stand out there to me that beg a few questions, especially knowing your intellect, your dedication as a scientist, your former reading of the Quran as a form of holy text, and then looking at the Bible. I’m sure there are a lot of differences there. But the first thing I wanted to ask, in a sense, is, when you opened the Bible for the first time—of course you’d have had some kind of esoteric reference there with the Quran—the Bible or the biblical narrative in Matthew, I’m sure, felt quite different as a story. But also embedded in those stories are supernatural presumptions and actions and activities. And I know at this point it sounds like you were open to perhaps the person of God, whoever that was. So, when you read the Scripture for the first time, did you push back on what seemed to be the miraculous? Or did that seem like, “All the pieces are fitting into place. It makes sense to me. If a supernatural being exists, the miraculous can happen.” 

Yeah. I don’t think I was ever troubled with the presentation of the miraculous. In some respects, I expected that to be the case, that if indeed there really is a Creator, that there was room for miracles.

And one of the things that really struck me immediately, reading the Bible, as you alluded to, Jana, compared to the Quran, is that it was written as if… Here’s a narrative. It was written as if this was history, as if this really happened, that you could follow. There was a logic. There was an ordering to what was being presented that made sense, that I could track with, that I could understand. And even the culmination of Christ’s teaching at the Sermon on the Mount is part of the narrative. The teaching is incorporated into the narrative. And so I felt like I was part of a story. And I understood what was going on. I understood what was being communicated, which was not the case when I was reading from the Quran.

And another thought that occurred to me is that you opened the Bible as a curious investigator, as an honest scientist would do, right? You’re willing to open and look at the evidence and see where the evidence leads. And it led you to the truth in the person of Christ, which I agree, He can be an amazingly compelling character, especially when you’re not expecting what you find in scripture. I can also hear a skeptic whispering in my ear, saying, “Well, how much investigation did he really do? He opened the Bible. He had an experience of Christ. He was overwhelmed by the teaching and the person of Christ, which sometimes is enough.” If that’s a real experience, it’s not, I think, in a sense, that you’re just not looking for truth, which it is, but also the reality. And Jesus showing up in a very palpable way, I’m sure, was incredibly convincing for you, evidentiary almost in a sense, that His presence was enough to convince you, in a sense, all of those things put together. So I wonder how you would answer the skeptic to say, “Well, you didn’t investigate for very long.” 

I guess I would say yes and no to that question in terms of how long did I investigate. To respond to the skeptic. Gosh, I think it was in the summer of 1999, Michael Shermer, who heads up The Skeptics Society, located in Pasadena, California, wrote a book on… How We Believe, I think is the title of the book. And he and a sociologist by the name of Frank Sulloway interviewed people and asked them why they believe. And the two reasons were, number one, seeing design in nature, and number two reason was experiencing God.

And so I would say that my conversion essentially involved both of those facets. I wasn’t looking for God. I wasn’t looking for a crutch. I discovered God in the design of biochemical systems. And so the question was really who is God? And to me, the encounter I had with Christ really drove home who God is. And so Jesus is indeed God incarnate. So it was that experience.

But I think experiencing God is as much evidential as actually seeing the elegant structure of a biochemical system or a biomolecule. And the thing is that, as a scientist, you have a theory. You have data that seems to support the theory. Your work isn’t done. You continue to devise experiments and observations to interrogate that theory, to determine whether that theory continues to withstand ongoing scrutiny.

And so, for the 35 years I’ve been a Christian, I’ve continued to challenge my conversion, if you will. I continue to study biochemistry and see even more and more evidence for design. In fact, I’ve worked hard to develop design arguments based on the latest advances in biochemistry, as a way to formalize that intuition of design that I had. I continue to study the origin of life question and seeing more and more intractable problems emerge over the 35 years that I’ve been investigating.

I have, since then, learned about the historical argument for the life, death, and resurrection of Christ, the arguments that are made for the reliability of the Old and the New Testaments, learned about archaeological evidence that supports both the Old and the New Testaments, and even have studied things like the argument from religious experience for God’s existence. Richard Swinburne is somebody, a philosopher at, I think, Oxford that developed this argument. So you can even take religious experience, and actually, by looking at the shared experience that Christians have had for 2000 years, construct an argument for God’s existence. And so I’ve continued to challenge my conversion in a sense, and I’m more convinced now than ever.

And so the investigation continued, and still continues to this very day, where I am not afraid to look at challenges from skeptics that would challenge God’s existence or challenge the God of the Bible as being the explanation for who the Creator is.

I think that’s a really excellent answer. I think it’s an honest answer. Again, as someone who takes objective truth seriously, who is constantly testing hypotheses and coming to conclusions based upon what you observe and see. I am also encouraged in a sense that you look not only at the biological mechanisms, your field of expertise, but you’re willing to look at reality in a grand way, in a sense, and look at the whole picture with regard to reality. It sounds as if, the more that you have studied, the more that you can see how science and belief in God really coalesce. That they’re not enemies you kind of had the presumption early in your life that you can’t study science or be a scientist and have faith in God or believe in God. How would you answer that skeptic? 

Yeah. Well, one of the things that is interesting about Christianity is that God invites us to test, to test our faith. And there’s this idea that somehow faith is just blind belief in what you hope to be true. But from a biblical perspective, faith is really about looking at evidence and then acting on the evidence that’s in front of you. And so, when you look at the stories in Scripture, people are experiencing God, and then are being asked, as a result of that experience, to then put faith in God. And ultimately that’s what Jesus is asking us with respect to faith. It’s that here’s everything about Me, right? And now do you trust in Me as the way for your salvation?

So faith is not something that we blindly hope is true, but it really is something that has an evidential component to it. But yet at some point we have to exercise the act of trust, in light of what the evidence is telling us. And in some respects, that’s true about science, is that we’re using evidence to evaluate theoretical ideas, but we also are making certain assumptions about the nature of reality as we gather that evidence and then draw conclusions from it. But then, once you have a theory in place, you are then acting on faith to determine if that theory is indeed valid. So you make predictions about what you think will be discovered in the future, and then you operate accordingly. So there’s a faith element in the same way in science as you do see, I think, in the Christian faith.

But the Scripture also tells us, too, that God is revealed to us through the record of nature. And not only can we see evidence for God’s fingerprints according to Scripture, but even ascertain God’s character. And so you would expect, then, if science is really about investigating the world of nature, that science should actually uncover pointers to God, should reveal to us about the reality of God.

When you look at the creation accounts in Scripture, many of them are presented as a divine natural history. And so there are elements of that that are also testable as well. And so this idea of testing is really very much part of the Christian faith, and scripture kind of invites you. It presents things in ways that invite predictions and invite testing.

I think that’s a really helpful way for us to think about things. As Christians, I think there is sometimes a presumption that you ‘just believe’ and that you don’t need to continue to affirm the person of God through scientific investigation or testing – whether it’s looking at the biblical text or looking at the archaeological record or all these many things that you do to look at Scripture and hold things up and test them and hold on to the things that are good, But also what I love about it is that you’re not afraid to question. So that you’re continually led more closely to truth, whatever that is. And it seems to me that, after 35 years, you hold a pretty solid belief, that what you believe in terms of God and Christianity is true. That’s so encouraging. I’m sure Amy was incredibly excited when you came to faith in Christ and the wedding could proceed, and that you actually have a household of unity in terms of your religious belief and your faith and what you pass on to your children. 

Yeah. My wife always says the way our stories intersected is really a testament to God’s faithfulness. And I would agree with that, yeah. I mean, in retrospect, there are just so many pointers to and signposts that I see where God was at work, in retrospect. Even having a friend in college who was a Christian, father was a Methodist minister, and he and I having conversations about, “How do we make sense of Genesis 1 in light of modern science?” And he and I having those kind of conversations and asking questions. ‘Was Jesus haploid or diploid?’ And things like that. But those are all conversations that were putting stepping stones in front of me along the way.

It’s really wonderful how you can look back and actually see God’s hand in your life even when you really didn’t know what it was at the time, but you can recognize it in hindsight. That’s really amazing. Before we go on to the advice that I’m going to ask of you for skeptics and Christians, is there anything else to add to your story that you think that we’ve missed or anything you’d like to include? 

No. Other than, I guess to me, as a scientist, there is nothing more gratifying than learning how something works in nature and just seeing again God’s fingerprints in that process. I see myself as a scientist, as much as a worship leader, as anything else, where I get to see God revealed in nature in ways that I think a layperson wouldn’t necessarily see.  But then trying to communicate that to laypeople is a lot of fun. And it’s exciting when laypeople get a glimpse of just the majesty of the Creator through what He’s made. It’s very exciting. And so I just see myself as much as a worship leader as anything else, as a scientist and a person of faith.

That’s beautiful. Yeah. The heavens do declare the glory of His handiwork. It is kind of interesting to me how even the most atheist among us, like Richard Dawkins or even Lawrence Krauss, who will declare the magic or the wonder of the cosmos or the things that they’re observing. They just have no place to put it. But as a Christian, you can look at the wonder and the complexity and the beauty and the elegance, I think is the word that you used, of what you see in the cell and just go, “Well, there’s a reason for that.” There was a mind, and it all makes sense. The pieces come together because it is a comprehensive and true worldview. That’s really wonderful, I’m sure. 

Before we get to the advice, I do want our listeners to know a little bit of the writing that you’ve done. Could you just mention very briefly about some of the books that you’ve written, so they have a sense of your scope of expertise? 

Yeah, well, I’ve written four books dealing with the origin of life question and the design of biochemical systems. So one book is cleverly titled Origins of Life. One is The Cell’s Design, where I look at the nature of biochemical systems and present kind of a revitalized watchmaker argument for God’s existence. I’ve got a book called Creating Life in the Lab, which was a lot of fun to work on. And it’s about the work in synthetic biology, where scientists are literally trying to create cells in the lab and kind of presenting an argument that I’d call an empirical argument for God’s existence, basically showing how intelligent agency is critical in order to convert molecules into cell-like entities. And if that’s the case, then by analogy, that should be true when it comes to the origin of life. And just have a book released about a year ago now called Fit for a Purpose, which is presenting another type of design argument from biochemistry.

And I’m also very much interested in the question of human origins. To me, I think, in the science/faith conversation there’s no area that has more implications than really how we understand our origins as human beings. And so I’ve got a book called Who Was Adam? that I wrote looking at the scientific evidence dealing with human origins and how to integrate that with the biblical account of human origins, where we show that there’s really a strong scientific case that can be made that human beings bear God’s image, as scripture describes. And then also interested in kind of the future of science and technology, so I wrote a book called Humans 2.0 that deals with the idea of using technology to modify our biological makeup and to try to create post-human species, where many people view human beings now as being in control of evolution. And so I look at the advances that are happening in transhumanism and really discuss what does it mean from a Christian worldview perspective for transhumanism to be gaining momentum, and how does the gospel intersect with transhumanist thinking?

And I’m currently working on a book called Should We Play God?, which would be kind of a sequel to Humans 2.0, as well as a sequel to Creating Life in the Lab, and it’s looking at advances in synthetic biology and our ability to create artificial organisms in a laboratory. And how should we think about that from a Christian perspective, where I’m developing a theology for synthetic biology and biotechnology using the kind of the grand narrative of Christianity, creation, fall, redemption, and consummation, as being the framework. And how do these different areas of Christian theology speak to our efforts to create artificial life forms? And how can we produce a robust theology that gives us a framework to think about these kind of advances? And really addressing the question, should we play God?

That’s a great question. Yeah. And wow! Thank you for that little summary. It sounds jam packed with fascinating work. I hope our listeners will take advantage and start to read some of your resources, if they haven’t already.

As we’re wrapping up, Fuz, and thinking about those who are perhaps skeptics, maybe they’re open, perhaps they’re agnostic but open to the possibility of God or a mind or something that’s bigger than themselves, bigger than mechanical systems. How would you advise someone like that to consider in a serious way the possibility of God? 

Yeah. I guess I would ask the question: How open minded are you to the reality of God’s existence? Because, from astronomy, we’ve got this recognition that the universe has a beginning, that there’s design in the universe. This is the fine tuning of the fundamental constants. We see design in biology. The origin of life is a scientific mystery. We don’t really know how life originates. And so nobody disputes there’s design in the universe, there’s design in biology. Nobody disputes that, when it comes to the question of origins, there seems to be something that is beyond our capacity to explain the universe or explain life.

And in my experience, many skeptics will look to any kind of potential natural process explanation and would prefer that compared to, I think, the obvious possibility that there is a God that’s behind everything. And so really, my question is, how open minded are you to what the evidence is really saying? Are you truly open minded or would you prefer a natural process explanation? And if that’s the case, why is that the case? Why do you prefer that explanation?

So those would really be the questions I would have. But I think if one is really open minded, again, the evidence really points strongly in the direction of Christian theism. And yet there are still outstanding problems: The problem of evil. What’s now being called the hiddenness of God problem. And these are challenges and problems that Christians and nonbelievers alike wrestle with, right? And I wouldn’t minimize the severity or the significance of those problems, but there’s ultimately answers. There’s intellectual answers to those problems. But ultimately the most satisfying answer to these challenges is actually the person of Christ. It’s only through the person of Christ can you make any kind of sense or have any kind of meaning in suffering. It’s only in the person of Christ that you find hope in the midst of suffering. And it’s in the person of Christ that you realize that God isn’t hidden from us. Though we might think that to be the case, God isn’t hidden from us but is fully revealed to us.

And so to me, even the most significant challenges to Christian theism, or at least what many people think are significant challenges, really are in a sense, taking us to the very heart of the gospel itself. And the only satisfying explanation to those two challenges is the person of Christ, ultimately. So even when superficially the evidence seems to go against Christianity, when you think more deeply about it, it really brings to life the gospel itself.

Yes. You’ll often hear people say, “Well, there’s no evidence for God.” I guess that particular statement, I would imagine, would answer your first question: How open are you really? And then, I guess, trying to peel back the onions. Why are you so closed off? But that’s another issue, probably for another day, because that can be very difficult. But that is very wise. I love the way that you pulled all of that together. 

And for the Christian who wants to engage with someone who is very skeptical but perhaps open, how would you best encourage Christians to share the gospel or provide evidence, or how would you suggest that they go about that? 

I think the first thing that we have to do is recognize that, regardless of a person’s worldview and whether their worldview is something that we would share, we have to recognize that they are image bearers and that they have infinite worth and value, that they are sacred, and that our greatest obligation towards those people is to love them. And anything we do as we engage nonbelievers has to be ultimately shaped by our genuine love for them. If we can’t say that we genuinely love that person, we probably shouldn’t try to present the gospel to them. But when people know that you genuinely love them and that you accept them regardless of their perspective, that goes a long way, I think, towards really building genuine bridges with other people. And then to have honest conversations with them about their doubts. Not to judge them. Not to necessarily pepper them with evidence. But really answer and engage their questions and engage them sincerely. And be aware of what kind of resources are available that you can point people to who do have questions if you yourself aren’t versed in those questions.

But ultimately I don’t think you can ever argue somebody into the kingdom of God. But I think you can love people, and through that love, they’ll experience the love of Christ. And that will, I think, open them up to evidences and soften their heart towards evidences, if that’s what they need.

Yeah. I don’t think we can hear that enough. I mean, if the person of Christ is the personification of love, and we are His representatives, it is something that we should be able to do well, right? They’ll know that we’re Christians by our love. And I do appreciate you reminding us of that because I think sometimes, especially, we get carried away with all of the intellect and the rationality and the evidences of it. But sometimes we miss the most important thing, and that is seeing others as image bearers, as you say, and made in the image of God’s love by God’s love. And we want to love in the way that He’s called us to. So thank you for that reminder. 

Fuz, This has been an amazing time together. I just feel like I’ve learned so much, and I’m very inspired by your story. I do appreciate you coming on today, as just a representative of someone who is not only brilliant, but obviously you have a heart for the Lord and for others. So thank you for showing that to us today and sharing your story. 

I’m glad to do it. Thank you so much for having me. It’s a privilege to be with you.

Wonderful. Thanks for tuning into Side B Stories to hear Dr. Fuz Rana’s story. You can hear more about his speaking and all of the wonderful books he mentioned, as well as the ministry, Reasons to Believe, in the episode notes. For questions and feedback about this podcast, you can always contact me through our Side B Stories website at sidebstories.com. If you enjoyed it, I hope you’ll follow, rate, review, and share our podcast with your friends and social network. In the meantime, I’ll be looking forward to seeing you next time, where we’ll see how another skeptic flips the record of their life. 

Dr. Sy Garte, a biochemist, was raised as a communist and militant atheist. He began to question his naturalistic worldview as he began to see the limits of science as the best explanation for the origin of life and other conundrums. It opened him to the possibility of God. Dr. Garte’s website: https://sygarte.com/ To hear more stories of atheists converting to Christianity, visit www.sidebstories.com Episode Transcript

Hello, and thanks for joining in. I’m Jana Harmon, and you’re listening to Side B Stories, where we see how skeptics flip the record of their lives. Each podcast, we listen to someone who has once been an atheist but who became a Christian against all odds. 

Does science point away or towards the existence of God? Does a science-driven worldview conflict with a biblical worldview? Or does it complement? In other words, are science and God friends or foes? Is belief in science enough to prevent someone from believing in God? After all, some people will reject belief in God because they say they believe in science. They believe what is rational and observable and repeatable and not in a reality beyond the natural universe, which they say there’s no evidence for. Some people think that science is king, that science is the only way to know anything, and that science can and will eventually win the day, will give us answers to the universe. It’s not the stuff of wishful thinking, such as religion. Science and belief in God cannot and do not go together, nor will they ever, or so it is thought. 

But what happens when a highly educated scientist devoted to a naturalistic, atheistic view of the world begins to experience the limitations of science? That it is not as capable of answering all the questions he once thought it would. Especially regarding three of the biggest questions there are: How the universe began from nothing, how life began from non-life, and how humans became so exceptional in their capacity as compared to the rest of the biological world. These conundrums were the door openers to consider the possibility of something more than the natural world as a viable explanation. These, in addition to some other very surprising events in his life. 

Today’s guest, Dr. Sy Garte, holds a PhD in biochemistry, was once a strong anti-theist from generations of militant atheists who long resisted the possibility, much less the probability of God, but today he writes and speaks clearly and boldly on his convinced view and the reality of a personal and powerful God and the truth of Christianity. He sees how science and faith work together well as mutually reinforcing. I hope you’ll come along to hear his journey. I hope you’ll also stay to hear his advice to curious skeptics on searching for truth and for God, as well as advice to Christians on how best to engage with those who don’t believe. 

Welcome to Side B Stories, Dr. Garte. It’s so great to have you with me today! 

It’s great to be here, thanks.

So our listeners know a little bit about you before we get into your story, why don’t you tell us a little bit about perhaps your credentialing, where you live, a little bit of your life now? 

Sure. I’m a PhD. I have a PhD in biochemistry. I’m a retired scientist. I worked in academia for about thirty years as a professor at several universities. Then I worked at the NIH for a few years as an administrator. And now I’m retired. And I’ve been devoting my life since then to Christianity in terms of its relationship to science. I’ve written a book, and I feel that my mission, my call at this point, is to talk about my own life in the sense that it was science that helped bring me to faith. I started out life as an atheist. I grew up in a very atheistic family, three generations of atheists and communists, and at some point, I began to question that, and that was largely through science, and then eventually came to Christ, got baptized, and I’m now an active member of my church.

Okay, wow! Yeah. It sounds like there’s a lot there, and a lot of ground to cover. I mean, not only your wonderful credentialing, as you’ve highlighted, PhD in biochemistry, I believe. So we’re going to walk through all of that. Let’s start back in your childhood. You said you are from generations of atheism, militant atheism. Let’s start there in your home. As you were growing up, tell me about the home that you grew up in, their view of God, their view of all things religious. Why don’t you start us there? 

Sure. Well, it’s actually fairly simple because the view of God in my house was that there’s no possibility that anything like a God could exist. My parents were, as I mentioned briefly, they were both members of the American Communist Party in the 1930s, and that included a very militant atheism and anti-religious view. Their view, which was the Marxist view, is that religion is an evil thing. God is impossible, could not possibly exist. My father was a chemist and a very strong materialist. He only believed in anything that was materialistically and scientifically demonstrable, and so for him, the whole idea of anything with spirituality or religious connotations was complete nonsense. My mother was even a stronger atheist in a philosophical sense. And she also was a very strong communist, and again, atheism is part of the communist dogma, so that’s how I grew up. I grew up not even thinking about God. I just thought it was ridiculous and nonsense and couldn’t be true. And yeah. There was no discussion of it. We didn’t celebrate any holidays of any kind. We gave each other presents on New Year’s because that’s what they do in the Soviet Union. They don’t celebrate Christmas. So New Year’s Day was the holiday, and that’s when we exchanged presents.

So I would say a pretty extreme atheism. And it’s very interesting, by the way… I may just mention this, too, Jana, that, whenever I speak about this, and I look at the comments, I get a lot of comments that say, “He was never really an atheist, because atheists never convert to Christianity.” That’s apparently a statement of belief in the atheist faith. And so people keep denying, that I was ever an atheist, and I don’t see how I could’ve been more of an atheist than I was. It wasn’t even an issue.

Yeah. I would imagine growing up in that household, where it’s not only just a strong presumption, it sounded like there was real active movement against all things religious. Of course, if you have a Marxist view of the world, religion is… I guess it’s an opiate for the masses-

It’s evil.

And it is something to be gotten rid of, right? It’s something that is not only for those who are ignorant, as it were, and superstitious, but it’s bad, it’s evil. What did you think religion was? Other than, you know, these negative characteristics of it. Was it mythology? Was it social construction? How did you all view it? Did you think of it in those terms?

Well, I think you actually hit it when you said opium for the masses. The idea was that religion was a tool of the ruling class to enslave and control the ignorant masses. I mean that’s pretty much word for word what I learned, when I began listening to Martin Luther King, who besides being a major leader of the Civil Rights Movement was also a very strong Christian and a brilliant man and an incredible speaker. And it didn’t make sense, just this whole idea that religion is something for people who are not very bright and get easily fooled and it’s oppressive. It didn’t hold together. And needless to say, I dropped my communism pretty early, much before I dropped the atheism part, but the whole left wing agenda started to fall apart for me based on some of these things.

Okay. So you, over time, left your communism behind, but you still embraced atheism. Now it’s interesting you say that sometimes you get accused of not ever having been an atheist, and I’ve seen that before as well, in terms of a lot of people who present themselves as former atheists, and yet they’re accused of not ever having been an atheist, so just for clarity, how would you define atheism, and what your perspective was at that point. Because I know, even now, people define atheism in different ways. 

They certainly do. That’s a big topic.

Yeah. 

Many atheists claim that atheism is simply not being convinced that any gods exist. When I hear that, my first approach is to say, “Well, if that’s all atheism is, why are you on YouTube? Why do you have an Atheist Experience radio show, where you spend most of your life attacking religion if all it is something you’re not sure exists?” I mean, I don’t go on the radio, or I don’t go on YouTube, and say, “I don’t believe in unicorns, and I’m going to prove they don’t exist, and nobody can convince me.” Why waste your time on something you don’t think is real? I think the real definition of atheism, especially the New Atheism which is now very prevalent and very successful, is not at all simply, “I don’t believe God exists.”

I got to that stage after I left the communist idea that religion is purely evil and has to be fought against. Then I got to the point where I just didn’t care. I didn’t believe in God, but I didn’t tell anybody. I never talked about it. And it wasn’t something of any interest. And the reality of New Atheism is it is pretty much a religion, because they are not just saying, “Well, try to convince me.” They’re claiming that there is no God and that all the evidence we have, and there’s so much of it, both scientific, historical, all of that evidence, to them, is meaningless. They reject it because they want to reject it. Because it goes against their religious views. Their religious views are not simply that they don’t believe that there’s a God. Their religious view is, “There is no God. God does not exist. There is no spirituality. There is no supernatural. There is no free will. There is no significance or meaning to life, other than the fact that you’re alive, and that science can explain everything, everything, including who you love and why, and every question that comes out is a matter for scientific investigation.”

These are religious beliefs. They’re not scientific beliefs. Scientists don’t believe in scientism, which is the idea that everything can be explained by science. The only people who believe in scientism are religious atheists.

So as an atheist yourself, if you can put yourself back in those shoes, looking back, would you say that you were in some ways a religious atheist? Did you have arguments against God? Or did you just merely presume the perspective because of your parents? That’s a loaded question. Or did you actually have evidence on your side or arguments for why God did not exist? 

Yeah. I think the answer is that I started that way. The evidence that I had, of course, was all negative. I would claim, if asked. I didn’t trumpet this very much because, when I was a child, there were very few atheists around. So I didn’t really talk about it much. I probably would have been beaten up if I had. But if I had been speaking to someone else, I would have said, “Well, everything that we don’t understand can be explained by science. There’s no need for a god. And science disproves the supernatural.” None of which is true, but that’s what I thought.

But once I dropped the religious part of that, which really was related to the communism, as I mentioned, I entered a phase, and I’d say this was probably when I was in college, where I was simply not… I was like today’s “Nones.” I just didn’t have any religion. I didn’t care about it, didn’t think about it, in fact, I actually had a girlfriend when I was a teenager who was a Christian, and I didn’t realize it. She didn’t tell me. And she did bring me to see the film The Gospel According to Matthew, that was my first experience, when I watched that film, of feeling that maybe there’s something here after all. And the reason for that is because there was a very emotional scene of the resurrection, when the empty tomb is discovered, and the music, the background music in the scene of this movie… And in the scene, the music goes from a very depressing funeral march to an incredibly beautiful, uplifting African hymn called Missa Luba, and that instant where the music changes is the instant when the stone is rolled back and the Marys look up and see the empty tomb, and I had this amazing feeling for the first time in my life of witnessing the miraculous. And I didn’t even believe at that time that that was possible. And about five minutes later I told myself that that was just an illusion, it was brought on by the emotional effect of the music, and it wasn’t real.

But I now know that it was real. It was the first time the Holy Spirit came to me and said, “Um, you’re missing something. Here it is.” But at the time I didn’t want to believe it. And so I continued with that for many years, just if people asked me what was my religion, I would have said, “Nothing. I’m an atheist.” But I would never have argued. I didn’t care about it. It wasn’t something that I thought about. It wasn’t a religious view, it was simply a lack of a view. And I think that many atheists today who share that kind of atheism. They’re sometimes called LackTheists. They just simply don’t believe in God, and they don’t care about it. But that’s not the New Atheism. The New Atheism is much more like my original atheism, where people have slogans like, “Empty the pews.” They talk about religion being an evil influence. They talk about trying to defend freedom from religious attack. All kinds of things.

And they have specific views which are religious views. And I mentioned them a few minutes ago: Not believing in free will, not believing in the significance of humanity. All kinds of things. The idea that we live on a very tiny, insignificant planet, that there are probably millions of other intelligent beings. All of these ideas which they claim are scientific are actually not. They are religious.

In some ways, too, they are implications of the atheistic or naturalistic worldview. That is, you are, in a way, forced to believe in determinism if you are a pure naturalist and the world and nature is all that exists, or your significance is… Well, it’s not grounded. The exceptionality of humanity is not grounded in the naturalistic worldview. So in your life, like you said, you kind of moved from a more, I guess, enthusiastic atheism to a more apathetic atheism, but in that period of time, did you ever feel like your views, your atheistic worldview, affected your life? Did you ever think, “Okay, I actually don’t have free will in my choices. There actually isn’t objective moral good or evil.” Those kinds of things. Did that ever come to roost, as it were, in your life? Or were those just kind of intellectual concepts that came along with your atheistic worldview? 

You know, that’s a very good question because, although I didn’t feel the kinds of things you’re talking about, I definitely did feel that something was missing in my life. I didn’t know what it was. By this time, I was studying science very intently, first in college and then in graduate school. And I loved science. And I even felt at a certain point that science was providing whatever it was that was missing. I didn’t have a name for then, but now I know it was spirituality. I think human beings need something spiritual in their lives, especially as they get a little older, get married, have children, begin to live a life that’s complicated and difficult, and it’s hard to do that without some kind of spirituality. And science was great. I loved it, but it didn’t quite do it completely. And even though science was very fulfilling for me, I still felt a sense of a missing something. I didn’t know what it was. And I think I actually am a very spiritual person and always was, but my upbringing kind of squashed that, and I think I started feeling that that was getting squashed, and it was also at that time that I began learning things in science that were true and also questioned this whole idea of materialism and determinism, and that began really shaking my conviction that there is no god and cannot be a god.

I began wondering, “Is that really true? Maybe it’s not.”

So walk us through that. That’s a very interesting thought, in that someone who is really pursuing science in very sophisticated ways through your education, graduate education, that you’re very thoughtful about, in a sense, your worldview and what science is able to answer, what doors it opens to understanding the universe, but it sounds like there were some questions you were asking or answers you weren’t receiving or something that was causing you to think, “Is there something more?” Tell us about that. 

Well, yeah. I mean it started with quantum physics, which I had to learn as a chemistry major. I started as a chemistry major in college. And we learned all these things, but we learned them as, “This is how things work. This is what it is. There’s something called the Uncertainty Principle, which means you can never know the position and the momentum of an electron at the same time.” And I remember thinking, “You can never know? How is that possible?” But I put it out of my mind.

But as I grew older and I began reading and I wasn’t just studying this stuff, I began realizing that there’s an awful lot in modern physics that doesn’t fit with determinism or materialism. Almost all of quantum mechanics, which is undeniably true, is not something that makes any sense in terms of our normal, logical, human way of thinking. It just doesn’t. And nobody says that it does. But what we know is that it’s true. It’s why we’re talking to each other. I mean, it’s the basis of modern technology, so it has to be true. And I didn’t get that. And I started wondering about that. And I’m not a physicist, so I couldn’t go into any detail about it, but it just seemed strange to me.

But what I could go into detail was, and what I was learning about biochemistry, about life, and I remember the first time I really went into great depth on some of the biochemical mechanisms for how life works, especially the system that produces proteins from the genetic code, from DNA, RNA, and the genetic code, and that system is just incredibly amazingly ornate and unbelievable. And I was a full atheist, but again, I got chills up and down my spine when I learned this material. I looked around at my classmates, and they were just writing everything down, like I was, but somewhere were in my mind, I was saying, “How did this happen? There’s no way this could have happened by spontaneous, random chance.” I never thought, “This is design. This is God.” And I still don’t know what it is, but it did shake the foundations of my conviction that God isn’t possible. And I began thinking, “Well, I don’t know. Maybe God is not impossible, which means that He is possible,” and at that point, thanks to these scientific issues, and there were many others that came along… There are lots of questions, for example, in science that you just can’t ask because they have no answers.

So all of those questions led me to what I call my agnostic phase. I reached a point where I would not have said I was an atheist anymore. If someone said, “Do you believe in God?” I would have said, “I have no idea. I don’t know.” And that phase lasted a very long time. And during that time, I became more open to the possibility of God, and I think that openness allowed me to finally be susceptible to the effects of the Holy Spirit, and that’s when I began to have some dreams and some other experiences, which I now know were the direct action of the Holy Spirit in my life.

Well, I’m very curious about this. Because obviously, again, you’re a very intellectually driven, thoughtful critical thinker, you were willing to see the limitations of science and the answers that it can provide, that there were extraordinary things that you were seeing in the universe, from quantum physics to the complicated things that you were finding in the mechanics of biology. It’s not like a nice package with a bow that’s tied up, and science is… Not that it’s not robust. It’s incredibly robust. But perhaps it’s not the end-all in terms of answering every question. I find it interesting that you say that there are some questions that people just don’t even ask because science is, at that point, really incapable of even addressing certain kinds of things. 

But you were intellectually honest enough to say, “Okay, maybe there’s something else. Maybe there’s something beyond the physical world, beyond the material world,” that opened you to the possibility of something more, and I just want to kind of appreciate that for a moment and say that that’s very laudable, as compared to perhaps your earlier days, where you would just shut down, like you say so many do, the possibility of something beyond the material world as providing an explanation for what it is that we see and experience in our world. 

But now you’ve raised my curiosity because you’re talking about things like openness to the Holy Spirit. And dreams and other experiences. Why don’t you talk us through that? What were some of these extraordinary things that continued moving you in the direction of God? 

Well, I’ll be happy to, but first, I just want to say one more thing about this issue of scientism, of the idea that science provides all answers. The first person who ever told me that science only answered some questions and not others was actually my atheist father, who was a scientist. And if you ask any scientist today, “Can science answer all questions?” whether they’re theists or not, they’ll say no. Science is designed to understand the natural world. The world we can see, that’s available to our senses. It’s not designed to address the question of God or the supernatural. There’s no way it can even answer those questions, along with many other questions it can’t answer. So the people now who are saying things like, “Well, science has shown us how everything works. Thunder used to be… People thought that it was Thor. Now we know it’s natural.” Yeah, that’s true. And exactly correct, because that’s what science does. And I’m still a scientist. I have a paper pending now for publication. I published two papers in the last couple of years, even retired. So science is wonderful, but what it does is it answers questions about the natural world, and not all of those questions, either

In terms of, yeah, opening up, now at the time that happened, I had no idea that I was opening up. I certainly would have scoffed at the idea of a Holy Spirit, but you know, I mean, it wasn’t up to me. This happened without my willingness. And the first dream happened while I was agnostic, just barely agnostic. It was quite a while ago. And I had no idea what to make of it. I thought it was just a crazy thing. And this was the dream where I was … It was a nightmare where I was holding on by my hands at the edge of a cliff, and I’m afraid of heights, so that was a very terrifying dream, and I didn’t know what to do. And then I heard a voice say, “What’s wrong? Just let go,” or maybe just, “Just let go,” and I thought that was crazy. “If I let go, I’ll fall down,” and I said, “No, I can’t let go.” And the voice was insistent. It kept say, “Just let go.” And so eventually, I didn’t know what else to do. I was losing my grip, anyway, so I let go, and as soon as I let go, the world turned 90 degrees, so instead of hanging off the cliff, I was lying on the ground, with my hands clutching a boulder on the ground, and I was perfectly fine. And there was a man there. And then I woke up. And I had no idea what that was all about. And the man who was there had the voice that I heard. And he was standing not far from me, and I didn’t put it out of my mind, but I had no idea what it was all about. And for a long time I didn’t know what it meant to say, “Just let go.” Let go of what? And obviously something was holding me back, and that was later that was realized that that was the first time the Holy Spirit came to me directly and told me what to do.

And it turned out that letting go was exactly what I had to do, of all the garbage that had entered my mind from childhood on, that was blocking me from making any progress towards understanding reality and truth. And when I let go of that, and that doesn’t mean I let go of science. It doesn’t mean I let go of rationality or anything related to intellectual honesty. It meant I let go of all the mythology that I had learned about, the impossibility of God, the evil of religion, all of that garbage I had to let go of. And eventually I did. It took time, but eventually I did.

So, like you say, that was early in your agnosticism, so it was a step forward, I guess you could say, in your journey, but you were still pretty far from-

Oh, yeah. Quite far. And then I had another one, which was later. So at this point, I had already been to a church for the first time in my life, and I should mention that had an effect on me, too, because I had never walked into a church for the first 46 years of my life. Never been in any religious institution.

So I’m just curious. Why did you walk into the church? 

Good question. I met a woman, a Christian woman who became a friend of mine, and she was not very evangelical, but she wanted me to go to a church with her. She was Catholic. And I thought the Catholics were the most evil group of people in the world, but I agreed to go with her. I was absolutely terrified. I thought I would be, I don’t know, taunted at best and stoned at worst.

Oh, my! 

As a sinner and a pawn of Satan. I had no idea what a church was like. And I was completely overwhelmed by the difference, and the reality was that this was a church run by Franciscan monks, and the priest who gave the sermon talked about love and why love is so important. I don’t think he even mentioned God very much, maybe a little bit, but what I heard was very nice, and everybody shook my hand and wished me peace. It was nice. It was nothing bad at all. Nobody looked at me harshly or whispered to each other about this infidel in their midst. And I survived, and that made me really wonder about what I had been taught, whether that was all real or not. Whether the church was the main enemy of humanity or not and eventually I decided not.

You know, I think that’s not an uncommon experience. I think that there’s so much negative press, as it were, about the church and so much negative caricaturing that when someone actually goes or encounters it for themselves, it is nothing as they supposed it would be. They’re so surprised, and those negative caricatures fall. 

Well, I still hear this. You’re right. You’re absolutely right. I still hear this. And I hear of people deconverting because of the horrible experiences they had at church, and I have to tell you, since I’ve become a Christian, I’m a Methodist, but I’ve been to Baptist churches, Southern Baptist churches, Catholic churches, denominational churches, all kinds of churches. I have never seen anything bad in any of them. Maybe I’m just lucky or maybe I’m missing it, but when people start complaining about how badly they were treated, I just haven’t seen that. And a church is where you worship Jesus Christ, right? And there’s nothing bad in that. That’s nothing but love. So anyway, that’s a side issue, but…

Yeah. Of course, that’s not to say… A church is made up of people, and certainly people can be very bad representatives of Christ, so I just want to acknowledge that those things do happen. 

So you left that church experience with a different impression, again, maybe perhaps a bit more openness towards the possibility [CROSSTALK 40:04]. 

Yeah. I did. And I started thinking, “Well, maybe I should actually look at that book that they keep talking about,” but I didn’t do it yet. I had another dream, which got me to open the book.

Okay. 

And that was the one… Where I’m by myself outside of a walled garden, and I know there’s a garden inside. I’m not sure how I know that, but it’s surrounded by this very steep wall which you can’t see over, and I’m circling around it, trying to find the way to climb up, and I can’t climb up, because every time I try, I fall down again. There’s no good handholds or footholds, so I’m getting very frustrated. I’m walking around, and all of a sudden, there’s a man standing there, and he says, “What’s the matter with you? What are you trying to do?” And I said, “I’m trying to get into the garden! There’s a garden there, and I can’t get over the wall.” And he said to me, “Open the door. It’s right there.” So I did. There was a door, I opened it, and I walked in. And by then I knew that that meant something. I knew who the man was, and I knew what the garden was, and at that point, I decided, more or less. I don’t know exactly when, but at that point, I decided it was time to open the book.

And I did. I started looking at Bible. I didn’t like the Old Testament much. I didn’t understand it, didn’t know what it was all about. So I went to the New Testament. I had seen that movie as a teenager about Matthew, and I saw there is, in fact, the Gospel of Matthew. So I started with that, and I read that. And I read the Sermon on the Mount, and I almost broke down in tears. Who knew this was in this?

For those who don’t know what the Sermon on the Mount is, may not be familiar with the Bible at all, could you tell us a bit about what that is? 

Yeah. The Sermon on the Mount, which is in the Gospel of Matthew, is a sermon by Jesus. It’s the longest single passage in the Bible of Jesus’ speaking. And it includes what’s called the Beatitudes, which are a series of sentences that start with, “Blessed are…” and it includes, “Blessed are the peacemakers,” and, “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.” I don’t have it memorized, so hopefully I don’t get anything wrong, but there are many of these blessings of people who are humble, poor, modest, in trouble, suffering, sinful, and that’s who Jesus came for. And I didn’t know that. And then the sermon continues with all kinds of amazing messages that, if you’re not familiar with it, look it up. You can just look at Sermon on the Mount and read it, and for someone like me, who didn’t know what Jesus Christ was all about, it was such an eye opener.

Now, I heard it when I saw the movie, but that’s different, and I wasn’t really paying attention, and I was quite young, but when I read it, at that point, then I decided, “Okay, I have to read this whole thing. I have to see what else is going on here.” And I went straight to the book of Acts, which actually is my favorite book in the Bible, and later and I went and read Luke. Luke also wrote the book of Acts, the book of Acts of the Apostles. And that’s a history. It’s a historical treatment of what happened after Jesus Christ rose from the dead, was resurrected. The early church in Jerusalem. Very detailed, who said what, all kinds of things that are obviously not made up. I mean anybody who could make up that is an amazing writer and liar, because it comes across as so honest. I never have doubted anything in that book as being real. And that made me face the key question, which is, “Is it true that Jesus Christ rose from the dead?” because if that’s true, you have to be a Christian. I mean that’s the essence of Christianity.

And I saw that, and I said, “Well, I can’t believe that. That’s supernatural. That can’t be real, and also, it’s too good to be true.” If the resurrection is real, and we are saved in Jesus Christ, then that’s wonderful! And the world isn’t that good. I had learned that the world was horrible. The world was a place where you’re lucky if you survive a few years, and then that’s it. And this was too good to be true. So I couldn’t believe it, even though I had the dreams, I read the Bible, I read the New Testament, the rest of it. I read Paul’s letters eventually. But I couldn’t believe it because it was beautiful, and I didn’t think life and the world was beautiful yet. And it was too good to be true. And it was just remarkable. And it was hard to believe. And it implied that God is absolutely real, that Jesus Christ is his Son and the Savior of humanity. And I couldn’t get there. I tried. I really wanted to, but I couldn’t get there, and it took me a very long time to get over that last threshold, and that was not my doing. That was a direct intervention by the Holy Spirit while I was awake, and it was an experience that I will never forget. It’s, as the two dreams, that is detailed in my book, but I have rarely spoken verbally about this last experience because I find it difficult to do so. But I have done it once or twice, and if you like, I can talk about it now.

I would love to hear what that profound experience was. 

So I was driving alone. I lived in two places. At that time, I was teaching at University of Pittsburgh. I also had a home in New York, so I was driving back and forth fairly frequently on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, and one day, I was driving, and there’s a very long stretch where there isn’t much radio, and I turned on the radio, and I heard a preacher. It was a Christian station. And I was listening to this preacher and thinking, as I had before, that many of these radio preachers have amazing abilities for oratory. They’re really able to speak well. And I didn’t really pay attention to what he was saying because I never really… at that time, I didn’t like listening to Christian radio, which I guess was hitting too close to home at that point.

So I turned it off after a few minutes, but I started thinking about this idea of giving a sermon or a talk, whatever. I thought of it as a sermon. And somehow it came into my mind, “What would it be like if I gave a sermon?” which I thought was funny at first. And then I started thinking, “Well, I’d probably talk about the origin of life or something scientific.” And then it happened. I had some feeling which I can’t explain, and I pulled the car over, which was a good thing because I began seeing myself speaking to a crowd somewhere in the countryside, outside, and I was speaking a sermon. And the sermon’s words came to me without any thought. They came from outside. I’m sure of it. What I basically said was, to these people, all of whom were Christians, I said, “You people should be praised and be happy and be blessed because Jesus Christ loves you, and I know that He loves you because Jesus Christ loves even me.” And the word even was important because I knew that I was a sinner, and when I say I’m a sinner, I really mean it. I mean, I had been a terrible sinner, not only for not believing in God and rejecting Jesus, but for many other things. And I said, “He loves even me, and if He loves me, how can He not love each of you?” And I said a few more things about that, and then I stopped, and then it was over. And I was sitting in my car, and I was crying uncontrollably, and I said out loud, sitting in the car, “I believe.” And that was it.

And at that moment, this huge weight just fell away, and then I understood my first dream. I had let go, and that weight was gone. And what replaced it was joy, and that has not left me one minute since then.

That’s amazing.

And this joy of knowing Jesus as my Savior and as One who has forgiven me, forgiven my sins, and saved me, saved my soul, saved my life.

It sounds like your life has been really quite different since those days of really pushing back against God, when you were feeling that there was something missing when you had a lot of unanswered questions. I’m wondering, on the other side of that, as a believer in God, I know that there are still a lot of questions that are hard to answer, whether it’s about life in general or even things we observe in the world, but I wonder if some of those conundrums that you had from a naturalistic point of view, do you find that some of those are answerable now that you embrace a God-created worldview? 

That’s an interesting question. I may have trouble answering it. I’m thinking about it. One of the big questions that many thoughtful Christians and theists in general have is the problem if evil. If God is omnipotent and all good, why is there evil. And that question doesn’t bother me as much as it does other people. What is evil depends on where you start from. What is a blessing depends on where you’re starting from. If you’re a refugee from, say, Ukraine or some war-ravaged or starving place, and you get to live peacefully for a few days with a roof over your head and have some soup to eat, that’s wonderful! Right? That’s a wonderful blessing. And if you’re used to living in a great house with lots of money and everything, you have other problems, which, you know, you might consider evil, but everybody else would say, “Wow, that’s a lucky guy.” So it depends where you start from, and where I started from was the idea that everything is bad, that there’s no good. It’s what Richard Dawkins says, pitiless indifference. That’s all there is in the universe. And that’s what I believed. So when people say is the glass half empty or half full, what I always say is, it’s a miracle that there’s any water in the glass at all. And that’s how I feel. I don’t care if it’s half empty or totally full or whatever, there’s some water there. That’s amazing. That’s a miracle.

Yeah, I bet you do-

In some ways, some of the questions that many people ask… I mean, I don’t think that’s the answer to the problem of evil. That’s not enough. I mean we still have these horrible things happening, these children being killed. It’s just heartrending, and I have very good friends… I’m not a young man. I have very good friends, God-fearing, wonderful Christians, who get sick, are sick, and have horrible experiences. And yeah, it’s a bad world. It is. You can’t deny that. I don’t think anyone denies that this is a bad, hard world. That’s not the point. Atheism doesn’t make it any better. Atheism doesn’t help you with that. What God has done is told us and shown us that this is not the end, that this is the vale of tears we live in, and what’s coming is what we’re hoping for. And that’s what I found too good to be true, and I couldn’t believe it until I had to believe it. Because the Holy Spirit came to me and basically dragged me across that threshold of belief, and now I know that it’s real and that it’s true.

And so, in terms of science, I mean I have not given up one shred of my scientific worldview. And there’s no reason to. And that’s my main message. If you’re a person who is a Christian and has been told that science is in conflict with your faith, that’s a lie. That’s a direct lie from Satan. It’s not true. And I’m not just talking about myself. The former head of the NIH, now the President’s Science Advisor, is Francis Collins. He’s an evangelical devoted Christian. He’s one of the most brilliant scientists whose ever lived, and there are many, many, many others. I’m not going to name them all. Nobel Prize winners. Many people.

So there’s no conflict between Christianity and science, and as I said, I’m still doing science. I’m still doing research. And I will probably never stop.

I’m so glad you clarified that, because I think that that is, obviously, one big reason that people think that they have to reject God, because they believe in science, not in God, which they have, again, perhaps a misconception. 

It’s not a choice. It’s not a dichotomy.

Right! Right! Yeah. They’re very complementary.

Exactly. And science started in a Christian context. I mean all the original scientists were devout Christians, and they all said that they were determining the laws that governed God’s world. They weren’t against God.

Right. 

If you had told even Galileo or Pasteur or Copernicus or Maxwell, or all the other scientists of the nineteenth and even early twentieth century, Lord Kelvin. If you had told them, “You choose between your science and God because they’re in conflict,” they would have looked at you with mouths open and would have said, “It’s exactly the opposite! Science is the way to understand God’s creation, and we’re doing it. Look at all we’ve done.” And that’s still true today. There’s no question about it.

Right. Yeah. Your story is so full, Dr. Garte, and I can imagine that there are some skeptics who have that, just the tiniest bit of openness, that they’re willing to take a listen to your story and to your journey, and as a brilliant man, see how you’re able to bring your intellectual life, your spiritual life, your emotional life, everything in concert. It’s obviously made a tremendous change in your life. Just your perspective. I’m sure you’re an incredibly joy-filled person because you have an amazing perspective on life. Obviously, a half full kind of guy, and for good reason! 

So if there’s a curious skeptic listening to you today and you could advise him towards his continued search for God, what words of wisdom could you give him? 

I would say what I was told by the Holy Spirit, just let go. Because what’s stopping you from… Many people have said to me, “I would like to believe in God, but He doesn’t answer me. I don’t hear Him. I don’t see Him. I don’t detect Him.” And I say, “Yeah, I didn’t either.” And I tell a story about driving in my car and being lost in a rainstorm in the dark, and I was absolutely in a state of horror and terror and frustration and angry and everything else, and I stopped the car, again a car story, and I stopped the car, and I suddenly realized, once the car stopped, that I had the radio on, and the most beautiful music was coming out of this radio, and I had never heard it because all of this emotion, this anger, this frustration was just consuming me. Once I stopped the car and heard the music, I calmed down, and I relaxed, and I realized where I was.

And a lot of people don’t realize how much they’re blocking the voice of God. The voice of God is not very powerful sometimes. It can be. But for some individuals, it can be a calm, still voice, as the Bible says. And that’s a beautiful passage because it says God is not in the thunderclap, God is not in the hurricane, He’s not in the earthquake, He’s in a small, still voice. So to hear that voice, let go. Let go of everything that is telling you, “No. It can’t be. It’s impossible.” Let that go. And then just listen and pray if you can and see what happens.

That’s really good advice. And for those of us who are Christians who really want to be a light, in a sense, a way forward to help people who are looking for God, how would you advise us as Christians to best engage with those who do seem a bit resistant or maybe even those who are willing to take another look? 

I would say tell your truth. And sometimes you’ll hear things that sound convincing, like, something from the Old Testament usually they’ll bring up. Just tell your truth to them, be patient, listen. You’re not going to convince somebody in a discussion to change their mind, although it has happened, and it usually happens with people sitting around a living room, and suddenly somebody says something, and the listener says, “Gee, I never thought of that,” and they feel a wave of something, and there are some amazing stories about conversions. So do the best you can, and be patient and kind. Be loving. I say that as someone who often finds that difficult, but I know that that’s really what we need to do. That’s what we’re called to do.

And don’t get angry, don’t get upset. You may get attacked, but that was foreseen already. Paul has already told us about that. And you put on the armor of God and you stay steadfast, because you know what the truth is. Jesus Christ is the truth. Christianity is real. And you know that. And just don’t let that go, because there’s no reason to let that go.

That’s wonderful.

Thank you so much for joining me today. Again, I am so inspired by your story, just the fullness of it, both the way that you were, again, brought up in such an antithesis of a Christian home, just the polar opposite, but yet, here you sit now, really proclaiming the truth and the reality of God, and not only proclaiming it, but I can really tell that you live it and that you’re unashamed of Who you know and Who is truth, and I hope that everyone who listens to this podcast today picks up your book, The Works of His Hands, because it will go into depth in terms of much more of the scientific questions that you wrestled with, as well as your story and the experiential aspects and spiritual aspects of all of that. It’s just such a full and gratifying read, and you can just see how God works in extraordinary ways in the lives of people who you would never think would be proclaiming his truth today, just like you. 

So thank you so much for coming on and telling your story today. 

I just want to mention that, if anyone wants to contact me, be on my newsletter, mailing list, or even just say anything, I always answer. My website is sygarte.com, very easy, and there’s a contact page and a sign-up page and a bunch of other pages, so that’s how you can reach me.

Yeah. That’s terrific. And we will put that link in our episode notes as well. So again, thank you, Dr. Garte, for coming on today and telling your story. 

It’s been a pleasure. Thank you.

Thanks for tuning in to Side B Stories to hear Dr. Garte’s story. You can find out more about his book, The Works of His Hands, and how to connect with him through his website and Twitter and social media accounts in the episode notes below. For questions and feedback about this podcast episode, you can contact me through our Side B Stories website, at www.sidebstories.com. I hope you enjoyed it and that you’ll follow, rate, review, and share our podcast with your friends and social network. In the meantime, I’ll be looking forward to seeing you next time, where we’ll see how an skeptic flips the record of their life. 

Psychiatrist Andrew Parker’s pursuit of the true and beautiful led him to consider the possibility of God, but his personal life hindered belief. After a long philosophical journey, he decided the cost of conversion was worth any personal sacrifice and gave him life beyond what he once imagined possible.

Resources mentioned by Andrew:

New Seeds of Contemplation by Thomas Merton

Philosophers: Keith Ward, John Cottingham, Richard Swinburne

To hear more stories about atheists converting to Christianity, visit www.sidebstories.com

Episode Transcript

Hello, and thanks for joining in. I’m Jana Harmon, and you’re listening to Side B Stories, where we see how skeptics flip the record of their lives. Each podcast, we listen to someone who has once been a skeptic but who became a Christian against all odds.

All of us want to make sense of reality, to understand our lives, the world around us and our place in it. We want to know who we are, why we’re here, how to live, where we’re going, and how we’re supposed to think about these bigger issues in our world. We wonder what is truth? What is beauty and goodness? Does God exist? Is there more than just the natural world? Are we really no more than merely physical beings? Is there more to us? How do we make sense of our minds and consciousness? And what of our desires? What should we be pursuing? And how can we know? 

Although we all want to make sense of all of those things, some of us think more deeply about those questions than others. They’re drawn and driven by a seeking, a searching out for answers, seriously so. For they know that the answers to those questions have great implications for how they understand themselves and others, how they live life. 

Today’s guest, psychiatrist Dr. Andrew Parker, is one of those few who have been contemplating those larger questions for most of his life. As a skeptic, they led him on a quest to consider the reality of God and Jesus Christ. I hope you’ll come along to hear his fascinating, inspiring, and in many ways, surprising journey. I hope you’ll stay to hear his advice to curious skeptics on searching for truth, for God, as well as advice to Christians on how they can best engage with those who don’t believe. 

Welcome to Side B Stories, Andrew. It’s so great to have you with me today. 

Thank you, Jana. I’m really excited to be here. Thank you.

Wonderful, wonderful! Before we start your story, I would love to know more about who you are now, perhaps your profession, where you live. Why don’t you tell me a little bit about yourself? 

Yes. Well, I live in southeast London, England, and I’m 49 and single. Living the celibate, chaste life now, in fact, and I work as a psychiatrist in private practice in central London. General adult psychiatry with a specialty in addictions, and in fact, I got into working in addiction because of my own earlier brief addiction, but it was very serious, and I went through treatment myself at that time. And that part is also very important for my spiritual journey, which we’ll get onto a bit later. So I’m very settled in this life now and very happy in this path now as a Christian, but that wasn’t always the way. And I enjoy something of the solitary contemplative life.

You have piqued my curiosity, Andrew, in terms of it sounds like you’ve got some very interesting pieces and parts of your journey. So why don’t we start in your childhood and your earliest rememberings of your family life and community life in terms of how did religion fall into your world? Were you born in the London area? Talk to me about all of that. 

Yeah. Well, I was brought up in Kent, a semi-rural, really lovely village, and I feel as if I had quite an idyllic childhood. Very happy, stable, loving family. Large extended family. Lots of fun. Lots of family things together. Very simple family in many respects. Not wealthy. In fact, quite a struggle financially at times. There were four children, and my father worked. My mother was a busy mother of four and housewife, and then she trained as a primary school teacher later, so they all had a lot on their plates, but they gave us a wonderful upbringing. There was no spirituality in the home, though, at least explicitly. We were not a religious family, although we did go to the local church family service a few times for a brief period. But it just wasn’t part of our life, religion and spirituality. That’s not to say it was totally absent, however. I do remember, in fact, my father teaching me once to pray. At a very young age. And I did have enormous curiosity about the beyond, which manifested in various ways, and I did pray, in fact, at times of distress, at several key moments in my childhood and adolescence, but they were very isolated events. So really mainly it was a very secular life but a happy one.

But as I grew older, I think I realized I was very drawn by the deep philosophical questions. What does lie beyond the sensory perceptual world? What is reality ultimately? What am I? What are we? Are we just material things that fizzle away to dust? Is there’s something more substantial? I got increasingly drawn by these questions in my adolescence.

How did you pursue the answers to those questions? Was it just independent study? Did you start reading philosophers or spiritual material? 

I did start reading philosophy later, but I was a very latecomer to reading. I was quite lazy with reading, and instead, I would think a lot. Now you could say it was just daydreaming, but I like to think there was more serious thought going on. I was becoming, I guess, something of an armchair philosopher, but around the age of 18, I discovered Plato and read Plato’s Republic and then The Symposium, and I was really blown away by this. And soon after I came across books on the mind/brain problem, the problem of consciousness. Is the mind just the brain ultimately or not? And this again caught my attention and set me on a lifelong interest in philosophy of mind.

Nothing terribly spiritual at that point, no.

Okay. So you were obviously a contemplative child, a contemplative adolescent. You were a deep thinker who really looked at these really large questions. As you began to think in this deep way, was it leading you away from the concept of God as the transcendent source of the answer to these questions? Or were you finding substantive answers for you that were satisfying among the philosophers, among Plato and others? And even with the problem of consciousness, it is a tremendous problem in terms of how to explain our consciousness apart from a material being. So how were you working through those issues? 

Well, I need to go back a step, which I sort of hopped over, and this was something of a personal existential mini crisis. Not a really troubling crisis but just an internal, “My goodness! What do I do?” situation. Around age 15 or 16, and this was due to my increasing realization that I was of same-sex attraction. That had become apparent from early teens. I’d kept it completely private. But by 16, it was very clear indeed. And, of course, being a young person, I was craving for experience, but I saw that as being somewhat far off. I just had to be patient. But there was this other question: Is it okay? Is it okay to have same-sex sexual experience? I knew what the church said. I knew what the Bible said in very basic form. No one drummed it into me, but I had grown up with that knowledge. And I was troubled by it concerning my desires. And I spent a lot of time thinking about it, and on one particular occasion, I made a very extended prayer, even on my knees, which is a bit extraordinary for someone in such a secular environment at that age. I went on my knees to pray to God for an answer to this. Is it okay or is it wrong? Do gay people go to hell? It just didn’t make sense to me that they would.

But it just seemed natural, as I think is the case for most people with same-sex attraction. It just seems to be who they are naturally. It doesn’t feel like you’re transgressing. Although you’re aware that it’s taboo. Now, I thought, during that prayer, “If God is real, if God answers me, how would I know that it’s really from God?” So that began a philosophical train of thought, then, about how to identify some apparent revelation as really being from God. And I realized that just a sensory vision would not be enough, and I wasn’t quite sure what would be. Nevertheless, I made the prayer, and there was no answer, it seemed. And that was that.

But it, I think, ignited the question in my mind is God real? And how do we ever know, how does anyone know? How can we distinguish true revelation from false revelation? And that set of questions, which kind of roughly falls into the scoop of philosophy of religion, became an interest alongside the philosophy of mind. In fact, I saw the two as really quite tightly linked, but I decided to focus on philosophy of mind as sort of firmer, more certain ground. Less controversial, I thought. And I was very attracted to becoming a medical doctor, and I thought I could explore that through my medical studies as well.

It sounds like you were moving through a lot of things. So when you were really submissive in a sense, the body posturing of prayer, you were in earnest to know more about whether or not your desires were okay. And it put you into a very deep form of thought, I guess, in terms of really looking for what is true and what is real. 

Yes. Now, here’s something interesting. Because I was praying to God, but the image of God that I had was of Jesus. I was brought up in England, a vaguely Christian culture, and had learned a bit about Jesus. So I thought He is our model, our role model if you like, for how to relate to God. And so I thought, in that prayer, if I knew that Jesus and God were real, my sexuality would no longer be of any great significance, because I would want to be a disciple for Christ, and I think that was a very interesting turn around, that I began by praying around sexuality and end up by thinking I would want to be a disciple of Christ if He’s real. But knowledge of that reality only came much later.

But still, to understand the seriousness of the commitment if there is a God, that to live in the way of Christ is not something that’s just superficial or flippant, that it is something that requires something of you in a substantive way. That’s amazing that you considered that, but then I guess… Did you receive any answers to your prayer? 

Well, I didn’t, and I would want to emphasize that all this was over 30 or 40 minutes in my bedroom at age 16, and there was absolutely zero putting into practice at the time of anything like a Christian life. So you could say perhaps this was more fantasy thinking than a reality, but it was, in some sense, a very serious prayer, but there was a lot of, I think, idealization of what I would be if I met, encountered Christ, an heroic ideal, which of course we don’t quite live up to.

So at that point, you were actually, in some ways, willing to entertain the possibility of a real God, but then you moved towards philosophy, and I wondered if God faded in the distance, particularly in the background of your same-sex attractions and the taboo, you said, associated with that and things of the church. So guide us on from there, yes. 

So what Plato gave me, which has proved to be of great lasting value, is the focus on the three transcendentals of truth, beauty, goodness. Reading The Republic gave me a very profound sense that those three things are the most important values, if you like, and if you follow those three, you will reach God if He exists. And I remember a little bit whimsically saying to myself, probably around the age of 20 or so, “Well, I’ll seek truth as hard as I can through science and philosophy, and I’ll engage with beauty as much as I can through art and music and the beauty of the human form. For goodness, well, I’m not so sure about that. I’m quite attached to my pleasures, so we’ll leave goodness aside. But if I can at least do two of those three reasonably well, then by triangulation, I might get there.”

Right. 

And that was a sort of personal philosophy for a while.

Right. And how did that work for you? 

Well, that’s interesting. Because I think now that the Lord gave me a long leash to explore some of those areas. I perhaps did better on the truth side. I certainly did engage quite seriously with philosophy and also science of the mind. Beauty really went off track. I mean, I certainly developed a deep and enduring interest in classical music which got progressively more sacred, actually, and earlier and early to sort of fifteenth, sixteenth century sacred choral music. But I would rather bask in this in a sensual way, but I found it enormously, immensely beautiful. Same with art. I made a sort of progression from a very diverse taste down to more and more sacred art, Renaissance, early Renaissance paintings and sculpture. But. The big but is I was also exploring hedonistic pleasures, the beauties of the flesh, and I guess that’s the part that I refer to when I say I went off course. That got a bit excessive.

So it sounds like perhaps you were torn a little bit because you’re pursuing these values of truth and beauty, which are, I guess as Lewis would say, pointers towards the transcendent. 

Yes.

Yes. Although I wouldn’t say I felt very conflicted at the time, actually. I’m not someone that has felt a lot of guilt. I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing. But I think what I took from Jesus was the great importance of integrity and treating people well. I think my family also gave me that. I’m very grateful. So whoever I was with, wherever I would be, I would try to treat people well, even if I was crossing taboos, and I think the Lord is with you when you’re exploring because you don’t really know if doctrine is true or not, you don’t know if the church teaching is true. You’ve heard about it, but it doesn’t make sense to you, so you’re exploring, but you’re exploring with attention to the heart and to loving one’s neighbor, et cetera.

So I’m really taken by your love for these things, love for truth, love for art, love for music, and engaging in those and appreciating those things. Did you ever look or think about the grounding for beauty or not? I wondered if, in any sense, they pointed you towards God or not. 

I certainly had this sense that there was something beyond the material world and pointing towards a unity. And I very much enjoyed mathematics at school. And this was another area, actually, which I felt pointed towards the transcendent, beyond material forms. But around the same time that I was exploring those kinds of thoughts, I was also coming to think that perhaps the mind is totally explained by the brain. I was quite impressed by some of the philosophy of mind I had read, Daniel Dennett in particular. When his book came out, Consciousness Explained, I read that and a series of other books along similar lines, and I was increasingly thinking that perhaps the mind is just explained by the brain, and there isn’t anything truly transcendent. So there were these different ideas going around. I never closed the door to the transcendent completely. I never concluded that the mind is the brain. I never became atheist proper. I was always agnostic and open. And seeking, actually. But what I was seeking was something solid, some kind of solid grounding, philosophical or scientific, to answer that question. And always hovering in the background for me was the question around sexuality. If it looked more likely that God was real, I knew that, at some point, I was going to have to confront the question around sexuality again.

And how did that happen? 

Well, it didn’t really happen for quite a long time. What happened was that I went through medical school, did well, started work as a junior doctor, which was very hard, long hours and a huge amount of stress, and then we’re coming to my late twenties now, a time that I thought would be the best time in my life, but in fact I had a physical health scare and took a sabbatical year from work because of that, and during that year, my hedonistic streak took over, and instead of doing what I ought to have done, I went down a path of escapism and got addicted to cocaine. And that period lasted just over a year. It was extremely serious, and I was in hospital several times because of it and eventually went to rehab, and since that time, I’ve not had any problems with addiction.

But I’d like to tell you about how I got into recovery, because something extraordinary happened which initiated that, or was one of the initiators of it. I had been refusing help. It had been about one year since this started, and at that point, something prompted me to pray and basically to repent, to say sorry to God for everything that had happened. Now one of the prompts for this was a picture that I had on my wall at home of St. Jerome in the Wilderness by Albrecht Dürer. It’s a very famous picture, and St. Jerome is kneeling in the wilderness, at peace, with a lion beside him, at one with nature. And he’s gently beating his breast in repentance for the wrongs in his life. And his countenance is really sublimely peaceful, not one of despair, and his eyes are looking towards a tiny, makeshift cross that he had made.

And this image really struck me. I thought, “There’s nothing to fear about repentance, about saying sorry to God for wrongs. In fact, it appears to bring peace.” And I felt this picture was saying something important to me at this time, so what I embarked upon in the midst of my addiction was, over a period of many days, possibly weeks, to go through my whole life like a piece of string chronologically, and each time I came across, in my mind, a knot, that knot would represent a time when I hadn’t been the best version of myself. What I was seeking was not just the immediate reasons for the addiction but actually all of the much earlier precursors, all the earlier faults in my character that built up and built up, that made me go my own way so foolishly, that made me so stubborn against advice, that made me so hedonistic, seeking selfish pleasures and so forth.

So I was seeking the roots, and so I did actually imagine my life as a thread and these knots along the way, and I would pause in these knots and imaginatively go into that scene using memory and immerse myself in that and look at it from different perspectives and say sorry. And try to feel genuine remorse, even for what might seem quite trivial things, like telling a fib as a child or evading responsibility for something. I saw these as the precursors to what came later with the addiction, so I felt I had to get to the root of it all.

So I did this over a series of weeks, inspired, as I said, by St. Jerome, and at some point, having completed that, I decided to make my own makeshift cross out of a couple of pieces of cardboard, and I fixed that to the wall, and a day or two later, I looked at this cross, and I just felt overwhelmed and dropped to my knees. It was automatic. I dropped to my knees, and tears were streaming down my face, and I was full of joy. Now, this sounds very extraordinary, but there was something like a beam of light coming down on me, and I was in tears of joy, and I remember thinking, “I need to stay here and just let this light come in, because it’s purifying my heart,” and I felt forgiven, and I felt accepted, and I wanted to stay there for as long as possible to make sure that every last corner had been cleansed. And I just felt in the presence of God at that point. I had a vision of Jesus standing there whilst all this was happening. It was quite faint, but it was definitely Jesus.

And, after some time, I got up, and I still had a sense of this light. It said to me God loves me, God accepts me, God is forgiving me and letting me know that if I take the right path now, He will be with me all the way. And that was of massive benefit, because I had lost all hope of getting into recovery at that point. I thought I had wrecked my career completely. So many people who knew about the addiction and its effects, senior colleagues at work. So I thought there was no way I could get back to working as a doctor, but after this encounter, I knew that I had to get well, I had to take the right path, and that God would be with me.

That sounds like a very, very powerful, palpable encounter, obviously life changing for you. It came on the heels of your repentance, almost a protracted, very honest, transparent repentance over a period of weeks. That’s really quite amazing, Andrew, and obviously, you were able to turn the corner. You found hope and somehow through, as you say, you felt the presence of God with you, so that you were able to let go of your addiction, I presume, you said after a period of time? 

So things came together, interestingly, all at one, by my sister… One of my sisters found an excellent rehab center in South Africa for me. Around the same time, I got to see, for the first time, an addictions consultant, who was excellent and took a thorough history and gave me good advice. So I had the courage, then, to enter treatment, which I did thoroughly and properly, and then through NA, the 12 steps, and so forth. I don’t know that I would ever have done that without that encounter with God.

But even after that encounter, I did not join the church. I do remember thinking whether I should. And that thought was very, very brief. And the reason I didn’t is, again, because of my sexual orientation. I thought joining the church would bring too much conflict, and also I felt I had encountered God outside the church, so why was church necessary? I already had a community of friends, so I thought, “Well, maybe I need to improve my community a bit. Community, I think, would be very advantageous for my recovery.” So I had a think about what kind of new community I could find. So instead of joining a church, I joined a rugby club. In fact, the world’s first gay-inclusive rugby club, in London, called the Kings Cross Steelers. And that was a wonderful community to be part of for something like nine years following my addiction treatment.

So you were… Just to clarify again, you were convinced, at this point in your life, you were perhaps more of a theist? Or would you consider yourself someone who believed in the transcendent reality of God? In the Person of Christ but-

I think my mind was rather split, actually. With the different parts not talking to each other too much. There was a part of me that was still pursuing this, that the mind is just the brain, scientific material will show that God is just a figment of the imagination of some kind. There was another part that was very open to something more, but after that encounter, I did think God was real, but I was also open to nonreligious concepts of spirituality, as a vague spiritual ether, and Jesus is some kind of archetypal figure. And because I was English, a Christian country, it was Jesus I saw. If I had been brought up in a different culture, it might have been some other religious figure. But I didn’t think about those kinds of questions too much for a long time. I just got on with my work, playing rugby, having a fun social life, still with a hedonistic streak, but without cocaine addiction.

But I knew at some point I was going to have to address these questions more thoroughly. And a few years after being in recovery—in fact reading Richard Dawkins’ book The God Delusion was one of the prompts in fact. I enjoyed that book, and it made me laugh, but he’s not very theologically or philosophically minded. And I slammed the book shut and thought, “No, he’s wrong. He’s ridiculing God. He doesn’t understand.” And I thought, “I need to go back and examine my experience and see what do I really believe?” I wanted to write a book to help others of my journey, but I thought, “How can I talk about that experience to others if I’m not certain what it was?” And, “How would they be convinced given it all happened in the midst of an addiction?” Quite rightly, they would be highly skeptical.

So I decided that I had to be clear from a rational point of view what the evidence says, scientific and philosophical, concerning theism versus atheism, and in particular, the soundness of the worldview of scientific materialism, which says everything basically is physical material, including the mind, which means that all apparent mystical experience would be ultimately explained by brain states and would not mean anything, any ontological realm transcendent to the material.

So slowly, over something like seven, eight years, I read many more books, and gradually this came together, and I realized that there were far more pointers towards theism than atheism. And not only that, these scientific and philosophical pointers tended to work in synergy with each other, so they related to each other and supported each other. I also saw very pervasive bias in a lot of the literature that many inquirers just couldn’t take seriously the possibility that God is real, and so every bit of evidence pointing that direction has to be taken apart. Rather than following the pointers to where it may lead and thinking carefully about that possibility on its own terms, I saw that many popular writers were dismantling every bit of evidence and never stepping into the realm to consider, “Actually, this could be truth, and what implications might that have for oneself and the differences of opinion.”

So this was gradual work over several years, and it was leading me to make a decision. “Am I going to take God more seriously, religion more seriously, Jesus more seriously, the church more seriously?” And yet, because of my sexual orientation, this was such a massive thing, because I knew I would have to confront that question. As you may have gathered, I’m not someone that does things by halves if I’m interested in them.

Right. 

I don’t like to compromise. And I knew what the orthodox teaching was on sexual orientation. I didn’t know if it was true, but I knew I would have to confront it. And that delayed me. But my hedonistic streak was also delaying me. I was still having fun, playing rugby, socializing, and I was in my late thirties, but I was increasingly coming to realize that after the encounter that I had had at age thirty, I wasn’t perhaps living with complete integrity, given I had gratitude for this encounter, but I was doing very little else about it. And I was increasingly wanting to serve in some way, to bring to others what I had been given, to mature as well, to develop spiritually. But I had to be sure. I had to be more sure about what I really believed and why.

So this intellectual search was just really about finding a foundation or testing a foundation for the earlier encounter. Eventually, I decided that the evidence for theism is far greater than that of atheism, and I would therefore be a fool not to take that earlier encounter very seriously. So I decided that I would be joining a Christian church, and I didn’t know which denomination. I had no idea. But I was reaching that decision around the summer of 2012. I was also retiring from rugby that season. So I anticipated some change of life, that I would enter a Christian community, learn through this more virtuous group. I would face struggles around sexuality. I didn’t know which way that would go. And I certainly didn’t expect anything extraordinary to happen. I just thought I would be learning through a community gradually.

But this is what in fact did happen: After a holiday in Italy, looking at sacred art, I returned to London, and there had been for some time these sublime intrusions in my awareness occurring, often during my periods of reading and contemplation, and they would stop me in my tracks. They were so deeply peaceful. And I felt the presence, I felt a communal presence, but it was very mysterious, and I didn’t really know what it was, but I came to identify these as encouragements, and they speeded up my decision making. And around the same time as these were increasing, I had a very profound dream, so vivid that I wrote it down, which I’d never done before. The whole theme of the dream was purity, and also in the dream was a figure of Mary, with Jesus, having come down from the cross, in her arms. And this was extraordinary because, although I’d looked at a lot of sacred art, the Blessed Virgin Mary had not played any significance for me in my imagination, and yet, in this dream, I kneeled in front of her in adoration. And then another figure appeared, and that was St. Paul. And St. Paul and I, in the dream, clasped each others’ arms. Now, Paul was significant for me because it is his words in the New Testament that the teaching against same-sex sexuality is often drawn from. And so there was a bit of hostility in my mind with St. Paul, but in this dream, we are reconciled in a very warm way. And I took that as meaning, the whole dream together, as being a call to purity, but an acknowledgment that maybe the church has not dealt with these matters in a very sensitive way sometimes.

So that was just a dream. And I didn’t want to make too much of it. It was just a dream. But two weeks later, I decided to go to a homeless shelter to volunteer my services near Victoria Station, but on the way, I got a bit lost and found myself in front of the Roman Catholic cathedral, Westminster Cathedral, and I stood in the square in front of the doors, and I felt very, very drawn to go in, so I went in, and just after I arrived, a bell went, and a priest arrived, and Mass was beginning, and I thought, “Well, I decided to try the different denominations. Here I am now in a Catholic church, so let me try this.” And I stood up and sat down dutifully like everybody else and followed the Mass as closely as I could, but in the middle of the Gospel reading, something miraculous happened. First, I saw a set of lights high above, and one of these lights shot down to me and seemed to enter me, and from that point, I felt all my sins fall away. I felt completely released from chains and completely forgiven. And I was full of joy. It was a bit like the earlier encounter, but this time with greater fullness. It felt more profound. The word salvation was in my mind. And all around seemed to be a holy presence. And I remember thinking, “That holiness is not me. It’s the presence of God.”

I was completely full of joy, and I felt released and that I had become better in my nature. I felt more able to be good, and it was all instant. And I came out of the cathedral that day and looked up to the skies and thanked God and felt that I was completely in the palm of His hand. I had no doubt at all about the reality of God at that point, and I knew at that point that I was changed very profoundly that that would be permanent, that this wasn’t just a transitory thing, and that I was on a new path. And that has been borne out.

That’s extraordinary. Yes. As I’m listening to you, I’m just picturing it in my own mind and wondering… Obviously, that was an encountering, as you say, a profound encountering with the Person of God that was, again, another life-changing experience in which you felt, not only known and seen but called to a certain way of living, I’m also struck, too, because, at the end of this, you were convinced, but it had come on the heels of, you say, seven to eight years of reading books, intellectually contemplating the reality of God, looking at the theistic worldview and how the components are synergistic in terms of they work together. They explain reality in a much better way than the naturalistic, materialistic worldview. I imagine, too, you, as a psychiatrist, just reaching back to childhood, when you were asking the big questions of life. Who am I? Why am I here? Where did I come from? Those very deeply existential questions for us all have to be explained within a certain worldview or a view of reality, and I wonder, in that time of exploration intellectually, existentially, what you were finding that was so convincing and compelling that almost enabled you to experience this final encounter in a much more profound and almost convincing way. Because it’s like the pieces of you had come together in a way. 

Yeah.

That your intellectual self… You had spoken of them being separate, that you had a sense of God, but you were living your own life, but you were exploring things intellectually, but somehow, after all this time, God pulls the pieces together in this one grand encountering with Him at a point at which then everything came together for you. 

That’s right. I think that’s a very good image. Because at that point, feeling released from sin, released from chains which had held me down, and this sense of salvation and complete forgiveness, I also realized I had a soul. That the soul is not just a metaphor for some part of the mind but is very deep, perhaps reaching infinitely to God, but something opened. I just became aware of the depths of my being. But yes. This second encounter was a far fuller conversion. I talk about my conversion as if it was in two parts, but the first part kind of set me on the road for recovery from addiction. It did not pull me into the church. God allowed me to continue my own way and I think encouraged me to make that intellectual search, but when I was satisfied intellectually, I then commit myself to serving Christ out of gratitude for that earlier event.

And by that point, I was ready to surrender to Christ and offer myself in service. It was, again, repentance, actually, immediately before this second conversion event. Around sexuality. It was not that I… I never felt the need to repent for having same-sex attraction, but the way I’d lived that out, with some excess, I certainly did repent for. But I was very concerned that I wouldn’t be able to remain celibate and chaste. I was not achieving it for more than a few days at a time.

But from the point of that conversion, I became celibate and chaste, and it has been rather permanent. There’s been a few brief periods in my life since then, over nine, ten years, where I deliberately broke that to test things during periods of difficulty, but 99% of the time, I’ve been on the celibate path. And the immediate sense was joy about it. I had just so much love for the Lord at this point. Love had been poured in. I felt I didn’t need any more. And the Holy Spirit gives you the ability. He gives you an extra strength. It opens up ways of being which you didn’t know before. That’s not to say there won’t be significant struggles at some point. Certainly, I have had those. But there was a sense of a gift being given on that day in Westminster Cathedral.

That’s amazing! It’s a really amazing story. It sounds as if your life has been completely transformed. It sounds deepened, expanded, in just amazing ways from a secular life, really pursuing truth, goodness, and beauty. But that you have found new realms, deeper realms. Like you say, you discovered your soul. And it sounds like you have found the source, the transcendent source of truth, goodness, and beauty this time, that you were exploring and appreciating all of those things and looking at them through the eyes, through the lens, of a theistic worldview, of a God who’s not only grand and transcendent but also it sounds like intimately personal to you and in your life. There’s no part of reality, it seems, that is untouched. 

That’s right. It’s all encompassing. And what I’ve told you so far is simply what happened on that day of conversion in 2012. A lot more happened after that, in the following year. Specific occasions, specific events, and those further things drew me more towards the contemplative spiritual life, and in fact, I spent some time discerning possible vocation as a monk and did three months of postulancy in an enclosed, contemplative monastery in 2016 to test that out in a more serious way. Eventually, I decided not to stay. I found that age, in my early forties by that time, it’s quite difficult to adapt to that austere life. And in fact I was craving to be back in the world to proclaim the word of God in some form.

So I’m back, but I engage in my work, and I’m trying to develop some kind of a ministry, but I also try to protect my solitary time.

I can imagine that even your practice as a psychiatrist, your perspectives, have changed in the way that you’re helping others through those large existential and experiential questions of life. As we are turning the corner here, Andrew, I can imagine that there are many out there who are searching and seeking and questioning whether or not God is real. You went through quite a journey intellectually. You did due diligence-

Yes, I did.

… not only to your mind, but also you were willing to look into your heart, which many of us would dare to go. It’s a very brave endeavor, even thinking back to your experience in cocaine addiction, your willingness to look at yourself. I wonder, for those who might be listening, how would you counsel someone to journey towards pursuing the reality of God, whether it’s intellectually or in their own life personally. How would you advise them

So now the spiritual dimension of mental health care is extremely important and often under emphasized, undervalued, and it is a big interest of mine, how to do that well.

So people need to go on their own interior journeys, and you can’t come to faith by just reading a book. Books can help. You’ve got to have your interior journey of deeper integrity, honesty with self, and some prayer. Talk to God. No one else is listening, if you’re in private. So have courage and trust.

If there is someone who says, “Yes, but I need to understand rationally, intellectually,” you obviously read, like you said, several books over a seven- to eight-year period. Is there any particular direction you might direct someone to find that synergy, the groundedness of theism or the Christian worldview? What helped you the most? 

Well, there were different kinds of books that helped me a lot. Some of the authors I found most helpful on the philosophical side were Keith Ward, John Cottingham, Haldane, Swinburne, but when I got into matters of the heart, it was a different set of writers, people like Thomas Merton. I was very touched by his book The New Seeds of Contemplation.

Very good. Now, as someone who was a former skeptic, agnostic, and someone who really understands both sides, how would you encourage or advise Christians to best engage with those who, unlike your former self, was resistant to the Person of God for a while? 

I think you have to love people where they’re at, even if you think they’re living in sin, that you should try to reach out to engage with them and make them part of your life. Of course, there may come a point where they’re just not interested and they’re maybe even combative, and you have to let things go, but you can always return. But it’s very important not to be judgmental because I don’t think sexual sins are the worst sins. I don’t think substance addictions are the worst sins.

I know that many of the people I work with in addiction have been through great traumas, and they are very good people with beautiful hearts. They’re just troubled and wounded hearts that have got into trouble with one thing or another. And, as humans, we can’t see the person’s heart fully. We just get glimpses of it. God sees that person’s heart fully. So we must not be judgmental about ways of life that are contrary to Orthodox Christian teaching. Through loving and just giving time and trying to impart something of the Gospel, not necessarily through words, I think is the most powerful thing. And of course also prayer. You can pray for everyone you meet, friends, family, and strangers, and that is very powerful. I really believe in that. Because I’ve noticed many times that the people I pray for who seem to be in desperate situations that I can’t help too much, suddenly they have turn-arounds. Everything comes together. And they come back and say thank you to me, but I’ve done very little, and I think, “Actually, it wasn’t me, but I did pray,” and so I do really believe in the power of prayer. It’s worked for me, and I think it works for others.

That’s a wonderful way to wrap this up. At the end of the day, it really is all about God reaching down and touching hearts and bringing all of us, as wounded, troubled people, to Himself and transforming us. And when I think about your story and I hear words like that you had tears of joy and that you were filled with the fullness, really, of what God has for you, I think that that is something that we all really seek for. You obviously have a very deep and intimate contemplative life with the Lord, obviously informed every part of you, and even the tone of your voice and the way that you speak, there is that peace that seems to reside in you, that I think is a beautiful living testimony of all of that that is possible with and through a surrendered life to God. 

I am so privileged to have you on our podcast today, Andrew. 

I feel so lucky to have been invited, Jana. Thank you so much.

Yes. It’s been wonderful. So thank you so much for your time. 

Thank you.

Thanks for tuning in to Side B Stories to hear Andrew Parker’s story. You can find out more about his recommendations for pursuing the truth and reality of God in the episode notes accompanied with this podcast. For questions and feedback about this episode, you can contact me through our Side B Stories website at sidebstories.com. I hope you enjoyed it and that you’ll follow, rate, review, and share this podcast with your friends and social network. In the meantime, I’ll be looking forward to seeing you next time, where we’ll see how another skeptic flips the record of their life.

Professor Craig Keener became a convinced atheist at an early age. When philosophy left him without solid answers, his intellectual curiosity led him to consider the possibility of God.

Resources by Craig: https://craigkeener.com

Resources mentioned by Craig:

Stephen Meyer, Return of the God Hypothesis

F.F. Bruce, The New Testament Documents, Are They Reliable?

Episode Transcript

Hello, and thanks for joining in. I’m Jana Harmon, and you’re listening to Side B Stories, where we see how skeptics flip the record of their lives. Each podcast, we listen to someone who has once been an atheist but who became a Christian against all odds.

We all believe what we believe because we believe it to be true. We believe that our beliefs are true because they match up with reality, the way things really are in the world, and we are usually pretty convinced that we’re right, or else we wouldn’t believe it, right? 

Sometimes we run into people who seem to have exceptionally strong, unwavering confidence for their beliefs. In fact, they have given their lives towards deep understanding, living out and sharing their beliefs with others, but what seems even more extraordinary is that they completely shifted their way of seeing the world and perceiving reality to a nearly polar opposite view from where they once were. There was something that was profoundly convincing enough for them to change. This begs the question: What was the information, events, reflections, or experiences that opened the door for them to another whole different set of beliefs? How do we change the basic way we think about the world around us, the way we think about ourselves? Those are huge questions. 

Usually, there has to be something we come to learn or experience that seems to conflict with what we know, that challenges our beliefs. We begin to question ourselves and our knowledge and perhaps come open to another possibility of what is true and real, but that also takes a bit of humility, of admitting that we might be wrong, and more often than not, that’s not an easy thing to do. There are those thinkers who are seriously curious seekers who want to find answers, even if they don’t seem to line up with their own beliefs at the time. They want to find the truth no matter where it is to be found and what it is, as long as it is true. 

Former atheist Dr. Craig Keener is one of those with a brilliant mind who desired to discover what was true about reality. Although he once held a belief in strict naturalism that only the natural world exists, he came to believe that reality consists of so much more, and he’s now a professor, prolific writer, and scholar in biblical studies. How did that shift happen? I hope you’ll come to listen to his story today. You might also want to stay to the end to hear his advice to curious skeptics on searching for God and truth, as well as advice to Christians on how best to engage with those who don’t believe. 

Welcome to Side B Stories, Craig. It’s so great to have you! 

It’s a privilege to be with you, Jana.

Wonderful. As we’re getting started, can you tell the listeners a little bit about who you are? 

I’m a professor of biblical studies. I did my PhD in New Testament and Christian Origins at Duke University. I’ve authored somewhere over 30 books now. One of them is 4,500 pages. It cites over 45,000 references from ancient sources outside the Bible. So that’s my main focus of research, putting the Bible in its historical context in antiquity. My wife is Dr. Médine Moussounga Keener. She is from Congo in central Africa, and she did her PhD in France.

let’s go back to the very beginning, and why don’t you tell me a little bit about your upbringing. Tell me, Craig, about your home. Was there any religious belief in your home? Where did you grow up? Did you grow up in the United States or what area of the country? Did the culture affect any of your beliefs. Talk with me about your early childhood. 

Sure. I grew up in suburban northern Ohio, and my parents were very respectable socially and morally and so on, but there was no religious belief talked about in our home. We didn’t attend church or any other religious institution. So when I would study religion, I was studying it from the encyclopedia or things like that, studying religions, studying philosophies, and so on. Just as a matter of interest. Especially, I liked ancient Greek philosophy and so forth. But I think at least by the age of nine…

I didn’t believe in life after death, because I remember having a conversation with a family member, and they said, “No, we don’t believe in that, either.” And I’m pretty sure I was an atheist by then. I was purely naturalistic, materialistic, empirically oriented, and I think by the time of age eleven or twelve, I remember having a conversation with my grandmother, who was a Christian, Catholic, and I was telling her I didn’t believe in God, and she said, “Well, what about a first cause?” And I said, “No.” I just went on and postulated infinite regression and said, “It could go way, way back, just infinitely in time.” I didn’t know yet that that doesn’t work in terms of the laws of physics and relativity and so on, but I was eleven.  So, as time went on, though, I began to question some of my certainties.

First of all, I want to say I’m incredibly impressed, at the age of nine and eleven, that you were thinking in philosophical terms, that you must’ve been a very erudite child, an avid reader, a thinker. I presume, from the very beginning, you told us that you have a prolific library of books that you’ve authored. You’re an extensive researcher. So I imagine your curiosity about life and reality started when you were very young. I presume that you were fostered in that way. 

Yeah.

So, when you were reading, you said you were reading philosophy and about religions. Was this some kind of investigation, even as a child, that you were pursuing on your own? Or was it at the impetus of any of your teachers or your parents? What were you looking for as you were searching, even at such an early age, through the religions? 

My mother encouraged whatever kind of intellectual pursuits I would have, so it was just kind of what I was interested in. And I was certainly interested in everything Greek, pretty much Roman, most things from ancient Mediterranean or Near Eastern antiquity, apart from the Bible. But Plato was really kind of a turning point for me. When I got to be about age thirteen, and reading Plato’s discussions of the immortality of the soul, I began to wonder. I didn’t think his arguments for the immortality of the soul were convincing, but his questions about it really got me thinking. I was also reading a book about that time, a mathematical discussion of infinity, and thinking about, “You know, forever is a long time.” And also I used to visit a medical lab where somebody had come and spoken at our high school, and so I would tag along with him sometimes and go visit the medical lab, and one day, they wheeled a corpse by, and I was like, “What’s that?” “It’s a dead body.” And it was something I couldn’t get away from, the reality of the questions.

So when you say the reality of the questions, now, again, just to reiterate, at this point, you had declared yourself an atheist, and you said you believed in naturalism. If you could… I know that there’s a lot of definitions of atheism floating around. At that time, how would you have described what you believed atheism to be and what naturalism to be? 

Yeah. My naturalism, by the time I was thirteen, was getting mixed up with platonic idealism, which isn’t exactly naturalism, so I’m holding these different epistemologies, pure empiricism on the one hand, which can’t be proven empirically, and platonic idealism on the other, which definitely can’t be proved empirically, so I was inconsistent, admittedly.

You were reading about all of these Greek mythologies, but you didn’t believe that any god existed, any being outside of the natural world existed. I presume that you believed that all of those things, all of those gods, or the one God, were all mythological. 

I didn’t rule out the possibility of spirits, of spirit beings. I just didn’t believe in a Creator God. I thought I could explain everything without recourse to that hypothesis. Now, given what I know now and actually given what we know a lot more from physics now than was even known back then, my views were not really very well founded, but it’s where I was.

And philosophically speaking, you were convinced, then, I guess, in platonic idealism or the forms? Or some form of reality without a personal being outside of the universe? 

I wouldn’t say I was completely convinced by Plato. It just seemed like the best logic I knew of at that point. And I was still looking for something more. But as far as God, my thinking was, “Look, most people are stupid.” Talk about intellectual snob. Whether I was intellectual or not might be debated, but I certainly was a snob. “Most people are stupid. 80%,” and back then, I think it was about 80%, of the people in this country claim to be Christian, and they don’t even live like they believe it. Because if I really believed that I owed my existence to a God, I would give everything to that God. But they don’t live like they believe it, so why would I take it seriously when even the people who claim to be Christians don’t?” And I wasn’t distinguishing between the really serious ones and the pseudo ones, or today we might say the really nasty ones and the nice ones or whatever. I just threw everybody in the same boat.

Obviously, you didn’t have a high view of Christians or perhaps Christianity, but what did you think religion was? As an atheist, what did you consider religion to be? 

I don’t know that I would’ve used the language of an opiate for the masses, but that’s probably pretty much what I thought of it, just people are scared to die, and they’re scared to be off on their own in an empty universe, and they just comfort themselves with a fantasy is how I would have viewed it at that point.

So it was wishful thinking for, as you say, the ignorant I suppose and perhaps the weak. Again, you were reading Plato. You were finding some answers not satisfying. What were the questions that you were asking that you found that were leaving you still wanting more? 

What I couldn’t explain just based on my pure naturalism was my own consciousness, my own… I’m inside me. How did I get to be? And it can’t be from me, myself, because I, in contrast to what Plato said about the preexistence of a soul… That’s one thing I wasn’t persuaded on, and so if a soul wasn’t preexistent… I had a beginning, and if I had a beginning, then I was certainly going to have an ending. And it didn’t make sense to me. Why am I perceiving the universe from this standpoint as a self? As a personal being? And I’m perceiving other people as personal beings, but they’re outside of me. I didn’t cause them. Maybe I’m hallucinating them. I did consider that, based on Plato’s idea, don’t trust the world of senses, but then I was in a quandary because I also realized, “Okay, the book that I read. When I’m reading Plato, I’m reading it through my sense knowledge.” I really went to town with this stuff.

But I began to realize, if there is a source of my consciousness, my existence, and it’s not me, and there’s just an infinitesimal chance of my own personal existence, with the genetics and the environment and everything coming together, all the marriages and unions all the way back for me to exist as me, I was like, “I don’t know how that works unless maybe I’m just hallucinating my finite existence.” Or… The one hope I had was, “If there’s something infinite, if I could tap into that, but how would I get to something infinite when I’m finite? And if there is a God,” so I suppose by this point I was starting to drift towards agnosticism, but as far as everybody knew, I was an atheist. I just made fun of Christians.

Well, there were a few Christians I didn’t make fun because I could tell they were really serious. I respected even. A few that I thought were really, really serious, even though I didn’t agree with them. I just kind of avoided talking about religion with them. But I started thinking, “Okay, if there’s an infinite being, that would be great, because the infinite being could obviously confer immortality through union with itself somehow, but why would the infinite being care about me?” I was not only finite, but if the infinite being cared about me, it would have to be because the infinite being was also loving, and why would an infinite loving being care about me, because I clearly wasn’t loving. I just didn’t want to die and stop existing. I didn’t care about this being. I didn’t care about anybody else’s immortality at that point. Well, not very much. So my big thing was, “How can I have it?”

And that’s where I was left. I didn’t have a solution to it, and it seemed to me like the possibility of a loving, infinite being would be the best of all possible scenarios, and yet I had no reason to believe it. It would just be maybe wishful thinking.

So then you would be back in that place, in a sense, that you had accused the Christians of, of somewhat inventing a god that they wanted to be true. So in some ways your grandmother’s question of first cause came back, but kind of in a different way, in a more philosophical, existential way, rather than first cause of the universe, per se. But in terms of transcendence, though, it had to be a personal agency, right? A personal agent. And had to be infinite. I mean, the concepts that you’re speaking of, again, are pretty deep, especially for, it sounds like, a teenager at this time. You’re really considering your own mortality. You’re considering your lack of immortality, as it were. Your sense of personhood and how that could continue or not in time, based upon whether you’re physical only or if there’s something more to you. Those are really big questions. And of course, like you say, who would create a being like you or me? Unless it was out of love. 

And those are, again, very deep and contemplative things, and so those deep questions and being honest with yourself, I guess, about them, those were the catalysts for you to continue forward, I suppose, in trying to resolve what seems to be a real existential point of tension. And intellectual point of tension. There’s a dissonance, whether it’s cognitive or emotional or existential, there are some issues that you needed to be resolved. And I’m sitting here wondering how is it that a thirteen year old could solve those kinds of issues, wanting there to be a god but, in a way, not being able to solve those grand issues in any kind of a direct way. So I’m curious, Craig. Walk us forward. Because I want to know how you found some answers. 

Yeah. I thought I could explain the universe purely naturalistically. Now I know I was wrong, but that’s what I thought. And I thought may be platonic idealism might explain my own existence as a sentient being, but platonic idealism couldn’t explain the material universe, and I couldn’t explain from pure naturalism my own existence as a sentient being or the meaning of it, at least. And so that’s where I kind of left it. I was really getting a commitment to platonic idealism, but as I would walk to school, I would still look both ways for cars when I crossed the street and still, even if, okay, the sense world is purely my hallucination, just in case, I’d better play by the rules. Just in case.

But I didn’t really have a solution. That’s kind of where I left it. Except I started saying, “If there’s a god or a goddess, a he or a she or an it or whatever, if there’s something out there, and you do happen to love and care about people, please show me.”

So it was a humble prayer. It was like, “I don’t know how to solve this,” so you just prayed to whoever?

Yeah. Yeah. Just desperately. And every once in a while, I’d repeat that, just that cry to whoever, if anybody was listening, meanwhile putting up the front like I’m convinced of atheism, but by this point, just in case… I gave Christianity only about a 2% chance, so I guess I wasn’t 100% atheist, but Christianity seemed to me to be the least plausible of all things, but I didn’t want to stake eternity on even a 2% chance, and eternity is a long time. I didn’t know about Pascal’s wager, but if I had, I would have said, “Yeah, that’s probably right.” Pascal was a brilliant mathematician, and one of his contemplations, his pensées, was if there is a God and you live like there isn’t one, you’ll be really sorry. But if there isn’t a god, and you live like there’s one, well, really not too much harm done. You don’t stake all of eternity on your mistake if you make the mistake the wrong way there.

But what eventually happened was not the kind of evidence that I was wanting. I wanted empirical evidence, or archaeological evidence. There actually is some of that, but I didn’t know. I wanted somebody to show me in a way that satisfied my intellect, which is a good thing for that to be done, and I want to provide evidence for people in that way today. But that’s not what happened in my case. Because God was going to welcome me, but He wouldn’t welcome me with my idols, and I idolized my intellect, and God has given us so much evidence, but God is not obligated to jump through our hoops. We don’t get to decide what kind of evidence He’s going to give us. We have to look where He’s offered the evidence, and He’s offered plenty of it, but we say, “Well, God you have to do it this way or I’m not going to believe you.” Well, it’s our tough luck.

So I was walking home from school one day, and it was after Latin class, and a couple of very conservative Christians dressed in black suits with ties, and they could’ve been anything, but anyway, they stopped me on the street with one of my friends, and they said, “Do you know where you’re going to go when you die?” And I figured, “Okay, these are probably religious people. I’m just going to humor them.” I said, “Probably either heaven or hell,” and I laughed, but they didn’t laugh. They were very serious. So they started in explaining how I could be sure I could go to heaven when I died because Jesus died for me and Jesus rose again. Well, when I saw they were serious, actually this was a concern of mine, but they were just talking to me from the Bible. And I said, “Look, you guys, I don’t believe in the Bible. I’m an atheist. Do you have any other evidence?” And they looked at each other like, “Uh oh,” and I realized they don’t have anything else to give me. So I said, “Look, if there’s a God, where did the dinosaur bones come from?” You know, if you ask a stupid question, you get a stupid answer. They weren’t trained in paleontology. They weren’t trained in apologetics either. They just… All they knew was… They just knew Jesus died and rose again and that’s how you could be saved.

So I argued with them for, like, 45 minutes, but when it got to that point, they said that the devil put them there to deceive us. I said, “Okay, guys. I’m going to see you later,” and I started walking off. So, okay, they didn’t know paleontology, they didn’t know apologetics, but they did know the heart of what makes us right with God, what Jesus did for us. We couldn’t bring ourselves to God. That was something I already figured out philosophically.

Well, God was now reaching out to me through this message, and I walked off from them, but there was a Presence there that was so strong that hadn’t been there when I made fun of Christians or when I read about different religions or read about different philosophies. There was a presence that wouldn’t let me alone. And I walked home trembling, not because of these guys but because of what was still with me. And it was maybe an hour after we talked, I don’t know the exact amount of time, but I was just overwhelmed with the presence of God. It was in the room with me when I got home, and it was so strong, it’s like, “Okay, I have wanted this chance, if there was a God, that God would show me. This isn’t the way I had expected it, but you know, I would be an idiot, if God is here in the room with me, to blow my chance,” and I’m like, “Okay, God. I don’t understand how Jesus died for me and rose from the dead, how that makes me right with you, but if that’s what you’re saying, I’ll believe it. But God, I don’t know how to be made right with You, so if You want to make me right with You, You need to do it Yourself.”

And what I’m about to describe, I know this is not typical. Most people I know don’t have this happen. But God was very gracious to me, considering where I was coming from. All of a sudden, I felt something rushing through my body, like I’d never felt before. I jumped up scared out of my mind, like, what in the world was this? But I said, “Okay, God. I always said if I ever believed there was a God, I would give God everything, so that’s what I’m going to do. I don’t know how to do it right, but I’m going to do my best.” So I found a Bible. Now, once I had secretly started reading a Bible, and I started in Genesis 1, and that didn’t go very well for me. What I thought it meant. I didn’t understand about ancient or Eastern creation narratives and different literary genres. I wasn’t sophisticated at all in literary terms like that. But I started reading the New Testament, and there was a church where a pastor had seen me running to school in the rain sometimes when he was taking his daughter to school. He stopped and gave me a ride. So he was one of the people I didn’t make fun of. I’d always thought, “Okay. He’s sincere, and he’s nice. So I’m not going to be mean to him.”

But I said, “Okay, I’m going to check out his church.” And so I got there, I think, at 7:30 in the morning, as if it were school, and there was nobody there! And I thought, “Well, I’m not sure when I’m supposed to come.” But I stopped back a little bit later. This was two days after my conversion experience. And when I stopped back later, Sunday school was in progress, and they took me to the teenager’s class, and I found out later the teenagers thought I was a little bit strange. My shoes didn’t match. My face was half shaven. As you can tell, I still don’t like to shave too much, but anyway that was the beginning of my Christian life.

Wow! That’s pretty extraordinary. I find it really interesting that God didn’t, as you say, meet you in a way that you expected. And speaking of Blaise Pascal, it kind of reminds me of his night of fire. This brilliant mathematician, the polymath, Blaise Pascal, incredibly intellectual, just became overwhelmed with the presence of God. He experienced God, and his life was forever changed in a passionate way. And it sounds like that’s what happened with you. It’s like, when you actually experienced the presence of God, everything changes! And it didn’t sounds like you had this experience and then you still had… I’m sure you had some intellectual questions and having to tease all of this out, but it sounds to me that there was no doubt in your mind and in your heart and soul that God was real and that God existed and that God had somehow touched down in your life and made Himself known, based upon that prayer that you had offered, that 2% chance prayer, and He took that 2% and then made it 100%. To where you were completely convinced, and then you started on this journey of really learning, I suppose. Like you say, what scripture is, what church is, and obviously became a very learned scholar on all of those things. But I also love the way that you presented the gospel there. That really it is God reaching down and bringing us to Himself through the person of Christ and what He’s done. 

So all of your doubts were erased, but you still had a lot of learning to do, and you started reading the scripture. A lot of it didn’t make sense. Why don’t you walk us on from there? 

Sure. Yeah. I mean there’s this one level, I know that I know, and I had to eat humble pie, because I had to go back and apologize to a bunch of Christians that I’d made fun of. And they were like, “Wow!” And I had some relatives who were very pious, and they were among the few people I didn’t make fun of because I knew they were very serious with it, and I respected their seriousness. And when I told them, they were like, “We’ve been praying for you for years,” so I realized, “Okay, well I wasn’t completely on my own here.” It was good to find out that. But intellectually, I still had a lot of questions.

When you look at sociological studies of conversion, my understanding is that often people are socialized into it gradually. That wasn’t the way it was for me, and so I wasn’t getting questions answered along the way. So had plenty of questions, and people in the church, friends, and the pastor, for sure, were able to address some of the questions, but they weren’t able to address all of them. And that started me on a long road of having to get the answers and to nuance the things that I was initially taught as a Christian, once I was converted, and just keep seeking for truth. Which is a good thing, because God is a God of truth, and if you seek the truth with an honest heart, and you keep seeking until you find it and not just put yourself into a position of, “Well, who cares?” or something like that. But there was so much evidence. I mean it took me years to find some of it. But I’m grateful for the people who already were working on that background and providing different lines of evidence.

So you became intellectually convinced. You could see philosophically, intellectually that the reality of God is not only experientially true or substantively true from your experience, but also there are good, rational archaeological, textual, all of these different reasons, everything in reality that points back to the Person of God and who He is. 

Yeah.

You had mentioned earlier that sometimes people question that there’s any evidence. As an atheist, sometimes looking back, you want to say there’s no evidence, or that’s oftentimes what I hear. “There’s no evidence for God.” But yet you’re telling me that there is prolific evidence for God, that it is wherever you look if you have eyes to see. And you took, it sounds like, a very painstaking, intentional path towards seeing, looking, and finding evidence. I’m curious. How would you respond to someone if an atheist just said, “There’s no evidence for God,” knowing what you know and experiencing what you have experienced? How would you respond to someone like that? 

Philosophically, from the moment of my conversion, everything fell into place, in terms of how to explain the external universe plus my own existence as a sentient being. From this theistic standpoint, it’s like, “Oh! Now everything makes sense,” so that was an immediate change. But I wanted scientific evidence, and I wanted historical evidence. Now, I was planning to be an astrophysicist. Obviously, I can’t do that and become a biblical scholar at the same time. Not enough time in one’s life to do both well. But my younger brother did go on to do his PhD in physics. And he’s a solid believer now also, and he’s like, “The evidence is so clear, and the parameters for what it would need for life to exist in the universe, they’re so finely tuned. It’s just clear.”

But my own area of research is especially in ancient historiography, so, going through what we can know about how things like the gospels were written and what we can know from external evidence how the material in the gospels fits in to what we can see archaeologically and so on. There’s just an abundance of evidence. And even when I was an atheist, I would not have been a Jesus myther. I mean the people who say that Jesus didn’t exist. I mean, you don’t have to believe God exists, but that doesn’t mean you’re going to say, “Okay, Jesus didn’t exist historically. His movement just sprang up out of thin air.” Or you could say, “Oh, okay. Mohammad didn’t exist.” “Actually, I don’t like the Bible. The Bible doesn’t exist.” That doesn’t work.

But if Jesus did exist and you actually look at the evidence about Jesus, His contemporaries experienced Him as a miracle worker, and that’s attested not only in every level from the Christian witnesses about this, including some who had been not just skeptics but enemies of the Jesus movement but then came into the faith. It’s also attested by Josephus, the first century Jewish historian. It’s also attested by critics of early Christianity. And things like the site of Jesus’ tomb. That was so carefully preserved. I’m going into different lines of evidence, and people will say, “I dismiss this. I dismiss that,” but the evidence is really strong. But even if you dismiss this line of evidence, there’s another line of evidence, and there’s all sorts of other lines of evidence.

But if we’re not looking for, say, okay, “I have to see God myself, or have my name written in the sky,” we’re saying, “Okay, where does the evidence point?” I think we’ve got plenty of evidence that should compel people to trust in the reality of God.

Yeah. I think, in your story, at some point, you actually turned towards openness in a way. Just that little bit of openness, that 2% openness, where something came, and you were willing to see and experience reality for the way that it was. And I think you’re right, there has to be a willingness to even consider the possibilities, rather than shutting everything down. 

You have an amazing story, Craig. Truly amazing to see where you were and where you’ve come, and I can’t imagine the number of lives that you’ve impacted by all of the research and all of the speaking and the thinking that you’ve done, and the living that you’ve done. Your life is an amazing testimony. If there’s a curious skeptic who is listening in and perhaps has a little bit of willingness. He’s curious. Or she is. To search or to look, what would you say to someone like that who might be listening today? 

It never hurts to ask. That’s what it was in my case. It was just like, “Well, God if you’re there, please show me.” God may not show you the way you’re expecting, but it never hurts to ask. When we admit that it’s not something we can resolve on our own, when we ask for help, that’s a step towards God, and if you think there’s no God, it can’t hurt, but just in case, you might want to ask.

I know reading scripture is probably very important in terms of a step of starting to look. I wonder if you had any words of wisdom for, if someone did pick up the Bible for the first time maybe, where would you encourage them to read? Or even apart from the Bible, any other books? If somebody says, “Okay, I’m willing to look at the evidence. Where should I look?” Do you have any suggestions either way? 

Yeah. The gospels tell you about who Jesus is. Slightly different versions in the four of them, so you get to know about Jesus from different angles. I think that’s a great place to start.

And for those who don’t know what the gospels are, could you tell them? 

Yeah. The majority of scholars today recognize that the gospels fit the genre, the literary type, of ancient biographies, and actually in the early Roman Empire, that was the apex of the historiographic interest in the way ancient biography was written. And, to actually have multiple biographies of one person within living memory of that person, the way oral historiography defines living memory, that’s phenomenal. We have that only extremely rarely for any figures in antiquity, and we have that with the gospels.

For the person of Jesus, right? They’re stories, the biographies of Christ? 

Yeah. The biographies of Jesus in the Bible. So it’s like two thirds or three quarters of the way through the Bible, in what is, in the Christian Bible, called the New Testament. They begin the New Testament.

And they’re Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John? 

Yeah.

Yeah. Just for those who just aren’t familiar. 

Yeah. I take too much for granted. When I was a young Christian, again, like I said, I didn’t really know how to read different literary types, and so my first time through Matthew, I was like, “This is great!” and then I got to the end of Mark, and Jesus gets crucified and rises again, and I’m like, “How often is this going to happen?” I didn’t realize it’s four different gospels. It’s not supposed to be in chronological order all the way through.

Right. Yes. 

In personal conversation, I can talk with people about the scientific questions, but I don’t speak as one whose PhD is in science. I speak as one whose PhD is in New Testament and Christian Origins, so I speak as a historian. But one book, I think that probably shows the best of where the scientific evidence has gone at the moment is by Stephen Meyer called Return of the God Hypothesis. I think that’s a really good case.

In terms of historiography, because that’s where I work, there are so many books on a less academic level, not as heavily documented, but more readable for people who, you know, it’s not their discipline. I used to recommend a little book by F.F. Bruce, The New Testament Documents, Are They Reliable?, but there are so many other ones right now.

So let’s turn the page, and I’m thinking now of the Christians who are listening who have skeptical friends that may or may not want to listen to the evidence. The atheist friends may have good or bad impressions of who Christians are. And I’m wondering how you could advise Christians in terms of how they can best engage with those who don’t believe. Do you have any words there? 

Yeah. It kind of depends on where your skeptical friends are coming from. If they are, like I was, making fun of you, you can pray for them. And be nice to them. You never know what God might be doing in their hearts. But if you know your stuff and you can engage in intelligent conversation and answer some of the questions, that’s really important. I wanted that so much, and even after I became a Christian, I wanted that so much. I was able to find some people who could answer some of my questions. Actually, some ministers and some other kinds of churches than the one that I went to were able to answer of the questions because of the areas in which they were trained. But it helps, I think, to be able to answer people’s questions.

But you’re not just dealing with an argument. You’re dealing with a person. And a person needs to be shown the love of God. It makes love a whole lot more believable if people can actually see it embodied in a world where sometimes love is hard to find or people have experienced deep brokenness, or I think sometimes my feelings were frozen. I didn’t want to deal with the feeling level, but we’re all people, and that’s part of who we are, too. So be patient.

And sometimes people, they came from backgrounds of faith and were really hurt, and so they need to be shown something different. And sometimes, like me, they came from backgrounds of no faith, and they think that makes sense. Actually, it was faith. It was just faith in nothing, rather than faith in something, but they need to… It helps if they have somebody that they can trust to really answer them honestly, and dialogue with them if they’re open to it, or if they think maybe someday they do become open to it, they know who to go to, like the pastor who was really nice to me.

And I’m also thinking of those family members of yours who were praying for you, and you didn’t even know. I think prayer can make a tremendous difference. It certainly did, I think, in your story. Not only others praying for you but you willing to take that first step of praying to God. 

I don’t think my step was the first one. I think the Holy Spirit was probably dealing with me already, and I just didn’t recognize it yet.

In closing here, Craig, is there anything else that you’d like to add? Or say? You mentioned the Holy Spirit. For those who that sounds like a very strange concept, but for you as a Christian, the Holy Spirit is God, and so I don’t know if you want to end with a word about the Holy Spirit or anything else that’s on your mind or heart? 

Yeah. Because God is real, God does work in our hearts to show us His reality. And therefore, we can pray with confidence that God hears us, that God is going to work in people’s hearts. I think people still have a choice. Not everybody’s going to respond positively to God leading. We can see that pretty clearly in the Bible. But we can pray with confidence to a God who does show Himself and does work in the world, and sometimes I’ve been frustrated because at certain times in my life, there were certain people who wouldn’t listen to me, but found that even in dialoguing with them, what it helped me to do was to come up with answers that someday, somebody down the road would be asking the same questions. It’s like Jesus told about sowing the seed widely, and there’s different kinds of soil, and some are going to bring forth fruit and some aren’t, and you don’t know at the beginning which seed is going to bring forth fruit.

Those guys who were out sharing their faith that day, on October 31, 1975, who shared with me the message of Christ, they may not have been the most educated people in some respects. They may not have been the most culturally contextually relevant to me in some other respects. But they were available. They were probably the only people available in that town who actually were willing to go out and engage people on the streets who would never set foot in a church, and God used them.

God works in personal and powerful ways. He looks for those who are available, doesn’t He? And when our lives intersect with others, He can do amazing things. What an inspired story and what an inspiration you are to all of us, Craig. Thank you so much for coming and just offering so much to us, spiritually and intellectually, and so much for us to think about and really be challenged by. I love your story. Thank you so much for coming and telling it today. 

Thank you so much, Jana. God bless you.

Thanks for tuning in to Side B Stories to hear Dr. Craig Keener’s story. You can find out more about his books and his recommended reading in the podcast episode notes. For questions and feedback about this episode, you can contact me through our Side B Stories website at sidebstories.com. If you enjoyed it, I hope you’ll follow, rate, review, and share our podcast with your friends and social network. In the meantime, I’ll be looking forward to seeing you next time, where we’ll see how another skeptic flips the record of their life. 

Former skeptic Andrew Sawyer lost faith in religion as a child and lost faith in humanity as an adult. He quickly realized that he still didn’t have answers for the questions of life and death. His search eventually led him back to God.

Resources by Andrew: https://andrewsawyer.substack.com

Resources mentioned by Andrew

• C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (specifically referenced book two in Mere Christianity “What Christians Believe”)
• C.S. Lewis Doodles YouTube channel
• Andy Stanley, It Came From Within

Episode Transcript

Hello, and thanks for joining in. I’m Jana Harmon, and you’re listening to the Side B Stories Podcast, where we see how skeptics flip the record of their lives. Each podcast, we listen to someone who has once been a skeptic or atheist but who became a Christian against all odds.

We all want our lives to matter, to mean something, to ourselves, to others, to someone. We’re all driven, at different points, to ask the question, “What is worth living for?” Is there more than just the daily grind or the pursuit of pleasure or power or stuff? Why this urge, this angst for meaning, to feel valued, worth something, going somewhere. Why do we feel that wasting time is meaningless, while investing time is meaningful. What is it in us that longs for something more? 

After all, if we are merely just physical beings determined to act and react, to think and respond according to mere impulses and environmental pressures and instincts, why even ask the larger questions, the ones that lurk beneath the surface of physical motion? Are we really just cogs in a mechanical wheel with no particular direction.

Former skeptic Andrew Sawyer found himself in a place, physically and existentially, to ask these big questions about himself, about life itself. Come listen to him tell his story of searching for what matters most. I hope you’ll also stay to hear his advice to curious skeptics on searching, as well as his advice to Christians on how best to engage with those who don’t believe. 

Welcome to the Side B Stories Podcast, Andrew. It’s so great to have you with me today! 

It’s great to be here.

As we’re getting started, why don’t you tell us a little bit about who you are, where you live, maybe perhaps what you do? 

Sure. My name is Andrew Sawyer. I live in the Atlanta area. I’m an aerospace engineer. I work for a large operator of airplanes. I manage the reliability for the fleet.

That’s great! So why don’t we start back at your story. I know you were, at one time an atheist, and I wondered how those atheistic inclinations began. Tell me a bit about your family, your story growing up. Was God a part of your family life? Your community life? Tell me about all of that. 

Okay. Yeah. So I grew up kind of moving all over the place. Every couple of years. My dad was really ambitious. He was always starting businesses and stuff like that, so I lived in a bunch of different states. I think I went to seven different schools before I finished high school. So we were always on the move. And as far as the family dynamics, my dad’s side of the family is really, really, really religious, so my grandfather went to Wheaton College, he was always very, very religious. So very moralistic, and there’s only one right way to do anything, and that sort of thing.

And then on the other side, my mom’s side, the opposite. Basically a Wisconsin family, German/Jewish, always looking to have fun, party, out playing on boats and all that kind of stuff, not really interested in faith at all. But coincidentally, one of my mom’s older sisters had a conversion experience when she was just out of high school, and she decided to become a missionary, so she spent 35 years in Burkina Faso. So a little bit of influence on both sides. On the one side, very strict, moralistic grandparents, and then that influence from my dad, and then, on the other side, a much more permissive attitude, but then my aunt, who would visit us every few years and pester me about Jesus.

So your mom and dad, obviously, grew up in very different traditions and understandings of God, but they married, and they had a family. So during the time when you were a child, your father was obviously very religious. You said rather moralistic. And your mom, did she come to believe in God because of her aunt or your father? 

Yeah. My dad actually rebelled against my grandparents, who were extremely strict.

Okay. 

But they still dragged me to church. But we went to church with them sometimes, and it was the, you know, I’m wearing a suit when I’m 10 years old, that kind of thing. And my mom and dad, my mom was, in some ways, escaping from her family, so she went to a Bible college, and that’s where they met and so on.

Oh, I see. Okay. 

So they took us to church and stuff like that, but the thing about it was, aside from the moral part of it, there wasn’t really any substance within our family, of, “This is what our faith is about.” It was more, “This is how you should behave,”

Okay. All right. So very disciplinary and focused, I guess. Rules and regulations and perhaps rituals of going to church. 

Yes. Shame was a big part of my childhood. And just feeling not good enough, stuff like that.

So I would imagine, if there was a perception of God, it wasn’t positive based upon your personal experience. Did you have any understandings of God or belief in God, that there was an actual God? Or was it just some kind of moral system that you really didn’t want to have anything to do with unless you were forced to do it? 

Yeah. You know, I think I just kind of absorbed what, I guess, most people in my generation, at that age, absorb, which was, “If you act right, if you’re good, be good, God will bless you,” type of thing. So that’s what I thought. It didn’t really occur to me at the time, but it was really just about my behavior. And that’s what I was taught. So it was just much more of a moralistic thing than any kind of… I would say now my relationship with Jesus is much more about love than about punishment. To put it that way.

Yeah, but I can see where, in a family that values discipline that it would be easy to transfer those thoughts of a Heavenly Father being somewhat vengeful if you’re not behaving in a certain way and that you would have a very different idea of who God is, and that your relationship is all based upon your own behavior. 

Yeah, so I should mention I have a lot of memories of my whole family, basically, fighting in the car all the way to church. And then pretending the whole time that everything’s just fine. And then fighting all the way home. So that sort of thing. And then my parents got divorced as well, when I was 14 years old. So there was a lot of tension and conflict. And then balanced with strict moralism. So it was kind of a chaotic upbringing. And again, remember, moving every couple of years and having to be uprooted and start over and make new friends and stuff like that. So it is a unique childhood, I’d say.

Yeah. It sounds like it was really quite different, quite difficult, rather. So as you’re moving along and you’re going through the motions, you’re having this disintegration of your family, walk us on forward from there. 

Sure. So at that point, that’s when whatever faith I had, or beliefs I had about God, started to be challenged significantly. For me, when I had to uproot and move and change schools constantly, my family was really the only constant thing that I had, you know? And then to have that fall apart, it was like I had nothing really left. And so the thoughts that I had at the time, 14 years old, were, “Okay, if my parents went to church and tried to do all this stuff, and this is the result, then forget it. Forget the whole thing. I don’t want anything to do with any of this.” So that’s where I was. That’s where I spent high school and about the next ten years after that.

So if you rejected what you had been taught, essentially, or raised with, you’re rejecting God and Christianity, but were you specifically embracing a particular worldview or particular identity, like atheism or agnosticism? How would you have thought of your world or reality around that time? What was religion? 

Yeah. Religion was something I didn’t want to have anything to do with, so my interests took me elsewhere, so I got into partying and sports. There’s plenty of things to occupy a high schooler.

Did you outright verbally reject God? Did you identify yourself as an atheist around that time? Or did you just kind of move on and just said, “I know what I’m not.” I don’t know exactly what I am, but I know I’m not that? 

Yeah. I’ve always been a big reader and intellectual and stuff like that, but I never really got there with my faith until much later. So at the time, I just rejected it on the basis of my own experience and my own anger, and I didn’t really research for any better reason than that. And it worked for me.

Right, right. It worked. This whole God thing didn’t work for your family and it wasn’t going to work for you. So you just kind of went on to life on your own, right? 

Yeah. It was also quite convenient in high school to feel like I could just do whatever I wanted.

So we were living in Green Bay, Wisconsin, at the time, and it was such a chaotic thing. I have three siblings, a brother and two sisters. My older sister chose to live with my mom, and my other siblings were forced to because of their age. I was the only one that lived with my dad. And there was a bankruptcy involved as part of the divorce, and we were living in an apartment, and I switched schools again, and I just wanted nothing more than to just get out of there. So when I was 16, I went on a… Some neighbors of mine felt bad for us, so they invited me on a canoe trip. So I went on this canoe trip for three weeks in the boundary waters in Canada, and when I came back, my best friend had joined the Air Force. So he said basically, “Hey, while you were gone, I joined the Air Force. It’s going to be awesome. You should do it, too.” So the next day I was at Hooter’s with the recruiter, and he was talking me into it. So I signed. I enlisted in the Air Force in August of 2001, one month before September 11 happened, with the hopes of never coming back to Green Bay, you know? Who knows what’s out there, but it’s going to be better than this. So I did that.

But that was a big change of everything for me, to get out and go. So, like I said, I signed up for delayed entry at 16, and then I went to boot camp in July of 2002 and then finished all my training in March of 2003, and one week after I got to my duty station, President Bush declared war on Iraq. So I’m in a Special Operations wing in now a two-war front. So it was an interesting time.

I can imagine. That would’ve been very, very challenging. It’s a strong time of upheaval worldwide. I would imagine it was a bit frightening. I presume that that kind of experience would affect your worldview, the way that you see reality, and-

Well, you know, as I recall, September 11 really had a big effect, I think, on just the public consciousness of religion. And, for me, it was just more evidence that religion is a bad idea at the time. And I think that’s when a lot of the Richard Dawkins books began to come out and stuff like that.

Yeah. Now you said you were an avid reader. Were you reading some of those new New Atheist books? Literature? 

Actually, I was much, much too busy with my job and drinking to do much reading at the time.

Which might have been a good thing.

So finally I was away from what I thought were all my problems. Of course, most of them followed me. But it was a very transformative time for me. I feel like I didn’t really have any direction beforehand, as far as what I wanted to do. I just wanted to escape. And the military gave me a vision of what could be, and it was taught me that I was much more capable in a lot of ways than I had ever thought, and so on and so forth. So it was a very chaotic four years. I got out after four years. But I wouldn’t trade it for anything, really. And at this point in my story, it sounds like I’ve had it pretty rough, but I’ve got to say I’m really grateful for the difficulties that I had early on. I feel like I learned a lot of lessons much more quickly, much earlier in life, than a lot of people do. So, for example, moving every couple of years, I recognized really early that cultural norms are arbitrary. So I had no trouble recognizing, after experiences like that, that really I needed to come up with my own pace and figure out what I like and not really go along with the crowd. I was much less tempted to just go with the flow. So that’s one [UNKNOWN 19:38].

I would imagine it would make you a bit of an independent thinker in a sense, after you’ve experienced all those different cultures and ways of living. You have to decide for yourself what your life is about and what your interests are. 

Right. And then also, as an outcome of being uprooted so often, I really got into books and novels and stories, and I think I read the Lord of the Rings when I was maybe eight years old. Stuff like that. So those were my friends.

Well, books can be very good friends. Great companions. So you had gotten out of the military. You were having a more confident sense of self. And so what happened next in your journey? 

So actually I think the real turning point for me was a deployment I went on in 2006. I finished my enlistment in July of 2006, so I went on a six-month deployment from January until June. It wasn’t quite six months, January till June, and while I was on that deployment, and leading up to it, I had had a couple of close calls with death. I laid a motorcycle down. Stuff like that. I wrecked a car. I got in some bar fights. And then, on this deployment, I remember contemplating my will. I had to do the out processing and go over my will. I’m 21 years old over there at time. And I remember just thinking, “This is really happening, and I’m really at risk. I’m not safe anymore.” And when I first got there and landed, when I first got involved with that kind of stuff… I don’t think people realize that there’s a blanket of safety. There’s this assumption of safety in America. Really bad things just won’t happen to me. Or when really bad things happen, it’s just kind of a one-off, one in a million. It’ll never happen to me. But when you’re in a place that people are actively trying to kill you, that’s not so. And I didn’t realize until I was there how significant that would be. So I got to thinking about my mortality and about what’s important.

And then also, “What if I die?” I’m 21 or 22, early twenties, with all kinds of dreams and stuff like that. I’d make $15,000, $20,000 on a deployment, which I thought was worth going to the Middle East for six months to make, and you know, come home and buy motorcycles and stuff like that, but along this contemplation of my mortality, it just struck me as so foolish to risk my life for $20,000. Like, “So if I die here, then what do I have to show for it? Not much.” So that led me down this rabbit hole of, “Is there anything worth dying for really?” It can’t be my own stuff. Dying for my stuff would be stupid. Or dying for anything that only belongs to me is a pretty useless thing. So surely none of those things are worth living for, either.

So I started down this path, and also, on that deployment, my sister gave me an iPod, and she had been attending Buckhead Church in Atlanta, so she gave me this iPod with all these Andy Stanley sermons on it. So it was kind of a perfect storm. All these realizations are kind of coming to a point, all at the same time, and I also have an iPod full of Andy Stanley. So we had a couple of sand storms while I was there. We were stuck in a tent for hours and hours. And I’m just listening to Andy Stanley and trying to figure out where he’s wrong. But the thing that struck me about him was… So at the time, I’m 21, 22 years old, trying to find out what it is to be a man. And I’m in an environment where manhood is about being tough, strong, and not taking anything from anyone, and get her done and carry your regrets around because there’s nothing else you can do with them. And the people that I was with, myself included, of course, we were living pretty hard. So I was making bad decisions. And I got involved with women and all that kind of stuff. So I had some regrets that I was carrying around.

And when I listened to Andy. He was twice my age at the time. And I’m thinking, “How is it possible that this guy is so clean?” I just couldn’t believe it. Does that make sense? Like how does he not have this baggage that I have? I’m having a hard time just getting out of bed sometimes, and here’s Andy Stanley, and it seems like he’s got it all together and doesn’t have any problems. So that really struck me. And then somewhere along that whole season, I, for the first time, saw the picture of manhood that is represented by Jesus. And it’s completely different than everything that I believed about what real manhood was. It wasn’t about being strong and coming in power but being humble and coming in meekness. All these things. So there was this sharp contrast. And I began to see that, for example, humility requires much more strength than putting on a strong face, you know? And all these qualities that I found in Jesus were actually more difficult than what I thought being a man was about, being tough, things like that. So that started to turn my world upside down.

So I think that was the first big thing that I was really wrong about. And I recognized I was way off. Does that make sense?

Yes! So when you were listening to Andy give these sermons, were you learning about, not only, I guess, who he was and the kind of life that he led, but the Person of Jesus. Were you learning about Jesus through listening? Or were you reading the Bible for yourself? How was that information coming to you? 

Yeah. I’m not sure whether I had a Bible there at the time. There was a little library on the base, where people had donated books. And I also got a copy of Mere Christianity. But I was just listening to Andy because I couldn’t sleep and just, like I said, trying to figure out where he was wrong. I couldn’t figure it out. But Andy is very practically minded, too, so there’s usually an action item with each message. So I found that very helpful, too. So I wasn’t necessarily trying to solve the philosophy first. This was kind of just the first attractive thing about the faith I had really ever seen. Prior to that, it was always just what people do in order to get blessings from God. And this was, “Wait a second. This is presenting something that you didn’t see before,” and it’s showing me that I was completely mistaken. And that really threw me for a loop.

I bet. I would imagine that being in that kind of environment, where you are in the desert and you’re facing a lot of the big existential questions that, like you say, oftentimes we, in the safety of wherever we are, don’t often think about. We’re often distracted by the next thing or whatever it is we’re doing. But you were actually forced to be in a position, sitting in a sand storm, plus signing papers of potential risk for your life, that it was kind of forced on you to really think about the bigger questions. And sometimes that can be a blessing, although difficult. And obviously, your sister had taken some sort of step in her life towards faith because she was listening to someone who she thought had answers for you. Something to learn.

And what’s also impressing me is that you were open, at that point. You were open to, not only listening, but also self discovering that perhaps you were wrong about a few things. And I think that speaks a lot to who you are. Oftentimes, we’re not willing to go there. If something doesn’t seem right or feel right to us or we don’t want to be impressed with a change. But you were willing to say, “Hey, something’s not right in me. He obviously has something. Jesus is different than I thought.” And evidently, it sounds like Jesus, in the Person that He is, His strength and humility, was attractive to you. 

Yes. The main question that I was wrestling with at that time was, “Is there anything worth dying for?” So I got hurt over there. I broke my back. So when I got back, that was it for my military career. I spent the rest of the time out processing. But I think I got the answer, at that time that… Really, the only thing that I could think of that was worth dying for is love really. And just in contemplating that, I thought about, “Why is it that I do things? Why is it that I joined the military? Did anything.” Really, it all came back down to either trying to get love or give love somehow. I want people to like me. I want people to respect me. I want relationships. It all ultimately for me boiled down to people. And not stuff. Dying for stuff is a foolish thing. So I think that was biggest blessing from that season, is recognizing that, a really fundamental truth, and then also, the flip side is, if it’s really worth dying for, then it’s also worth living for.

So my mission, as I assumed it at that time, was to figure out what that means. So I’m not necessarily focusing on the resurrection or on any of that stuff, or even on the ten commandments or the moral law. I’m really just interested in, “How can I love as well as possible?” because I thought that was the way to have the most meaningful life. Does that make sense?

Yes, yes. You were looking for, really, the point of life, of what matters. And it really is about love and relationships and truth. 

But I had a lot of baggage, too, at the time, and a lot of regrets and bad habits and all kinds of stuff. But that’s how it began.

So, as we’re talking here, when you were considering the Person of Jesus, were you considering Him as the Person of God? Or just a figure in history? Or a good example of humility and meekness and strength? 

Yeah. I don’t think I really turned to really look at Jesus as a whole, aside from just this little interest I had as far as love goes, until I read Mere Christianity. And that was a huge deal for me.

Tell me about that. 

Yeah. So I had read the Narnia books when I was a kid. I remember being in second grade and telling my dad they should make movies out of these things, that sort of thing. And so they had this little mini library where… You know, people sent books and Girl Scout Cookies and all this stuff, so there’s this little stack of books, and Mere Christianity was in there, so I got my hands on it, and I think it was book four of Mere Christianity? I think the subtitle is “What Christians Believe.” I read that, and I recognized that I hadn’t even been exposed… I may have been exposed. I had never noticed any of those things before. If I had made a list of what I thought Christians believe, none of those things were in the chapter.

So what was in the chapter that surprised you of what Christians believe and who they are? 

Well, he does a great job of cutting through all the controversial topics and really getting down to the basics, that Christianity is a process of becoming a new kind of man, of going from death to life, and he’s even got an essay in one of his other collections called, “Nice People or New Men?” And it was just a completely different category for me. I hadn’t thought of it that way, as far as the possibility of God getting involved with me and transforming me. I didn’t even know that was on the table. I thought it was about getting to heaven and being good, you know?

It was about tin men coming to life, right? 

Yeah.

It’s a full transformation of something that once was that becomes something so much more than you thought possible. 

By the way, if I can just mention, there’s a fantastic YouTube channel called C.S. Lewis Doodle, and the entire book is not only read but drawn out as it’s read. So, if anybody’s interested in that, I highly recommend it.

Okay, and we will include that in our episode notes, too, the link for that. So you were finding that Christianity was something very different than what you thought it was and that you were finding yourself attracted to a God who could transform your life because evidently, you had, like you say, some behaviors and many regrets, and that you were looking for a different way of thinking and doing life.

Now, I’ll put on my skeptic’s hat for a moment and just say, “Well, that sounds like it’s something that you might have embraced because it sounds like it works for you, or something that might give you the kind of life you were looking for.” Obviously, you thought it was the kind of belief that would be worth living for. So what it made it so compelling? As an intellectual, you said you are attracted to books. You’re an aerospace engineer. You’re very bright. I’m sure that issues of truth came into play, in terms of, well, perhaps God does exist, and here’s why. Was it just an existential kind of journeying? 

So, just to backtrack a little bit, I’d say, with my parents’ divorce, I lost my faith in religion. And when I was deployed, actually, I lost my faith in humanity at the time. I forgot to mention that, but this is very important. I was involved in both Iraqi Freedom and Enduring Freedom, and I had a different viewpoint than a lot of guys. I was a crew chief on airplanes, so I got to see a little bit bigger picture, Like from a big picture perspective. Like, how is this going to play out? And just seeing war first hand and the destruction of it and just the stupidness of so many of the things. I used to think, when I was a kid, that grown-ups had things under control and figured out, but it didn’t take long for me to be dispelled of those notions through experience. So I really just lost my faith in humanity at that time. And the idea that we, as the human race, were capable of solving sin, really. But also death.

We’ve got these big problems, sin and death. So I was wrestling with that as well. I think the sin and death piece came a little bit after the contemplation about love. But just this idea of we’re all bound by this human condition of sin and death, and it doesn’t matter what amazing technology we invent or how we structure the world or any of that stuff. None of it matters if we’re all going to die anyway. So I started to recognize that. Those really are the fundamental problems I think that everybody is trying to solve in one way or another, whether they recognize it or not.

So you were coming face to face, through your experience of seeing the failures and the brokenness of humanity, the horrors of war-

Seeing caskets come back.

I truly can’t imagine what that must have been like. I can’t even pretend to put myself in someone’s shoes like that. 

It just further hardened my resolve that, like, “If I get home, I don’t care how difficult it is, I’m going to do it right.” So in other words, “I’ve got to figure out this thing.” “The days of me just living for myself, now that I know what I know, that’s over. I can’t go back to just blissful ignorance.”

So you started putting the pieces together. You were reading Mere Christianity. You were trying to make sense of what you were hearing and seeing and reading. And it sounds like that you started to make steps towards finding what it meant to live well, what it meant to live for more than yourself. I would imagine that seeing the brokenness of humanity in the world, as well as feeling the brokenness in your own self, that there was some attraction to Jesus in terms of finding that Christianity is the belief system, or the reality or the offer, really, of forgiveness. It’s not something that you can be good enough to make up for everything you’ve done or will do. How did the Gospel come into play in terms of your accepting this Christianity, Jesus as being the true or real or life-giving way to live? 

Yeah. I think of it as kind of a two-sided coin. So on the one hand I had no trouble at all acknowledging that I was a sinner. There were even times, I think, that I probably bragged about my sin and stuff like that. So that wasn’t a hard sell. And then also coming to terms with the reality of death. That wasn’t a stretch at all for me, either. So that side of… you know, you’re lost. And there’s nothing that you can do under your own power to do anything about sin and death, really. They’re going to take all of us down. So that side was easy for me to embrace.

But the other side of, but you’re also, at the same time, much more loved than you ever thought. You’re so much more valuable and loved than you ever even imagined. So I still wrestle with it. I still remind myself of both of those things. Sometimes, when I get puffed up, I use the negative side to humble myself. But then, in the course of humbling myself, I use the positive side to keep me from self pity. Does that make sense?

Mm-hm. 

So I think that was a bit of a gradual process. There was another huge turning point that I can get to, but I want to say a few words… After I got out of the military, I went straight to college. I went to the University of Wisconsin. And I’m a nontraditional student at this point. I’m a combat veteran, 22 years old, which is old for a freshman. And I just did not fit in at all. And no one understood me at all. And it was so hard for me. My whole life in the military was all 100% about the mission, and everything that I did was for the service of something much greater than myself. But when I got to college, it really is I think the most selfish season of life. You have to be selfish. All of my time was spent on stuff that only mattered to me. And that was really hard. And then, as far as my faith goes, I tried to plug in and meet other believers, so I went to Campus Crusade. I got involved in Campus Crusade. I joined a Bible study and stuff, but man, I just did not fit in at all. So it was a big struggle for me.

But the turning point for me, as far as how the whole thing fit together for me, in 2007, my first summer of liberty, really, for five years, me and my best friend who I had joined the Air Force with, and we both went back to Wisconsin, so that first summer, I said, “Why don’t we take a road trip out West, and we’ll go visit all the national parks and all this stuff.” I thought that would be good for both of us. So I took him on this road trip, and I had my iPod with all the sermons and stuff like that, so we went all the way from Wisconsin to San Francisco, up through Canada on the way, stopping at every national park, and from San Francisco, he flew home. So, as soon as he left, I switched from listening to music in the car to listening to these sermons. I was just trying to figure out my next steps.

So I was listening to this series of Andy Stanley called, “It Came from Within,” and it’s about the sin that gets lodged in your heart and the verse, I think it’s from Proverbs, “Above all else, guard your heart, for it is the wellspring of life.” And so I thought, “We’ll see what he has to say.” So I’m listening to these sermons. He’s got one about anger, and I thought, “Oh, that’s not really me.” And he had one about greed. And no one thinks they’re greedy. But then he had one about guilt, and it really just rang my bell. It’s like he was saying, “If you are dealing with guilt. If you have this burden of regrets, the way you deal with that is by reconciling with the people that you’ve wronged,” right? So I thought, “I’m with you on the guilt. I feel the burden. But that’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.” So he said, “Make a list of the people you’ve wronged and call them, if you can, and reconcile.” And I thought, “I’ve wronged a lot of people. What’s the use in me calling people that I’ve wronged a few years ago and saying, ‘Hey, I just want to apologize for whatever I did to you and remind you of what a bad person I am.’” So that’s what I thought. So I was wrestling with this.

So two weeks pass, and I get to Colorado, and I had kind of run out of money by that point, so I didn’t want to pay the $30 a night for a campsite at the Rocky Mountain National Park, so I went outside of the park, and I had a GPS. I parked the car at a trail head. I hiked twenty miles into the Roosevelt National Forest and was just kind of wrestling with this idea of reconciling and just my reluctance to do it.

So I was out there for a few days, and one morning, I woke up, and it was a beautiful day, and there was this mountain maybe three or four miles away from my campsite. I think it’s about 11,500 feet high, and I thought, “I’m going to climb to the top of that today,” and I didn’t think it would take too long. I’m a tough guy. I’ve been doing this all summer. So I didn’t even wear a shirt. I left my GPS in my tent. So I’ve got some tobacco and a bottle of water and a knife. I go hike up the top of this mountain, and it’s just stunning, so I had the camera with me. I’m taking panoramic shots. I eat my snack. And I’ve got nothing else to do, so I’m up there for maybe an hour or two, and before I realized what was happening, clouds had rolled in and completely obscured the sun. And that was the only thing that I had to get my bearings from, because I was up on a mountain top going in circles.

So now I didn’t know which direction I had come up from, because I didn’t have the foresight to make a mark or something like that. Just arrogance. So now I’m on the top of this mountain, and I don’t know where my campsite is, so I pick a direction and just start hiking down for about 30 minutes, and nothing looks familiar, so I turn around, and I climb all the way back to the top. By the way, at 11,000 feet, this is no easy task. I’m back at the top. I look around, try another direction, go down another 30 minutes, 30 minutes back up, so I’m three or four hours into at this point, and now it’s starting to get dark. I don’t know where I am. There’s no trails. I don’t have a shirt on.

Oh, my! 

And it had been raining that week, so everything was wet. I couldn’t start a fire. So I realized that I have to set up my camp for the night, so what I wound up doing was I found a big spruce tree with these really broad boughs. I went underneath it, and I dug a hole in the dirt with a stick and then made a huge pile of the dirt and pine needles from the tree, climbed up underneath it, and covered myself with the pile for the night. And hoped that I wouldn’t freeze to death. And I think it was probably about 45, 50 degrees that night and windy. And I did not sleep at all, but I did think about whether or not I was going to call the people I had wronged and reconcile with them. Honestly, I was ready to die. At that point. So there was this belief that had crept in that my problems were much too big for me to ever really get through. The best I could hope for was maybe dealing with half of them or something. So I’m lying underneath this spruce tree, shivering, hoping I don’t freeze to death, saying, “God, if this is it, this is it. That’s fine with me. But if You get me out of here quick and easy, I will do this stupid thing that You want me to do.” And at the time, I thought, “I will prove You wrong. If You want me to prove You wrong, show me how to get back to my tent. I’ll go. I’ll make the phone calls. And that will be the end of that,” right?

So the sun comes up, I get up, I brush myself off. I get up to the top of the mountain, and I pray. So I get down, bow my head, close my eyes, pray that thing, “Lord, You know the deal. If You get me out of here quick and easy, I’ll make the phone calls. Amen.” I lift up my head, and I can literally see my tent. I had a red rain fly on it, and a tree blew and swayed, and there’s my tent.

So I went straight down, straight to the tent, and went to sleep. And then, when I got up, I packed everything up, hiked back to the car, and drove straight to Popeye’s Chicken. It was my 23rd birthday, August 9, 2007, and I started making phone calls. So I think this was the biggest turning point for me because this was the first time that I obeyed something that I did not agree with. And I already had mentioned that Andy’s always done a great job of having an action item. This week, let’s do this, you know? So I did it. And of course I called the ex girlfriend that I was sure hated me the most out of all the people on my list, so that I could very quickly put this thing to rest, but she apologized to me. First off, she couldn’t believe that I had called, and then, through tears, I’m apologizing to her, and then she says, “I think I’m just as guilty as you are, and I’m so sorry,” and you know. “Okay, I was wrong about that one, but I’m sure it’s a one off.” All the way down the list. I called about thirty people. And every single one of them forgave me. So again I was proven completely wrong. Not just a little bit wrong but 180 degrees wrong. So that is really where I think my faith got serious. Because I thought, “If I could be wrong about something like that, what else am I wrong about?”

So what I did is I started studying the Bible, and then when I’d bump into something that I didn’t like, I would do it and find out that I was wrong.

Oh. Wow. 

So through that process, I found that, for me, when I bumped into something in the Bible that I don’t like and then I start making excuses about it and saying, “Here’s the reasons why I’m not going to do what this says,” I recognize that those are actually the signs of conviction, the symptoms of conviction, and those are the big opportunities, the big turning point opportunities, so I started just doing all of them. And that, more than anything else, more than any of the grieving or philosophizing or anything, is what really opened me up to it, because I recognized that I wasn’t qualified to sit as the judge of what is true and false and right and wrong and worth doing and not worth doing or any of that stuff. If I can be wrong about such basic things like that.

And by the way, when these people forgave me, that burden that I had was just lifted off. And I thought, just the day before, I was thinking about how it would take years to work through all of that, years and years and years, but here it is, all done in a couple of hours. And I just can’t get over the epiphany that that was for me.

What amazing transformation it sounded like. What a difficult process in a way, but like you say, what a sudden and amazing transformation, and really, it confirmed that what you were seeking and believing was true. And I imagine that it would also make you think of how God could forgive in such an amazing way, too. All of whatever it is that you had done, or whatever you were feeling guilt about, that all of that could be washed away in a nanosecond, really.

And also restore. Restores.

Yes, yes. So with that repentance comes forgiveness and restoration and that life that you were looking for. So I imagine, at the end of the day then, you have found the life that is worth living, or that there is something worth living for greater than yourself. And you’ve found that in the Person of God, I presume, through Jesus. Is that right? It sounds like you-

Yeah, absolutely.

… yeah. 

So I began to take the biblical language to heart. So essentially what it says about this stuff is I wasn’t just wrong about what real manhood is. I was deceived. And I wasn’t just mistaken about my problems and how difficult they would be. I was deceived. Right? How do I find out what else I’m deceived about? Well, the only way I knew how was to do this. Study the Bible, find something that I don’t like, recognize the symptoms of conviction, and then blast through and obey and see what happens. And by doing that, I was, I guess, gradually, step by step, undeceived. Does that make sense?

Yes. 

And I wish there was more out there on this sort of thing, because I think you can spend a lot of time contemplating truth claims without actually changing your behavior at all. And I don’t know… I could’ve probably gotten stuck in that for a long time, too, but the point at which the rubber hit the road for me was obedience. And Jesus Himself says, “Whoever wants to be My disciple must deny himself and take up his cross daily.” So that’s what I’ve been trying to do.

I believe that adage that it’s not just about information. It’s about transformation. Right? You read for transformation. You seek towards transformation, towards that which is true and life that is truly life. And what an amazing story, Andrew. I’m thinking of those who might be listening. Perhaps there’s someone who, as earlier in your life, has some experiences that were really not their fault. Some of it was. We’re all guilty in some ways, that we bring life and its consequences upon ourselves. But you also experienced a lot of moving around, a lot of difficulties, the horrors of war. A lot of things that might push you away from God. 

But you came through that and towards Him. And I’m wondering, if there was someone listening who says, “I just can’t believe because of everything that’s happened to me.” … But you also read some things that pointed you back towards truth and towards God. I just wonder what would it be or what would you suggest for those who might be curious enough to be open, to listen or to learn? 

I would say be as honest as you possibly can. And genuine. With yourself. The things that you believe, are you really sure about them? Could you be wrong? Also, look at what you’re living for. What is your mission? Is it success or wealth or fame or any other thing that you’re going to lose when this life ends? …You know, the thing about my difficult childhood and all these experiences, of course I didn’t enjoy it, and I wouldn’t wish it on anyone, but after following Jesus, I don’t know how long it took, but He’s really redeemed those things. And I think back on some of the traumatic things that happened when I was a kid, and then I’m reminded of the lessons that those things taught me. Like the stuff that happened to me, it got me to the point where I recognized that love was the only thing worth living for. None of it was enjoyable, but I’m so grateful for it. So I’d say you never know. And so with, “I have so many problems, it’ll take years and years and years, and it’ll be so difficult to deal with them.” The only way to know really how difficult something will be is to do it. I found that it’s actually easier than I thought. And especially after time after time after time, me being proven wrong and scripture and principles outlined by Jesus, the self-sacrificial love and all this stuff being proven right every time I apply it in my life, that’s the basis, really, of my relationship is… You know, God even identifies Himself often as, “I’m the Lord who brought you out of Egypt,” and stuff like that, so I feel the same way about my past. He’s the Lord that not only redeemed me out of a lot of chaos and brokenness but also redeemed the chaos and brokenness itself.

Yeah. I think there’s just a tremendous difference between the moralistic, more legalistic form of religion that you encountered as a child, to wanting to obey Someone Who loves you and has your best interest in mind and wants to bring you out of deception and out of slavery to your own problems and bring you into a life that’s worth living. And you do it because of love and because you trust, because they have your, again, best interest in mind. It’s a very different way of looking at God and at Jesus. It’s not just religion. It’s a relationship of trust and love. 

Right.

So, thinking about those Christians who are listening and who want to impact those who are pushing away from perhaps their misconceptions like you did at one time, their misconceptions of God and religion and Christianity. You said you thought Christianity was one thing, and then you realized it’s something totally different than you what you thought it was. How can you encourage us as Christians to live and love or engage with those who don’t believe in a way that’s compelling, like the person of Jesus?

Yeah. I think it’s really a lot less complicated than a lot of people assume. I found it is really just about trying to love people as much as I can. And I haven’t had a whole lot of success with outright evangelism. I’ve tried, but I have had some opportunities to really show up and love people through really difficult situations. There’s a verse that says it’s God’s kindness that brings us to repentance. And really that’s what brought me to repentance. It wasn’t the fear of condemnation or something like that, so I think kindness and gentleness go a long way. Actually, gentleness brings to mind… One of my favorite passages is actually in 2 Timothy. It’s chapter 2, the second half of the chapter. Beginning in verse 23, it says, “Do not take part in foolish and stupid arguments because you know they produce quarrels, and the Lord’s servant must not be quarrelsome but must be kind and able to teach, not resentful,” and it goes on to speak of the condition of deception that the world is in. So I’ve been very careful.

This is an example of the way the Lord redeemed my conflict with my moralistic grandparents. I’ve been very careful not to be like that to other people. “You’re wrong. You’re going to hell. You need to repent.” That sort of thing. And I’ve put most of my chips more on the love side of the table.

I think you’re pretty safe there. I think scripture says also that they’ll know us by our love, that we are Christians by our love, so I think your words are well ordered and well grounded. So, Andrew, you have really opened yourself up today and given us an amazing story of transformation. I love the fact that you were willing, although you rejected all of it from the beginning, that you can look back and see that perhaps you rejected something that we all kind of reject. We reject the malapplication of religion and moralistic legalism and we reject a lot of things that others reject. But yet you embraced what was actually real and that you were willing to be seen. You were willing to see that you were wrong about some things, and you put your pride down. But you found life at the end of it. You found that thing that you were actually looking for all along. So I just appreciate your story, and I know that many will benefit from it, so thank you for coming on to tell it today. 

Absolutely. It’s been my pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.

You’re so welcome. Thanks for tuning in to the Side B Stories Podcast to hear Andrew Sawyer’s story. You can find out more about Andrew and the resources he mentioned with C.S. Lewis in the podcast episode notes. For questions and feedback about this episode, you can contact me through our Side B Stories website at SideBStories.com. I hope you enjoyed it, and if so, that you will continue to follow, rate, review, and share our podcasts with your friends and social network. In the meantime, I’ll be looking forward to seeing you next time, where we’ll see how another skeptic flips the record of their life. 

From a non-religious home, former atheist Ian Giatti thought God was a character of fiction and fantasy like Santa Claus.  His mind slowly changed as he began to realize the reality and truth of Jesus.

Ian’s Website: https://iangiatti.com

Episode Transcript

Hello, and thanks for joining in. I’m Jana Harmon, and you’re listening to Side B Stories where we see how skeptics flip the record of their lives. Each podcast, we listen to someone who has once been an atheist but who became a Christian. You can see these stories and more at our Side B Stories website, www.sidebstories.com. 

One of the most common objections you’ll hear for rejecting belief in God is a pervasive sense of brokenness and apparent evil in the world, that we wouldn’t see and experience so much pain around us and in our own lives if God was real. The world and our world would and should look much different. Although this objection is common, interestingly, in my research with former atheists, the problem of evil did not register as highly as I thought it would. While 26%, about a quarter, thought suffering in the lives of others was a reason to dismiss God, only 16% said that personal pain led to disbelief. However, pain, when it is felt, it is felt quite personally, and when it is present, it can play a significant role in forming perceptions and understanding of God. It can cause us to ask questions. Where is God? Why didn’t God show up? Why did God allow this to happen? Who is God? Our expectations, however shaped, crumble in disappointment, giving us no apparent option except to embrace a reality without God, or so it is thought. 

It has been said that beauty and pain run on parallel tracks throughout all of our lives. This is a stark reality we must all face. The question is how we must make sense of all that we see and experience in the world and in our lives, of both brokenness and beauty. 

As an atheist, Ian wrestled with these large intellectual and existential questions. I hope you’ll join me to hear him tell his journey from disbelief to belief in God and then stay to hear his advice to curious skeptics or even former Christians in rethinking their faith, as well as advice on how best to engage with who don’t believe. Welcome to Side B Stories, Ian. It’s so great to have you! 

Well, Jana, thank you for having me. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Wonderful. As we’re getting started, so the listeners can know a little bit about who you are, why don’t you tell us a bit about yourself? 

Sure. My name’s Ian Giatti. I work in digital media. I have a family of about four kids. Sorry, I just lost count. Wife and four kids, including a newborn, so that makes us a little on the tired side. We’re out here living in Texas, enjoying life, and trying to just walk with the Lord every day.

Wonderful, wonderful! Four kids, including a newborn. No doubt, you’ve got a very busy household! 

A very busy household. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. I’m an empty nester, so I’m on the opposite end of that spectrum, but I do miss those days. There’s nothing better than a house full of kids to bring life to your life. 

Yeah. I can just say a big thank you to my wife, because she makes it all go, so I’m grateful for her.

Wonderful. Well, you’re with us here today because you used to be an atheist, but you’re no longer. You actually are a Christian. So why don’t you start us back, so we have a better idea of how your atheism was formed. Just starting from the beginning. Tell me about the house in which you grew up. Tell me about your family. Was church a part of that picture? Was there any belief in God? What kind of heritage were you handed as a child? 

Yes. I always tell people I grew up in a loving secular home. Both my parents, who did the best they could, were great parents overall. Loved me. Did everything they could to support me. I had an above-average childhood. I was in the entertainment industry as a young boy, got to go travel places and see things and do stuff, and boy, it was a blast! My upbringing was awesome. And I think that that kind of throws people off. Because most people think of atheists, former atheists, as, “Oh, well something bad must have happened to you,” or, “You must have seen the dark side of things too early,” or what have you. And that wasn’t really the issue with me. We grew up in… It was a non-religious household, but we celebrated Christians, celebrated Hanukkah. We would pray from time to time, even though I don’t think any of us, parents included… we kind of really understood all of that, right? But we just kind of figured, “Well, that’s kind of what people do.” And I remember I have photos of my childhood where I would be on my knees praying. I don’t know why I was doing those things. I didn’t go to church with any regularity, rarely at all. But again, that wasn’t because my parents were against it or anything else. We just enjoyed being a family, and that was kind of our sanctuary, really.

And I think it was… The journey through childhood. I see it in my own kids, too. You get past a certain age where you have that childlike faith or understanding or belief in what you’re told, and then you which to go, “Wait a minute. I have a question. Wait a minute, how come this?” And I think I started receiving more frequently unacceptable answers to my questions. And yeah, that was no one’s fault. It wasn’t my parents’ fault. It wasn’t teachers or people around me. For various reasons. I don’t think people were prepared to discuss theological truths with a child. Generally speaking. At least outside of the church.

Did you have any interaction with any religious people? Were they in your world at all? Where did you grow up? 

I grew up in the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles, California.

Okay. 

So relatively safe, middle class neighborhood. Really just kind of like an average childhood. I had it pretty good, looking back.

Were there any Christians in your world at all? 

You know what’s funny? In my area, there seemed to be more friends… My friends at school… It felt like there were more Jewish people than Christians who practiced, who went to church, who led overtly Christian lives. I felt like I had more Jewish friends. Yeah, we weren’t any religion at all. I went to plenty of Bar Mitzvahs, all those types of events. I was familiar with going to synagogue with friends. I rarely went to church, except for maybe Christmas, because my extended family did so.

But I’ll tell you a funny story: My real first encounter in my memory. When I was 9 years old, roughly 9, I got to take a trip with my mom out to Italy to visit my grandfather, and my grandfather had led a pretty exciting and kind of interesting life, and he was very bold, and when we got there, my mom kind of explained, “Oh, your grandfather might say some things and just ignore him.” And I remember specifically arriving in Italy. I’m like, “Oh, this is cool!” I’m still a 9-year-old kid. We get to my grandfather’s house, and I remember one of the first things he asked me is if I knew Jesus. And I’d never heard that question before. I’m like, “What do you mean?” I know about Jesus. I know who Jesus is, right? But looking back, I finally understood, especially when I got saved, I realized my grandfather was preaching at me. And he was using theological terms. He was using “born again.” He was using things I had never heard. And to be completely honest with you, it was a little bit terrifying because… and I get that now. Because you have someone who obviously found the truth, right? Met God. Had one of those God encounters, and he just wanted to share it with his grandson, and yet I’d never had that one-on-one encounter where biblical truths were being thrown at me. So that cause a lot of… as it does at many family Thanksgivings and other holidays, right? It caused a lot of consternation and disruption, and eventually we kind of smoothed it out and we went on and enjoyed our time. But I remember now specifically that being my real first childhood experience with the truth of Jesus. Not knowing Him, not believing, just hearing something biblically sound about the Person of Christ.

But it sounds like it wasn’t something that drew you in. It was actually something that pushed you away at the moment, because probably you had no paradigm for that kind of thinking or language or taking Jesus any more seriously than a baby in a manger perhaps at Christmas time. 

Yeah! I didn’t have any kind of paradigm. And I’ll tell you what, this kind of actually segues into another childhood story, which is almost the flip side of that story, which is my paradigm of someone who was always watching over me, judging whether I was doing good or bad, and planning to reward or punish me on those things, my only paradigm as a child was Santa Claus.

Sure. 

That’s all I really knew. And I believed. I mean I was a hard and fast believer in Santa Claus for my very young childhood because I just knew it, and Christmas always had such a special place in my heart, and I just remember the joy of Christmas morning. Not just the presents. Of course every kid likes the presents, but even now, you know there’s something in the air, right? Just something changes, and people, they act differently, and family gathers, and there’s just a shift. And I remember enjoying it so much, and I believed. I believed that there was a man that broke into our houses and left gifts for 6 billion children, or 4 billion children in the world, in one single night. I believed it. Until I didn’t. And I realized, “Oh, this is false!” But it wasn’t just the realization of that. The hardest part was that I had been told a falsehood by the people I trusted the most, who again were just doing what parents do, right? Sometimes we tell our kids things that aren’t full truths, half-truths sometimes or outright lies, in order to, in our view, protect them. Or maybe to make things easier or better for them. And it’s one of those very parental things that parents sometimes do. And I understand that to an extent. I do. And I’ve forgiven them for that. I never held that against my parents, but what it also showed me is that, if this Santa Claus paradigm is totally false, then there’s no reason for me to even think that this whole religion paradigm would be true, either. Because it just seemed like a bigger version of that lie, on a grander scale, and on a scale, by the way, that coincidentally governments exploit and other people exploit to oppress people and yada, yada, yada.

And this is again… I’m probably an 11-year-old boy, maybe 12. Things started to click really quickly for me. I’m like, “Oh, wait a minute! Okay, so there isn’t any of this, and it’s just all kind of something people choose to believe in. Okay. No problem.” I wasn’t angry about it, but I also realized, “Okay, well. Let’s just start over.” So that led to a skepticism that really took root from a very young age.

So as you were deciding what you didn’t believe. You didn’t believe in Santa Claus, and you didn’t believe this wishful thinking of God that many people did, this bigger lie, did you appreciate as a middle schooler or even high schooler what you were embracing as any kind of a paradigm of belief? If it’s not religion, what is it? Is it science? Were you thinking, “I’m too smart for that.” What were you buying into in terms of a worldview for yourself? Or were you even giving it any thought? 

Well, I don’t want to over play it as a 16-year-old, doing what 16-year-old boys do, which is a whole lot of dumb stuff. But the more I reflect on my time as a teenager, I think what I started learning to do is live off of my intuition, of my intuitive mechanism, and I started to trust that more. Because it seemed to be steering me, generally speaking, in the right direction, around potholes, away from dangerous things or people, right? And so I began to trust that. So that’s a form of self-trust. I’m trusting in myself. But also there’s not anything innately wrong with trusting your intuition, I think. Like our conscience, God gives us these things as part of our spirit, right? Our soul makeup. To kind of navigate, because it’s a dangerous world, you know? And so I just kind of lived by that, and like most people, as I went into my later high school years and toward college, I thought I was a pretty good person. “I don’t see what the hubbub is about about hell, guys. I know some people who are going there for sure, but definitely not me. I’m better than that. I’m far too qualified for heaven to ever think about eternal judgment.”

So those are vague kind of religious notions you’re talking about here, but you had rejected religion and the reality of God at this point. So when did you really start thinking in terms of identifying as an atheist? Was it around this time, in college, or…? 

So in college, I read everything. I was a voracious reader. I loved reading even from a very early age, and in college, you’re essentially introduced to a buffet of ideologies. Sample a little bit of this, sample that. Put some on your plate. Mix it with that. Figure out what combination you like, and then enjoy, right? And that’s what I was doing. I was reading all sorts of stuff and picking and choosing what rung true to me, what had the veneer of truth, at least, and I decided, “Okay, I’m going to piece it together myself, and I’m going to create my own thing. And that’s what most people do, and that’s what has been the heart of idolatry from the very beginning. They create this own thing, and they say, “No, this is the thing that’s true, that finally sums up how I see the world, and that’s what I’m going to worship.” And that’s how I pieced it together.

And as I did that, especially venturing into more kind of intellectualized ideologies, Zen Buddhism, these kinds of things, I realized, “Okay, well you’re living in this head space of all these intellectual ideas. There’s no room, really, at that point for a God who isn’t seen. There’s no room for a theology that says, ‘Well, all these things are true, but you can’t taste, touch, smell, or see them.’” And so I became a materialist, for all intents and purposes, who said the only thing that is true is what I can encounter with my five senses, that I can verify right now. Beyond that, there is no truth. And that began to coalesce pretty quickly for me. And it colored my relationships. It colored how I approached college itself and the future, so it was pretty significant.

So yeah, absolutely, beliefs and ideas have consequences. How did it affect your life in terms of, if you are a strict materialist, then that means there are a lot of things about yourself that aren’t necessarily true that we take for granted. You talked about your intuition in terms of steering you which way is right and wrong, or that sort of thing, but you lose a lot of things about yourself when you’re a strict materialist, in terms of freedom of choice, for example, or conscience, or the sense of this immaterial me inside who’s making these choices. Did you think that deeply about it? Or did you just say, “I’m a strict empiricist. If I can’t see, feel, hear, or smell, or touch it, I can’t verify it’s true, so everything else is out the window.” I mean, did you really live with those kind of stark implications of your worldview? 

I did. It wouldn’t be till years later, till after I put my faith in Christ, I began to read all these great Christian thinkers who were so articulate in bringing up what you just said articulately yourself. About the loss of so much humanity if our existence is restricted to strict materialism. Boy! It’s like having the cover of a book and the pages in it, but there’s nothing written on it! It’s the software and the hardware, and so no, I didn’t get the distinction because… Look, it’s so obvious even then, just by the fact I was thinking about these things in thoughts that are immaterial by nature, it should have occurred to me, that, “Wait a minute! Hold on! That’s not true,” but I think what happens, and we don’t get into this a lot when we get into Christian philosophical matters, is that the desires, the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, the pride of life had so begun to take root in me that my desires… Now, I was putting those in the driver’s seat, and really saying, “You know what? I’m going to live my life. I’m going to try to be nice to people. But at the end of the day, I want what I want,” and I think that once people understand that’s really the fruit of that kind of philosophical stance, I think there’s a lot to think about there. For sure. Yeah.

When you were living your life like that and just observing the world and learning a lot, were you making any observations about the brokenness in the world? Or things that aren’t quite as they should be. Or maybe I shouldn’t be making the choices that I’m making. Or those kinds of things? Or was everything just kind of status quo, everything great, and life is good without God. God’s irrelevant, and everything. Those intuitions that we have sometimes kind of haunt us at times if we intuit that something’s not quite the way it ought to be. 

Yeah. I knew the world was broken. From a very early age.

So people telling me something, I immediately thought, “Well, I’ve been lied to by my parents. There’s no reason to believe you’re telling me the truth about anything,” so I think I felt like it went all the way down. In other words, the corruption of the world, which I later discovered to be a biblical thought, because it’s a biblical truth. The corruption of the world went all the way down, and as I grew older, and as I dove more into following politics and geopolitical affairs, I was very, very politically involved as far as the news and everything. I went into the news media later on. But I’ve always been a follower of just how the world operates, the currency of the world, right? And it was hard to get away from the idea that it wasn’t just a little bit corrupt, and it wasn’t corrupt in certain areas, but it was totally corrupt, and not just superficially but fundamentally, all the way down.

And when you acknowledge that truth, which it is a truth, it started to really shape how you engage with the world. And so, in my early twenties, which is where I believe we are in the timeline, before this significant life event, that’s really how I came at the world. You’re corrupt, everyone is corrupt, their thinking is corrupt, their behavior is corrupt, so I, too, am now free to engage in that corrupt thinking and that corrupt behavior.

Wow. That’s pretty transparent and very sobering, to really think that that’s the reality of the world. No matter what perspective you’re coming from, but it sounds like you were sober-minded enough to not only acknowledge it but actually almost go with it. To kind of indulge in that sensibility. So you’re moving along in life, and you are, I presume, still skeptical. It sounds like perhaps even a little cynical because you’re able to see, in a sense, this corruption that goes all the way down. And it doesn’t sound like you’re headed towards God at this point. What is it that makes you turn and reconsider this larger question of God? 

It was a long journey. Like I had mentioned, I had grown up in the entertainment industry. I had acted as a child and kind of a preteen, stopped for my high school years, and I began again as a young adult, got into the entertainment industry again. That started picking up. Again, I was in my early twenties, and I was kind of living life and enjoying it, now as a full-fledged adult, on my own, trying to piece together a life, as everyone attempts to do when they’re that age, right? And I thought I was cruising along. I thought, “All right. I’ll get there.” And at age 24, I began experiencing these really severe headaches, crippling. The pain was unbearable. It wasn’t just something you pop a pill and you move on. They were migraines, and they were increasing in strength and frequency, and so I had to get it checked out. No doctors really had a good answer for me. I began to lose some strength in my body. At one point, one doctor diagnosed me with spinal meningitis. It was a serious thing, but no one really knew what was going on. And so finally we went to a neurologist and neurosurgeon who finally determined that I had a congenital benign cyst in my brain that had just either grown or shifted enough to where it was disrupting the flow of fluid in my skull, and it had to be removed. So that was not something most 24-year-olds are really expecting to hear when they’re just chugging along in life.

And that was a very big turning point in my life, unfortunately, and to my shame, not for the good immediately, but all the things, all the plans, all the ideas I had come up with myself in the previous 24 years were basically brought to a halt, and I had to sit there and undergo brain surgery and have my head shaved and have a row of metallic staples there and look like a monster for several months of my life and be taken care of by my immediate family, who helped nurse me back to health and get me back on my feet. I was left to a pretty dark place. And I’m so thankful for it. I wouldn’t have it any other way now that I can look back. But I had to be there. Like I tell so many people, I’m Italian Argentine. I have a stubborn streak in me. And I just don’t listen. And I know the Lord had to do it this way. Because He needed my attention. He got it, again, not immediately in the way that I would like to tell you here and have a great testimony, to just end it and wrap it up. But I do remember the first moment of real faith in my adult life, and I didn’t know it then. But I remember acknowledging, as I was going into this operating room for the surgery, I had no idea if I was coming out the other end or what would come out the other end. And I remember a silent halfhearted almost but sort of a prayer, like, “Well, I guess You’re in charge.” Something to that effect. I remember it.

That is a huge kind of pivot, isn’t it? I mean, when you move from a place where you’re in charge, and then all of a sudden, you have this halfhearted prayer somehow acknowledging someone else or something else is in charge, that you were willing to lift that up to. I would say that’s a pretty big pivot, that you turned that corner. Now, of course that was in a moment. It was a very scary, frightening moment, so I don’t know. After the surgery, did you consider that at all? Or was that something that was just for the moment, and then you left it behind? 

It was a messy combination, because it was a messy time in my life. But I remember, for the rest of my life, to this very day, I always think back to that time because it was such a pivotal time for me, and now having the knowledge I have, biblical knowledge, intimacy with God, understanding exactly what the truth is, now I understand that it was a start of acknowledging His existence. Now that’s not enough. That’s not enough. Lots of people believe there is a God, right? Lots of people. And that he’s all sorts of things. But to acknowledge that as a grown man, it was a start of a journey.

Unfortunately, when I woke up and I began to see the road ahead of me and how I had lost any hope of the life that I thought I was starting to move towards, I grew angry with God. And I grew angry to the extent of saying, “There’s no way you can exist because why am I in this situation? Why am I suffering? How could you possibly be real if you allow people to undergo this?” Now granted, I look back now… I can say this to you now twenty years on and say, wow. There was a lot of self-pity. There was a lot of crying in my own soup, so to speak. So many people have had it so much worse. I was relatively healthy, you know? But the selfishness of having a life planned, and then the sovereignty of God intervening and saying no. Again, that’s a theological truth, and it wasn’t something I was ready for, because I had heard about a God who’d do anything you ask. You’ve just got to ask for it. Like a genie. He’s running here and there for you, and he’s going to do this, and he’s going to do that. And the thought that God would say no so plainly, so resoundingly to me, made me angry.

Yeah. Especially as a young man in your prime. Like you say, 24? That’s when you think you have the world by its tail. 

And I like to always say, though, that you can’t be angry at someone who you don’t believe exists. So something had happened in me where I knew it. I knew He was real. I knew He was active. I knew He was present. I knew He was sovereign. And yet I was very, very angry with Him, that He would allow it to go this way. And that’s obviously a major turning point, because, as weird as it sounds to say it, there was faith there. And I know that now. But that period of my life following the surgery was a period where I said, “You know what? We’re all going to die anyway.” then let’s eat, drink, and be merry.” That’s what life is. Live for the flesh. Live for now. There is no tomorrow. There certainly is no eternity. No heaven, no hell. That’s how I began to live the next six or seven years after that, believe it or not. And increasingly worse, waxing worse and worse. I wish I could tell you that I came out going, “Now, I’m going to be a good moral pagan.” I was a better moral pagan on the other side of the surgery, before I ever had that, because at least I had the veneer, right? Of, “Well, I’m trying to be decent.” That was no longer there.

Okay. Yeah. So then after the surgery… It’s interesting you had this moment, this seed of faith, this tacit belief in God, and then it just went like Katy bar the door. You just let it go, and you just decided to live for yourself basically, it sounds like. 

Yeah. And so I’m thankful for, my then girlfriend, now my wife, who was with me the whole time and loved on me like no human being’s ever loved on me. And we got married.

Did she have any belief in God at all? Or was she an atheist as well? 

You know, she came from a more, an Orthodox background. She’s Middle Eastern, so her family grew up in the Orthodox church, so again, there’s a veneer there of religiosity, right? “Well, we believe these things are true, even if there’s no necessarily personal relationship. There’s an objective acknowledgment that we think these things are true, and etc.” But she would tell you now that she wasn’t necessarily living those truths out.

But she was good to you, it sounds like, and she was with you through all this period of time. 

Yeah, she was. Before we got engaged, right around the time we got engaged, her brother, my brother-in-law, around that time became a radical born-again Christian.

Her brother? 

Her brother, yeah. My soon-to-be brother-in-law. And he was constantly in my face, preaching the gospel, telling me verbatim, “You need to repent, or you’re going to hell,” and I’m so appreciative of that now, but at the time, boy! There wasn’t much more you could say to me that could get me riled up than preaching the gospel. And we just butted heads. And so one day… We were newlyweds. My wife and I had been married less than a year, and she’d been gone all day or a couple of days, and she came home and said, “You need to believe in Jesus, or you’re going to go to hell.” And that was the first time she ever said anything like that to me. She had a glow about her. Everything was different, and that really just terrified me. Because I’m like, “Look, I love you. I know we’ve only been married a few months, but if you want this marriage to continue, don’t bring this up again.” And that wasn’t a very comfortable situation, obviously. We weren’t sure how this was going to work out. She took a more passive approach. She still went to church and worshiped and did those things, but she didn’t bring it up to me, kind of left me out of it. And I went on my own and would be like, “Okay, so now my wife’s gone crazy, and I need to figure out how to prove to her this is all fantasy. The best way for me to do that is to, instead of parroting what other people say, is to actually read the Bible. And that way I can explain to her, ‘Well, this is why this is false,’ and, ‘This contradicts that,’” and so I began to actually read the word of God.

So what did you think of the Bible before you started reading it? And then, of course, I’d love to know what you thought when you started reading it. 

Just another great religious book, like all the rest, right? There’s a lot of religious books out there. Spiritual, religious. I think, to the atheist, they’re synonyms for each other, and what I’ve always explained to atheists is that actually there’s really no spiritual truth in any of those things because there’s only one Spirit, and He wrote only one book, and when you start to frame it in that dichotomy. You can say, “Oh, well, these things have nice teachings,” and that’s fine and dandy, but at the end of the day, there’s no redemption. There’s no eternal value there. Because they’re just nice words that you can read and enjoy and put on a shelf. Whereas, the only book written by the Spirit of God, the word of God, actually tells you how you can know Him and then how you can spend eternity with Him. And it gives you instructions on how to do that. And it introduces you to the Person who can grant you that.

So that’s how I’ve always seen the distinction now. Before, it was all just big books with nice words and good teachings, and Jesus was just another guy, like Mohammad and Moses and whomever else. I had never heard that Jesus was God the Son. I had only heard Son of God. That didn’t mean anything to me. It meant a diminutive. It meant that He was here on behalf of God, but His name is Emmanuel, because He’s God with us, and I didn’t know those things. And again, I don’t blame anyone for that, but I also look around in my childhood and go, “Where were the Christians telling me that?” There were so many Christians telling me I should do this or I need to believe that, but no one was telling me that God became a man and took on the sins of the world, including mine, to accomplish what I could never accomplish, to do it on my behalf. And I never got any of that. And I think that’s where we fall short a lot, is making sure we clarify our definitions.

So language is everything, so oftentimes we as Christians, we fail to grasp that, to communicate that to atheists or agnostics or whomever it may be.

So, Ian, it sounds like that, when you started reading the Bible, for the first time really, you read it in order to disprove it, to take down your wife’s faith. So what did you find when you started reading the Bible for yourself? 

Jesus. And I don’t mean to give you a pat answer. Those words… I had the version where His words are in red, and I’m telling you… I think I started in Matthew. I’m pretty sure I did. And His words were in red, and every time I went through those words that were in red. It was unlike any other experience I had had reading any other book in my entire life. It was the hearing without the verbal, oral, physical experience of hearing. It was like an awakening at the same time. It was like an alarm clock that I was reading. I don’t know. I’m trying to articulate something that really, for me, has no physical kind of boundaries in which to put it in and articulate. I just… I met Him there.

You met the Person of Jesus, not just a character or a figure in a story or on the page. It was someone who was actually real, it sounds like, that you encountered. 

You know, it’s like. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen this movie. It was a big movie in the 1980s called The Neverending Story, and the boy reads this book, and the book starts talking to him. And he’s like, “What?” And the Person of Jesus began speaking to me. I’m like, “Who’s this written for? This ancient book, written on another continent. How is this talking to me right now?” And that began the final… If the flight started, brain surgery is taking off, we were in our final descent here, really coming into the gospels and going, “Okay, something’s happening. Something’s happening.”

Yeah. So when your grandfather planted that seed when you were 9 years old, asking you if you knew the Person of Jesus, and then here you are in your mid twenties, I guess, mid to late twenties, and then you’re, for the first time encountering this person. It sounds like it’s something so much more real than you ever thought possible, that this person was very real and true. Now, throughout, you’ve talked a little bit about not understanding who He was prior to reading, that He was God who came as a man. You’ve also talked about the gospel, and I wonder if… Was it through reading the Bible that you understood not only Who the Person of Jesus was but also why He came? 

Yeah. And that’s really kind of the crux of all this, right?

I guess the person of Jesus is Who I met reading the scriptures. That was when He became real, and that was really the first encounter of another spiritual truth, right? Which is knowing someone who is not physically present in the room. So when I read His words, I heard His voice. He talks about it in John chapter 10, right? “My sheep hear My voice.” Boy did I hear it! I heard it, and it freaked me out. Because I never expected that. I didn’t know what to expect, frankly, other than just to read it and say, “This is why it’s fake,” and then move on to the next thing. And then everything just came to a crashing halt, and I found myself wandering into Catholic churches because they were the closest and looking around and going… It was empty. Middle of the week. No one there. Saying, “I guess I’ll sit here and fold my hands and pray.” I didn’t know what I was doing. I did that randomly, not sure what I was doing there.

Were you asking your wife about any of this as you were experiencing this encounter with Christ? 

No. I was hiding it from her because I didn’t want her to know. I didn’t want her to think that I was a Christian. I didn’t want her to get any crazy ideas. I just wanted to read this book and then tell her why she’s wrong and call it a day. But no. I hid it from her as best I could.

So you were reading the Bible, and you were still… It sounds like a real approach avoidance kind of thing, that you were being drawn in but yet pushing back. I imagine that you continued some kind of pursuit on your own? Walk us through the next step. 

So we have that going on. We have my brother-in-law continuing to come at me. Very outspoken, bold Christian, constantly using apologetics to kind of come at my worldviews. I had all these… I thought they were lofty ideas, right? And we would get into debates about all sorts of stuff, and he started to make sense, and I was like, “That’s weird.” Because I used to think all Christians were just crazy and they had just kind of given up and decided to believe this crazy thing. And here was this guy speaking truth to me and having it resonate with me as truth, like, “Wow! That makes sense. There’s something here.” That threw me off combined with the stuff that was already going on that we spoke about. And one day, it culminated. When I was home alone and I was, again, reading the scriptures, and I was just overwhelmed, I guess, with the presence of God and I guess what I know now to be really conviction of sin. Me personally, not as a theological construct. Not as an ideological abstract. But as something that I was guilty of, that I had done against a perfect and holy God. And I got on my knees, and I’ve never done anything like this before, and I said, “I’m sorry.” I don’t think I had my eyes closed. I had my head kind of bowed a little bit. And I remember saying, “I’m sorry,” out loud, and there’s no one home. It wasn’t just spoken carelessly. It was spoken deliberately. I knew Who I was saying it to. I knew why I was saying it. And my heart flooded. My mind flooded. I was overwhelmed with all sorts of… I don’t even know what thoughts and sensations, and it felt like something really important had happened.

I did realize, looking back, that’s what Jesus talked to Nicodemus about, saying you must be born again if you want to see the kingdom of God. And I knew that’s what God did that day. That is the day that God gave me a new heart, gave me His Spirit, and started me on this new life. And I was never the same after that.

Wow. It sounds like quite a journey, Ian. There was a lot that built up to this moment of you getting down on your knees and surrendering to the person that you not only thought was real but also true, and the one who was actually there, as Schaeffer says, the God Who is there. I’m impressed, also I think that you are, as someone who is thoughtful about ideas, that you were a skeptic by nature. You’ve had this sensed personal encountering with God, but yet you had your brother-in-law challenging you intellectually with ideas from the Christian worldview that made it sound substantive and true, especially as compared to what you believed. So it’s not just an experience, is what I hear you saying, but it’s also that you can make sense of reality through the lens of the Christian worldview, that it makes sense that the Bible makes sense, that brokenness that you saw in everyone and everything that you referred to a bit ago, that that make sense through a Christian or a biblical lens, that there are things that are broken, that the world is broken and corrupt, that we ourselves are broken and corrupt, but it sounds like you found the remedy for that when you felt guilt because we are all guilty, and you came before the One who was the only One who could remedy that guilt in you and save you. It sounds like everything spiritually, experientially, intellectually, everything kind of all came together, it sounds like, to that point, and then you were transformed. 

That’s a really good summary of it. I think the framework behind that is the realization that Jesus is not a theological construct, but He’s the Lord Jesus. He’s the Person of God. He is not simply an idea that you borrow from and then you mix with all this other stuff over here, but he’s someone you meet, and when you meet God, and it actually is God, the only natural response is to fall to your knees and worship.

I didn’t choose to do that. I didn’t plan on doing that. That wasn’t what I started the day thinking about doing, but however he does it in the spiritual realm, it happened, and all of a sudden, that experiential knowledge, combined with the biblical knowledge I had begun to acquire by reading His word, even a very, really just still in its early stages, right? I didn’t have a great grasp on theology or anything, but just very rudimentary understanding of who Jesus is, right? From the Bible. And everything coalesced and became one thing.

And that’s really what I feel like I would make a point of is, especially as far as atheists are concerned, is that you no longer have these realms in which you filter all your thoughts and ideas through, which is how I lived my life. I went through this political realm, through kind of this biological realm, and then it becomes one stream, and it’s not just theological, it’s also experiential, but one can’t exist apart from the other. It’s married together. And it was like, “Boom!”  This great big blast went off, and the tunnel opened, and of course I didn’t see any of those things. I’m speaking strictly from an intellectual view. It all just came together, and everything finally made sense. Every question I had had as a 12-year-old boy was at least hinted at or immediately answered by understanding that Jesus is God, He is not only real but intimately involved with His creation, and that He’s stooped, humbled Himself into His creation in a way to reconcile those who rebelled against him back to himself, and to know him and to fellowship with him.

And having that all come together, all the other questions I had about, “Why this?” “Why that?” they either were answered by a biblical truth or they didn’t feel as important anymore. Because obviously, if the truth of God is kind of settled onto your life, everything else kind of gets pushed to the sidelines, right? All of a sudden, you’re going, “Oh, wow! I’ve got to navigate this now. This is now the primary focus of my attention and my heart.

Yeah, it’s a huge paradigm shift, the way that you see and experience life. What becomes important and what becomes less important. It sounds like you really did undergo just a full life transformation once you found the person of Christ, and it sounds like just surrendered to Him. It’s a beautiful story, Ian, and I am thinking about these atheists who you’ve spoken to already a little bit or even skeptics, how it’s so easy, I think to compartmentalize and try to think about, okay, making sense intellectually of this and experientially of that, but they can’t coalesce in a way that you have found, and they’re still searching to try to make sense of all of reality, perhaps. Or maybe not. Maybe they’re just perfectly fine in the way that they’re seeing and experiencing life and their own worldview. For those who are listening, those skeptics who may be listening to your story. Do you have any advice for them if they are willing to take the next step or maybe even look at the Bible or anything to find the Person of Jesus like you have? Or to test it? Or anything? 

Before I knew the Lord, I would really come up with these great intellectual arguments. I’d try to be as articulate as I could about why this can’t be true, and I learned about ontological arguments, right? And the cosmological. And then I began to hear all about apologetics, and I began to have answers to all those things. But none of those things matter until you individually, A, decide you want to know what’s real. You want to know the truth. You’re willing to accept whatever it is. You’re willing to accept the truth. I was at that point before I ever was saved. I had started reading everything I could get my hands on because I was ready to… I even, and I don’t boast about this, I just simply added because I wanted to read it from an ideological standpoint, what did it say? I had a copy of The Satanic Bible in my library. Not because I was a Satanist. But I want to know what these Satanists believe. Why did they really think this was true? Crazy enough is I had gotten to a point where I was like, “You know what? If something has enough truth, I’m willing to go all the way with it and believe it. And I think some of these skeptics today, they’re hardened. They’re hardened because they see a hard world around them, a difficult life, a life that seems, in many ways, senseless, and I get that. Believe me, I get it.

And we as believers have to be ready to engage them there, right there. We have to be able to talk about the seemingly meaninglessness of it all. Because let’s be honest, even Christians experience that. … The Apostle Paul talks about the imagination, right? High and lofty things that are brought down by the truths of God. I think a lot of skeptics hold onto those, but at the end of the day, the foundation for many of them, there’s an anger and a hurt. There’s a pain there and a world that’s very painful, that’s very difficult to navigate, and we’ve got to be able, I think, as Christians to engage them on both levels. Because they know it’s true.

They know sin is real. They may not call it that. But they know the world is broken. They see it all around them in every system of life, in every facet they’ve lived, the classroom, the boardroom, the home. It’s broken. Something is terribly wrong with the human race, with humanity, and Christians have the answer. It’s the truth. We just often… I think we gloss over it instead of really engaging them right where they’re at.

Yeah, that’s a good word for both the skeptic and the Christian. Is there anything else, as we’re wrapping up here, Ian, that you want to add? Anything you think we’ve missed? I am curious, at the very end, too, to know what you’ve been involved with since you’ve been a Christian. Any kind of ministry? It sounds like you’re very passionate about making sure that people understand and know what is true and real, especially about Jesus. 

After I got saved, I got plugged into a pretty good, sound, Bible-believing church. We were going there not only every Sunday but sometimes two, maybe even three times a week. I began serving, along with my wife, in children’s ministry, first as a Sunday school teacher, then kind of like a coordinator/overseer of the ministry. I began to lead Bible studies at the jails in Los Angeles County. I got to do Bible studies and worship for inmates, and that was an enormously rich and rewarding experience. I got to take part in an overseas mission trip which was, again, something that… You learn so much. I think that really—and I used to say this all the time when we’re serving. You can believe all the things you say you believe, and that’s great, and that’s fine, but it really… where the rubber meets the road is where you start to put that into practice, when you start to do it when you don’t feel like doing it, and for people who may not be the easiest people to love. That’s where the Lord gets in there, in those dirty nooks and crannies, and does some really unexpected things, and those have been the most rewarding moments. Where I used to think things were mundane, sweeping the floors or wiping down things or cleaning up after other people, picking up stuff, doing that in the Lord is a totally different thing. And again, without Him there, it would just feel like chores or errands, but when you start to put your body in the way, and say, “God, use me in ministry somehow,” He’ll honor that, for sure. So I spent the last ten years or so, a little over a decade, as my kids were born and starting to grow older doing that, and now I’m venturing into kind of a new arena, starting a new project. I started a media company. It’s a fledgling media company called Infinite Burn Media, and I’m really starting to navigate what that looks like, producing all sorts of content, video content, books, podcasting, etc., and so I’m starting that out, and I’m seeing what the Lord has for me there, but I’m excited just to speak candidly and transparently, like I am with you, about where I’ve been, who I’ve been, and Who I met, and how that changed everything.

It sounds like it has changed everything. Thank you so much, Ian, for coming on and being transparent, being forthcoming, and again, so passionate about what you believe and why you believe it, and who you believe in. Thank you so much for coming onto this podcast with me today. 

Thank you so much, Jana. I really appreciate it.

You’re so welcome. 

Psychology professor Dr. Rich Suplita believed science provided the best explanation for truth, and he promoted atheism on the university campus.  Over time, he began to question his own beliefs, and it led him to find truth in Christ and become an advocate for the Christian worldview.

askaformeratheist.com

ratiochristi.org/chapter/university-of-georgia/

To hear more stories about former atheists and skeptics converting to Christianity, visit www.sidebstories.com

Episode Transcript

Hello, and thanks for joining in. I’m Jana Harmon, and you’re listening to Side B Stories, where we see how skeptics flip the record of their lives. You can also hear today’s story and see other video testimonies on our Side B Stories website you can find at www.sidebstories.com.

Each podcast, we listen to someone who has once been an atheist but who became a Christian against all odds. Each story is different. Each journey courses a different path. Everyone has their reasons for belief and for disbelief. There are the reasons that sound good and reasonable as supporting our beliefs, and then there are the real reasons underneath the surface, sometimes presumed and unexplored, sometimes not particularly rational. 

One of the most interesting findings in my research with former atheists was the difference between the reasons they gave for atheism, which they said were mostly based upon reason, science, and evidence, and in hindsight, the real reasons they said why they rejected God and belief in Christianity. It turns out, on self reflection, that one-fourth of them actually rejected God solely for more personal, rather than intellectual or rational reasons. For the remaining three-quarters, it was a mixture of both the personal and the intellectual. As humans, we are holistic beings. We are all susceptible to rationalizing what we want to be true. Of course, our desires and objective truth may line up, but sometimes it’s good to be skeptical of our own beliefs, to look more deeply at why we believe what we believe. 

In our story today, Rich was compelled to examine his own beliefs, first as a Christian, and he found his beliefs wanting. Then, as a militant atheist, he became skeptical of his own skepticism. As an academic and deeply introspective and contemplative thinker, he became willing to look at his intellectual reasons for atheism but also beneath the surface to the real reasons below. I hope you’ll come along to hear what he found along his journey from belief to disbelief and then back to a much stronger belief in God and Christianity than he once knew. 

Welcome to Side B Stories, Rich. It’s so great to have you with me today. 

Yeah. Good morning. Thank you.

So the listeners know a little bit about you. Can you tell us a bit about who you are, where you live, your education perhaps? 

Sure, yeah. My name is Dr. Rich Suplita. My wife, Mary Kathryn, and I, we live in Athens, Georgia, and we do a lot of ministry at the University of Georgia, with Georgia students. My educational background: I did my underground at West Virginia University, which is my home state, and then came to the University of Georgia in 2000. From 2000 to 2005, I was a PhD student, earned my masters and then my PhD in psychology, with an emphasis on neuroscience and psychopharmacology, and I went on to teach as a lecturer at the University of Georgia for about 10 years after that.

Wow. Okay. So you’re an academic by training and history, but it sounds like you’ve moved in a completely different direction from that, and I can’t wait to hear all about it. Now, let’s get into your story from childhood. I know that part of your story is that you were a militant atheist, but you didn’t start that way. Why don’t you bring us into your world as a child? Talk to us about your family, your community, friends, culture. Was God in any of that at all? 

Yeah, sure, absolutely. He was. Very much so. I was raised in a middle class, blue collar family in north central West Virginia, a little town there called Fairmont, West Virginia, and my family and I, we were members of a Church of Christ. And so it was a three-times-a-week thing. We were very much in the habit of going to church. I learned a lot of Bible growing up, Bible verses, Sunday school, all of that, so God was very much in the picture, although it never really resonated with me on a deeply personal level.

So you went through the routine, and I guess the ritual of going to church three times a week, but it never took personally for you. Through that period of time, would you ever say that there was even an intellectual assent to belief in God? Was it something that you had accepted on that level, although you didn’t accept it personally, perhaps? 

Oh, yes. Absolutely. I did believe that it was true, and there was good and bad there. It wasn’t all a negative thing. There were certainly positives. I believed it factually, and I would say, and part of this was a product of the time. In American evangelicalism at the time, there was a big emphasis on fire and brimstone, eternal judgment, and of course, that is a true part of the Bible that needs to be put into perspective, but as a child, I really remember thinking of God as a God who was displeased with me, who didn’t like me, who almost was a God that I was terrified to really approach, and I really think I just had no understanding of grace growing up, and for that reason, it was easy for it to not make its way into my heart.

I went through the protocol that I learned about, “What must a person do to become a Christian?” because I did believe it intellectually. I did believe that it was factually true. I hadn’t even considered that it might not be, and so I wanted to be on the right side of eternity. And so I went through the protocol that my particular denomination offered, and I do remember feeling a certain peace when that happened, but there was no life change. I really went back to being the same kid, the same teenager that I always had been, and there was no real desire in my heart to pursue Christ for truth’s sake, pursue Christ for the sake of Christ being the son of God and true and worthy of my worship.

So you lived with this, I guess, rather tentative belief. Belief in the sense that it wasn’t taken personally or with life change. How long did you express belief in God, and when did doubts or resistance or rejection of that start to come? 

Yeah. So I retained my belief in God and even, I would say, religious practice, going to church, maybe not three times a week, but on a very regular basis, throughout my undergraduate years at West Virginia University. I do think it was some time during that time frame, especially towards the end, maybe the last year, if I’m remembering correctly, that I started, for the first time, really questioning the possibility of, “Well, maybe Christianity is wrong. Maybe there’s some truth here,” but beliefs like, “The Bible is the perfect word of God.” I started to question that. Like many college students do, I really came to question the creation narrative. “Did God create like Genesis 1 and 2 says He did? Or is that just a metaphor for evolutionary processes over billions of years?” And so I was really wrestling with those questions at the time, but I would say that the deep skepticism didn’t set in then. That was something that came more during my graduate school years.

Okay. Because I would imagine, pursuing psychology at the university level, a lot of the coursework is through the framework of a naturalistic or materialistic kind of thinking. Was that influential in your pushing back against these kind of narratives that you were finding a bit unbelievable? 

Yeah, absolutely. And that’s what I really remember. And there are only certain snapshots that, when I look back, stick out in my mind, and of course, you have a whole life that’s being lived there. With anybody’s story. Regardless of whatever direction they’re moving toward or away from, there are a lot of complicating factors. What I remember in terms of the classroom and academia, what I was learning during my graduate school years, there was specifically a History of Psychology class, a seminar for graduate students. We had 15, maybe 20 students in there. I’m one of the students. And I loved this professor. He was a semi-retired professor emeritus, and I just loved his personality. Great guy. I connected with him. He had a very warm heart, was very approachable, but he was, from what I could discern, adamantly a disbeliever in anything supernatural. And that’s where the enemy—I want to be clear this man is not my enemy. We have an enemy of our souls, Satan. But I think that’s where the enemy does his best work, is through people that come into our lives that are very disarming, that we have their words, their beliefs, their philosophies that are certainly counter to the Bible, and so I remember a big part of the class was really instilling this metaphysical position of naturalism, of physicalism, the idea that, when it comes to understanding the brain, the human mind, that is the subject matter of psychology, that really understanding it as a machine is the proper way to view it, that it is a mechanical thing, mechanical problems lead to psychological problems, damage to the brain causes these different types of dysfunction, and consequently, a corollary of that would be that the mind is what the brain does, nothing more and nothing less.

So did that then cause you to question your own spiritual nature? 

Yeah, I think it did. I was still involved with Christianity, but it was becoming more and more in a marginalized sense. But I was previously married. My wife Mary Kathryn was previously married. My now ex-wife and I, we were members of a church when we moved from Savannah up to this area of Georgia, so there was still a connection to Christianity, but I increasingly disbelieved it, I would say. It became something that… What was really resonating to me was science. “I’m a neuroscience student. I do scientific research. This book is outmoded. It’s outdated. Hey, maybe there are some good things in there. Religion’s not all bad. It can give a person a sense of culture and kind of the background, a way to connect with family and certain friends,” but in terms of it being objectively true, I had pretty much checked out at that point.

So, this religion that you had intellectually believed, you found very strong intellectual reasons to leave it behind. 

Right. In terms of my personal conviction… At that point, the question did God exist, I probably would say, “I don’t know.” I would have probably said, “Probably not. There’s probably not a personal God Who is described in these books that we call the Bible. That’s probably much more myth and legend, embellishing different nationalistic stories in the Old Testament, a lot of wishful thinking in the New Testament, among desperate people, and that’s… I didn’t think about it a lot, but I think that would characterize pretty much where I was at the time.

Yeah. So you left it behind. I guess for many years of your life you had believed it, but I guess in your twenty-something, as you became educated, you became, I guess in a way, too smart to believe that kind of superstition. 

Yeah.

You mentioned or inferred, I guess, that Christians essentially were uneducated, perhaps a little bit ignorant, and they believed that a book that just doesn’t hold up to what an educated person would actually believe. So as you’re moving forward, what are you finding? Do you move into atheism by default? Or does it become more of an intentional decision and identity? 

Yeah. I think there was actually both of those. I think there were two phases there. I think that kind of what I have been describing up until this point was more by default, more passive. You know, you’re in graduate school, and I remember I still went to a Bible study the first year or two that I was on campus at UGA as a grad student, and you become sort of like a family with your lab partners. Your major professor, the fellow graduate students. You just do life with these people. You do classes, seminars, go to conferences together. They really become like your siblings, and they jokingly got me a little action figure Jesus for a birthday present one year, and I thought it was hilarious, because I wasn’t an evangelical Christian by then. I just was still going to Bible study, but I was… The first couple of years there, it was funny for them to playfully, gently mock, shall we say, my residual beliefs. But as I said, during that trek through grad school, I became more and more influenced by these folks. Their worldview. Their politics. Their devotion to science. That was such a strong association, and we know that the word science can be used in many different senses, right? But the idea that I’m a scientist. You know, “Science says X.” This topic of the Bible or Jesus or the apostles, that’s religion, and that’s a far inferior way of knowing and experiencing reality than the scientific method is. And so that was the passive part of it.

The more deliberative stage really came, I think, in the aftermath of being on the receiving end of divorce documents, and I think, in retrospect, a lot of that had to do with emotional pain that I didn’t understand at the time as pain, but it was, I think, reflexive and sort of catapulted me more into what we might call militant atheism.

It’s interesting that you revealed that, that there was some kind of emotional pain that catapulted you into a more militant atheism. I’m trying to hear and possibly infer the connection there. Why emotional pain would push you towards a more militant atheism. Why do you suppose that was? 

Yeah. And I want to preface my statement with I’m just talking about myself.

Right. 

I want to be clear. I’m not trying to insinuate that all atheists are angry people who are mad at God. I can’t speak for them. They have their own stories, and when they tell me, I listen to them, and I believe what they say. For me personally, in my own situation, I really do think it was a disappointment with God more than a disbelief in God. Because again I had sort of jettisoned the Bible, but the idea that there was something higher, a higher power. I would go back and forth. The psychologist in me would say, “Well, that’s just a residual thing from your childhood, going to church,” but there was something that seemed to go beyond that. But I was disappointed in this God for my own failures, for the failures of my marriage, my family, the fact that I was not going to be a daily presence in the life of my three daughters anymore. And that was the big one. That was the big one, more than, I think grieving the actual dissolution of the marriage, it was, “We’re not going to be an intact family anymore,” and there was a sense… I don’t know if I really thought of it in my mind at the time this way. I don’t think I would’ve put it into these words, but there was really a sense in which God or the universe or whatever you want to call it, my higher power had failed me or let me down.

So, yes, I can see then where disbelief would be both intellectual and personal or emotional in that sense, that there were a lot of reasons to push away from this God who you once believed as a child. So how long were you in this particular phase of your life? And what did that looking like, walking as a militant atheist? 

Somewhere around the year 2002 and 2003, I checked out, and then my return to Christianity, at least in terms of believing it to be factually true, and maybe we can get into this more later, was late in 2011, and so I’m going to say roughly an eight-year period of time that I would’ve said… And at the time, I would’ve never thought that there was any possibility of me ever calling myself a Christian again, like, “That was my past, that was my childhood, those were my formative years, I left that behind,” and the idea that I would ever go back there would’ve almost been laughable to me at the time.

Did you move into a strongly atheistic community that was reinforcing and supporting your ideas? 

Yeah. I think so. I do remember coming across The God Delusion, which was probably the most popular of what are called the New Atheist books, of course that one by Richard Dawkins. I would say that was really my entrance point to a more militant variety of atheism. Like, “I’m not just a skeptic now. I’m actually going to wear, to own, to appropriate this title atheist, and I’m not going to be ashamed of that.” So of course I read Dawkins, and that sort of introduced me to the other New Atheists, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, a philosopher, and I would say probably what ended up being the most influential of all to me actually was the podcast, the internet show out of Austin, Texas, with Matt Dillahunty, Atheist Experience, spending many, many hours, sometimes until two in the morning, watching back episodes of that.

So you were really looking towards becoming very saturated, I guess you could say, in the rhetoric and the language and the thinking, really, of the atheist community. So you walked in that for, it looks like a period of eight or nine years. What started changing your view? If you were so ingrained in that kind of thinking. What happened then? 

Again, you know, it’s challenging to try to really pinpoint specific things, but I’ve done that, and again, I don’t think it was one thing, but I really believed that there was sort of, at the same time, an intellectual problem that I was developing with metaphysical naturalism, physicalism, materialism. It goes by different terms. This idea or doctrine that all that exists is matter, all that occurs is matter in motion. There’s a universe filled with stuff, natural stuff, obeying natural laws, but there’s nothing beyond that. As a neuroscientist, I developed an intellectual problem, and it really focused on the idea, more than anything else, of free will, of choice or volition. I have never found a way to… And this is something that philosophers have discussed at length, but I’ve never been able to reconcile metaphysical naturalism, physicalism, with the idea that there’s some type of capacity in human beings for genuine meaningful choice or volition. And so I really was confused by that problem, and I knew… I saw it as being a problem for my own beliefs, my own worldview at the time, and I think, mapped onto that roughly at the same time was just the experience of being a father to three daughters. That was huge.

I think I had gotten myself to the point, for myself, where I became kind of satisfied that, “Okay, I’m here on this planet for who knows how long? 50, 60, 80, maybe 100 years, and then I’m just going to die one day, and that’s going to be it. Lights out. Fade to black. And it won’t matter because there won’t be a me to be aware that I had ever existed.” One of the things that I would say as an atheist was, when people would bring up this idea of the existential problem, I would say, “Well, does it bother you that you were not alive 100 years ago? Does it bother you that were not alive 200 years ago?” And of course, people will say, “No, because I wasn’t alive yet.” And I’d say, “Exactly, so once you and I are dead, we’re not going to care that we’re dead. We just won’t exist anymore.” So I think I got in a position where I was satisfied with that for myself, but I could never get to the same level of satisfaction with that being true for the lives of my three daughters.

I can see where the existential problem could be dismissed pre and post death, but as you said, when you start looking at the implications of your own worldview and see if they’re actually livable, like trying to say that free choice is an illusion. I presume that you had some differences, then, with Sam Harris and the way that he perceives free well. Or as a neuroscientist, the whole concept of consciousness and where that comes from. So there’s the mental life. But there’s also, again more existentially, meaning and purpose, human dignity, values, those things. From an existential individual perspective, did any of those things also bother you? 

Yeah. I think it did. Especially centered around the idea of justice and human rights. And it’s not something I went as deep in to the time. Now, I think today this has become sort of like the backbone of my main apologetic when I interact with skeptics. But yeah, there was the idea… I remember thinking, at least a bit, about ethical systems, and what is the justification for human worth and dignity and value on metaphysical naturalism, which was the basis for my atheism at the time. I could not get myself past a utilitarian view of that. People are essentially worth… their value, their dignity is tantamount to their value to society, their perceived value or their real value to society, but of course, where does that leave someone who is severely physically disabled or mentally disabled or something like that? Is this a lesser person? And I would think that a person who is going to be consistent with a truly metaphysical position would have to say that that’s true, although there’s something in us that recoils against that notion.

You know, it strikes me as almost ironic that the more that you ventured into atheism, listening to Matt Dillahunty and reading books, that it actually surfaced some issues or some cognitive dissonance in you. The logical endpoint of atheism, in many different ways, is a little bit difficult to take, in terms of when you’re thinking about reality and how just intellectually and experientially things match with reality, somehow that it actually surfaced some areas of tension or cognitive dissonance for you that allowed you to become a little bit more skeptical of your own skepticism. 

Yeah, absolutely. And that’s what I started experiencing. And so I really… How would I phrase this? I checked out on atheism, in terms of its militant variety, in terms of it’s Richard Dawkins esque, Matt Dillahunty esque… For a while there, I really wanted to get something like the Atheist Experience started in Athens, and I thought it was great what they were doing there. I think they called themselves the Atheist Community of Austin, Texas, and I’m like, “Wow, it’d be great if we had something like that here in Athens.” Long about this time, which would’ve been 2010, going into 2011, I’m like, “Okay, this is not my future. I’m not that convinced of these things.” In fact I retreated to a more moderate position. I still would’ve never thought that I would ever, in a million years, become a Bible-believing Christian again, but I wanted to retreat away from the militant atheism, more to an agnosticism, a weak agnosticism, an agnosticism that really appreciated ideas like the idea in NA, Narcotics Anonymous, of a higher power. You know, my higher power. A guide. Some type of spiritual guide that helps me get through life and relate to people and those sorts of things, and so I knew that… I had served at this point, the previous two years, as the faculty advisor for UGA Atheists, a student organization of skeptical students on campus. It had been the Secular Student Association, and eventually, it went back to being the Secular Student Association, but during the years I was involved, it was called UGA Atheists. So I knew that, going into the following year, I was going to say, “No. Hey, ya’ll, I’ve had a good time. This has been fun getting to know you, but I’m too busy. I’m not going to do that again next year.”

 

I came across the… the guys with The Great Exchange outreach.

So what happened there? Who are the guys with The Great Exchange outreach? 

Okay, so yeah, The Great Exchange is an outreach or an evangelistic survey. Which is really just a nine-question survey, so you just ask people walking by, “Hey, do you have a few minutes to take a spiritual interest survey?” And roughly half the people, depending on where you are, will say yes. And so it asks questions like, “Describe your spiritual background. What was that like?” “Do you believe in God?” “What do you think God is like?” “What do you see as the greatest problem in the world today?” “Is there a solution to that problem?” And really it’s kind of a funnel. But the real kicker question is, “If you were to stand before God, and God were to ask you why should I let you into heaven, what would you say?” Well, I skipped a couple of questions. One of the questions is, “Who, in your opinion, is Jesus Christ?” And so you just write down, in a few words, what the person says. The last item is, “If you could know God personally, would you like to?” And if the person says yes, then the idea is you ask, “Do you have about three to five minutes? I would like to tell you what the Bible says, what scripture says about how you can know God personally.”

So it was the first ever Great Exchange event. It was on Good Friday of 2011, which was an extraordinarily late Good Friday that year. I remember. At the very end of the semester. And I was approached as I was walking across the Tate Plaza at UGA, and so what I did is I gave all of the atheistic answers to the questionnaire. And mind you, I had checked out on atheism at this point. The true response for a lot of those questions would be, “I just don’t know. For the past several years, I’ve been calling myself an atheist. I really went kind of extreme with that. That’s not where I am now, but I really don’t know who Jesus is. I’m open to the possibilities.” And so this was the Holy Spirit at work arranging this particular time and circumstance for me to meet some guys, specifically Pastor David Holt. He wanted to know kind of like what we’ve been talking about here. What got me into skepticism, what got me into atheism, where I truly was now, and specifically what did I make of Jesus, what did I make of the claims of Jesus of Nazareth. So we started meeting once a week, on Fridays I believe it was, in downtown Athens at a coffee shop, just to talk about those things.

Well, yeah, that’s interesting that he started by asking you questions. And trying to really get a sense of who you are, what you were thinking, rather than just pounding you with information or what you should believe, that he was actually willing to take the time with you to really explore what your thinking was. 

Right.

So where did it go from there? Did you start studying certain things? How did Dr. Holt lead you? 

Yeah, eventually I did. That was after a few meetings. The first, we talked for about an hour that day, at The Great Exchange, and I believe I gave him my email. I know I received an email from him within a few days, maybe that same night. I don’t remember. “Hey. Great meeting you today. I think your story, what you’ve described is fascinating,” and he asked me, “Why do you disbelieve in God?” or, “What are your intellectual problems with the God of the Bible?” Just a very open-ended thing, and I think he was looking for a more succinct response than what I returned to him, but I probably sent him back about 10 or 12 paragraphs worth of information. And of course I didn’t know David. We’re very close now, but I got a response—anybody who knows David, this will resonate with. It’s like, “Okay, thanks.” I’m like, “Really? That’s it?” But then he followed it up very quickly with, “Can you meet?” “Are you open to getting together, getting coffee, because I really want to talk to you one on one?”

And you can explain maybe more specifically where you’ve been, what journey you’ve been on,” so we started doing that.

Yeah. I’m, I guess, a little bit surprised that you were so willing to meet with a pastor, but it shows that you did have a willingness or an openness to actually explore, at that point. And I think that’s huge. 

Yeah. And he’s just a very… He’s very gifted. He has an amazing ability to connect with people and to hear them, to, I think validate them without compromising what he believes, and just really… And people are eager for that. People are so eager. I’ve heard it referred to as evangelism with our ears, right? Which I’m terrible at, by the way. There’s a lot of room for growth with me, but I’m aware of that, and I try to do better, but asking people the questions and really letting them… It doesn’t matter who we’re talking to, whether it’s an atheistic or an agnostic or a Muslim or a Buddhist, we don’t want to go in and tell them what they believe, right? We want to ask questions and let them tell us, and of course, naturally, that’s going to build rapport and open up doors.

So, as you were having a conversation, and he was asking you questions, was he trying to rebut your points? Or was he just continuing to ask questions? And then where did that lead? 

Yeah, that’s a good point. Unlike me, probably, my tendency, he did not jump on the opportunity to say, “No, you’re wrong about that, and let me give you seven reasons that shows that my position is correct.” Rather, he just really asked the questions and good follow-up questions. I remember, at some point, I think maybe it was the second or third meeting we had, where we’d talked about so many things, and he says, “Well, what would you say right now, at this point, where we’ve been, this journey you’ve been on, one or two of the big issue things that you see that really keep you away from placing your faith in Christ.” And I think that’s a great question, when you’re at that point with a skeptic, and so I thought about it for a minute, and I said, “Okay, well, there are really two that pop into my mind. Number one is evolution.” Okay, this is not where I am now, but I said, “I’m a scientist. That’s what I do. That’s my background. That’s my education. I teach. One of the things I teach here at UGA is a seminar on evolutionary psychology, and this is settled science, and there’s just really no way that I think I can reconcile that with what it says in the book of Genesis.”

Okay, again, my tendency would be to start giving people disproofs. And I’m not saying there’s never a role for that. There can be a role for that, but that’s not what David did. He said, “Okay. What’s the other one?” Rather than objecting, just, “Okay.” He’s still in listening mode. And what a great example. And I said, “Okay, the other one of all the things that could be considered is the doctrine of hell, of eternal punishment, and I don’t understand how it can be just or fair that people would spend eternity in hell, which is infinite punishment, for finite sin,” and again, he didn’t these rebutting. I know he knows good answers to both of those questions, but he didn’t jump in with those, and what he said instead was, he said, “You know, those are really deep questions. You’re going to have to spend some time thinking through those and investigating and reading and praying.” He said, “But we’ve been talking about Jesus, and really that is the bull’s eye. That is the bull’s eye of Christianity, the Person of Jesus, the work of Jesus, specifically the biblical claim, and the claim of the apostles, that Jesus died and rose again, the resurrection of Jesus.”

And that was, I think, at the point where he gave me what we call the 21-day challenge. It wasn’t in the 21-day form. But just a challenge to read the Gospel of John. It has 21 chapters. These are not like chapters in a novel. You can read a chapter in like 3-5 minutes. And so the idea of the challenge is to devote 5 minutes a day, read one chapter a day, and just ask God, say, “God, I don’t even know if You’re real. I don’t know exactly who Jesus is. I would like to know if this book is true. If it’s accurate. If this is giving me valid information and true information about Jesus, please reveal that in my heart in a way that I’ll understand it as a read.

David just gave me the challenge to read the Gospel of John. He’s like, “Would you mind doing that? We’ll meet again next week, next Friday. Between now and then, get out your Bible and read it.” And I told him I would, and I’m thinking to myself at the time, “I don’t mind doing it. I’ll read it.” I didn’t say this out loud: “I’ll read it, but I already know what it says. I grew up in church. I grew up memorizing Bible verses. I know that it says Jesus died and rose again. I know that. So what good’s it going to do me opening up my Bible and reading?”

And so I went home, … I was cleaning my apartment. I’m there by myself. Which I never did. And so I think this is also a divine appointment, right? And I’m dusting one of my bookshelves, and right there, between two of my psychology textbooks, is my old NIV Study Bible from when I was a kid, teenager. And it triggered my memory, and I said, “Oh, yeah! I told Pastor David that I would read the Gospel of John. I have no excuse. Here it is 6:00, 6:30 PM. I’ve got nothing to do tonight.” The semester was over at this point. Grades had been submitted. Nothing but lull time. And I’m like, “I really have no excuse,” and so I sat down there on my couch. As I opened the Bible, I thought again to myself, “What’s the point? It’s not going to make a difference. I already know what this says,” but I said, “Well, I told him I would do it, so I’m going to do it.” And I began reading.

And what did you find? 

Well, a lot of familiarity. Things I hadn’t thought about for years. The stories, of course, sounded very familiar. Jesus meeting the woman at the well in John 3, His discussion with Nicodemus. That was all very familiar territory. And it was… For lack of a better term, it was just fun. It was kind of fun revisiting that territory. And then I got to John chapter 11, which is halfway through. The narrative of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead, and what really… I would say the real turning point, at least in my brain, was His words to Martha. I think it’s John 11:25. Martha’s confused. “Why did You let our brother Lazarus die? If You had been here, he would’ve lived.” And Jesus says, “Well, your brother will rise again,” and Martha doesn’t know what he’s talking about. “In the last day, Lord. I know. At the end of time that he will rise. All of the dead will rise, so he will rise then.” And then Jesus makes that “I am” statement, “I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in Me, even if He dies, yet shall He live, and whoever lives and believes in Me will never die.” And then, the real kicker: “Do you believe this?” And in the context of the narrative, of course, He’s talking to Martha, but I really knew in my heart. That’s just the best way to describe it. I can’t intellectualize this. The skeptics who are listening, I don’t know a way to intellectualize this to them. I’m not trying to. I would just say, in the deepest recesses of my heart, I knew that the Christ, the Messiah, was putting the same question to me, and I knew that my answer was that that I did. I don’t know why. I don’t know how. But I knew that I did believe that. 

That’s amazing! That’s amazing. So in that moment, I’m sure it was a surprise to yourself. 

Yeah, it was.

So at that moment, the whole concept… Pastor David had talked about who Jesus was and His resurrection was the most important question to consider, and here you are confronted with the narrative of Lazarus being resurrected, but somehow it affected you in terms of Jesus saying, “I am the resurrection.” That it was something more than just rational statement, that there was something deeply spiritual about that and deeply real. I’m sure you finished the book of John, and you met with Pastor David. Did that question of Jesus and the actual resurrection of Christ and its association with His proclamation of being the resurrection, did that come into play in terms of your belief or confirming that more intuitive deep personal belief in His statement of who He is? 

Yeah. It definitely did. You know, the question comes sometimes: When was I born again? And I don’t know the answer to that question. I guess I’ll find out if it’s important. Does the time scale really matter? I don’t know. If there was a moment in time, I do look to that moment as being the moment, but I could be wrong about that. I would say, more than anything, it was a seed. It was a big seed. It was a huge seed. But it was a seed that was planted. I knew that my recognition of the truthfulness of who Jesus was and is, that He wasn’t just making a proclamation of what He had the power to do. He was talking about his identity. I didn’t say, “I can raise the dead,” he said, “I am the resurrection.” And I had never seen that before. I knew that verse. That verse sounded familiar to me, but I’d never, ever seen it in that light before, and so that was the real… What I realized at that point in time was, “This truth is going to have to change everything about my life.”

There’s a lot we could go into. But to really bring all of that to fruition took another two or three years. But I could never—even though I tried. There was a point in time where I actually tried to divest myself of all of this. I wanted to go back to secularism about two years later and even tried to, but I could just never turn my back. I could never turn that off in my mind, in my heart, this truth of Jesus is the Son of God. He died, and He rose again. Everything was stripped away, back to that, but it ultimately was that truth that brought me to a point of completely surrendering my life, not just my mind, but also kind of getting off the fence of cultural Christianity, which I would say I was on for the first two or three years of this, finally getting kicked off of that fence in late 2014. It really was that truth that was the anchor.

I can imagine a skeptic listening to your story and just saying, “Oh, you just had an experience. You were looking for something, and you saw what you wanted to see of Jesus when you started reading the Bible, but how does this match with your calling yourself a scientist? How can all of this, the way that you viewed superstition in the past, why don’t you view it that way now?” How do you integrate, essentially, your mind and your intellect with your beliefs? Just because you believe Jesus is the truth, which we do, and that His claim to be the resurrection is true, but how… I can just, again, hear a skeptic saying, “How can you forsake your mind and all that you know about reality?” Were the pieces able to come together? 

Yeah. Well, I think that’s sort of an ongoing thing. I do decidedly come down on the Christian side of this thing now, and I can appreciate their question from their perspective. It’s genuine. It’s a good question. It’s not a question that I can really, again, over intellectualize to them. I can talk about my journey. We can, and we should, point people to resources, to sometimes what we talk about as what’s been called the legal historical case for the resurrection, the changes in the lives of the apostles, their eventual martyrdom, this being the catalyst for Christianity spreading across three continents within its first generation. There’s all of these facts, and I do talk about those a lot, but I am convinced that the Bible makes it pretty clear, going back to John chapter 3 and Jesus dialogue with Nicodemus. “Unless a man is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of heaven.” He’s not talking about heaven or hell there. He talks about that in other places. He’s talking about the ability to see the work of God, right? We perceive, as scientists, as naturalists, we perceive the three-dimensional world around us. Jesus obviously is talking about something that, what would be trans dimensional, something that involves a reality that transcends the three-dimensional reality around us, and He’s saying this is the ultimate and true reality, and a human being can’t even begin to fathom that unless they’ve been born again by the Holy Spirit of God.

Now, of course, that is going to sound like a cop-out to a skeptic. I get it. The only thing I can say is that I’ve experienced that, right? And I don’t know who it was. It was a brilliant mind who said that the man with a testimony is never at the mercy of a man with an intellectual argument, right? I mean I get it, but it’s kind of like you’ve got to really jump in that pool and start splashing around. If you just try to say, “Okay, this is going to be a purely intellectual endeavor to me, nothing more and nothing less. I’m just going to analyze it in a completely rational and logical sense,” I don’t think you can ever get there. I don’t think anyone is ever argued into the kingdom of God that way. There has to be the proverbial door of the heart that is at least cracked open to the possibility of this all being true.

Thank you for that. And I would presume, then, that the cognitive dissonance that you had within your naturalistic materialism or atheism, that some of those issues are resolved even existentially, like being able to explain or ground your freedom to choose, or, like you say, where human dignity comes from, rights and values, or things that like, that it seems that you have a more coherent worldview, not only to think but also to experience. 

Yeah. So one of the groups that we help lead on the campus of the University of Georgia now is called Ratio Christi, and it’s Latin for “a reason for Christ,” so we take on a lot of these apologetics themes and topics. My favorite recently, because I think is so timely… it’s perennial in one sense, but it’s very timely in another… is what we call the moral argument for God, that if God does not exist, then there are no objective moral truths. What is moral? What is right and wrong in a naturalistic framework is just feels. It’s a matter of opinion. It’s a matter of how many people feel strongly one way or the other. But the truth of the matter is that all sane and rational people recognize that there are certain moral truths, moral absolutes, that are not subjective. They’re not open to opinion, right? Human rights, value, things like… You can think of the extreme. Murder is wrong. If a person says it’s okay to murder, it’s not like they have the wrong opinion. They’re factually wrong. It’s not like they have the wrong opinion. They’re factually wrong. When we say racism, there’s a big one. Racism is—when I say that it’s wrong—and here my atheist friends almost always agree with me. Thank God! My agnostic friends agree with me. Buddhist, Muslim, we call could say, okay, well, when we see these racist things happening, people being the victims of race crimes, “Wow! That’s truly wrong.” That’s not just my opinion. That is a moral fact. That’s a moral absolute.

I would understand that as only being possible if human beings are more than stardust. We’re not just the end result of a certain conglomeration of stardust. Being rearranged and reassembled by natural laws over billions of years can never get you to that point where we say humans have objective worth, objective dignity, objective value, and consequently, well, racism is wrong. Murder is wrong. Sexual assault is wrong. That’s not just an opinion. Those are moral facts. And so that, I would say, is one of my favorite questions and discussions to have with my skeptical friends and is certainly something I would encourage fellow believers to look into and at least ask those questions to our atheist friends. “Do you believe that humans have real dignity and worth and value? And if so, according to your worldview, what is that based upon?” And then just listen to them. Don’t try to trick them up or gotcha. That’s not the point. But really just have them think through it out loud with you.

That’s great advice. Rich, it sounds like your world and your worldview both have changed dramatically, not only from the kind of more superficial Christianity you held as a child and a teenager and even early adult, but obviously changed from your militant atheism or even your agnosticism. You’ve come to a place where you seem very passionate about what you believe now and that you’re helping others to understand the same. Or at least challenging in their worldview. I take it that your world and your worldview have changed dramatically. Can you talk with me about how that has transformed your life? 

I would say there was a coherency there that was lacking in my life before. I don’t think I realized at the time, but I think that postmodern secular humanism, which was a big part of what we did in UGA Atheists and that type of advocacy. I wouldn’t say it’s necessarily bent towards radical individualism, but it tends in that direction, right? The emphasis being on self, charting your own path through life, doing good for others, but really in so far as much as it also benefits you. And in one sense, that’s very reasonable, but I would say what change has there been in my philosophy of life since then, just that recognition, that observation that’s so apparent in the New Testament. I think of the verse in Romans where it says that we are individually members one of another. This organism, this spiritual organism that’s what Paul calls the Temple of God, which is the church, not a temple made out of bricks and mortar and those sorts of things, but of individual souls.

And just understanding that my purpose in life, the reason why I’m on this planet for however many more years that the Lord has me here, is to be a functional part of that body. We don’t all look alike. We don’t all have the same role. Paul uses the metaphor of the body. Some are hands, some are feet. Some are mouths. Some are ears in the body of Christ. And God has given me a specific role, and my life is not about the radical individualism that I used to live for. I think most people would’ve said I was a pretty good guy, you know? My peers tended to like me when I was an atheist, and I got good reviews, and people wanted to take that class, and probably in the worldly sense, people thought that I was a pretty good guy, but I know that I was very selfish. I know my life was about me and really nothing beyond that. Understanding now that the church, the body of Christ, being part of that body, announcing the kingdom, these are the things that occupy my time and thoughts and my life now.

Wow! That’s amazing. 

Okay. Yeah. Yeah, so going back to the time leading up to my conversion, really leaving atheism and understanding who Jesus truly is, I remember that my oldest daughter, Annabelle. Her mother, my ex-wife, was still involved in her local church and taking my daughters to Sunday school, and I received a text that says, “Annabelle is going to be baptized two Sundays from now,” and it had the date and the time. And this is while I was the faculty advisor for UGA Atheists, and so I received the text, and… I don’t know. I had mixed emotions right up front. I think it was mostly negative, like, “Why are they inviting me to this? She knows I’m not religious anymore. Is she just trying to antagonize me?” Well, clearly that was, like, okay, that’s not the case. I told a few of my skeptical friends, my atheist friends, and of course, we made the obligatory jokes about if I walked in the building the walls will start shaking and that sort of thing. But then it was actually one of those friends, one of my atheist friends, encouraged me and said, “You know, you probably should go. You probably should just go, smile, take the pictures. Be a good dad. That’s what a good dad would do. It’s not about you. It’s not about what you believe or disbelieve. Hey, you can talk to her about that later.” That’s what my friend told me, and so I said, “That’s good advice. I think that’s what I’m going to do.” And so that’s what I did.

And I went there for her baptism service, and that day, sort of an unexpected thing happened in my heart, and not just that day, but following that. I really experienced a sense of joy, and it wasn’t something I was putting on. It wasn’t just an artifact of being around my daughters, which always made me happy. Well, not always, but usually. Depending on how well they were getting along. But it was a real core joy, a joy that Annabelle had embraced Jesus, and talk about cognitive dissonance. That was extreme cognitive dissonance, because I’m thinking to myself, “Here I am. I’m the faculty advisor for UGA Atheists. I talk against this religion all the time. I go out onto campus and actually try to dissuade people from believing in a personal God and specifically the God of the Bible, and now one of the three people that I love the most on this planet, that I have certainly the deepest affections for, has made this… whatever you want to call it… personal decision for Christ, received Christ, decided to follow Christ, and I’m not angry about this. I’m actually joyful. That’s really confusing to me. If I’m sure that it’s false, if I’m sure she’s making a bad decision by doing this, shouldn’t I be angry? Shouldn’t I have some sense of righteous indignation, where I want to go and talk her out of this, and that’s just not at all where I found myself.

so this was very much the preliminary changes that were getting me to a point where I knew that atheism wasn’t a good fit and I wasn’t going to continue staying with… I would’ve still considered myself very much a secular humanist. I had no intention of changing that. But on the spirituality topic, it was more of like, “Okay, I’m certainly open to spiritual possibilities now.

 So, Rich, as we’re winding up your story, and it’s just really amazing, and it sounds like you have a lot of experience, not only as a skeptic but talking to skeptics. If you have any advice for the curious skeptic who might be listening in, what would that be? 

Yeah. So what I would say is truth exists, and truth matters. One of the things I really liked about the Atheist Movement… I know that sounds strange to say that, but I do believe that this is a good thing, is that myself at the time, and most committed atheists that I talk to today, would affirm that objective truth exists, right? Most of the atheists I talk to are not proponents of relative truth in the ultimate sense. They would say that there is such a thing as ultimate reality, that it has a certain nature, and that we can have discourse and discussion about those things because truth is a meeting ground, right? More than anything, that’s what truth does. It unites and it divides, but it is there, and our quest should be to… It just popped into my mind. One of the things that Matt Dillahunty used to say, of all people; he said, “I want to believe as many true things as possible and reject as many false things as possible.” I think that’s great. That’s one of the best quotes that we could bring to the table here. I do believe that truth exists, and going back to Christ, His claim was not just to teach the truth, His claim was to be the truth. He says, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the father except through Me.” And I do believe that a person with an open mind, a posture of honesty at heart, being willing to go where the information leads, will see Jesus, will come to see Jesus in an entirely new light.

Yeah. And I would imagine, based upon your own experience, too, reading the Gospel of John is probably a good place to start. 

Yeah. Absolutely. Any of the gospels. I have a fondness for the Gospel of John, but if you want to do the 16-day challenge, hey, you can do Mark. It’s not quite as much of a commitment.

Yeah. That sounds good. Kind of short and sweet. He’s a very pragmatic writer. So if there are Christians today… Obviously, there were Christians who played a role in your life in terms of bringing you towards what you now believe as truth, like that pastor, Pastor David. 

David Holt.

Yeah. Yeah. How would you encourage us as Christians to engage or interact with those who are skeptical or don’t believe? 

Yeah, so if you’ll allow me, I’ll preach to myself a little bit. Because I always have to remind myself. I like to debate. I’ve always liked that, regardless of which end of this I’ve been on. It’s always been extremely enjoyable to me for people to push back, and let’s butt heads a little bit. Not in a mean-spirited way, but let’s exchange ideas, and I’ve come to realize that not everyone has the same affinity for that as I have. And there is very much a necessary role of being good listeners. Knowing some good questions, right? They don’t have to be enormously complex. We meet people all of the time. The Great Exchange questions are a great starting point. What was your spiritual background like? Do you believe in God? If so, what is God like? And even if the person expresses disbelief, then well, “Who in your opinion is Jesus of Nazareth?” I think that’s one of the best questions, possibly the best question that we can ask. We don’t ask them telling them what they believe, again. We just ask them because we really want to know. If a person is going to be intellectually honest, then they’re going to have to do something with this historical figure. The person, the man who has undeniably influenced the history of the world more than any other person. What is true about him. What can we know about him? Why did he leave such an enormous impact. And I think those are fair questions for anyone.

I think that’s great advice. Yeah. I can almost see Jesus turning to His apostles and saying, “Who do you say that I am?” And that is the biggest question for everyone. So thank you. That’s very wise. I mean, your story, it has such an arc to it, from embracing some form of Christianity, dismissing it, militant atheism, but then being drawn back to truth. I mean, truth has been a major thread throughout, from the beginning to the end, and Rich, I want to thank you for coming on board to tell your story. I’m sure many people will enjoy it, relate to it, and really be inspired by it, so thank you for the wisdom that you’ve given us today. 

Absolutely. It’s been a real joy.

Thank you. 

Thanks for tuning in to Side B Stories to hear Rich’s story. You can find out more about him by visiting his website askaformeratheist.com, and we’ll include that link, along with the link to his work at Ratio Christi, in the episode notes. For questions and feedback about this episode, you can reach me by email at [email protected]. I hope you enjoyed it. If so, that you will rate and subscribe and share this podcast with your friends and social network. In the meantime, I’ll be looking forward to seeing you next time, where we’ll see how another skeptic flips the record of their life. 

 

Former atheist Leah Libresco rejected religious belief until she encountered intelligent Christians at Yale University. Her search to find the grounding of objective morality led her to God.

Resources written by Leah:

• Website:  www.leahlibresco.com 
• Book:  Arriving at Amen (the story of her conversion from atheist to Catholic)
• Book:  Building the Benedict Option (a guide to building thicker Christian community)

Resources/authors mentioned by Leah:

• CS Lewis
• GK Chesterton
• Allister McIntyre, After Virtue

Episode Transcript

Hello, and thanks for joining in. I’m Jana Harmon, and you’re listening to Side B Stories, where we see how skeptics flip the record of their lives. Each podcast, we listen to someone who has once been an atheist who became a Christian against all odds. You can also hear today’s story, along with other short video testimonies from former atheists, on our Side B Stories website. 

Oftentimes, we think that atheists have nothing in common with those who believe in God, but that’s not necessarily true. Both points of view can equally acknowledge the existence of certain parts of reality, but they have different explanations about what something is and how it came to be. One of those hot topics of debates between atheists and Christians is something we all have a very deep intuition about, that there are certain things or actions in our world that are really right or really wrong, not merely for ourselves but for everyone.

As C.S. Lewis says, if someone cuts in line, we automatically think that’s unfair according to some commonly understood rule or standard of fairness, and that’s certainly the case for much more serious points of injustice.  It doesn’t take a lot of time to consider whether or not certain things are more like vices or virtues.  In our own minds, we are constantly making judgments about whether or not something or another should or should not be the case, whether or not someone ought or ought not to do something. We simply can’t help ourselves in the way that we are constantly judging.  The problem is not that we can’t or don’t know what’s right or wrong. The problem isn’t even that we aren’t capable of living good lives with or without God. The problem is, rather, where we ground those moral duties and obligations as true and real, not merely opinion or preference. 

From an atheist household, Leah Libresco learned to critically analyze ideas from a very early age, fostered into her Ivy League education and beyond. Her intellect drove her to deeply consider the seeming difficulties that lie with the problem of objective morality. It led her to reconsider God. Let’s listen to her story: 

Welcome to the Side B Stories Podcast, Leah. It’s so great to have you with me today. 

Thank you so much for having me.

Leah, so the audience knows who you are, a little bit about you, your education, why don’t you give us an idea of where you live. Are you married? Do you have children? Any of that. 

Yeah. I grew up in New York. I went to Yale University, where I studied political science, and now I live in northern Virginia with my husband and our two daughters.

Oh, wonderful! Wonderful. So let’s start back… You said that you were born or grew up in Long Island? Is that right? 

That’s right.

All right! So you’re from the big city. So why don’t you walk us back to the early part of your life and growing up. Tell me about your family, about your culture. Was God any part of that picture at all? 

I’m from about 40 minutes by train outside the big city. So growing up, that was definitely a big part of my life. I’d go to the Museum of Natural History for my birthday almost every year. But my family wasn’t religious, and I grew up in a community that was mostly nonreligious. I think there probably were some people of faith in the surrounding community, but not in a way I noticed. I didn’t know anyone who believed in God personally that I knew of.

So it just wasn’t part of your world at all.

It was part of my world, in that I knew there were people who were Christians in the world, but not knowing any personally, that meant Christianity was mostly relevant to my life when it made the news, and that was usually in a bad way.

Ah, ah. Yes. That seems to happen a lot, where Christianity gets a very uniquely distorted picture from the news and from the arts many times, and it sounds like you grew up in a very culturally enriched environment, but also heard, obviously, things from the news and that sort of thing about faith or Christians or Christianity. Did you say that you were raised a secular Jew? 

My family is Jewish in our background, but it’s long enough since anyone practiced that we don’t remember the last person to practice. So my family was Jewish by heritage but not particularly in practice in any way.

Okay, so it was more of a cultural, like affiliation, but you didn’t practice the high holy days or any of that. 

No. The closest we got is that we watched the Shari Lewis Chanukah on TV, which I assumed everyone watched growing up, but I have the impression that may not be true.

Okay. So growing up in this environment, you had religion, I guess, as part of the cultural background, and you had bits and pieces of religion in your culture, I guess, with regard to just what happened in the city or in your environment. What did you think religion was growing up? Obviously, it wasn’t for you or for your family. What was it in your mind? 

I thought it was a mistake. I thought it was a mistake people held onto for a long time, in the same way you can have a theory of disease or a theory of physics that’s outmoded, but it takes a while for people to be comfortable with the truth that we understand better. You know, even in what you’d think of as a hard science, like astrophysics, there will be a long transition where people who are very invested in an old model of the world don’t find a new model satisfying. And that’s kind of what I thought Christians were, people who had a false model of the world and who were having trouble adjusting to a true, newer model.

So it was an outmoded way of thinking about reality, about the world. Is that something that was informed, not only by your family, but by your education as well? Were you interested in the world of ideas? What shaped your thinking about all of that? 

Absolutely! Well, I was a teenager during kind of the heyday of the New Atheists, of people like Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, etc., and I think a lot of the way they wrote was really focused on the threat of religion, the sense that religion wasn’t just wrong in a passive, ignorable way, but it changed people’s lives for the worse. It kind of focused on flash points of conflict, teaching evolution in public schools in some parts of the country, and that made it feel more urgent as an error to correct than just a different mistake people might make.

That’s an interesting way of looking at it, because certainly the New Atheists were very strong in their rhetoric against religion, that it was a poisonous thing that needed to be extricated from society, that it was not good for, I guess, mankind or for the world. Did you affiliate basically with their ideas? Did you believe in the way that they believed in this anti-theist kind of way? 

I definitely did. And I will say they pay religion a kind of compliment that people who don’t believe but are willing just to tolerate it don’t, which is that they think religion makes serious claims that matter, that change your life, and if the under-girding logic for those claims isn’t true, then those ways you’d change your life don’t work. And in some ways I find that, now as a Christian, still more respectful than just saying, as someone did to me after I converted, “Well, whatever makes you happy.” And I said, “I don’t care what makes me happy. I care what’s true, and I would hope that, as my friend, you’d care about that for me also.”

Right. So truth was important for you, even as someone who especially as someone who was intellectually minded, who pursued not only your education in a serious way, but truth was very important to your life and the way you thought about things. Why don’t you talk with me a little bit about that, especially as you’re moving in towards higher education and how you made sense of reality in a sense? we all want to make sense of reality, intellectually, existentially, we want to embrace a worldview that makes sense of our worldview and of our world in a comprehensive way that matches with what we know and experience. And you are a very thoughtful kind of brilliant mind, I think, who was pursuing those kinds of things. So tell us a little bit about that. Walk us through who you were more intellectually. 

Well, it’s funny because in some ways, looking back, I see the movement of the Holy Spirit in things like my math classes. Because math was a place where I was really getting to dig deeply into hard questions about what’s real. What’s at the bedrock of what’s real. That’s not always how math is taught, which is a shame, because math is a philosophical proposition, as well as a set of formulas. Its claims about how do we know what’s true? How can we best explore it? And I loved that! It felt urgent and exciting and beautiful and difficult. And it had that sense that it does take work. These questions aren’t easy to answer, but you can be part of a tradition that’s exploring them. You can have a shared set of tools, a shared way of deciding, “These are our axioms. Here’s how we can extend from them to figure out the next true thing we can uncover.” I think the core thing I got from mathematics, which then I brought to philosophy also, was that when we look for the truth, we’re like archaeologists. We’re uncovering something that’s already been laid out before us and trying to make sure we don’t damage it or misinterpret it as we pick it up. We’re not architects who get to build things to suit ourselves. Everything we receive is a gift.

So you were not necessarily of the postmodern ilk of creating your own truth or believing in relative truth as it were, but rather you were discovering truth, like in mathematics. That it was something to be found and not something to be created. That is a very, I would say, intellectually honest pursuit towards truth, and really, in a sense, almost counter-cultural to what was happening in the postmodern world, but you speak of things like math, which was a little bit more, I guess, objective in its nature. But I’m curious, too, as you’re moving along, and I presume that you identified as an atheist. Is that right? 

Absolutely.

In your atheism, as someone who pursues truth, a pursuer of truth, did you look at the existential or even intellectual implications of your own worldview? As you were pursuing these kind of grander and almost abstract concepts in philosophy and in math, what about the existential implications of atheism and naturalism or materialism or whatever you worldview you embraced? 

Well, this is where I found parts of the New Atheist movement a little dissatisfying. Because I’d say that a lot of the people participating in it in good faith were focused primarily on shoring up defenses against religion, or on arguing people out of religion. I think that came from a feeling of being very embattled in America, that people felt so under threat as atheists that there was no room for what you might think of as the luxury of expanding their own philosophy, articulating their own view. It was just about clearing space. But I felt we had some space, and that, if you were going to try to argue people out of religion, you had to argue them into something else. Being an atheist wasn’t my philosophical identity because you can’t simply not believe in something as your creed. What I was initially was someone who was a deontologist stoic. I was interested in an articulation of moral law that was really rules based, rather than outcome based. What’s the right thing to do, no matter what happens, and I cared a lot about what’s in my control? How do I not become attached to things that aren’t in my control and focus all my efforts on where I can make a difference?

And so what was frustrating at the broader atheist movement is it didn’t seem interested enough in what I thought was the really fascinating question. I thought religion was a boring question, so I wanted more space to argue about how should we live our lives? Where do we acquire our sense of the good? How do we fight each other about where those senses differ, so that we can uncover the truth collaboratively, if pugilistically.

Did you ever see any religious people engaging in a deep way in those kinds of discussions? If you got bits and pieces of religion based upon political or perhaps provocative statements or caricaturing in the wider culture, what did you think of Christians? And again, were they engaging in these kinds of deep discussions?

Well, this is where I really lucked out. Because when I went to Yale I joined a political debating group that wasn’t what you might think of as a debate team, where you’re assigned sides at random and you’re kind of seeing how well you can argue for any given idea. This was a philosophical debating circle, where people were arguing only for what they actually believed, because the goal was to change people’s minds, and it was be terrible to argue so well for something you thought was false you changed someone’s mind to that!

Yes. 

And so that was where I was meeting really interesting, smart Christians, who obviously didn’t believe their faith just out of an obligation to their parents or unaware of questions people might ask about it. Some of them were also converts who had considered it and then cleaved to it, and I was given such a gift in spending every Thursday night and every Tuesday night—we met twice a week—arguing until late in the night about any kind of philosophical or ethical question and seeing how people thought about it. And what under-girded their philosophy.

So were you surprised that there were serious-minded Christians who actually thought deeply about these things? Because I know, again, there’s oftentimes a negative stereotyping or caricaturing of who Christians are, and I wonder if any of those negative stereotypes were broken down by actually meeting someone who was so other than what you expected. 

I was surprised. And I also had the benefit of learning the gap between what my Christian friends actually believed and some of the lowest common denominator rebuttals to Christianity that were prevalent among New Atheists. There were ways in which, as I talked to friends, especially Catholic friends, about, “Well, how do you sort out, if everyone has different interpretations of the Bible, how do you have any trust that you’re right?” What they articulated about the magisterium and tradition sounded more like what I was used to in mathematics. You know, we have a long history of how we interpret this. We have processes for adjudicating what’s right. Figuring out something new if someone poses a new question takes a while because we’re cautious about what we articulate as true because we have this deposit of faith it’s our duty to safeguard, not just kind of spout off about.

So obviously, you were able to appreciate, I guess, with this meaningful debate, that the history of Christianity or belief in God has some substance and some longevity and some, I guess, long intentionality, that these concepts and ideas have been discussed and thought about for a long time now. Of course, that in and of itself doesn’t make it true, and you are a truth seeker. So I’m curious. As you were going through these debates on Thursday nights, was it making you question your own view of reality or truth? Or was it opening you towards some potential other explanations of reality? 

I think one of the things that really changed for me is I didn’t think Christianity was self refuting, which is what I would have said, that the claims were incoherent. They didn’t hold together. That you had to ignore big gaps to remain a Christian if you looked at it. And instead, I didn’t think it was true, but gradually, especially through reading C.S. Lewis and G.K. Chesterton, who both made a big difference to me. I thought of it as something that held together from the inside that I thought still was false, but it’s the difference almost between a well-written fantasy or sci-fi book, where you could imagine that that whole world works. It isn’t true. It isn’t where we live. We’re not in this intergalactic civilization, but it feels real, versus the ones that kind of feel thin, that the author didn’t think it all the way through. You can’t imagine the story could continue outside the confines of the book because it isn’t well thought through. It isn’t a full, rich world. And Christianity shifted for me from being one of those kind of schlock y books to being something that could work if it were true. And there were even parts I found attractive about it, but I didn’t think it was true, and I could never believe in something, no matter how well constructed, if it wasn’t founded on truth.

And meanwhile, my own atheism, as I explored it, as I tussled with my friends, it had gaps. It had questions it didn’t answer well, but there was nothing in it I thought was false, so I kind of had the juxtaposition of what you almost might think of as a beautiful, filigreed clock, all put together very well, with centuries of labor, to see how you can get the pieces to inter-mesh, that wasn’t on, that wasn’t running, that wasn’t true, animated by something true, and that was Catholicism. And then on the other hand, I had this patchwork sail with big rents in it and ugly seams, and that was my atheism, but there was nothing in it I didn’t believe. And I figured I had a great deal of the rest of my life to try and make sure I kept working on it and filled in the gaps.

Now, this patchwork sail. You said that there were some rented areas, I guess you could say, of fabric that were a little bit more difficult to take, or really, I guess, understand. Or unanswered questions. Were there any that were so unsettling that it caused you to look beyond atheism? I mean, at the time, it sounds like you really believed that it was true. It just wasn’t perhaps as comprehensive of an explanation as you wanted. What were the tears in the fabric for you?

I think one of the unsettling things was when I moved beyond what I said. Deontology was where I started. A sense of what are the rules? How do you derive these rules? And a certain belief you can derive them logically. You can follow something like the categorical imperative. Whatever I do has to be something I could will for everyone to do. It can’t be a special rule just for me. But I found that that wasn’t as satisfying as I wanted, in part because I realized—and this is partly my own faults and my own sinfulness at the time—because I cared so much about doing the right thing, especially when it was hardest, I found that I was sort of rooting for other people to be bad, so that I could be best! Because it doesn’t feel like there’s as much virtue in being kind to someone who’s kind to you. It feels more satisfying to go, “I’m extremely kind to someone who is unpleasant to me.” And so I wanted to be able to distinguish my virtue in a way that I realized didn’t work. Didn’t work according to the very standards that I cared about, of universalizing things, of not treating myself as a special moral actor.

And I wound up more and more attracted to the claims of virtue ethics, which, instead of kind of starting from a rule book and just how well can I follow the rules, says, “How well can I become the person I am meant to be?” It’s a teleological view. It’s aimed at something. It doesn’t require that morality is something that’s so hard but we do it anyway. It says, in some senses, what I’m made for. And I read a book, After Virtue, by Alasdair Macintyre, that was making this case. It was very moving. I was so excited. I took it, at the time, to the Catholic friend I was most often talking about these questions with, and I said, “Well, this is what I believe. This is what I want to work on as an atheist,” and he said, “Well, you know Macintyre became Catholic, right? He didn’t find that this worked.” And I was so mad, at Macintyre specifically. For giving up. And I was like, “Well, I’m not going to wuss out like Macintyre did. I’m going to keep developing this theory of virtue ethics as an atheist.” Of course, you know where this ended up for me also.

So how far along did you go along that trail? Of really trying to kick against the goads as it were? It strikes me funny, too. You speak of, especially in your deontology, that it didn’t feel good to be kind to someone who was just kind to you, but you wanted to be able to love your enemies, or something to that effect. I wonder if Jesus’ ethics even came into that somewhere along the way. It’s like, “Wow! It sounds like your desires were something along the lines of the difficult ethics of Jesus.” 

I think you’re giving me too much credit, though, because of course when you love your enemy, you love your enemy for their sake, or even for God’s sake, for loving them the way God’s loves them. But I wanted to love them in the sense of, and then I will be so strong. It’s almost virtuous bench pressing, right? Like loving my enemies is bench pressing 500 pounds, and I want to do that. I don’t just want to love nice people, so it’s just the bar, empty.

Right, right. So, again, you were frustrated that Macintyre actually relented in some way, that he betrayed you in some way and became a Catholic, a believer in God. So then you wanted to become this stalwart defender of virtue ethics. So where did that take you? 

Well, so ultimately it took me to what felt like, not a dead end, but a wall I couldn’t see my way past. Something I had to build something new or uncover something new to get over. And that problem was that, if virtue ethics is teleological, if it’s aimed at something, the question is, “Where do I get the sense of who I’m meant to be?” This sense of the final end of man. That’s a different way of framing morality than just, “Let me think logically about what’s fair to everyone.” And that was where I got stuck. Because it felt like morality was a lot like math, which is how I’d felt the whole time in some way. It was real. It was separate from me. It was transcendent. And the question was: How do I come to have knowledge of it?

For math, I didn’t think it was that weird. You’ll find people who disagree, but I found the old kind of Plato explanation pretty satisfying. I can look around the world. I can see my two hands. I can see my two shoes, and go, “Well, my hands and my shoes are of different types, but there’s something that’s the same about them, and it’s that there’s two of each of them. There’s some separate thing that they participate in, and it’s bigger than them. It’s the concept of two itself.” And I found this satisfying for math. You can kind of sneak your way that way into getting the natural numbers, and then if you have the natural numbers, one, two, three, etc., you can get to basically anywhere else in math from there. It just takes a really long time. But it felt like there was a foundation. These things are different than the physical world. I can see them in the physical world, but they’re more than just that.

And when it came to morality, I didn’t have a good way to get there. I thought, “I can claim that I’m doing it the same way.” I can say, “Well, I see someone defrauding an old woman, and I see someone kicking a puppy, and I go, ‘How are these things alike? They both participate in the form of injustice.’” And I think they do, but I don’t think that’s how I work it out. And I couldn’t say with a straight face that was how. The numbers are a lot more obvious than injustice. It didn’t feel like I worked it out by comparing, “How are these things similar?” but like I already knew something about injustice and recognized it in each of them. And the problem was, “How do I know?” “How do I, someone who’s not transcendent, come to have knowledge of the transcendent?” 

So that was a conundrum for you. A turning point or a pivoting because, when you’re dealing with these transcendent concepts and realities, like you say, that’s one thing, and as you’re speaking, too, I’m also thinking the teleological nature even of virtue ethics, it’s going somewhere. And that also is a transcendently grounded kind of concept even, rather than things just are. 

Exactly.

There’s an ought-ness. There’s a way things ought to be. And that’s how we know how to go from A to B, or that we’re getting better, in a sense, or progressing. So I can see, from an atheistic perspective, your worldview breaking down. Somehow these tears and rents are getting larger and more difficult for you. So was this a turning point then, at which you said, “Okay, there has to be a transcendent source. There has to be something more, someone more.” 

Well, it’s kind of funny because it was a… This was the thing that made a turning point possible, but that was kind of a simmering problem. I thought, “I’ll just keep reading. I’ll keep discussing. I’ll see what I can do with this,” and then the bigger moment that this was laying the groundwork for kind of came when I was back at college, after I’d graduated, for an alumni debate. And I just had such a strange feeling while I was there. We weren’t debating a topic related specifically to religion. But I could tell that I sounded like the Catholics, even though they were on different sides of the resolution. It wasn’t that they all believed the same thing. It was a topic like “resolve nationalize the curriculum.” It was something that’s prudential. People can be on different sides. But what they were appealing to and the way they reasoned all sounded similar. They were part of one conversation, and so was I! Which was weird! And I could tell, kind of, if you came into the room and didn’t know anything about religion, and you were just trying to group people in the room based on, “Who sounds like they agree on the fundamentals here?” that I was with them, and this bothered me.

I bet! 

So after the debate, it kept bothering me, and we were having a toasting session, where we make toasts, we pass around a big cup, and I just had the impulse that I should toast the Nicene creed and become Catholic. And that didn’t really make any sense to me, and I thought out, “Well, that’s crazy. Because first of all, I don’t think I know the whole Nicene creed by heart. Second of all, I think toasting the Nicene creed at a debating event is actually not how you become Catholic. Of course, you go through a process of RCIA, and if I were going to become Catholic, I should do it in a Catholic way, not in a weird debate culture way. And third, I don’t believe in God.” And come to think of it, three should have really been one. I don’t know what that was doing as last on my list. And that night, I gave some other cop-out toast. I was just troubled by this. And what was worst is, three months later, I came back for another alumni debate. We have them a lot because we’re all weirdos. And the same thing was happening to me during the debate, that same feeling of which side I was on. So I skipped toasting. I didn’t want to go to toasting. Because I thought, “I don’t want the same stupid problem again.” And so I kind of laid out for him what I’ve been talking to you about, this problem of, “I’m more certain that morality is transcendent. I’m not willing to let go of that, but I can’t articulate how I come to have knowledge of it, and that’s where I’m stuck.”

And so did he, through your conversation, help you resolve this? Or come to a place of awareness or decision? 

Well, what was great is that, I’d been talking through what I talked through with you, that sense of, “Well, I have this feeling about how this can work for math and not about how it works for ethics,” and Ben said, finally, “Well, you’ve kind of gone over with me what doesn’t work for you, but there doesn’t feel like there’s any point in wallowing in that, or continuing to explore it. No matter what, you need to think of something new. So if it’s not that kind of platonic ladder building up, what do you want to think about next?” And I’d spent so much time kind of working the problem over and over in the same place, that that space of freedom to just think of something else… I said, without really thinking about it, “I guess morality just loves me or something.”

That’s an unusual statement. 

It is! And Ben looked pretty pleased when I said it, but I really needed a second then, to sit with it. I’d said it, but did I believe it? And the more I sat with it, the more I did, that if there’s something I have that I can’t reach myself, then I can’t give up the truth that I hold. The question is, “How do I have it?” If I can’t build something up, then it must’ve com e down to me. And once I’m talking about morality that way, I can’t be talking about some kind of inert rule book, because a rule book doesn’t move, right? I’m talking about the form of the good no longer just as a static form, but as an agent, something that acts. And so once I’m talking about goodness itself in some sense as a being that acts, that not just acts or moves but loves, that does this for me. I could recognize who was talking about. Goodness itself lowering Himself to take the form of the slave for my sake personally, for yours personally. I knew I was talking about God and not in some broad encyclopedia entry of God, but I was talking about the incarnation.

Well, that’s a tremendous shift. I mean, that realization that morality loves. I would say that that was a major shift in your understanding and even acceptance of that new way of really looking at the source of morality itself. So I presume that was a turning point for you. 

It was. The next morning was the first time I ever went to church as someone who believed it was true. I’d gone with friends in college, so I wasn’t unfamiliar with it, but that night with Ben was the night before Palm Sunday, and so then I went to church the next day believing that it was God there on the altar, that we were talking about historical truths of what had happened in the entrance into Jerusalem and then what happened after that. That was kind of the conversion of heart of coming to believe that God was, but the preparation to enter the church and kind of the constant conversion that makes up anyone’s life is now not just believing that God is, but knowing Him, spending time with Him, developing a friendship with Him, in a way that even I, as a big math enthusiast, can’t say that I have a personal relationship with the Pythagorean theorem. That was really a big shift also. From, as an atheist, wrestling with the question of God as an intellectual proposition, versus, once that had been settled, coming to know Him.

So as a truth seeker you not only pursued truth as a proposition but truth as a person now, it sounds like. But now you’ve somehow embraced a story which some, I guess, atheists would say, “Well, it’s still not real, and it’s still not true,” but for you it sounds like it is. That it is the true story of reality. Is that what I’m hearing from you? 

Well, except that I would never say, “For me, it’s true.” What’s true is true for everyone. What changed wasn’t what was true for me but what I understood about the world, but everything that’s true was already true. It’s just a question of whether I know about it yet.

Oh, oh. That’s wonderful. Well, this has been a very insightful conversation. I think your conversion from atheism to Christianity is obviously very intellectual, but it’s also very, very personal. As we’re wrapping up, because it sounds like you’ve had a tremendous life change but that there are also very skeptical intellectual atheists who are listening to this podcast. If you had something to say to them in terms of their own pursuit of what is true, what words would you have to offer for them? 

I think the encouraging thing is it’s always worth pursuing what’s true and that you can turn to your friends as a way of exploring ideas, of really delving into tough questions in a way that will strengthen your friendship. I was friends with a great number of Catholics before I converted. I’m still friends with a number of people who aren’t. And in all those cases, as long as we were arguing with the sense of we both love the truth and we want to live in the truth together, exploring those questions made us closer friends. It didn’t pull us apart.

I think there’s a real maturity and grace that comes with that ability to discuss and to debate even ideas without it being a negative exercise, and you obviously have the grace and the intellect to be able to do that well, and I think we can all learn from you in that.

And for the Christians who are listening, obviously we can all take a cue from what you just said to the skeptic, but did you want to add anything with regard to how you would encourage Christians to engage with atheists or nonbelievers? In a sense, Ben did a beautiful job, I think, in leading you to think more deeply about your own ideas. What would you say to the Christian? 

I think it’s to be confident that God is working in everyone’s life and is calling them by name. And in my case, that calling didn’t look like a calling to church for me. It looked like an interest in mathematics, but looking for wherever your friend is ardently pursuing the good, the true, and the beautiful, strengthening that desire, and then really not so much trying to divert them from that but to say, “I have something even more to offer you.” I wanted to know what was good and what was true. And I didn’t think there was a person behind it. I would have been satisfied with a rule book! And the surprise is that God is always responding to our desires for something bigger and better than what we think we’re pursing when we aren’t pursuing Him.

That’s really wonderful. Well, Leah, thank you again so much for giving of your time and telling us your story, and I know that there are some ways that, when people are listening, they’ll want to know more or hear more about you, and we will include some of those contact points in our episode notes. If you want to add something here, you’re more than welcome. 

Yeah, so after I converted, I had that conversion of the intellect, I did write a book, Arriving at Amen, that’s more about the conversion of heart that followed, of learning to pray, learning to think with God instead of just to think about God. And then, a little while after that, I’ve written a second book called, Building the Benedict Option, and that’s about building deeper Christian community wherever you are. Something you can do in the next 4-6 weeks, not something that has to wait for everything in your life to be settled.

Those sound like wonderful resources, and we will definitely include those in the episode notes, as well as any websites or connections with you. Thank you again, Leah, for coming on. It’s been a true blessing. 

Thank you so much for having me.

Oh, you’re welcome. Thanks for tuning in to Side B Stories to hear Leah’s story. You can find out more about Leah by visiting her website at www.leahlibresco.com. We’ll include this website, along with her books, in our episode notes. For questions and feedback about this episode, you can reach me by email at [email protected]. I hope you enjoyed it, that you’ll rate, subscribe, and share this podcast with your friends and social network. In the meantime, I’ll be looking forward to seeing you next time, where another skeptic will flip the record of their life. 

Former atheist Stacy Gleiss traveled across the world and explored worldviews and philosophies until she finally found what was true, good, and beautiful in Christianity.

 

Stacy’s Philosophy Group: Philosophy in the Forest: http://philosophyintheforest.com

 

Authors and Books recommended by Stacy: Soren Kierkegaard Lee Strobel, The Case for Christ C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy Episode Transcript

Hello, and thanks for joining in. I’m Jana Harmon, and you’re listening to the Side B Stories podcast, where we see how someone flips the record of their lives. Each podcast, we listen to a former skeptic or atheist who unexpectedly became a Christian.

On the surface, in a world without God life seems so free. Someone can live without constraints of religion and morality without someone or someone telling you who you are or who you ought to be. You can dream and idealize. You can create and recreate yourself and your identity, your own meaning and your own purpose, pursuing it on your own terms. You can design yourself in your own life, free from criticism or control except for yourself.  It’s called expressive individualism.

But oftentimes the underbelly of this pursuit begins to show. The idealism begins to crumble, and the dreams begin to fade. Satisfaction fades to that which is elusive and fleeting. Temporary pleasure erodes into long-term pain. Poor choices result in deep pain and regret. Perhaps we are not the best judge after all. Perhaps our identity and our ideal cannot be found in what we want or what we think is best for ourselves. After all, identity is fragile if it’s based upon our own passing whims and desires. Meaning becomes meaningless if it’s only determined by what we create or deem important. Temporary pursuits gratify for the moment, but lasting satisfaction seems an ever-elusive dream. As one of the wisest men who ever lived said, it’s like chasing after the wind, and we know that when we sow the wind, we often reap a whirlwind. We cannot run from ourselves and our own brokenness. 

Our story today touches on these personal realities. Searching for identity and meaning and purpose on her own terms, yet finding herself in dark realities and desperate places. Is there something more than this, Someone who can provide a life that is true and good and beautiful?  Let’s listen to Stacy tell her story of moving from darkness to light, from a kind of death to life that is truly life.

Welcome to Side B Stories, Stacy, it’s so great to have you with me today. 

Well, thank you for the opportunity. I’m really happy to be talking to you today.

Wonderful. It’s great to have you. So our listeners know a little bit about you, Stacy, why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself. 

Well, my husband and I live in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, which is the northernmost part, so it’s very cold, and we enjoy a lot of outdoor sports, fishing, hunting, hiking, and so on, and a lot of my time is spent with a tiny house mission center called Philosophy in the Forest.

Well, that sounds intriguing, and I would like to come back to that a little bit later and find out more about what Philosophy in the Forest is. So why don’t we get started with your story. Were you raised in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Has that upper Midwest region of the US been your home since you were a child? Where did you begin your life? And tell us a little bit about your family, whether or not there was any religious belief or anything associated with that? 

Yes. So I grew up in Michigan, in lower Michigan, the lower peninsula, the mitten part, as they say, and I lived on my grandfather’s farm for a good bit of the time. We lived in a rural area. We were not religious. My parents did not talk about God. I don’t even think we owned a Bible. So I didn’t have a religious upbringing, but when I was about 12, my family joined the Mormon church, so we went from 0 to 100, you know? Because that’s a very active, involved faith.

There must have been a strong Mormon community around you, I’m guessing? Is that how your family got acclimated or involved with the Mormon church? 

No, actually it was pretty rare when I was a child. There weren’t that many Mormons around, but my aunts, my father’s sisters, had joined the church at a certain point, and they kind of brought missionaries around us.

Oh, I see. So you had some influence of Mormonism in your life, and I’ll explore that in a moment, but did you have any historical or orthodox Christianity or any form of Christianity around you at all? You said you grew up without much reference to God in your family, but I wonder in your friendships, relationships, in your culture, was there much of Christianity around you? 

Not that I sensed really. I mean, there’s churches everywhere, and you kind of have an idea that a lot of people are Christian, but I didn’t really have any interactions with that until we became Mormon.

Okay. So like you said, back to this Mormon faith, I know that Mormonism does require quite a fully orbed belonging, as well as belief. How long were you and your family in the Mormon faith, and is it something that you embraced personally? 

Well, first I think my parents may have been in about five years, but I left the church a little earlier than they did. First of all, for me, as far as beliefs, I didn’t believe it. Instinctively, there’s such a concentration on Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon that you don’t get enough about Jesus and God, which they do talk about, but it’s kind of overridden by Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon, so I knew that there wasn’t an ancient people living in North America. Pretty much American Indians came here first, so I knew instinctively it wasn’t true, but I was going for social reasons and kind of putting up with it because Mormon kids were nice, nicer than the average kids that I grew up with or were in my school. And I had a lot of rejection issues because of a disfiguring accident when I was five, so the Mormon kids were nicer, and I liked the activities, so on that front, it was good. On the truth front, not so good.

Okay. So it was a great placing of belonging and building friendships and relationships but not so much in terms of substance of belief. 

True.

So even through all of that, belief in a real God or Jesus or anything just wasn’t even on the radar?

No.

But you said that your family left after five years and you left before that. What caused you to leave if it was a good place of belonging? 

Well, it was kind of accidental. It was kind of a passive exit, I guess. It was a casualty of a change in my life that happened when I was 16. I went on a cultural exchange trip to Japan. I became very infatuated with the culture. I saw it as a place of acceptance and meaning, and there was a layer of spirituality with Buddhism there that I thought was interesting, and so I became infatuated with it, and I was quite determined to live there, to the degree that I married a Japanese man at 18.

Okay. Well, that’s a major pivot in your life. 

It is.

When you’re moving from American culture to the Japanese culture, I’m sure there’s quite a lot of cultural adaptation, much less expectations as a wife, and then also you mentioned the spiritual aspect of Japan, which is a lot more Eastern in its influence. Let’s start with the spiritual influence there. You moved from a very kind of Western understanding of a potential for a Judeo-Christian God, but you moved into an environment in which it was, in many religions, even godless. You mentioned Buddhism and that you married someone. Did his family embrace that kind of Eastern religion or spirituality? 

Yes. So you mentioned about the change from a Judeo-Christian American culture. I traded in my culture really not knowing very much, so it was pretty challenging, so whatever I’m telling you wasn’t immediately obvious. I saw all the interesting things about Japan and the acceptance, and I just jumped headlong in, and then I would learn more about the faith. For example, it seems like Buddhism is more of an over layer to their culture. It’s more recent for them. Because their ancient worldview is more feudalistic, honor, shame, the typical things you might think of, and then also a paganistic polytheism, so that’s kind of the under worldview, and then the over worldview has the Buddhist elements, which are a little more, I think, peaceful feeling in a way. And calm. Meditation and everything you might think of with Buddhism.

Did you embrace that personally? 

I think I would have liked to get involved with Buddhism a bit. His parents were definitely Buddhist, and he said he was Buddhist, but he never practiced it. He didn’t pray at the altars or the temples, so sometimes I would sneak in and pray for something at the family altar or at a temple, kind of say a quick prayer for acceptance and for understanding of what it was I was facing, spiritually and otherwise. But he never did those things. And I would come to learn that he had more of an older, ancient culture perspective, the guilt/shame culture and that kind of thing. He was very proud of their warring history, so he really liked that underside and kind of mocked, actually, any spirituality. So that came to affect me, obviously.

I felt acceptance from his parents and from the neighbors, actually, but a lot of rejection in the home, under that kind of underside of the culture, which is more guilt/shame, I guess.

I would imagine that would be quite difficult, in terms of coming from the individualism and freedom associated in the US, particularly the rise even of feminism, and you’re talking about the eighties, so a lot of that had happened in that time, and when you go to a culture like Japan, where things aren’t quite the same, I would imagine that would’ve been challenging in your life. Did you stay in Japan for very long? You said you moved back to the US. 

Yeah. We didn’t stay in Japan as long as I thought we were going to. So we ended up coming back to the US, and then I had children, but even here in Michigan, downstate, especially in the eighties and early nineties, there were large pockets of Japanese families here to support the automotive industry, and we lived in a pocket like that, so our house was always run the Japanese way, according to the culture. There was no duality. The worldview was according to the older Japanese culture and then plus atheism, which my husband was clearly atheist, I would figure out over time. That he just didn’t like any spirituality at all. So that was our worldview in our home, Japanese culture plus older Japanese culture plus atheism, basically, and I came to feel that way, that there was no God.

What did you think, in terms of what you had around you… Granted you lived in a culturally saturated Japanese environment, and your life and your lifestyle at that point was probably really engrossed in that, and you didn’t believe in God, and that was a perfectly obviously acceptable point of view within your family and your surrounding culture. I wonder, did you ever give a thought to God, even as an adult? What did you think religious belief was? Was it a construction? Was it something that was just culturally constructed for people to gather, like the Mormons?

Yeah. I think that that Mormon start kind of had an effect there, too, whereby I thought, “Okay, the Book of Mormon and Joseph Smith, those stories are just not true,” and that’s kind of modeled after the Bible in a way, and the Christian culture, so I thought probably that’s also not true, and it seemed like a crutch as well, so I was pretty ingrained in my atheism by the time… The marriage lasted 14 years, well two years engagement and then 12 years together, so… yeah. By the time I left, I was a full-blown atheist, and on top of that, I had studied existential philosophy near the end of my marriage, and although Christian philosophers come into play there, like Anselm, Augustine, and Kierkegaard, their cases were kind of downplayed. Every time we would get to those particular areas of study, they seemed to be downplayed, and there were so many dominant atheists in the mix in existentialism. So it kind of further backed what I had come to believe.

So you became convinced, more than ever, that there really was not God. That it was just probably a construction of sorts, a social construction. 

Yes. And if I could mention how it felt to me.

Yes. 

What it felt like was I was living in kind of a challenging household culturally and belief wise and with the guilt, shame, and all that, and the rejection, so what it felt like to me, by the time I graduated with my degree in philosophy, was that I lived in a box, this cultural box, and below me was like a false floor, like it was an un up-ended cardboard box, and I was going to fall through, and there was nothing but a black hole abyss under me. And then it also felt like… I thought there should be something above or some hope, some sky, some daylight, and I couldn’t sense that, either, so that kind of feeling caused me to lose a lot. It caused me to lose my… I left the marriage abruptly. I kind of lost my way in my mind, and I lost my children. And so it was tough.

That sounds devastating, devastating. I suppose that, as a thinker… If you are studying philosophy, you think about things critically and existentially, and of course, the endpoint of a nihilistic worldview can be very despairing. There is not much in the way of hope and life and light there, according to those who are proponents of that, those philosophers. And so it sounds like you really hit an endpoint or a point of, again, existential angst because of the logical endpoint of your views. 

Yeah.

Ideas do have consequences. They don’t just live in your mind. They actually affect your life, and I would imagine that could be very devastating, especially in the fact that you’re losing your marriage and your children and you’re losing your own way. So it sounds like the bottom had dropped out for you, and you found yourself in a very dark place, a despairing place. So walk us on from there. What happened during that time period? Or what brought you out of that? 

 

So you just kind of took some steps forward. All the while still embracing an atheistic worldview? Or naturalistic or materialistic worldview, as someone would be more prone to say. 

Yes. That’s right. So my husband was, I said, American, and normal meat and potatoes guy, outdoors-man, and he told me he was Christian, and then I asked him why, because now I’d had a husband who told me he was Buddhist and found out he wasn’t Buddhist. I said, “Okay, so you’re a Christian. What does that mean?” He had no idea. He just said, “Oh, I just believe. I was baptized.” So okay, well, then, I guess I’ll just stay with what I have, but I suppose during my move to this small town, of course now I was seeing more churches. They were popping up into my purview. My coworkers were all American now. So I got this sense, and I think it was a pretty Christian town actually, and I got the sense that Americans were really nice and tolerant and forgiving, and that wasn’t the version of the Japanese culture I got. I got the older version. So I was feeling pretty good about that, and they were probably having an influence on me. The catalyst for my change, I think, was Sally. This woman whom I met over the phone accidentally. That’s quite a story on its own.

Yes. That begs some curiosity. So an accidental meeting on the phone. You met a woman named Sally. I presume she was a Christian? 

Yes. That’s right. Just like I was finding most of the people around me were Christian, or a good portion. So Sally was from another state altogether. She was from California, and I’m in Michigan. So we met accidentally. She was an older woman, and she witnessed to me. We became pals by phone and letter. I didn’t really go for anything she said, but shortly after I met her, a really dark secret came to light, and Sally was there for me.

So I guess that meant a lot. Obviously, you had developed a relationship, a friendship with this woman who seemed to have a faith in God, in Christianity, and it sounds like she cared for you at a time when you actually really needed it. And that opened you? Did that soften you to the things that she was saying about God? 

No. No.

Okay. 

No, it didn’t. So this dark secret was really, really not good at all, and it involved my daughter. She never… I had two children. My son I regained custody of, but my daughter never came back. She was so broken from my leaving and from my breakdown that she wouldn’t come back to me or spend time with me. So this dark secret was revealed by her, and it really turned my world upside down. And my friend Sally sent me a Bible right after she heard about it, and inside the Bible, it had this note, this sticky note which is still there to this day. It says, “This book will contain all the help you need.” And it contained scripture. I paid no attention to it.

Two more years would pass. I’d lose touch with Sally, because she ended up in a nursing home, and she had no relatives whatsoever, so I lost track of her. But between the Christians I lived around and Sally and this burden now of this guilt over my daughter’s situation… Well, I saw a church one day that had a sign that said, “Got Jesus?” or something to that effect and had a class. It mentioned a class. I went online, signed up for it, and that was Alpha. My goal was to disprove the faith, so that I could get Sally and the other voices, whatever they were, out of my mind and then maybe I might try Buddhism again. I might try to understand that better because I never got a chance with that.

So you walked into a church. You had had some experience with church. It was just the Mormon church. What was your experience when you first walked into a Christian church and opened the Bible for the first time? 

Well, the people were all really nice. And the Alpha presentation was tolerable, understandable, kind of nice sounding, and so I stuck with it until… I almost dropped out at about the 11th or 12th week, though. There was a lesson on forgiveness, and having been in a Japanese culture for so long, I just had this sense that I have to carry the weight of the things I do wrong on my back all the time. It’s kind of like sackcloth and ashes or something. I have to do this. So I didn’t like that. I told them I didn’t like it. I thought it was a ridiculous idea that Christ would bear that, and then a member of the group, the church, gave me The Case for Christ book, and I read it, devoured it, and came out thinking, “This is probably true,” and kind of, “Now what?”

So the Alpha course is really presenting an overview of the Bible and the story of God. Who is God? Who are we in our humanity? Obviously, they talked about the need for forgiveness and how we carry some sin, and you wanted to hold onto the burden of your own guilt, and the gospel, or the good news, is that Jesus wants to carry your burden of sin for you, so that you can receive forgiveness for what he did on the cross, rather than what you’ve done to try to remedy your own guilt or sin. But that was too tough to take for you. 

Yes.

So it just didn’t make sense. So you left there, but then you found intellectual confirmation or something that was satisfying for you to believe that it’s true, but there’s a real difference between believing a person came in history and did something on your behalf and actually accepting it personally, and it sounds like there was a great divide there for you. 

Well, it took me a couple of weeks to think, “Now, what do I do?” Because it was, I guess, that offense. The offense of the cross. Am I going to be able to accept that? And so a couple of weeks later, I was at a funeral, my husband’s uncle, whom I didn’t know very well, but I found myself sobbing inside during the whole thing, like something deeply touched me in a way that I can’t even explain today. But when we left, I turned to my husband and I said, “I think I’m Christian,” and I began… At the funeral party, I remember witnessing to other people. “I think I just turned Christian at your father’s funeral.” And they were glad for that because he was a Christian man, so that was kind of interesting.

Yeah. So I guess the pieces came together. You were able to see your own need and accept His gift for you of salvation. 

Yes and no.

Okay. 

So that’s kind of a bump in the road that I came to, still. I thought… So here we are. My husband and I start going to church. I get baptized in Lake Michigan. Life is better. I feel a little relief. I could sleep better. But the bump in the road is that I still retained, unwittingly, a lot of control. That I had to fix things. I had to make things better. Constant. And then, this particularly became an issue when, about five years after I became a Christian in 2010, so it was about 2016, my daughter, who had been back in my life for then about nine years, abruptly left, estranged me. There were a lot of reasons. I hadn’t handled her brokenness well enough, I felt, and she felt that way. So there was still a harshness. I didn’t say this, but there was a harshness to me from being in that culture, a lot of rough edges, and when I accepted Christ at that funeral, my image is the Grinch, like the heart, the little heart that’s in the cage, like the heart’s growing and busting out. So some of those edges smoothed, but it was probably too late, and I still did not give all of my guilt to God. And I realized that…

So she was gone. My husband and I moved up here to our second home here in the Upper Peninsula, where there’s a lot of nature, and there was more time. I didn’t work full time then. And I began to be outside a lot, just walked miles. I walked 10, 13 miles a day, just talking it out with God, and eventually would get so much insight and vision that, while I believed, the fact that I wouldn’t give over my children, and I still idolized my children so much, and I wouldn’t give up the control I needed to keep all the balls in the air and everything right, that that was showing I didn’t trust the gift. I didn’t trust God. And so my belief was too shallow. It was almost… I envisioned like Abraham and Isaac, like I had to say, “No matter what, I believe, and I trust you with these most precious things to me.” So that was the bump in the road that ended up deepening my faith. And that allowed the guilt to almost be completely gone, and then it allowed me to feel joyful and do what I’m doing today. So that’s where I’m at with that.

Yeah. It’s such an oxymoron, isn’t it? The more we surrender and the more that we give, the more joy that we feel, and that’s certainly the case with God and our humanity. We want to retain control. It’s just something that we have to lay down almost daily, almost moment by moment. It is a constant struggle, and it sounds like you had a real, real deep challenge with that, and I’m glad to hear that you’ve learned, in a sense, the joy but the difficulty of surrender.

I’m curious—Stacy, you said that you have come to a place where you are today which is a lot more firm in your faith and your life and the life of your mind coalesce more, and you mentioned at the beginning that you actually have a place, a house of ministry where you talk about philosophy. Now I’m curious because, at the beginning, you were really invested and believed in the existential philosophers, and you felt the despair of nihilism, but there were some philosophers that were put off to the side, you had exposure to, but you really, at that point in your life, had not embraced. I’m curious, then. After you became a Christ follower, you believed in God and Christ and a different worldview altogether, did those philosophers resurface in your life? And how was philosophy really re-framed in your mind in terms of how you see truth and reality and how it applies to your life, and then what you’re doing now with it to help others understand really philosophies talking about the big questions that we all ask about life.

Talk with me about how you were able to put those pieces together. 

I’ll try to summarize that. That’s kind of a big one. So it’ll be almost two years ago now, a year and a half, I started the Colson Fellowship Program. I felt a need to study more. I hadn’t had so much time when I was working full time, and I felt the need to study my faith more and go deeper with it, so at the same time, I wanted to be better at defending the faith for my children. My son still communicates with me, and he’s not a believer, and he has a lot of nihilistic thinking. Both of my children suffered quite a bit. So it was important to me to study apologetics.

I felt such, as a young person, such a need for meaning in my life, and Kierkegaard has the stages along life’s way that show a human being’s kind of progression from what they call a mass-man to a knight of faith. There’s this over-arching paradigm. And so I used that to identify people that I encounter, I guess. So here in the forest, there are all kinds of people, just like there are in the cities or anywhere else. There’s believers. There’s marginal believers. There’s spiritual but not religious. There’s transcendental worldview folks. There’s atheists. We have them all right here in the forest. We have a microcosm of what’s everywhere.

So I used Kierkegaard’s system, these stages upon life’s way, to understand where they are with the meaning of life and where their worldview, along with kind of a worldview survey that I have—I run that through my mind technically. I typically don’t ask them to take it, but they may, and I kind of identify where they are. But this is a lot of relationship building. This isn’t like I bring somebody in and I’m like a spiritual counselor. This is relationship building with people. That’s where philosophy’s a little more relaxed, I think, as a term. They don’t come in expecting I’m going to hit them over the head with my Christianity or my worldview. It’s very open and very soft entry. I call it pre evangelism. But not only do I use Kierkegaard’s philosophy in what I do, but I also use C.S. Lewis. So in order to get to the truth, it feels like the good and the beautiful, which I love G.K. Chesterton for his take on beauty, and I use a lot of his stuff as well. So the good and the beautiful lead one to the truth, I believe. That’s easy to show when you’re up here in such a beautiful place. So I kind of use all of that to bring people to the truth which they can base their meaning of life on and gain fidelity of belief.

No. It really sounds intriguing, and I imagine you foster a great deal of very deep and meaningful discussion, very insightful discussion, and how wonderful that you lead people towards self-introspection, towards introspection of their own views, but also views about reality and leading them to a place of being able to see, perhaps for the first time, what really is good and beautiful, and ultimately true. So it sounds like a really wonderful and very unique work, and it’s intriguing, and I know that you have actually a website, don’t you? Philosophyintheforest.com? 

I do. Yes.

And so anyone who’s interested in seeing more of Stacy’s work can certainly go online and take a look.

So Stacy, as a former atheist—for years, you were an atheist. How old were you when you became a Christian, by the way? 

Well, I became Mormon, if that counts. Mormon was 12, but Christian was… I think I was 46?

46.

Yeah.

So you lived a good long time really looking at the world through atheist eyes. 

Yes.

And I wonder if those who are skeptics or who are actually looking at the big questions, maybe even struggling in their own sense of nihilism, I wondered how you would advise a skeptic, who might be listening today. 

Oh, the skeptic. I would say to the skeptic that—and this is Kierkegaardian of me, I suppose, but the most important thing for the existing individual is to find the meaning of life, the reason for which we should live and die. And without that, we’re living precariously. We can’t know the absolute truth. We can reason our way close to an approximated truth, but we cannot know the absolute this side of eternity. Therefore, the individual needs to get as close as possible, and in order to do that, it takes investigation. It takes thoughtful investigation. But also it takes taking a step back and understanding what the higher truths are of this world. You can find them, those things which are good that we know are ultimate goods. And those things which are clearly beautiful. And build upon that to get to as close to the truth as possible. And then, from there, you need to think about, “Is there a litmus test for this or that view that I’m looking at? That I’m thinking will hold up this goodness and beauty?” Look at the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ and find out whether it’s true or not. And I would challenge them to do that in an open-minded way, and if they find that it’s true, then they need to go with that. That’s what I say to the skeptic. You’ve got to get rid of your bias. You’ve got to be open minded and investigate, and The Case for Christ book is a good book for that part of it. Mere Christianity is good for talking about the good. And I love G.K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy for the nature and the beauty and the joy that that brings us. So that’s what I recommend for the skeptic.

Yeah, I like what you’re saying there. There’s something called abductive reasoning, where we reason to the best explanation for reality. It may not be certainty, but we look at everything holistically, and we look at a cumulative case for what we see and experience, and it leads us to truth, really. Like you say, we all have certain biases, but we try the best we can to look at things in a neutral point of view or through a neutral lens. Again, that’s not absolutely possible, but we do the best we can to look and find actually the person who is truth, and like you say, it stands and falls really on the person of Christ. So that big question is, “Who do you say that I am?” He asks. He asks that of all of us. 

So in terms of your advice to Christians who might be listening, what would you say to Christians in terms of how they would engage someone who’s skeptical? 

Yes. Very important. I’m glad you asked that question. Because it’s a struggle out there. A lot of Christians struggle to do that, to share the gospel, and I’ve found that, number one, I have to be approachable, and before I just had all these rough edges and stuff, even when I first became Christian. So the joy that I found by giving the control over to God more and more and more, that relief is so incredible, and that gives me joy, which makes me approachable. So be approachable. Be joyful, really joyful. I don’t mean just say, I’m going to be happy today. It’s different. You’ll know if you don’t know now.

And second, I would say be a listener. Make relationships. Both my husband and I have a lot of relationships in our neighborhood, and our neighborhood is big in terms of miles because there’s very few people, so you live five miles away from somebody, you know who they are. So we make a lot of relationships, and I think, in our minds, we have a little gauge—I wouldn’t tell them this exactly, but where they are with their worldview, if they have a worldview—well, everybody does to a degree, but how strong is their worldview? How embedded in that? How knowledgeable are they about it? And kind of gauge that through relationship.

And then, third, I would say find an opening to bring in the good and the beautiful, and for that, I recommended a couple of books. Mere Christianity and Orthodoxy as good reads. Sometimes difficult but really helpful. So find that opening, because today people really want the good, and they’re very skeptical of you saying you have the truth. Naturally. So the good and the beautiful are really keys. And keep encouraging them and telling them that our meaning in life really is to face that difficult topic, that the meaning of life is very important for them to grasp, so that they can have a firm foundation, like I have. So that’s what I’d tell them.

Yeah, that’s very good, and if I could just add one more question onto that, just a natural outflow of what you’re telling us as Christians and the importance of meaning, and I think meaning is really on the surface of culture these days. People are searching for meaning. So, in your life, if someone said, “Well, how is your life meaningful?” or, “What is the meaning that drives you in your life?” “Have you found that source of meaning that moves you every day?” How would you define meaning or your quest for meaning or the manifestation of meaning in your life? 

My meaning isn’t based on any man-made culture. It’s not based on anything man-made or circumstance. My meaning is based on a God Who loves me, Who delights in me. He finds me delightful, and when I’m joyful, He finds me really delightful. He rescued me because He delighted in me. That’s the meaning of my life, is I know my God wanted me. And it makes sense. He’s an artist. Obviously, he’s an artist. He wants all kinds of crazy people, really. He wants all kinds. So I’ve been through all of this, and I have a meaning. All of this has had a meaning. As tragic as some of it has been, but it has a meaning and a purpose. And I’m there to delight my Lord as much as possible, as much as humanly possible.

Yes. To know and be known by God. And to make Him known-

Yes.

… is what you’re saying that you have found. You’ve been found by the Creator of the universe. But I would imagine that that really fuels your life. It sounds like it does. 

It does! It drives me hard. Because I want to help so many people, and I find my time is very taken up by that relationship building piece now, and… yeah. It’s unbelievable, really.

Yeah. So you want others to find the joy and the peace and the meaning that you have found. 

Yes.

This is a beautiful story! It is good, and it is beautiful. And it’s true! 

It is.

And your story points to all of those things, Stacy. So I just want to thank you for coming on and really revealing some very deep things about yourself, some very hard things, but pointing us all to really think, as a philosopher would, to make us think about our own lives and how we view those big and deep questions. And I hope that everyone who’s listening to this will be more thoughtful and intentional about pursuing those big questions and actually pursuing the person of Christ, where all of that lies. 

So thank you so much, Stacy, for coming on today. 

Thank you.

Thanks for tuning in to Side B Stories to hear Stacy’s journey from atheism to God and Christianity. You can find out more about her group, Philosophy in the Forest, in the episode notes. For questions and feedback about this episode, you can reach me by email at [email protected]. If you enjoyed it, I hope you’ll follow and share this podcast with your friends and social network. In the meantime, I’ll be looking forward to seeing you next time, where we’ll see how another skeptic flips the record of their life.

 

Stacy’s Books: “The Mind Hike: Finding Meaning Through Truth-Seeking” https://amzn.to/3h8rAJo “The Six-Foot Bonsai: A Soul Lost in the Land of the Rising Sun” https://amzn.to/3vcX6xZ

 

 

For more stories of atheist conversions to Christianity, visit www.sidebstories.com

Former atheist Guillaume Bignon set out on a quest to disprove Christianity and was surprised by what he found.

Guillaume’s Book: Confessions of a French Atheist: How God Hijacked My Quest to Disprove the Christian Faith

Guillaume’s Twitter: @theoloGUI

Website featuring Guillaume’s work: https://www.associationaxiome.com

To hear more stories about former skeptics and atheists who became Christians, visit www.sidebstories.com

Episode Transcript

Hello, and thanks for joining in. I’m Jana Harmon, and you’re listening to, where we see how skeptics flip the record of their lives. Each podcast, we listen to someone who is a former atheist who, against all odds, became a Christian.

Our beliefs, religious or not, are shaped within a context of place and people and events. We tend to believe the ideas of the people we like, that fit in with how people around us view the world. Most beliefs are not tested but rather assumed. Caught, not taught. And then shaped to fit into our individual understanding and experience of the world. According to many in Western culture, belief in God has nothing to do with their lives. More than that, to believe in God is not only irrelevant but embarrassing. It’s social or intellectual suicide. The scientifically minded don’t believe in God, in the supernatural, in the superstitious. Besides all of that, it constrains your lifestyle.

For the happy atheist, there’s no felt need or desire for God. They’re just fine navigating life on their own. This begs the question: For someone like that, what would change their mind? Why switch course and change and turn in God’s direction? For the former atheist in our story today, life could not be going any better. As a sophisticated thinker, a successful businessman, an esteemed athlete and musician, Guillaume was also an avowed atheist. But he unexpectedly came to believe that God was not only deeply relevant to his life but was the source and center of life itself. In fact, he now holds a doctorate in theological philosophy, discussing issues of reality and of God. How in the world did that happen? I hope you’ll come along with me today to listen and to find out.

Welcome to the Side B Podcast, Guillaume. It’s so great to have you with me today!

Thanks for having me, Jana. It’s a pleasure.

Wonderful. Why don’t you give us a sense of who you are right now, where you live, a little bit about your life before we go back into your story?

Yes. So as my accent really betrays, I am French, but I do live in the United States now. That was kind of part of my story of how I went from France to the US, but yes, I grew up in France, near Paris. Today, I am the US. I have lived for many years in New York, or in the New York area, and I have just now recently moved to Virginia with my wife and five young children, so the five young children explain the move away from New York. We are in a little bit more of a peaceful area in Virginia. I am an engineering manager. I work in information technology, and in my spare time, I am a philosopher and apologist, so I engage in topics around the Christian faith, philosophical theology, and all sorts of related matters.

It sounds like you’ve got a very, very full life. For sure. Five children! My hat’s off to you, though. What a blessing that must be! But a busy life, no doubt. So you were telling me, through that self-introduction, that you grew up around the Paris area in France, and I want for you to take us back there to your childhood. Give us a sense of what that looked like growing up. Was there any sense of religious belief in that culture and in the culture of your home and even in your own life?

Yes. So as a young child, I grew up in France near Paris, in the suburbs, in a very loving family. I have an older brother and a younger sister, and the three of us had a wonderful family with our parents, and as far as religious beliefs are concerned, we are at least nominally Roman Catholic. I mean I didn’t really get very invested personally in this. It was more of an inconvenience than anything else, something that we just did, maybe out of tradition and maybe a little bit of superstition, but not really a very strong life conviction, at least not for us children. So that was kind of my environment. But that’s not something that lasted for very long because, when we grew up and were given a bit more freedom, my parents didn’t force us to continue attending church, and we very soon decided that this was not really for us, and so we were able to—I mean I say we because my brother went a couple of years before me, but I followed along, and we simply stopped going to church, and at least my life as an atheist at that point didn’t really differ much from what I had always believed or done. It just that I no longer had to go to church on Sunday morning, so that was just an initial inoculation to religion and then the departure and not much of a life radical change as a result.

You fairly quickly said that you just moved into atheism, like it was a default position. And it sounds like you did that as a teenager, I presume, and I wondered: Was that just a presumption that you made? Was there any intellectual thought or investigation towards a naturalistic point of view? How did that happen?

It happened fairly naturally. Again, in France, I think this is a little bit in the air we breathe. It seems like a default position indeed, not believing in religion, and we just… God is not really an entity. It’s not even a question. So it’s not a topic that we spend too much time thinking about. And so, no. That was just, “Okay. If we are done with religion, then I guess let’s live without God, and this is fine.” And there wasn’t all that many other alternatives or options. I wasn’t considering another religion, and so there was just default, and this is how I figured I would live my life.

So did you give naturalism much thought in terms of its implications for your life? Or were you just fine without God, and that was pretty much all you thought about it?

No. I mean I certainly started to believe there was nothing beyond the natural world. Whether there were any important philosophical consequences from that belief is not something that I really asked myself at that time. I simply figured that I didn’t need God. I didn’t need Him to be happy and to have a good, full life, and so I simply ceased going to church, and I focused on my own projects and trying to live a happy life, and I sought for happiness in a number of avenues that seemed fun and right to me. I was playing volleyball at that time. I was very engaged in sports, so I was having fun and became good after late puberty and ended up growing pretty fast and being big and jumping high, so I ended up having fun playing volleyball, and I ended up playing in the national level, so traveling the country on the weekends to play the games, trying to have fun and just seek for happiness in that area.

I was also playing music. I played the piano when I was little and then got into playing the keyboard and started to play in a band and writing my own music, playing in concerts, so I was trying to live the dream of being a rock star in my own world. And I studied math, physics, and engineering, and so I sought to have a solid job and a good income, and I ended up graduating from engineering school and then starting to work as a computer engineer in the financial industry. So I figured this was stability and income, and I had volleyball and music to have a range of enjoyments of this life to seek my own happiness.

So it sounds like you really had life by the tail. It sounds like, from almost every perspective, that you were successful. You were athletic. You were a musician. You were brilliant. You studied and achieved at a level, and that you were working. So it causes one to pause and say, “Wow! If life is going so well, and I’m sitting with you talking about God and your belief in God, how in the world did that happen?” What was the catalyst that turned your head or turned your mind or your heart to become open towards even the possibility of God?

Yeah. Well, besides the volleyball and music, as far as avenues to seek my own fulfillment and happiness, for a young atheist in France of my age, there was one other goal that I very much was running after, and it was women. And so I was very much seeking feminine conquests and trying to have enough material to satisfy the banter of the locker room in the volleyball games, and so I had a pretty rough history of relationships and treating women very much poorly. A lot of cheating and a lot of… just very… lying and deception and simply self-enjoyment and fulfillment.

And that’s another area that was instrumental in me being converted by Christianity again because it happened very fortuitously, while on vacation, I was in the Caribbean with my brother. We were visiting my uncle. And there was a very serendipitous meeting, on a day where we were on the distant beach, where we didn’t have a car to come back home, and somehow we decided to hitchhike our way back home, and after a few seconds of hitchhiking, there was a small car that stopped with two American women in it. One was from New York. The other one was from Miami. They were both very attractive. One of them was a former model, and the car that stopped didn’t stop to pick us up. They stopped to ask for directions. They were lost on their way from the airport to their hotel, but as it so happened their hotel was right next door to the house that we were staying at, so when they told us that, we said, “Well, that’s great! We’ll tell you where it is if you’ll pick us up and drive us there,” and they hesitated for a second and then eventually we got in. And we started talking, and I immediately went into seduction mode and trying to connect and trying to see them again, and the French accent kicked in, and the seduction worked out decently, because they gave us their room number again and made plans to see us again while on the island.

And so we did go and see them and showed them a good time on the island, and on the day where we were on the beach, I pretty much made the move, and I was now in a relationship with one of them. And I was fairly hopeful that this would be a bit more serious than just an island romance because it was a very romantic situation. She was really exceptional. And so I… Yeah. Well, I was hopeful it would lead to something more. The problem is that, in conversation with her on the beach, I found out a couple of pretty devastating news. One was that she claimed to believe that God exists. She said she was a Christian. And to me at that point that was clearly an intellectual suicide. I did not have any respect anymore for belief in God. And the other piece that she mentioned was that, alongside her belief in Christianity, that included a belief in abstinence before marriage, and that was really not what I wanted, and so those two things were extremely problematic at the time.

So that was how I got converted by Christianity, by having to say, “If I want this to work with her, I’m going to have to disabuse her of her beliefs about religion first and then about the sexual ethics that come with it, as a very important piece for us to be together.” And so I still… With anybody else, those beliefs would have made me run away with no questions asked.

I bet.

But she was special enough that, when I went back to Paris, and she flew back to New York, I decided to try to work it out as a long-distance relationship and that her religious beliefs would have to take care of themselves, and that we would work it out.

Wow. So you were distanced not only geographically, you were across the world, but you had quite a distance in your beliefs. So that, I would imagine, would cause a lot of problems, but for whatever reason, it opened the door to investigate a little bit more closely what belief in God meant. So what did that look like? Take us on from there.

Sure. So I went back to France, and here I was in this extremely problematic long-distance relationship, and I thought if I’m going to have to convince her to stop religion and to be with me and happy, I would have at least to explain to her, to give her some good reasons, right? To use my common sense and explain to her why this is silly to believe in God, but I realized if I was going to refute her beliefs, I needed to at least understand what she even believed, and I realized I had very little knowledge of what Christianity was even about, so I did pick up a Bible that was left in my closet and dusted it off like Aladdin’s lamp, and I started to look at it and see if I could glean some of the very distant memories I had of Christianity, but I very quickly realized that I really had no knowledge at all, and it was something that we would need to figure out together because it was foreign to me. So I figured, “We’ll discuss those things when we see each other,” and that’s something that we organized fairly quickly after the vacation. We did make plans for her to come visit in France, and so she came, and I got to see that religion was going to be clearly the center of the problem, that it was a very real thing for her.

A couple of things really concerned me: One is that apparently her pastor was the one who was dropping her off at the airport and picking her up, and to me, that rang some sort of alarm bells, like, “Oh, what is going on with the pastor there? Is this some sort of a cult like I’ve seen in documentaries?” And the other is that she apparently had been given the address of a church in Paris to visit, and to me, that seemed completely unnecessary. Could she not skip a few Sundays of not going to church while she’s with me in France? So it was problematic. The fact that she had somehow the need to get the address of a church in Paris was concerning to me.

So she came to Paris, and this is where we started to talk a little bit about our potential future, and I asked her if her religion could be… I was trying to take it slowly and to ask her, before I tried to convince her to stop religion altogether, I figured, “Well, I’ll at least start with a degree of openness,” and I said, “Well, if I never change my mind, would you be okay to be married with an atheist?” I thought it would be a bit of a longer conversation, but she very casually almost said, “Oh, no! Absolutely not. That wouldn’t work out.” And I was shocked. Like what kind of intolerant belief that here I was almost ready to make a concession that she could be a religious person and she was not ready for me to be an atheist. So I said, “Well, this is nonsense. That means it’s not going to work,” and it was kind of a tense evening. And then she was really upset that I was this close minded, and she said, “Well, why won’t you even hear any of what I have to say? Some of my reasons. Why are you so closed minded?” And I realized I was really not open to that, and so that launched me into a little bit more of a thinking about, “Okay, let me hear the other side. Let me understand what you’re believing and then think about it for myself, so that I can actually see what we’re dealing with and I can refute it on solid grounds,” but not just on a whim or ignorant of what she actually believed. That’s kind of the turning point there in terms of my getting ready to investigate those things seriously.

So when you were investigating, then, or when you started the process, it sounds like you wanted to take down her beliefs. I’m curious, even just getting started with the investigation, you tried to move to a little bit more openness to respect her and her beliefs and try to figure those out. Would you see it as a movement towards disproving, rather than true investigation? In terms of a neutral perspective. I know none of us are neutral. We all have biases, but how would you judge your own motives and perspective at that time?

Yeah. I mean, I think it was a progressive change in terms of openness. I certainly started as a very negative project because I just wanted to remove that barrier between unsuccessful, and I couldn’t stand the idea of religion. I felt I had wasted enough time in my childhood with this nonsense, and I had no intention of really giving much more time to that activity. So I was certainly not willing, but I was also trying to be fair to whatever it is that she believed, so that I could give it a fair hearing and actually use my common sense to refute it, but at least refute something accurately.

And then, at the same time, there was also a part inside of me that thought, “Look, if I’m going to take this seriously, if I’m going to investigate and actually think about it somewhat objectively, then I need to force myself to be a bit open,” and I also didn’t want any of my desires to influence this reflection one way or the other, because yes, I didn’t want religion at all, and so that could force me to just refute it even if I don’t have a good case against it, but there was also the real possibility that, if she was not open to changing her mind, that maybe I could be motivated because of her to now, all of a sudden, say, “Oh, yeah, yeah, sure. That’s true,” but that’s going to be just to make it work with her. And it was very clear to me that neither of those scenarios was positive, was desirable. If I were to believe all these beliefs, it would have to be based on the truth, not be based on my desires to be with her or not.

So there was kind of that approach to objectivity, trying to force myself to be somewhat neutral, even though I was aware there were influences on both sides that would be irrelevant and that needed to be kept outside of my reasoning.

So you were, as best you could, pursuing truth as the most important thing?

I think yes, as best I could. None of us is fully objective, but I think this was a concern, to think about this properly and figure it out.

Yeah, yeah. So walk us through that. How did you start to begin this process?

Yes. So the first thing I did is that I actually opened that Bible and started to read the New Testament for myself to get an idea, finally, as a young adult of what it actually says. Because I had memories of my childhood, time spent in the church pews, bored every Sunday morning, and when I took the Bible, I expected to find in there some of the boring platitudes that I remembered from my childhood. And here, it was a very different experience, reading the New Testament, reading the gospels for myself, this description of the life and ministry of Jesus. The Person of Jesus, when I started reading about Him as a young adult, was very captivating. I thought I was confronted with a very compelling character, a very smart teacher, a master with words who navigated masterfully through conversations, who was constantly winning the exchanges when people came to try to entrap Him and to catch Him in his words, and He would always masterfully navigate those conversations. He was teaching with a sense of authority, saying that the kingdom of God had come in His ministry and that he was the Son of God. He claimed all sorts of big things and was just a very compelling character. So it tasted nothing like I remembered from my childhood, and it made me a little bit uncomfortable. I wasn’t too sure what to make with that Jesus. And who was also morally impressive, that he was able to humble Himself and wash the feet of His disciples and just present a compelling picture, so I was very captivated by the person of Jesus I was reading in the New Testament.

Yeah, I think it’s often surprising. Someone has an idea of who they think Jesus is from some cultural reference or from a picture or a painting they saw as a child or whatever, and then once they started reading themselves, the scripture, what they find is something so much more robust or impressive or intelligent or stronger than they had thought in their own mind, and it sounds like you were very surprised and, like you say, captivated by the person of Jesus.

Yep. So that was one piece here in my investigation, to be confronted with the real Jesus of the New Testament and to find Him really compelling. Another piece is that I tried to be somewhat open and did something that, in retrospect, was probably mistake number one, or mistake number two, but I thought, “Look, if any of this is true and I’m going to give it a fair hearing, then that means that there’s a God who would be looking at me doing this right now and would probably be interested in the fact that I’m looking into it,” so I started to pray as an unbeliever, just somewhat… I mean I saw this as an experiment. I was a scientist, and I was an engineer, so I figured, “Let me do the experiment, and say, ‘Okay, I don’t believe there’s a God, but if there is one, go ahead and reveal Yourself to me. I’m open.'” And so that was kind of the next move, unbelieving prayer, which, in retrospect, as a Christian now, I very much say, “Well, this was clearly not a lost prayer,” but it’s just a move that I did, and that’s just about all I had for that investigation just on the moment. I couldn’t really end up in church even if I wanted to because, at that time, I was playing volleyball in the national league, and every weekend, I was traveling around the country to play the games, and it’s just that, shortly after I prayed that unbelieving prayer, there’s something that happened out of the blue is that I developed an injury on my right shoulder.

And it’s not something that came from an accident or anything very explainable, just out of the blue it started to hurt. The shoulder would be inflamed, and in ten, fifteen minutes after the beginning of each practice, I just couldn’t spike anymore, and I was just unable to play, and the doctor really couldn’t see what was going on. The physical therapist tried to help, and that didn’t really do it. And they were basically saying, “Look, we don’t really know, but you’re going to need to rest that shoulder, so you need to stop volleyball for a few weeks, and we’ll reconvene.” And so, against my will, I was now off of volleyball courts for a number of weeks, and so I figured, since I’ve been reflecting on this Christianity thing and trying to figure out what she was about, what I did is I went on my computer, and I recollected the address of the church that she had been given when she visited me. She had opened it on my computer, so I was able to go and get the address again without telling her, and I figured, “I’m going to go and see what those Christians do when they get together, just to get an idea,” and so I picked up that address, and I drove to that church in Paris, and once again, it was shortly after I got my own apartment, thankfully, because clearly if I had still been with my family, I could never have justified my going to church, but now I was isolated, by myself, off of volleyball courts, and I had the address, so I went.

And I drove to that church in Paris, and the way I would describe it is that I went there like I would go to the zoo, to see some weird, exotic animals I had heard of but never seen in real life. And so I walked into that church, and it was very awkward because I was constantly thinking that this was already an offense against my intellect to be even present in the building, and that if any of my family or friends could see me there I would die of shame. But nevertheless, I walked into the church and observed some of the differences between that church and the Catholic church of my childhood. But I was touched by some of the genuineness of the people. Again, all of this was very awkward and felt strange to me, but some of them were praying, and it really looked like they were actually talking to a God who they thought was there. It wasn’t rehearsed or recited prayers, like I was used to. And they genuinely believed that stuff. And so I sat down, and I just watched the service. The music was modern, and as a musician, I was interested in the talent of the musicians but clearly couldn’t sing the lyrics with their religious nature. And the sermon was an interesting piece. I don’t remember a word that the preacher said on that Sunday morning. Maybe I was just too focused on my feeling of being ashamed of being in the building and what would happen if anyone saw me there, but I don’t remember what he said. But the sermon ended, and I thought, “I’ve seen enough. I’ve got what I came to see, let me escape now so that I don’t have to introduce myself to anybody and don’t have to connect,” so I don’t make eye contact with anyone, and I just jump on my feet and walked to the back of the church to escape.

And this is when I opened the door to leave, and I literally had one foot out the door, and there’s a big blast of chills that just started in my stomach and went up in my chest and grabbed me by the throat, and I was frozen on the doorstep. With goosebumps. And I heard myself thinking, “This is ridiculous. I have to figure it out.” And so I completely turned around. I closed the door, and I walked straight to the head pastor, and I introduced myself. And I said, “So you believe in God, huh?” “Well, yes.” And I said, “Well, how does that work?” and he offered that we should talk about it if I was willing to make an appointment with him. And so I did. And years later he told me that he didn’t really believe that I would actually come, but I said, “All right. Fine. I’ll be there, and I’ll come, and we’ll chat.” And this is how a long series of conversations started with this pastor in France. His name was Robert. He was American, but he had been a missionary in France for many years. And I showed up to his office on that day and started to unpack my questions. I told him about my situation, what I was looking into, and we started talking about Christianity.

Were you letting your girlfriend know? You said you kind of went there without her knowledge for the first time, but were you communicating with her about what you were reading in the Bible? What you were experienced? What you experienced that day at the church?

Yeah. A little bit of that. It seems fuzzy. I mean it’s many years ago, so I’m not super clear on the details of what transpired. After a while, I did tell her that I did go to that church and then there was this conversation, but somehow I kept things very separate in my mind. It was really all about my thinking and investigation of those things, and she was somewhat out of that. I started the conversation with that pastor, Robert, in France, and it started to be more about our exchange together than really anything that I would do with or without my girlfriend at the time.

So it was really just an independent investigation, it sounds like, you and the pastor.

Yeah. That’s how I recall it. Yeah.

Yeah, so we started talking, and I asked some of my previous questions, and he would not necessarily engage in what we would call apologetics, and I don’t know that he offered really positive arguments in favor of Christianity, but he was explaining, at least within his own worldview, the coherence of his beliefs, and that was impressive enough already for me at the time, that there was somebody who was actually willing to answer questions and explain his beliefs about God. And he seemed to really believe it, I guess. There was no doubt. This was not a facade. He really believed this stuff. He gave me one little booklet that was very interesting of him. He gave me a little booklet that he had written with a number of questions and then the Bible references for me to go and find out the answer for myself. So that was kind of an introduction to some of his Christian beliefs, and I did this, so I took that little booklet of his and went home, started to open the Bible and go and get those answers and write them down, and then every answer led to more questions on my side, so I wrote all of my questions on those papers, and this would fuel the next conversation when I went to see him again and could ask those questions, which led to more questions, so it quickly turned into a pile of paper with lots of questions, and this is what drove our exchange. And through these conversations and my own reading of the Bible and my own thinking, there’s a number of areas, a number of topics, on which I came to simply realize I was mistaken and to quite significantly change my mind, and… yeah.

So some of those topics were my view of the supernatural, miracles, and whether it was intellectual suicide to believe that there was something beyond the natural world. Another one was my view of science and the role that science needs to play in our beliefs and justifying our beliefs and our knowledge of the world. Another one was my view of sex and Christian ethics around relationships and marriage. And another one was my view of knowledge and what it takes to know something. And then my view of salvation. So that’s five areas in which I really had a significant shift, that’s supernatural, science, sex, knowledge, and salvation.

Those are quite big areas. Especially for someone who was an atheist, an avowed atheist, all of your life. Especially, like you say, the very first one, just the reality of the supernatural. That’s a really tremendously big issue. Either the natural world is all that exists or there’s something more than the natural world. How did you come to believe or accept that there was something more than the natural world? Did it come through reading the Bible? Or was it more, like you say, apologetics-related things? What convinced you there?

Yeah. So here, the shift wasn’t immediately that I believed that something beyond nature existed. My shift… I was starting from a bit farther down. My shift was to simply accept that one could believe that and not be stupid. That was a little bit of a shift, but that was something that I was confronted by Robert, that in front of me was this guy who was clearly educated, who was smart, who was not emotionally unstable, wasn’t trying to use religion to compensate for some weakness, and he genuinely believes that there’s a God and that Jesus was raised from the dead and that miracles are actually possible and happening. So the beginning of the shift here was to simply say, “Okay, what’s going on with that?” that somebody could not commit intellectual suicide but actually believe those things. So I was confronted by Robert’s existence, and then I also realized there’s actually lots of smart people who believe that there’s more to the world than just nature in motion. So it wasn’t that I embraced the supernatural just quite yet, but I placed it on the map by realizing some people can actually affirm it, and it’s not like I had a solid argument for why that couldn’t be, right? So I figured this was just a possibility and started to respect that a bit. So that was my shift on the supernatural at that point.

The shift on science was simply realizing that I had somewhat assumed that science would be at the center of all this, and I was a scientist myself. I studied physics, engineering, science, and biology, and I figured science is how you know things about the world. And then I reflected and tried to see, “Well, what have I learned in all of my engineering studies of science? What do I know that actually conflicts with the existence of God?” And it was an important step because I hadn’t really sat down and actually given much thought as to what counts for or against God’s existence, and for the first time, I realized that, for all of my scientific pretensions, little of my scientific knowledge was even relevant to the question. Certainly none of what I had learned or knew about science was a refutation of the existence of God. So that shift on science simply said, “Well, probably this is probably not the most relevant consideration,” and I realized that there’s plenty of things that we know in life that are just not based on science. That’s just not how we know things. And I figured that maybe God’s existence and the truth of Christianity would be in that category of things that we can possibly know, but it’s not going to be based on science itself.

And now today, as a philosopher, I realize that this is absolutely basic, right? The idea that science is the only way to know things is very sophomoric. It’s really a bad idea. And these tons of counter examples, and it’s even self-refuting. So that’s really not a good philosophical view, but that’s one that I came to surrender in my own thinking about those matters.

So if I am working down through that list again of topics, the next one, I suppose, was sex and the Christian ethics around that. And here, that was a minefield because I was clearly bent on not accepting the idea that abstinence was a good idea before marriage. And here the progressive shift that happened is that Robert was able to paint a picture that was more attractive, that there was something genuine about his understanding, so he was able to defend the Christian view as one where God is designing marriage. He’s the Creator of the world, and He’s in a good position to tell us some of the good conditions for us to engage in sex. And surely I didn’t like that picture myself, and this is not what I was planning, but there was an internal consistency once again, and there was also some degree of appeal from a more traditional and more conservative view of relationships and sexuality. I myself had this long past and long history of terrible treatment of women and cheating and lies, and this was not good, and so there was a part of me that was ready to contemplate that maybe the more conservative ethic on that front would be actually refreshing. But not all the way to that Christian belief. So there was a bit of back and forth there.

And one piece that he was very helpful at was that I was also concerned that the Christian view of relationships like that had also some intolerant aspect to it, which was, “You should not marry a non-Christian,” right? To me, that seemed intolerant. And that Robert was very helpful in clarifying. Look, there’s actually plenty of good wisdom in that. If belief in God and Christianity is very central, which it should be for a Christian, then this makes good sense to say that your spouse, who is going to be the most important person in your life on this planet, shares the most fundamental beliefs about life. Otherwise, your marriage just doesn’t stand a chance. So that, I understood, was no longer intolerant. It made good sense. And he was able to defuse that.

Yeah. So your girlfriend’s statements about not being willing to marry an atheist, I guess, was making more sense to you at that point? Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

 So you said also the issue of knowledge was something that you had to work out?

Yeah. And so this was a bit later on, and this is a piece that was really a turning point there. When I started to realize that the Christian view was making much more sense than I had hoped it would and that I was starting to suspect this actually… I don’t really have much of a case against it. And I was starting to wonder, “What do I make of this Jesus character as well?” At least I never really bought the idea that Jesus was a fictional character. It seemed clear to me that He was a person steeped in history, that minimally He was this teacher in Palestine in the first century who gathered lots of people and clearly had an impact such that the world is still very much at least influenced by His teachings and lots of His followers. So I was really unclear, and I was starting to wonder what would happen if this would actually be true and if my life should have to confront a change, a radical change, in beliefs. And I continued to have those unbelieving prayers and trying to see, “Okay. Well, I’m starting to see that there’s room for Christianity to be true. I’m curious if God really is there, could He reveal this more powerfully to me, in ways that would really convince me, would make me certain.” Because if there’s one thing that I didn’t want to do it was I didn’t want to just believe, have blind faith. I really wanted to be quite confident that what I embraced or what I concluded would be the truth, and this is one piece where I realized my view of knowledge and the expectations that I had in terms of certainty were also misguided.

So what I really hoped for was that I would have absolute certainty, that there would be really strong grounds for an irrefutable belief in God if that were where I landed, and I realized that this was a very unrealistic expectation, that there’s lots of things that we know in life that we don’t have absolute certainty for, but there’s one category of knowledge that’s very respectable and very important to us, and it’s simply testimony, that we could be knowing things simply on the basis that somebody else who knows it told us. And it sounds a bit silly, but there’s tons of very important things that we know like that. I know my name. I know my date of birth. I know what happened on the day I was born. I know lots of things, not because I have proof or certainty of any sort, simply because somebody who knew told me this was true.

And so that was an important intellectual shift when I started to contemplate Christianity and it started to make sense, and I was starting to suspect this might actually be true and it would be a huge deal. I realized that my expectations in terms of knowledge were unreasonable, and I realized there’s lots of things that we know simply on the basis of a testimony, and I started to see the gospels that I was reading as pretty much satisfying that criteria, of testimony, realizing this is actually comparable to a testimony of people who were there, who said, “This is what we’ve seen. We’ve spent this time with this Jesus. Here’s what He said. Here’s what He’s done.” And obviously the story of His being crucified and His allegedly raising from the dead. So obviously there’s the supernatural aspect in there, and then there’s the question of whether or not that testimony is reliable, but I came to see that this was similar to the claim that somebody has seen something, they tell me, and now I know. So I came to appreciate the reliability of that testimony to come to the knowledge of what happened to Jesus, of who He was, and what He did, allegedly rose from the dead.

And obviously, we don’t want this… You know, it shouldn’t be simplistic, like somebody says something, and now we just believe it, and we’re gullible because we just take everything. No. You don’t get knowledge just because somebody says it. It has to be a reliable source. And so that question is whether or not the gospels are reliable as a testimony to what Jesus said and did, and the important point here again, when we look at what I was considering at the time, is that I wasn’t aware of all the scholarly debates around the reliability of the scriptures like I am now, because it’s my interest, but at that time, I was still convinced that I didn’t need to know all of those objections in order to form a justified knowledge about what Jesus said and did.

So at the time, this is pretty much where I landed. I saw the testimony of the gospels as reliable, as telling me what happened, and intellectually, it seemed like, yes, that made sense, and I could trust that this was the truth about what happened in history. So that was the last very strong intellectual shift where I changed my mind in terms of the truth of this happening. But that doesn’t make me a Christian quite yet, because there’s the final shift that needed to happen, and it’s the shift of heart more than the shift of mind. And that’s the part where I came to understand the message of salvation.

And so this is another piece that happened concurrently to all of my reflections, is that, through all of this study and my prayers started to become like, “God, again, if You’re there, really show Yourself powerfully,” and I was hoping for God to just open the heavens and shine the light and say [CROSSTALK 49:01]. But what he did was very different, but it was very powerful, too, is that he reactivated my conscience, and it was very unpleasant because what happened is that I had come to commit some really nasty stuff. I had essentially cheated on my girlfriend multiple times and in aggravating circumstances, and so I’ll spare you the details, but basically I had done all of this stuff, and I had obviously covered it with lots of lies, and I was lying to myself as well, and in my experience of asking God to reveal Himself to me, He simply just took that and shoved it in my face, and I was just afflicted with guilt. I could only see what I had done, my own sins, and it was very crippling. And it’s in the midst of this pain that the message that I had been reading all along, the message that I had actually had a very hard time understanding intellectually, finally clicked. I had been reading, that Jesus died on the cross for us, but I hadn’t really made the connection. I couldn’t see, like, “What’s the connection between Jesus dying on the cross and me, my life as a Christian if I were to become one?” And it’s in that area of pain when my conscience was reactivated that I realized, “Yes. This is why Jesus had to die. Me. He paid the penalty for my sins. Those very ones here that I can’t stop seeing, that I’m crippled with guilt about,” and I realized this is now the good news that this text has been proclaiming, that I can repent of my sins and simply trust in Jesus, and because of His sacrifice on the cross, He can forgive me freely, and I would have eternal life freely on the basis of my faith in Him and not on the basis of my righteousness.

And that message hit me like a ton of brick. And so this is really the shift that happened in the heart, as much as in the mind, where I was willing, and I said, “Yes. That’s the one. Okay. Lord, You’re real. This has happened. Take my life and save me,” and there was a very strong spiritual renewal. My guilt evaporated. I was literally born again, quite literally. It was a very significant change emotionally, spiritually about that. I felt like I had encountered the living God and that my sins, that had become very real to me, were now forgiven because of what Jesus had done.

Wow! That’s quite something. It sounds like, although you began this search, obviously, to see if it was true, but you not only found that it was not only true but real and real, not only intellectually but real for your life, for your person, for your soul. And I can’t imagine the shift, the juxtaposition that you must have experienced. How long was this process? How long did this take you? It sounded like you were quite on an intentional journey.

From the time that I met Robert on that infamous Sunday morning to the time that I actually embrace the good news, it was a number of months. It was probably less than six months. But yes, several months, and the final piece is that, when I finally was convicted and realized this was the real deal, it was just at the right time that I was planning to go, for the first time, to visit my girlfriend in New York. And so this was an extremely conflicting moment, because I felt like I had believed that this was the truth, but now I needed to confess my own sins to her.

And I figured that… I was extremely conflicted because all the advice that I had been given was, “You don’t need to mention any of this. It’s done, so just be happy with her.” That was not the advice that Robert gave me, obviously, because I didn’t tell him any of this before I went to New York, but my friends had given me this advice, to simply not say anything, and inside of me, my conscience was very activated, and I thought, “There’s no way I can build a relationship with a lie,” so I was confused. I went there, and I discovered New York. We had a very intense week, and towards the end, I finally caved in, and I did confess all of my sins and figured, like, “This is going to break us up, and this is going to be over, but at least I will live in the light, and I will be able to walk according to my conscience.”

So this was extremely painful. She took it very negatively, and that was just before I was leaving, so I flew back to Paris, and I thought we were done for. Well, I knew, except that when I walked out of the airport in Paris, there was a message on my phone that she still wanted to try and forgive me and to make it work. And so at that point started a period of me trying to make it work with her. And I had thought, “God has been using all of this to bring me to faith,” so I was ready to make the jump, and what I did is that I took steps to basically turn my life around. I left everything in France, and so I quit my volleyball team. I quit my band. I quit my job. I found a job in Wall Street because I was working in finance, so that worked out quite well. And then I moved to the US to be with her and to just have this new life.

And so I was full of hope and emotions, and then I arrived, and then this is where the story takes another turn, which is that our relationship turned out to be really bad. We were not meant for each other at all, and it took me a number of months to accept that truth, but all of this was not for us to be together, and so we actually broke up after that.

And this is the place where I was starting to wonder, “Well, okay, God. What are You up to? This is what I get when I turn my life around?” And so I was in New York with very few social connections and no volleyball team, no band, just my job, and all of my evenings and weekends were just free, and this is just about the time that I started to have to answer questions from my family and friends in France about my newfound faith, trying to convince them that I hadn’t lost my mind, so this is what started conversations where I started to engage intellectually and tell them, “Look, these are some of the reasons that I’ve come to believe,” and then I was curious and started to study and understand, “Oh, yeah, there’s other good reasons to believe this is true,” and so I shared those, and I enjoyed the exercise of sharing that, and the next thing you know, I was spending all of my evenings and all of my weekends just thinking and researching those things, watching debates and documentaries and reading books and following the footnotes and really enjoying this, and after a few months of doing this all the time, I figured, “If I’m going to be spending all of my time and all of my resources doing this, then I might as well get a degree out of it,” and so this is how I applied to seminary, and I, a few years later, graduated with a Masters in Biblical Literature with an emphasis on the New Testament, and then after that, I pursued my studies with another degree. I got a PhD in Philosophical Theology.

So this is how, after the move and after my conversion, I ended up walking through the small door and into the world of Christian scholarship, without planning any of it, but I ended up being active and writing and researching and speaking, and what’s fun is that some of the folks that I studied initially turned out to be colleagues and friends, and the whole thing feels a bit surreal, but this is where I am now.

You’ve coursed a long journey, from unbelief to not only just Christian belief but compelling, deep, scholarly Christian belief and debate, and that you are now one of the voices that people look to and listen to on very deep theological and philosophical areas, it’s really quite impressive. It sounds like, for someone who held truth to be supreme, that you still hold truth to be, in the person of Christ, to be incredibly supreme, not only in your life personally but contending for that in terms of the Christian worldview and even, like I say, at a deep and a scholarly level.

For the skeptic who might be listening in, someone who thought they would never believe in God or never even think about investigating God, when I look at your life and listen to you, you are someone who obviously, again, is a brilliant thinker and someone worth looking to and hearing your wisdom. What would you say to someone who might be curious, at least, to investigate like you did?

Yeah. So I don’t know that I’m necessarily in an awesome position to give them advice and tell them what to do, but here’s a couple of pieces that I will mention. The first is that, if they are intellectually curious, they should definitely consult some of the material that is discussed, controversial material, right? The debate material on the truth of Christianity, that there is some really good thinking happening and that there are some really good reasons to believe that God exists and that the Bible is actually reliable and that we get a good account of what happened to Jesus. So considering the intellectual case is one advice, and some of them have, some of them have never done that. I would recommend that you look into that, actually.

And the other is a little bit more personal and dear to my heart, but it’s also the encouragement to not assume that you know who Jesus is, that you know because we’ve heard about Jesus and maybe you’ve attended church and you’ve heard a million stories, but I would recommend that you try the same experience as I did, which was to say, “Let’s forget about everything I’ve heard. Let’s pick up the sources and see what people actually saw and the kind of character that He was,” and I trust that this can be extremely transformative, to be put face to face with the real Jesus and not the one that we think we know.

That’s good advice. And for the Christians who are listening in who, especially they may know someone in their life who’s not a Christian, but they want them to know. And you encountered Robert, for one, who is an intelligent Christian who sat down with you and answered questions in a thoughtful way, was patient with you in moving through this intellectual and spiritual and very personal material in different ways it affected your life. How would you advise Christians to engage with those who are skeptical or even searching?

Yeah. So there’s a couple of pieces of advice that I like to give Christians while engaged in conversations with what could be old atheist self, right? So some of the things that I think worked quite well and that are a really good idea and encouragement. One would be to never assume that the person that you’re speaking with actually knows the Jesus of the Bible, so the same piece of advice applies here. Try to point them to the scriptures. First of all, as Christians, we’re convinced that the scriptures are alive, so there’s actually a spiritual benefit in reading the text. But just to point them to make for themselves a good opinion of what Jesus actually said and did, so to encourage them to learn, just on the historical realm.

And the second is to not assume that they’ve heard the gospel, so as evangelical Christians, we like to think that this message is obviously the constantly proclaimed truth of the scriptures, that everyone has obviously heard that we are saved by faith in Jesus, that eternal life is not based on our own righteousness, but it’s purely by faith in Christ because He died on the cross to pay the penalty in our place. That message that I came to understand and accept as part of my conversion was radically new to me. I had never heard anything like that in over 25 years, and so I don’t want Christians to assume that this message is understood and known by everybody, and there’s very much a place in the conversation with an atheist to say, “Let’s forget a second whether or not it’s true. I’m not trying to yet convince you that any of this is true. But do you even know Christianity affirms? What is the message? And I’d be happy to tell you what it says before we can come to discuss whether that’s actually true,” and to explain that gospel succinctly, and I’ve done that with a number of folks, and I found there’s plenty of value in simply laying out the account on the table directly to say, “This is the message,” and to try to see if they actually understand this. And one test of whether they understand it, I have found, is that very often, right after I’ve explained this, the first thing that comes out of their mouth is the objection that Paul himself anticipated in Romans when he lays out the gospel. He anticipates somebody’s going to say, “Well, if we’re saved by faith. If our good works don’t do anything, then why not go on sinning just so that we can enjoy this and that grace may abound?” So Paul anticipates this, and I’m hearing this very often when I present this message, which tells me, “Yes. Now they get it.” So that’s a check where we understand. Now, the message is understood and correctly evaluated. It’s a very positive place to take the listener, and then we can discuss the merits of the message, obviously. But I think this is a helpful piece to do.

Yes. Very, very helpful. As you say, I think oftentimes we’re coming from our own perspective and presuming what the other person knows and oftentimes, we’re very, very mistaken on that, and the gospel, I think is the most important thing, right? It’s why Jesus came. It’s the big question you had, “Why did He have to die?” And that is the most important question of all. Thank you for bringing that to the fore. And for those who are listening, I also want to let everyone know that Guillaume has put all of his story down in writing in a new book that he is publishing and releasing called Confessions of a French Atheist,

Thank you so much, Guillaume, for coming on and telling your story. You’re just incredibly articulate, and we are all blessed by seeing what your journey was and just are so encouraged. You know, sometimes I think we look at someone and think they would never become a Christian, wouldn’t even think about becoming a Christian, but we look at you and see that God can reach down in extraordinary and very personal and powerful ways. And even gives you chills and goosebumps. Something extraordinary happened for you to stop in your tracks and just say, “No, I actually am going to investigate this.” It’s just amazing to me, story after story that I hear, where God reaches people and, like you say, in serendipitous ways almost, and circumstances, and He does that for us all, to be honest. Sometimes we don’t recognize that, but He’s a personal God who reaches us in personal ways.

So thank you for coming on to share your story with us today.

It was really my pleasure. Thanks for having me, Jana.

Oh, you’re so welcome.

Thanks for tuning in to today to hear Guillaume’s story. You can find out more about his book, Confessions of a French Atheist, and how to follow him on Twitter in the episode notes. For questions and feedback about this episode, you can reach me by email at [email protected]. I hope you enjoyed it, if so that you would follow and share this podcast with your friends and social network and that you’ll rate and review it as well. In the meantime, I’ll be looking forward to seeing you next time, where we’ll see how another skeptic flips the record of their life.

MIT graduate Chris Lee was raised to reject religious superstition and embrace science alone.  His search beyond a purely naturalistic worldview led him to believe in God and Christianity.

 

To read Chris’ written story, you can read his article “My Christian Story” here

 

To read and listen to more stories of skeptics and atheists’ conversions to Christianity, visit www.sidebstories.com

Episode Transcript

Hello, and thanks for joining in. I’m Jana Harmon, and you’re listening to the Side B Stories Podcast, where we see how skeptics flip the record of their lives. Each podcast, we listen to someone who has once been an atheist who surprisingly became a Christian.

Why do atheists become atheists? There are as many answers to that question as there are atheists. Every skeptic has a reason, or more likely, every skeptic has several reasons for rejecting God. Sometimes, it’s on the back of bad experiences with Christians, Christianity, and faith. People or institutions who are supposed to represent truth and grace, lives of integrity and generosity, genuine love for God and others, well, they don’t. They’re supposed to demonstrate lives that have been transformed into something other, something more, something different, something better than what is normally expected by those who don’t claim God as authority and guide, but they don’t. If they reflect God, then they are poor ambassadors for the one they supposedly represent, or so it goes. Once someone starts to distrust Christians, they can begin to doubt the whole endeavor of Christianity and God. Belief is no longer attractive or plausible. It is no longer an option. 

Today’s episode taps into this reality, the reality of human failure to embody God well. It can be very disorienting. It can lead to disbelief, and unfortunately, it often does. But the question in today’s episode is whether or not someone can find their way to belief in God despite all of this human failure. Let’s listen to Chris Lee’s story to find out. 

Welcome to the Side B Stories podcast, Chris. It’s so great to have you with me today! 

Thank you, Jana, for having me.

Wonderful. Before we get into your story, why don’t you tell me a little bit about who you are, where you live, maybe a little bit about your education, what you do? 

Sure, absolutely. I live in the Boston area, in a little town called Braintree, about 10 miles south of the downtown. By day, I consider myself a software engineer in financial services, so fin tech, and by night, I jokingly say that I’m a cult fighter. I graduated from MIT in 1997, and also did my master’s degree in divinity at Gordon-Conwell Theological seminary.

Oh, okay. So you’re pretty highly educated, and of course, in the Boston area, academics is prevalent there, so I’m sure we’ll find out more about what you mean by cult fighter? 

Something like that, yes.

Something like that. I forgot the exact term. But anyway, so that sounds very intriguing. I’m sure we’ll get to that later in the podcast. So you’re in Boston now. Let’s go back to your childhood and where you were born and grew up. Tell me a little bit about your family, whether they had any belief in God or not, or how they directed you. 

Sure. I grew up in western Canada, in a city called Vancouver, a beautiful, amazing place to grow up. Very multicultural. And my parents, my dad was very much an atheist, a humanist, so did not have any beliefs, and in fact, had been very hurt by a number of Christians in his life, so he had very much turned against Christianity and was, as you might expect, anti Christian. My mother was very nominal. She might have gone to church a few times now and then in college, as well as afterwards, and certainly she had a belief in a higher power. She believed in God. She prayed, but it was not very evident in her life, and certainly if she mentioned that she was Christian, it was only in name. As I mentioned, the very nominal side. So that’s the background.

So Vancouver. Is that—tell me, culturally speaking, is that much of a religious community? 

No! Not at all.

Okay. 

I would say probably less than 20% even identify as Christians. Certainly, it’s very small. It’s maybe more than New England where I am, which is something like 5% or less evangelical and something like very nominally Roman Catholic, but certainly religion in western Canada was not a public thing and was not even a major factor in people’s lives.

So did you have any exposure to what you would consider a more robust form of Christianity growing up? Any people that you knew? Or was that in your world at all? 

Sure. So there’s kind of two major influences. My grandmother was very devout, but we didn’t have a lot of exposure to her. And then my best friend in high school was able to answer a lot of my questions, and he was and continues to be a very devout Christian today. And so whenever I had weird questions, like, “I don’t understand the Bible,” or, “I don’t understand this Trinity thing. This is weird,” I would go to my best friend in high school, Vern, and we’d talk about it. And he very cogently explained to me these doctrines.

Okay. So you did have some influences. So as you were growing up, you had a father, you said, who was a secular humanist. He was an atheist. You had a mother who had a nominal expression of faith. So when you were growing up, did you have any belief in God? Were you following in the footsteps of your father or your mother? Or was it an issue or something—did you go to church? Talk with me about that. 

Sure. So my younger brother and I were taken to church for a while, maybe off and on. Whenever we went on vacations or whenever it was convenient, so maybe a couple of times a month, and mostly to go to the Sunday school programs and socializing. And I really didn’t get much of the faith, and a lot of it seems like rituals, so I really didn’t understand why people did what they did, and then, when I was 12, my dad came up to me and said, “Well, Chris, you’re twelve. You’re old enough to make your own decisions. If this is what you want to do, then you have my,” whatever, equivalent of blessing, I guess. “You can do that, but if you don’t want to do it, then stop doing it.” And I said to him at that time, “Yeah, I don’t understand this. It makes no sense. I’m going to stop doing it.” And, also around the same point in time, we were talking about college applications already, at age twelve, and preparing for higher education, and also I had become very enamored of science. Kind of like Carl Sagan puts it, that the cosmos is all that is and all there ever was and all there ever would be. And really believed that science could or would be able to explain everything. And so I said, “Well, this all seems like superstitious hogwash. Every kind of religion, especially going to church and things like that.” So I, at that point in time, decided, “I’m going to be an atheist.” And it was a distinct moment in my life that I remember. It was over two years where I said, “I don’t believe any religion is true. I reject it all.” “All this stuff seems like either fantasy or hogwash, your choice.”

So when you rejected God and that metaphysical reality, any kind of supernatural reality, by default, in a sense, you embraced a naturalistic view of the world. 

Correct.

I know you said you really honored or revered science in a way as being an ultimate explainer, in a sense, of the world and that there was not anything more than that. Would you say that you looked at the naturalistic worldview with any kind of critical eye at all, in terms of the logical implications of that naturalistic worldview? Or were you looking more at just the positive aspects of “intellectual people believe in science, not in hogwash.” What was your line of thinking around that time? 

That’s a great question. So yes, absolutely, I actually carried through a number of the logical conclusions, so, in fact, we were being taught, not only evolution and all that it entails, but you can apply that also, you know the Darwinian evolution, to the survival of the fittest. And certainly in terms of implications, if I’m smarter than somebody else, I deserve to live longer or… deserve to have my opinions heard more rightly than other people. I became very elitist in a way. I’m kind of ashamed now to admit it, but I certainly had this air of superiority because I thought that my thinking was correct, more correct than others, and certainly that those who were more correct deserved to have their voices heard, and the less correct voices did not deserve to have their voices heard.

So certainly I did carry through in some of those implications of what I believed. I didn’t fully see that certainly naturalism and humanism have certain assumptions, like, as you alluded to, if you basically eliminated all possibility of the supernatural, that it’s almost like, “Okay, everything has to be explained by science,” or it’s kind of like you’re almost using science in a way of being like god in the gaps instead of using God as the God of the gaps, things like that kind of argument.

Yeah. That tells me a little bit about you, that you are, obviously, a critical thinker. That you are willing to look a little bit more closely at what you were embracing, not just what you were rejecting. So you were obviously a student, a teenager. You had embraced this atheistic identity. You were moving towards university and developing an elitist, intellectualist way of thinking, I guess to pursue your goals of academia and achievement. So I wonder, were most of your friends thinking in the same kind of way? Did you have a lot of friends who called themselves or identified as atheists as well? 

I had some friends who were atheists, maybe one or two, and then the rest of them were largely agnostics, true agnostics, meaning they didn’t know, so in my mind there’s a major difference. Atheists are—within reason, you determine that there are no supernatural… there is no existence other than what we know. There is no possibility of any God or gods. And agnostics can range from, “Well, I’m not sure, and I’m not 100% certain that my position is correct,” or it doesn’t have to be 100% certainty that there are no gods, but maybe even 99%, 97% sure. That would be an atheist position, and then some agnostics were like, “Well, I haven’t thought through it enough, so I don’t know what to believe.”

It strikes me, as you were talking about the embracing of your naturalistic worldview, that there was somewhat of a Darwinian perspective on who was perhaps the stronger or the more fit. And I think that oftentimes there is a dismissal of the religious in that kind of scenario and almost a contemptuousness. Did you ever have a sense of that? As just a part of your atheistic worldview? 

I didn’t get to that point where I saw all, whether it was Christianity or other religions, as having zero credibility and zero value. I think I was much more a pragmatist about it and very utilitarian. It’s like, “Okay, well, I guess some Christians do function as counselors, and they give free counseling and help out the homeless. Okay, yeah, that’s somewhat useful,” and I definitely heard a number of my brother’s sentiments, whether that’s expressing that Christianity is just a crutch for those who are mentally weak or other sentiments that are similar.

So you lived with this perspective for a little while, while you were in high school. So take us on your journey from there. How long were in this atheistic perspective? What, if anything, kind of starting making you question, perhaps, your own perspective and becoming open towards another? 

Sure. So I would say it was just over two years, maybe somewhere between two and two and a half years, that I very much would self-identify as an atheist and would tell you, “I’m an atheist. I don’t believe in anything. I believe science can explain everything or will explain everything.” And I think even I had an atheist high school teacher who questioned that a little bit, and he said, “Well, wait a second. Are you sure that science will be able to explain everything?” I was like, “Wait. You’re an atheist. Aren’t you supposed to accept that science will or can explain everything?”

But it was really a set of three circumstances that really made me think that maybe atheism is not correct or maybe that there is an existence outside of what we know, outside of a naturalistic environment. So the first thing was I was walking home—this was in, I think, the end of seventh grade or eighth grade or something like that, and I was walking home from my school, and on the way home, there’s one side of the road that has a sidewalk, and the other side has no sidewalk, and the other side that doesn’t have a sidewalk is actually further, and for whatever reason, I decided I’m going to cross the sidewalk. And a car came over, kind of barreling out of control, on the side of the sidewalk, where I was standing, and I thought to myself, “Well, that’s really strange. It’s completely illogical and irrational to cross the street where it would be a further path and it’s not got a sidewalk, and crossing the street, I could’ve been hit by a car. Does this make sense?” And it’s like, “I wouldn’t have seen the car coming from behind me, either, but it did eventually run over that piece of sidewalk. So hmm.” That was a little puzzling, and I didn’t think anything much more when that happened.

Like it was a near miss? 

Yeah. It was a near miss. Well, that was an unusual piece of intuition, that I crossed the street and should have been dead, and I’m alive. And there’s no rational reason for this. So, okay, whatever.

And then, the second time, my mother was driving my brother and I back from whatever it was, I think from the high school, and she had just finished the night shift, so she was overly tired, and she forgot to stop at a stop sign, and a car kind of came over the hill and broadsided us. And it was on my side of the car, but five seconds before the accident happened, I’d actually unbuckled myself and moved over to the center of the car. Not seeing the car. I just unbuckled myself and moved. And again, I was like, “My goodness! I survived another crash and could have been seriously hurt.” My mother actually did have whiplash and concussion, and she had to wear a neck brace for many months afterwards, whereas I didn’t have any injuries whatsoever. And it was very remarkable. So again, it was kind of like, “What?” I should have been fully seat belted and not taken it off at any point in time, but for whatever reason, I moved.

And then a third time we were passing in between two warehouse buildings, and there was a railway crossing, and there was actually a train coming our way, but the gate had not dropped and there was no signal, and we barely missed it. It was—I don’t know—six feet? Ten feet? It couldn’t have been more than that. And so there was a series of situations that I realized, like, “Probabilistically, I should be dead. And if I had followed everything rationally, done everything rationally, stayed on the same side of the sidewalk where eventually the car would’ve run over, kept my seat belt on, that I should be dead. And yet here I am alive, and all these things not very rational.”

Right. 

“So is there perhaps something more than what I see, maybe more than rationality, maybe more than naturalism,” and so that led me to thinking, “Okay, maybe I should think there is the possibility of a supernatural,” and then at that point I kind of went from atheist to agnostic. And I definitely would not say I was a Christian, did not want to explore Christianity at that point in time, but at least at that point in time, I would have put it this way, “I’m open to some existence beyond the natural, whether that’s God, gods, goddesses, whatever. I’m open to it. And maybe I should go look into these things.” So this was at the age of fourteen.

Okay. So then you started looking, I presume, and tell me about that journey. Where did you go first? What did you start looking at first? 

So I was very interested in pantheism, so I started exploring Greco-Roman gods and explored that to its logical conclusion. It was like, “Okay, maybe more gods is better, and having a god for everything.” So I’d already studied Egyptian mythology, Norse mythology, Greco-Roman gods, even Hindu gods, and it seems like, to me, that if there were such gods or goddesses, they were very haphazard, like throwing dice with our lives. And, for the Egyptians, it was like, there’s a god for everything. There’s a god of Nile. There’s a god of the dead. There’s a god of fertility. There’s a god of the rain. There’s a god of the sun. And so on and so forth. And certainly I think, as I’ve read, in retrospect, as a Christian now, when we use the word universe, it’s like one out of many, and we’re trying to make sense of the diversity of life and the diversity of… whether it’s beetles or whether it’s life forms or numerous other things, and I think that the pantheism appeals to the diversity, trying to explain that, but it didn’t do a good job of trying to unify, “Why does science make sense?” “Why is physics so mathematical and so elegant and so beautiful?” The pantheism doesn’t unite very well there. And so I slowly rejected polytheism or pantheism.

I moved into human wisdom religions, so Taoism, Buddhism. I actually practiced a number of things. Like, “I feel hungry!” “No, I don’t, because this is causing me to be imbalanced, and I should not have strong desires, because that’s what causes conflict.” And so I practiced a number of these things, and I realized later, especially becoming Christian, that it’s like, well, sometimes God does work through our desires. Certainly, we love justice. We love beauty. We love truth as Christians. And certainly even compassion or things like that… There’s a number of virtues that Christianity espouses, and these are things that we should strive for. If justice doesn’t matter and we should have no desires for justice, well, who cares? Just let everybody do their own thing. And then we get anarchy and chaos, but anyways.

Yeah. I was going to say, there are such things as good desires. 

Right, absolutely.

Worthy. Yeah. 

And also that there are some times that God does tell us, as a Christian, it’s like, “Well, I’m feeling tired.” Well, is it legitimate, like I didn’t get enough sleep? Or maybe I did work really hard for 12 hours on physical labor or things like that. And so my body is telling me, “Hey, maybe it’s time to get some sleep.” Instead of saying, “Okay, I’ve got to deny myself and not have these desires for sleep,” or whatever. So I actually slowly but surely rejected those human wisdom religions. I actually had my own Tarot card deck. I had crystals. I was playing around with that. I was into horoscopes and into biorhythms and all kinds of things. And that seemed a little arbitrary.

And then eventually I got back to monotheism. And I studied with a rabbi, and we read the Old Testament. He instructed me fairly well. I actually had a very strong sense of the holiness of God. That’s one of the major themes of the Old Testament. A number of the books, especially Leviticus, emphasize God’s holiness. And whether it’s Isaiah 6 or numerous other passages, that God’s moral perfection and that He’s utterly sinless and that no fellowship can exist between a being of utter absolute moral perfection and sinlessness and imperfect, finite creatures. And so I actually was struck with a sense of my own sinfulness and my unworthiness because of that experience, and I was like, “Okay, this is nice. I’m glad I studied it. Okay. Moving on.”

And then I studied Islam, and I actually had my own copy of the Koran and read it a lot, and it struck me as like, “Well, if we actually carried a number of the statutes, like carried eye to an eye, unfortunately what we see is, like, “Okay. You knock off my brother. I don’t know why. I’m going to go knock off your family or several of your brothers,” or things like that. And then there were later hadiths that had to address, like, “Okay, you can’t deal with other followers of the way that way,” or the followers of the way of peace that way. And I realized that a number of the things in Islam were untenable if you follow it through philosophically. You can’t do that as a society. You can’t do that even as a family. And I cannot exercise eye for an eye. And that will only perpetuate a cycle of violence and wrongdoing.

And so I came back to Christianity, and I had already been somewhat instructed by the Jewish rabbi and others, that the Old Testament ends at basically Malachi in our canon, and then Matthew is the first book, and of course, as soon as you dive into Matthew and right after the genealogy, you get into, within chapters five through seven, the Sermon on the Mount. And this was mind blowing to me. It was like, “Oh! Of course! This is correct! This is how you defeat evil. Turn the other cheek and not retaliate.” So it actually surprised me. Caught me off guard. In contrast to everything that I had studied beforehand. And even… Jesus has the passage about prayer, and so I said, “Okay. Let me try this. Maybe it might work. God, if You are real,” I remember praying, “please show Yourself to me. Please guide me or help me understand,” and I did have the distinct impression that this was happening and that… My best friend from high school started spending more time with me, and taking me to things, some of his youth group activities, although they weren’t terribly overtly Christian. They were more social.

But, anyway, my best friend Vern explained to me a number of things at that point in time, so I was much more open and saying, “I don’t understand the Trinity. I don’t understand why God has so many names. What is this?” And so my friend was very patient and kind of took me through and explained to me what it meant and slowly but surely I think I was like, “Okay, I can see that. That seems reasonable.” So he laid that foundation.

So you were, at this point—how old were you then? You said later in high school? 

So this was—Vern and I started spending a lot of time when I was sixteen and seventeen. So at this point in time.

And you had been, it sounds like, on a very diligent exploration, exploring all of these different potential faith traditions that didn’t seem to have substance, or at least didn’t seem to satisfy your understanding of God or faith or how it relates to reality or the human condition perhaps. 

Right.

Except when you got to the Old Testament. Then it really peered into the human heart. You said you felt the holiness of God. 

Yes.

Which that can be daunting. But I love what you talked about when you started reading the New Testament, and you started with the stories of Jesus, the gospel narratives, and that there was something palpably different, in the sense that there was something there a little bit different than what you had felt or experienced before. Now, again, I’m thinking about this. You had moved from atheism to agnosticism. Agnosticism but with an openness and a willingness to see these different faith traditions or religions for what they were. You were willing to actually take them on, to try them experientially, which again I think is very laudable, in your search. Rather than just looking at things intellectually, you actually tried them out experientially.

I’m curious. When you started reading the New Testament and you obviously, as an inquisitive person, you started critically thinking, and you had these big questions. And Vern was there, and he was helping guide you. Was he a good resource? Or was he, let me just say, more than a nominal Christian? Was he able to engage with you in a way that was intellectually satisfying? Able to answer your questions? And also was he someone who actually embodied Christianity in a meaningful way? Not just nominally. Not just by name only but actually took it seriously.

Yeah. Vern has always been rock solid in his faith. And he’s very much self-identified not only as a Christian but been very serious about his Christian faith. At that point in time, even when we were both sixteen and seventeen, he had certainly internalized his family’s faith but also had explored it and was able to articulate why he believed what he believed and could explain a number of things in his faith. And I don’t ever recall that Vern was ever at a loss. He knew his stuff, and he really knew his faith.

So you obviously knew that he was a Christian, and you… because I think sometimes we wonder how we can start meaningfully engaging with those who aren’t Christians, but you obviously knew something about him that you were willing to engage with him, ask him questions, and he was approachable, which sounds pretty wonderful. As you were reading the Bible and it has this miraculous content, as a former naturalist, when you were reading those kinds of things, was that off putting?

So it was actually a long process for me to come to actually accept the Bible was true. So I think I started exploring Christianity when I was sixteen, and I would not have ever said, “Yeah, I’m definitely a Christian.” In fact, I remember distinctly going off to MIT and thinking, “Okay, when I get my life in order, and when I finish my PhD or something like that, then I might consider exploring Christianity more seriously, and maybe then I’ll think about becoming a Christian,” and things like that. So it was not even on my radar when I went to MIT.

Okay. 

And so it was actually about a three-year journey, from sixteen to nineteen, where there were a number of things, and even, shockingly, you might find, at MIT, there were a number of professors who were Christians, including my academic advisor and now the department head of AeroAstro. That’s Daniel Hastings is a devout Christian. He was my undergraduate advisor. And then there were numerous other ones, and then little hints here and there, like they talk about Cantor sets or Gödel and his formulation of God and actual infinities and things like that, talking pretty high level, but I was resonating with this, and I was going, “Huh. I never thought of it that way,” in terms of actual infinities as a way to prove our God.

And there were a number… I had a material science professor who jokingly mentioned that some MIT students, pranksters that they were, they decided, “Oh, let’s enter a wine contest and figure out how to synthetically make a wine, and they combined, obviously, ethanol and various carbon compounds and things like that, and then they entered the wine contest,” and the judges were like, “Oh, this is really, really good! Where did you get the grapes?” and they were like, “Uh, yeah. We can’t tell you that. Proprietary knowledge,” or whatever, and they got busted, and they got eliminated, but they synthetically created a wine from water, carbon compounds, and alcohol, ethanol. So the idea of even Jesus turning water to wine suddenly became far less far-fetched. And obviously somebody who is very advanced in technology could do these things, but obviously the technology didn’t exist back then, so it even argues that somebody who was the Creator of the universe, or somebody who had mastery over nature and the elements, would be far superior in order of magnitude than any human being that existed. So even my time at MIT kind of opened me to a Christian worldview.

Wow. That’s interesting. So it sounds like, even though you were trying to venture a little bit away from thinking about God, that you entered into an environment where actually there were some very high-level discussions about that very reality. So did that kind of bring you back around to thinking more seriously about the potential for God’s existence? 

Sure. I think I would say that, somewhere between… I was eighteen or nineteen, and certainly whether it was my freshman year sometime or by that summer, I had accepted that, “Okay, the Christian God exists. Even if I’m not a Christian,” like I would not self-identify as a Christian at that point in time. I did say the Christian God exists, and certainly my sense of His holiness prior to the end of high school and my own unworthiness kind of alluded to that, or at least gave me some sense of that. And certainly towards the summer of my freshman year, so as a rising sophomore at MIT, my best friend in high school took me to a number of church events that I started to realize, “Oh, the Bible is not just abstract and full of weird stories and genealogies. It’s very practical and applies to my life.” And of course I’m not ready to live it yet. This forgiveness thing, too hard, not going to try. And the moral codes. “Nah, nah. Not for me. It would be too hard. Nice ideas, certainly, but not ready to follow after the steps of Jesus.” So I would not, again, identify myself as a Christian. I was, at that point in time, age eighteen, turning nineteen, at least recognizing, “Okay, the Christian God exists. I recognize His existence and certainly His presence in my life, and it makes sense of all that I’ve gone through, and certainly I recognize the Bible is factual and credible and certainly practical.” So that’s where I was.

So you embraced it a bit intellectually. 

Yeah.

That it was propositionally true or historically true? 

Yes.

But you weren’t willing or able to… willing, I guess, is the right word. 

Yes.

To embrace it personally. So then what happened? How long did you stay in this bit of an ambivalent state? 

Sophomore year, I was launched into grades, so I kind of threw myself wholeheartedly into my grades and was getting straight As even at MIT, and even my professors were patting me on the back, saying, “Keep it up,” “You’re doing great,” “Whatever you’ll want will be open to you,” whether that’s graduate studies or whether that’s working for NASA or whatever else. And so it seemed like the world was my oyster, and I was really working hard, too. I was maintaining some extracurriculars and successfully auditioned… Out of ten french hornists, I was the only one who selected for MIT Symphony Orchestra, and it was a fabulous experience, and numerous other extracurriculars.

So I was doing everything that I’d ever wanted to do, and yet I felt like it was empty. And so kind of this existential angst here. I had finished up one of several all nighters, so sophomore year in Aeronautics and Astronautics, which is nicknamed rocket science.

And I came into my room and was thinking to myself, “Hey! Everything that I’ve ever wanted has come about. I’m at MIT. I’m doing incredible. I’m doing research. I’m involved with all these extracurriculars. I’m at the top of my game.” It’s like, “If this is the best life now, I’m living it,” and it wasn’t a nadir or I’d lost everything. I was at the top. And yet it was like, “Is that all that there is in life?” Like, “I’ve accomplished everything that I’ve ever wanted, and yet why do I feel like something is missing? There’s something else.”

And I had packed a red King James Bible, which I kept on the left side of my dresser, and coming back into my room, I was thinking through, and I was like, “Yeah, I’m pretty sure if I kept this up, I’d be doing fine in life, and then what? Then get married? Then get a job? Get whatever, and what does this all mean?” And I was at a loss for answers, but as I came into my room, my eye fell on my King James, and I opened it up. “Seek first the kingdom, and all these things will be given to you as well. Seek first His kingdom.” And I realized, “You know? Yeah. I don’t know. Chris doesn’t know what’s right, what’s best for Chris. I think I might.” And later, as I became a Christian and I started studying, I realized, “Yeah, there is a big God-shaped void in my heart, and I’ve been trying to stuff it full of everything else, of extracurriculars and achievements,” and it wasn’t satisfying. And it’s not like God necessarily changes you and you become like the Borg or whatever. It’s not like that when you become a Christian. God reorders your life, and it’s not like I had a lobotomy after I became a Christian and was dumb thereafter. It continued to be intellectual and use my intellect to honor God. But at that point in time, late October 1991, I was 19 years old, and I think I remember praying, like, “God, I don’t know what’s best for my life. I don’t even know how this is supposed to go. I know that You know because You have seen the past, the present, the future. I know how this is supposed to go. I know You know better than I know what I need, and please help me find people who will help me order my life as would please You.”

So you surrendered. I mean, you finally came to that place where you were willing to go His way instead of your own. 

Right, exactly.

Right. Wow. And so you said that was… You had kind of reached the pinnacle and it wasn’t enough and then you surrendered.

And then, I’m curious. In terms of your Christian faith walk, have you been able to find that sense of fulfillment or satisfaction or meaning that seemed so elusive for you when you had everything? 

So it has not been easy. And sometimes the route is very circuitous. So even though I prayed for God to put people in my life who would teach me the Bible or teach me His way, I got involved with a deviant group, the Boston Church of Christ, at that point in time. In fact, one of my friends in the MIT Symphony Orchestra had just joined the Boston Church of Christ, the extended International Churches of Christ, and he had been seeking out people that he was going to try to bring in. And so, because we were pretty good friends, he decided to invite me, and I got involved with the Boston Church of Christ. And that was a little bit over 2-1/4 years of that, and kind of a long story short, it took an amount of time of searching after that before I came back to Christianity again. So certainly a lot of looking for the truth and trying to understand what is the truth, and then I came back to Christianity, and then in trying to align my life with God, I did eventually make a lot of sense of my difficulties, my suffering, my circuitous route in life, and things like that. So it hasn’t been easy. It hasn’t been like going from mountain to mountain to mountain to mountain. It’s been very circuitous.

And for those who aren’t familiar, just in a nutshell, the Boston Church of Christ is not what you would consider an orthodox Christian group. I presume from your work with cults that you would consider this group to be cult-like or a cult. Is that right? 

Sure. So there’s a number of synonyms, because the word “cult” can certainly bring out a lot of strong emotions, so I try to avoid the word cult sometimes. Certainly, we can talk about either authoritarian groups or totalitarian groups, groups that tell you how to run your life or that bring out unhealthy psychological dynamics. Certainly yes. Absolutely. Or we could talk about spiritually abusive groups or groups that cause codependency, especially on leaders or other members. Yes, absolutely. So I try and use synonyms for the word cult, yes. It is not an orthodox group. It’s not terribly healthy. In a nutshell, yes.

But you found your way out of that group and found, a healthy, normative kind of Christian church, I presume. 

Yeah. So that, again, is circuitous. In a nutshell, I went from… My friends that I consider Christians outside of the Boston Church of Christ were shocked when I started hanging out with them. They were like, “Hey, Chris. Did you know you’re hanging out with the members of the Boston Church of Christ?” And I was like, “Yes, I did.” And then they’re like, “You know there’s all this controversy, and let us give you numerous pages and numerous articles about how controversial they are.” And it’s like, “Oh, my gosh! What have I gotten myself into?” And then I made the mistake of, again playing the scientific principles, so it’s like, “Okay, I won’t tell them I’m looking for something, and if I don’t see it, it must not happen anymore,” but that was the wrong leap of logic. It was, “If it doesn’t happen, it probably is that they’re not telling me,” much like in corporations. It’s on a need-to-know basis, rather than total transparency. And so I was very committed to the Boston Church of Christ for a number of years, and then even became a leader, and was actually, for having some integrity, like I really believed that there were Christians outside of our group, unlike the Boston Church of Christ, that I tried to present to the conciliation meeting and failed horribly, but it got back that I was orchestrating it and that I dared to question that there are issues, like things that could be improved in the Boston Church of Christ, so I was kicked out.

And I can honestly say that was God acting, because I would not have had the strength to leave, and I would not have chosen to leave on my own. And the people have since, numerous of my friends who have left have apologized, and I was like, “No, no, no. Nothing to apologize for. We were kind of under that mindset and being unduly influenced.” I had to unwind a lot of that stuff and figure out, “Okay, what does Christianity actually teach?” And, “What is actually correct?” And it was examining my faith. And that led me to studying the scriptures even more intensely and in the original languages and studying church history and theology and things like that. Kind of a weird coincidence, when I was involved with the Boston Church of Christ, one of the deans of administration at MIT had kind of taken me aside and said, “You know, I know you’re involved with the Boston Church of Christ. You really should take some time and study maybe at a theological institute. Study your church history. Study your original languages. Study your theology,” and at that time, when I was a member, I scoffed at him. “All you need is the Bible.”

And I had done poorly. My grades had kind of plummeted when I was involved with the Boston Church of Christ, and I had to take some time off. And then eventually… That was kind of a further purification process, too. It’s like I had to get rid of everything, all preconceptions of who I was, so I had kind of wound myself up to be, like, “Okay, I’m this really smart guy who is an MIT student,” and suddenly, I was stripped of all that. I had to take some time off. No chance of returning for at least a year. And then I had to claw my way back to finish, and then eventually did finish, and all these experiences had kind of led me to a point where I was like, “I’d really like to study my faith better, not only for myself, but also to teach it well. And that led me to seminary, and I actually asked that dean for his recommendation letter. And as well, I got involved with a much healthier church, and there were a lot of people who were refugees from the Boston Church of Christ there.

Then, you have a heart, obviously, for those who get wrapped up in things like that. I’d like to ask you a question. As someone who is such a thinker and with an appreciation for philosophy and science and theology, there’s often a push back against Christianity that, if you believe in science that you cannot believe in God or religion or have faith. How would you answer a skeptic or someone who raises that objection, that you cannot believe in them both together? 

Sure. No. Absolutely. That’s a great question. I was fortunate that I got to meet Alvin Plantinga when he was at Harvard, and he exactly lectured on this. And the way he put is this: There seems to be very superficial concord between scientism, which is really what it is. It’s not just science, but it’s scientism. It’s a purely science and naturalistic point of view. But there’s actually some deeper discord in the ways that they actually conflict, so it’s almost like you have to outright object or get rid of any of the supernatural. You have to ignore a lot of things, and so while there is very superficial concordance between scientism and atheism or humanism, but also linked to truth, that there’s much deeper concordance between Christianity and science. And not surprisingly, there are a number of Christians at MIT who were strong Christians but also strong engineers and strong scientists. And they didn’t see a conflict.

Yeah. There’s a basic order and rationality to the universe itself, and the elegance of mathematics, and the way that you’re able to even pursue observation and evidence and that there’s a predictability to it. And all of those things that would not be unless there was a transcendent source. Even your own rationality, right? 

Right. Absolutely.

There’s a comprehensibility to the universe. And we have a mind that can comprehend. So there’s just so many things with regard to actually belief in God that allows you, like you say, to even understand the physical nature of the universe and science. It’s really quite wonderful and elegant when you look at it. And there are those, like you say, that have brilliant minds that can see all of that and that there’s no conflict. 

So as we’re wrapping up, Chris, let’s kind of turn for a moment. If you had a skeptic sitting in front of you who was actually curious. Maybe think back to when you were in high school and you were actually looking. “There has to be something more. I feel it.” Or, “I intuit.” Or, “I have an experience,” like you did, that they’re, “Okay, there’s something more, and I want to search for it.” There’s an open willingness there. What would you say to that skeptic? How would you speak to them? 

Yeah. Obviously how Christianity is lived out and how it is practiced is going to be a little to quite flawed. Go to the source and look at what Christianity actually is. And go to the author of Christianity, Jesus Christ Himself, Who I believe is the only perfect person who ever lived. And see the difference, the qualitative difference of his teachings as compared to Buddha or Mohammad or numerous other teachers. And also be open to Christianity and kind of look beyond—even if you look at my life, I’m sorry, I’m a horrible signpost. I’m a flawed person. And I will be the first to admit that, yes, this means I’m a sinner, and I don’t live up to the ideals which I’d like to espouse. But look to those ideals. Look to the ideals of Christianity. And see whether they’re true.

And not only that, that Christianity is not just head knowledge, but it’s also about a relationship. And how would I approach a relationship, right? I’d want to talk to that person, get to know that person, and maybe figure things out. And as I hinted at some of my early turnings, it was about prayer, and I had to turn to God and say, “Hey, I really don’t know if You’re real. I kind of feel silly sometimes, but show me. Please guide me.” And even with all hesitancy that you might have, like you might know you’re certain that He is there or whatever, but try. And try talking to Him. And try getting to know Him, this God that we profess.

That’s wonderful. I think, as I’m reflecting on your story, too, as you’re talking and prior to accepting Christ, you felt this great weight of sin. And the holiness of God, but yet you said, right there, that Jesus was the only perfect person who could ever live, and He lifts that burden from you, right? He lifts and forgives your sin, so that you don’t have to bear that burden anymore, and I think that’s a really beautiful part of Christianity.

If you turned for a moment then to talk with Christians who may know someone or are engaged with those who don’t believe, how would you best advise them to engage? Like Vern did with you.

Sure. I actually still have a number of friends who are atheists and not Christians, and to this day, one of my best friends from MIT is an atheist, and I think he admires that I’m truthful, and I’ll be happy to point out the flaws, and there’s times where he’s like, “Hey, Chris,” his name’s Matt. He has a PhD from Cornell in statistics now, and he’s more fascinated about Christianity from an intellectual point of view, but Matt will say, “Hey, Chris. I’d like to watch Jesus Camp with you sometime and get your insights.” And sometimes I’ve used interesting analogies, so it’s like, “Well, there is definitely some people in the church that I’m like, ‘Okay, you know Crazy Uncle Bob who just wants to talk about fishing all the time? Or Aunt Emma who just has 57 cats, and she’s the crazy cat aunt, and whatever else.’ Yeah there’s some of that in our background, and I’m sorry. They’re a part of the family still, too. And yeah, I’ve got to accept them, and it is what it is, but hopefully there are some more sane parts of the family that you can identify with and get along with,” so there’s definitely times where I haven’t tried to hide all of our warts and pimples and things like that. It’s like, “I’ve got crazy parts of my family and also in the extended family, and that’s also true in Christ, and that’s okay. We’re imperfect. But we are part of the same family, and yeah, maybe I would really like them not to be, but they are.”

And also having an open dialogue with them, so Matt knows that he can talk to me about anything, and we have actually a pretty interesting relationship, like we’ll talk about the New Atheists, and he’ll have read them, and I’ll have read them, and we’ll compare notes. And although Matt is an atheist, he’s never been like, “Chris, you’re crazy for believing what you believe.” He’s respected it, and even with my work with cults, he’ll see, “Okay, so you’re basically a specialist. And you deal with all those weird parts of the family that people don’t want to really acknowledge exist. So yeah. Good for you. Good on you.”

So he respects you. 

Yes.

And what I love about what you’re saying here is that you keep an open dialogue. You speak with him intellectually on his terms. You read things together. You discuss them. You have a nice open dialogue. It’s not defensive. It’s inquisitive. You learn from each other. And I really appreciate that you have ongoing relationships, because I think that’s tremendous. I think that’s huge.

Wow! What a story! Chris, amazing story. Amazing life. And amazing intellect, too. And I think that bodes well for really demonstrating—your whole story demonstrates this real strong intellectual pursuit of truth and what’s real. And that you have come to a place of not only believing it intellectually but giving your life to the One Who exists, Who’s real, Who lived the perfect life. And so He’s obviously transformed you and given you loads of meaning and purpose in your life. 

Mm-hm.

So I just really appreciate you coming on board today to talk to us about your story. 

Thank you for your time.

Very good. 

Thanks for tuning in to the Side B Stories Podcast to hear Chris’s story. You can find out more about his ministry, Exposing Cults, by visiting his website, which I’ll put in the episode notes. If you enjoyed it, follow, rate, review, and share this podcast with your friends and social network. In the meantime, I’ll be looking forward to seeing you next time, where we’ll see how another skeptic flips the record of their life. 

 

Kyle‘s childhood faith disappeared when he began questioning Christianity, finding no answers.  His inquisitive mind led him on a long journey to find the truth.

bkylekeltz.com

Kyle‘s recommendation for apologetics reading for those who want to know more of the evidence for the Christian worldview: On Guard by William Lane Craig Episode Transcript

Hello, and thanks for joining in. I’m Jana Harmon, and you’re listening to where we see how skeptics flip the record of their lives. Each podcast, we listen to someone who was once an atheist or skeptic but who surprisingly became a Christian. It’s often believed by atheists that there is no evidence for God, that science is the sole source of knowledge, and that science points to a godless reality. There is no need to impose a God explanation any longer, they think. We are beyond that, more sophisticated than that. Science has or will have all of the answers eventually. It is acknowledged by both secular thinkers and Christians that science does provide knowledge of how and when the material universe acts and reacts, causes and effects, and that much can be known through the scientific method. That is not in dispute. 

But what happens when scientific observations actually point towards the need for an explanation outside of material universe in order to understand and explain what we see of the universe itself? What happens when investigating science causes someone to question their own secular understanding of reality? That which we observe and measure needs greater explanation than the material world itself.  But within atheism, the closed universe of cause and effect is all there is, was, or ever will be. We are pieces in the clockwork of the universe, winding down to an inevitably encroaching end, with no real meaning or purpose in life. 

What happens when that sense of personal emptiness begins to take root? There are points of tension intellectually, personally. Competing explanatory worldviews are on the table. How does someone decide which one is true? These are but a couple of the issues faced by our guest, philosopher Kyle Keltz, in his journey from atheism to belief in God. I hope you’ll stay with us to hear his story. 

Welcome, Kyle. It’s so great to have you today! 

Hi, Jana. Thank you so much for having me on.

Wonderful. So glad to have you. I am curious, as we’re getting started. Kyle, can you tell us a little bit about who you are, before we go back into your story. Tell me about your life now? 

Okay, yes. Well, my name’s Kyle Keltz. I live in Lubbock, Texas. I’m married to Laci. I have two sons, who are eight and six. Their names are Thomas and Jack. I have a PhD in philosophy of religion from Southern Evangelical Seminary. I also got a master’s degree in apologetics from the same seminary. Like I said, I live here in Lubbock, Texas. I work at South Plains College, where I teach Introduction to Philosophy, Intro to World Religions, and English Composition.

Okay. Wow! You’ve got a full plate! 

Yes.

And it sounds like you are a strong proponent of the Christian worldview at this point, but I know you were not always there in that place of a proponent of Christianity. So let’s go back. Let’s start at the beginning and your childhood. Tell me a little bit about where you were born and your family and whether or not God was anywhere to be found in your home environment or among your friends. 

Okay. Yeah. So I grew up in—well, they call it west Texas. It’s actually closer to the panhandle, around Lubbock. I was born in Lockney, Texas. I claim Lubbock. But I think I had a pretty typical middle-class upbringing in the Bible Belt. I loved playing video games from an early age. That’s mostly what I did. But as far as God—was there religion in our family? There definitely was. When I’ve thought back on this in the past, I’ve called this nominal Christians. But the more I’ve thought about it, the more I realize I don’t really think that’s the case. I think I was just more hardheaded than anything. Both of my parents are Christians. They’ve usually served in the music side of ministry in churches. But they both talked to us about Christianity. They both tried to get us to go—I say “us.” I have a sister. They’d try to get us to go to church every Sunday, and the more I think about it, I think they had a huge influence on me eventually becoming a Christian.

So I think it was around when I was—1989, when I was about eight years old, I do have a memory of my mom talking to us like she usually did about heaven and hell, and I remember thinking, “Well, I want to be with my family and go to heaven,” and I actually remember, when I was eight, that I prayed for Jesus to come into my heart. So that was kind of the extent of it.

Growing up, we would go to church. I don’t know. Like I said, I think I was more hardheaded than anything, more immature. I didn’t listen much at church. I didn’t like going to church. I fell asleep a lot. And it became like a habit. I just would go to church and fall asleep in the sermon. Didn’t like going to Sunday school that much. But my parents were great. They had a good influence on me. I think I have a memory—I even tried to read through the Bible in the seventh grade. I didn’t make it. I think I stalled out probably in Numbers or something, but yeah. I mean, they had a good influence on me. I just wasn’t into it that much really.

Okay, yeah. So you had kind of a childhood faith. Your family, obviously, were believers in Christianity. You went to church. And it was just part of your life and the rhythm of things.

I’m curious. Did you have any other friends who were invested in Christianity at all? Or were you just kind of hanging out with guys who pretty much felt the same way you did? 

Oh. Yeah, that’s a good question, Jana. So most of my friends didn’t, if I remember correctly. Especially… One of the big turning points for me was in high school, is whenever I started claiming to be an atheist. At that time, most of my friends weren’t involved in church. I did have one that was highly involved, but thinking back to [sic] graduate school, I don’t even remember talking about religion with any of my friends. We moved around a lot, so I had to make friends everywhere we went, and one of the ways I did it was I just—an easy icebreaker for me was, “Do you like video games?”

Okay. 

And if they said, “No,” then it was awkward, but if they said, “Yes,” then I could almost instantly make a friend, but that was kind of… Usually, me and my friends, we would just go play or ride bikes, go play in town or play video games, and I don’t remember talking about religion with just about anybody. It wasn’t until really high school that I did have a friend who, still to this day, is a really strong Christian. And he was back then. But most of my friends weren’t.

So you said you started thinking more that you didn’t want to or didn’t believe in Christianity when you were in high school? Tell me about that. 

I think it was in junior high or a little bit younger—and thinking things that probably most kids don’t think. Like I remember one time sitting in my room thinking about what it would be like if nothing existed. I’ve just always had this mind that I was always daydreaming and/or thinking about why we’re here and things like that, so that really started to come to a head in high school, and that’s when I actually started questioning whether Christianity was true or not. And I haven’t said that—like I said, up to this point, I’m almost 100% sure, 99% sure that I wasn’t a Christian. Because my understanding was that I had prayed for Jesus to be in my heart, so that was my understanding of what it was to be a Christian. But I don’t think I understood the gospel message. But I still called myself a Christian.

At this point, I think it was my junior or senior year, I started to really question everything. I remember I had so many objections to Christianity but the more I learned about Christianity later on, the more I realized that they were all kind of—like I wasn’t objecting to Christianity. I was objecting to my misconceptions of what Christianity was. But I do remember one issue I had was that I thought—I did look in the Old Testament, and I saw that God was commanding the Jews to take over the land of Canaan, and I was like, “That doesn’t seem like something a good God would command. It just seems like maybe the Jews were just using their idea of some god as an excuse to do conquest.” I also had questions like—I didn’t think that Christianity made sense because I would tell people, “Well, you know, if Jesus is the only way to be saved, but He just only showed up 2,000 years ago, what about all the people before Him? Does that mean that they all went to hell?”

And I had many questions that were similar to that, and I just—the people I would ask—I can’t remember if I talked to my parents about it or not, but the people I did ask didn’t have the answers. And I got to the point where I didn’t think anybody had the answers. And a lot of times, I just wouldn’t even talk about it, because, to a certain point—I was pretty convicted it wasn’t true, but I didn’t want to argue to other people that it wasn’t true and hurt their beliefs, you know?

Right, right. Or perhaps even—like your parents. I’m sure that would be a difficult conversation to have. 

Yeah.

But when I asked people, it was mainly just people from church or friends that I knew that I thought would know something about it. It was mainly just asking the people I knew these questions, not really… And that’s what blows me away now, knowing how much apologetic material was out there during this time, I can’t believe I missed all of it… but yeah.

I think it’s easy to miss if it’s not, if those kind of answers aren’t to be found in your culture, in your circle of friends, family, church, whatever. So you started having these doubts. You were internally questioning the reality of Christianity. You began to, I guess, intellectually push away from it? And you were keeping quiet about it. It sounds like you were… I guess, like you said before, it may have been a bit too much of an uncomfortability to let it to be known that you were an atheist among your own circles? 

Yes. Now I was outspoken with my friends. I think I was just quiet about it with my family. I wasn’t sure how they would take it. I think maybe eventually I told them. What happened was I graduated from high school, and I went straight into the Army, and I had signed up for college money basically, but I signed up for the army to go serve for 4-1/2 years, and when I left the house, I really became like a staunch atheist. I actually still have some dog tags in a box somewhere, and you know, at the bottom, it usually says what religion you are, and I had some that said “N/A,” you know? N slash A. And I remember being really proud of that. And they always said—there’s a saying in the Army. They say, “There’s no atheists in a foxhole,” and I just used to sneer at that and be like, “No, I don’t believe in it at all.”

To be honest, and the more I’ve thought about it, I wanted to be a Christian probably because of my family influence, but I remember wanting to believe that God existed, but I just couldn’t. It was like… I don’t know. It’s almost like working out, and you’re trying to get that last rep in of whatever you’re doing, and you just can’t do it. That was how I felt. I wanted to believe. I just couldn’t bring myself to believe in it. But that kind of takes me to the next step, was where—I guess there was something in me that felt like there was more to life? Because there was a time where I literally thought, “If I died today,” like I actually wasn’t even afraid of death, like I thought, “If I die today, it’ll just be like going to sleep.” I just won’t exist anymore, and for all eternity, that’s it. I’ll just be like being unconscious. But I don’t know. There must have just been something in me. I thought there must be more than this.

So while I was in the military, I started researching other religions. And I read a lot of books. I read books on new age things, if I remember right. I know I read a lot of books on Buddhism and Hinduism. I remember the Bhagavad Gita was one of my favorites. I think I even read a little bit about Islam. I don’t know. I think I tried meditating a little bit here and there, but I always felt silly. The more I read about Hinduism, the less it made sense to me. But I did transition. I think it was for a couple of years I was an atheist, starting in high school, going into the military, but then I started leaning more towards agnosticism or at least being agnostic leaning towards atheism.

After a while, I quit being so outspoken about God not existing and all that. I transitioned into a period where I was like, “Okay, I’m going to start looking into it and try to figure out what I think is true, and I’m not going to take a side on this right now, and I’m not going to try to talk people out of being Christians or religious.”

So when you decided to start looking, though—because it sounds like you looked a lot of other directions than Christianity, so you were willing to look. Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, but was it one of those “anything but Christianity” kind of searches at the beginning? 

I think so. In the beginning, it definitely was. Because I had all these unanswered questions about Christianity, and I didn’t think anyone had the answers, so I began to assume that there were no answers, so that’s why I mainly went looking to other places first when I was trying to figure out… when I went on my “search for truth.”

But just thinking about the catalyst that started the search, it was that you were looking for something more in life, because you must’ve—like you say, the death was the end. So you must’ve been thoughtful enough to understand the implications of your atheism, that there’s not much in the way of objective meaning and purpose, that there is no life after death, all of those things.

Right.

So you were thoughtful enough about your own worldview, the implications of your own worldview, that you saw that there was something missing, at least from a human perspective, that you wanted something more existentially in your life? 

I think so. And I don’t want to say that I had completely thought out every angle of atheism or the implications for that on a comprehensive, logical, coherent worldview, but yes, I certainly had realized that, if God didn’t exist, which I didn’t think He did, that basically nothing mattered. And that if I died, nothing would happen. I would just cease to exist. And it’s funny, too, because you keep your living your life, and you keep going, and you have goals, but you tell yourself, “Ultimately, it doesn’t matter, but I’m going to do it anyway.” So I don’t think I’d thought it completely through, but I definitely knew that, at least.

But yeah, I think at the end of the day, though, I definitely knew there had to be something more than that. And so that’s why I did start looking for other—at least to see if maybe one of the other religions might be true, or there’s something in it that really struck me.

So as you were looking through these other religions, it sounds as if you weren’t finding what you were looking for in terms of… I don’t know. Intellectual substance? Or meaning? Or whatever it is that you were searching for. Why don’t you tell me about that? Or what it led towards. If it led away from those? What it led towards? 

It was Buddhism and Hinduism that really intrigued me the most. You know, there are several types of Buddhism. I was really into thinking about or wanting to try to practice the ones that are more meditative and more intellectual. I got into Hinduism, though, but yeah, when you try to read about, in some of the writings, how did the world begin and—oh!

That reminds me of one of my major objections to Christianity. It was because of Genesis 1. I used to think that because Genesis 1 says that… Or let’s say this: It seems to say that the world was created before light was created. I used to say, “Yeah, it seems to obviously be saying that the world was created before the sun was created, but science says otherwise,” so that was another major objection I had. But you know, when you start reading in other religions, what they say the origin of the world is and kind of the purpose for why we’re here and all that, it really… I don’t know. It wasn’t satisfying, I don’t think, and I was trying to—I guess because of the way my mind works, I was trying to integrate it into what I was seeing in my everyday life, and I was trying to make sure that all the concepts lined up with each other. And it just wasn’t really clicking.

And that really does kind of lead in to what I started doing next. So I got out of the military. I was still agnostic at this point. I got in in ’99, and I was in for 4-1/2 years. I think I got out around the beginning of 2004, and I came back to Lubbock, and I started going to Texas Tech University. At this time, I think that, because I didn’t find anything satisfying in these other religions, I started going to philosophy of religion. I specifically remember buying a book called Philosophy of Religion: Selected Readings, and philosophy of religion, it’s not completely… Philosophers of religion can be dabbling with just about any worldview. They can be theists. They can be pantheists. So I bought this book. I was like, “Well, I want to see what the philosophers have to say about all this.” I don’t know why I bought that specific book, but I saw in the table of contents that it talked about god of theism, it talked about pantheism and several others, I believe, and it had all these other things into it.

And that really was a turning point for me. Another thing that was happening in my life, around the time, the last couple of years in the Army and some of those years going through college—and this leads up to my conversion—was I was having I think it’s called sleep paralysis. Have you talked to anybody that’s experienced that?

Well, I think I know what you mean just from a personal experience, but why don’t you describe what it is, essentially? 

Oh, okay. Yeah. Well, and I didn’t even know it was called something back then. But I would have these, and I call them dreams. I honestly don’t know what you would call it. Because it’s like a dream, but you’re in the exact place you’re in, and you’re in the exact position you’re in, but I would have something that—I didn’t know it would be a dream at first, right? So I’d just think I’m awake in bed, but in these “dreams,” I would notice that there was a dark figure standing in the room somewhere. And when you realize that there’s a dark figure standing in your room, you want to sit up and ask who it is or see what’s going on. But then at that point I would realize that my whole body was paralyzed and I couldn’t move. And obviously that’s a jarring experience, so I would realize that I couldn’t move, and then, for the next couple of seconds, I would try with all my might to move and I couldn’t, and the dark figure would still just be standing there over me, kind of across the room, never right over me, and then maybe a minute or so later, finally I could move because it’s because I just woke up. But I’m in the same place. It feels like I just woke up, but I’m in the same place. I’m in the same bed and position, but I just sat up, and I’m breathing real hard. And you know, whenever I’d wake up, there wouldn’t be anything there. But it was always so weird, and I had it occasionally. I didn’t think much of it, to be honest. It would happen, and I was like, “That’s weird.” I might tell somebody about it.

I remember one time specifically I was on vacation from the Army, and I went hunting with my dad. We stayed the night at my grandma’s house in a small town in west Texas, and yeah, this one night. I slept on the couch that night, and I remember two people standing over me talking about me, just, “He’s doing this. He’s doing that. Blah, dah, dah, dah, dah,” and I wanted to sit up and be like, “Who is this in the living room?” because it was just me and him. I think my grandma and grandpa were out of town that night. But I couldn’t move, and I never saw who it was. When I finally was able to wake up, sit up, no one was there.

So I just mention this because this was kind of happening alongside me looking through all these other religions, and I started to be more open to maybe taking another look at Christianity, or at least theism, because I didn’t find any of the other ones compelling or interesting after a while.

Yeah, so Kyle, I imagine those experiences were quite frightening in some ways, I wonder. Did you consider that these figures—probably there was a palpable reality to them. Did it make you question whether or not there perhaps was something beyond the materialistic world? Something spiritual, perhaps? Maybe even a dark kind of spirituality? 

I don’t think so. In the beginning and for several years, I thought they were just weird dreams.

Okay. 

Yeah. There was a specific example that happened that really jarred me, and that kind of leads up to my conversion, really the main part of my conversion story.

Yes. 

Oh, okay. So yeah… Okay, so I joined the Army for 4-1/2 years. When I got out, I joined the Texas National Guard. And I decided to stay in the Texas National Guard while I went to college at Texas Tech. I started school in 2004. What happened was it took me like six years to graduate from Texas Tech, but I went to school for less than four years out of that time because I got deployed to Iraq a couple times.

So on this one specific deployment, in 2005—we were in southeastern Iraq. We were the Texas National Guard, and it wasn’t a super important mission or anything, but they had us basically stationed out in the middle of nowhere, just northwest of Kuwait. But we were at what is called a radio relay point out in the middle of the desert. And there were only like fifteen of us.

Most of our time was just spent on guard duty, really, and maybe going out and helping truck drivers every once in a while.

Now, leading up to this point, on this deployment, obviously it was really boring, because we were just doing guard duty, so I did a lot of reading. And I had ordered that philosophy of religion book, and I remember in that anthology there was an article titled “The Kalam Cosmological Argument” written by J.P. Moreland. And if your readers aren’t familiar with the Kalam cosmological argument, it’s a philosophical argument for God’s existence based off of the beginning of the world, right? And the argument says things that begin to exist have a cause. The universe began to exist. Therefore the universe has a cause. And I was reading that article by J.P. Moreland in this philosophy of religion anthology, and I just could not come up with an answer to this idea that there had to be a beginning to space and time. I tried. I came up with a few solutions, but it was so interesting because I just couldn’t come up with a satisfying solution. And it really started to hit me that I thought that there was a beginning to the universe, and if there was a beginning to the universe, I thought obviously it would follow that there had to be a God who made it begin.

So I was struggling with this at this point. I was wrestling with the Kalam argument, and then one night in the guard tower… And like I said, I don’t know if these are dreams or not. Because it seems like you’re awake but then you go through this experience and then you kind of wake up from it. But I don’t know. So I’m on guard duty, and I thought I was just kind of sitting there, watching everything, and I started to hear someone come up this ladder. It’s not like a ladder. I don’t know what you would call it, but it’s these things that kind of stick out from the tower, so you grab onto those and step on those. And they were metallic, so it was a very distinct noise that someone would make if they would climb up the ladder. And oftentimes, some of my friends would come up and visit me, and would visit them. Or maybe my squad leader would come up and see how I was doing. So it wasn’t a big deal. It was a very common thing for someone to come up the ladder and see you.

So I’m on guard duty. I hear someone come up. I don’t think much of it. But all of a sudden, when I could hear those footsteps and hands coming up that ladder to the top, this dark figure emerges.

Oh! 

And it really freaked me out. But I couldn’t move, you know? And then it stood there, and I couldn’t move, and then maybe a few seconds later I could move, and then it wasn’t there. So that really freaked me out for some reason. Way more than the other ones did when I was in bed. And that’s really the point where I started thinking that maybe there was something to this. And I started thinking about all the other times it happened. And I was wondering maybe that there’s some bad force out there that’s not happy with what I’m doing. And I think it was almost the next day—I don’t remember what it was. I think it was probably one of these camouflage Bibles that you have all over in the military. I think basically I took something like that and flipped to the back and looked for plan of salvation portion, you know? And I prayed the sinner’s prayer basically. And from then on, I definitely… I think that was the moment I was saved, but from then on, I definitely said I was a Christian. I never had someone to mentor me, so it took years before I finally started taking the Bible seriously, but I at least said I was a Christian.

So if I’m listening to your correctly and kind of putting the pieces together, and I suppose, from intellectual point of view, you were reading J.P Moreland, the Kalam cosmological argument, that from, again, an intellectual point of view, you’re beginning to see that the beginning of the universe requires a sufficient cause outside of the material universe, and that God seems to be the best explanation for that, and so I guess, in some way, you began to become open, again intellectually, to the idea of at least a theistic god or someone, the Big Banger who caused the Big Bang, as the sufficient and necessary cause. And so I guess, once you made that step, it was almost as if these episodes, these sleep paralysis episodes and then the seeing of the dark figures, that prior to that you just dismissed them, but after that, it was enough for you to kind of—push you is probably too strong of a word. But it was enough of a frightening experience or a sobering experience that you were able to apprehend at least that maybe, if there is a God, then maybe there is an evil force? Or a dark force? That’s real. If God is real, then maybe there’s something else that’s real that’s not so good? 

So it was through an interesting journeying, both experiential as well as intellectual, and then experiential again to bring you to a point of willingness, to where you actually looked at the Bible and looked at the back. And you were willing and really, it sounds like, very in earnest to accept God at that point. 

Yes. And it’s funny, because I look back on it now, and I thought I was so smart back then, when I didn’t believe in it. But I honestly—since I’ve learned about evidence for Jesus’ resurrection in seminary, I realize that there are so many questions I actually didn’t ask. And I was surprised that I didn’t. I thought, “Well, why did I go back to Christianity so soon?” I wonder if some of it has to do with my upbringing, but a lot of was that I really—at that point, I thought that the Judeo-Christian view of demons and the devil was real, so the rest of it must also be real, and I needed to ask Jesus for help really soon so they wouldn’t get me. You know, an interesting thing is, ever since I prayed, I did do that sinner’s prayer and I accept Jesus as my Lord and Savior, I haven’t had one of those sleep paralysis episodes with the dark figure standing over me.

That’s interesting. 

And since then, that’s been something that’s just really blowing me away. And I don’t know, maybe some people might think it’s completely psychological, but all I can say is that’s what I’ve experienced. Religious experience is difficult to get across to somebody, but that’s what I was seeing, and then I prayed to Jesus, and it has never happened to me again. In all these years.

Yeah. I think that is a powerful testimony in its own way. Granted, it is your own experience, but it is a very convincing experience for you. I can listen to the skeptic who may be listening and saying, “Oh, he was just imagining Or, “He just got scared or something, and he just believed,” but I have a feeling that you, as a thoughtful person, like you said earlier in your story. You wanted to believe, but you didn’t think that there was enough compelling evidence for you to believe. 

Right.

But at this point in your life, you didn’t want to believe, but you were searching and then found something compelling, both intellectually and experientially. Once you accepted Christ and  you were able to, I guess, look at the doubts and the hard questions through different eyes, I guess you could say, were you able to make sense intellectually of all of those questions that you had before? Was this new worldview philosophically—as a philosopher, as a thinker, was it something that gave you meaning and hope beyond death? But more than, from a human perspective, was it something that made sense of reality as a whole? Both what you were thinking about, say cosmologically with the origins of the universe for example, as well as in  your own humanity that the Christian worldview seemed to put the pieces together? How did that work? I mean you came a long way from just agreeing or praying the sinner’s prayer, the plan of salvation, to now being a PhD philosophy professor. There must have been something quite convincing to you beyond mere experience. 

Oh, yes. For sure. Now, you know, the rest of the story, there’s a lot of grace, a lot of providence I think. That’s what I think is so amazing, you know? And I still don’t think I went and talked to my family and asked them hard questions, but it was a slow process. After I became a Christian, I think I started reading the Bible a little bit. Never read it all the way through. I started praying. But not really going to church. When I was an undergrad, I joined a social fraternity, and we had a GPA requirement, but to be honest, most of the guys in my fraternity joined so we could go to parties. So I was drinking a lot back then, and looking back, sometimes I wonder if I was drinking a lot because of some of my experiences in the military, but I didn’t have… I basically came to Christ because of a book and the Holy Spirit. So I didn’t have someone guiding me through all this.

What I think was a turning point for me was when I met my wife. At this point, I was surrounded by people who drank, and that’s all I did. But then I met her. And we started dating. She didn’t drink, and really, it was interesting to me, because when we would talk or hang out, I realized that you can have fun without drinking, basically. But also she was someone—because I was wanting to date her. She didn’t tell me not to drink, but she’s just one of those people. She was definitely a mature Christian. And she’s just one of those people that you just want to act better around, you know? You just want to be a better person around them.

So I wouldn’t drink around her, and we got serious really quick. We both met in our late twenties. We were both looking for something serious. And we got married within a year of knowing each other, and she was just this lifeline to a world where I wasn’t surrounded by people drinking. And like I said, she was a mature Christian. She started getting me in church. I started reading the Bible more.

But also, one day, we had this conversation asking each other what we would do if we had a billion dollars. And she asked me what I would do, and I said, “Well, I would go back to school and learn all this stuff I’ve always wanted to learn about. I hear these things in the sermons, and I understand it for the most part, but I want to know the why of it all. I want to know how this is even possible,” so she actually talked me into following my dream. At first I thought I would just get some high paying job, or hopefully a high paying job, and work my way to retirement, so I could go back to school, but she talked me into going to seminary just right up front and then hopefully doing something like that as a career. So I did. And I went to Southern Evangelical Seminary, started going in 2014. She laughed because I was so excited I was ordering books on Amazon for my classes when we were on our honeymoon.

Besides my wife’s sanctifying influence on my life, going to SES was great for me. I was required to read through the Bible in the Bible survey courses. It was the first time I’d read through the whole thing. But I knew that I wanted to learn about philosophy. I wanted to learn about why Christianity is true, I also wanted a place that was grounded in the Bible and seemed to be pretty orthodox and conservative.

So I went there, and that was what was kind of an eye opener to me, is when I started learning about all of these philosophical arguments for God’s existence that I hadn’t even considered, when I started learning about the historical evidence for Jesus’ resurrection, when I started learning about all philosophical arguments for the existence of the soul and all these arguments against atheism. Well, some of the stuff on Jesus’ resurrection surprised me because I thought back and I thought, “You know, I didn’t even ask these questions, but there’s all of these answers and all this evidence for Jesus’ life and all these answers to objections from skeptics,” and I hadn’t even considered that. But I think it really had a lot to do with me thinking that demons were real.

But at this point in time in my life, I’ve seen so much. For one, it does make sense out of pretty much all of reality, the Christian worldview does. Whether it’s the beginning of the universe or us always seeking some kind of good, whether we believe that God exists or not, our rationality, our sense of right and wrong. But I’ve seen so much evidence for Christianity at this point that I just… It would take more faith for me to be an atheist. I tell people if they dug up Jesus’ body tomorrow, and they were able to somehow conclude conclusively that Christianity is false, I still would be at least a theist. I’d be confused, but all the evidence for God’s existence, philosophical and scientific evidence that kind of helps confirm that, I just… At this point, I’m so convinced that there is a God, and of course, with all this evidence for Jesus’ resurrection and all the evidence for the reliability of the Bible, I just think that Christianity stands alone as the true religion. And that everybody needs to take a good, hard look at their life and a good, hard look at the evidence and make a decision.

You know, sometimes, despite all the evidence that seems extremely obvious to those who’ve studied the evidence for a long time on a Christian perspective, oftentimes the skeptic will say there is no evidence for God. How would you respond to that, especially in light of what you just said, that there seems to be an overwhelming amount of evidence? 

It reminds me of me back whenever I was in that position. Because there were so many books written on apologetics before 1999. It blows me away how many people were speaking and writing about the truth of Christianity at that point, and I had no idea about it.

But I have journal entry assignments in my classes at work, in my philosophy class, and we get to a philosophy of religion portion of the class, and students are asked to write about their opinions and their thought on whether God exists, and I’ve had several students say things to that effect. “There’s absolutely no evidence for God’s existence,” and it always puzzles me, because in these debates on whether God exists or not, the theist is saying that the entire universe is evidence for God’s existence. Basically, to me, when someone says that, it would be like someone being in a murder case and the prosecutor has provided a lot of evidence, pointing… maybe circumstantial, but pointing to the guilt of the offender, but then one of the people on the jury says—they don’t think he did it, but they wouldn’t say, “There’s absolutely no evidence for it,” right? They would just say, “I don’t think this evidence means that he murdered that person.”

So if someone says, “There’s absolutely no evidence for God’s existence,” I think either they don’t know about all of these philosophical, logical, scientific arguments that Western philosophers and theists have been making for thousands of years, or what they really mean is, “The evidence doesn’t convince me.”

So that’s what I would say to somebody. If you think there is no evidence, then you need to start reading up on apologetics. If you’re really interested in this topic and you’re really searching for truth, there are a lot of books that provide logical, evidential reasons for believing that God exists and that Jesus rose from the dead.

Yeah. I think that might be a little bit key there, in terms of either they are not convinced or they haven’t been exposed, but what you said there is if they’re really looking. And I think that has a lot to say about all of us, in terms of what we’re looking for. We have a tendency to see what we seek, and so sometimes our desires prevent us from seeing perhaps what is true. 

Yeah.

if I had any more, other advice to a nonbeliever who was seeking in some sense of the word, I just think of my younger self, really. That’s one of the reasons kind of why I do it. One reason why I’m a philosopher is because I’ve always just thought about these hard questions. And I really was one of those people at work daydreaming about, “Does God exist?” and all these things.

But thinking about my younger self, I had all of these objections to Christianity, but like I said earlier, the more I learned about systematic theology, the more I learned about philosophy and all these Christian ideas that the church fathers and all the major leaders of the church in the medieval and modern and ancient period have argued for over thousands of years and the more I understood what Christianity really means, the more I realized that all of these objections I had to Christianity early on weren’t objections to Christianity, because I was basically… I had these straw man ideas about it, and I didn’t believe in something that wasn’t even Christianity. So I know it sounds crazy, but I almost wonder how many atheists or people who once were Christian or have never been Christian, but if they would just sit down with an open mind with someone who knows what they’re talking about and have them explain it to them, I wonder how many would find it more compelling.

Another thing is that I was asking all these questions, but no one had the answers, but the more I’ve thought about it, I tell people… Let’s say that I wanted to know about something, some really deep scientific concept, so I want to learn about relativity theory, and the only people I ask about relativity theory are my family members, who aren’t scientists, or my high school teacher. And none of them can explain it really well to me, and in fact, when they do explain what they do grasp, it doesn’t sound right. But the thing is I wouldn’t reject relativity theory based off of just asking my friends and my high school teacher. I would need to go to a professor, a PhD in it. And in the same way… I’m not saying that someone has to have a PhD to understand what Christianity is. I’m just saying that, if someone has asked their parents and a few other people and maybe their pastor, who hasn’t been taught apologetics maybe, and those people don’t have the answer, that’s not good reason for rejecting Christianity. You need to go to theologians. You need to read systematic theology, read some philosophy, read some works of apologetics, because those are going to be written by people who know what they’re talking about, and there is a lot of material out there on this stuff.

If you had a chance to recommend one book, say someone said, “I really would like to read something substantive from a Christian writer, philosopher, theologian,” can you think of a book that you might recommend for someone to pick up? 

Yes. The book I usually recommend is a book by William Lane Craig. It’s called On Guard, Student’s Edition, so it’s written by a Christian philosopher and apologist, written with an unbelieving audience in mind, and he covers a lot of ground in that book. He covers the meaning of life, whether or not God exists. He presents several arguments for God’s existence, and then he moves into the resurrection of Jesus and presents all of the historical evidence for Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection. And that’s one of my favorites. It’s written for a beginning audience, so I think it’s pretty easy to understand for beginners. And that’s one of my favorites to recommend to people.

Yeah. That’s excellent. And for the Christian, how would you recommend them to really consider talking with those who were as you once were, are engaging with those who don’t believe or the skeptic? 

Yeah. So as an apologist and a philosopher, obviously I put a lot of stock in and emphasize 1 Peter 3:15, that says that everyone needs to give a reason for the hope that is in them when they’re asked. I think obviously different Christians are gifted with different gifts, right? And I don’t think that everyone is going to be gifted in a way that they’re going to be interested in apologetics. I know many people who just know Christianity is true, and they don’t really have to dig into the evidence. They just know it’s true. And honestly, I think that’s okay. But I would say that everyone needs to at least know a little bit of good theology. Try to learn a little bit more about why they believe what they believe, whether it’s learning a little bit of basic systematic theology but also maybe reading at least one book on apologetics and looking at the evidence for Jesus’ resurrection and God’s existence, in the very least that you could point someone to that.

You know, since I became a believer, I’ve discovered that there are a good handful of people like me who needed to see evidence that it was true before they got on board, but I’ve also discovered that, in churches, there’s a lot of people who aren’t into that, and I’ve seen some Christians who were actually… They’re against apologetics in some sense, whether they think it’s just kind of a waste of time or they think it’s not very pious to say that you have to defend the truth of Christianity, and so yeah… For one, I think when engaging with nonbelievers, we need to at least know a little bit about what we believe so you can point nonbelievers who do want to see evidence to these resources, but also, as believers, we need to realize that not everybody has the same experience we do.

Because I’ve had some people say that we shouldn’t do apologetics because it doesn’t work. But I’m living proof that it does work. I know there were some experiential things going on with my conversion, but also a huge part of that was through philosophy and through apologetics and me being—one day I wasn’t convinced that God existed. The next day I read a philosophical argument, and I was convinced that there was a beginning to the universe and God had to be the cause of that. So I would just tell people that apologetics is okay. And God can and does use it to bring people to the Kingdom of God, so to have an open mind about it, and just because someone else is…. We’re not all gifted with the same gifts, so it’s okay for other people to do it, whether you’re interested in it or not.

Yeah, yeah. Thank you for that. Apologetics is something I think both you and I hold close to our hearts. I have, as you have, seen the value of it, especially in a world increasingly skeptical about Christianity and its truths. 

Yes.

So it’s good to know why we believe, what we believe, and all of these grounding arguments for it that are really, really quite substantive when you take look at them. I think, too, I love your story and what you’re saying because I also believe that, just as you had constructed straw men and arguments to take Christianity down, I think there’s oftentimes a misconception of what Christianity is and who Christians are, and oftentimes, we’re given a very negative stereotype, and one of those stereotypes is that we’re not intelligent people. And I think your story really counters that, your journey really counters that. You’re a thoughtful, intelligent person. You have asked questions since you were a boy, and into your adulthood, you’re spending your life still considering the big questions of life in a very thoughtful, intellectual way, not only for yourself but for college students and high school students as well. And that’s pretty wonderful, that you’ve gone through this whole journey in your life, both intellectual, as well as experiential, and spiritual of course, and that you’ve found the worldview that seems to make the most sense of reality, but you’re not keeping it to yourself. You’re sharing that with others. 

And that’s why I’m so happy that you’re on the podcast today, Kyle. Because I’m thinking about those who are going to be listening to your story and really benefit from your journey, so thank you for coming on board today. 

Thank you so much for having me, Jana.

It’s been wonderful. 

Thanks for tuning in to to hear Kyle’s story. You can find out more about him with the links in the episode notes, as well as the book On Guard that he recommended by William Lane Craig. If you enjoyed this episode, I hope you’ll subscribe and share this podcast with your friends and social network. It’s always great, too, if you give it a good rating. In the meantime, I’ll be looking forward to seeing you next time, where we’ll be see how someone else, another skeptic, flips the record of their life.

Former skeptic Adrienne Johnson embraced anything but God in her life until her drive to discover truth led her to belief.

Resources

Prager U, Stories of Us, Adrienne Johnson: Why I’m No Longer an Atheist https://www.prageru.com/video/stories-of-us-adrienne-johnson

Max McLean, Fellowship for Performing Arts, https://fpatheatre.com

C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

Learn more about the C.S. Lewis Institute Fellows Program at https://www.cslewisinstitute.org/Fellows_Program

Visit www.sidebstories.com to explore more resources and stories of atheist conversions to Christianity.

Episode Transcript

Hello, and thanks for joining in. I’m Jana Harmon, and you’re listening to the Side B Podcast, where we see how skeptics flip the record of their lives. Each podcast, we listen to someone who has once been an atheist but who, against all odds, became a Christian. Everyone is different. Every story is different. Everyone has and holds beliefs, yes, based upon intellectual reasons, but it’s usually more than that. We all have good and bad experiences, influences, emotions, desires, and disappointments. We have people in our lives that shape our expectations and thinking about what we should believe to be true or good or real. We are complex and complicated, but oh, so interesting. Every story of an atheist moving from disbelief to belief is nothing short of fascinating. This huge paradigm shift occurs not merely in the mind of someone in their expressed beliefs, but it also affects an enormous transformation of life and living. After all, what we believe dramatically effects how we behave, how we see and live life, or at least it should. If not, your beliefs are essentially meaningless. 

But when you see a remarkable shift in someone’s life, it causes us all to look more closely at what happened, to step in. One thing I can say from listening to story after story of conversion from atheism to belief in Jesus Christ is that an extraordinary change occurs, an exchange of life so undeniable that it captures the attention of all who’ve observed the before and after, so to speak. We stop in our tracks, and we want to know why and how it happened. What was so profound that turned someone from resolutely walking one way to changing course to a nearly opposite way of thinking and living? 

Today, we’re going to hear another one of those incredible stories. As an atheist, Adrienne Johnson couldn’t remotely conceive of God as a possible reality, much less anyone she wanted in her life. Now, she can’t imagine life without Him. I hope you’ll come and listen to her story and be encouraged by her courage, inspired by her change of belief and change of life. 

Welcome to the Side B, Adrienne. It’s so great to have you with me today! 

Thank you so much for having me. So, my name is Adrienne Johnson. I’m the chief of staff at PragerU. And we have a series called Stories of Us that features Americans from every walk of life and their amazing stories of transformation. We recently released an episode featuring me and my story, about how I was a lifelong atheist. In fact, I was a chain smoking, tattoo covered, sexually promiscuous, suicidally depressed atheist that was transformed by Jesus.

Wow. You have set the stage for us, Adrienne! I’m so intrigued to find out your story. Obviously, you’ve come a long way. Transformation is probably the right word to use for your story. So let’s start at the beginning of your story. Tell me about your childhood, where you grew up, your culture. And was there God in the picture? Did your family have any beliefs? Just start us there. 

Sure. So I grew up in Santa Monica, California. I grew up with two very loving secular parents. We really didn’t have any religion in the home. We didn’t have a whole lot of moral structure or guidelines, and my dad was basically an atheist. My mom was sort of a New Age hippie, and any time that I was exposed to any kind of religion or spirituality, I rejected it, even at a very, very young age. I thought it was all make believe and fairy tales. It didn’t make sense to me. It wasn’t logical.

I was a very rational, logical child. In fact, when I was about four years old, I came to my dad, and I was so earnest, and I said, “Dad, I just want you to tell me the truth. Okay? Just be honest with me. Is Santa Claus real?” And he was so taken aback by my directness that he said, “No, he’s not,” and I was relieved, because, to me, that whole thing didn’t make sense. How could one person fly all over the world in one night? So even as a little four year old, I wanted everything to be rational and make sense, and when I heard things about Adam and Eve and Noah’s Ark and the parting of the Red Sea, it just sounded like Santa Claus to me. It just sounded like fairy tales, and so I rejected it, and we really didn’t have any kind of religion or spirituality in the home?

Did you ever talk about religion or belief with your father and his atheism? Did you have any discussion? Or did you just come to this conclusion on your own? 

A little bit later, when I was in college—high school, college—my dad and I would talk about… That was really when I started coming into my own with my intellectual thinking, and we would have philosophical discussions about history. And I remember him telling me things about The Selfish Gene, which was a book that was written by a prominent atheist. I don’t know if it was Richard Dawkins or someone else, yeah, and he was saying how the only reason humans exist is because we’re really good hosts for DNA and that sort of sums up our entire existence. I guess I was a college student maybe at the time, and I thought, “Oh, that’s really interesting.” And I remember saying to my dad in the car—I went to college at UC Santa Barbara, and so we would drive back and forth often. I would go home on the weekends and then drive back to college, and so my dad and I would spend time together in the car, talking about the world and economics and politics and philosophy and all of these things that I was just starting to learn about as a young woman.

And I remember saying to him once, “Religion is something that man created back in the ancient times, when we needed purpose and reason and something to make sense of the world, and now we don’t need it any more, but it’s this ancient holdover that we still have. And one day we’ll be rid of it. We’re just sort of in the middle transition phase right now.” And I really believed that, and in fact, when I was in college, I was an adamant atheist, like an angry, cynical, hard, harsh atheist. And any time I was exposed to religion or spirituality, I was very hostile toward it.

What do you think informed that contempt? 

That’s a good question. I mean, now I have sort of my own opinion about it, which is that there is so much truth and power to God and Jesus, that it is so offensive to people who don’t believe. I suppose there are some atheists or some agnostics who just sort of shrug and say, “Oh, I don’t really believe anything,” or, “I don’t care what other people believe,” but I know from my personal experience, it was incredibly offensive, and now I think—it’s sort of like when you’re in the dark and you are exposed to the light, and it’s so harsh and blinding. It’s very hard to be indifferent toward it. You either can accept it or you reject it, and you have to fight it, because it is so offensive to your worldview and who you are, and that was how I felt.

So as you were growing up, you obviously had this very pragmatic view of life, but you observed your mother practicing some form of spirituality. What did you think that was? Obviously, she believed it, or did she talk with you about her New Age beliefs? 

A little bit. I mean I was definitely exposed to it. I definitely saw it. I don’t think we discussed it that much. I was sort of more in line with my father, who was very intellectual, very cerebral, and we would have these discussions, but I saw my mother dabbling in all of these different sort of New Age spiritual practices, especially in Los Angeles. She would go to these different organizations, different… I guess you would call them churches but sort of New Age versions of churches or spiritual centers. There was definitely a seeking about her my entire life that I witnessed. She’s always looking for something to make her happy, make her whole, make her complete. And I didn’t quite understand this as a child, but it seems to me that she’s always been sort of seeking for something. And I was intrigued. She would have a room in the house with her paints and her canvases when I was a child, and she also had dream catchers and rain sticks and crystals. And I was very interested in that stuff, probably just because it was my mom’s. It was like “my mom’s neat stuff,” “my mom’s neat room,” that I thought was interesting. But it didn’t have any meaning. It didn’t have any spiritual meaning to me.

During that time as you were growing up as well, I know you’re in LA. Especially, you’re young enough that there were some forms of Christianity around you. Did you ever have any touch points with those? Any people who called themselves Christians in any kind of orthodox sense? 

I love that question because Christianity is actually such a huge part of our culture. It’s very easy to be exposed to things around Christianity, and I was, and yet it never penetrated. For example, I didn’t really have Christians in my life. I didn’t have Christian friends or Christian family, but I was very much exposed to it with things even like Christmas cartoons. I loved Christmas cartoons. I loved the Charlie Brown Christmas special, Merry Christmas, Charlie Brown, and in it, Linus quotes Luke. He quotes several verses of Luke, and I must have seen that cartoon a hundred times as a child, and so I even probably had some of it memorized, but if you asked me what it meant, I would have no idea. Hearing terms like the Son of God, died for our sins, Jesus is Savior, you know I heard things like that because it’s part of our culture, but I didn’t know what any of that meant. I certainly never, ever knew that Jesus was God. No one ever said that to me, explained that to me. I thought He was a special person in the Christian faith. I didn’t really understand who He was or what Son of God or Son of Man meant. But it is really interesting that you could grow up in America, and even in Los Angeles, and be exposed to parts of Christian culture and still never hear the gospel, never really know what it means, and that was my experience.

So as you were moving along and you were becoming this adamant atheist. I like the way that you say that. There’s a certain worldview that that entails. Atheism itself, atheists would say, is not a worldview, but there are certain worldview implications to that, where you’re embracing, whether it be naturalism or materialism, those kind of worldviews where the natural world is all that exists, or the material world, that there is no supernatural world. Were you, as an intellectual person, aware of the implications and what those worldviews entailed in terms of meaning and purpose and value or free will or consciousness or those kinds of things that go along with embracing those kinds of ways of thinking? 

I think it all made sense to me at the time. At the time, it was the most rational, cohesive worldview that I saw out there. It definitely made the most sense. And I actually found comfort in things like, “We are a speck of dust hurtling through an infinite, vast universe with no meaning and no purpose. There’s no explanation. We don’t know why we’re here, how we’re here. We can never know. We will never know. We can just sort of throw our hands up and say, ‘It just is.’ It just is, and it’s all random, and there’s no meaning to any of it,” and somehow, when I was a young person, maybe in my early twenties, that was enough for me. And it brought me some weird sense of comfort. I think it came from an intellectual arrogance in a way. I really thought that I knew best and I knew more than other people. I definitely held myself above others, and I think maybe that’s part of being a young twenty-something. I thought I knew. I had it all figured out. I understand. I understand the way the world works, the way the universe works, and I don’t need meaning or purpose, and I thought that that served me just fine, but unfortunately it left a huge, huge void in my heart, in my life, and I was trying to fill that void with other things. Now if you had told me that at the time, I would’ve said, “Screw you. You don’t know what you’re talking about,” and I wouldn’t have believed it, but now, of course, looking back on it, I can see how that meaninglessness really affected me and left me thirsty, wanting more, and then very painfully trying to fill that void with things that could never and would never fill it.

You say you have a God shaped… or a void in your life that you were trying to fill. So in a sense, your intellectual beliefs were having an existential kind of connection to your life, the way you were living it out. You were searching because, I suppose, if there is a God in the picture, there is a sense of source of meaning and purpose and value and identity. But without that, on your own, did you feel a sense of kind of grappling or grasping for, “What is life all about?” “How do I make sense of life?” I presume, based upon your introduction, that it was affecting your choices. 

100%. And that started at a very young age. That started at age twelve. Twelve, thirteen, fourteen is when I started trying… Now, I didn’t realize I was trying to fill this void, but that is what I was doing. Because I wasn’t comfortable in myself. I didn’t have confidence just because I am me and I am human and I exist. I needed approval and affirmation, this feeling of really wanting to be good enough and wanting to be liked and wanting to be popular and wanting to be cool. And that meant, at the time, being a twelve, thirteen year old, middle school student in southern California, that I would start drinking and smoking and doing drugs and being sexual with boys because that’s what the cool kids did and that’s how you get approval and affirmation and how you feel good about yourself and how you build confidence, is by being a cool kid. So I really went at that full force. And I enjoyed a lot of it. I had some fun. But I also really damaged myself. And I also did things that I didn’t really want to do, but it was more important to appear a certain way, to look a certain way, to do certain acts, than to say things like, “I don’t want to do that.” “I don’t like that.” “Please stop.” As a thirteen, fourteen year old girl, I basically gave in to things that I didn’t really want to do because I thought it would somehow benefit me or elevate my status.

And it’s just pretty heartbreaking to think about, that that’s what I was doing at such a young age because I didn’t have a better sense of self and love and acceptance, even though I was in a loving family. My parents adored me. They gave me a lot of praise. I still was seeking and longing for something else. The only thing that I can make sense of now is that there was something that was lacking that I was trying to fill with those other things.

So you’re going through adolescence. You get to college. You’ve become quite hardened against the idea of God, and I presume organized religion and Christianity. Why don’t you take us to that place and walk us forward from there? 

Okay. So it’s funny. I remember—you bring up this memory when I was in college, and I was very much the way you describe. I was at a coffee shop, and this sweet older man started talking to me and my girlfriends. We were there studying for class or whatever. And I thought he was just so pleasant, and I was so surprised that this nice older man would just strike up a conversation and start talking to us, and then maybe about five or ten minutes in, he dropped the, “Well, I just want to tell you that Jesus loves you,” and I don’t remember the exact words he used, but it was basically—he was being so kind and generous, and the reason he was doing that was because of Jesus. Because he loves Jesus, and Jesus loves him, and Jesus commands him to love others, and he just wants to spread Jesus’s love to us. I was livid. You could see the smoke coming out of my ears. I thought, “How dare you?” I didn’t say this to him. I just got very cold and turned a cold shoulder. But I was so offended. “How dare you pull this bait and switch on me? Here you are pretending to be this nice man talking to me, and then you drop the Jesus!” And I was so offended.

I wish I could somehow tell that man what has happened to me since. And maybe there was a seed that was planted there. Maybe all along the way, all along my life, there have been seeds that have been planted, even though I was very clenched and very hardened to them. Only God knows what those little interactions and encounters have done to me throughout my life. So God bless that man!

Yes.

For having that conversation with me. I wish I could tell him what’s happened to me since. College, I basically came out of college. I felt the whole way through college. I was still constantly trying to fill this void. I mostly did that through relationships, jumping from one relationship to another. I was pretty much never faithful in my relationships because my relationships couldn’t satisfy me. I would get into a relationship, and then it still wouldn’t make me happy, so then I would need to find another person that would make me happy. If I wasn’t in a relationship, I was engaged in a lot of one-night stands, being sexually promiscuous, again trying to get that attention and approval and affirmation from other people. It felt good in the moment and then would quickly wear off and not last very long.

I met my ex-husband when I was, I think, 22. I was very young, and we were in graduate school and dated for a few years. We thought it was very romantic to be sort of these tortured artists who had a lot of emotions and a lot of pain and a lot of struggles, and we were very intellectual, and we wrote poetry. I thought that that was really beautiful and romantic at the time. And I thought that, by us getting married, that that would make me happy and make me whole, even though I had been unfaithful while we were dating, and he warned me and said, “If you ever do this to me again, I will leave you. I cannot let you do this to me again.” And I said, “I won’t do it again,” and at the time, I would mean it. I would cry and say, “Of course. I’m so sorry. I’ll never do it again.”

He married me, and very shortly after our marriage, I really plunged into the depths of depression. I started struggling with depression shortly after college. I was in my early twenties when I first had my real first bout of depression, of feeling completely meaningless, wanting to end my life, needing to get help, starting to see a therapist, see a psychiatrist, get on medication, and that went on for many, many years. It would kind of ebb and flow. I would have some good periods and then bad periods, and shortly after we got married, I went into a pretty deep, dark depression, where it was very hard to get out of bed on a daily basis. I couldn’t really find meaning in anything. I really just wanted to end my life. I would fantasize about killing myself all the time. It was a terrible, tortured place to live in, and my poor ex-husband was right there alongside me for all of it, and I certainly was not a pleasant person to be around for all of that time.

And then eventually… I couldn’t stay in that place. It was unsustainable, being that depressed and that far gone and wanting to kill myself, so I really think I had three options at the time. One was that I could get healthy, which my ex-husband was begging me to do, which I honestly had no interest in whatsoever. Really taking responsibility for myself and making a change and saying, “I’m going to get healthy.” No, thank you. The second option was to kill myself, which I really thought about doing all the time. And the third option was to act out and to blow up my life and to totally go crazy and just burn it all to the ground, which is the choice that I opted for. So I was unfaithful in my marriage. I just created a lot of chaos. At this time, it felt like needing to escape from this prison that I was in, which was really a self-imposed, self-induced prison, so that’s what I did. I was unfaithful, and my ex-husband and I had a business together. I completely blew all of that up. And my ex-husband, after many months of really trying to work things out and wanting me to get healthy, said, “I told you. I can’t let you do this to me anymore, and I’m leaving you.” So he left me, and that’s when I really, really hit rock bottom, and that was when I finally made a change.

Yes. Tell us about that. It sounds like you were in a really, really hard place. 

It was awful. It was. I mean hitting rock bottom was so terrible, but the one good thing about rock bottom is that it finally got me to admit that I needed help, and that I needed to do something different. I had basically been doing the same thing for many, many, many years, and even though I was in therapy for years and on medication for years, I was stuck in this cycle, and it just got progressively worse over time. Every time I was unfaithful, the stakes were higher, and I caused more damage. Every single time. And I kept doing it. With the same result. And finally when I hit bottom, I said, “I have to do something different.” So I basically crawled in on my hands and knees to these meetings, these support groups for people struggling with sex and love addiction. I was incredibly ashamed. I was now approaching thirty, I was going to be divorced, and I was going to these support groups for people struggling with sex and love addiction. This was not in the plan. This was not the life I was supposed to lead. And I would go into these groups, and I would just sob. I would just cry the entire time, and I was so angry and so hurt and so broken. But I was also so desperate that I was willing to try basically anything.

And so in these groups they said, “You have to get some kind of spiritual practice. You have to have some kind of higher power.” I don’t care what it is. It doesn’t matter. Try a bunch of different stuff. Try New Age stuff. Try Buddhist stuff. Try Jewish stuff. Try Christian stuff. Whatever. You know? And so I did. As uncomfortable as it made me. I mean, you’re telling an atheist to pray to a god that she doesn’t believe in. This is ridiculous.

Right. 

But fine. “I’ll just do whatever you tell me.” So when I first started… I couldn’t even pray out loud. It was so embarrassing. Even when I was alone in my apartment or in my car, I would turn all hot and red, and I couldn’t bring myself to say anything out loud. And then finally I started, at the direction of my mentor, I started saying, “This is stupid, and there’s no one here, and I’m only talking to myself, and I’m doing this just because I was told to.” And that is how my prayer life began. That’s how I started praying. My prayer life now is really different, but that was how it started.

That was honest. That was honest. 

Yeah. It was very honest.

Yes. 

So, for months, I was going to these groups, and I was trying all this different spiritual stuff. I would try basically anything and everything that was presented to me. Now, being in Los Angeles, there was a lot of New Age type stuff that I tried. I went to some churches with some friends. I went to synagogue. I tried Kundalini yoga. I tried Buddhist chanting. I tried Sufi healings. I was basically open to anything and everything, and the more I did this God stuff, the more I saw it having a positive effect on me. It was very uncomfortable to go through it, but I could see that it was starting to affect me. I was still in a great deal of pain. I was still crying on a daily basis, but for the first time in my life, I wasn’t acting out. I wasn’t doing the unhealthy behavior that I had done for so many years. I was doing something different. I was spending time with healthy people, journaling, praying, meditating, writing, being alone for the first time in my whole life, and it was a very, very painful process, but it got me to a really seeking place. I sort of became a spiritual seeker, but then it became clear to me that I didn’t want to just be a spiritual seeker. I wanted to be a spiritual finder. I wanted to find it. I wanted to find the truth. And it was after going through that whole experience—the timing was just amazing—that a friend of mine invited me to a play of The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis, and I had never heard of it. I didn’t know what it was, but I loved theatre, and I just thought it would be a fun thing to do with my friend, so I said, “Sure, I’ll go with you to see this play.” And so we go, and it completely, completely changed my life.

Yeah. That’s a powerful production of Max McLean. It’s a very sobering production. For the listeners, can you tell what The Screwtape Letters is? Tell us what that is and what is based on? 

Absolutely! Yeah. So I go to the theatre, and I open the program to see, “Oh, what is this play about?” and it says who the characters are, and it says God and the devil, and I was like, “What?” Like, “What is this play? What am I about to watch?” And it turns out that it’s essentially this production with Max McLean that was put on by Fellowship for Performing Arts. It’s like a 90-minute monologue essentially, where Max McLean plays Screwtape. Screwtape is sort of a high-ranking demon official in the underworld, and throughout the play, he’s writing letters to his apprentice, to his nephew, named Wormwood, who’s sort of a junior demon. And he’s teaching Wormwood, this junior demon, how to be a proper demon and how to properly torment his patient, which is a human. And so the book and the play are sort of that idea that you see in popular culture, when there’s like a little angel on your shoulder and a little devil on your shoulder. It’s like, “Oh, that’s a real thing!” The whole concept of these little devils do exist, and they do torment you, and they do plant lies and deceptions into your thinking, and so the whole play is really about spiritual warfare, spiritual attack, about these dark forces that want to keep us hurting, doubting, alone, separated from God, and even comfortable. They want to keep us comfortable and separated from God, right?

And so I’m watching this play, and it’s like watching a mirror. Some of the things that Screwtape is saying about how the demons torment the patient is just… it’s what I had been living for so many years, for so long. It felt so true. It just resonated so deeply within me. And for the first time in my life, this thought occurred to me. And I always saw myself as messed up, like there’s something wrong with me. I’m tortured, and I’m this, and I’m that, and it was the very first time in my life that it occurred to me, “Maybe that’s not me. Maybe there is a dark force that is doing that to me, and that’s not actually who I am.” And that, “God actually wants me to be pure and happy, like truly connected to him, and full of joy, and there’s this dark force that doesn’t want that for me.” And it just really blew my mind and opened up my eyes, especially after I had been on this year-long spiritual journey of trying all these different things, and then I see this play. It just completely shattered me.

Now, considering Christianity as an atheist was ridiculous and extremely uncomfortable, but I just kept putting one foot in front of the other, as I had been doing for an entire year, sort of just taking the next right action and doing the next right thing. I actually ended up reaching out to Fellowship for the Performing Arts to let them know what an effect they had on me, and Max McLean himself said that he was so moved by my reaching out to them, and he actually even became a spiritual mentor of mine because of this whole interaction.

Wow! That’s amazing! 

Yeah. Max is absolutely fantastic, and he has literally watched me transform from being a very broken, not even a Christian. I mean, when I first started talking to him, I was still just a seeker. I was still just sort of curious and interested and still very, very broken and hurting. And then God was so amazing in this time because He kept putting person after person in front of me. My friend who took me to the play, she actually was somebody who had not been a Christian who then became Christian and actually became Catholic, and so I said, “That’s crazy! That’s a crazy story. Can I talk to you about that sometime?” And I went over to her house, and we ordered Thai food, and we stayed up until 1:00 in the morning talking about Jesus, and I was crawling out of my skin, and it made me incredibly uncomfortable, but there was something about it that felt right. It felt like truth. It felt like a bell ringing within me, like I was being covered in water, you know what I mean? And then she introduced me to someone else. And God just kept putting all these people in front of me, and every time I talked to someone, I went to coffee with someone, I read this book, it was like God was wooing me, you know? He was pulling me, lovingly, gently closer and closer to Himself.

And I just kept exploring Christianity, and one morning, I was getting ready for work. This is probably now a few months in to exploring Christianity, and this thought occurred to me. I was listening to Christian worship music, getting ready for work, and this thought occurred to me that, if somebody asked me, “Are you a Christian?” I would have to say yes at this point. It wasn’t just like a moment. It wasn’t like a white light, road to Damascus moment for me. It was a gradual transition, and I became a Christian. And after that, I found a church that became my home church. I got baptized. And that is church where I met my husband, my current husband, my new husband, who’s also a Christian and who loves Jesus more than he loves me.

That’s an amazing transformation! And it all started with The Screwtape Letters. Of course, C.S. Lewis himself was a former atheist, so he, in writing that narrative, understands the struggle. Not only in becoming a Christian but also in the Christian life still. There’s struggle. But through that process, as you talk about your exploring. You were reading books, and I presume that you opened the Bible, maybe for the first time. 

Yes.

As a former atheist who probably had never even been exposed to the Bible, what were your thoughts when you started reading it? As an atheist, what did you think the Bible was? And then I’m curious the perspective of when you actually opened it and read it for yourself, the first time or thereafter. 

Yeah. That’s a really great question. I certainly did not read the Bible before then. I had no interest in reading the Bible. So after I saw The Screwtape Letters, and God kept putting all these different people in my path, one of the people He put in my path was a pastor psychologist who was in Chicago who very, very graciously offered to talk to me, sort of counsel me, once a week if I wanted to. And my initial reaction when that was offered to me, it was offered by my friend who took me to the play. I really wanted to say, “No, that’s okay. No thanks, I’m not interested in talking to a pastor once a week,” but it was so clear that it was one of those next right actions that God put in front of me that I just had to say yes to.

I said, “Okay. I will talk to this pastor once a week on the phone,” and so I started talking with him. He was a wonderful, wonderful mentor, a wonderful guide, and he said to me, “Why don’t we start by reading the Bible? Why don’t you start by reading the Gospel of John? And just take your time and read through it, and whenever questions come up or things you want to talk about, we’ll just talk about it on the phone once a week.” And so that’s what I did. I actually started—I had a drive. I was driving from Los Angeles to Sacramento to go stay with a friend for the weekend, and I decided to listen to the audio version of the Bible, read by Max McLean, and so I listened to Max, in my car, read to me the Gospel of John. And I still remember the experience completely to this day. It was… I was alone. The sun is shining, and it’s that same feeling, that same feeling of just being washed with water, this bell ringing inside of me. There’s something about this truth. It’s just resonating. It just feels so right and so true. And in fact, once I got all the way through it, I was so thirsty for me, and at the time, I didn’t know there were Bible apps and different things, so I’m driving and trying to find… “I need to find more Bible that I can listen to in the car!” I’m frantically scrolling on my phone while also driving, which was not a great idea, but it was like I was so thirsty! I listened to the Gospel of John and then I just wanted more. I just wanted to consume more of the Bible.

And I had a very interesting experience this entire spiritual journey of simultaneously going through what I was going through and then also watching myself in total disbelief. “I cannot believe this is who I am.” I still feel like this on almost a daily basis, like I pinch myself. I look at my husband, and I’m like, “Who are you? How did this happen? How is it that I’m a Christian? How is it that I have these two children with you? How did this life even happen?” It’s just so mind blowing to be called to goodness and truth and then still have that very dear former self part of me that sort of judges all of it and questions all of it and is a skeptic about all of it. It’s a really amazing dichotomy that I get to live out on a daily basis.

Oh, I’m sure! And I bet there are some people listening who are saying, “Yeah, you are a rational, intellectual, skeptical person.” So you mentioned that you had been reading some books. I wonder if… Not that the scripture isn’t intellectual in and of itself, but I wondered, did you read beyond that in terms of intellectual grounding of the Christian worldview? Or to support maybe that what you’re reading in the Bible is actually true and reliable text? Did you wrestle with any of those issues? 

Oh, very much. The entire process was a wrestling match. And this pastor psychologist who counseled me, one of the things that he said to me that was the most powerful, that has always stuck with me, is he said, “Faith requires doubt. Faith is not the absence of doubt. Faith is not 100% certainty. If it was, it wouldn’t be faith. Of course you doubt. You will continue to doubt. You doubt, and you take a leap of faith, anyway,” and that was a real revelation to me. Because I always wanted to have 100% certainty, and that’s just not available in human existence. You’ll just never… Even in atheism. Sorry. I would never have admitted when I was an atheist that atheism is a stance of faith. It is a belief system. You believe that there’s nothing. You believe that life is meaningless. But that’s the case.

And so, at the time, I really struggled. I read Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis, which was also incredibly enriching because C.S. Lewis had been an atheist, because C.S. Lewis was such an intellectual and so well read. I mean, he spoke to me very, very deeply. He got me, right? He understood me. He knew that God had to prove himself intellectually to me, and He did. I was very lucky, in that my initial exposure to Christianity, having been a former atheist, was C.S. Lewis, Timothy Keller. Max McLean had recommended to me Tim Keller’s sermons, and I think I consumed nearly, and have consumed nearly every single Tim Keller sermon that exists in the world on the internet. I find him incredibly intellectual. I never knew that a pastor could talk like that. As a former atheist, I thought that Christians were either sort of what I’d call like a used car salesman, where they have a like a really cheesy smile and they’re like, “Praise Jesus!” Or like a very somber, Catholic, pageantry Mass. Neither of which appealed to me as an intellectual atheist. Then I find these sermons, and I think, “This man talks like a college professor. This is meeting me intellectually, where I need to be met,” and so our God is so amazing, He can meet anybody where they need to be met.

For some people, it is a very spiritual experience. It’s like that white light experience. And for other people, like me, it’s a methodical intellectual breaking down of ideas, reformatting my mind and my thinking, and that is what God did with me.

That’s wonderful! Now you’ve spoken about your journey, where you came from, and then you found yourself saying that you believed you were a Christian. Talk with me about how your life has changed since you became a Christian. And what of that question of meaning and void in your life? Has it changed at all? Has God met you there? 

Yes. 100%. My life has changed. Now, that does not mean that my life does not have struggle. That doesn’t mean there aren’t things that are hard or challenging or difficult. I still cry. I still have anxiety. I still have stress. But it’s not like it was before. It is not this meaningless, hopeless, debilitating depression. I now am married to a Christian man. We both love Jesus more than each other. Jesus comes first, before anything else, comes before my marriage, comes before my children, comes before my career, my success, money in the bank, how I look, whatever. Because I know that ultimately all of those things will fail me. Even my husband will fail me. My kids will fail me. My body and my health is eventually going to fail me. Everything is going to fail me. The only thing that is not is God. And realizing that, realizing that I don’t have to strive and strain and struggle, that it’s not all up to me, which it always used to feel like it was. “It’s up to me to find the thing to make myself happy and to give myself meaning.” And now it’s like I can let go and just let God take over, and we’ve been very, very blessed in our Christian life together, my husband and I. We’ve had struggles. We’ve had very painful losses in our family. We’ve had tragedies. We’ve had things that we’ve had to deal with, but we also know that this world is not the end all, be all. This is not the ultimate. There’s something greater.

For now, we’re here and it matters, and it’s important, but it’s all going to fade away eventually. It’s all going to fade away eventually, and so we get to keep our eyes fixed on Jesus, knowing that that is our ultimate hope and that is our ultimate meaning, and it has definitely, definitely served me well.

Well, anyone who’s listening can see the obvious, or hear the obvious, change in you, that it is night and day from where you used to be. As we’re kind of turning the corner here, you have a voice of wisdom because you understand what it means to think and live as an atheist for a long time and in a very deep way. I guess you could say you lived it out to its fullest. But you also found Christ. And I think one thing that’s really beautiful about your story is your willingness to seek. That you were not just a seeker but you wanted to find. And you did. You found. 

Yeah.

So if you were speaking to someone, a curious skeptic who’s listening in today, how would you speak to them? 

Yeah. That’s a great question. For anybody who’s struggling out there, I would just say that it’s never too late. It’s never too late, and you are never too far gone. There’s truly always hope. I know, for me, it was very, very hard to believe that there was hope. It was very hard to believe that there was any way out of the dark that I was experiencing. And it really felt like it was going to kill me. It really felt like the darkness and the depression was going to destroy me. And for somebody who’s in that place, I would say it won’t. It may feel like you’re going to die, but it cannot take you unless you let it.

And I’ve heard so many stories from people who were at the very, very, very end of their rope and said, “Well, I might as well try this Jesus thing, and then if it doesn’t work, I’ll kill myself, anyway,” and that was their coming to faith moment. I would just encourage someone that, if you’re in pain, to try something different. If you’re so far gone, if you’re so desperate, if it’s so bad, you might as well try something different and just give it a chance. That is what I did, and I couldn’t do it myself. I was powerless, but God is not powerless. He can do it, and so I let Him. I let Him take over. And I have been following him ever since. And I would just encourage anyone to honestly and earnestly look into it and give it a try.

Or just like you did, just that honest prayer. I love that honest prayer. “I don’t believe you’re out there, but if you are,” and it looked like the Lord really answered your prayer, like you say-

Yeah. Come to Him as you are, you know? You don’t have to get good or get clean. You just come to Him exactly as you are, wounds and all. You are totally accepted. You come to Him with your doubts. You come to Him with your skepticism. You can curse Him outright to His face if you want to. Don’t worry. He can take it. He is God. You know? I used to have this note that I had on my mirror that I would look at every single morning, when I was early in my spiritual journey, and I loved it so much, and it said, “Good morning. This is God. I will be handling all of your problems today. I will not need any of your help, so have a nice day.”

That’s terrific! So, turning the corner then, now as a Christian, you see things freshly, with new eyes, and I’m sure, thinking back to the man who came up to the table to you, you know, and he approached you saying, “Jesus loves you,” and it was so off putting to you. I wonder, as a Christian now, how would you best invite us as Christians in terms of engaging with those who don’t believe. Maybe not like that, but maybe. It sounds like he was a little bit of a touch point, even though at the time it wasn’t what you wanted or expected. 

Yeah. I mean, when I share my story, not just with you here, but just with friends, with friends and family, because I come from a family where I am the only Christian. Nobody in my family believes, and when I talk about it, I don’t try to convince anyone. I don’t try to argue or anything. Really I think the most effective thing I can do is speak from my own personal experience. And share my story. I know that it’s true, that it is objectively true. It’s not just subjectively true. It’s not just my truth. I know that it’s true, but I also know that you do have to approach people with a certain stance and a certain posture, and coming up and saying, “This is true, and you should believe this,” may turn some people off. So when I talk to people, it is my truth, and it is my experience, and I gladly and willingly and openly share it with people.

And I think just going back to… We were talking earlier about the Stories of Us episodes at PragerU. I mean that’s one of the reasons why they’re so effective, is because they really are people’s personal stories of transformation, where they get to just speak authentically. And it’s a way to not only change minds but to change hearts, too, and I really pray that my story would change some hearts and minds and maybe bring even just one person closer to God.

That’s beautiful! Like you say, it’s like someone may not be convinced by a story, but it might open the door for them to seek for themselves. And we can hope for that, right? 

Yeah.

What a beautiful story, Adrienne. What a beautiful life you’ve lived. It’s been tragic but beautiful. I mean, when you think of the word redemption and a redeemed life, that’s what comes to mind when you tell your story, that you moved from kind of a darkness to light and from a fragmented brokenness to such wholeness. Not perfect. Like you say, none of us are perfect, but it’s beautiful. It’s so beautiful. So thank you for… Oh, yes? Anything you want to add. 

I was just going to say thank you so much. And even though I did a lot of work, I really don’t take credit for this change. It really wasn’t me. The only thing that I did was that I became willing. I became willing to make different choices, but God is the one who did the change. Jesus is the one who did the change in me. That was all Him. That was all His doing. And He is the reason for my life now. That is why… Anything good I have is because of him. And I just want to encourage everybody out there to go watch this story. If you just go to prageru.com, you can watch my Stories of Us episode, and I’m just so grateful to get to share this story and hope that it affects some people.

Yes, yes. Praise God that you were willing. 

Yes.

Because the result is glorious, really amazing. 

Thank you so, so much.

Oh. You’re so welcome. And thank you for coming on. 

Thanks for tuning in to the Side B Podcast to hear Adrienne’s story. You can find out more about the books and resources she recommended in the show episode notes. For questions and feedback about this episode, you can reach me by email at [email protected]. Please rate, follow, and share this episode with your friends and social network. We would greatly appreciate it. In the meantime, I’ll be looking forward to seeing you next time, where we’ll be seeing how someone else, another skeptic, flips the record of their life. 

 

Raised in a secular country, Alex embraced an atheist identity into adulthood when a surprising encounter with Jesus Christ dramatically changed his life.

Alex’s Website: Faith Thinkers https://faiththinkers.org/about-us

Recommended Resources:

The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus, Habermas and Licona

The Case for Christ, Strobel

To learn more about the C.S. Lewis Institute Fellows Program, visit www.cslewisinstitute.org

Hear more Side B Stories and learn more at www.sidebstories.com

Episode Transcript

Hello, and thanks for joining in. I’m Jana Harmon, and you’re listening to the Side B Podcast, where we see how skeptics flip the record of their lives. Each podcast, we listen to someone who once identified as an atheist who became a Christian. Oftentimes, they grew up in a world where there are no apparent traces of God, no reason to believe in God, no experiences of God in their lives. In my research with former atheists, the number one reason they gave for disbelief in God was that there was no subjective, no personal evidence for God in their lives. They didn’t see or feel God both in their lives and in the world.

In many Western, secularized, European countries, there are traces, artifacts of Christianity, of its historical presence and the remaining relics of architecture and its rituals and holidays, but there seems to be little apparent belief in the lives of people. The vibrant faith or hope that once was has been replaced with a settled independence and autonomy, for some a felt isolation, emptiness, and darkness. Atheism then seems a natural response to what is seen, what is felt, or perhaps what is not seen and what is not felt. Although it may not be existentially or emotionally desirable, it must be true, or so it is thought.

But what happens when someone is driven to press beyond their culture, beyond their circumstances, beyond their personal despair to look for something more? And in their journey encounter unexpected life and joy and a real God who they believed to not exist.

Alex’s story is nothing short of fascinating. It is truly a story of moving from darkness to light, from depression to life.  Alex moved from a world bereft of hope to someone who cannot help but tell almost everyone he meets about the God who saved his life. He wants others to experience the joy and love he now radiates. I hope you’ll come along to hear his amazing story of transformation and be inspired or challenged. I hope you’ll also stay to the end to hear him give advice to curious skeptics towards seriously considering the possibility of a real God, as well as advice to Christians on how they can best engage with those who don’t believe.

Welcome to the podcast, Alex. It’s so great to have you!

I’m so happy to be with you.

Wonderful. Alex, as we’re getting started, so the listeners can know a little bit about you, why don’t you tell us about your life right now?

Yes. First of all, like I said, I’m really happy to be with you. I always enjoy talking to you and seeing you at different events. I feel like I haven’t seen you in a while. But I live in southwest Florida, in a city called Fort Myers, and I love living here, and I’m a full-time financial advisor, and I have some Christian ministries on the side. But I feel like I’m a Christian minister 24/7 because we’re called to be ministers and sharing the gospel of life with everyone.

Oh, that’s wonderful, Alex! I can tell that you’re not native to Fort Myers, Florida, though. I hear a very distinct accent, and so I’m very curious. Of course, I’m familiar with your story, but for all of us, take us back to where you were born and where you were raised. Talk us through that world. What did it look like in terms of religion, God, your family. How did you grow up?

Yes. I was born in France in 1972, in Paris. My parents were immigrants from the former Yugoslavia, and they grew up—that was a Communist regime, and by the grace of God, even though they were not strong believers, they wanted freedom, and my dad was in his twenties, and so he was very fortunate to be able to leave the former Yugoslavia and go to France, which was—when I was born and before I was born, in the sixties, it was a wonderful country, very welcoming to immigrants, very loving. The neighborhoods, even in Paris, were big families, and so I grew up in that environment. And I had a fairly normal childhood, even though my parents were not wealthy. They always provided, and I had really nothing to complain about.

The only thing is that I didn’t like school very much, and the reason was because politically I didn’t see eye to eye with my teachers. My teachers, a lot of them, were Marxists. They were actually promoting the ideology that my parents had fled from.

So most of my friends were from a Muslim background and from north Africa. So I learned a lot about Islam with them, but I was not very religious to start with. And we were what I call CEO Christians, Christmas and Easter Only. We went to church only twice a year, and so I was not very religious to start with, but then around the age of 13, 14, my dad had a heart attack, and that really shook my world. And I dealt with a lot of internal pain, seeing my dad suffering and knowing that one day he would die because he was a heavy smoker and he had health issues. That really shook my faith. I didn’t have much faith in God to start with, but then I made the decision that there was no benevolent God, no good God who cared about His creation because that’s what I thought, because otherwise why would He do that to my dad? You see how the roles get reversed. The responsibility’s not on people and how they live their lives but rather it’s on us blaming God and shifting the responsibility to God because we don’t want to accept our own.

So that’s the environment I grew up, and I lived in France until the age of twenty, from birth to twenty, and I failed high school at the age of twenty.

So I had a really difficult childhood because I didn’t care for school. I didn’t have any direction in life. I didn’t have any foundation. I didn’t have any peace or joy. And I’m a fairly happy person in general, but it was very hard for me.

Okay.

But that’s pretty much in a nutshell how I grew up.

Okay. Well, good. It sounds very interesting and challenging, especially in a culture where Marxism was becoming more prevalent, in a world that your parents were trying to escape and then they found again. I’m wondering, especially as a Marxist worldview was entering into your culture and the nominal religion that you were experiencing really wasn’t that meaningful, what did you think that God and religion and belief—what was all that? Was it just some kind of a social activity that people went to but it wasn’t real or true? What were your perceptions of religious people then?

Yes. In America, a lot of people perceive religion as a social activity or things of that nature because a lot of the churches are social clubs, or organizations are social clubs, or charitable organizations, so that’s how people perceived it, but in France, France being one of the most secular countries in the world, most people, including myself, perceived religion as being something for people who were ignorant, who were uneducated, and people who were anti scientific. So there were two spheres. And you can see that happening again. Everything that’s happening in France is happening now, forty years later, in the United States, where you can see how those who are atheists in America are trying to push people of faith into the sphere of uneducated, anti scientific people, right? And so that’s the way I perceived religion, for people who are fragile, people who are weak, and of course, I was always one of the more successful, because I’m a fairly driven person in general.

When I came to America, I started becoming successful in my business. Then that only made things worse, of me seeing myself as a person who is not a person of faith, being much stronger than any people of faith. And seeing people of faith as being weak and fragile mentally and needing a crutch, not realizing that faith actually is, and Christianity more specifically, is based on evidence. It’s not devoid of evidence or devoid of intellectual belief. To the contrary. And you know that all too well because of apologetics, which you and I really respect and like. But that was my thinking of religion, was that you had to be really weak to believe in a God and that you needed a God to believe in, versus I needed no one to believe in because I was my own man, and I was strong enough to control my life and do things—instead of you praying for God to do something for you, I was actually doing it while you were praying about. But that’s very common of people, thinking that way, right? And this false view that somehow people of faith are weak and fragile and need a crutch because they’re not strong enough on their own. So that was pretty much my view of religion in general.

Yeah. That’s interesting, that perception of people who believe in God, that it is anti-intellectual in their eyes, but yet you made a decision to finally reject God because He didn’t show up for you and for your father, that He wasn’t there, that He allowed, somehow, your father to become in poor health. So it was a real mixed bag, wasn’t it? It was not social, it was not scientific, and it was not intellectual, and yet there was this subjective reason, too, existential, that He just didn’t do the things that He was supposed to do.

It’s true that it seems like many people reject God not for intellectual reasons actually, because if they were seeking intellectual reasons, they would actually find God if they were genuine, but there’s always… it seems like, not always, but many times or most of the times there’s some kind of emotional element to the equation, where they were hurt.

Yes. And that certainly can at least be a significant part of many people’s story. So, Alex, here you are twenty years old. You are in school or getting out of school. You’re still living in France, but it’s not necessarily where you want to be at the moment. Talk us through that. Give us the next step in your story.

Yes. So I’m twenty years old. I just failed high school in France, which most kids fail at eighteen, and then they’re given another chance at nineteen, and usually they pass high school at nineteen. Well, I failed it at twenty. And so I really didn’t see the point.

So that added to the depression, too.

But by the grace of God, because God is so good that He knew my life from before the foundation of the world, He knew where I would be, where He would take me, He had His hand on my life, and I didn’t know any of it, but He sent me—my dad’s assistant at work, she overheard that I wanted to leave Europe and go to the United States. I don’t even know why United States. I have no idea why I kept saying the US. I didn’t really know anything about the US. Maybe because I wanted to make money, maybe America was rich. I really don’t know. I don’t remember. But I kept telling people I wanted to go to the United States, and my dad’s assistant at work overheard that, and she said, “How are you going to leave? How are you going to go there?” I said, “I really don’t know. I don’t know anybody there. But I really need to leave. Otherwise, I don’t know how I’m going to end up here. I may commit suicide because I really hate my life, and I hate being here.”

She said, “We have an American missionary from Kentucky, and she organizes trips for kids to go to America for a few months. You should meet her because she’s leaving next Tuesday,” so you’d better believe it, I woke up on Sunday and went to church, not because I wanted to meet God, but because I could meet somebody who could help me. Because it was all about me, right? It was all about me, and I was going to do whatever it takes for my wishes and desires to be fulfilled, even if it meant telling people that I’m a Christian. Because all that mattered was me getting ahead.

So I met this lady, and again by the grace of God, she helped me. Well, she helped me because I expected—see what happens, when you think a certain way, you project your thinking onto other people. You think that everybody else is like you, right? So because I was all calculating and only doing things that benefit me, I would never do something for you voluntarily because it doesn’t help me, then I projected that onto her. I’m like, “Why would she help me? What’s in it for her?”

So my expectations were very low, but then a month or two later, I got a letter in the mail, and I picked it up, and I read it, and she said that she had found a family for me, and I just want to cry right now because it brings so much memories to me and how she found a family in Illinois and that they would welcome me for a year to go to high school. I cried, and I ran, and I ran… I could’ve run a marathon. I had so much energy. I ran through Paris. I probably ran through a third of the whole city. I was so excited. And I couldn’t stop crying and being so joyful, so happy, and so anyway. So that was the beginning of my journey, and I came to America on October 2, 1992, and that was an interesting day, because I came. I didn’t speak English. I had $200 in my pocket. I had not met any Americans besides this lady. But when I landed at the Indianapolis airport, I honestly felt like I’d come home. And, like I said, United States is not perfect, and I didn’t understand why. Why would I be so excited? But then I found out later on that it was basically the Judeo-Christian roots of this nation. There was something in the air. There was the Holy Spirit, and I could sense the Holy Spirit, but I didn’t know what was going on.

So I went to school and was supposed to go to high school for one year, and during that year, I learned just a little bit of the language after three months, and I said, “You know, I’m wasting my time in high school. I’m not going to get any degrees. How about I go to community college, so I asked my parents. My parents were poor because, after my dad had a heart attack, he also lost his business. He did business with former Yugoslavia and put a lot of money into it, and then Yugoslavia went into civil war. So he basically lost everything. But my parents borrowed, and they always said yes to everything I wanted. And also I want to mention that I grew up, and the two things that I’m really proud of that happened in my parents’ lives is that my mom was always, me growing up and before I was born, was a fortune teller. And when my dad lost his job, she was cleaning houses, and he was a breadwinner, but then when he had a heart attack and couldn’t really work much, she went to a profession of being a fortune teller and won all kinds of prizes and things of that nature, but God always protected, and He always protected me, and I never was interested in any of it because, as an atheist, I was a hardcore atheist. To me, all of that was quite silly, and thank God I did not dabble in that stuff.

And then my dad got really, really into Masonry, the Freemasons, and was moving up the ladder, because my dad was looking for brotherhood. He was looking for that kind of solidarity, for that kind of family, right? And he found it initially in the Masons. So my dad was moving up the ladder and was so proud to move up the ladder. He finally found something that he could invest himself in, give himself into, brothers and moving up the ladder. He was really proud

My dad was very disappointed with the Masons at the end of his life, and he felt like they were all in there for themselves and they were not interested, really, in investing in other people, but they were there to get something out of it. So he was very disappointed.

But here’s the thing I wanted to tell you about my parents. My dad. In 1996, on his deathbed—he had open heart surgery, and he got an infection. Eleven people died from the infection. He was the last one to die. He was there eight weeks, getting dialysis every day. He was on his deathbed. Eight weeks before he died, he had an out of body near-death experience, and he met Jesus face to face, and that, to me, is so incredible. And I talked to—of course you know, Dr. Gary Habermas, and I don’t know if many people know who are watching your show, but I imagine many do, but Dr. Habermas, if you don’t know, is one of the lead experts, if not the lead expert, on the resurrection of Christ and has written some books on near-death experiences. So I went to Dr. Habermas, and I said, “Gary, is this a near-death experience of my dad?” And I explained how he met Jesus. He said, “Alex, not only is it a near-death experience, it’s the most common near-death experience that people experience, when they meet Jesus.” And that is crossing a body of water. Because the water, I imagine, signifies the Holy Spirit.

But, anyway, so he came back to his body, and he was instantly born again, so everybody who walked into his room, he would say, “Sit down. I want to tell you about Jesus,” and of course all these friends who were secular… so they would say, “I don’t want to hear about Jesus.” He would say, “I’m sorry. If you don’t want to hear about Jesus, then the door is right there, so you can just leave right now.” And they said, “No, but I want to see you.” “Well, then I’m going to tell you about Jesus.” So he told everybody about Jesus before he died.

So obviously, as an atheist, I didn’t believe my dad’s experience. I thought it was from the drugs, that he was hallucinating, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And that was seven years before my experience, ‘96 to 2003, yeah, seven years.

And then my mom, after, became a Christian. she gave up fortune telling, got rid of her cards, and stopped doing that and started reading her Bible.

So I started working. After four years of university, I started working for a company, a major company, as a financial advisor. So I’m an atheist. I arrived in 1992. I finished my studies. Now I got hired to work as a financial advisor in 1997. So I’m still unhappy with myself, but I’m telling myself, “You know what? That’s because you’re poor. Once you become rich and you can afford buying anything you want, then you’re going to be happy. Obviously. Right now, the stress of life and not having funds to do what you want to do, that’s what’s keeping you from being happy.” So I started moving up the ladders. I worked very, very hard. And then, in 2002, my ex-wife left me, and she left me, and that really destroyed my world. Because she was my god. She was my everything. Not even money. Money was secondary to her. She was my idol. And when she left me and left me for good, my whole world fell apart.

And I went through six months of severe depression, and in April of 2003, I decided to finish my week, go home, and commit suicide. And I was still in the same place where I’m at now, in southwest Florida. So I finished my affairs and went home. I’m making a long story short. Because there are a lot of details. But I went home to commit suicide, sat down and started contemplating on my life, contemplating how I was going to commit suicide, and the only thing I could think of was my mother and my nephews and my sister, and how tomorrow, when I’m not there and the news is brought to them that I committed suicide, how they would react, and I knew they would suffer for life.

So now, for the first time in my life, I felt like I was not in control of my life anymore. I was at a dead end. A moral dilemma that I could not come up with a solution with. One, I didn’t want to live. I did not want to wake up another day to face life. Life was evil. People were evil. I was the only good person in the world. That’s how delusional I was. That I was the best person in the world and the whole rest of the world was evil. But at the same time, I couldn’t commit suicide because of my mom, my sister, and my nephews. So that moment I was going to turn—without even knowing, I decided—the only solution I could think of was that I was going to turn over my life to the devil. Now, I didn’t think of it in those terms, but I decided, “You know what? I’m just going to live like everyone else. I’m just going to take advantage of every single person. Financially, sexually. In whichever way, I’m just going to live for my own self.” Because I was already selfish, but I didn’t see it that way. I saw myself as a moral human being, but I was going to turn my life over completely to a devil.

And that moment I cried out out of anguish, because something in me was ignited, and I cried out, and my soul left my body, and I saw my whole life come in front of my eyes and how Jesus had walked with me from the beginning of life, when I was born, and how He protected me, and I saw my whole life. It was more beautiful than a Hollywood movie. It was so vivid and so beautiful. And then I came back to my body. And people tell me, “I don’t believe you, Alex.” I said, “I really don’t mind you not believing. I don’t care. Because I wouldn’t have believed myself. I didn’t believe my dad having the experience. So why would I expect you to believe it?”  But one thing you cannot explain is how, after I came back to my body, I went from total depression to total joy, total depression to total love. I felt like I had so much love in me I had to unbutton my shirt because I thought my chest was going to explode out of love. And since then, I’ve carried that joy of the Lord, and no one can truly explain that.

So that’s when I met the Lord, and then… It was around 11:00 PM at night, so I’m like, “Who do I call to tell what happened? To explain and tell them what happened,” and of course it was too late to call Europe. So I called my Muslim friend, a local, and I said, “Well, he’s religious, and I know that the most religious people I know are Muslims, because they give the appearance of being the most religious,” just like the Pharisees, they give the appearance of being religious, but again, that doesn’t mean that they are born again, that they have the Holy Spirit in them. So I called my Muslim friend, and I said, “You have to help me.” He said, “Come over, and I’m going to explain everything that happened to you.” So I went to his place, and he said, “Alex, everything that happened to you is in the Koran. You have to read the Koran. Everything.” I said, “But why the Koran? This is Jesus. I felt Jesus. I didn’t see him, but I felt Jesus. Jesus is Catholic. He’s not Muslim.” He said, “No, no, no.” That’s how much information I had. That’s how much knowledge I had. That he was Roman Catholic. And he said, “No, no, no. He was Muslim.” I said, “Jesus was Muslim?” “Absolutely, he was Muslim. Yes, you’ll see it all in the Koran.” I said, “Wow!” He said, “Yeah. It’s just we don’t believe that He’s God.” And I’m like, “Well, that makes sense. Maybe He’s not God. Why would he be God? He’s just a human being.”

So, anyway, I started reading the Koran before I read the Bible, but I read it with the Holy Spirit, and what happened, within days if not minutes. I can’t say minutes, but I would be willing to bet minutes. But within days for sure, I could tell this was not a religion from God. That it was not a revelation from God. And I started going back to my Muslim friend and friends in France, and they all started telling me. “I don’t know which Koran you’re reading, but you’re reading the wrong Koran.” I said, “Well, this is the Koran I bought.” They said, “No, no, no. Here, I’ll get you the right one.” I said, “Okay.” So I have seven Korans, and all seven Korans say the same thing, but they didn’t know that what I was showing, pointing out to them, was in the Koran. That’s how ignorant so many people of faith are. They don’t even know what’s in their holy books. Including Christians.

Yeah. Right.

People who claim to be Christians don’t know what the Bible teaches. So I went back to my friends, and when I went back to France, I did the same thing with my best friend that grew up with, Kamal, and I said, “Kamal, look what it says in the Koran.” And I was not a Christian per se yet. I was seeking. Even though I was born again and it was just a matter of time, but it had to make sense intellectually. And that’s why apologetics is important. That’s why Paul speaks of renewing the mind in Romans 12:2. Because just because you’re born again, you still have to work on renewing your mind and reading the Bible and work on loving God with all of your mind, because if you don’t, you’re going to start believing things. Even as a born again person, you could believe things that are false. Anyway, so that’s what I was doing, and I told my best friend in France, and when I showed it to him, he was really shaken. And then later on I baptized him, and he became a believer, so that was really beautiful.

So I studied for a year and a half, and what really helped me was apologetics. And that’s why I like apologetics so much. Specifically one book, The Case for Christ, and of course you know that book. Lee Strobel. And that really, really helped me. And I was like, “Wow! There is so much evidence!” And then I started reading people who… I was like, “Christianity is based on evidence. It’s not devoid of intellectual belief or reasoning.” Then I started reading people like Bart Ehrman and things of that nature. And then I started realizing how weak his arguments are and how even sometimes, and I know many people are friends with him, Christians, and they don’t want to use these words, but how dishonest some of the arguments are.

So a year and a half later, finally I knew 99.999% that Jesus was who He claimed to be in the Bible, and the Bible was the word of God. And then I always remember my Jamaican friends, that asked, “What are you waiting for?” “Well, I’m waiting for 100%.” They said, “No. Alex, please. If you wait for 100%, you’re never going to get 100%. You’re at 99.999%. I think that’s enough, so tonight you should give your life to Christ.” And I did. And even though I was born again, that was a commitment. It’s like loving a woman and wanting to marry her and marrying her.

Yes.

The love is there. The love is there. The passion is there, right? But still making that commitment was quite important for me, and when I did, I regretted immediately that I had not done it a year and a half earlier. But I had to go through what I had to go through. That’s part of life.

But then what I did, I went and got a master’s degree at Biola University online in apologetics, and I learned so much, and I loved it. I met some great people. Great professors. And I learned so much. That gave me a foundation for apologetics. My mission, not God’s mission, my mission was to be a prophet or a minister to America. I absolutely did not want to go anywhere else because I still love this country so much, and I didn’t like the rest of the world. So why would I want to go elsewhere?

Well, that was my thinking, but my plans are not God’s plans, so I went to France one time, and I met a man that God told me, told me his name, and when I met him, it was a confirmation that I was supposed to meet him. So I explained my testimony, like I did to you, but just in five minutes, and he looked at me. He said, “Alex, next year I’m organizing the first public debate in France between Muslims, radical Muslims, and Christians. You will be the Christian. And I looked at him and said, “No. Absolutely not, Sir. Absolutely not. I appreciate you trusting me, but, A, I haven’t spoken French in years, and my French is really rusty, B, my whole theological training in apologetics and Islam is in English, so I don’t even know the translation, the words in French, and C, my ministry is to America, not to France. I don’t like France.” So he said, “Sorry. God told me. You’re going to have to do it.” And I’m like, “Okay. Sure. I understand you think you heard from God, but I assure you you didn’t hear from God.” So I had one question for him. I said, “Sayid, what if I lose? What if I lose? I’m not an expert. What if I lose?” And I love his answer, and that answer stayed with me ever since, because sometimes we are our own worst enemies. We will say, “Oh, I’m not equipped. I’m not good enough. I’m not this. I’m not that.” And we don’t do the things we should be doing, instead of just jumping in faith and letting God be God through us, right?

Yes.

So he looked at me. He said, “Alex, you cannot lose because we won 2,000 years ago.” And he said, “You go and open yourself to God, and I promise you good things will happen.” I’m like, “All right. Now you’re putting it on me and my conscience,” so I said, “Okay, Sir. I’ll try my best.” He said, “You’ll be fine.” So I did the debate and more debates and more debates

looking back now, people either converted that I debated, so I baptized an imam, the second-most influential imam in France. I baptized him. He’s thriving now, preaching the gospel all around the world. The one person I debated the most, who, according to me, would never come to Christ and is still not confessing accepting Jesus, but he should, because he, a couple of years ago, came out and publicly said that the crucifixion of Jesus and the resurrection of Jesus are the two most sure historical facts from antiquity. So for a Muslim, it would be—supposedly Muslims deny that Jesus was crucified and thus resurrected. So God has been really using me, and by His grace, and I’m still surprised when I’m on your show or when I’m speaking about God, because it’s not like I was the best candidate for those kind of things. God has opened some doors, and I’ve been able to minister to people in power, and that’s been really quite amazing. Amazing that God has opened those doors. And so that’s my prayer request if people are watching your show, listening, that they would pray that God would send more souls in my life, because I love seeing people—when somebody comes to Christ, my faith gets multiplied. It’s not in addition. It’s a multiplication. And when we see people coming to Christ, it’s just the most beautiful thing. And then you realize that what you’re doing is worth it. It’s completely worth it. But even if we don’t see it, we still should be doing it. Because that’s what we’re called to do. And the harvest is plentiful, as we are told, but few are the workers, right?

Right.

So the things that are important is discipling and preaching the gospel. Those are the priorities, and when we do those things, we know 100% that God is on our side, that that will always be in His will, and He is going to honor our efforts because He will bless those efforts by the power of his Holy Spirit.

Those are powerful words, Alex. And it’s an amazing, amazing testimony. Talk about going from darkness to light, or depression to joy. I love the way that you really spoke to that. Your life really shows, demonstrates that contrast of just lostness, I guess you could say. And just looking and then finding in such a profound way the person of Christ. So unexpected, really. I mean, you said you were actually calling out for darkness, and you found light and said Jesus showed up, like He had done in the life of your father and even your mother. Showed up to you.

It’s just incredible. It’s incredible, and I think your story may surprise some people, in terms of the spiritual experiential nature of it, but for me, I guess, having heard your story before. I’ve spent some time in France, with the church in France. And hearing, really, if I can say this, the oppression, the spiritual oppression and the darkness that is being experienced there and the power of spiritual darkness there, and hearing more stories like yours, where darkness is broken by powerful spiritual experiences. So, for me, it’s not a surprise, but for our listeners, it may be. But you’re one among many, and I want to make that really clear, that the Lord works in very powerful and personal and experiential ways even today in the West. It’s not just in unknown parts of the world. It’s where God needs to be revealed, and He reveals Himself in ways that cannot be denied. Obviously, in your life, your life took just a complete change immediately, just like your father, to where you cannot help talking to others about Christ. And that is your mission in life. It’s so, so very clear. It’s compelling. And inspiring.

I’m wondering now, for those who may be curious about your story who are not believers, who are skeptical, willing to perhaps look, maybe open, because obviously they’re intrigued by your story and the complete life change that you’ve had, based on what you believe to be true and real and good. And very relevant to your life. What would you say to the curious skeptic who may be listening in?

Yes. Very good question. Yes. You’re not alone. Most people have questions. And many people have actually good questions. And so just because someone you ask, someone who believes in God, doesn’t have the answer. It doesn’t mean the answer is not there. A lot of people are not trained to give answers. That’s the sad part. All of the Ivy League schools were founded for students to be trained to give answers to those objections, but the church today, sadly, has gotten too comfortable for too long and does not train people to give answers, because what is a church? One is to go and be in communion with the body and to worship together and be with the body, but two is to train us, to prepare us to go to the world. And that’s what the church is about, and sadly, the church has not trained its people to go and answer these objections.

So if you have questions and objections, please reach out to us, because there are answers. I promise you. Answers to every objection. Now, are the answers always specific? For example, if your question is why did this specifically happen to me? We’re not God, so we may not know why specifically something happens at a certain time, but if it is an intellectual objection, some kind of objection to God, His existence, or the Bible’s veracity, or Jesus’ crucifixion, or His deity, whatever it is, the Christian faith is based on evidence, and you can see that. Luke, when he opens his gospel, his first chapter, he tells us that… And he’s a physician. He was not an uneducated person. He was a very educated man. He tells us that the accounts were written, it’s a historical account of what eyewitnesses and those who were disciples or companions of eyewitnesses, what they saw with their own eyes. So the evidence of Christianity is based on evidence, and so if you have objections, if you have questions, please reach out to us.

Seek, because we’re promised in the Bible, if you’re seeking with the right kind of attitude, not seeking for the sole objection to attack Christianity or to deny it. If that’s your sole priority or objective, then you’re not seeking with the right mind and with a right heart. But if your objective and if you’re seeking, like, “I truly want the truth. Wherever the truth takes me, I will be willing to go,” I promise you, you will get the answers. I promise you. Because the answers are there. So reach out to me or to Jana or whomever it is. Please reach out to us, because we are there to help, because we have been helped.

The reason I’m here, where I’m at, is because, I wanted truth. I didn’t care about people’s personalities or character or what they did, whether they’re sinful, sinless. I wanted the truth. I had questions, and I wanted answers to those questions. So you should have the same attitude. Sadly, many people reject Christianity because they’ve had a bad experience, and I remember one time one guy said, “Oh, I stopped going to church once I saw my priest buying a lottery ticket.” What does that have to do with your relationship with God? Relationship with people. We are to be seeking God, not seeking people. Our faith is not in people, but if you have questions and objections, seek the answers to those questions and not people. Because many people join Mormonism or Islam because they’re looking for community, the same reason my dad joined the Masons, because he was looking for community. He was looking for brotherhood, right? So he found it initially, but that does not make Mormonism or Islam or Freemasonry true. So seek the answer to questions. Remove emotions. We’re emotional beings, and trust me, I’m one of the most emotional people you’ll meet, but remove emotions from the equation. When you’re seeking truth, you’re removing emotions from the equation, and you’re looking for answers to your objections. And you’ll find them.

 

That’s wonderful. And I wonder if you have a word for the Christian, too. I’ve heard you speak about the need for training, preparation, the encouragement to be on mission for God, to be prayerful. I wonder if you could speak to any of those things or whatever’s on your heart for the Christian.

We need to help one another, because we need one another. No one is an island. We’re not created to be lone rangers. We’re created to be a body. That’s what the Bible speaks of. It compares the church to a body, where I may be the arm, and then you may be the eye, and the other person is the ear. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter. But how is one part of the body going to function without the rest of the body? And how powerful is the whole body when it comes together? When we come together and we’re united, nothing can stop us. Absolutely nothing can stop us. But the enemy wants to divide this body. So that’s the work of the enemy.

So if we come together and we train one another and we help one another, you don’t have to go to seminary. You don’t have to go and get a PhD in apologetics. Just go to a group of men, and you will learn so much, one from the other, and then maybe do some ministry together as a group, and go preach the gospel or minister to the poor or orphans and the widows. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter. You do something, and you’re going to see a result, and it’s going to be quite visible, and it’s going to be quite powerful.

Thank you for that challenge. Your story truly has been completely inspiring, Alex. Just your person, the way that you radiate Christ, and your passion for Him. Not only your intellect but also your mission. You have found life abundant, and you want to give it away, and you’re looking for the best for the other. It’s incredible. Truly incredible. So I thank you for coming on to share your story with us today, Alex.

Thank you so much. And all glory to Jesus, all glory to Him, because I was blind, and when you’re blind, I cannot choose to see. I was blind, and He’s the one who gave me sight. So all glory to Him.

Yes. Yes. Absolutely. Thank you so much.

Thank you.

Thank you for tuning in to the Side B Podcast to hear Alex’s story today. You can find out more about Alex by looking at the episode notes and his contact information there. For questions and feedback about this episode, you can reach me by email at [email protected]. If you enjoyed it, follow, rate, and review, and share our podcast with your friends and social network. We would really appreciate it. In the meantime, I’ll be looking forward to seeing you next time, where we’ll see how another skeptic flips the record of their life.

We are excited to share with you some special news about the podcast and a new phase of ministry for the newly named Side B Stories.

Website www.sidebstories.com

Former atheist Jim Warner Wallace embarked on a personal investigative journey and eventually became convinced of the reality of God and the truth of Christianity.

J. Warner Wallace’s website: https://coldcasechristianity.com

Books by J.Warner Wallace

• Person of Interest: Why Jesus Still Matters in a World that Rejects the Bible
• Cold-Case Christianity: A Homicide Detective Investigates the Claims of the Gospels
• God’s Crime Scene: A Cold-Case Detective Examines the Evidence for a Divinely Created Universe
• Forensic Faith: A Homicide Detective Makes the Case for a More Reasonable, Evidential Christian Faith

Episode Transcript

Well, welcome to the Side B Podcast, Jim. It’s so great to have you with me today. 

Well, thanks so much for having me. I appreciate it.

Before we get started into your story, why don’t we start with where you are now, so the listeners have an idea of who you are? 

I worked homicides, cold case murders mostly, in Los Angeles County for a number of years, and most of my work ended up on Dateline, so there are several episodes out there that will illustrate the kind of work we’re doing. They’re unsolved murders. There’s no statute of limitations on a murder. I was not a Christian most of my adult life. Now it’s been 25 years, I guess, I’ve been a Christian. I was 35 when I first walked into a church. And somebody described Jesus as really smart, and that’s what really started the journey for me. So today, I write books, I still have a couple of cold cases that are open that I need to tinker on a little bit, and for the most part, I get a chance to talk about Jesus a lot, which is what I love doing.

That’s fantastic. Well, let’s get started back early in your story because, like you said, you were an atheist probably for most of your life, so I’m very interested in how those views towards atheism got started. What formed that kind of belief? What was the culture that that was fostered? Your family? Did they have any kind of religious belief? Start me in your childhood. 

I think my mom was raised definitely as kind of a cultural Catholic but not somebody who ever opened a Bible, really was familiar with scripture. If we had a Bible in the house, I wasn’t aware of it. I think she has one now, but it was not the kind of thing we had in our house. And I didn’t know any Christians. I really didn’t even know any Catholics as a kid growing up. But I think I would have identified my Boston Italian side of the family, her family, were definitely raised within kind of a Catholic ethos, but really uninformed kind of view, and it was the kind of thing that we might go, when I was younger, much younger, like elementary school age, I remember we would go to church on Christmas, for sure on Christmas. Easter not so much. But by the time I was maybe in junior high or maybe upper elementary, I just told my mom I was done with it. “I don’t want to go on Christmas. I’d rather not go.”

And I had a very sarcastic view, largely because… You know, my parents divorced when I was pretty young, and my mom was not allowed… She talked about… I wasn’t even sure what the heck she was talking about, but there were certain privileges that the church offered that she was no longer going to be allowed to take advantage of. That’s how I saw it. That’s all I really knew. I didn’t know there was a sacrament issue or any of that, I just knew that, “Really? So now you’re in a different status because my dad left you?” So I just thought, “All of this is such a bunch of nonsense,” and I was growing in the ’60s and ’70s, when, you know, this is the Star Trek generation that lands on the moon and eventually thinks that science will have the answer for everything. And I was in southern California. I was in Los Angeles. So I was in a relatively secular environment. No one around us that was Christians. Never got invited to church by anybody. Just saw no place for it.

So at first… I could be relatively patient with people who are believers, unless they try to aggressively assert what they believed. Then I’m going to call it out for the nonsense that it is. And that was pretty much my view. And as a detective, I often would encounter Christians… We had a couple in the department who were officers who were not really good at articulating what they believed or, more importantly, why they believed it to be true. They were just raised in the church or they had an experience that changed their minds, and I’m not a big believer in experiences, so… I mean, everyone has an experience, so I just didn’t think that that was worth considering.

So, to me, it just seemed like a bunch of nonsense, but I would, for the most part, not say much about it until I encountered one of these Christians who would be outspoken, and then I was quick to knock it down. And that was my view. So I would say I was a thoughtful atheist, because I really thought… and part of it is it’s not hard to be thoughtful if the people you’re encountering who say they’re Christians are not able to defend what they believe at all. All you have to do is give a 10% effort, and you’re going to exceed the other side by ten times. They just weren’t able. They were not equipped to… Like, “Why do you trust the Bible?” “Do you have the originals of the Bible?” “No.” “So if you don’t have the original document, how can you even trust that you have anything close to the original document?” And a lot of the folks I would push back even… and I’m just hearing this stuff from other nonbelievers.

This is a little bit before the proliferation of the internet. So there’s a lot more skepticism out there today than there was… I just would hang out with other atheists, and we would mock these Christians together, and then you start picking up on their way of mocking, you start adopting that yourself. Before long, you all sound like each other, and that was really where I was for a number of years. And I can point to… I watched a guy do a bank robbery, just to have him tell me he was a saved Christian on the way back to jail. So I was not impressed.

Yeah. Yeah. It sounds like there were a lot of reasons for you not to be impressed really, between the hypocrisy-

Well, yeah. I would’ve probably said that, anyway, but the arrogance in me… And a lot of us think we know better than anybody else around us, especially if you’re in a position on a job where you’re constantly called to solve the problem. They call us to come in as an authority figure to settle this thing. Well, if you start to take that too seriously, you start to think that basically you’re the source of information, rather than somebody else. And I think it’s probably not uncommon amongst people who do that kind of work to kind of think that they can’t be taught anything.

That’s an interesting insight, really, and sometimes we’re not aware of our own blindness in that direction, right? You were in a position of authority, and I think that that would really feed into your understanding of yourself as knowing more than. 

Not only that, you kind of feel like you’re the good guy.

Yeah! 

So you’re the atheist who’s not doing a bank robbery-

That’s true! 

… talking to the Christian who is.

That’s true! Absolutely! 

Yeah. So that’s part of it.

Yeah, no, yeah, I totally get that. So there were a couple of things that you raised there that interest me. One is you said that you were a thoughtful atheist, and I’m curious did you understand the implications of where atheism goes, in terms of the big questions of life. 

So I would’ve said it this way: I would’ve said—this is the old Jim now, okay? I would’ve said that moral truths are grounded in groups that make decisions about what is the law of the culture, and those things change and evolve over time, and you Christians ought to know that, because at one time you affirmed polygamy and slavery and a bunch of stuff that you would say is not good now. So clearly it’s not grounded in the nature of your God. It must be grounded in the nature of the time in which those groups lived. That’s what I would’ve said. Okay. And that typically would stop the conversation right there.

But again, as a logical, analytical, obviously very bright person, did you pursue the logical endpoints of your atheism? In terms of where that headed, whether it be how you explained the origin of the universe.

I would’ve said, “Well, look, I’m not quick to jump to God for those kinds of scientific quandaries or mysteries that we have since solved. I mean I could have easily jumped to God, I guess, when I thought that Zeus was the thrower of the lightning bolt, but at some point we discovered where lightning really comes from, what causes lightning in the atmosphere, and so I don’t have to attribute it to an act of Zeus. I can actually find a naturalistic explanation, and so for every other thing you want to quickly attribute to God, I would say, ‘Be patient.’ The way we were patient with lightning. You will eventually have an answer from a naturalistic perspective. That is the trajectory of human history. It’s not toward theism, it’s toward naturalism,” and I would’ve said, “Just be patient.”

Oftentimes you’ll hear an atheist say, “Well, there’s no evidence for God,” right? There’s just no evidence for God. Dismissing out of hand without consideration. Did anyone even try to bring any logical argument or evidence for you to even seriously consider? 

Well, yeah. I mean I’m sure that a couple of these guys who are Christians in our department would make claims that they thought were well supported historically about the Gospels, but I had bigger problems in terms of even believing that… I mean I would give you there’s some form of Jesus maybe, but there’s not the miraculous form of Jesus. That’s just stupid. I mean why would we believe that anything in the New Testament that describes a miracle is reliable? The minute you enter a miracle into your narrative, you had made a genre change. You’re no longer doing history. You’re now doing mythology. That’s the genre in which miracles occur. You’re not doing science if you’re going to interject a miracle of God, either. So I would have said, these are two, by nature, by definition, naturalistic disciplines, and you cannot do science or history if you’re going to start including miraculous explanations. That, to me, was the foundational groundwork that we started, so I would say, “You were talking history for a second there until you mentioned that, and you just switched over into mythology.”

I would’ve said the same thing that people say to me today. “Look, are you going to go solve the next crime by assuming that there’s a demon out there that is equally as responsible as the suspect you’re looking for? No, you’re not even going to consider supernatural explanations. You’re only going to consider naturalistic explanations because you know in your heart of hearts there are no such things.” That would’ve been my response.

Yeah. And so when you think of Jesus and the miraculous as mythology, then I would imagine that your view of the Bible or any kind of religious text would fit in that genre. 

Yeah. And I’ll tell you why. So part of this for me, too, was growing up with a divided family of atheists and Mormons. So I don’t really have any Christians. I wouldn’t call my mom a Christian growing up, even though she would’ve said she was baptized as Catholic. I mean it just was not part of our life at all, and she was not reading scripture, she was not ever talking about this stuff. It was just like, “Well, you know, I’m a Californian, and in that way, I’m also a Catholic.” So because you happen to live here does not mean you know anything about California, and that’s kind of where she was. The other side, though, I had a group of very well-informed Mormon believers, because my Dad’s second wife because a Mormon pretty early on in their marriage, and then they had six kids, all of whom they raised LDS. My dad’s a very committed atheist. He will tell you why he thinks Mormonism’s false.

So I’m watching all this, and I’m thinking, “Okay, all of you nut jobs think that your religious view is true. You think yours is true. The Mormons think theirs is true. They think you’re wrong, by the way. That’s why they’re out knocking on your door, to try to convince you that Mormonism is better than Christianity. Well, why would I believe any of this nonsense?”

Right. 

“It’s just all different levels of nonsense.” And so that’s where I stood for many years as an atheist.

So you’ve painted a very clear picture of where you were. 

Pretty dismal, right? But I’m just being honest with you. People will say, “What kind of atheist were you?”

Yeah. 

Susie will tell you that, when I finally walked into that church with her and this started to change, she saw just a change. Years later, we did an episode on 700 Club, and they wanted to come out and interview her, and I had never really heard her talking about it, and as I’m watching this interview with her, I realize, “Oh, wow! She saw that entire thing as a miracle.” Because while she was open and neutral, she saw that I was completely closed. And so something had to happen in order to change that.

Right. So let’s step into that. So you were a detective, and you had no desire for God or anything to do with religion. It was complete nonsense, and even, obviously, you had some kind of antipathy towards it as well. For good reason. For good reason. 

Well, I’m not sure it was a good reason, but it was the reason I held, anyway. You can embrace an atheistic worldview without ever having to bend your knee to God. But this worldview requires you, as a first step, to do this thing we call repentance. Right? To repent. To change your mind. To trust in Christ. To confess your sin. To bend your knee. Every tongue will confess. And I think that’s just a really hard step for a lot of us. Our atheism has never asked… As a matter of fact, our atheism has elevated us, whereas Christianity puts us in our proper place. It’s a hard thing to bite off.

It is. And you raise a good point for me because, in looking at all of these stories, one of the most interesting things for me is to see what moves someone from a closed to an open posture towards God. Now you mention your wife Susie. So obviously, she has something to do with leading you, perhaps, in another direction. Why don’t you walk us through what moved you from a closed to at least a curious perspective? 

Well, Susie and I met in 1979. We were together about 18 years before we walked into that church, and during those 18 years, I can honestly say we never talked about God’s existence.

Was she an atheist? 

She was raised as kind of a cultural Catholic also but much more open. And so, because I knew her before we got married, once we were married, this was just not part of our relationship. It was something we did on Christmas. If she was with her mom, she might go to a Mass with her mom. And if I was there, too, if I wasn’t working that night, because I worked as a police officer. Sometimes you’re working on holidays. Murders almost always occur on holidays. So you’re always working holidays. But I would go if I was available, kind of the same way you would sit down for a Thanksgiving dinner. I didn’t like turkey, but I’ll sit down for the Thanksgiving dinner because it’s part of that traditional holiday.

Right. 

So in the same way, I would go, “If you want to go to a Mass, great,” so when we had kids, she said, “Well, do you think we…” because she had been… She said, “Even you, your mom was a cultural Catholic as a kid. Should we start?” I’m like, “No!” I mean, “If you want, I’m… I want to do what pleases you, so if you think we should do this, then we’re going to do this.” My dad, even today, will go to church as an atheist. He thinks that the world is a better place, the country’s a better place, if it holds to Christian ideals, even though he thinks they’re based in a foolishness, they’re based in a delusion. He says the ideas that emerge from that delusion are still powerful, and, “I would rather live in a country that is under the shadow of Christianity than one that isn’t.”

And I’m, very honest, the same way. “Yep, I can agree with that.” It’s a relatively law abiding, conservative worldview? Okay. I’ll be happy to go if you want to go. But I also knew that if I wait long enough she may just forget about it. She may not push it. And for three years, she didn’t. She would mention it. Like when we moved into this neighborhood, I knew right away that our kids were school aged, and she was thinking, “Should we take them to church?” And I just avoided it and always had an excuse, every weekend. But then, about three years into living here, it came up again, and I said… For whatever reason, I said—and this is where I think God works. I said “Okay, I’ll go if you want to go.”

I assumed we were going to go down to this Catholic parish, but somebody had invited us to a big evangelical church, so we ended up at this big evangelical church. And we walked in, and I’d never been in an evangelical church, really. Not for a church service, for sure. And I’d never seen anything like this on top of it all. This was a megachurch. And I was pretty sarcastic. I went with a partner of mine who had invited us, so he was there, and he kind of played off my sarcasm a little bit, so that was good. It made me a little more comfortable. But I can remember Susie—her only experience ever going into any kind of setting like this was a Catholic setting as a kid, so she was like, “It doesn’t seem very holy here.” Because it was like a big warehouse!

Right. 

And it was like a big stage presentation, you know? And so I was just willing to sit through it. I really didn’t think we would ever come back to it. I figured we’d probably go someplace else maybe next time or whatever. But the pastor pitched Jesus in this way that was provocative, saying that he was the smartest man who ever lived. He said a bunch of other related… You know, “He’s more important than any other historical figure,” all kinds of other stuff. Some stuff that he said was biblical that I just didn’t really care about. But the idea that He was smart did provoke me to buy a Bible to see if that was true.

Interesting. 

And I got a pew Bible, and I still have it. And I put the tabs in it because I started to pour through this, and I started to look at the gospels, and I thought, “It’s clear these people who are writing the gospels think that this stuff actually happened. They want me to believe that it happened in this order. They’re acting like they’re eyewitnesses of this. John even says, at the end of his gospel, “We could say a lot more than we’ve said so far, but it would fill up a lot of books.'”

So I started to look at these gospel accounts as eyewitness accounts, and one of the things you do to test eyewitnesses is something called forensic statement analysis that’ll help you test deception, deception indicators, things like this, So I started first in the Gospel of Mark and worked my way through all the gospels, and when I got done, I told Susie… This took some time. And I told Susie, I said, “You know, they seem like they would pass the… If I was doing this… Take out the miracles. These pass the test.” The only thing that’s in there that bothers me is the miracles.

But at some point I did start to reexamine my biases against the supernatural, and so when you’re talking about, for example, the beginning of the universe, you have to ask yourself, “Is there anything inside of space, time, and matter, that can cause space, time, and matter, or are those two mutually exclusive cause and effects?” So in other words if you can’t cause yourself to come into existence, that means whatever causes space, time, and matter has to be outside of space, time, and matter, and there really is a problem. So you already believe in something extra natural if you just seriously consider the beginning of the universe. So I just tried to learn to drop my innate biases against any… Because if there’s a God who’s powerful enough to blink everything into existence from nothing, well then every New Testament miracle is a small potato miracle. You can probably walk on water if you can create the water to begin with.

So I had to at least kind of open the door to that possibility, that reasonable inference, and that’s where I started to see my change in my own view of the gospels.

I bet that was surprising to you. I mean, having considered the Bible myth or mythology as a genre. Delusion, I think you used the word. To suddenly, as an investigator, a serious investigator looking at the eyewitness testimony and saying, “There’s something really valid here. There’s something historical and accurate here that I can’t dismiss.” I suppose those things were breaking down the wall of resistance, I guess you could say, because it sounds like you were willing to actually look at it in a serious way, rather than just dismissing it, and so-

No, that’s true. And a lot of that for me was—even though at some point I told Susie, “I think these are probably going to test out okay, but I don’t know why God would have to come this way when He came this way. Why would He die on a cross?” I didn’t understand the gospel even as I was confirming the claims of the gospels. So at some point I was like, “By the way, if this thing happened. If Jesus actually rose from the grave, it’s game over.” Everything changes because the authority of people who rise from the grave is different than those who don’t. So I have a tendency to trust people who come out of the grave. So that gives Him an authority that would change the way I see everything He said.

A lot of this was us trying to make that transition.

So just for clarity, you said you were willing to take with credence the things that you were finding in the Gospels except for the miracles, but then you just described the greatest miracle apart from creation, and that is- 

Yeah. So this is why when people say, “How clean was the investigation?” I wrote a book called Cold Case Christianity. Well, actually, it was my investigation that’s in Cold Case Christianity and the one that’s in God’s Crime Scene, and the one that’s in this new book, Person of Interest, that was happening all at the same time for about nine months, and what I mean is that I had to stop at some point and say, “Well, what’s keeping me out? The miracles.” So then I’d say, “Okay, do I have really reasoned, substantial reasons to reject miracles?” I knew that this was always bugging me from the Star Trek days, like, “How do I explain the beginning of the universe?” The standard cosmological model is still a big bang cosmology even today, and that’s still the standard model because most physicists and astrophysicists and cosmologists think that’s how the universe came into being. Everything came into being from nothing at a point in the distant past. And we’re talking about nothing. There is no space before space, no void before the void. All space, time, and matter came into existence from true nothing, the stuff that Aristotle says that rocks think about, nothing.

So that means that I already had a belief in something outside of space, time, and matter that could have that kind of causal power, so that’s when I returned to the Gospels and said, “Okay, so if that’s the case, and if they check out every other way, am I supposed now to believe that He rose from the grave?” Now that would explain certain things that I see in history. That’s the stuff we’re talking about in Person of Interest. In other words, if he really did rise out of the grave, wouldn’t you expect there to be a ripple effect on human history that goes beyond the four authors of some little gospels in the first century? This is a huge rock that someone’s throwing in a lake. I would expect all kinds of ripples.

But as a guy raised in southern California, I wasn’t educated on what impact Jesus of Nazareth had on human history. I would’ve said it was probably very limited. It was probably whatever Christian history you want to dig up. I had no idea that literature, art, music, education, science, and other world religions were standing on the shoulders of Jesus of Nazareth. And that’s what we’re trying to do in this book is to show… Once I started to look at that, I go, “Okay, this makes sense now.”

Given the possibilities, three possibilities: One, He’s a myth. It’s fiction. It’s all fiction. It’s always been fiction from the very beginning. Would He have this kind of impact on culture? Would you be able to reconstruct every detail of the myth from these weird aspects of human culture? I don’t think you could. Number two, He’s another… just a guy. A guy who lived. What other person who’s ever lived has had this kind of impact? I mean unless you don’t know the kind of impact Jesus has had. You won’t find anybody else who has had this kind of impact on history. In the most important things, that were important to me as an atheist, literature, art, music, education, and science. How about this? He’s God incarnate, entering into His creation. Well, now all that impact makes perfect sense! Right? That we, as humans designed in the image of God, eventually encountered God, and then we can’t stop talking about Him. And He provides the catalyst and the igniter for all the things that matter in history! And that’s really what we’re looking at in Person of Interest.

So it was a very ugly kind of… I was lucky. I was assigned, at the time, as undercover detective in undercover division, and a lot of that is down time. This is before the internet, but it was just early enough. I didn’t have a computer. So I asked my sergeant, “Hey, if I come in every morning and I pay for the ink and the paper, would you let me print out everything I can find about Jesus?” And he said, “Yeah, as long as you bring the ink and the paper,” and so I did. And I had these huge binders of stuff I was trying to dig up, plus all the books I could find, and I kept them in my unit and my car. It was an undercover car. And I just had them in the passenger seat, and they were all stacked up, and so I would just sit for hours digging through this data, and that’s what is in these different books.

So what was this process like in terms of time? How long did it take for you to kind of move through this process of your gradually moving from being totally unconvinced to being convinced that there was something real and true about the person of Jesus and the story and the Bible? 

Well, I think it started in the middle of… was it ’95? Maybe ’95. And I think by the middle of ’96 I have a name tag where I’m serving in the children’s ministry. And I did that, really, before I was a believer, but not much before I was a believer. Believe it or not, I was in this huge megachurch, and we were going now more often toward the end of that first year, and our kids would not sit still in the children’s ministry, so one of us would sit with them usually,

So we were asked to lead it, and I remember saying, “Well, I don’t know anything about scripture. I’m learning, but I don’t feel like I’m equipped to teach students.” They said, “Look, we’ve got curriculum. So I started serving in children’s ministry even when I didn’t know anything. So yeah, I just don’t know when. I wasn’t keeping track of it back then. I didn’t know it was going to lead anywhere. I should have a spiritual birthday, but I don’t because it was a process for me. It wasn’t an epiphany moment. It was a series of events, and at some point, I’m serving in the church, and I’m sure by that time I was probably pretty convinced it was true.

So, as you were becoming convinced that it was true—you had spoken earlier about Christians who really didn’t know how to answer your objections and who didn’t seem very well informed. Your understanding of Christians were they were uneducated. As you were reading through this material, obviously some substantive material that you were reading through, perhaps Christian writers or thinkers or apologists who obviously were educated in some way. I wonder. Obviously your perception of Christians and Christianity was being changed. Were you discussing any of these things with other Christians who were more educated as you were moving through this process? 

Well, I mean I wish. There were people I was listening to, I started to listen to, on air. One of them was Greg Koukl at Stand to Reason. He had a local radio show here in Los Angeles, and I was listening to him. He had a couple of hours a week, two or three hours a week. I can’t remember how long it was. And I was not always convinced at first, but I was impressed that at least there were other kinds of Christians out there.

Right. At the beginning, when you were talking about, as an atheist, you saw God basically as a God of the gaps, that it was just an excuse for explaining what we don’t know quite yet in science, but science will know, or naturalism will know, at some point. But obviously, when you came to believe that God exists, how did that affect your understanding of the reconcilability or the compatibility of science and God and thinking about comparing that with your earlier explanation? 

Well, sadly, when I first started looking at this DNA and the information in DNA and how you explain information in DNA, it was not something that was on the forefront yet, so a lot of this has been a process, too, of getting to a place where you’re looking, “Okay, what is the best inference for the things we see in the universe?” which is the approach I took in this book called God’s Crime Scene, right? It’s kind of an inside or outside the room principle. Not every death scene’s a murder scene. If I can explain everything that’s in the scene, that’s in the room, by staying in the room for an explanation, it’s not a murder. It’s going to be a suicide, a natural, or an accidental. So if I get there and there’s a pistol, but it’s your pistol. There’s one shot fired. Well, you can fire one shot. There’s no one’s fingerprints or footprints in the room other than yours. Well, this is probably a suicide. On the other hand, if I get there and it’s not your pistol and there’s bloody footprints leading out of the room, well now clearly the best explanation is not in the room anymore. It’s outside the room. Now I shift to murder.

Well, the same thing can be true of the universe, okay? If I can explain everything I see in the universe by staying inside the natural universe for an explanation, space, time, matter, physics, and chemistry, then there’s no intruder. But if the best explanation for the stuff in the room is somebody outside the room, you’re going to have to go outside the room for an explanation. And that’s exactly the approach I took as a new investigator of scripture. I’m like, “Okay, so which is the best explanation? Is it inside or outside the room?” Well, it’s really… The origin of the universe, the fine tuning of the universe, the origin of life, the appearance of design in biology, your consciousness, your free agency, your moral intuitions, even evil is best explained by a moral standard, a creative force that’s outside of space, time, and matter, outside the room. And so, in the end, that’s still the best explanation for the stuff we’re seeing in the room. So it’s not a jump, right?

It’s that I’m trying to find the… You go to any crime scene, there’ll be evidence in the crime scene. And each of your partners will develop an inference. They’ll say, “Oh, I think this is best explained by the girlfriend.” “No, it’s best explained by his wife.” “No, it’s best explained by his coworker.” We’re just trying to figure out what’s the best explanation for the evidence in the room. Same thing with the universe. And so I think it was a reasonable way to approach it, and I do think that, today, to jump to science to say… in all those eight areas I mentioned, science is relatively quiet. How did life originate in the universe? “We’ll figure it out someday.” Well, that’s just science of the gaps. It’s just the equivalent of God of the gaps. Someday God will tell me. “Well, some day a scientist will tell you,” is the exact same approach. So we have to be careful. In all of those eight areas, it’s really just science of the gaps.

That’s quite a juxtaposition from where you’ve come. It sounds like, Jim, that you took a real intellectual journey and you found a worldview that is not only true with regard to eyewitness testimony in the scripture but also gives you a comprehensive worldview for how you can look at all of reality. I’m curious. You mentioned one other thing I want to explore, and that is you said that you were investigating or researching the Gospels, but you separated out the gospel, apart from that. I know that belief in Christ is not only intellectual belief that He existed at a certain place and time in history, and all of these things led up to Him and have fallen out in history in terms of seeing the amazing effect of Who that Person is. But I know that to call yourself a Christian is really more than that. 

Right. That’s “belief that.” That’s not “belief in.”

Yeah, so-

The demons believe that.

Right. 

But they aren’t saved. Right.

So, for those who are listening, especially maybe a skeptic who doesn’t understand that it’s more than just an intellectual belief, that there is something called the gospel, how would you put all that together? 

Okay. So I think even my acceptance of the gospel—so the gospel, what I mean by saying the gospel, is the plan of God in which He can reunite Himself to us, or us to Him. Because we have separated ourselves from God by our fallen nature and our rebellious nature. And we all know this even if you’re not a Christian. You know you don’t teach your kids, your infants, to be impatient. That’s their default position. You don’t need to teach them to be jealous, teach them to be prideful. That’s their default position. We are fallen by nature from the moment we emerge from the womb. That’s just the nature of who we are. The question is how did we get there? Why is that the case? And how do we get reconciled? If there is a Being that is powerful enough to create everything from nothing, well that Being has the power to eliminate imperfection. You’re trying to unite yourself not to a good God, to a perfect God, to a morally perfect God, and you might have good days, but you never have morally perfect days. You’re not a morally perfect being. How do you ever expect to be reunited to a morally perfect Being?

Well, you’re going to have to adopt the perfection of some—you’re never going to be practically perfect, but you could be positionally perfect, and that’s about the gospel. That’s about what is it that brings us back to God? How is it that God forgives who we are? How is it that we can repent and change? And who’s nature can we adopt if our nature is never going to be good enough? And it’s not. There’s the one perfect Man, right? And this is the gospel.

Now, I will tell you that, in order for me to make those kinds of claims I just made, those are thoughtful claims. Those aren’t feelings. Those are intellectual propositions about the nature of God, the nature of humans, and the nature of reconciliation. These are actually intellectual claims. So I think even to understand the gospel, you’re going to have to use your mind to do it. This is why Paul doesn’t talk about the renewal of your feelings or the renewal of your emotions. He talks about the renewal of your mind. This is a thoughtful worldview. We have always been people of the book. We are a teaching worldview.

The first thing Jesus says is don’t go out and make converts, “Go out and make disciples, teaching them what I have taught you.” That means, right away, you’re going to be establishing monasteries and cathedral schools and universities. You’re going to have to teach people how to read. You’re going to have probably create alphabets. You’re going to have to translate everything because you’re a teaching culture. Well, that’s the culture we are.

The difference, though, for me was you can read everything there is to know about Jesus and you can research everything there is to research about Jesus, and you can get to believe that Jesus is who He said He was. That doesn’t make you a Christian. But I needed to move past that and start to read the New Testament, not for what it said about Jesus, but for what it said about Jim. And I trusted it for what it said about Jim because I first tested it to see what it said about Jesus. And once I determined it was telling me the truth, I started to trust it for what it was saying about me. And what it said about me was really true, that I’m not God. I don’t have a right to even put myself in that category. And I am that fallen person who seeks after his own selfish gain, who is always, by comparison to God, depraved at best and in need of a Savior. Lucky for me, I already knew there was a Savior, so I just put those two things together, and that’s how I gave my life to Christ.

So I’m a Christian because it’s true, not because it works for me. I say that all the time. Because I honestly think that’s what you have to ground this in. Because there’s going to be lots of days when I’ll say God is good but I’m having a terrible day. Outwardly, I probably could make a case that God is not that good. But I know that God is good, that God is love by nature because I’ve thought through the evidence, and even on days where I don’t want to believe it, it’s still true.

Yeah. That’s powerful. As we’re coming to a close, you’ve… That’s really some excellent advice, even for the Christian to push towards understanding the grounding of their belief, to investigate it seriously, to take the Word seriously, to look into the reasons and the arguments why God exists and why it’s true and it’s worthy of belief and to be able to give good answers. I’m not sure if you want to add to what you’ve already really encouraged and really admonished the Christian to do, but is there any other word for the Christian before we move to advice to the skeptic? 

So I would say this: There’s already something that you have much more robust knowledge of probably. Even those of us who call ourselves Christians. Now look, you have a great podcast that examines these issues every single episode, so maybe the audience that’s listening to us right now is already… like you’re preaching to the choir on this, okay? Because they already get this. But most of our friends who are Christians know far more about the NFL rule book than they do about this playbook we call the Bible. They know far more about the H&R manual at their business, or what the rules are, if you’re a cop, what the law in California is. You can do the penal code. You can probably recite portions of that. No problem. But you can’t do the Bible. And you even call yourself a Christian.

So what it comes down to is that we have the capacity to do this. We just don’t do it. We just do it in other areas. And that gives away what we really worship. That gives away what really matters. Now I’m as guilty as anyone. I was a Christian for a number of years before I left law enforcement. I still have a couple of open cases, but I am officially retired. And when I drove off that compound for the last time, it struck me that my identity is still in my work. I say my identity’s in Christ, but I wouldn’t feel the way I’m feeling right now if that was true. I’d be celebrating the fact that I get to now live my identity more robustly because I have more time. Instead, I was mourning the loss of my identity. Because in the end you can say all these things, but how we live is often very different. So my advice to all of us who call ourselves Christ followers is let’s show it.

Now I’m offering not as somebody who’s saying, “Be like me.” No, no. Don’t be like me. I can’t do this, either. I have the same problems, the same limits. I find myself still having the same hesitation, the same distraction, the same sinful inclinations. I’m Paul in Romans 7. I’m still doing the stuff I know I shouldn’t do, and I’m not doing the stuff I know I should do, and that’s just the nature of what it is to be human. So don’t take this as, “Well, you could be more like me.” No, I need you to be less like me. We need all of us to be less like us. So that’s my advice to those of us who call ourselves Christ followers.

Now when it comes to advice to atheists, let’s just consider the outcome of where this all heads. Think of it as a thought experiment. It used to be C.S. Lewis, I think it was, the idea of liar, lunatic, or Lord. Jesus is either a liar, a lunatic, or a Lord. Well, I think there’s another trilemma that we can look at that’s a little bit different. He’s either fiction or just another guy who lived in the first century or the God of the universe. If you look at how history has panned out, the fuse and fall that we talk about in any crime scene. Before the crime occurs, there’s a fuse that burns to the detonation of the bomb. Then there’s a fallout afterwards. The same thing happens with Jesus in the first century. A fuse that burns up to the appearance of Jesus, this explosive appearance of Jesus, and then fallout of history. The Person of Interest book I’m talking about just examines the fuse and the fallout. But if you ask yourself a question. He’s only one of those three things. If He is mythology, then how do we explain His impact on history? If He’s just a mortal, how do we explain? But if He’s God, now this impact makes sense, so my suggestion, my encouragement for those of us who are wondering which of those three it is. He’s either a complete lie. He’s either just a regular person living in the century. Or He’s the God of the universe. It turns out that the history the way it shaped out with humans on planet earth, it’s far more reasonable to believe the third option than it is the first two.

And so I would say know your history, know the impact that this sage, this ancient sage from this obscure corner of the Roman Empire. How in the world did that guy change everything? Why are we calling it the first century for that guy? Well, we are because He’s not just a guy.

I am just so overwhelmed with all of the wisdom and insight you’ve presented, not only through your story but just along the way. I’m also—I guess I just want so, for those who are so closed or so dismissive of the faith to really take an honest look, like you did. And I’m hoping that this story sparks at least the curiosity that it did in you. Because I’m confident, as you are, the detective who’s devoted years to looking at the evidence now, that you’re more convinced than ever that this is true, that God is real, that Jesus is who He says He was and He’s worthy of following. So I’m hopeful that, at the end of the day, there will be someone out there inspired to actually just stop and really be willing to take an honest look. 

Thank you so much, Jim, for coming on today. This is an extraordinary story. You’re an extraordinary man and follower of Christ, and we have all benefited from your work, and I just want to thank you so much for coming on to tell your story, so that when people read your work, they can even know more of your background and who you are as an author, and more importantly, as a follower of Christ. So thank you so much for coming on. 

Well, thanks so much for having me. All of those nice things you said, I feel embarrassed, because none of them are true, but what is true is that we worship a God that’s so big that He can take every one of these broken stories, every one of these people that think that they’re so full of themselves that they actually matter, and He can take our gifts that we give back to Him, which much look like the crayon drawings of your children being offered back to you as an offering. And all of this work, all of these podcasts, everything we do is just another version of the crayon drawing that we’re giving back to Jesus. And luckily, you know what? He smiles. With what little we’re able to give Him, and so I’m just glad to be on the podcast with you. Thanks for having me.

Thanks so much.

 

University biology professor Dr. Dawn Simon dismissed belief in God until faced with convincing intellectual arguments from an informed Christian, Tim Stratton. Dawn‘s recommended resources: On Guard by William Lane Craig Tim’s resources: Website: https://freethinkingministries.com Contact: [email protected] Episode Transcript

Hello, and thanks for joining in. I’m Jana Harmon, and you’re listening to the Side B Podcast, where we see how skeptics flip the record of their life, from atheism or skepticism to belief in God. It’s often thought that belief in science excludes belief in God, that somehow they are not reconcilable, that one cannot be a serious student of science and be a serious believer in God. After all, Richard Dawkins once said Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist. Many atheist thinkers over the decades have touted the story of atheism as the courageous scientific progress of man, overcoming primitive superstitions and make-believe gods, that we no longer need a god of the gaps hypothesis to explain what we are now seeing in the world and through science.

Has Darwin definitively ruled out the possibility of God, as Dawkins suggests. Or is it still possible to believe in God and evolution at the same time, as Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga and others contend. That evolution does not necessarily disprove the existence of God. Along with Dawn, we’ll also be talking today with Tim Stratton, someone who was quite influential in engaging Dawn on the issues of science and belief in a thoughtfully challenging, intelligent, and humble way. This should prove to be an intriguing story. I hope you’ll join in.

Welcome to the Side B Podcast, Dawn and Tim. It’s so great to have you both with me today.

Dawn: Thanks for having me.

Tim: It’s great to be here. Thank you for the invitation.

Wonderful. As we’re getting started, I’d like our listeners to know just a little bit about you both. So we’re going to introduce both of you one at a time. Dawn, why don’t you tell me a little bit about who you are now, and then we’ll get back into your story after Tim introduces himself.

Dawn: So my name is Dawn Simon. I am a professor of biology, and my specialty is actually molecular evolutionary biology, and I am at the University of Nebraska at Kearney.

And Tim?

Tim: Yeah. My name is Tim Stratton. I’m a professor at Trinity Theological Seminary and College of the Bible, teaching apologetics and theology. I run a ministry called Free Thinking Ministries. People can find me on YouTube under that name and also find my website, freethinkingministries.com, and yeah, I just have a passion for apologetics and theology and evangelism, and I think you’ll see some of that today.

Fantastic! And for those of you who are listening, we’ll put those sites and links in our episode notes. So let’s get started with your story, Dawn. Take me back to where you’re from, where you grew up. Talk to me about your family. Was religion or God part of your world growing up?

Dawn: So I grew up in a small town in eastern Iowa, so heavily Catholic. So we were a town of about 2,000 people, and we had two churches in town, both Catholic. And I come from a very large extended family, so my mom has a family of 12 and my dad has a family of 11. Everybody’s Catholic. My grandparents were definitely observant, and many of my relatives were as well. My parents were not particularly, though I did go to Catholic school and I went through all the sacraments associated with that. I would say, while I knew… I could win Bible trivia and I knew the rules. I don’t think I ever was a believer. Even though if you would have asked me as a third grader, “Do you believe in God?” I probably would’ve said yes because that was the right answer. That’s the answer I was supposed to give. My parents… we just didn’t talk about it. Ever. So, in general, my family left those kinds of ideas or beliefs about a higher being as personal. They’re not things to talk about. You believed or you didn’t, but you kept it to yourself.

And so I can distinctly remember having some questions at a young age. I had this Children’s Bible that had a picture and then one story per page that my grandma gave me for my first communion. And I liked it. I mean, I liked the stories. I definitely had the distinct impression that you just don’t ask questions.

Yeah. So you were growing up in a Catholic world, I guess, nominally Catholic, it sounds like.

Dawn: Yes.

You went through the motions. It was more ritual and perhaps rules. You were in a Catholic school. But you’re also telling me, even as a young child, you were inquisitive. You were what I would consider a critical thinker or even introspective or really thinking about the books and the beliefs that you were asked to believe. And you weren’t exactly buying it. It sounds like you were pushing back at an early age. That tells me a bit about you. So you went through Catholic school, elementary school. Did you go through middle school and high school?

Dawn: No. Our town only had Catholic school through elementary school, and then I transferred to public school, but we still had what was called release time religion class, where you would leave in the middle of the day, cross a parking lot, go to religion class in a building across the parking lot, and so I did that until I made my confirmation, I think in tenth or eleventh grade. So I wasn’t at a Catholic school but was still doing the release time religion classes.

So I’m curious. At that time you were actually confirmed in the Catholic church, how were you feeling and thinking about that? Were you buying into it at that point? Or were you feeling a bit conflicted about even going through the motions of that kind of sacrament?

Dawn: I wasn’t conflicted, in the sense that… I mean, it never really had a deeper meaning. It was just a thing we were supposed to do. And so… I remember that there were questions, like you had to pass some test, I think. I don’t know. The bishop asked you questions, and it was very nerve wracking whether you were going to get the right answers, and so I was really focused on just that. It was just like a thing to pass. And so I never thought too much about deeper meaning. I mean I was conflicted in the sense that I remember—I don’t remember it with confirmation, but around that same time, I really thought I didn’t believe in God. And I had asked my mom. I remember saying to her, “I don’t think I believe in God,” and it was super hard for me to say because I knew that was bad, and it made me feel like a bad person. And she didn’t have a thing to say about it.

So she had no response.

Dawn: No. Nothing. Nothing. Because we have a… My mom’s cousin is a priest, and I remember thinking. I don’t know if I said it to her, but I was hoping that’s what she was going to say, like, you go talk to him. But that didn’t happen.

So did you ever think, “Well, perhaps I should go talk to the priest?”

Dawn: I thought I should, but it was too scary to do it, because I wasn’t supposed to think that, so it was bad, and I thought it made me a bad person, and so I wasn’t going to do that. I mean, I confided in my mom. And it wasn’t like she disapproved. She just didn’t have anything to say in response. And that’s kind of how my parents are in general. They’ll support me, but it’s up to me to figure it out.

Well, I think it was really quite courageous for her to reveal that to your parents, but I hear you when you say that… It sounds like there wasn’t a real safe place for you to go outside of your home to ask the bigger questions.

Dawn: Yeah. Absolutely.

Yeah. So did you take on the identity of an atheist then? Or is that something that came later?

Dawn: No. Yeah. I was really reluctant to call myself that. Always. I never got over the reluctance to say that I was an atheist. Well, and one thing was I had learned very early… I mean, and I don’t even know if this definition is right, but what I had learned was that an atheist is that you know for sure there isn’t God and an agnostic is you’re not sure, and so I’m not sure about anything. And so I thought being an atheist… I mean I really thought, “Who would say that?” Certainly not me because I’m, again, not sure. I mean I might be 99% sure, but to me, in my mind, atheist was you’re 100% sure there isn’t a God. And for me, I think I was always hoping there was. I didn’t see any evidence for it. I thought that was probably wishful thinking on my part. And so I would have said I was agnostic, but I didn’t think there was a God. I just wasn’t sure. And so that actually never really changed, even though, by most definitions, I think people would call themselves an atheist. It’s just that, because I wasn’t 100% sure there was no god, I wasn’t willing to take on that label.

Dawn: And so that never went away. And I tried to do things. I remember, in college, in graduate school, I started going to church, Catholic church, and that I went most weeks. It was something to do, and I could say I was trying, but it didn’t do anything for me internally. Nothing about me changed as part of that experience, Well, growing up, the only thing I knew to do was to go to church, in terms of trying to have faith or trying to believe in God. That was the only thing open to me, I thought. And so I tried that, and that didn’t work for me.

You know, and again, I think that really speaks to who you are, Dawn, in your desire for intellectual honesty and integrity. Because a lot of people will just take on the identity of atheist and really not think what that means. Like you said, you defined that, in order to be a credible atheist, or to call yourself that, you really have to know everything about all of reality.

Dawn: Yeah, right, right.

And you understood that. So to be that self limiting, again, speaks to your integrity. And your desire not only, again, just to be sure, but you’re also honest in the fact that you’re continually skeptical.

Because you’re constantly searching for the truth, and that is something that I think all of us can take a cue from, is really continuing to search for truth. So as you’re moving along, you have this interesting kind of oxymoron that you’re telling me. It’s like you want to believe, you just can’t because it’s not intellectually credible to you, but yet you’re going through the motions of church, but that doesn’t… It’s just more of a social outing, it sounds like, for you more than anything.

Dawn: Mm-hm.

So that was college, and you pursued a degree in?

Dawn: Biology.

In biology. So you were heavily immersed in the sciences at that time.

Dawn: Yes, yes.

So I would imagine that your naturalistic worldview, that worldview without God, was being reinforced through your study of the sciences. Were you attending to any of that as how it related to the existence or not of God?

Dawn: I mean truthfully that didn’t play as much of a role as people think. I mean I specifically remember, in grad school, having this conversation with another person who, if he wasn’t an atheist, he was like me, agnostic leaning atheist, and we were both in the lab, and I remember saying to him, “People that think we have it all figured out don’t know anything about what we do.” I just remember saying, like, “There’s plenty of places for supernatural.” Not that I would be able to say exactly what those places were, but there’s so much unknown, and so I just remember having this kind of discussion. He was kind of philosophically minded, and we were having this discussion about the debate between intelligent design or creationism and then the naturalistic worldview. And we both thought that there was room to be a believer and an evolutionary biologist.

Dawn: So even though I was not in that category, I didn’t see inherent contradictions in general. Maybe specific claims, yes. But in general, I thought it isn’t as if we have things all figured out. We have 1% of things figured out. So it’s arrogant to claim that we don’t need anything else. And I was agnostic on whether we needed a supernatural being or not, but I knew there was plenty of unknown.

Yeah, I appreciate your humility there. Kind of a modest epistemology, if you will. That you understand our limitations of where we are, and there’s just so much that we don’t know. But we’re always looking to make the best explanation of the things that we do know, right? And experience.

Dawn: Right, right.

So you were moving along, and I’m curious, too, before we move too far. In embracing this agnostic, atheistic leaning direction, as the critical thinker that you were, were you looking at the implications of that godless worldview and what it meant for you in terms of your life, meaning, purpose, direction, any of that?

Dawn: No. So I wasn’t thinking like that exactly. I mean I definitely felt empty without God. But I wasn’t thinking in terms of bigger picture, like what is life without God like? Because that’s what life was for me. So I didn’t have to think, “What would it be if there was no god?” because I already thought there was no god. So I knew what that felt like. And, again, I would have to put that into, like, mystery category. Why do we continue to do anything at all? I don’t know. But there’s a desire to do. So even if there’s no implications later, there still is inherent kind of driving force to do good, be good. But I wasn’t thinking about that in a philosophical sense, just kind of one foot in front of the other, keep moving forward kind of thing. And I was struggling. It’s not as if I was comfortable with that idea. I was struggling.

Dawn: And I remember there was a podcast, actually. This was during my postdoc. So after you finish your PhD, scientists often do additional training called a postdoctoral fellowship, and so I was in Canada doing my postdoc, and I heard this podcast about how somebody lost their faith. And it felt very similar to me. They grew up in a Catholic home, and she talked about her brother dying, what that meant, and I just thought, “Well, this is it. This is really what I think, and I finally, finally admit it.” I wasn’t happy about it at all. It was like a punch in the gut. Yeah. But I just thought… I’d been trying really hard not to come to this conclusion, but that’s what I actually really think. And so that’s when—during my postdoc years was when I started, if not to other people, admitting to myself that I didn’t think there was a god.

So you were finally closing that door. And so what happened next in your journey?

Dawn: So I got this job, the job I currently have, in Kearney, Nebraska. And I came here, and this was a place different from any other place I had lived. Just in general, people are super friendly. I’m also an introvert, so I didn’t always, always appreciate that. I mean I appreciated the sentiment, but I did not appreciate needing to talk to people all the time, or people clear across the street waving, waving, waving, but you don’t know them. And they want to say hello. So extremely friendly, helpful community. And then the second thing is very open about religious beliefs. And that… I really didn’t like that part. So, for example, at the dentist’s office, they’re playing religious music. Go to the coffee shop, there’s Bibles on the table. And I just felt like it was everywhere, and people are so comfortable and so open with their faith. And I didn’t find it pushy in the sense that it wasn’t like people treated me different or were always trying to talk to me about it, but there was just evidence of it everywhere.

Dawn: And so I had this thing but the same people were super nice, some of the nicest people I’ve ever met, and so I had this issue where they’re obviously very religious, very, very nice people, seemed happy, had something I didn’t have, or it seemed so, and so then at that point I was like, “Okay, I’ll try church again. Let’s see. I’m going to really give it an A+ effort here.” And so then I started going to the Catholic church, and even at one point I was like, “I’m going to read the Bible straight through.” And so I started at Genesis. It didn’t go super well. I got to Noah’s Ark, and I was done. And so I was kind of in that, and I had stopped. I had stopped going to church. I mean I went, I don’t know, for maybe a couple of months. And there was something… Because I grew up in that environment, there’s something comforting about the ritual, but I didn’t feel any closer to God. What I felt like was I just… I gave it an effort. Like, “I don’t see what these other people are seeing. I wish I did. I don’t see it.” And so this is that point when I met, Tim, actually.

So, Dawn, as you’re moving along, then, and you’re in this community that’s very different than what you know, how does your story change? What is it that makes you want to really re-investigate seriously this issue of God?

There were a series of letters to the editor in the local paper about evolution. I don’t remember what instigated that exactly, but there was a series of letters and then comments about those letters, and I was just ashamed. I was ashamed by some of the responses coming from people at the university. And I should note that some of these people were using pseudonyms and were behaving very badly, just unkindly and very badly. And then there was this person, Tim Stratton, who was commenting on a lot of them but was kind. I didn’t agree with anything he said, honestly. But he was kind. And was offering… anybody that was writing responses, he was offering to meet with them and talk to them in person, and so I had this impression of this person, Tim Stratton, who I didn’t know who that was at all. That at least he was kind.

So, Tim, You were on an opposite end of those who were at the university. I guess it was on the topic of evolution? Is that what you were talking about?

Tim: I think that’s right and intelligent design in general. I was, at that point, really new to apologetics. I was a youth pastor at that time, and I saw that many of my students were losing their faith or becoming atheists in front of my face, because I kind of answered their questions. And so I went on a journey to see if there were good answers to their questions. What Dawn noticed was that I was arguing and trying to be nice and respectful and loving at the same time, and I think that got her attention. I do think some of the arguments that I was giving back then are horrible, and I wouldn’t give them anymore, and some of them are still good.  But I like what Dawn says. At the time, she didn’t agree with any of them, but she noticed something in my tone, I guess.

Dawn: Yeah, absolutely.

You know, that really says something, I think, that even though the content wasn’t exactly perhaps or anything that she agreed with, she appreciated the manner in which you communicated as particularly juxtaposed to those who were her colleagues, who weren’t putting their very best foot forward.

Tim: Yeah.

So, Dawn, his contribution and his tone, did it cause you to initiate some kind of discussion with him? Tell me what happened after that.

Dawn: I think because of this series of articles, my colleague invited someone to come to speak at what’s called a Science Cafe, so it was supposed to be outreach to the public, and the topic was on evolution, and so… before that I thought probably Tim would be there, and I Googled him so I knew what he looked like.

Tim: Really?

Dawn: Yeah, I did. And so I was on the lookout to meet him. And my only intention was to meet him and tell him I appreciated the tone of his arguments. I mean, I just wanted to thank him for that and to kind of also speak up that we all were not like some of the other people that were responding. And so I met him there, and then, I think within the week, we had connected on Facebook?

Tim: I ran into you at Qdoba, the burrito joint.

Dawn: Yeah.

Tim: Right after that.

Dawn: That’s right. We did. We did. That’s exactly right. Yeah. And so then he or I added the other one as a Facebook friend, and then this started a very long series of messages back and forth, like… I think at that point I said, “Actually, I’m closer to an atheist,” and so I was putting all my cards on the table there. And I think, if I go back and look, I bet several times I’m sort of trying to end it, saying, “Thank you so much for your patience!” Just because I didn’t have any kind of… I didn’t think somebody was going to be able to answer my questions. And I didn’t want to waste his time. But the other thing I appreciated very early was that it felt like give and take. So I would not have been as interested in those conversations if it felt like he was teaching me but I wasn’t giving back anything in return.

Tim: Oh, yeah!

Dawn: So I would ask questions. He would ask questions. And so we sort of came to understand each others’ beliefs that way. So that was kind of the initial part. And it was purely intellectual. I had no, no thought that this was going to lead to some kind of change in my life. And at one point, he said “Maybe God put us in each others’ paths for this reason,” and I remember thinking, like that’s so nice of him to say, but it’s just not going to happen.

So, Tim, talk with me about the way that you were… As obviously a thoughtful communicator and really appreciating this conversation you were having with Dawn, what kind of questions or topics or things were you talking about? Were you just question asking? Were you trying to present some kind of evidence or arguments? How was this conversation proceeding?

Tim: Yeah. The way I remember it. Like I said, this was when I first started getting into apologetics, and I think at the time I’d just enrolled at Biola University, started my master’s degree in apologetics. So as I was getting stuff from my classes, I was giving it right to Dawn, and so I was offering the Kalam cosmological argument and the moral argument and the ontological argument and the fine tuning argument, any argument I could get my hands on. As I was learning it, she was basically learning it along with me. And I was even trying to argue against evolution at that point, too, and then she asked me if I’d be willing to read some books on it, and I’m like, “Sure,” so she gave me some books to read. I remember one in particular from Jerry Coyne, right?

Dawn: Yeah.

Tim: And I was reading through that. If we’re going to be taken seriously, we better understand that which we are arguing against,” and I realized that I hadn’t done so. And so I really appreciated learning about evolution from Dawn, and I wasn’t just going to reject it. I figured if she was willing to listen to me, I’d better be willing to listen to her, and I learned a lot in the process. And while at Biola, then, I started thinking about, “Wow! Could an omniscient and omnipotent God create via evolution?” and it seemed to me that if God was both omnipotent and omniscient that He could. He would have the power to do so, and He would know how to do it. And I think you could even relate this to the fine tuning argument, the fine tuning of the initial conditions of the big bang or the early universe. So I didn’t see a problem there.

Not that I necessarily said I affirm this view, but I kind of had Dawn in mind. I wanted to see, could I come up with a model here, for Dawn’s sake,

Long story short, I was willing to learn from Dawn, and I think… So being willing to learn from her and listen to her and the fact that the tone was good, that we were respectful to each other and we weren’t like, “You stupid idiot!” I think those two things worked in favor of us having a really good conversation, and she was then willing to listen to me. Over a long period of time, I felt like almost daily we’d have some interaction, over Facebook Messenger most of the time, and argue.

Facebook is bad for tons of reasons, but I always point to this as something good that happened because of it. And I know it was definitely a very intense time, because I was really wrestling with big issues at that point.

It’s curious because it sounds like you started the conversation really not wanting to be convinced.

Dawn: Yeah.

But there must have been a tipping point at some point, where you actually found the person who was willing to engage in doubts and questions in a serious way and a respectful way, and so it was the first time in your life, I think, that perhaps you—you not only felt safe, I guess, to do that, but also somehow with a renewed interest.

It was initially just intellectual, and there were some of these arguments that I had heard a little bit of because of the class, because of teaching evolution, that sometimes we do this part where we talk about common objections at the end, and I try to just let students talk, and I try not to talk so much, but I needed to understand the objections, and so initially I thought, “This will be great for that. He’ll be able to explain some of these objections that I just don’t understand.” And so initially… And I had done some work. I had gotten some books to try and understand that, but I just couldn’t quite get it. And so initially that’s what I thought it was going to be, is that he’ll help me understand the opposing arguments and then that’ll be great and that’ll be that. But then we started going through… The argument that convinced me was when Tim was developing his Free Thinking argument against naturalism, so it’s kind of the early stages of that, so we were going through those premises and arguing a lot, and at one point it blindsided me.

Dawn: I mean, so it’s intellectual, intellectual, intellectual, and then one night, and I was getting ready to move, and I wasn’t sleeping. This was like 3:00 in the morning, and I was packing, and I was just thinking, “Gosh! I really think we have free will,” like, “I can’t be certain. I can’t be certain.” So this was one of the things also that would not have worked for me if Tim did not make clear that we don’t have to be certain, that you can have some doubt and still be convinced. So I was like, “I can’t be certain about free will.” I had tried and I was making myself crazy trying to think of, “What experiments could we do to show that there’s free will?” and just could not and had read scientific literature of people trying to show it and just couldn’t figure out a way to definitively know.

Dawn: But I had this revelation that, “Oh, I think we do have free will,” and then the very next thing was, “What does that mean?” That means there’s God. And then it was like… yeah. I get a little bit emotional talking about it because it was… Like I said, I felt blindsided by it because it was all intellectual until we had gone through the arguments, so I knew the argument well. I just was stuck on this… I thought either we think we have free will or we do have free will. And I just… I have to live my life with what I think is true, and what I think is true is we have free will, and if we free will, there’s a God. And I was just… I didn’t know what to do with that. I was crazed that night.

When you have that sense of… like this is profound and this is actually true and perhaps God does exist, I’m sure that’s a very sobering moment for you in many ways because you had, for so long, not believed. I mean really your whole life.

Dawn: Right, right.

Tim, for those who don’t know the free will argument, really that’s a novel thing for someone to think about. “What do you mean I don’t have free will?” or, “If I have free will, that means there’s a God.” Could you, in a nutshell, just tell us what that is.

Tim: You bet. So the free thinking argument is an argument that demonstrates… Well, the free thinking argument against naturalism. It starts out just by saying, if naturalism is true, that the human soul does not exist, right? Because the human soul would be a non-natural or a supernatural, immaterial, nonphysical type of thing, so if naturalism is true, the soul does not exist. And then I would say, but if the soul does not exist, then humans do not possess libertarian freedom because everything about humanity would be caused and determined by something other than humanity, namely the laws and forces and events of nature.

Tim: So yeah, number one, if naturalism is true, we don’t have a soul. Number two, if the soul does not exist, libertarian freedom does not exist. Three, if libertarian freedom does not exist, then important kinds of rationality and knowledge do not exist. That is, if something causally determines you to affirm a false belief about X, then it’s impossible for you to infer a better or true belief about X, and I think that hit Dawn hard because the goal of the scientist is to infer the best explanation from all the data. But if something else is causally determining her to affirm a false belief about X, then she can’t infer the best explanation of the data. She can’t do science, right?

Tim: But then the next premise is we can infer better and true beliefs. We can do science. So therefore you have some conclusions. Therefore, humans possess libertarian freedom. Therefore, the soul or some non-natural aspect of humanity seems to exist. Therefore, naturalism is false, and then I argue that the best—speaking of the best explanation, that the best explanation of all of this data, souls and libertarian freedom, is not just God but the biblical view of God, and that really starts a new argument.

Yeah. Thank you for explaining that. So then, Dawn, back to you. When you had this sudden awareness or realization that you actually believed, what happened then? Did you call Tim? Did you think, “Oh, I need to think about this,” or what next? Or what kind of God?

I’m sure I wrote to him immediately. And then I think… Again, he was still helping me know what to do. And so he suggested that I start with the book of John, that I read and also just pray to God, which was novel.

Tim: Notice that I didn’t say, “Start with Genesis.”

Dawn: No, you did not say start with Genesis.

Tim: I know that wasn’t going to be good for her.

Dawn: And so then the next part was kind of… So there is a God. Is it the Christian God?

Right.

Dawn: So Tim was, at that time, teaching a Sunday school class on apologetics, and so I started… I wouldn’t go to church, but I would go to that. And so we went through Dr. Craig’s book On Guard, I think, and went through all the arguments there, and then a pivotal moment or time was he showed this debate between Mike Licona and Bart Ehrman, and I remember, oh, boy, I was rooting for Ehrman. So he showed this… I just… I mean because I just… I don’t know what my deal is, dragging my feet every step of the way.

Tim: The resurrection in general.

Dawn: The resurrection, yeah. The resurrection. How can that not be true? And I again just… It’s not that I was sure, but I was more sure than not, so I was… Tim and I would often talk about percentage. What percentage sure are you?  And so I was above 50% sure. I don’t know how high, but the idea was that that’s the thing that I thought was true. Whether I was 100% convinced or not, that’s the way I needed to live my life at that point. So I think that was in the spring, so when we first starting talking in the fall of 2012, I think, and then in the spring was when I was going through the classes with him, and then we watched the debate during that time. And I still wasn’t calling myself a Christian yet. And then I had a question… Yeah, I had a question to Tim about the resurrection, like why did Jesus have to die? It didn’t make sense to me that there wouldn’t be some other way. And he gave a sermon at church about that, and so then after that sermon, then I started calling myself Christian. That was the final thing that I needed answered.

That is a really tremendous question. And I think it’s really a stumbling block for many people. Why did Jesus have to die? And I don’t know if you want to give a little 60-second response to that.

Basically it had to do with how our broken relationship’s restored. What does the offended party have to do? What does the offending party have to do? And really cached that out and connected a whole bunch of logical dots.

Dawn: Yeah.

Tim: And yeah, I think you can make a pretty good case that, “Wow, this is why the Creator of the universe had to enter into the universe to die for those who He loved within the universe.”

You know, as we are going on, it just strikes me how perfectly God placed you, Tim, in Dawn’s life as someone who is incredibly logical and analytical. And you obviously are made from the same cloth. And you’re able to think through things in such a way—you don’t just say, “Believe!” You know, “Why don’t you just believe?”

Tim: Right. That’s what I used to do. As a former youth pastor and a bad youth pastor, that’s what I did.

Yeah.

Tim: And I realized that doesn’t work.

Yeah.

Dawn: Yeah.

Because, for especially the skeptic, they just don’t take things just because you throw them out. You have to have a good reason. And it sounds like you were the perfect person in her life who—it’s not that you knew all the answers, but you’re willing to look and engage and learn alongside and you’re both searching for truth but in a very deep, logical, and analytical way, and there’s something to be said for that, and it’s really a beautiful thing.

So you came to a place not only that you believed intellectually, Dawn, that God exists and obviously you were convinced at some point that Jesus rose from the dead and perhaps that verified the claims that He, too, was God. But that it was more than an intellectual assent. It was something that you… Someone to whom you gave your life.

Dawn: Right.

And affiliated and you were willing to put on that label of Christian. That was a tremendous change.

Dawn: Yeah.

Talk with me about that and the change that has come in your life as a result of really becoming a Christ follower.

Dawn: Yeah. So this is a harder part to talk about for me. I think partially because of my personality and also because of my job, I was not super excited to use the term at all. And just the other part that was difficult, well difficult about, “What does this mean?” was that I’m not sure if my family are believers, and most of my friends are not believers, and so there was one point that… I mean, I was disturbed. I was distressed by my conclusion. So it wasn’t like all rainbows. I mean, I felt pretty bad about it for a while. Like you had said, for me it wasn’t enough just to say, “Believe.” It seems like for plenty of people it is, but for me, I needed more, and God gave me more.

Dawn: So there are so many gifts that I’ve been given, but I don’t often feel like I do enough with those gifts, but in terms of how it’s changed my life, I wouldn’t even be thinking like this. I would just… Let’s rewind to when I was saying one foot in front of the other. I’ve always tried to be a kind person, but there’s a different obligation to that, to helping others and living your life for more than just yourself, and that’s… It just changes, so I don’t know if it has changed my actions as much as the mindset of why I do things or what things I try to keep in mind as I live my life.

Yeah, yeah. It’s an ongoing process for all of us, Dawn, isn’t it? I mean, every day is a gift even-

Dawn: Yeah, yeah.

… and time is a gift and what we do with that, it’s a struggle for us all. I’m imagining that there are listeners who are curious about your perspective, too. It may be very much like Tim’s in terms of what would you say to the person who doesn’t understand how science and faith can go together? They look at you. You’re a PhD in evolutionary biology, or molecular evolution, but yet you call yourself a Christian, a believer in God. How do you reconcile those or put those together? Or is there a problem at all?

Dawn: I don’t think there’s a problem at all. I separated out, and I teach my students this, that in science we use methodological naturalism, such that, by definition, we’re studying the natural world. Biology is the study of life. So what’s outside of the natural world isn’t in science. Not that there’s no influence of supernatural but that, just by definition, the rules of science are we do not include that. So if I’m in a lab and I’m doing an experiment and I can’t figure out why, we can’t jump to supernatural influence. We wouldn’t make progress. It’s separate from whether or not you think there are supernatural influences. You can believe that there is and still not take it into account because the process of… We have a process that we use to make progress, and so, for me, not that they don’t intersect, but the way that I look at science or the way I do my job, it doesn’t come into it. I’m trying to be as objective as possible, making the inference with the best explanation.

Dawn: I mean, in my life, every single thing I do, I try to make the inference with the best explanation. And I’ve never really seen the problem. And I think also because I’m a scientist, I’m pretty used to ideas changing with more information, and so I don’t get hung up on on that.

And I think it’s arrogant to think that we will figure all this out. On either end, that we’ll know God’s mind or that, as a scientist, I’m going to be able to recreate what happened billions of years ago. I mean it’s arrogant to think we’re ever going to reach that step, but if you have a possibility, that should give you reason to believe that reconciliation is possible.

Tim: And I think Dawn’s exactly right. When she’s going into the lab, she’s, for lack of maybe a better term, assuming methodological naturalism. She’s not looking for supernatural everywhere.

Dawn: Yes. Right, right, right.

Tim: Even though she believes in God and that God created the universe and everything.

Dawn: Right, right.

Tim: I mean Psalm 19:1-2 says, “Day after day, your creation pours forth speech. Night after night, it delivers knowledge.”

Dawn: Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Tim: So God’s word is telling us, “Study nature. Do science,” right? That’s what the Bible is saying.

Dawn: Yeah.

Tim: Do science, study what God has created. So if you study the nature that God has created, it’s not necessary to look for… What’s the term that you like to use? Tinkering?

Dawn: Tinkerer, yeah.

Tim: The Tinkering God or whatever. No need to look for that once you affirm that He already created it supernaturally.

Dawn: Yeah. And actually that’s another thing, is that I think that’s one of God’s greatest gifts, to me personally but to humanity in general, is that He allows to figure some of this out. We get a glimpse. We can use our brains, and He gives us enough resources to be able to make inferences for the best explanation and understand how He created. I mean I just… That’s the part where faith comes into my work, that part, is that I’ll just be blown away just at what we’re able to figure out. It didn’t have to be that way. We didn’t have to have these tools to be able to make inferences. He gave us this gift.

That’s right. All the more reason to really appreciate that free thinking argument, right?

Dawn: Yep. Absolutely, absolutely.

Yeah. You have to have a grounded rationality because you can observe a predictable, rational universe and all of that.

Tim: That’s right.

So it all comes together. As we’re wrapping up, I think I would like to hear really from both of you in terms of advice that you would give to someone like yourself, Dawn, who is just a skeptic at heart. Someone who really is looking for truth and wants to have valid reason and rationality for their belief. They want to have grounded, warranted belief. What would you say or how would you advice someone like yourself? Or who might be searching with that kind of intentionality and thoughtfulness?

Dawn: I think one of the things that helped me a lot early is when I came to that conclusion, exactly that. I’m just looking for truth. Whatever way it goes is what I’m going to believe. I don’t have to be invested in there not being a God or there being a God. I can just simply say, “I’m looking for evidence, and I’m going to come to the conclusion that makes most sense to me.” And so that takes a lot of pressure off and takes a lot of emotion out of it, which I think often is a hang-up for that, so I mean if you have the idea in your head that you’re just looking for the truth… Also, you can think for yourself. So maybe you really admire one person, but that person, there’s part of the arguments you don’t like. Well, it doesn’t have to be the whole thing or nothing. You can look for pieces of evidence all over.

Dawn: I tell Tim this all the time, that there’s all of these arguments for the existence of God. I think about three of them are good. So I mean I’m not an easy sell, and I’m not convinced… I don’t care if there’s a hundred. If there’s one that is convincing to me, then I go with it.

Tim: That’s all you need.

Yeah. Anything you would add as advice to the skeptic, Tim? Anything you would encourage them?

To the skeptic, I’d say really evaluate your life and even in your innermost being and your subconscious thoughts, even, if you can. Are you resisting the Holy Spirit? Are you resisting the arguments? Are you resisting? I know many people who’ve said, “Look, I want God to exist. I don’t want atheism to be true,” but then when you start arguing with them, even in a polite way, they get very emotional and defensive, and it seems clear to me, “Well, you are not a nonresistant nonbeliever,” and Dawn seemed to me to get to the point where, at least I thought she is definitely a nonresistant nonbeliever, and if that’s the case, then she was going to be open. Some times more than others. Yes, she is the most skeptical person I’ve ever met! To this day! No matter what we’re talking about. Skeptical! And I think it’s a gift, though.

Tim: And sometimes maybe I’m too optimistic, and so her pushing back on my optimism with a little bit of skepticism is good, and I think we’ve been able to meet in the middle on so many things. And so then I would just say to those who are having conversations with skeptics or nonbelievers in general don’t wipe the dust off your feet too quickly. I see too many Christians just say, “Well, I had a conversation with them once, and I’m wiping the dust off of my feet and walking away,” to quote scripture. I just last week was with somebody who led his friend to Christ after 30 years of sharing the gospel and doing apologetics with him. Thirty years! This man finally accepted the truth and accepted the evidence. Followed the evidence where it was leading and gave his life to Christ.

Tim: And, Dawn, I felt like our conversation was a long time, but it wasn’t close to 30 years. I mean it was several years, though, right?

Dawn: The bulk of it was a year.

Tim: Okay.

Dawn: I had questions for a long, long time after that.

Tim: Right, right.

Dawn: So I mean it was several years, but from agnostic-leaning atheist to Christian was right around a year.

Tim: Okay.

Dawn: But hundreds of pages of texts.

Tim: Yeah, that’s right.

Maybe that needs to become a book. Yeah.

Tim: We have it.

Tim: We might have to publish that. We’ll see. I don’t know. We’ll have to edit it, that’s for sure.

Dawn: Edit it for sure!

Tim: Yeah. There are some things that I’m sure I said back then that I would be ashamed of now. But I’m sure God can use imperfect arguments at times, too. So just keep having the conversation and love each other and respect each other and don’t be jerks.

Dawn: Yeah.

Tim: And even some of Dawn’s colleagues, one guy in particular, we used to probably hate each other, but now we’ve even kind of developed a friendship with each other. We stopped being jerks to each other and are able to have these conversations. And so, yeah, just have fun conversations, and at the end of the day, trust God with it. But you gain friends and develop critical thinking skills in the process. For me, it strengthened. Dawn came to faith in Christ. My faith in Christ was strengthened, and it seemed to expand. I saw a bigger view of our Maximally Great Being through the process as well.

That’s wonderful! Wonderful advice both ways, both to skeptics and to Christians, Tim. And finally, Dawn, if you were to talk to the Christian, especially with the example that Tim was in your life, patient, kind, diligent, very thoughtful and intelligent, meeting you where you were, open, all of those things, how would you advice the Christian to engage with the nonbeliever, maybe perhaps the nonresistant nonbeliever.

Dawn: That may not be nonresistant?

That may or may not be resistant, I guess.

Dawn: I mean the biggest thing, I guess, was just to show humility and to show… You don’t have to be sure, you know? You can learn from each other not to… I don’t know… think less of a person that has doubts? And to make them feel like the doubting part is okay. That was huge, that I knew it was okay to doubt. I mean, if he would’ve said, “At some point, you’re going to be 100% certain,” I would’ve said, “Okay, we’re done.” You know? This idea that certainty isn’t the goal. I mean, we’re not trying to be certain. We’re trying to have a relationship. Relationship with God. It’s not about being 100% certain, and so those were the huge things. And just, yeah, to be kind. I mean it shouldn’t be so hard, but that’s… Think the best you can of the other person.

Yeah. I’ve heard… This is actually wisdom from my husband, that we have a hermeneutic of either trust or suspicion towards the other. And I think, to your point, I think that we do need to trust, really, that the other person is coming from a good place until they demonstrate otherwise.

Dawn: Right. Until they prove otherwise. Right.

Yeah. It’s kind of innocent until proven guilty. Because we really do want the best for the other. That’s what love is, and some of that’s just being patient, and it’s giving the benefit of the doubt.

So wow. What an amazing story this is, and how rich it has been to have both of you in the conversation today, to give life to your story, Dawn, and to Tim, just to bring such insight and wisdom in how you walked alongside—both of you. You’re walking together in this process. And I think that humility and that respect, mutual respect, really stands out a lot.

So thank you so much for, again, your time and just coming forward and telling your story. Like you said, it’s not an easy thing to do necessarily.

Dawn: Right.

Especially as a professional as an evolutionary biologist and someone in the academic world. So I applaud you, Dawn. It’s courageous. So thank you.

Dawn: I appreciate that. Thank you.

All right. And thank you, Tim, of course.

Tim: You bet. My pleasure.

Yes.

Thanks for tuning in to the Side B Podcast to hear Dawn Simon’s story. You can find out more about Dawn and Tim Stratton, as well as their recommended resources, in our episode notes. For questions and feedback about this episode, you can reach me by email at [email protected]. If you enjoyed it, I hope you’ll follow and share this podcast with your friends and that you’ll rate and review it as well. In the meantime, I’ll be looking forward to seeing you next time, where we’ll see how another skeptic flips the record of their life.

A strong atheist until he was 51, Mark Meckler felt no need for God until the influence of his personal relationships paired with deep intellectual curiosity led him to consider something more.

Recommended book: The Case for Christ by Lee Strobel

Episode Transcript

Hello, and thanks for joining in. I’m Jana Harmon, and you’re listening to the Side B Podcast, where we see how skeptics flip the record of their lives. Each podcast, we listen to someone who has once been an atheist or skeptic but who unexpectedly became a Christian to learn from their perspectives, both as someone who once resisted belief in God and then as someone who changed their mind.

What we think and believe is a complex phenomenon. We often come to our beliefs because they’re part of our world growing up, the fabric of our family, the views of our friends. We seem to be drawn to what is familiar, at least at first. Sometimes we actually reject what we know and become drawn to other views based upon what we desire, or towards the beliefs of those who we like and admire believe. We can also be swayed towards strong beliefs by dominant voices in our culture at university and beyond, when exposed to different ways of thinking about and viewing the world, towards or away from God and religion. 

In our story today, Mark Meckler’s nonreligious cultural Judaism grew into a militant atheism, as influenced by the dominating voices of the New Atheists. As a young adult, he became convinced of the poisonous, immoral nature of religious belief and wanted nothing to do with it. Religion was for weak people who needed a crutch. Highly driven and accomplished in his life and career, over the years, he didn’t feel the need for God. He was happy on his own. But against all odds, he became a Christian after three decades of atheism. This begs the question, what would it take for someone like Mark to become open to consider the possibility of God? Even more than that, to become an impassioned follower of Jesus Christ.

I hope you’ll listen to find out the answers at least for Mark. Even more than that, I hope you’ll stay to the end to hear his advice to skeptics in considering becoming open to ideas that they may have readily dismissed and to Christians on how to live in a way that invites the skeptic to reconsider. 

Welcome to the Side B Podcast, Mark. It’s so great to have you. 

It’s really great to be here. It’s an honor. Thanks for having me today.

Wonderful. As we’re getting started, so the listeners can know more of who you are, why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself? 

My name’s Mark Meckler, and I run a national political organization called Convention of States Action, about five million members. I’m trained as an attorney, but I am a political activist for a living and for my passion now. I married to Patty for 28 years. We live just north of Austin, Texas. I have two grown kids. My son is 26 years old, in his last year of law school in the Washington, DC, area. My daughter is 22, another political warrior, and she lives here in Austin, Texas, with us, and she runs the education reform project for the Texas Public Policy Foundation. Also, you might have seen my dog in the background back there. That’s Levi, and he is a 160-pound Great Dane. He’s a permanent fixture here in the office with me.

Wow! You couldn’t have a greater companion. I’ve got two Golden Retrievers, so I know what that’s all about. 

Let’s step back and lay a context for your story, your story that brought you to place of atheism and then to God. Tell me about your childhood. Where did you grow up? Tell me about your family, your community, culture. Was God any part of that world?

So I grew up in southern California, in the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles, and I grew up in a very what I would describe as Judeo-Christian family from a value set perspective. I’m Jewish from both sides of my family. The whole’s family from Ukraine, grandparents on one side, great grandparents on the other side. Jewish culture was very important in our family. I would say, in my high school, 50% of the kids were Jewish. A lot of folks went to temple. I would now, in hindsight, call it ritualistic Judaism. Not much God involved. Really wasn’t much about faith, more about family, community, tradition. Those things were strong in my family, but there was no God in my family, per se. There was no prayer, there was no worship, and we as a family never went to temple.

So you didn’t go to temple, so did you practice Shabbat or high holy days? 

None of that. Once in a while, for Passover, for some of the high holidays, we might go to somebody else’s house, one of the older relatives who still practiced that kind of stuff, but we really didn’t participate in it, and I really frankly, as a kid, didn’t understand any of the meaning of it. We would read prayers that had been translated from Hebrew to English. Sometimes the older folks might say a prayer or two in Hebrew. I mean, to me it just sounded weird. My weird relatives who were into this stuff, and I love them dearly. It was fun for the kids, and we would get treats, and that’s pretty much all it was about for me growing up.

So you didn’t go to Hebrew school? You didn’t have a bar mitzvah or any of that? 

No, all that stuff was offered to me, but the way it really works in what I would call a really nontraditional Jewish community, non-orthodox community, is you get to be about twelve years old, and then your parents say, “Hey, you’re going to be bar mitzvahed,” and usually, you’re like, “Well, I don’t really want to, but I will if I have to,” because we were a part of a temple community. But for me, I didn’t want to do. And the main reason I didn’t want to do it is my friends who did it all got a bunch of money. This sounds weird, but cash is the primary gift that people get for their bar mitzvah or bat mitzvah, and I felt like, to me, that just seemed kind of weird and sacrilegious. I didn’t believe in God, I was not a practicing Jew, and I was going to have a big party where I put on religious garb, sort of pretended that I was religious so I could get money. And that actually felt wrong to me at the time.

I don’t know that I expressed it that articulately, but I told my parents, “I’m not really interested in this,” and my parents were okay with that.

So your parents were nonpracticing Jews. Did they have an expressed atheism or disbelief in God, even though they were part of a, I guess culturally speaking, of a religious sect? Judaism? 

Yeah. I mean in a sense there’s two questions wrapped up into one there that I want to address. First of all, it’s just my parents in particular. They had a decision they had made when they were younger and a philosophy that they were going to kind of turn it on us and ask us, “Well, what do you think?” as opposed to telling us what to think. And so we were raised in a household that was very open to whatever you might think but non imposing of any particular religious orientation. Again, important to remember the values were there. Everything that you would think about as Judeo-Christian values, we lived according to the commandments essentially, but it was not expressed in religious terminology. So that’s where we came from philosophically.

There’s a very different, I think, distinction that has to be made for folks who didn’t grow up in a religious home because, it’s hard to understand this, but being Jewish is both a race and a religion. And so I don’t have a choice, I’m Jewish. That is what I am. That will never change. Every day of my life, I wear a Star of David. Mine has a cross in the middle of it now, so that I understand where the heart is, right? But I’m Jewish, and that can never change. I can’t renounce my Judaism any more than I could renounce the fact that I’m a Caucasian person, right? That just is part of who I am genetically speaking, literally. And there’s a culture associated with being Jewish if you choose to participate in that culture. And I did. My family was very Jewish culturally. We ate traditionally Jewish foods quite often. Like I discussed a little bit, we went occasionally to Passover, things like this, and if you’ve been deep in Jewish culture, families behave a certain way, same as there might be an Italian culture or a Greek culture. So we were very culturally Jewish. My parents were very proud of that, were always very proud of being Jewish.

They were not religiously Jewish, so this is—even when I married my wife. She’s from an Irish Catholic family. She said, “Oh, it’s kind of like being Irish and Catholic,” and I said, “No, because it’s not a nation. I’m not Jewish because my parents or my grandparents are from some particular region of the world that had a particular political ideology. This is my genetic lineage. I’m from the line of the Jews,” and so it is an actual race of people. I always felt Jewish. I still feel very Jewish today. But I was never religiously Jewish. My dad, I came to know later in life, was a serious atheist. He still is. My mom is what I would describe as a deist. She absolutely believes in God. She believes that God has a role in our lives. But she’s not accepted Jesus Christ, and she doesn’t necessarily believe in the Abrahamic God in any sense of the word.

Thank you for that clarification. I think that it does make things clear to understand that there’s a cultural and almost genetic heritage. There’s a familial heritage of Judaism, and there’s also a religion associated with that. It sounds like, if 50% of the people in your high school were Jewish, you were really steeped in Jewish community. I’m curious. Were there any Christians around in your upbringing at all? 

Oh, yeah. I mean, there were lots of Christians in my high school and lots of Jews. I went to temple occasionally on a Friday night because I had friends who were Jewish, and it was really a social event, mostly, for the young people. It was a place to gather on a Friday night. And because I had friends who were Christians, occasionally I’d spend a Saturday night slumber party over at somebody’s house, and Sunday morning, I’d go to church with them. So I was exposed from a religious perspective to both Judaism and Christianity.

But for you, what was religion? Whether it was Christianity or Judaism, obviously it wasn’t something you believed that was real or true or worth your life or belief. What did you think it was? 

Yeah. As I became old enough to actually consider it, you know, which really as I got into high school and started thinking about these things, to me, I would describe religion, what I would’ve said back then is it’s a crutch for people who need it. I wasn’t offended by it per se. I just felt like, “Look, I’m a good person. I live a good life. My parents are really good people who taught me the right values, so that’s for people who are struggling to understand that there are things that are unexplainable, that we don’t understand the cosmos, and so they want to call those things that they don’t understand God,” or, “Things happen that seem like a wild coincidence or couldn’t possibly happen. They want to call those things miracles.” To me, it seemed like a crutch for people who couldn’t deal with the fact that there were unanswerable questions. And a lot of the stories that I’ve heard about coming to faith, people came to faith during times of trauma in their lives. And so that made sense to me. I’d think, “Well, when you don’t know where else to turn, you would turn to God.” I mean it’s so true now! In hindsight, right? But I thought it in sort of a negative way. Like, instead of just saying, “Hey, I’ve just got to figure out how to deal with this,” you’re going to turn to this invisible force that you can’t see or explain. To me, honestly, it just sort of seemed weak.

So it really wasn’t a rejecting. It was just an embracing of, I guess, a more realistic understanding of life? You didn’t need that kind of thing. You didn’t need God. You didn’t need the crutch of religion. At what point did you-

Yeah. A terrible mistake in hindsight, but that’s really where I was at as a high school kid.

Yeah. So when did you actually embrace the understanding or identity as an atheist? 

Really in college is when I came strongly to atheism. I was fascinated by religion in the sense that I love people, I’m fascinated by people. I’ve always loved history and politics and sociology, so if you look at the world and you want to understand the world broadly writ, then you have to understand faith and religion. Because it plays a role as far back as we can go in recorded history, and it always has and it always will. It plays a major role, perhaps the most major role. It plays a role in the formation of countries, in human being’s lives, in geopolitical realities, and so, if you don’t study that stuff, you can’t understand humanity.

So when I went to college I took religion classes, not because I was a religious person, but I wanted to understand. I didn’t know anything really about Christianity or Judaism or Islam, Abrahamic religions or any religions, for that matter. Buddhism, Hinduism, Jainism, you name it. I knew nothing about that stuff. And so I wanted to take classes to understand that. I went to San Diego State University, a pretty classic, regular, public-funded university in San Diego. I went because it was a great party school, to be honest with you. It was not intellectual rigor I was seeking.

But as I took these religion classes, what I found out in these classes was I was taught that the greatest force for evil in the history of humanity was Christianity, that more people had died in the name of Christianity than any other religion on the face of the earth, that the Crusades had been this incredible period of grotesque excess and torture and conversion at the point of the sword and all of the stuff that is, partially at least, true about the Crusades. Certainly all that stuff took place historically. But I was taught it without any context. There was no reason. Why did the Crusades happen? I was never taught what happened right before the Crusades, which is 400 years of Ottoman domination, Muslim domination, across the continent of Europe, the torture, the excess, the conversion, the rape, the pillage. I wasn’t taught any of that stuff.

So what I learned out of context was that Christianity itself, as a doctrine, had brought all this evil upon the face of the earth and that the earth would be a much better place without it. So I became a pretty strident atheist, and I would argue even further I became what I would call a militant and even a mean atheist. I refer to myself today… I’m Paul. I mean, from the bad side of Paul. I’m the worst among you. And I would’ve been a persecutor in the day, honestly. I can relate to Paul. I thought those people were stupid and crazy and frankly evil, that they fostered an evil ideology, and if they didn’t understand that, it was only because they were ignorant.

It sounds like you were influenced by the New Atheists thinkers. 

Absolutely.

Yes. And your professors must have been promoting the same. 

Yes. And that was really… I’m happy to say that, as you follow it today, the atheist movement has largely died out. The New Atheists thinkers, the great thinkers of the atheist movement, they’re not speaking anymore. Even the modern ones have realized that, whether they believe it or not is a different question, but it’s a moral dead end. It leads to nowhere good. And so they’re really not speaking out anymore. Back then, that was the heyday of atheist thinking. And it was being taught institutionally on campuses, and yeah, I drank a big dose of it from a fire hose.

Wow. So you graduated college. I guess you were still living with this mentality of the evil nature of Christianity and religion generally, that it poisons everything, as Christopher Hitchens says. 

Yep.

So how long did you live with this kind of mentality? Into your young adulthood? 

In hindsight, not just because I’ve become a believer, but in hindsight it’s horrifying because of how intellectually vacuous I would say I was. That here is, I think, the most important question that faces any human being. Why am I here? Where do I come from? What does all this mean? And I was providing for myself and in judgment of others around me the most simplistic of answers while actually doing no research. And I’ve always considered myself an intellectual person. I’m a reader. You can see my library behind me. I have thousands of books here. I love to read. I’ve always been this way, since I was a little kid, so to take this kind of position on the most important things in human existence, without having done any homework, without having really read the Bible, read the Koran, read the Hadith, read things like that. To take those positions. Frankly, to be honest, I wasn’t even reading the great atheistic thinkers. It was this simple, easy answer, like, “There’s no God. That’s for weak, stupid, evil people, so I’m an atheist.” And that was really the depth of my intellectual analysis. Pretty embarrassing in hindsight.

Well, you know, you were taught that by probably people you respected. It probably agreed with your desire to live the way that you wanted perhaps. I’m curious. In embracing atheism, you said you were intellectually minded, you loved to read, but that you perhaps didn’t read the great atheists in terms of truly understanding the implications of atheism, or that worldview, or even the grounding of atheism. Did you venture into that? Did you consider, as an intellectual person, where atheism goes? Other than it’s a rejection of religion, but what is atheism actually? 

Yeah, no. Not at all. No consideration at all. Again, this is why, in hindsight, I look back at that person, and if I was talking to myself back then, I would say, “You’re kind of an intellectual embarrassment. You don’t know anything, and you’re drawing conclusions, and your conclusions have consequences, and you’re not following your conclusions to their logical consequences.” If I were talking to old me, I would say, “What have you read? What have you considered? What comes of what you believe?” And there was literally zero consideration. It was very hedonistic to be honest with you. And I don’t mean that in the sense that I just wanted to enjoy earthly pleasures. I mean it in the sense that I was just indulging my own thoughts. Because my thinking was, “Look, I think I’m a pretty good person, and I think I lead a pretty good life, and so I don’t really need God. So why would I spend any time on this? I’ve made my decision. There is no God. I don’t need God.” And so it was very internally focused. It was me focused, I focused. It had nothing to do with any other consequences.

So you weren’t bothered by those existential questions, like, “What happens to you when you die?” “What about bigger purpose or meaning in life?” How to ground certain things, like your own free will or consciousness or even your own moral conscience? 

No. And again, I feel like speaking across the decades to a different person, which I was before I was saved. There was zero of that. There was zero intellectual curiosity. There was zero worry. For me, it was so simple. I didn’t need it, so it didn’t matter. I didn’t feel the need. I wasn’t in a dark place. I wasn’t seeking salvation. I didn’t feel like I needed to be saved, and so I would say, if I had been able to talk to myself back then, my response would be, “Why would I spend any time with that stuff? I know there’s no God. Nothing happens after I die. I live a pretty good life. I’m a good person. And I’m happy. So what does the rest of it matter?”

Yeah. It just is completely irrelevant. Not even worth consideration. 

Yep.

So as you’re moving along, walk us along your journey. What made you stop and reconsider, perhaps, your perspective? 

Well, I think a couple of big turning points in my life. So one was I got married straight out of law school. I was still absolutely an atheist, got married out of law school. That marriage lasted a year and a half and was one of the biggest mistakes I’ve ever made. There’s a lot of depth in that I didn’t understand anything about people, to be honest with you. My wife came from a badly dysfunctional, alcoholic family. There was a lot of that wrapped into it. And that was the first of what I would describe as any kind of a dark period in my life. My parents have been married forever. They’re past 60 years married now. And I was expecting I would get married and I would be married forever. My grandparents were married forever, and strangely, even in Los Angeles, most of my friends’ parents had been married lifelong marriages, so that was my personal framework. That was my own view of myself, was as a married person. So when I ended up divorced after a year and a half, it was really personally devastating. That was the first time in my life I’d gone through what I would describe as a dark place. And it has nothing to do… I didn’t seek God there. I didn’t feel like I needed that. It’s not what I looked for.

But on my way out of that, I met my wife, my current wife. We’ve been married, it will be 28 years on the 28th of this month, and she was a person of faith, and she had grappled with big questions, and she had studied her own faith, and she had been through much more stuff than me. She was six years younger and way more than six years wiser than I was, to be honest with you. And she sort of plucked me out of the rubble and started a little bit to open my eyes. And so that was the first turning point.

The big turning point in my life came after we got married and my son Jacob was born. And I remember standing in his bedroom one night, looking in his crib, as every parent does, and watching him just breathing quietly in the night and thinking, “That’s a miracle. That’s not just biology. That’s not just a sperm and an egg. That’s life! That doesn’t just happen. Something miraculous is right there,” and I had that feeling, and I would say now, in hindsight, that’s the Holy Spirit saying, “I want to show you something. I want you to see this, and I want you to acknowledge this.” I didn’t become a person of faith, but that started to open my heart to a journey of faith, realizing there’s things that I just don’t understand that I want to try to understand.

So it was humbling, in a sense, and who can deny almost the miraculous nature of a child? It really seems just so incomprehensible that something so beautiful, someone so beautiful can come from your own body. And I can see, and I’ve heard other stories similarly, that it just seems so beyond what an atheistic view could explain. But you said that your wife kind of picked you up out of the rubble. You had spoken of cultural Christians in the past, but somehow it sounds like the way that you’re speaking of your wife is qualitatively different. 

You said that there was something more thoughtful, something deeper or more profound in her faith that you had seen earlier that opened your eyes to perhaps that there’s something different? Or more? Or about Christianity that drew you in or at least opened you up? 

Yeah. I wish it was that simple and that fast. I’m a very slow learner, and she’s a very patient woman. It really wasn’t her faith. It was just her general demeanor, and her ability to love me despite my lack of faith was a big deal. I knew she was a person of faith, and she was willing to love me and to bring me into her heart despite my faith. Honestly, I could never understand that. Even today, I can’t understand that. It doesn’t make sense to me. It’s just a blessing from God. I think there’s a difficult place and a special place in the Lord’s heart for people who are willing to marry people not of faith. I don’t recommend it, honestly. I tell people you shouldn’t do that. She was willing to love me, and she’d never even met a Jewish person before, and she would tell you that, when she met me and started hanging out with me, she said to her friends, “I know he’s not a Christian, but I’ve never met a more Christian man in how he lives his life and his personal ethos and the things that he believes. Aside from knowing the Lord and loving the Lord, the entire rest of the framework is there more than anybody I’ve ever met.” So that’s what she saw in me was God’s plan, not necessarily God’s light because I hadn’t accepted God’s light.

And what I saw in her is a person who was just wise. She had a wisdom beyond her years. And I didn’t attach that to her faith. I didn’t think, “Oh, this is so great! There’s a good Christian woman coming into my life.” To me, it was actually a little bit a hindrance, like, “Is this going to be a problem for us?” because I’m an atheist, she’s a Christian. And because she was willing to accept me how I was, I just accepted her how she was, and so it worked out. So when we got married, I was not a believer. I was not a person of faith. I was an atheist. She was a believing Christian. And that’s how we formed our marriage.

I’m sure that there are those people listening who may have a spouse who doesn’t see life and belief in the same way. I’m curious, from their perspective… It sounds like your wife was very patient, not pushy, not pressing, gave you space to move along this journey on your own terms. Would you say that that was the case? 

Yeah. I would say that’s beyond the case. She honestly never mentioned it to me. She just practiced her own faith and went about her own business quietly. And her faith, to be fair, was very quiet, and what I mean by that is she had grown up in the Catholic church. She had left the Catholic Church and a big part for her was she always felt called to a personal relationship with the Lord, and she felt that the way that the Catholic church, at least the way she experienced it was organized, was that there was an intermediary. There was the priest, and there was the parishioner, and then there was God on the other side. And in a real specific sort of metaphorical sense, she used to sneak into church after hours and go up behind the Holy of Holies so that she could be close to God. Her heart was seeking today, and she felt like… If she was wrong about all the structural stuff, she had a direct heart for God, and God had a direct heart for her, but she saw this structure between her and God, and she was willing to do something that was essentially cheating, right? That she would go into church when no one was there and go to kind of a secret place where she was not supposed to be, so that she could be closer to God.

So when she left the Catholic church, she began a seeking of her own, which was just to have a heart for God and to have a personal relationship with God, and so that was very quiet. So her faith was very quiet and very steadfast, and it never impugned on me, and she never tried to impose it on me. And she just used to pray to God that I would come to faith.

There’s a pivotal instance in her life before we got married. Her dad said he was very worried that she was going to marry me, and he loved me. We had a great relationship. But he said, “I’m worried because I’m worried that your husband’s going to burn in hell because he hasn’t accepted Jesus Christ,” and she said, “I don’t know what His plan is. I don’t know how it works, but I have absolute faith that that will not happen.” I mean, it turns out she was right. Thank God! She didn’t understand how she was going to be right. It’s not like she foretold the future, but she had enough faith in God, and I would add something super important. She was patient. She was willing to wait on God, something I struggle with quite often. She was incredibly patient over a lifetime of marriage before I came to the Lord.

That’s really wonderful, and what a testimony to her and to her life. You had, as a militant atheist, such contempt for Christians and for Christianity. You viewed them in an extremely negative light. Obviously, those negative sensibilities or stereotypes of Christians and Christianity must have been broken down as you fall in love with someone who calls themself a Christian. It would be hard to hold those two views simultaneously. Did obviously living with her, loving her break down some of those negative understandings of what Christianity was and who Christians were? 

I wish I could tell you I was that insightful. Again, a lot of this is embarrassing in hindsight, but I just viewed her separately from that.

Okay. 

I knew she was a wonderful person. I never made the connection. “Oh, part of that is her relationship with the Lord.” I just knew her as a wonderful person. In fact, over my lifetime—and this still happens today and I try not to be this person. The hypocrisy of so many Christians is what really set me off on a personal level. Doing business, I would meet Christians, and I would call them Sunday Christians. They went to church on Sunday, and I used to say they’d go to church on Sunday so they could pray for forgiveness so they could put the knife between your ribs on Monday and Tuesday, right?

Wow. 

And so I met a lot of folks that professed Christianity, that talked about going to church, that talked about their relationship with the Lord. I did business with them, and I watched them do horrible, terrible things, that I would think, “If you’re a follower of this faith and this is what you do as a follower, then I don’t want to be part of that faith.” And so of course I didn’t see that in my wife, but I never… sadly… now I know, but I never thought of her as like, “Oh, well, part of the reason that she’s such a great person is because of her faith in Jesus Christ and her following biblical tenets.” I just never thought about that.

So you had this beautiful child born. There was something in you that became open at that moment or softened. Why don’t you walk us on farther from there? 

So what started to happen is, the older I got, the more I realized that it could not just be me. Everything can’t be about me. When we’re babies, when we’re born, everything is about us. That’s the only thing we know, right? We scream to be fed. We scream to be changed. We scream to be picked up. We want what we want as we grow up, and maybe we have temper tantrums to give us what we want. The entire universe revolves around us, and hopefully, if we get wisdom as we grow, if we learn from our experiences, we learn that it’s not all about us. There’s other people. There are other needs.

So after having Jacob be born and seeing that as some sort of miracle, I started to say, “There’s things I don’t understand. Maybe they’re not explainable by science, but maybe there’s something else. There has to be something else,” and so I started to think, “Well, maybe there’s just some sort of… like we’re all connected.” I think it’s called monism, right? We’re all one. Everything’s one. I started to think about that. In some way, there’s some universal force that connects all of us. So I started to seek. I didn’t seek Christianity. I sought everything but Christianity. I didn’t seek Judaism, either. Really what I started to seek is Eastern religion, Eastern thought, Buddhism, Hinduism. I have bookshelves full of books on Buddhism and Hinduism and going into more ancient religions, Jainism, which is the root of Hinduism. I literally went to India. I spent time in India. I was doing business in India, but I was fascinated by the way faith is integrated with everyday life in India. I don’t agree with most of the faith systems in India, but what I do agree with is, whatever you believe, if you’re a person of faith in India, it’s everything. It’s every day. You pray in the morning. You pray before you go into a meeting. There’s a shrine that’s prominent in your home, in the entry of your home. That’s true if your poor or rich.

I remember coming from India thinking… Patty and I were relatively newly married. Thinking, “Man! That’s how I would want faith to be in my life! If I believed in God, I would want it to be like that! Not like the Sunday Christians. It’s everything! If there’s a God, then He’s everything, and it should be part of every fiber of my being.” So going to India taught me that. I studied yoga a lot. Patty and I got really into yoga as a form of exercise but sort of then philosophically, does that make any sense? I went very deep into Buddhism. I think as a philosophy, Buddhism’s a great thing. How to live your life in a great way. It was never meant to be a religion. I think Buddha himself, if you look back in the writings, he’d be horrified that they worship him and made it into some sort of a religion. It was supposed to be a comfortable, nice, happy way of living.

So I studied all that stuff, and none of it resonated with me. It was interesting. I was fascinated by it. I appreciated the cultural impact it had had, the geopolitical impact that it had, but none of it made my heart sing. So I came out of all of that still seeking but not being fulfilled.

So that’s an interesting turn of phrase. It didn’t make your heart sing. So there was still something there, obviously, that you were searching for. So what was your next step? If it wasn’t Eastern religion. 

So I gave up. Essentially. I wasn’t looking anymore, but I’m always still intellectually curious. By happenstance, I started studying quantum physics. I know that sounds crazy, but I’m just a curious person. I love the science around quantum physics. I’m not a mathematician, so I don’t understand the mathematics, but I found it really fascinating that quantum physicists are seeking what they call “the god particle,” which is the origin of all things. Like can you go to the smallest particle and find the origin of everything? And from my thinking, I thought, “Well, that’s what faith is seeking. That’s what people who seek God, they’re seeking the origin of all things, so scientists and theologians are seeking the exact same thing. That’s weird.” And the more that I got into quantum physics, the more I realized quantum physics is actually as close as we’ve ever come from a proof perspective, starting to prove up God.

For example, in quantum physics, they’ve now proven that a particle of light can be in two places at one time. The same particle. They can identify the particle. Now, that’s impossible according to anything we understand in science. What I just said should not be possible. They don’t know how it’s done. And when I saw that, I said, “God can do that.” Like, “If there’s a god, we know gods can be everywhere, all at once, and is, including through all of time. So is that God? What is that?” And so that started opening my mind, like science and religion not incompatible, completely integrated. And then I got into politics just by a bizarre happenstance. I built this huge political organization. 23 million members of conservative political activists. Through that process, I started to meet dozens, then hundreds, then thousands of righteous Christians all across America as I traveled. That’s really what opened my eyes and honestly gave me that spark and made my heart sing.

So it was really a combination of things. Again, I love what you said about the compatibility of science and belief, because oftentimes there’s a sense of, “I believe in science, not God or religion.” And there seems to be a real I guess misunderstanding with regard to their absolute integration and being able to remain intellectually sober minded and intelligent and actually seeing how God grounds what we do in science. It’s a bit upside down. But it’s interesting that quantum physics paved the pathway for you towards the possibility of God! 

A little crazy, I admit.

But then you started meeting more… Like your wife, in a sense, more who were serious minded Christians from political activism. I guess they presented themselves as being more than Sunday Christians, and they were, I would presume, serious about their faith, serious about God and country. 

Yes, absolutely.

I’m also interested in the statement that your wife or the perspective that your wife had about you, that you seemed to be a Christian man but without… So you had the moral integrity and values, perhaps those ten commandments, those presumed ten commandments that you grew up with were instilled in some way. Somehow Judaism got into you even though you weren’t into Judaism. In some regard, that it held for you and your moral character, so that, when you met Christians and had a similar moral compass, I presume, that there seemed to be more in common than you thought. Was it surprising to you? 

You know, well first of all, I’ll credit to my parents, because that moral code was put into me by my parents very intensely, and when I started to travel… I have always loved people. I just deeply love people, and I always have, from the time I was little, I’m just a people person, and so when I meet people, like if you asked me, “What do you collect?” You could look around on my shelves or whatever. I don’t have collections, but I do collect relationships because I just love people. When I meet somebody I love, I just stay in touch. I’ll stay in touch for a lifetime. I’m the person who will call you after two years and say, “Hey, we haven’t talked in a while.” Because I remember that spark in your eyes that meant something to me.

And so, when I started traveling around, and I would sit with somebody and I would think, “Man, there’s something about this person.” I would always ask. And I would say, “You know, you seem well settled. Things are crazy right now. You don’t seem angry. You seem happy. What is that?” And I started to hear over and over, “Well, I wasn’t always like this. I wasn’t like this before I was saved,” or, “It’s my relationship with Jesus Christ,” or, “It’s not me. It’s my Lord and Savior.” And I started to hear this over and over and over from people. If you travel in conservative political circles, you’re going to meet a lot of Christians. That’s just the way it is.

And so this is who I was crossing paths with. And Patty will tell you that, while this was going on, people would come up to me all the time because I’m becoming a public figure. I’m going from being a private person to a public figure. And people would come up to me all the time and say, “I’m praying for you,” and I’ll tell you, if somebody had said that to me in college, I’d have probably said something offensive in return, to be honest with you. I wouldn’t have liked it. I’d have been offended by it. I’d have probably told ’em to bug off and said something nasty. And I started to just feel like, “Wow, that’s really nice,” like, “I appreciate that.” It didn’t have the meaning to me that it does today. It almost makes me cry with people say that to me. Back then, it was just kind of like, “That’s very nice.” It’s like somebody saying, “Hey, we care about you.”

And so all these people were saying this to me, and Patty would talk to them, and they’d say, “Hey, we’re praying for your husband.” She would say, “Hey, I appreciate that,” and they would say, “It seems like he’s already a Christian,” like, “We see the Lord working in him.” And she would say, “I’ve seen that since before I married him. He’s the most Christian man I know. He just doesn’t know it yet, and I believe the Lord’s working in him.” So a lot of people said this to her. I had beyond what one human being deserves. I can’t possibly deserve this. I had thousands of people praying for me all over the country who I would meet, many of them who I now know were. And they’re a big part of my path to salvation.

I met a family in Sacramento, they would stay after every event. Four home schooled girls, mom, and dad, and every event, they could come pray for me and with me after the event. And they knew I was an atheist. And they would just keep praying for me. They were patient and persistent and loving. And I love those guys. And they’re still good friends of mine. The girls are grown up now. They’re wonderful kids. Some of them are married and have families of their own. They prayed me through. They prayed me to the Lord.

Then I met Dr. Dobson. Most of your listeners will know who James Dobson is. I had a chance to go to a big dinner, a fancy political dinner. All these big round tables, and I was seated at a table with Dobson. And I remember watching Dobson and thinking, “How come he’s like that?” All these people are talking about all the things that they’ve done, and “When I met this person…” and, “When I worked for this President…” and, “When I did this incredible thing…” and all Dobson was doing was like, “That’s fascinating. How did you get to be there? How did you meet him? How did that make you feel?” And I thought, “This guy has ministered to millions of people! He’s ministered to Presidents and foreign dignitaries. He’s been on television. He doesn’t care about himself. All he wants to do is love on all of these people,” and I remember sitting at that table thinking, “Whatever that thing is, I want that. I want to be like that. I don’t want to be like them,” and so that had a profound impact on me.

He had no idea of the impact, what he put in my heart that night by being Christian, not by being famous, not by being powerful, but by walking like Christ, by acting the way that Christ asks us to act, he transformed my heart. Something opened up in my heart that night that made me seek whatever it was that he had. So that was a big turning point in my life.

That’s fascinating. We often don’t know who’s watching. And I’ve heard it said, “The city on a hill works both ways.” We can cause people to leave Christianity and the faith because of not taking it seriously or that hypocrisy that you mentioned earlier, but then there are those people like James Dobson or the people who took time to come and pray with you, that get your attention, that you can see that there’s something different. They live differently. They’re selfless, not like the child who’s just coming up. Like you said, everything is about them. The world revolves around them. And these people obviously had others in mind first. 

Yeah, absolutely. Then I met… This is the biggest break point of my life is I met a guy by the name of Tim Dunn, who has become one of my closest friends in life, a political mentor and a mentor in every way, and I largely credit him for being the guy that brought me across the finish line and accepting Christ, not by asking me to but by just teaching me, and the first thing Tim did—he’s a wealthy donor. He’s on my board of directors. And we just hit it off intellectually. We could talk quantum physics and theology and religion and sociology and geology, and we just were both interested in everything, and we’d be up late at night, talking on the phone, like new best friends.

And one night he asked me what I know about my own heritage. And I said, “What do you mean?” He goes, “Well, you’re Jewish. That’s a totally fascinating, amazing thing! Your people are the Chosen People. I mean you go all the way back to a covenant with the Lord. I know you don’t believe in that stuff, but it’s incredible, the stories that have been told about your people for over 2,000 years, and what do you know about that?” And I said, “Nothing.” He’s like, “You should know about that! It’s really cool!” Like, “Whether you believe or not, it doesn’t matter. The history is there,” and so he said, “Why don’t you read Hebrews?” And he had me read Hebrews, and that was honestly my first real introduction to scripture.

And we started studying together. And he never said to me—and I think this is so important. He never said, “By the way, Mark. What I’m doing here is you need to be saved, because I’m worried about your soul and you’re going to burn in hell.” If he had done that, I’d have just been like, “I’m done. I’m out. I’ve heard this stuff before. Not interested in this stuff. You’re judging me. I don’t want that.” But all he did was use my intellect, and like, “These are things that should fascinate you,” and the real crux point with Tim is he asked me one day, “When did Christianity and Judaism actually separate? They’re obviously two major world religions, both Abrahamic in origin, so how’s the separation happen?” And I said, “Well, I don’t know much about it, but Jesus is born, He lives, He’s crucified. If you’re a believer, He’s resurrected, and He ascends, and those who believe that that happened are Christians, and those who don’t, if they were Jewish before, they’re still Jewish. Those who now believe He’s the resurrected Messiah, those are Christians.” And he said, “No, that’s wrong.” And I said, “Okay, so what’s the story?” And he said, “I’m not going to tell you. Go figure it out. But your history’s horrible. You need a history lesson.”

And I love this kind of mentoring. I practice this now. “No, that’s wrong. Go figure it out,” right? So I did.

And for me, as a Jew, and I recommend this to anybody who is speaking to Jews about Christ, what that meant to me is like this door swung open, and I thought, “Wait! Are you saying that I can be a Jew and be a Christian?” And Tim laughed. He’s got this southern drawl. He’s like, “I’m not just saying it. I’m saying that’s how it’s s’posed to be!” He’s like, “That’s just the deal. This is what God was all about was God made a promise to the Jewish people that He would send a Messiah, and He did, and this is just the answer to that promise.” He said, “You couldn’t any more not be a Jew than I couldn’t any more be a 6 foot 3 guy,” like, “I just am what I am. You are what you are. And we just have to deal with that.” And that was fascinating and profound to me because Jews believe, even if we’re not told this, that it would be a betrayal to our Jewish heritage to become a Christian. And it couldn’t be further from the truth. It’s actually a fulfillment of our heritage. And so for me that’s what made me say, “Okay, now I’ve got to really look at this. Because I’m not betraying anything. I’m fulfilling something. That’s how it was supposed to be. That’s how it was in the Bible. That’s how it was after Christ came and walked the earth. So I’ve got to take a serious look.”

That’s when I started studying Paul. Paul says, when he’s in Rome, waiting to visit Caesar, under house arrest, the Jews come to him, accuse him of not being Jewish, and he says, “What! I’m a Hebrew among Hebrews. I keep the Jewish law!” And they don’t believe him. They challenge him. “Oh, well, come to the Temple and pay for our ceremonies.” He’s like, “Yeah, whatever. No problem. I’m still Jewish. What’s wrong with you guys? Don’t you understand this has nothing to do with whether I’m Jewish or not? The promise has been fulfilled. The Lord has walked the earth, and that’s all I’m saying.” “The good news has arrived. The law has been fulfilled. You don’t have to worry about that stuff anymore.” And so, for me, I mean, you can see my excitement. That’s when it sang in my heart. That’s when I heard the song. That’s when I was like, “This is okay. I can do this,” and then sort of the anticlimax is there’s no moment.

I never had a moment where I thought, “Okay! Lord, I give my life. This is it! I can see You. I can hear You!” It was just one day I just thought, “I can’t not believe. It doesn’t make any sense not to. And now what I’m believing is so obviously untrue. Why do I believe that anymore?” And I just said, “Oh, I guess I’m a believer.” And then I said, “Okay, Lord. I’m a sinner. I don’t know if You’ll have me. I hope You’ll have me. I’ve sinned gravely against You for a very long time, but I give my life and my soul over to You, and I ask You to cleanse me of my sins. I’m Yours. I’m all Yours if You’ll have me.” But it was not dramatic. I was not on a beach. I was not on a mountaintop. It was just kind of this logical, “I guess I’m there. I guess this is what I believe now.”

Yeah. I’ve heard it said that believing in Jesus is one of the most Jewish things that you can do, because He is the Jewish, the foretold Jewish Messiah, so you’re accepting the fullness of your Judaism. You’re not changing paths in a sense, like cutting off one. It’s like fulfilling everything that… all the feasts, all the laws, everything is fulfilled in Christ, and to see it from the fullness of that perspective, I can’t imagine how that must feel when really all of the pieces came together for you, how wonderful that must have been. You came to a place where you believed in Jesus as your Savior, and I’m sure Patty was thrilled. So how has your life changed since you came to that moment of belief and confession? And how long ago was that? 

So I’m 59 years old. That happened when I was 51. So it’s 8 years ago. And it’s completely transformed my life, in many ways. The first is I would just say, on a personal level, aside from the religious or the faith aspect of it, I’m a very driven A-type of a person. Whatever I do, I’m going to do it to the max. I’m going to accomplish the most. That’s just the way I work. There’s an incredible amount of pressure in that, right? Everything’s on you. It’s all on my shoulders. I have to make everything happen. If it doesn’t happen, it’s my fault, and there’s all this self blame, and so to realize that I was saved and that there was something much greater than me and that I had a Lord and Savior and that I really wasn’t in control of anything except for whether I choose to accept my Lord and Savior and that there’s a greater plan and that everything together for the good and it’s not all on me. It’s impossible to describe the measure of relief.

Now I still struggle with that because I put myself in the driver’s seat when I shouldn’t. That’s how I’m wired, and I work in that. That’s me fighting against my flesh, but it’s impossible to describe the level of relief. So I went from being a very kind of wound person, wound up tight, to being pretty relaxed all the time. It’s pretty easy for me to say, “Yes, that frustrates me, but God’s got that. I don’t know. That’s not big for God. It may seem big to me, but that’s not big for God, and God’s got that, and I’ve turned it over to God, so it’s all okay,” and interestingly, it’s allowed me, I think, to accomplish far more than I could’ve ever accomplished. Because when I realized it’s not up to me and I can only do what I can do, my job is to fight the fight and run the race and leave the results up to God. It allows you to do so much more. The stress, the anguish, the anxiety, the performance pressure don’t get in your way anymore. Because it’s not on me. He’s got it. I don’t have to worry about it.

So it transformed me in that way. It transformed a lot of my relationships. I said I’ve always loved people, but I also have the part of me… I’m verbally strong. I’ve always been this way. I’m an opinionated person. I’m trained as a lawyer. I used to take great joy in eviscerating people in verbal combat. It felt really good to me. I would always feel afterwards terrible. In the dark of night, like myself, like, “That was pretty mean. I made that person feel really bad,” but in the moment, as a lawyer, you’re really trained to do that. I don’t do that anymore. I don’t enjoy that anymore. I don’t like that anymore. So it transformed me in that way. It explained to me why I love people so much.

My friend Tim said to me one time, after I became a Christian, he goes, “You know why you love people so much?” and I said, “No.” And he said, “Because you always looked in their eyes and you always saw God,” like, “Before you even knew God was there, before you even believed in God, that’s how you were connecting. Each one of those people made in the image of God. You got that in your heart before you got that in your head. That’s why you love people.” So now I recognize that on an outward basis, and I openly seek that a lot more.

And I would say the big one for me was that I wear my faith on my sleeve boldly. I’m proud, and not only am I not ashamed, the greatest thing I’ve ever done in my entire life is completely surrender to my Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. There’s nothing bigger that I’ve ever accomplished in my life. There can’t be anything bigger. There never will be anything bigger. And I’m happy to tell people about that.

So I say that from the stage, I say it in environments where people would normally say, “Well, you shouldn’t say that. This is a very political place,” or, “There are people who don’t believe what you believe.” I don’t care. I am boldly and brashly in love with God. I describe my love for God as like what you feel like when you fall in love the first time. It’s just so overwhelming, and everybody needs to know how awesome this person is! And I have to tell you. It’s not that I want to, it’s that I can’t contain myself. That’s how I feel about my relationship with the Lord. I can’t contain myself.

Wow! You are like Paul in so many ways, so many ways. That’s extraordinary! And coming to faith at 51. I imagine there were so many people, since you’re so well connected relationally, who were just stunned, having known you as the militant atheist that you were. 

Yeah. There were people who were mad at me and who really struggled with it. I have one brother, my younger brother. He was furious when it happened, and we were actually at a birthday party for my dad. I guess it would’ve been his 70th birthday party, something like that, 75th birthday party, and I remember him just cornering me and just going after me. Like, “I can’t believe you would do this!” and, “It’s just because of the people you’re hanging out with and just bad influences on you,” and, “You’re suspending rational judgment,” and he’s since come around, and we have a great relationship. I think he thought I was going to become something weird, you know? He had the perception I had, like all of a sudden I was going to demand that he be Christian, like I’m going to tell him he’s going to burn in hell, and I’m going to lecture him and judge him.

My dad was really offended. My dad was offended not because I became a Christian but because I didn’t consult him. Like why didn’t I ask him? He’d been my mentor my whole life. And I had to explain to Dad, “Hey, you’re my mentor. I admire you. I love you. I knew your position on this. I know you don’t believe in Jesus as your Savior. I know you don’t believe in God even generically, so I knew your position very thoroughly. I grew up with it. Why would I consult you if I’m seeking something broader and more?” And we have a fantastic relationship. We’re very close, both my parents, and we have a tight family. And so it hasn’t hurt any relationships in the long term, but in the short term, I think you described it correctly. It really threw some people off balance because it’s just not something they saw in me, becoming a Christian.

So when you were growing up and considering religion, you saw it in purely sociological terms. Your brother kind of brought that out, that he thought that maybe it’s just the people you are hanging around with. How would you, as a Christian on this side of things, answer that question? How did you answer your brother? Is it more than just belonging or sociological? Obviously, this has transformed your life, but as an intellectual person and people were pushing back, thinking they’re smarter, like you were, how would you respond to someone who pushes back to you on that? 

You know, I’m very understanding and very loving because, how could I not be. It would be the height of hypocrisy not for me to be loving and understanding of their circumstances, since for the vast majority of my adult life I believed what they believed, either agnostically or atheistically. So when I hear people are super critical of people like that, I don’t feel that way. I don’t understand that way. For me, the emotion that I feel, honestly, is sadness. It breaks my heart because… I have a friend that I’m talking to and mentoring right now. He’s Jewish, and I think he’s coming to the Lord. He’s definitely moving that way. He’s going to church. He feels an affinity. And he asked me, “Why is this so important to you?” and my response was, “I love you, and there’s no greater gift that I could give you as somebody that I love than the gift of knowing Jesus Christ, the salvation, the peace that comes from that, the strength that comes from that. There’s no worldly gift that even measures that can compare. There’s nothing on the same shelf. And so that’s what I want for you.”

And so when I’m talking to people who push back, that’s what I would say is, “Look, I have no judgment for you for not believing this. I didn’t believe this most of my life, so it would be foolish and hypocritical for me to judge you, but I do believe that I’ve learned something that you have not yet learned, and it would be selfish of me not to tell you that.” Like, “Why would I keep this most incredible gift I’ve ever received in my life? If I said, ‘I’m just going to keep that from you,’ that’s selfish. And am I going to keep it from you because I’m embarrassed what you might think of me? That’s selfish. Because you might judge me? Well, that’s selfish. So the only reason I would not tell you about this is because I’m selfish. If I’m embarrassed to tell you, I’m selfish. I’m worried how you’ll judge me. So I’m going to talk to you about it. And if you don’t want to hear about it, I’m fine with that, too. I still love you. I love you exactly the same as if you wanted to hear about it.

For those who don’t know what the gospel is, could you just briefly describe what this gift is? 

Yeah. I mean, for me, the way I define the gospel or the gift is the good news that it’s not about you. You don’t have to fight. You don’t have to be at war. You have somebody that already died for you and went through this for you. It’s an incredible thing to think about… I’m not sure. A lot of the Christians that I know that have been Christians their whole lives, in some ways I feel like they don’t understand the enormity of it because they didn’t disbelieve. When you disbelieve your whole life and then you learn the good news that Somebody actually was willing to go to the cross for you, to take your sin, to take everything you’ve ever done wrong in your life and everything you ever will do wrong in your life, and to suffer the most horrible imaginable death to cleanse you of your sin, so you don’t have to worry about that stuff anymore. You don’t have to stress out about that stuff any more. To me, that’s the greatest news that has ever been delivered to humanity. And that’s what the gospel is about, and so, to me, I just want people to know about that.

And I don’t care. You can think I’m foolish. You can think I believe a fairy tale. You can think whatever you want to think about it. I’m not embarrassed by that. I thought the same stuff! So it’s all fine, and thank God that when I thought that stuff, that there were people who didn’t care that I thought that stuff, who didn’t judge me for thinking that stuff, who loved me, who prayed for me.

So if there is someone, Mark, who is listening and maybe they’re on that edge of being open, what would you say to the curious skeptic who maybe listening in to you, to your story? 

Yeah. I would say the main thing, the first thing is just to open your heart. I’m not telling you to believe. I don’t think anybody can tell you to believe. I’m telling you to open your heart, to look around the world and acknowledge there are things that you just don’t understand, that don’t make sense, the universe, life, whatever it is that you look out, and you go, “That just seems impossible to me,” and yet it happens, to understand that there are things that are impossible that happen, things that you and I don’t understand, and be curious and be open to looking.

For me, as a person who’s a very logical person, reading apologetics mattered a lot to me, so I would recommend the best book that I read, the simplest, the easiest to read, the most convincing was Lee Strobel, The Case for Christ. Millions of people have read this book. If you’re a skeptic, you should read this book. Strobel was the ultimate skeptic, a lawyer, an investigative journalist. He went through it. I looked through this. I looked at the crucifixion. I looked at the resurrection. I looked at the historical evidence, what we call historicity of the Bible. And Strobel walks you through this in a way where he was telling a story of a person who moves from atheism to belief, and so I think that’s really important. There’s another book that I love called Letters from a Skeptic, which is letters between a son who is actually a minister, he’s gone through seminary, and a father who is a skeptic and who expresses everything that I expressed as a skeptic, everything.

There’s difficult questions that you have to grapple with. If God is good and just, then why is there suffering and evil on the earth. These are important questions that, as a skeptic, you should grapple with, but I would argue you should grapple with them. Just dismissing them and saying, “That means there’s no God,” that’s shallow and superficial. And this is the most important question you’ll ever look at. Is there a God? What’s my purpose? Am I created? Why am I here? Why are we here? So I would say, if those are the most important questions we can ask ourselves, and I believe fundamentally they are, then you as a thinking person have an obligation to answer those questions, and you do that by doing the reading, doing the research, talking to other people, and I would ultimately say praying for guidance.

That’s excellent advice. It strikes me that your life is very similar to Lee Strobel’s too, isn’t it? He was an attorney-

Absolutely.

… who had a believing wife, and he went to disprove it, right? So, through his journeying, found what he…. He’s a huge proponent, right? Of Christianity now. Now you’ve spoken a lot about how we as Christians can—and given beautiful examples, through Tim and through Patty and those… Dr. Dobson and so many who touched you in a way that caused you to rethink your position. How would you encourage us as Christians to live or to speak or to engage in those who are skeptical about our faith? 

Yeah. The biggest answer that I can give that’s the best, I think, is love. I mean I don’t know what else to say. Love people who are not lovable. Love people who are hard. Love people who are mean. Love people who are difficult in your life. When we read the Bible, one of the things that struck me, and I had somebody point this out to me, is the Bible does not tell us to go out and tell people to be Christians. I think there’s one spot in the Bible where it says to go out in profess in that way. What the Bible tells us is to go out and live out our faith, to walk the walk, to be Christians. Because when you do that, people will ask you, just like I looked at Dr. Dobson and that, “What is that? I don’t understand that. I want that.” People will do that.

Her daughter suffered from stage 4 cancer multiple times. She’s a beautiful young woman, a mother of now teenage girls, and last time, she was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer… Jenny’s a close friend of mine. I’ve watched her go through it. She’s a woman of deep faith. And I watched her go through it, and I thought, “Could I be like her? I don’t know that I could.” This was before I came to faith. She understood. She said, “Look, Mark, this is God’s path. It doesn’t make me happy, but I’m at peace that He is in charge, and I can live with that. I’ll pray more. I’ll hang out with the Lord more. But God has a plan. It’s just not always my plan.” And I remember looking at that and thinking, “She’s living it,” right? So it’s not just that she says, “I’m a Christian. I go to church. You should do these things.” I watched her, and I thought, “Man, if that kind of thing ever happened in my life, I would want the peace that she has.

So you said, “You never know when people are just watching.” You’re not saying, they’re just watching, so live the life that Christ sets forth for us to the extent we can. Of course, none of us live it perfectly, but live it as close as you can. Strive to live that. That’s what will draw other people to the heart of Jesus Christ.

That’s beautiful. Mark, you have been—like you say, you have a gift verbally of being able to express yourself and to communicate well, and you have told your story, your full character arc, moving from militant atheism to just a passionate follower of Christ in such a compelling way, with wisdom. I think that somehow what you saw in Patty, you have a piece in you, too, now, that the Lord lives in you, and it’s obvious. I’m so inspired and challenged in a good way, especially with your boldness in your faith. Thank you so much for coming on the Side B Podcast to tell your story, Mark. I know that so many people are going to be just as inspired as I’ve been. 

Well, thank you for having me. Any time I get to talk about the Lord, it’s a privilege.

Wonderful. 

Thanks for tuning in to the Side B Podcast to hear Mark’s story today. You can find out more about him and some of his recommended resources in the episode notes. For questions and feedback about this episode, please reach me by email at [email protected]. I hope you enjoyed it. If so, that you’ll share this podcast with your friends and social network. In the meantime, I’ll be looking forward to seeing you next time, where we’ll be seeing how another skeptic flips the record of their life. 

 

A brilliant thinker, Dr. Peter Harris lost his childhood faith in God at university when intellectually challenged.  After years of atheism, the problem of meaninglessness caused him to reconsider the reality and credibility of the belief he once left behind.

 

Podcast episode notes:  

Peter’s recommended books:

• For ‘The Rage Against the Light: Why Christopher Hitchens Was Wrong’: https://wipfandstock.com/9781532651977/the-rage-against-the-light/
• For ‘Do You Believe It? A Guide to a Reasonable Christian Faith’: https://wipfandstock.com/9781725256163/do-you-believe-it/

Peter’s recent articles in defense of the Christian faith at apologetics.com:

• https://apologetics.com/blog/peterharris/an-unexpcted-ally/
• https://apologetics.com/blog/peterharris/why-christianity-not-epicureanism-is-the-philosophy-we-need-now/
• https://apologetics.com/blog/peterharris/who-wants-to-live-forever-christians-should/

Webpage on his church’s website:

• https://www.staidangravesend.org.uk/faith-and-spirituality/faith-and-spirituality-6541.php

Episode Transcript

Hello, and thanks for joining in. I’m Jana Harmon, and you’re listening to the Side B Podcast, where we see how someone flips the record of their life. Each podcast, we listen to someone who has one been an atheist but who unexpectedly became a Christian. There are those who have never had any belief in God and embraced atheism from their youth, and there are those who once believed in God and then changed their mind, becoming an atheist. 

It’s not uncommon to hear from skeptics that belief in God is nothing but blind faith, that there is no evidence for God’s existence, but sometimes that’s also the way religious people talk and believe as well. When difficult questions arise, we’re sometimes told to, “Just believe,” or, “Just have faith,” in the midst of our doubts. By these statements, we are led to presume that there isn’t much more than our willed faith, that there is no evidence to support our beliefs or perhaps we shouldn’t even try to have a reasoned faith. For someone who is a thinker, an intellectual, who wants solid reasons to support his or her beliefs, this approach doesn’t work very well. It may, in fact, cause many to leave their faith behind, along with with other perceived childhood fairy tales. 

In today’s episode, Dr. Peter Harris lost his childhood Christian faith when confronted with intellectual challenge at university. He was hard pressed to find any substantive answers for his questions, other than to just have faith in faith. The seeming lack of evidence for Christianity did not satisfy his brilliant mind, and so he left it behind to become an atheist. What was it that drew him back to Christianity to now become one of its strongest intellectual defenders? I hope you’ll come along to find out. 

Welcome to the Side B Podcast, Peter. It’s so great to have you! 

Thank you very much for inviting me on. Thank you.

As we’re getting started, Peter, why don’t you tell us a bit about who you are, where you live, perhaps your education? 

Okay. I live in Gravesend, which is in the southeast corner of England. At the tender age of 18, I went to University of Cambridge to study history. I’ve since acquired two master’s degrees and two doctorates, one of which concerns the anti-theism of Christopher Hitchens, and the other was a study of the military service tribunals of the first world war, which essentially were committees set up to decide whether men who wished not to fight in the war could actually be allowed not to fight and perhaps do something else or have nothing to do with the war at all. And that took about 6-1/2 years to do, that one, whereas the other one, on Hitchens, took me about 3 years, because I’d already read and listened and watched so much of what Hitchens had put out on the internet and in his books about his anti-theism.

I’m married to Hasina, and we have two children. I work for Lucent University in Texas. I have created their online History of Christianity course, and I also work as a high school teacher as well. So yes, I’m very busy, but what I do, I really enjoy.

It sounds really quite fascinating. It also speaks to your depth of intellect and thought. You obviously like to think deeply about certain issues. You are driven by ideas, it sounds like. Very interested in issues of theology and history and I guess truth, I would imagine. I understand you study apologetics and those kinds of things as well. So I’m terribly intrigued by the story that you’re going to tell us today because you are really quite an extraordinary person in terms of just liking to think about ideas and issues and history, especially Christianity in the context of history. I think that would come into play when we hear more about your story. Because I know you didn’t begin on this side of understanding Christianity and its history and understanding and teasing out Christopher Hitchens’ anti-theism, that perhaps you were on more of his perspective, maybe not… It sounds like you share brilliance. Let’s just say that. You share brilliance, perhaps, but you perhaps also shared a bit of his atheistic worldview from the beginning, or somewhere along the line, and as someone who’s intrigued by your story, why don’t we start back at the beginning? Tell me… Obviously, you are from England. Did you grow up in England? Is that your home? 

Yes. I did. I’ve lived in England all my life. I have traveled fairly regularly abroad because my wife is French, and my children hold dual citizenship. They’re both French and British. And yes, I’ve essentially lived for 52 years in England. Well, this is my 52nd. I’m not yet 52; 51, so that sounds a bit better, doesn’t it? And yes. I mean I suppose in many ways I’m not only interested within my own culture but also in other cultures as well, and in particular, I’m very interested in the United States also, its American Christianity and its history that perhaps most intrigues me.

So yes, I suppose I do have a very British outlook, but I think I’m very cosmopolitan as well and very interested in other nations, cultures, and histories and how Christianity has played a role in shaping, forming nations and what they are today in their culture, their laws, their attitudes, and I suppose even their foreign policies.

You do have a very broadened perspective, it sounds like, very intentionally so. So back when you were growing up in England, what was that culture like? Was it a Christian-centered culture? Was your family religious at all? Why don’t you take me back to your roots? 

Yes. I think I would probably go back to the early 1980s, when I was about 11 or 12. Because I was in a church choir. I sang for a local Anglican parish church, and I don’t come from a Christian background. My parents never went to church. They never spoke much about faith or religion. My grandparents, I don’t think, had any sort of regular church observance. So I came from a very sort of secular, not de-Christianized context, but I suppose an indifferent context. People just didn’t worry about church. They didn’t seem to think much about God. They weren’t particularly hostile, either. In fact, they weren’t hostile at all. They were just indifferent to that side of life. And I would say that maybe Britain in the 1980s was more overtly Christian than it is now, but the slide away from Christianity really began in the 1890s, actually. There’s evidence of church ministers, at the end of the 19th century, complaining that they were losing congregants at quite a fast rate, and that decline has continued, and it really got going after the first world war, which I can only imagine is a consequence of people not being able to imagine God exists after having seen so much suffering in hospitals and on battlefields.

So there has been a steady, relentless drop away from church attendance in Britain. But we are still a very spiritual nation, because generally, when governments do censuses, they find that perhaps around about 70% of British people have a belief in the transcendent, the metaphysical, or some kind of God. And that figure has been fairly consistent over, I think probably the last 20 or 30 years, but it doesn’t translate into church observance, so probably maybe 3% to 5% in the British population is in church on a Sunday morning, but 70% will say they believe in God. So that’s the sort of context in which I grew up.

But the wonderful thing about my childhood is that my parents made some very good choices as to which school to send me as a child, and they sent me to a grammar school, and I had to pass an exam to get into this grammar school. And it was a school that had a Christian headmaster, or principal, and there were lots of Christian teachers. Now it was not a Christian school. It was a public school, a state school, but I became a Christian because I went to that school. That school had a Christian Union. There were many Christian members of staff. There was one particular member of staff who organized this Christian Union so that we would have prayer meetings before the day began. Students would gather to pray on a Thursday evening after school.

And I became a Christian whilst I was participating in a school production of a musical called Fiddler on the Roof, and as I’m sure everyone’s aware, in that musical there are Russian Jews living in the early 20th century who are awaiting the Messiah. And I like to think that I actually found the Messiah during that time. And the reason why is that I heard the gospel being explained by members of the school cast who were also Christians. And I was the easiest convert. I heard once, and I believed immediately. And I took one of the gospel tracts from one of these students who had told my group of friends the gospel. I took it home. My parents did not like me reading late at night. They wanted me to go to sleep. So I would use a torch, and I would hide under the blankets or the covers, and read, and I read that tract by torchlight. I said the prayer at the end and became a Christian. And I felt tremendous love and peace, and I wasn’t expecting that. No one told me that that would happen And I concluded that that was God. That I had been reconciled with God.

But my loss of faith occurred when I was 19. And when I look back on that time of my life, I had drawn some very serious lessons, and when I think back to that time in my life, to some extent, that shapes what I do now as an apologist. Because I lost my faith at university, and I think it’s tragic because I’m aware of some of the statistics regarding how many young people go to university or college as Christians and come out as atheists and agnostics. And they’re not prepared to be able to answer some of the really difficult questions that will come their way. I’m aware of a Christian apologist who’s also a biologist, and he said on the very first day of one of his lecture series, the lecturer who was teaching evolutional science said to the class, “Stand up if you are a Christian,” and he stood up. There were a few other people who stood up. And he said, “Well, by the end of this course, you won’t be, I can assure you,” which is appalling discrimination. If you had a Christian lecturer who did it the other way around, Twitter would be in uproar. So I’m very, very concerned about that particular age group.

So it sounds like as a child you came to believe quite readily and you experienced what you thought was the Christian life and you felt the love and peace of God, and that, I guess, was a very settled thing for you. Were you active in your faith during your teen years? I’m just curious. And were you taught more or discipled in any way intellectually before you got to college, how to think in more worldview or grander terms than the simple gospel? 

Yeah. That’s a brilliant question because it really helps me to elucidate my own experience. I left my Anglican church when my voice broke because I didn’t want to sing the harmony section. I quite liked singing the melody, which is what the treble, the sopranos do.

Right. 

So my voice broke just short of my 13th birthday. I had gone through that sort of croaking frog stage that many boys do as their voices break and then finally the adult voice emerges. My church essentially was my Christian Union at school for about four years.

That’s where I got my fellowship. That’s where I got my teaching from. That’s what gave me the opportunity to pray and to worship God. Because I was a little bit scared about going to church by myself, because I knew that no one else in my family would go. But when I got to the age of 16, I decided that I wanted to go to church, and I remember, in January of 1986, going to a local Pentecostal church, which was about two minutes’ walk from my house, and I fell in love with that kind of worship, although I’m not into Pentecostalism any more. I’m an Anglican again. But I have very fond memories of that church because the worship was very warm. It was very authentic. People always seemed pleased to see me, which is really important for a teenager. And I remember enjoying the preaching. I liked the people. The people were very, very welcoming. And that continued for two years, until I was 18, and then I went to university.

But your question, was I discipled? I would say no. People showed interest in me, but there was no one individual who spent regular time with me, which again I think is really important. And secondly, I certainly had no knowledge or understanding of how to defend the gospel against intellectual attack. For me, C.S. Lewis was a writer of children’s stories. He was not the author of Mere Christianity or The Abolition of Man or The Problem of Pain or whatever. He was not an apologist. He was a writer of children’s stories. And that’s great. I think everything he wrote is amazing, but it is hard to formulate an argument on the basis of fiction, although sometimes you can. I mean I know philosophers do write fiction to explain their ideas, like the existentialists, but I had no training.

So when I went to university, I was very lucky for the first year because I had two very good friends who were Christians. They were in their final year. They were two years older than me, and they really took me under their wing, and I ended up going to a Presbyterian church, so whilst I was at college, I was going to a Presbyterian church and dressing up smartly, taking a Bible, and going and enjoying hour and a half long sermons, which… I mean, I love long sermons, and so I loved my Presbyterian church, but in vacation, I would come back to my Pentecostal church, where it was just very different, and I suppose I drew a lot from both those Christian traditions. It was a true Reformed Presbyterian church. It was not a liberal Presbyterian church. And there was very faithful preaching of the gospel, very faithful preaching of the word generally, but again I did not have any sort of education regarding the defense of the gospel against skeptics. And that’s what basically undermined things for me.

In my second year, I made friends with an individual who was a real anti-theist. He had no time at all for Christianity. He had no time at all for any religion, and because he was studying philosophy, he knew all the arguments against religion, and so he would present to me David Hume’s skepticism regarding the teleological argument or the cosmological argument. He would present to me Hume’s argument against miracles. And I’d never heard any of this in my life. And I was defenseless in the face of what he was saying. But I do remember being tormented by this question of whether my faith was true. And I would say that there were intellectual and emotional forces working at the same time, in the sense that I had this desire to be an academic, an intellectual, and I had come to the conclusion that, to be one of those, I could not be a Christian. Because everybody I knew who was teaching was not a Christian or never spoke about any kind of faith. A lot of the very bright undergraduates with whom I was studying had no faith, either. They found it ridiculous to be a Christian.

And I remember one evening, it was a Sunday evening, and I get the impression from my memory that it was maybe a Sunday evening in November. I don’t know… You probably know a lot about the British climate because you studied in Britain, but Britain seems to specialize in really gloomy, dark, wet, cold November evenings, so that’s why I think it’s November.

Yes. 

And I decided I was going to answer this question once and for all, and I decided to call upon an acquaintance of mine who struck me as the most spiritual person I knew, and he emanated peace and love and gentleness and all that sort of thing. He seemed to me to be a living saint. And I thought, “If anybody knows the answer, he does,” and I remember calling on his lodging, as he was renting a room outside of college. So was I. So I was on my way home from studying in the library all day. It was a Sunday evening. I went and knocked on his door, and he opened his door, and he looked rather perturbed at seeing me because I had gotten the impression that he was going to have an early night because he had a week of lectures and seminars and experiments to do. He was studying natural science. Yet he was a gentleman. He invited me in. He made me a cup of tea. And I remember, in the course of the conversation, saying to him, “Can you give me a reason why I should be a Christian?” And I believed that he could give me the answer. And I remember he looked rather startled because the conversation now had become very serious, and he sat there and he thought for a few moments, and he said to me, “Peter, it’s faith. You just have to believe it.” And that was the last answer I wanted.

Right. 

If there was an answer I didn’t want, it was that one!

Yes! Yes. 

So I remember leaving. No, actually. I remember saying to him, and I’m pretty sure I must’ve said it very robotically because I didn’t mean a word of what I was saying. I said to him, “Thank you for your answer. You have put my mind at rest.” Actually, the complete opposite was the case, and when I left his lodgings and cycled home, I decided, “Yes, I am now an atheist. If that’s the best Christianity can do, I’m not a Christian anymore.” And my faith sort of flickered on and flickered off over the next four years, but by the age of 23, I was a pretty hardened atheist. I mean I probably would’ve defined myself as an agnostic, but I behaved like an atheist. I didn’t pray. I didn’t read the Bible just in case God was there. I didn’t investigate any other religions, either. But I do remember being very hardened in my skepticism. And at times being quite aggressive in my response to Christians, which I don’t like to think about now.

I remember when I was in my hometown of Chatham, there was a man with a megaphone preaching the gospel outside a McDonald’s restaurant where loads of people were. And he was a member of the Salvation Army, and I remember shouting out at him, “Why don’t you shut up?”

Oh, my! Okay. 

So it got that bad. So here I was, very easily saved at the age of 12, and here I am now being rude to a street preacher, and he ignored me, of course. I walked on. But that was my attitude at that time. Yeah.

I can see how that would happen, but disappointing to lose that one thing you had that gave you peace. But you were doing it in an honest way, though. I would imagine, as someone who was an intellectual, who wanted to pursue life as an intellectual, that you had to be honest with your beliefs, and there was no other option for you. If at that time you felt that belief was blind, that it was just a matter of faith, almost in faith. That that wasn’t sufficient. I guess, especially, too… I mean all of those to whom you looked up in academia were all nonbelievers. So I can see why you would move that direction, but I imagine you felt a loss. At least at the beginning. Because, like you say, it kind of flickered on and off. So I presumed you kind of just moved into that understanding and more sobered understanding. “This is the way life is.” Again, as an intellectual, that’s how you pursued your reality and pursued your education and whatnot. 

Yes.

I’m curious, at this point within your atheism, did it change the way you lived your life? Were you intellectually honest enough to really look at the underbelly, as it were, the logical implications of your own worldview as an atheist? 

Well, again, that’s a really, really interesting question. When I look back on that time, I don’t see any significant drop in the moral standards of my life. I think that I’ve always had a pretty good moral compass, and so from the age of 23 until 27, when my faith was restored, I basically lived for myself, which I suppose in itself is not right, but I don’t remember my life going off the rails. I mean I was teaching at the time. I was enjoying my work as a teacher. I had my life all mapped out. I would go for drinks with friends at the weekend. I would go to the gym a lot. I’d write and publish poetry, so I don’t see any sort of catastrophic decline in behavior.

In terms of whether I thought much about the implications of my atheism, the one that really did worry me was the fact that I couldn’t now believe in any sense of an afterlife. And I suppose I was very young and very healthy, and there was no immediate chance of my leaving this mortal coil, as it were, but every now and then, I would stop and think, “Well, what happens when I die?” Because one day I will, no matter how strong and healthy I feel at the moment. No matter how much life is enjoyable, I’m going to eventually leave, and what is there? And I sort of clung onto the thought that there could be an afterlife. Now, there was no God in this afterlife, but this afterlife would somehow be a continuation of what I was doing on earth, which is impossible because my body would be dead and I would be some sort of disembodied fragment.

That was one thing that troubled me. And I think that the major problem that I had was a sense of meaninglessness. Now, the problem of pain and suffering, or the problems of pain and suffering, have never been a problem for me. In the sense that I can see a struggle between good and evil in the world, and even as an atheist, I never really used that argument against Christians.

My concern as an atheist was whether life had any meaning. That’s why I was drawn to the existential philosophers and Soren Kierkegaard. He was a Christian existentialist. And Martin Heidegger, who actually argued he wasn’t an existentialist, but Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, and Simone de Beauvoir. And their solution, or Sartre’s solution and I assume de Beauvoir’s as well, was that you create your own meaning. There’s no transcendence.

And in my bravest moments, that made sense, but every now and then, I would think, “Well, actually, I wouldn’t mind having a transcendent meaning attached to me,” and every now and then, I would have a feeling that I had been created. I didn’t like that feeling because, of course, I had adopted the notion that I am an evolved creature, that I am physical matter that’s highly organized but nothing more, but every now and then, there was a sense that I had been created as well. And in my bravest moments, I would… Let’s say I’d be walking home, and one of the symbols of meaninglessness was the stars. Now, that sounds really strange, but I had come to the conclusion that life was meaningless because it was predetermined. There was nothing you could do to change the course of your life. It just happened to you. And you just had to be brave and try in some way to resist, even though ultimately you’re going to lose.

 

I would defy the meaninglessness of my life by trying to give it some sort of meaning, but that didn’t seem sufficient. I had this need of something beyond this world actually giving me my purpose, and I didn’t like that thought, that that’s what I wanted. I thought, “How can I think this? This is undermining my integrity as a human being,” but still there was a desire for that. And it was not being able to cope with that meaninglessness that brought me back to Christianity, so in a sense, it was both an emotional and an intellectual movement at the same time that brought me back at the age of 27.

So you say it was an emotional and intellectual movement. That existential angst, as it were, and then-

So how did you make that movement? Obviously, you were… almost like Lewis’s argument from desire. There was something in you that wanted more. And that there had to be a source underlying that. And so how were you able then to move from this place of wanting and desiring something more but knowing that it didn’t exist in reality? How did you bridge gap from nonbelief towards belief? 

Okay. Well, during those I suppose four years of really quite hardened atheism, I never once heard the gospel. The only people who showed any sort of interest in my soul, as it were, were two sets of Jehovah’s Witnesses who knocked on my door, and I was happy to engage them in debate, and I argued from an atheist point of view. But they seemed to be genuinely interested in the state of my soul, but I didn’t have any Christian contact at all. I had two colleagues who were Christians. One was a rather sour, bitter individual, and I thought to myself, “He’s not a very good advert for Christianity.” He had a book on his desk which was titled How to Reach Your Colleagues with the Gospel, and I thought, “Well, you haven’t done a very good job, because no one will listen to you because you’re so unpleasant to talk to.”

Yes. 

But the other individual was the head of RS, Religious Studies, and he left after a year. He went on to become a Baptist minister, and I was very impressed with him both professionally and personally. I sensed he was a man of integrity. And so that started to make me think again. Maybe there is something to this. But I never attended church. I never heard any gospel proclamation at all. I had not thrown my Bible away, which is interesting. I still had my little red pocket miniature Bible that I’d bought as an undergraduate years earlier. And I didn’t throw it away because I felt that, even though I didn’t believe it, there was something wrong in throwing the Bible in the bin. I couldn’t do it. It was too sacred, as it were, and I couldn’t explain to myself why I felt that way, but I just couldn’t do that.

What happened was… I remember standing in my kitchen, and I remember looking up at the clock on the wall because I had to go to work that morning. I was making sure I wasn’t going to be late. And I remember saying the following prayer, I said, “God, if you exist,” — and I do remember saying, “God, if you exist,” — “Would you help me? Would you tell me why I’m here? What am I doing? What is my life for? Where is it going?” So it wasn’t a prayer of repentance. It wasn’t a prayer to say sorry for all the things I’d done wrong or the good things I hadn’t done. It was actually a prayer that was asking God to be a philosopher on my behalf. And to sort out this problem of meaninglessness. And I did not get an answer from God. I didn’t hear a voice. I didn’t see a piece of paper floating down from the ceiling, saying, “Peter, this is your purpose.”

What I got instead was what I hadn’t had for a long time and that is a sense of God’s presence and His love again. And my heart started to soften towards Christianity. Now, I didn’t go back to church. I still had no Christian contact. It was as if there were internal forces that had brought me to that point. It wasn’t any sort of external encouragement from friends or acquaintances. It just happened, and I can only imagine that there was some sort of seismic shift within my thinking and my feeling. But again, I couldn’t tolerate this question of meaninglessness or this issue of meaninglessness anymore.

And I remember walking to work. I did not drive to work. I liked to walk to clear my mind and think about the day ahead. And I remember feeling someone was walking alongside me, and it felt like Jesus. And I’m not prone to spiritual mystical experiences, but that was very strong, and I thought, “This is becoming real again to me.” And luckily I had a local library where there were some very good commentaries on the Bible, and I remember getting a book out. I can’t remember the name of the author or the name of the book. I can still see his picture, though. He was an elderly man with thick spectacles. But in his book, he wrote about the historical reliability of the New Testament, and for the first time, I came across an actual formal defense of Christianity, and I thought, “I have been wanting something like this for so long!” And I remember reading that book and marveling at this man’s intelligence, his ability to present Christianity as true, and all the thoughts I had about the Bible being a plethora of legends and make believe and superstitious and nonsense, gibberish basically, started to melt away. And my trust, my intellectual trust in Christianity, started to be recreated again. Well, I never had it. It was being created for me.

But I didn’t go to church for a year. I stayed away from church. My faith was a very private thing, but it started to grow again. I fell in love with the Bible again. I really like the book of Daniel. I really like the book of Romans. I really like the book of Ruth. And the notion of hell troubled me. I thought, “Well, if people are not repentant, God will put them out of His presence,” but the thing that helped me overcome that was I thought, “Well, look what God has done to stop people from going there. What more could God do?” So that was an important apologetic for me regarding God’s judgment.

And it was only when I moved back to the southeast, because I had been teaching in the Midlands, the middle region of Britain. I was living in Lincolnshire, and I moved back to Kent, the southeast, and that’s when I rejoined the church. And I started again to read and explore what apologist Christian philosophers and scientists and writers had to say, and it was a steady education. And I found it to be absolutely vital, and that’s one of the reasons why I get quite irritated if people dismiss apologetics, because that was my lifeline. That’s what reignited my faith. And when people dismiss that and say it’s not important, it’s rather like someone saying, “Well, you were rescued at sea by the Coast Guard, but the Coast Guard is not really important.” “Well, sorry,” you know?

Yes! 

My salvation is quite important.

Yes! 

And the salvation of other people who come to faith in that way.

So it was a steady movement back. I think what I heard from you, though, is that not only was there a longing but there was a willingness to see, which allowed you to begin not only experiencing a palpable presence of God but also to really actually look at the data, at the, like you say, philosophy and intellectual writings, the substantive writings that really substantiate the Christian worldview. 

Yes.

I can hear a skeptic in the back of my mind saying, “Well, you just wanted it to be true.” I don’t know. You may have encountered this, but, “You just wanted it to be true, so you see what you want to see, and you wanted Christianity to be true,” But what I know of you is that you are not someone who… Again, intellectual honesty is incredibly critical for you-

Yes, it is. Yeah.

… as a thinker. As someone who is true to yourself. So I would imagine that, when you began looking at all this material, whether it was the Bible or whether it was philosophy or apologetics, that you looked at it again with a fairly honest and sober perspective. I guess as neutral as one could be. We’re always biased. I mean we cannot escape that. But in a way that was intellectually honest to the material itself. Whether they were presenting adequate arguments and evidence and logic. Whether it was making sense with what you understood about reality. How would you answer someone who might push back on you a little bit about that? 

Yes. Well, I’ve thought about this a lot, and I would say that I may have wanted it to be true, but even if, let’s say, my emotions or my heart is driving me in a certain direction, my mind is the gatekeeper and if my mind says no, then the heart stops, as it were. The emotions stop. So I had a drive towards Christianity, but I would not have become a Christian if I had not come to the conclusion that it was true. So I may have wanted it to be true, but I would not have become a Christian if I didn’t think it was true, because in a sense, my mind has the last word on these things. So that’s how I would answer that.

And I’d also say that there are atheists who want atheism to be true. They’re equally subjective. I think Thomas Nagel, the famous atheist in New York, has said, “I don’t want God to exist, and I’ll be honest about it.” So I think any atheist or skeptic who wants to make that line of argument, perhaps also ought to consider whether he or she has the same inclination. “I want atheism to be true because I don’t want to have to deal with a metaphysical being or give an account of my life or even lay down my life,” hopefully picking up a new life, an authentic life, but I don’t want to have to take into account somebody or something, an entity or deity or whatever, who in some ways is interested in me. So that’s how I would answer that question. Yes.

That’s a great answer. 

Thank you.

Yeah. And I presume, because of the nature of who you are and your intellectual path and your studies and your teaching pursuits, that you yourself became fully convinced by what you read, whether it was philosophically, biblically, theologically, that the pieces, as it were, kind of came together and gave you a fully orbed understanding of the world, understanding of reality that made sense to you, to your mind, that is the best explanation for what you see and experience, both I guess in the universe out there with regard to historical nature of Christianity, as well as… It sounds like it was fulfilling for you as a person. I presume that you found the meaning, the source of meaning and meaning itself, that you were seeking. 

I did, actually. Yes. It’s interesting, because when we think about what is the meaning of life, sometimes it’s very hard to say what it is, but I would say that my worries or concerns about that have been quelled by my knowledge of God.

And in a sense also, there’s an element of mystery to this as well, because I obviously… Once we become Christians, everlasting life has already begun, even if we go through the valley of death and we are temporarily separated from our bodies. We are still on that everlasting trajectory. It’s like the potential infinite. And what manner of challenges and developments and excitement lies ahead of this, I think we can only say we have glimpses. I don’t think we fully now what God has in store for us. We know a lot, but we don’t know everything. And there is meaning in that as well. But love has its own way of answering that question, “What is the meaning of life?” Because when a person experiences love for God and experiences God’s love for him or her and then is able to communicate that love to others, that in itself is an answer to the question, “What is the meaning of life?” It’s not a philosophical answer necessarily. It’s not the sort of thing that you could put into a philosophical journal, but it’s an existential response. It’s your manner of living that gives you that sense of purpose. And it’s the most satisfying thing of all.

I remember reading somewhere Soren Kierkegaard wrote in one of his journal entries, not long before he died, I think, that he found it amazing that so many people could go through life not realizing that they were loved by God, and that sort of is the tragedy, and that’s why it’s so important to tell people about the love of God, so that they are reunited with their Creator. Some won’t be, unfortunately. I don’t believe everybody will be saved. I’m not a universalist, but thank goodness and thank God for those who are, who are drawn into His kingdom.

Peter, now you have mentioned the gospel, referred to it a few times throughout your story, both in childhood, both in your time where you were away from faith, and now you’re speaking of love from Creator. And I wondered if just, in a nutshell, you could describe what the gospel is and how that relates to the love from a Creator? 

Yes. Well, I believe that God has given humanity free will, and every human being has chosen to disobey God. We have all fallen short of the glory of God, as we’re told in Romans. We are all sinners. We are described by reformed theology as depraved and degenerate, not because we are totally evil but because every area of our being is infected by sin, and that sin is a law in a sense that people are, in a way, almost… because it’s so ingrained in their personality and character, they feel they are under the compulsion of sin, and the gospel is the recognition that every human being stands guilty before God, because God is a holy God. And the means by which humans are reconciled to God and become God’s children, rather than individuals who face God’s judgment, is through the substitutionary death of Jesus. Jesus, who is God as a human being, the God-man as it were. However you’d like to say it. God the Son assuming human flesh in the form of Jesus of Nazareth, dying of crucifixion, paying the penalty for our sins, and so then we are declared righteous. Our status is righteous. If we so choose to believe and trust in that death, but obviously there’s more to it, in the sense that Jesus is resurrected by His Father. He’s resurrected by his Father’s love, and that means therefore that we are, when we are united with Christ, we are in a way resurrected into a new life. To use perhaps now a rather cliched phrase, we are born again.

Now that doesn’t mean to say that we suddenly become perfect, but we are in the process of being sanctified we cannot save ourselves. There’s nothing in us by which we can be saved. It is purely by His grace, which is unmerited favor, that we are saved. It’s His righteousness imputed to us. And that is a covenant that God has with us everlastingly. God will never go back upon what Christ, God the Son, in human personality and form, has done for us. And that invitation is to everybody, so Christianity makes that claim, makes that call to salvation to every single person.

And I would add also to that every human being’s made in the image of God, which is one of the most revolutionary doctrines of Judeo-Christian thinking. And the Bible makes it very clear. It says, all are made, male and female—it’s almost as if the writer was anticipating all the rude things said about women and their status. No, no. Everybody. Male, female, whoever they are, wherever they come from, they are all made in the image of God, and we all have that potential to respond to God in a way by which we come to him through salvation.

Yes, yes. So, like you say, everyone is loved by God and can be united with their Creator through that love, through the Person of Jesus. Thank you for that. 

No worries.

And as we’re closing our conversation, I always like to end, particularly with these two questions because you understand, you know, you have lived what it feels like, what you think as an atheist, what it means to be on the other side of things, raising a skeptical eyebrow. But there may be those who are listening who, as you did at one point, perhaps were willing to consider Christianity. What advice would you give to a skeptic or someone who’s curious about Christianity? 

Well, I would say I’d consider Christianity at its strongest points. The atheist turned deist philosopher, Antony Flew, said whenever you are criticizing a worldview or a philosophy, take it on at its strongest points. Don’t take on straw men or don’t take on that worldview at its weakest points. Look at what the very best spokespersons are saying on behalf of that worldview, and if you can overcome their arguments, then the rest of the worldview will collapse. It’s rather like Quine’s web of beliefs. There are certain strands within the web upon which the whole web hangs, and if you can cut those, the web will collapse, but if you can’t cut those, then the skeptic has got a lot of thinking, then, to do. “Why am I not able to overturn the evidence for the resurrection?” for instance. “Why is the Kalam cosmological argument so good?” That would be the first thing.

I think the second thing is I would say to a skeptic, “Don’t get too caught up in New Atheism,” the Dawkins, Hitchens, Dennett, Harris brand of atheism, because they do go after the worst examples. It’s very important to look at the very best of what Christianity has to say, and don’t listen to the New Atheists, who specialize in attacking Christianity at its sort of, I suppose its worst parts, in terms of individual Christian behavior and whatever. What I mean by that is I don’t think there are any intellectual weaknesses in the Christian case, but you can certainly point to Christian individuals whose behavior can be imprudent.

The other thing I would say is please don’t expect Christians to be perfect in their behavior. No Christian, I think, should be saying that they can be perfect in this life. We are being sanctified. We still make mistakes. We still do wrong things. I believe that habits, sinful habits and patterns, are broken, but certainly Christians can fall into sin. It’s an exception, I think, but they can still do it, and therefore, the skeptics shouldn’t be looking for perfection in us.

So those are the three things that I would say. Another thing is, you know, I’ve met quite a few skeptics who criticize the Bible, but they haven’t actually read it, so I would suggest that skeptics, perhaps one weekend, make a nice cup of coffee or tea, put your feet up, read the Bible, have a commentary at hand so you can understand some of it, because I think there’s a bit of laziness going on with some skeptics, who will say, “Well, the Bible’s a load of fairy tales.” “Have you actually read it?” “No.” “Okay, so I think you need to go and read it first before you can come to a conclusion on it.” So those would be the four things that I would say to skeptics from my own experience.

That’s some great advice. 

Thank you.

And, Peter, for the believers, for those who have a heart for those who don’t believe and want to engage in a meaningful, perhaps an intellectually credible way, what would you say to them? 

I think I have more to say to the Christians than I do to the skeptics. I would say to Christians, “Please don’t think all atheists are the same.” I mean, I am aware that the atheist philosopher John Gray, in his book, he says that there are seven types of atheism historically. And so therefore when we’re dealing with atheists and skeptics, they do come in different categories. I’ve sort of identified, in my own experience, three. There are the anti-theists who really are adamantly opposed to the idea of God and religion, and Christopher Hitchens fits in that camp. There are the indifferent atheists who would say, “Well, whether God exists or not, my life carries on the way it’s going,” and then there are the theistic atheists who want there to be a God but can’t see any reason to think there is one, and I’ve encountered a few of those in my time. And they’re a very interesting group of people. There’s a novelist in England called Julian Barnes who has gone on record as saying, “I don’t believe in God, but I miss Him,” and I thought that was a very interesting statement.

So we need to take the atheists as they come. I think also I would say that, for me and for many other skeptics—well, when I was a skeptic and for other skeptics, often we are the only evidence they have of God. The messenger and the message can’t be separated. So 1 Peter 3:16 talks about giving a reason for the hope that’s within you, but it does say sanctify your hearts and do present those reasons with meekness and fear, or respect and humility in some of the more modern translations. So the reason why the message and the messenger go together in the gospel is because we are saying God can transform us. God can take a rotten personality and start to create a work of art. So if the skeptic can’t see evidence in our own lives of that proposition, then he or she is going to ignore us. And it’s so important that we watch the quality of our lives. I mean, for example, I led an Alpha course at a local church a couple of years ago, and I remember saying to this group of skeptics—I had all the hard bitten atheists in my group. The other Alpha leader, she had some really nice people, but I had all of the obnoxious hard skeptics who wanted an argument with me. And I don’t know why I got them. I can’t imagine.

But anyway, after a couple of weeks, when I had sort of gained their trust, I said to them, “Is it the case that you want me to present evidence of God’s existence?” and they said, “No. It’s not that. And I didn’t press them on it, but I realized that I was the evidence, that they were assessing me. They were trying to work out how authentic I was. “Does this guy really believe what he’s saying? And if we’re sort of pretty harshly skeptical with him, will he still welcome us? Will he still be kind to us? Will he forgive us?” So I felt as if I was going through a personality test. That’s really important.

And the other thing I would say is that the church really generally needs to grow up in its behavior towards doubting Christians. I think doubting Christians need to be handled very carefully and gently and to be restored gently, and people shouldn’t be treated as if they are carrying some sort of virus because they are in doubt. There has to be… I’m not going to use the phrase “safe space.” I can’t stand it. Let’s use the good old term sanctuary or refuge. There has to be a sanctuary, a place where they can air their doubts and for people to listen to them and then say, “Well, have you thought of this?” “Have you considered reading this?” “I can’t give you a straightforward answer at the moment, but I’ll come back with something,” because I’m aware of some very high-profile people who went to their ministers with questions and doubts, and they were told, “Well, you’ve fallen into sin. You’re a terrible sinner. You are doubting the truth,” rather than saying to them, “Okay, let’s sit down, and let me to listen to what you’re saying to me. And then let me tell you some ways in which you can rethink what’s happening,” and perhaps ease the doubt out of them.

And just very quickly—I’m aware of the time. One other thing is, in particular, before young people go to university or go out into the world of work, they may have grown up in a Christian cocoon, but they’re going to go in an environment where people are going to be quite merciless with their faith. I mean, some people will respect it. Others will be indifferent to it. But as I found out with my friend in my second year, there are people who will take you on, so what are we teaching these young people about the reasons why their Christians. I know of a tragic case recently of an individual who went to university to study a science subject, and she went as a Christian and she came out as an atheist because she could not square evolution with Christianity. And that’s so profoundly sad.

Yes. 

And I know that her parents are distraught about this.

Yes. 

And this is what’s at stake here. So those are the things I would say.

Those are excellent. Again, Peter-

Thank you.

We have been the recipients of a rich not only story but also wisdom based upon your years of deep consideration and living and thinking and really working out what is true, what is meaningful, what is real. And so I just want to express deep appreciation to you for your very thoughtful and articulate story, as well as all of the wisdom that you’ve given to us today. 

Thank you. Thank you for the opportunity to speak. That’s much appreciated. Thank you.

Well, I know that many will be blessed by listening to this, so again, thank you. 

Good. Good. Thank you.

Thanks for tuning in to the Side B Podcast to hear Peter’s story. You can find out more about Peter and locate his writings by looking more closely at the episode notes. For questions and feedback about this episode, you can reach me by email at [email protected]. I hope you enjoyed it. If so, subscribe, rate, and share this podcast with your friends and social network. In the meantime, I’ll be looking forward to seeing you next time, where we’ll see how someone else flips the record of their life.